Exploiting the social meanings of urban vernaculars: Differentiating effects of Citélanguage in advertising

Joyce Koeman; Stefania Marzo

doi:10.1515/ip-2017-0019

Article

Exploiting the social meanings of urban vernaculars: Differentiating effects of Citélanguage in advertising

Joyce Koeman
Joyce Koeman is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Media Studies where she obtained a doctorate examining ethnic-cultural differences in advertising perception. Previous research focused on the media uses and media portrayal of ethnic minorities in Dutch and Flemish newspapers, television and news programs and advertising. Current projects focus on the impact of social media on social identifications of minorities in an increasingly networked and consumer oriented society.
and Stefania Marzo
Stefania Marzo is Associate Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Leuven. Her research interests lie primarily in variationist sociolinguistics and contact linguistics. Much of her work focuses on the emergence and diffusion of multilingual vernaculars in urban settings (ethnolectal varieties in Flanders) and on sociolinguistic variation of Italian in and beyond Italy. Within these two research areas she studies among others, contact-induced language variation and the relation between (de-) standardization and language ideology.

Published/Copyright: September 6, 2017

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From the journal Intercultural Pragmatics Volume 14 Issue 3

Abstract

Due to several migration flows in Flanders many urban areas have become increasingly multicultural and multilingual, as is the case in the former ghettoized areas (cités) of Limburg, where a new urban vernacular – often called Citélanguage – has emerged. This vernacular has recently gained popularity in mainstream media and has been adopted in public and commercial campaigns to address Flemish youth, although its effectiveness had hardly been studied. In this contribution we join theoretical insights from language accommodation theory, sociolinguistics and advertising studies to examine the persuasiveness of this exemplar of youth slang. We study the impact of advertising slogans in Citélanguage on youngsters from Limburg, while taking into account their local identity (living inside or outside Genk), their ethnic identity (youngsters with or with no ethnic background) and other sociodemographic features as possible predictors of advertising responses. In addition, the social meanings attributed to Citélanguage are scrutinized, as Citélanguage has been previously found to evoke both positive and negative language associations. These social meanings are elicited by means of an experimental free response task and then quantified based on previous affective norms studies. The results confirm that language accommodation may be a viable strategy to address the wider youth population in Flanders, as it transcends classic sociodemographic segmentation criteria. The valence attributed to Citélanguage accounts for variances in advertising attitudes and particularly steers the behavioral intentions of Flemish youth with no migration background. Departing from these findings as well as the limitations of our study we discuss the caveats, opportunities and added value of urban vernaculars in advertising and stipulate a tentative agenda for future interdisciplinary work.

Keywords: variation; accommodation; affective norms; advertising; youth

About the authors

Joyce Koeman

Joyce Koeman is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Media Studies where she obtained a doctorate examining ethnic-cultural differences in advertising perception. Previous research focused on the media uses and media portrayal of ethnic minorities in Dutch and Flemish newspapers, television and news programs and advertising. Current projects focus on the impact of social media on social identifications of minorities in an increasingly networked and consumer oriented society.

Stefania Marzo

Stefania Marzo is Associate Professor of Italian Linguistics at the University of Leuven. Her research interests lie primarily in variationist sociolinguistics and contact linguistics. Much of her work focuses on the emergence and diffusion of multilingual vernaculars in urban settings (ethnolectal varieties in Flanders) and on sociolinguistic variation of Italian in and beyond Italy. Within these two research areas she studies among others, contact-induced language variation and the relation between (de-) standardization and language ideology.

Acknowledgements

We thank Nives Schoofs, Master of Arts in Business Communication, for her dedication and enthusiasm in data collection. Special thanks go out to Stefano de Pascale, researcher at KU Leuven Quantitative Lexicology and Variational Linguistics (QLVL), who suggested the analysis of affective norms and prepared our dataset for further inquiry.

Appendix A

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Published Online: 2017-9-6

Published in Print: 2017-9-26

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https://doi.org/10.1515/ip-2017-0019

Keywords for this article

variation; accommodation; affective norms; advertising; youth