Frenglish shop signs in Singapore

Abstract

IntroductionThe presence of French in advertising communication within largely non-French speaking communities has been noted by a few linguists. Haarmann (1984Haarmann ( , 1989 found that They further found that French and French-inspired shop signs of food businesses can be classified into four categories, namely, monolingual French, French + another language, French function words + another language, and coinages, noting that there are idiomatic usage and non-idiomatic usage in the first three categories. In this paper, we throw the spotlight on coinages which we argue as mostly being deducible as French-English code-switched blends.We focus on localized nominal concoctions used by shop owners across food and beauty commercial entities within Singapore. We borrowed the term 'Frenglish' from Martin's (2007) study to refer to the French-English blends. However, we noted that Martin's (2007) study focused on the use of English in advertising communication in France where English is the minority language that is largely sidelined by the Toubon Law. Contrastively, English in Singapore is de facto the national language, while French is a foreign language with few speakers.Background to code-switched blends

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