DUISEAEVA GULNARA

The master-teacher of the of the International Kazakh-Turkish University,Turkistan

SEGIZOVA GALIA

The senior-teacher of the International Kazakh-Turkish University,Turkistan

THE REASONS OF USING ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE OF ADVERTISEMENTS

This article deals with the reasons of using English as a global language of advertising

Across the globe, the use of English is a popular advertising technique. The ever expanding body of studies on this topic has revealed a number of explanations for the use of English in the advertising. It can be related to the larger marketing strategy of a campaign, to the cultural connotations English carries, or English can be used for creative-linguistic reasons.

In the globalization of English, mass media plays an important role [1, 2]. The worldwide spread of English not only occurs through the worldwide export of North American, British, and Australian English-language media products, but also in multilingual ‘media idioms’ [3] such as chat language, news broadcasting language, and the language of cell phone messages. However, empirical studies of the use of English in such media idioms are still quite sparse. One notable exception is the research of English in advertising, which, after the publication of a few early studies has seen a striking expansion of research during the last decade. Whether they target Asian, European, or Latin-American consumers, advertisers seem to regard the use of English words, sentences, and even entire texts as an efficient strategy to sell brands and products to consumers.

These different studies have revealed a number of explanations for the use of English in advertising, which can be categorized in three groups.

A first set of reasons pertains to the larger marketing strategy of a campaign. For instance, brands sometimes choose to use the same campaign or slogan worldwide in order to have a globally consistent marketing strategy and brand image. Some brands also choose to use the same advertisement in different countries in order to cut costs. In either case, English serves as the ‘lingua franca’ that is understood - or that at least sounds familiar - in different countries [4]; [5]; [6]. Within a single country as well, English can be used to address different language groups. In complex multilingual countries such as Switzerland, for instance, English is sometimes used because it is regarded as a comparatively neutral language, as it is not embroiled in the tensions between local languages [8, p.460].

English is sometimes used as a kind of strategy of persuation [7, p.827]. It is difficult to define the target of persuasion; social psychologists (e.g., Murchison 1935) distinguish among attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Attitudes are feelings about something, beliefs refer to the information that a person has about something, and behaviors are the actions that are, in one way or another, related to both attitudes and beliefs [8]. According to Murchison, attitudes are usually the target of persuasion, given that they are able to direct and even permit predictions of behaviors. If this is true, advertisements must be capable of influencing or, if necessary, changing the attitudes of potential consumers towards advertised merchandise if they are to succeed in persuading people to buy the product. In other words, they must be able to secure favorable attitudes towards the marketed product from the “narratee” [9]. Then how can English use help to achieve this objective?

According to Garver (1994), the power of persuasion depends on the interaction among three different factors [9, p.45]:

1) ethos, which refers to the speaker’s personal traits,

2) pathos, which refers to the audience’s emotions and state of mind, and

3) logos, which denotes the content of a message (the terms ethos, pathos, and logos themselves are the creation of Ancient Greek philosophers).

The use of English in bilingual advertising positively affects each of these three factors. In other words, it helps to secure audiences’ favorable attitudes towards the promoted product.

Secondly, there are also creative-linguistic reasons for the use of English in advertising. English words are, for instance, often used in the case of a ‘lexical gap’, i.e. when there is no accurate equivalent for a word or expression in the host language [10, p.167], or when the equivalent in the host language is considered taboo [Takashi 1990]. English words are also popular with advertisers because they are shorter than the equivalents in the host language [11], and because they (are believed to) attract the attention of the consumer.

The use of a foreign language also expands advertisers’ possibilities for linguistic creativity. For instance, it opens the door to bilingual word puns (e.g. ‘Koe and the Gang’ in a Flemish ad) and bilingual rhyming (e.g. ‘Trentenaire On Air’ in a French ad; [12, p.639]) in advertisements [1]; [4, p.8]; [11, p.495].

A third set of reasons for the use of English in advertising pertains to the cultural connotations that English carries. Here, English is used because the values or stereotypes associated with it (e.g. internationalism, modernity, and Britishness) are assumed to reflect positively on the product [7]; [13]; [6] or to appeal to the ‘implied reader’ of the advertisement [13]; [10]. In such advertisements, foreign languages are not used for their communicative value, but for their symbolic value [14, p.67]. Indeed, several studies report that for advertising purposes, consumers need not even understand the foreign language that is used, as long as they recognize the connotations that it is associated with. Very telling in this respect is that Martin (2002), Piller (2000), and Masavisut et al. (1986) report advertisers’ practices to even use ‘invented’ or ‘nonsensical’ English in advertisements, i.e. meaningless words or sentences that only sound English—and can thus activate certain values with the consumers [13, p.116].

When it comes to the connotations that are associated with different foreign languages, English seems to constitute a rather exceptional case. While other foreign languages derive their connotational values primarily from the countries in which they are the dominant language (e.g. German technical sophistication; French culinary superiority), English also has ‘meaning, use and significance independent of the countries in which it is spoken’ [11, p. 7]. In this respect, English is a ‘bicultural’ language [7], as it symbolizes values that are stereotypically associated with the USA (e.g. freedom) or Great Britain (e.g. class and traditionalism), as well as ‘general’ values such as youth, prestige, modernity, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and internationalism. The associations in the latter case seem to indicate that English is a ‘neutral’ and ‘transparent’ language, ‘tied to no particular social, political, economic or religious system, belonging to everyone or to no one’ [14, p.14–15].

However, the line between ‘American’ or ‘British’ values on the one hand, and ‘general’ values on the other, is probably far more blurry than it seems. For instance, the association of English with the ‘general’ notion modernity, might be strongly related to the stereotype of the USA as the modern country par excellence [15, p.116]. Furthermore, the association of English with values such as quality, progress, reliability, credibility, and prestige, reveals that implicit notions of American (or, more generally, Western) culture as ‘superior’ underlie the use of English in advertising.

Advertisers often even use English to market locally produced products to local consumers, in the hope that they will think they are produced abroad (Masavisut et al. 1986; Ovesdotter Alm 2003). ‘People still think that what comes from abroad is better, and if it’s in English – it’s even better’, an Ecuadorian advertiser states in Ovesdotter Alm [4, p.152]. In the same study, another advertiser says: ‘Usually we relate English with North American and European and, therefore, with quality, with well-made, with technology, with research, with design, with something that is good. American is good. American equals good quality’ [4, p. 151]. In such cases, the use of English amounts to an uncritical celebration of the language and its associated culture.

Advertising has become their natural environment of our modern world and ‘an effective and pervasive medium of influence and persuasion; advertising helps to create a climate in which certain attitudes and values flourish and others are not reflected at all’ [16, p. 67]. The cultural impact of advertising is enormous; young people, who are inexperienced, even emotionally unstable, have a much greater risk of being affected by advertisements’ messages.

The high incidence of English in advertising is often seen as an example of ‘linguistic imperialism’ [17, p.22]: The US dominant position in the production of commodity culture enables it to force English onto other, seemingly defenseless cultures. English thus becomes ‘the language of global mass consumer culture’ [15, p.8]. The use of English in advertising and in media more generally, is often a prime target for opponents of American cultural imperialism. For instance, the French ‘Loi Toubon’, which restricts the use of foreign languages in the media, was defended by its proponents as being an instrument against ‘Americanization’ [16, p. 494]. As becomes obvious from the summary above, the existing literature has provided insights into quite a range of explanations for the use of foreign languages in advertising. However, a sample of 746 advertisements that was collected in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) contained a number of advertisements for which the use of a foreign language could not be fully explained by any of the reasons discussed above. These 746 advertisements were collected over a 1-year period (in September 2004, March 2005, and September 2005) from 10 different Flemish television stations (commercial as well as public broadcasting stations). English was by far the foreign language which was used most often in these advertisements: not less than 45 per cent of the advertisements contain English words. If we include the use of English in product names (e.g. ‘Head and Shoulders for Men’; ‘Electrabel Do-My-Care’), this percentage even rises to 65 per cent. French was the second most popular language, featuring in 4 per cent of the ads (14 per cent if French product names are included), followed by Italian with 1 per cent (2 per cent if Italian product names are included). [15, p.117]

In 25 out of the 746 advertisements, a foreign language seemed to be used for a reason that has, to my knowledge, not been discussed so far in the literature. I propose that in these advertisements, which intertextually refer to a range of (media) genres, the foreign language functions as a ‘linguistic cue’ to the intended intertextual references that are made. In 22 of the 25 advertisements, the foreign language was English. [13, p.117]

Regev (2007) considers the ‘world culture’ that globalization has created as ‘a bank of visual, sonic and textual stylistic elements and techniques of expression, from which every local producer at the national level can draw materials for her own use’ [19, p.126]. In Appadurai’s (1996) terminology, mediascapes provide ‘large and complex repertoires of meanings, narratives, and ethnoscapes to viewers throughout the world’ [12, p.35].

Van Elteren (1996) focuses on American popular culture, which he regards as ‘one big self service store’ or ‘superculture’, in that it is ‘a reservoir of cultural elements from which one may borrow as much and in as many ways as one wishes’ [1, p. 69]. Van Elteren’s phrasing is quite euphemistic: ‘one may borrow’ [20, p.69], he states, but the fact is that the dominance of American cultural products in global media flows narrows down the repertoire of cultures to borrow from. Nevertheless, those who borrow from the American cultural repertoire are free to creatively employ their borrowings in a myriad of ways, including in ways that invert, ridicule, or oppose American culture.

References

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20. Elteren, M. (1996). ‘Conceptualizing the impact of US popular culture globally,’ The Journal of Popular Culture 30/1: 47–89