Social identity and linguistic creativity: Manifestations of the use of multilingualism in South African advertising

Abstract

This article is about an exploratory, qualitative study that used a range of advertisements to investigate the extent to which they revealed social identity and linguistic creativity in South African multilingual advertising. The selection of the texts was done on the basis of convenience sampling. For instruments, Carter and Nash’s (1999) cline of literariness and Fairclough’s (1992) framework for a critical reading of a text were employed. The study concludes that while there are still some areas of advertising South Africa has not exploited, there has been a significant use of multilingual advertising in the country, which has given rise to the creation of a new social identity and linguistic creativity seldom seen before in South Africa.

Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 2011, 29(1): 1–16