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Linguistic landscapes

French – the brand

By May 19, 2010May 27th, 20192 Comments3 min read10,906 views

Installment #6 in the mini-series on multilingual signage

Multilingualism sells! Some forms of multilingualism that is. In the world of marketing, languages operate like brands: they are a signifier for something else but they are devoid of substance. To phrase it in Marxist terminology: the exchange value of languages has in some contexts come to overshadow their use value.

This biscuit packaging is part of my banal nationalism collection. However, in contrast to the products marked as “Australian” I reported on recently, the national imagery that these biscuits are infused with is not the one of Australia but of France. As the biscuits are sold in Australia, it is the imagery of another nation that the French name, the French slogan and the French description associate the product with.

The bilingualism on the package makes it actually unnecessary to understand any French for the French imagery to work its magic. And in case you don’t know that the language is French and that you are supposed to associate the biscuits with France, and Europe more generally, the package spells it out for you: “glossy, rich, European chocolate, paired with an oh-so-French butter biscuit;” “chocolat européen riche et brilliant, recouvrant un biscuit au beurre si délicieusement français.”

The French language on this product, on the supermarket shelf, works because it is nothing but a stereotype: a stereotype about delicious French cuisine and sophisticated European savoir vivre. The product promises to bring these qualities to Australia and to let the consumer partake of them. Eating a petit écolier (which, for the non-French speakers among you, incidentally, translates as “little schoolboy” – does that ruin your appetite a bit?) promises to make you feel a bit more cultured, a bit more sophisticated, a bit as if you were on that holiday in Paris that the travel brochures and media make you dream about. Eyeing the package you can even feel like a sophisticated multilingual French speaker: “milk chocolate/chocolat au lait”, “European biscuits/biscuits européen” – by the looks of it French is not that difficult!

Marketing and advertising messages such as these work because they are embedded in the discourses of banal nationalism and because the foreign language works not as a conveyor of content but as the empty shell of a stereotype: just like a brand in fact. The product brand’s website makes this very clear with a page devoted to “how to speak LU.” There you can click on a short list of French words (chocolatier, petit beurre etc.) and listen to their French pronunciation.

And if you aren’t convinced yet that French has become nothing but a brand in this context, check out which international corporation LU belongs to: the US multinational Kraft!

ResearchBlogging.org LEE, J. (2006). Linguistic constructions of modernity: English mixing in Korean television commercials Language in Society, 35 (01) DOI: 10.1017/S0047404506060039

PILLER, I. (2001). Identity constructions in multilingual advertising Language in Society, 30 (2), 153-186 DOI: 10.1017/S0047404501002019

Ingrid Piller

Author Ingrid Piller

Dr Ingrid Piller, FAHA, is Distinguished Professor of Applied Linguistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. Her research expertise is in bilingual education, intercultural communication, language learning, and multilingualism in the context of migration and globalization.

More posts by Ingrid Piller

Join the discussion 2 Comments

  • Gag Halfrunt says:

    Im pretty sure that this packaging must have been designed for the US and Canada. The bilingual text is a legal requirement in Canada, and not actually a href=http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GratuitousFrench rel=nofollowgratuitous French/a intended to make it look sophisticated. Everything is in English and French (but no other languages), English is the first language you read but both languages are equal in terms of size and the Nutrition Facts box is in US/Canadian style.

    The a href=http://www.petitecolier.fr/gamme.htm rel=nofollowdesigns used in France/a are completely different in style, emphasising French tradition and childhood nostalgia by using the standard handwriting that all schoolchildren were required to learn until recently. I think that people in France would find the attempt to reposition the Petit Écolier as a refined masterpiece of the chocolatiers art fairly ridiculous — its just a little biscuit with a slab of chocolate on top, and as commonplace in France as, say, Oreo cookies are in the US.

  • xiaoxiao says:

    Interesting!
    This reminds me one of the advertising strategies in China: the names of some countries or cities are used as brands to promote the products. For example, France is usually associated with love and romance, so “Spring in Paris” sounds a much more attractive name for wedding photography studios than “Spring in Kunming,” even though the latter should be more pleasant than the former from the perspective of weather (Kunming, the capital city of Yunnan province, is best best known for its lovely
    weather). “France/French” also indicates feminine delicacy. The phrase of “French formula” is widely used in the advertising of stuff for women such as perfume, beauty soap and other cosmetics. And Germany always goes with fine quality. A catch phrase in advertising is “German quality”. German cars are very popular in China.There is a car ad going “French romance and German quality” –doesn’t this tell everything that can be expected from a car? Another expample is the association of Italy with art. So “Italy/Italian” or “Milan” occur frequently in the advertising of furniture (“European” is also a popular word in furniture ads).
    Well, the connections established between these countries and their representative features may be “true” or “factual” in some sense. But if viewed from the perspective of Ingrid’s blog, they sound more like generalised or reduced representations of the images of these countries. Moreover, the repetitive uses of such associations in advertising may make the stereotypes become a natural part of people’s knowledge about other countries. And then people may not even bother to know more or they may not take in information other than the imput from advertising that’s been naturalised. What good can this do to our intercultural communication in general?

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