Code-breaking/code-making: A new language approach in advertising

Abstract

The aim of this article is to study the mixing of languages in the advertising campaigns of the Spanish airline company Vueling. The main hypothesis is that foreign languages are used in this context for their symbolic and visual value rather than their content or informational components. The theoretical frame of multilingual advertising for the analysis is the linguistic fetishism approach proposed by Kelly-Holmes (2005). The data analysis will be carried out in two stages and will apply two different but related models of analysis. First, I will show how these ads break syntactic patterns of codeswitching according to the Matrix Language Frame model by Myers-Scotton (1992, 1993, 1995, 2001, 2002). Second, by applying the syntactic categories of codeswitching in Poplack (1982), I will explain how this company creates a new form of codeswitching in advertising very different from previous code-mixed ads in the general market and particularly in Spain. The results of the analysis confirm the hypothesis that symbolism is the driving force in using foreign languages in Vueling campaigns: English, French and Italian are inserted within Spanish idioms and proverbs to convey ‘foreignness’ rather than information. This pattern of ‘domesticating’ foreign elements into local semantic and syntactic frames suggests a desire to globalize or at least ‘Europeanize’ Spanish ads within the airlines market while maintaining and reinforcing Spanish identity.