Advertising as multilingual communication

Abstract

Helen Kelly-Holmes, Advertising as multilingual communication. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv, 206. Hb $69.95.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.