Advertising as Multilingual Communication (Electronic book text)

Advertising has traditionally communicated messages to consumers with strong local and national identities. However, increasingly, products, producers, advertising agencies and media are becoming internationalized. In the development of strategies that appeal to a large multinational consumer base, advertising language takes on new 'multilingual' features. Helen Kelly-Holmes examines the schizophrenic relationship that advertising has with multilingualism and the implications of market-driven language choices for notions of language and languages. On the one hand, advertising and other market discourses use multilingualism by accentuating linguistic differences in order to sell products and services associated with with a partiocular language, country or region. On the other hand, advertising responds to situations that are bi- or multi-lingual in nature by problematizing and attempting to overcome multilingual realities.