Journal of Creative Communications

The aim of this article is to focus on the two salient aspects of the capacity of the bilingual mind/brain, namely, its ability to maintain both language separation on one hand and language integration on the other. These two types of bilingual capacity result in language mixing, termed Code Mixing (CM) and Code Switching (CS) in socio-linguistic research. The article reveals various facets of bilingual creativity through language mixing as it manifests itself in the day-to-day verbal behaviour of a bilingual and in global advertising. The article argues that language mixing is essentially an ‘optimizing’ strategy which renders a wide variety of new meaning which the separate linguistic systems are incapable of rendering by themselves.

This article is an analysis of the use of English in advertising in Mexican newspapers (both classified as well as non-classified advertising in Monterrey's El Norte) and in seven magazines published in the Mexico City. A distinction is made early in the article between the use in advertisements of English borrowings that are an established part of the lexicon of Mexican Spanish as opposed to the use of English as language display (Eastman and Stein 1993). The electronic database of Monterrey's El Norte newspaper is utilized to verify the borrowing frequencies. English as language display in advertisements is analyzed according to the framework of English found in a signature line (product name), attention-getter, slogan, body copy, standing details or illustration (Bhatia 1992, Pillar 2003). As many other studies have shown, this study too shows that advertisers in Mexico use English, which now serves as a worldwide lingua franca, as language display in most structural parts of the advertisements.

This article examines the use of English in French magazine advertisements from a linguistic and legal perspective. Following an overview of language policy planning in France, French–English mixing in recent advertising copy is described in terms of both bilingual creativity and strategies used to circumvent the 1994 Toubon Law restricting the use of English in the media. This study provides evidence that, despite this legislation, the French advertising industry is continuing to exploit English as both a lingua franca in international campaigns and a pair-language for mixing that has been specifically tailored to French audiences. This ‘Frenglish’ mix involves various linguistic strategies, including bilingual hybridization, orthographic modifications, functional conversion and ‘visual glossing’, among others. The impact of globalization on French advertising discourse is also explored with specific reference to information technology and business terminology. The data presented suggests that Paris agencies are supplying French translations for slogans in compliance with the law while continuing, at the same time, to insert non-translated English in various stages of assimilation in their advertising copy. Despite the government's effort to curb the spread and influence of English in the media, the French advertising landscape continues to reflect consumers’ ever-evolving linguistic behaviour and global trends.

The article proposes that Russian advertising discourse offers prospective for examining the changes in Russian language and culture in the context of globalization. It focuses on the use of English in Russian advertising with an analysis of code-mixed samples drawn from recent print, Internet and TV advertisements. Strong evidence emerges that the main source of creativity in Russian advertisements is the mixing of English and Russian. English–Russian language mix is presented in abundance on the levels of words, sentences and phrases in the structural components of Russian advertisements. The proportion of English in advertisements is in alignment with gender and modernity. Nativization and assimilation of English also manifests itself in using Cyrillic script for language transfer. The English usage in the advertisements can be explained by utilitarian reasons, as the brand names and logo in English are promoted all over the world, and by social reasons, as English is a sign of high-quality products, novelty, prestige and even fun. By revealing age-specific English used in advertisements, the attempts are made to redefine a new ethnic identity. The phenomenon is interpreted according to possible ongoing changes of Russian ethnolinguistic identity.

Apartheid South Africa instituted laws that divided not only the communities but also the languages they spoke. Phenomena such as codeswitching (CS) were an anathema for the apartheid state. Now that apartheid is dead, it is perhaps opportune to explore to what extent the political change from apartheid to democracy has permeated South Africa's other institutions, including language. This article investigates the use of CS in print advertising in the post-apartheid South Africa, with a focus on Zulu English CS. In particular, the article seeks to address the following questions: Why do the marketers in South Africa use CS in advertising? What are the syntactic patterns of their CS behaviour? Are these patterns random or rule-governed? Does their use of CS in the advertisements follow a certain order or hierarchy, such that if English occurs in one part of the advertisement it then spreads to the other parts as well, as suggested in Bhatia's (2001) Structural Domain Dependency (SDD) model?