English and other languages in Italian advertising

Abstract

The presence of plurilingual practices involving the mixing of local and other languages is widely attested in advertising, mainly with English but also with other languages. Globalization processes have contributed to the global spread of English, but also to the blurring of linguistic and cultural boundaries, with translanguaging and transcultural practices becoming increasingly common. This study provides an investigation of print advertisements from a corpus collected from 2011 to 2018 from Italian magazines. We look at the presence of English and other languages across the dataset, focusing above all on processes of cross‐linguistic creativity exploiting English, English and Italian, as well as other languages.

A taxonomic approach to the use of English in the Italian media

“…When a journalists' goal is to promote a product, an event, an idea, or a lifestyle, they tend to use English more than in other, perhaps more neutral, news reporting contexts. This is because English in these contexts indexes coolness, sophistication, and modernity, as several studies of advertising have already demonstrated (Androutsopoulos, 2012;Baumgardner, 2006Baumgardner, , 2008Baumgardner & Brown, 2012;Bhatia, 1992Bhatia, , 2000Bhatia, , 2006Bhatia, , 2019Martin, 2007;Vettorel & Franceschi, 2019). In this way, readers can imagine themselves as participating in whatever globalized lifestyle trends are being described, and indirectly advertised, to them.…”

“…Of course, it is not only the Italian context where English borrowings occur. Numerous scholars have analyzed English borrowings in both journalism (Amorim, Baltazar, & Soares, 2017; Androutsopoulos, 2013; Molek‐Kosakowska, 2012; Simon, 2016) and advertising (Androutsopoulos, 2013; Baumgardner & Brown, 2012; Kelly‐Holmes, 2000; Li, 2019; Vettorel & Franceschi, 2019), showing that usage of English within different global language contexts has specific functions. Scholars who have examined the mixing of English with Portuguese, Romanian, and Polish in journalistic discourse (Amorim et al., 2017; Molek‐Kosakowska, 2012; Simon, 2016, respectively) argue that English is used intentionally, therefore pragmatically, for various reasons.…”

“…They argue that English is not necessarily there in order to be understood, but rather to allow consumers to identify with the ‘coolness’ and modernity of language and product. Vettorel and Franceschi (2019) also use the notion of ‘language display’ to show how, in Italian advertising, English is used consciously and consistently, especially in domains like technology, cosmetics, and fashion, to construct international connotations for consumers as members of ‘transnational communities’ (Piller, 2001, p. 163). In addition, Li (2019, p. 519) makes the important point that the diversity and complexity ‘observable in many aspects of English use is assumed to be mediated through language ideologies that are often diverse, complex, unstable and even conflicting.’…”

“…The use of non‐specialized English words is a contemporary phenomenon that has been documented in many languages around the world and has been studied extensively in the realm of advertising. In this context, the symbolic and aesthetic power of English is exploited (Kasanga, 2012; Lee, 2019; Tan & Tan, 2015) and its use typically indexes a cosmopolitan, modern identity or sensibility, as well as prestige (Androutsopoulos, 2013; Baumgardner & Brown, 2012; Friedrich, 2019; Montes, 2014; Vettorel & Franceschi, 2019; Weyers, 2015). As far as studies of English words in the Italian mass media, scholarly focus has moved from print versions of magazines and newspapers (Pinnavaia, 2005; Rogato, 2008) to online versions of newspapers (Demata, 2014), as well as to advertising (Vettorel, 2013; Vettorel & Franceschi, 2019).…”

Efficiency of Business and Intercultural Communication: Multilingual Advertising Discourse

“…The scientists draw attention on linguistic resources and patterns of responses [12] in bilinguals, follow the efficiency of various types of multilingual advertising means including borrowing, code switching, heteroglossia, meaningless infringements of foreign words, linguistic and cultural fetish [13]. Special focus is given to English as a global language [14], the role it plays in forming cultural and linguistic identity through bilingual advertising in various multilingual spaces found in the English-speaking [15], [16], [17]] and non-English-speaking countries [18], [19], [20].…”