This book presents a comprehensive account of the use and effects of foreign languages in advertising. Based on consumer culture positioning strategies in marketing, three language strategies are presented: foreign language display to express foreignness, English to highlight globalness, and local language to appeal to ethnicity (for instance, Spanish for Hispanics in the USA). The book takes a multidisciplinary approach, integrating insights from both marketing and linguistics, presenting both theoretical perspectives (e.g., Communication Accommodation Theory, Conceptual Feature Model, Country-of-origin effect, Markedness Model, Revised Hierarchical Model) and empirical evidence from content analyses and experimental studies. The authors demonstrate that three concepts are key to understanding foreign languages in advertising: language attitudes, language-product congruence, and comprehension. The book will appeal to students and researchers in the fields of sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, marketing and advertising.
Hornikx, J., & Meurs, F. van (2020). Foreign languages in advertising: Linguistic and marketing perspectives. Cham: Palgrave MacMillan. [link]
>review by Will Amos in Sociolinguistic Studies
“The book is very well structured, the index is comprehensive, and it is very useful … . It will constitute valuable reading both for beginners embarking on research and for experts from both linguistics and marketing looking for synergies between these two fields”