Toiletological English

Can you guess what kind of product the following text is promoting?

Your well-being is close to our heart

rail&fresh [product] areas are bright and friendly and leave nothing to be desired. The [product] facilities are kept perfectly clean round the clock. Scent sprayers, pleasant music, an attractive design and attentive, friendly and helpful staff round off the rail&fresh service package.

If you’ve taken your clue from my heading, you may have guessed it: [product] is a toilet. However, the text itself is pretty surprising as an ad for a public toilet with its generic corporate expressions that could be used for almost any product or service: “Your well-being is close to our heart,” “bright and friendly,” “leave nothing to be desired,” “attentive, friendly and helpful staff.” While these expressions are thoroughly familiar from corporate advertising and could refer to almost anything, it’s the first time I’ve ever encountered them in toilet advertising. As a matter of fact, this is the first time I’ve encountered toilet advertising! Until now I was under the impression that there is no need to advertise for public toilets as you either have to use them or you don’t. Now, the image that goes with the text seems to suggest differently, and I’m wondering whether I’ve missed a trend where public toilets have become whole-of-family excursion destinations.

Are you wondering how I came across this website advertising the public toilets at Munich Central Station? Let me put it on record that I was NOT googling international toilet destinations! Rather, the name of the toilet in question, rail & fresh, was mentioned in an article about English in Germany published in the German magazine Der Spiegel. The article argues that it is silly to object to English loanwords or English-based brand name creations such as rail&fresh in German. Reasons include that loanwords have always been around and are a normal part of all languages; people should be free to speak in whichever way they wish; there are more important things in life than loanwords and purists get worked up about nothing; and, finally, the usual clincher, the tide of loanwords can’t be stopped anyways.

The article’s target are German purists in general and, specifically, the Verein Deutsche Sprache (‘German Language Society’), a not-for-profit organization aiming to strengthen the German language and to enhance its reputation. Their main target is the use of English loanwords and English-derived brand names. Personally, I have little patience for linguistic purism. At least that’s what I thought until I read the Spiegel-article and found myself getting really annoyed with it. The reason I found the article annoying has nothing to do with the arguments put forward, which I’ve read countless times and which are the standard fare of the anti-prescriptivist tradition. Instead, it has everything to do with the identity of the author and the language in which the article was written: the author is a British expat based in Munich and the article was written in English in a German-language magazine. “Does an old and tired argument become fresh because it is presented in English instead of German?” I wondered.

My negative gut reaction against an ok, even if uninteresting, position goes to the heart of the matter: as many a language-ideological debate the debate about loan words in German is not about language but about identities, and my reaction was against the cultural defeatism that is implicit in offering a large public forum (Der Spiegel has 5.91 mio readers) in a German-medium publication to an English native-speaker rehashing a tired old argument.

In the end, both Der Spiegel and the Verein Deutsche Sprache completely miss the point: whether you think it’s a good idea – or not – to call a public toilet in Munich rail&fresh is not a matter of personal linguistic taste but of accessibility: toilet signage in a space frequented by such a diversity of people as Munich’s central station needs to be as language-neutral and as widely recognizable as possible. But the question of accessibility runs even deeper. Public toilets are a public necessity and as such it’s unfair to have them operate competitively and subject to the capitalist imperative for profit. Rail&fresh users are charged Euro1 per visit (at today’s rate that’s AUD1.40). Admittedly, you get half the fee back as voucher on a loyalty card (and, no, I’m not making this up!). I don’t know what the alternative for those who can’t pay the fee are at Munich Central Station. The key point is that access to decent public toilets is an equity issue that all citizens are entitled to irrespective of whether they can afford a 1-Euro-pee or not. Public toilets used to be truly public and maintained out of taxes. Privatizing them has given us toilet advertising, toilet brand identities and toilets with a bilingual website. That’s a pretty heavy price to pay for equal access.

Debating the use of English in the brand identity of a German toilet serves to obscure the continued assault on the welfare state and the dismantling of social justice. And that is why I object to toiletological English – because it dulls the critical faculties.

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

Persian version of my blog post about English as the non-language of globalization.
Translated by Niloufar Behrooz (نیلوفر بهروز)

(نوشتار شماره ٢ در مجموعه نوشتار های کوتاه درباره ی نشانه های چند زبانه)

اغلب تابلوهایی كه در مكان هایِ عمومیِ حالِ حاضر يافت می شوند جنبه ی تجاری دارند. اين نوعی روشِ تبليغات است و انتخابِ لغات در تابلوهایِ تجاری از جمله اسامیِ مغازه ها و فروشگاه ها به خوبی بيانگر ارزشهایِ مرتبط با يك زبان خاص مي باشد. هدف اصلی اين است كه معنایِ ضمنیِ نامِ فروشگاه به گونه ای باشد كه مشتری های زيادی را جذب كند. از يك چشم اندازِ چند زبانه، نشانه هایِ جالب آن هایی هستند که در آن ها از زبانی غير از زبانِ پیش فرض – زبانِ رسمي يك مكانِ خاص – استفاده شده باشد. در بيشتر دنيایِ غيرِ انگليسی زبان علامت هایِ انگليسی البته باعث مباهاتِ آن مكان شده وانگليسی به طور گسترده ای با مفاهيمی چون نوين گری، پيشرفت، جهانی سازی و مصرف گرايی پيوند خورده است. در حالی كه زبانهای غير انگليسی غالبا نشانگر كليشه های قومی هستند، انگليسی نشانگر يك كليشه یِ اجتماعی است (همان طور كه با شرح جزئيات در اين مقاله به آن پرداخته ام). اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی قرار نيست همان طور كه  فرانسوی یا ايتاليايی برای آغشتنِ یک داد وستدِ اقتصادی به رنگ و بویِ فرانسوی و ايتاليايی مورد استفاده قرار می گیرد، يكسری كيفيتِ بريتانيايی و آمريكايیِ کلیشه ای را تبليغ كند.

ارتباط زبان انگليسی با مصرف گرايی به طور كامل در تابلویِ اين فروشگاه در فرودگاهِ مونيخ مشخص شده است. مونيخ پايتختِ باواريا يكي از ايالات ساختار فدرال آلمان است. لغتِ آلمانیِ موردِ استفاده برای باواريا بايرن (Bayern) است و بخش اول Bay-ern دقيقا مثل كلمه یِ انگليسیِ Buy (خريدن) تلفظ مي شود. اسم ِ فروشگاه نوعی معمایِ لفظی ِ به تمامِ معناست. رنگ ملی باواريا، يعني آبي، در پس زمينه یِ لوزی شکلِ تابلو روابط ملی (گرایانه) را تقویت می کند. به عنوان كسی كه در باواريا بزرگ شده، با پيش فرضی از نماد ملی كه در بچگی به من القا شده بود، عكس العملِ ناخودآگاهِ من اما نسبت به اين تابلو از نوع وحشت و رنجش بود.

زبان انگليسی در اين تابلو به وضوح هيچ گونه ارتباطی با هيچ كشور انگليسی زبانی ندارد، بلكه انگليسی را به نمادِ ملیِ ناحیه ای غيرِ انگليسی زبان، يعنی باواريا، پيوند مي دهد و مردمِ آن ناحیه را به عنوان يك هدف مصرفی عرضه مي كند. کالاهایِ موجود در اين فروشگاه از انواعِ سوغات به شمار مي آيند، سوغاتِ باواريايي، آلمانی، اروپايی، فرودگاهی، كريسمسی ( من اين عكس را نوامبر سال پيش گرفتم) و چيزهای ديگری كه تنها برایِ خريده شدن آن جا هستند. بخريد!

مثل بسياری از فرودگاه های ديگر، انگليسی اين مكان را به نا-فضایی برای مصرف ِ مفرط، گردشِ مفرط و نماد هایِ ملیِ مفرط تبديل می سازد. انگليسی زبانِ جهانی سازی است؛ در این شکی نیست اما جهاني سازیِ هيچ-چيز، همان طور که جورج ریتزر به ما می گوید! آيا اين به اين معناست كه انگليسی زبانِ هيچ-چيز است؟ نا-افرادی در نا-مکانی سرگرم ِ خریدنِ نا-چیزهایی در نا-برخوردهایِ تجاری و با استفاده از یک نا-زبان؟

References

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage.

Language in the catfish war

I’ve just read False Economy and in addition to learning many new intriguing things about economic history, I’ve also learnt that the catfish war, was, inter alia, fought on the terrain of language. Never heard about the catfish war?! The catfish war is a trade war between the USA and Vietnam, which started in the mid-1990s and in which US catfish producers lobbied for trade barriers and tariffs be imposed on Vietnamese catfish imports.

Initially, US catfish lobbyists delivered a heavy blow to Vietnamese catfish producers when they convinced US lawmakers to implement a law that banned imported catfish from being called “catfish.” Both the US and Vietnamese fish are in the same order of Siluriformes but in different families.

However, their joy didn’t last long because the Vietnamese retaliated by rebranding their catfish as basa. “Basa” is simply the Vietnamese word for the fish in question. First they didn’t have a coherent strategy and so other names also proliferated, including tra, bocourti, panga and swai. Panga, which is mostly used in Europe, derives from the Latin family name Pangasiidae. Basa and tra are different subfamilies – basa is technically known as Pangasius bocourti (hence the trade name bocourti) and tra is technically known as Pangasius hypophthalmus. The Vietnamese word for Pangasius hypophthalmus is tra and the Thai word for it is swai (hence the trade names tra and swai).

It was all very confusing (it took me a good two hours of internet research to figure this all out), particularly as basa is used internationally for both Pangasius bocourti and Pangasius hypophthalmus, and the same is true for panga in Europe. However, since 2010 Vietnam has instituted legislation to label all basa and tra for export consistently as basa.

The Vietnamese strategy of market differentiation worked. In the past decade, basa has come to be seen as an imported premium product and has been doing well in a range of export markets, including the USA. Consequently, US catfish lobbyists changed their strategy: they went to lobby for basa to be treated as a “like product” – i.e. completely reversing their earlier strategy which had been to argue that Vietnamese catfish was different from American catfish. They were successful again and Vietnamese basa has been subjected to heavy import tariffs.

As a discussion paper by the Center for International Management and Development Antwerp explains, the catfish war has transformed Vietnamese aquaculture: export markets have diversified beyond the USA, basa and tra are now being farmed in large agribusinesses, who have the means to innovate and to impose quality controls and to produce to international standards (another strategy in the catfish war has been to allege the inferior quality of Asian catfish and aquaculture).

The catfish war is not the only trade war fought on the terrain on language. Trade names have significant implications for competitiveness and consumer protection, particularly in the seafood business where new species continue to be bred and where the final product on the supermarket shelf has often undergone substantial technological intervention and transformation from animal to food.

The catfish war continues. US catfish producers have recently released a new catfish product, specially filleted premium catfish, under the car-name-like trade name Delacata. However, by now both US and Vietnamese catfish producers are more worried about competition from China than from each other.

In the meantime, if you ask Australian fish-and-chip vendors what kind of fish they use and where it comes from, they tell you: “Dunno! It comes in a box” Do you know what your food is and where it comes from?

This particular piece of Australia for sale differs from the myriad of similar items on the market in its multilingualism. The product associates the national flag with the country name in six different languages. The product thus serves to make multilingualism part of the national imagery – a project I should presumably welcome. It’s the trivial and tokenistic nature of the multilingualism on the apron and gloves that irks me. It reminds me of the British woman who recently made headlines for “mastering 25 languages.” If you read the article, it turned out she knows how to say “hello” in 25 languages. The fact that this is considered newsworthy, even if only in a local paper, is evidence that the monolingual mindset is alive and well in other countries, too.

The idea that multilingualism is nothing more than saying “hello” or writing “Australia” in different scripts is a key aspect of the monolingual mindset: it makes it seemingly unnecessary for language learners to invest serious time and effort into language learning, and language education policy gets away with 40 minutes of foreign language learning per week as is the case in NSW primary schools: even after years of study, students can’t do much more than say “hello” in the language they study. Trivializing multilingualism also forms the basis for the myth that migrants don’t want to learn English: if you assume that there is nothing much to language learning, then of course you have to conclude that migrants who are not great language learners are actually willfully refusing to learn English.

Oh, and by the way, writing “Australia” in six different scripts really can’t be a particularly challenging task once you’ve decided that that’s how you want to design your apron and gloves. However, the producer of this product still managed to mess up the Arabic version. Instead of أستراليا the letters are written in the wrong direction so that the Arabic version looks something like “Ailartsua” …

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!

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

Signage not only appears in public space. Through our consumption of all kinds of products, we bring a multiplicity of signs into our homes. In this slide show, I’ve assembled images of a range of breakfast foods: cornflakes, yoghurt, bagels, cheese, apple juice, and a cup of tea. The packaging tells us what kind of food we have in front of us and also some nutritional information. However, beyond that factual information they are graced with national imagery. The Australian flag appears on the cornflakes box, the cheese slices and the apple juice; an outline of the Australian map appears on the yoghurt lid and the bagel tag (the tag itself was attached to a plastic bag with bagels in it); the national green-yellow color scheme appears on the back of the juice bottle; and the back of the cornflakes box and the tea mug are overloaded with national icons such as the Sydney Harbor Bridge, the Great Barrier Reef or Ned Kelly. For those who still don’t get it, the words “Australian” or “Aussie” are displayed prominently on each product.

But get what? Ostensibly, this display of national imagery provides information about where the products were made. However, according to the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, around 90% of food consumed in Australia is produced nationally. So, in Australia, the fact that the food on your breakfast table is Australian isn’t really all that newsworthy. In fact, the message that this nationalistic food packaging delivers is a different one. On one level, it is an advertising message: these products are marked as good and desirable because they are associated with the positive imagery of Australian-ness. On another level, however, they trivialize the very national symbols they use to “uplift” their products. And, they remind us, each morning at the breakfast table of our national belonging.

Michael Billig coined the term “banal nationalism” for the way in which mundane, everyday signage such as the labeling on these breakfast foods reminds us of our national identities on a daily basis. “Banal nationalism” refers to “the ideological habits which enable the established nations of the West to be reproduced” (Billig, 1995, p. 6). Many people think of nationalism as extremism and as extreme forms of national ardor such as those of Nazi Germany or the disintegrating Yugoslavia. However, Billig points out that nationalism is the endemic condition of established nation states, that it is enacted and re-enacted daily in many mundane, almost unnoticeable, hence “banal,” ways. It is these banal forms of nationalism that socialize people into seeing themselves as members of a particular nation who live in a wider world of nation states.

Have you had your daily dose of banal nationalism today?

Much of the signage that can be found in contemporary public spaces is commercial. It is a form of advertising, and language choice in commercial signage such as shop names is a good indicator of the values associated with a particular language. The basic idea is that the connotations of the shop name are such that they will attract potential customers. From a multilingual perspective, the interesting signs are those where a language other than the default choice – the official language of a particular place – is used. In much of the non-English-speaking world, English signs, of course, hold pride of place and English has come to be widely associated with modernity, progress, globalization and consumption. Whereas languages other than English mostly index ethnic stereotypes, English indexes a social stereotype (as I discussed in detail in this review article). What that means is that English is not used to conjure up some archetypal American or British quality in the same way that French or Italian are used to imbue a business with some stereotypical French-ness or Italian-ness.

The association of English with consumerism is perfectly encapsulated in this shop sign at Munich airport. Munich is the capital of Bavaria, one of the states in Germany’s federal structure. The German word for “Bavaria” is “Bayern” and the first syllable of “Bay-ern” is pronounced just like English “buy.” The shop name “Buyern” is thus a neat word play. Bavaria’s national color blue against the background of the national rhombus pattern reinforce the national association. As someone who grew up in Bavaria and had a certain reference for the national symbolism instilled in my childhood, my gut reaction to this sign was one of dismay and offense.

English in this sign clearly bears no relationship whatsoever to any English-speaking country. Rather, it associates English with the national symbolism of a non-English-speaking country, Bavaria, and presents that nation as an object of consumption. The products for sale in this shop are all kinds of souvenirs: Bavarian souvenirs, German souvenirs, European souvenirs, airport souvenirs, Christmas souvenirs (I took the picture in November last year) and other stuff whose only purpose it is to be bought. Buy!

English makes this place – just like pretty much any other airport – a non-space of gratuitous consumption, gratuitous travel, and gratuitous national imagery. English is the language of globalization, that’s for sure; but it’s the globalization of nothing, as George Ritzer tells us. Does that make English the language of nothing? Non-people in non-places buying non-things in non-service encounters and using a non-language?!

Piller, I. (2003). ADVERTISING AS A SITE OF LANGUAGE CONTACT Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 23 DOI: 10.1017/S0267190503000254

Ritzer, G. (2007). The globalization of nothing 2 Thousand Oaks, CA, & London: Sage

The fellow pictured is German comedian Kaya Yanar, who has made a living from comedic characters that consist of exaggerations and stereotypes of various immigrant groups. He’s best known for his show “Was guckst Du?” which translates into English as “What are you looking at?” and refers to staring as a form of passive-aggressive social control in German society. Staring is used as a means to express implicit social disapproval of the looks of another person and foreigners are often the object of “the stare.” The question “Was guckst Du?” is a form of resistance as it forces the silent disapprover to either make their criticism explicit or to respond with a cowardly “oh, nothing, nothing.”

One of the characters in “Was guckst Du?” is the pictured Hakan, a Turkish immigrant to Germany, who works as a nightclub bouncer. Hakan speaks in an exaggerated form of Turkish-German, although Yanar himself is an L1 German speaker. His comedy is of a pretty common ‘ethnic comedy’ variety, drawing on circulating stereotypes to get a laugh. It seems that “Lümütüd Edition”, then, is supposed to be an imitation of Hakan speaking English, and yet, as far as I’ve been able to gather, the character Hakan never speaks English in Yanar’s show and neither does Yanar. So what’s going on?

It is a case of multilingual advertising, with a twist. The English ‘Limited Edition’ is in common usage on German products. Hakan’s cartoonish representation of a Turkish immigrant bouncer is then layered on top, producing a consumable snack of multicultural ‘döner’ meets ‘crisps’. The gratuitous umlauts serve to make the English phrase look like mock Turkish and sound like accented English.

The designation of the chips’ flavor adds to the stereotyped language: “Döner mit alles” translates as “Doner kebab with everything.” The grammatically correct form would be “Döner mit allem” and the form of the expression thus mimics foreigner talk, or, more specifically, a form of uneducated and fossilized “Turkish German.” The Lorenz snack food company takes Yanar’s ready-made caricature: greased-back hair, accentedness, and foreigner talk, and commodifies it, with a sprinkling of contemporary advertising multilingualism (English-as-mock-Turkish) to top it off.

With anti-immigration (specifically anti-Islamic immigration) discourses in political advertising in other parts of German-speaking Europe being unapologetically racist, it’s hard to see past the stereotypes and language mockery to find the humor in Hakan, or the chips.

You can read more about ‘ethno-comedy’ in the German context (in German) in: Keding, K., & Struppert, A. (2006). Ethno-Comedy im deutschen Fernsehen: Inhaltsanalyse und Rezipientenbefragung zu “Was guckst du?!”. Berlin: Frank & Timme.

Ridiculous English signs

English speakers sometimes like to amuse themselves with ridiculous English signage from around the world. www.engrish.com is a typical example and I have to admit that there is some pretty hilarious stuff there. At the same time, I can’t help feeling that this kind of humor is adding insult to injury: first, we make the whole world speak English and then we laugh at how poorly they do it.

So, I thought we should institute a Ridiculous-English-Signs-Challenge on Language on the Move, where the joke is not at the expense of some poor speaker of English-as-an-additional-language whose English may not be quite perfect. Rather the joke on the Language on the Move Ridiculous-English-Signs-Challenge is at the expense of an English-speaker, quite possibly monolingual, whose English grammar is perfectly ok but who is meaning-challenged, quite possibly as a result of over-exposure to the language of marketing and management.

I’ll start the Language on the Move Ridiculous-English-Signs-Challenge with this sign from an Australian university. The writer/s must have thought that calling an establishment of this nature (a modest cafeteria with all the charm of a Soviet diner) “staff café” could bring the charge of un-Australian elitism against them and so, to guard against that terrible danger, modified “staff” with “everyone” and created this inadvertent oxymoron. It would have been enough to look around a bit to notice that this bright 21^st century corporate-identity sign with the charming French accent on the e looks nothing but ridiculous in the dreary 1960s concrete blocks and mesh-wire fencing surrounding it.

One dad in our trick-or-treating party figured Prestÿ was German: “Don’t you guys put umlauts on everything?” “No.” I figured it was Turkish but am told that a y with umlaut does not exist in Turkish, either. At least, Turkish is an educated guess seeing that the wrapper also has “Sütlü Çikolata” written on it. “Sütlü Çikolata” is Turkish for “Milk Chocolate” – the other bit of language on the wrapper I recognize.

Further clues: The candy was found in a trick-or-treat bag in Abu Dhabi and so can be presumed to have been purchased in the UAE although there is no Arabic writing on the wrapper. There is no country-of-origin information on the wrapper, either, although there is some illegible small print under something that looks like “asas” and which might conceivably contain statutory information if it were not too small to be legible. Googling “Elvan chocolates” produces a further Turkish connection: Elvan is the name of an Istanbul-based company producing chocolates and pastries for “more than 70 countries over 6 continents.”

Of course, it doesn’t really matter whether Prestÿ “exists” in any real language – as long as people associate it with a particular language and transfer the associations they have with that language onto the product, Prestÿ is doing its job. Along the lines “I suppose Prestÿ is German for ‘prestige’ so the qualities of German must apply to the chocolate, too.” Mostly, German is associated with cars and technology, though, where it tends to be used to connote high quality. I know because I’ve written a few research papers on the iconic use of foreign languages in advertising and if you want to follow up on multilingualism in advertising, you can find some of my research papers in our resources section.

More likely, Prestÿ is just supposed to be “general European” and supposed to connote the sophistication of European chocolate and cuisine. There’s a lot of multilingual meaning-making on this humble little piece of junk and I would love to hear your interpretations!