Language choices in advertising are never random. They represent an attempt to use language to achieve a particular goal. In commercial advertising the goal is, ultimately, to sell. The words that are present in advertisements are the product of a very conscious decision to put those particular words there rather than other words. Helen Kelly-Holmes in her fascinating book examines choices that have resulted in the use, non-use or, as it turns out, abuse of features from more than one language in commercially driven discourses. The object of her study is multilingual advertising communication, defined as the appearance of a number of different languages or voices in a market-discourse situation. For Kelly-Holmes, the market-discourse situation, deliberately chosen as the context of analysis instead of more narrow frames like the speech act, covers a range of possibilities from advertising texts to TV channels and Internet sites. The manifestations of languages or voices in these situations can range from single words to entire texts. Thus, taking examples from my own everyday context, a Finnish-language TV advertisement for a car ending in the English slogan Fresh thinking – better cars would count as a multilingual market-discourse situation, as would a setting where a TV ad entirely in Finnish is followed by an all-English advertisement for a particular cider, a perfume ad with only one word of French in an otherwise Finnish publication, or an advertisement where the “language” is an accent or a dialect, such as the use of Italian-accented Finnish to advertise pasta sauce.
In a brief introduction, the author describes her objectives and approach and outlines the structure and contents of the book. She specifies two main objectives. The first is to examine how advertising and other market-driven discourses use languages and exploit linguistic difference in order to sell products and services. The second is to explore how advertising responds to bilingual and multilingual situations, and to assess the effects of language choices made by the producers of commercial discourses in these situations. The objectives are met through a qualitative analysis of data that, the author says, have been put together opportunistically through her own encounters with advertisements in a variety of media. No quantitative information concerning the amount of data is given, but the examples cited to illustrate and support the argumentation in the book bear witness to a wealth of material. The data sources range from labels and packaging to billboards, magazines, newspapers, radio, TV and the Internet, and span in time from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Geographically and linguistically, the main emphasis is on the European context and the English-speaking world in general, and more specifically on Irish, British, and German contexts. The potential problem created by multimodal data is solved and the solution justified without much ado: The focus is on the language and text of the advertisements; graphics and visuals are not reproduced, but images and aural and visual paralinguistic features accompanying the (spoken and written) texts are described.
In chap. 1, the author lays a solid foundation for the analysis. She begins by briefly discussing the functioning of advertising in a consumer society, where the relationships among individuals, companies, brands, products, services and texts are multidimensional and constructed socially, economically, culturally, linguistically, and politically. The special nature of the language of advertising as purpose-designed, commercially driven discourse receives attention. So does the key role of language in consumerization: As the author points out, socialization into consumer society happens primarily through example and through language.
The second part of chap. 1 provides the theoretical frameworks that Kelly-Holmes employs in her examination of multilingual market-driven media discourse texts. She draws on various traditions of looking at multilingualism, including cultural studies, sociolinguistics, translation theory, and philosophy. She begins with the complex notion of “foreign” words and a range of methodological approaches that have been used to examine them and their effects in various types of discourse, including concepts like code-switching, language display, crossing, transference, and lexical borrowing. The frames that are perhaps the most prominent in the following chapters are, however, Venuti's idea of domesticated foreignness, Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia or multi-voicedness, and the Marxian idea of fetishization, the capacity to create symbolic value. The last notion in particular feeds into one of the main arguments of the book. According to Kelly-Holmes, much of the use of languages in advertising today is symbolic, which she terms “linguistic fetish,” having little to do with “normal” everyday communication in that particular language or in that particular sociolinguistic context. Fewer multilingual choices in market discourses appear to be driven primarily by referential functions. As the author quite rightly points out, the distinction between the mainly referential/informative and the mainly symbolic is problematic, since most communication consists of both aspects. However, the distinction does seem useful and justified in analyzing the way in which foreign languages are used in advertisements, and it has been employed in some earlier studies of the phenomenon as well (e.g., Haarman 1989, Piller 2000, Pahta & Taavitsainen 2004).
Chaps. 2 to 5 present a number of case studies discussing advertising as multilingual communication in different contexts and from different perspectives. Chap. 2 examines the use of foreign cultures, nationalities, and languages other than English in commercially driven messages. Kelly-Holmes shows how market discourses exploit widely held notions about a nationality or a country of origin as linguistic fetishes that become the core of an advertising message, a unique selling proposition. The main case studies illustrate advertisements and campaigns that rely on perceived German and French cultural competencies in engineering and brewing for the first, and food, wine, beauty, and femininity for the second. Some examples are provided from other languages and contexts as well; in some of them it is the language itself that is thematized as a selling proposition. Interestingly, the use of negative stereotypes and anti-country-of-origin approaches also receives some attention. In all the cases examined, the language choices are symbolic: Rather than communicating facts, the choices are about constructing identities for the product, producer, or brand, and for the advertisee.
Chap. 3 concentrates on English and its use in advertising in non-English-speaking contexts. Kelly-Holmes argues that the special status of English as an international language makes it different from other languages in commercially driven discourse. She claims that although the use of English in market-discourse situations can be linked to Anglo-American culture-specific stereotypes, English – unlike, say, German and French – often occurs in fetishized meanings and uses that are independent of the nationalities and countries where it is spoken as a first or major language. The first part of the chapter examines the various associations of international English in German advertising texts. In the examples, English acts as a social hieroglyph of something “cool,” modern, trendy, cosmopolitan, and international, often postnational or anational. The second part looks at the language use of some global brands and corporations on their international and local Web sites, paying attention to their varying language policies. The third part deals with the use of English in market discourses in some central and eastern (CE) European countries. Kelly-Holmes states the widespread notion that the expansion of “Europe” as a market to include the previously disregarded economies and consumers of CE Europe may result in greater homogenization in Europe and a consolidation of the position of English as the language of the market. Her examples show that this indeed is happening. In this new context, the English language seems to have become a symbol for “Western,” “freedom,” “democracy,” and “the market.” It is becoming the Fachsprache, the professional language, of advertising and marketing even for agencies that are locally based. The conclusion returns to the initial claims: Many of the fetishized associations of English seen in the examples are gross, commercially driven generalizations that have little to do with the reality of ordinary lives, languages, and economics in Britain or the United States.
Chap. 4 discusses advertisers' attempts to speak to people “in their own language.” One result of this is that advertising texts have become “informalized,” taking on the characteristics of informal communication. Another result has been the increase of multi-voicedness in market discourse – a greater number of accents, dialects, and ethnic minority languages. The complexities of the issue are illustrated in this interesting chapter with brief examples from a number of contexts with allochthonous and autochthonous minority languages, and a more detailed case study of the Irish context. Some examples strikingly show that, despite growing diversity in the use of minority languages, accents, and dialects in market discourse, they are often there merely for tokenistic or fetishistic purposes, while the serious business of advertising information is communicated in the dominant language. Such practices in turn create associations and symbolic meanings that are recycled in future advertising discourses and in time become part of widely held notions about authoritative and non-authoritative languages.
The focus of chap. 5 is multilingual and heteroglossic advertising within media contexts that extend traditional geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. Here Kelly-Holmes discusses the new media paradigms enabling pan-national advertising, and the cultural and linguistic implications of such media and markets. Much of the chapter focuses on Europe as a pan-national mediascape. Eurosport, a pan-European TV channel, is discussed in detail to illustrate the functioning of a multilingual market in this context. The author points out that the creators of media and market discourses in a pan-national context do in fact have a number of options in dealing with the language issue. This is seen, for example, in the fact that Eurosport now broadcasts in 18 languages. Consciously or unconsciously, however, the default choice for communication Europe-wide is English, which further enhances its symbolic value in this function. But not entirely: Kelly-Holmes's perceptive descriptions of the Eurosport screen as a multilingual adscape with on-site brand names, logos, and advertising messages, as well as the hybridized multilingual sentences, phrases, and texts on British Eurosport, show that watching a pan-European channel can be far from a monolingual experience.
The final chapter restates the main findings and discusses them in terms of the objectives specified at the beginning of the book. The chapter is divided into two complementary sections examining how, in order to sell, the market simultaneously creates multilingual texts and attempts to combat multilingualism. In her interesting discussion of this schizophrenic relationship, Kelly-Holmes raises a number of important issues, including language awareness, appropriation vs. disenfranchisement, the language/communication dichotomy, the absence of the language issue in textbooks on marketing, and the role of English in global advertising. For reasons of space I will discuss only one of the important points: the question of representation, or representativeness, in multilingual advertising discourse and its implications for the advertisee and the “representatee.” In terms of creating multilingualism, the author claims, and I agree, that the advertising texts discussed in the book represent what can best be described as “fake multilingualism,” a decoration that is primarily determined from an ethnocentric base and has little to do with real-life, everyday bilingual and multilingual existence. While companies on the one hand seem to be “speaking people's language,” in reality everyday lived multilingualism is far too messy to be dealt with in market discourse. The view that advertising texts offer is reductionist. What they really do is present the advertisers' perceptions of language attitudes, and accentuate difference. The advertisers' attempts to combat multilingualism also seem to result in reductionist representations. Linguistic fetish strategies tend to construct the advertisee as monolingual with a particular, ethnocentrically based view of the Other and of foreign languages. Such approaches disregard people who grow up speaking two or more languages or acquire them through education or experience in another country. Even if people in bilingual situations are taken into account, in market discourses they are deemed to speak one language or another, never a combination. These reductionist and simplified representations then feed into the advertisees' attitudes and become part of the intertextual field within which future advertisements operate. At the same time, they construe and maintain images and identities by feeding into the advertisees' general attitudes about the languages and their speakers, about cultures and nationalities, about self and other, us and them.
In the introduction, Kelly-Holmes quotes Pierre Bourdieu on the difficulty, and the importance, of managing “to think in a completely astonished and disconcerted way about things you thought you had always understood” (1991:207). Her insightful study of the communicative uses of multilingual resources in mundane market-driven discourses shows that she has indeed managed to do so. Though quite a few surface tendencies in the actual data may be unsurprising for readers who have kept an eye on advertising trends, the pertinent questions that Kelly-Holmes has asked and the perceptive answers she has provided challenge truisms and simplifications. Her acute analyses and important conclusions provide food for thought for anyone interested in contextualized language use, and they should inspire and inform future studies in a wide range of subfields in language and communication studies, cultural studies, and social sciences, not to mention marketing.
