In an officially monolingual community such as the one I live in, public communication acknowledges the existence of basically two languages – the official one and the culturally dominant one. This means that most linguistic material to be heard or read on the streets, in the media, in advertising, or even in the academic and scientific spheres will either be in Spanish or in English. Just as happens with the entries in this blog, as a matter of fact. I recently published a chapter on linguistic diversity in the commercial linguistic landscape of Salamanca where I analyze the presence of these and any other possible languages in the main banners of shops and other establishments, using a corpus of photographs taken along three contiguous urban areas. Together with the scarcely surprising finding that Spanish and English together account for 90% or more of the linguistic stimuli found on our streets, it was observed that the use of the former language increases as we move from the most central to the most peripheral area, while the opposite happens with English. These data were interpreted according to a variety of social, economic and even ideological features of the neighborhoods under study. The presence of local culture and of more traditional business profiles is stronger in urban zones with a lower economic status. For its part, the town center combines high income levels with its intrinsic touristic orientation; it is the zone where most foreign visitors lodge and make their purchases, as well as the one preferred by locals themselves for leisure activities. It would be naive to assume that English is exclusively or mainly aimed at facilitating comprehension by non-Spanish speakers.
Still, there are other languages that occasionally appear, which shows that advertising handles a wider range of resources and their respective connotations. It is true that those minority languages are usually more restricted as regards the conceptual domains where they can function as effective advertising strategies. This way, French is mainly associated with clothing and, to a lesser extent, with food (that is, with cuisine); the same values are clearly discernible with Italian. Latin is of course invoked when stressing the intellectual tradition of the oldest university town in Spain, while the rest of European languages are rarer and often restricted to a handful of occurrences. Asian languages such as Chinese and Japanese are mostly found in restaurants, although the former surfaces as well in the low-prize stores that have proliferated during the last decades. This is often a reflection of ingroup communication rather than a lure for outsiders. Also in connection with recent migratory flows, the most peripheral area studied has recently witnessed the emergence of a number of establishments with Arabic names, usually including a transliteration into Spanish, which suggests that outsiders to the ethnic and cultural group are also somehow invited to come in. The same area gives evidence of the relatively recent settlement of Central and South American communities, with occasional names in Quechua or Guaraní – and also, and quite interestingly, of dialectal features of American Spanish, showing that variation actually is all around. Finally, regional languages of Spain can sporadically be found in banks and other specific businesses.
These general observations can probably be extrapolated to the country at large, and maybe to other Hispanic societies as well. English does not seem to have lost a whit of the commercial appeal it has enjoyed since at least the 60s, citizens often being scarcely conscious of the extent to which they are continually surrounded by terms in this language and even use them – often with peculiar pronunciations and morphological alterations. In turn, the ever-growing commercial power of China does not seem to promote a more assiduous use of its official language in journalism, advertising, technology or the arts, perhaps in connection with larger structural differences with Western languages, as well as to the generally endogamic character of Chinese society and culture. In turn, we still adopt words and constructions from other European languages, e.g. Italian sorpasso ‘overtaking [generally used regarding election results]‘ or poner en valor ‘to highlight, place value on’, clearly modeled on similar French structures. It would no doubt be interesting to try to enhance our awareness of what we read and hear in our everyday activities, in order to discover where and to what extent languages other than Spanish and English prove relevant to those activities.
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