English in Italian advertising

Language mixing in advertising, particularly with the English language, has been a widely researched area. English is generally used to connote a cosmopolitan, international, modern and ‘cool’ hue, and is increasingly mixed with local languages to combine global with local appeal. This paper provides a qualitative investigation of print advertisements selected from a corpus collected in 2009/2010, in that they include processes of language creativity exploiting both English, and English and Italian language mixing. The findings suggest that English is well present in print adverts addressed to Italian readers/consumers. While slogans and headlines still represent the main areas where English is employed as an authoritative, dominant voice, language mixing with English appears not to be limited to isolated lexical borrowings, but rather emerging as a discourse phenomenon present in most sections of advertisements, and thus no longer confined to the word level. Language play, both at an English-monolingual and at a bilingual language mixing level, as well as inter-textual references to films and songs, emerge as well-represented in my data. English is exploited as an attention-getter, as a marker of cosmopolitan and international values, but also as a resource upon which to draw in terms of linguistic and cross-linguistic creativity. Bilingual competence in English is thus exploited in advertising discourse to create sophisticated linguistic effects, which are becoming part of everyday linguistic landscapes in Italy as in other European countries.