The presence and roles of English in Swedish print advertising : An exploratory study

Despite the ubiquity of English in the Nordic socie ties, little attention seems to have been paid to the presence of English in advert ising texts. Thus, the present study aims to survey the reality of the use of Engl ish in Swedish print advertising. A sample of advertisements published in Swedish mag azines from different market segments is examined. Drawing on genre analy sis and advertising research, this paper looks at the actual presence o f English in this genre, at the moves that include English words and phrases, and a t the values evoked by those expressions. The results suggest that English may n ot be so pervasive after all. Some of the roles and functions performed by Englis h are discussed. Finally, questions to be addressed by future studies are pre s nted.


Introduction
It is generally acknowledged that "English has a special position in the world as a global or international language" (Aijmer and Melchers 2004: 1), and its use in advertising stands out as a common practice worldwide.This seems to be motivated by two main reasons.First, with increasing internationalisation taking place, audiences are not always homogeneous in terms of language, and the use of English caters for those unable to understand the local language (Pahta and Taavitsainen 2004: 172).Second, the introduction of foreign words and phrases in the discourse of advertising has been traditionally resorted to as a means of attracting the audience's attention, and it seems that English is particularly effective in this sense (Berns 2009: 196).
Thus, English in commercial communication has been widely explored internationally (e.g.Gerritsen et al. 2000;Yueng-Ying 2000;Planken et al. 2010;Petéry 2011;Ruellot 2011), particularly in connection to the globalisation processes that bring local products to the global arena.Two main topics of interest have been identified, i.e., on the one hand, the use of English as a facilitating tool for implementing the same campaign in different countries, and, on the other hand, the combination of English and the local language(s) to achieve certain effects, for example drawing connections between values typically associated with the English language and the product being advertised.
The second issue, i.e. the mix of English and the local language(s) in a single message, has been explored in relation to several languages of the world, such as French, Dutch, Japanese, Spanish, or Italian.These studies have focused on two different levels, namely (a) the microlinguistic level, specifically the morphological, syntactic and semantic strategies used to incorporate English words and phrases into the discourse in the local language; and (b) the macrolinguistic level, namely, how mixing English and the local language affects the text in terms of author, audience, and purpose (Piller 2003: 171-172).
In the Nordic countries, English seems to be particularly ubiquitous, and some scholars (e.g.Hult 2012;Sharp 2007;Taavitsainen and Pahta 2003) claim that English should no longer be considered a second language since its use has extended to the intranational level, and it is not uncommon to come across combinations of English and the local languages in different contexts.For instance, Pahta and Taavitsainen claim that even "those Finns who are not actually involved in international affairs are also heavily subjected to English through the mass media, being thus passive consumers of the language" (2004: 167).Nevertheless, the presence and functions of English in advertising messages has not been fully explored yet.
Previous studies have touched upon the integration and assimilation of English words at the microlinguistic level in the Nordic region (e.g.Stålhammar 2004;Sharp 2007).However, it seems that the study of the role of English at the macrolinguistic level has received less attention, and only a few publications have tackled the issue.For instance, Pahta and Taavitsainen (2004) carried out a diachronic study of the use of English in advertisements from the yellow pages in Helsinki over a period of fifty years.Their main findings indicate that English is often used to incorporate connotations of modernity and/or high livingstandards.Furthermore, their results highlight the fact that some of the expressions used by Finnish advertisers imitate English but do not comply with the conventional ways of expressing those ideas as used by native speakers.In the case of advertising in Sweden, Larson explored job advertisements concluding that English is mainly used as a carrier of certain values that make the job "sound more appealing and challenging" (Larson 1991: 368).However, it seems that little attention has been paid to the actual presence of English in purely commercial texts, i.e. advertisements for goods and services, considering the seemingly substantial influx of English in the Nordic societies (Gottlieb 2004: 41).
Thus, the present study surveys the presence and role of English words and phrases in a sample of Swedish print advertisements.More specifically, the following research questions are addressed: 1. How much English is there in Swedish print advertisements?2. Which part(s) of the message are more likely to contain English? 3. Which values are attributed to the products through English words or phrases?

Material and method
For the purposes of this investigation, a corpus of magazine advertisements collected in 2012 is used.The Swedish Magazine Publishers' Association Sveriges Tidskrifter, one of the largest media organisations in Sweden, has been consulted so as to obtain information regarding the Swedish magazine market.When compiling the sample, two main issues have been particularly relevant, namely, the inclusion of different market segments and the selection of publications with high market shares.A variety of publications targeting different audiences has been included so as to gain insight into the situation in broad terms.This, in turn, may help identify specific aspects of interest for future studies.Sveriges Tidskrifter lists 38 market segments.However, some of these segments have been found to occupy highly specialised niches, while other segments only contain publications with comparatively low market shares.Thus, the magazines with the highest market shares in numbers of copies in 2011 have been identified, as these were the most up-to-date statistics at the time.Then, 10 of those magazines have been selected; they all represent different market segments (see Table 1).
Regarding the theoretical foundations for this study, my approach draws mainly on genre analysis and advertising research.On the one hand, genre studies provide "a variety of frameworks used to analyse a range of textual genres constructed, interpreted and used by members of various disciplinary communities in academic, professional, workplace and other institutionalised contexts" (Bhatia 2002: 12).Among those frameworks, research on move analysis has generated tools to study the prototypical moves contained in a specific genre, as well as the functions carried out by them.
Thus, Bhatia's work on the schematic structure of print advertisements (2004,2005) is used in this study.The model identifies six moves and their functions (see Table 2), which may shed some light on the role of English in each text in the sample.For instance, if used in the headline, English may catch the readers' attention; however, if used in the copy, English could make the details about the advertised product available to members of the audience who cannot understand the local language.Thus, for each advertisement in the sample, the move in which English appears is documented.The function typically performed by that move is then considered in the interpretation and discussion of the findings.It is important to note that the schematic structure identified by Bhatia is not rigid, and variation can be expected.In particular, it is not uncommon to find hybridity or omissions of certain moves.On the other hand, within the field of advertising research, studies in the area of content analysis focus on the way certain values are encoded in this type of commercial communication.This line of research contributes to the present study by providing the theoretical background and the tools needed in order to explore whether English is used to insert certain values in Swedish print advertisements.In this sense, any patterns identified in the sample could indicate that certain values, collectively associated to the English language, are being transferred to the publicised products or services in order to make them more attractive in the eyes of the prospective consumers.Previous studies (e.g.Pahta and Taavitsainen Table 2. Schematic structure of print advertisements (Bhatia 2004: 59-65;2005: 213-225) Move 1: Visuals/ reader attraction The visual elements are generally crucial in terms of catching people's attention.These might include photographs, drawings, or graphic accessories, such colour backgrounds, borders, etc.

Move 2: Headline
The headline is usually the most important element along with the visual elements.Typically, it includes the slogan or catchphrase.
Move 3: Lead Some adverts include a subhead or lead that briefly expands the main headline.Sometimes it becomes the slogan.Its main objective is to justify the product by establishing a niche.

Move 4: Copy
The copy is the main text of the advertisement.This move can present different realisations, namely: Using pressure tactics, • Soliciting response.

5: Signature
The signature provides the advertiser's details, i.e. logo, advertiser's name, address, geographical situation, website address, etc.

6: Coupons/ offering incentives
Coupons and other strategies attract the audience's attention and may raise their response by offering an incentive.
2004 ;Larson 1991) have identified this strategy in other types of persuasive communication, which suggests that certain values associated to the English language are sometimes transferred to the advertised products or services.
In particular, Pollay's list of appeals ( 1983) is used as a model of analysis in the present paper.This model, despite having its origins in the early 1980s, has had a significant impact on advertising research, and is still widely used (e.g.Zandpour, Chang & Catalano 1992;Albers-Miller & Gelb 1996;Göllner 2003;Singh & Matsuo 2004;Okazaki & Alonso 2005;Lee et al. 2011;Tsai and Men 2012;Zarantonello et al. 2012).Pollay's model is formed by 42 categories, each of which represents a value-conceptualised by Pollay as appeal-that can be inserted in a commercial message so as to attach that particular value to the product itself with the intention of enhancing the product's desirability in the eyes of the consumer.Appeals are not mutually exclusive, that is to say, any given advertisement may contain more than one appeal.Each one of Pollay's appeals is presented along with a list of adjectives and phrases that give linguistic form to that specific value (see example in Table 3 1 ).The terms listed under each appeal belong to the same semantic field.Besides, the model also considers other linguistic and visual strategies that bring these meanings into the message in an implicit fashion.Thus, the study makes use of mixed methods for the data analysis, which is organised in three phases.First, the magazines are examined, and the advertisements extracted and classified in three groups depending on language choice, namely: (a) only Swedish, (b) Swedish and English, and (c) only English.
Regarding the second group, the advertisements where English and Swedish are mixed, Bhatia's classification of moves for print advertising is used so as to identify the location and function of English within the message.Then, Pollay's list of appeals is employed to discover which values are expressed in English.
For the latter group, i.e. those messages written entirely in English, the scope of the company advertised is considered.Does the company operate on a local, Nordic or global scale?Can that provide any clues as to why the whole message is written in English?

Results
This section presents the results obtained in the analysis of the sample.First, the distribution of English in the sample is presented.Then, the messages fully written in English are examined.Finally, attention is drawn to the analysis of the texts where English and Swedish are combined.
The first stage of the analysis reveals that the ten magazines examined contain 430 advertisements, out of which only 73 contain English to some extent.That constitutes 17% of the total.From these 73, nine messages are entirely written in English, and 64 mix English and Swedish.
Regarding the nine advertisements written completely in English, further examination has revealed that seven of those campaigns belong to global companies-e.g.Mont Blanc, Henderson Global Investors, Deutsche Bank, etc.-, and have been used in several countries worldwide.This seems to indicate that these campaigns are written in English merely for practical purposes.In other words, because they are written in English, the campaigns can be used in different countries, without having to translate or adapt the copy to the different local audiences.Thus, these companies seem to be employing a global approach to the promotion of their products.
Besides those seven, two more advertisements fully written in English have been found in the sample; these, however, publicise a Nordic and a Swedish organisation respectively.The first one of these advertisements is for a Nordic firm that sells sweets in the different Nordic countries.Even if the scope of this company is not international, given that the targeted audiences speak different languages (i.e.Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish), the company's strategy is comparable to that of the previous cases.In other words, English is used as a strategy that allows the implementation of the same campaign in more than one country.
As for the second campaign, the Swedish advertisement belongs to Gotland University (see Figure 1).The reasons why this institution uses only English may be related to two different aspects.On the one hand, advertising in English may attract international students, which is currently important for universities in general, and for this one in particular, as a visit to their website demonstrates.In fact, their institutional website contains some statements that point at internationalisation as an important component in their agenda: -Gotland is a very dynamic region that is active in its supporting education and collaboration both on the national and international level.-Do you want a successful career in international management?Attracting students worldwide, the Master in International Management program prepares you for doing business in the internationalized world of today.
On the other hand, the appeals used in their advertisement include effectiveness ("our former students work at…", which implies that their alumni have managed to find a job in the areas connected to the studies they received from this university), and independence ("where do you want to go?", where the use of a different typography indicates the question is addressed at an individual member of the audience) which, combined with the modern image conveyed by the visual elements, could be used as a strategy to increase the attractiveness of the institution for the audience.
Moving on to the next phase in the analysis, the focus is on the moves and the appeals where English is used in the 64 advertisements that mix both languages, English and Swedish.
Regarding the moves analysis, as mentioned in the method section, Bhatia's model (2004,2005) is used so as to identify the location of the English phrases found.This, in turn, provides a rationale that may explain the role of English in these advertisements.
The analysis of the sample shows that the move that contains English more often is the headline, with 57 instances.This move is usually the most important element, along with the visual components, in an advertisement when it comes to attracting the reader's attention.Typically, headlines include slogans or catchphrases that are designed to remain in the audience's memory.The second move in terms of frequency in the presence of English is the signature, with 43 instances.This move provides information about the company, such as its name, contact details, and logo; additionally, the website address and name of the brand are normally present too, sometimes merged with the logo.This move has been found to be particularly interesting in the sample.More specifically, it has been observed that companies often include a phrase or a short sentence in English (see Figure 2), along with an image of the product or the company's logo on the right bottom corner; the position of this move is extremely relevant since, as Kress and van Leeuwen (2006: 183) state, the elements that are displayed on the right bottom corner are more likely to be identified by the reader as relevant information; thus, these elements are more likely to be remembered.The lead, with 29 instances, has been found to be relatively important as a carrier of English.In fact, this move has been noted to be quite often written entirely in that language (see Figure 3).The function of leads in this type of promotional discourse is to expand the headline; leads sometimes become the slogan.According to Bhatia (2004), the main objective of this move is to justify the product; this is done by establishing a niche in the market (e.g.pointing at a need the consumers may have) and then attracting the audience's attention towards the product as the way to fill that gap.The last move where English has been found in the sample is the copy.The copy is the main text of the advertisement, and it contains the details about the product or service.In the sample, 11 texts include English in this move.However, a closer analysis reveals that (a) these copies are not completely written in English, and (b) the presence of English is reduced to phrases or short sentences, which often refer to the name of the product, or the text on the product's label (see Figure 4).The third stage of this analysis involves the identification of the advertising appeals expressed in English in the sample.As explained above, the concept of advertising appeal refers to the values that a message attaches to the advertised product.These values are analysed by categorising their actualisations-verbal or non-verbal; explicit or implicit-according to the semantic field they activate.This part of the analysis has revealed that the most recurrent appeals expressed in English are effectiveness (25 instances), adventure (17 instances), and distinctiveness (12 instances).This means that the most common features that are attributed to the products through English are connected to the three aforementioned semantic fields.Some examples taken from the sample include: In addition, during the analysis it has been noticed that some of the features observed are sometimes constant among advertisements of similar types of products.For instance, the texts promoting videogames are an interesting case in that many of them seem to follow a common pattern.These advertisements use English in the headline, lead, signature, and in the copy to a certain extent, and they all contain references to untamed and adventure as appeals; besides, Swedish is used in the copy to provide the details related to the specific dates and retail outlets where the products can be bought.These firms are global brands that seem to use the same campaign globally.Similarly, in Motor magazine, it has been observed that local companies in the motorcycle sector-usually official retailers of international brands-tend to use English in their headlines, leads and/or signatures, in combination with the appeal of adventure.However, the details about the product, service or special offer are given in Swedish.

Discussion
This section discusses the significance of the results shown in the previous section, and is organised around the three research questions addressed by this study, namely: (a) how much English is there in Swedish print advertisements?(b) which part(s) of the message are more likely to contain English? and (c) which values are attributed to the products through English words or phrases?
The first question refers to the actual presence of English in Swedish print advertising.An interesting aspect that derives from the results of this study is that, only nine out of the 73 print advertisements analysed are written exclusively in English, which is a relatively low ratio.While the inclusion of publications targeting different population segments may have had an impact on the sample in terms of language choice, the low presence of English is still surprising given the attention that globalisation as a phenomenon has received in the last couple of decades.In this sense, a possible explanation might be connected to the concept of glocalisation.This concept, as defined by Robertson, refers to "the tailoring and advertising of goods and services on a global or near global basis to increasingly differentiated local and particular markets" (Robertson 1995: 28), and is sometimes summarised as "think globally, act locally"2 .Thus, it seems that most companies tend to go for a glocalised approach to marketing, at least when it comes to advertising their products in magazines; this means that they target different audiences over the world, and sometimes employ certain common elements, such as slogans or catchphrases, but the core of the message is adapted to each specific community.In this context, only a few companies seem to opt for a global approach in which a single campaign written in English is used in different countries.In fact, the sample as a whole contains a limited amount of messages written only in English.
It is also worth mentioning that among those nine advertisements fully written in English there are two campaigns of a rather different nature.One of them is a Nordic company which sells sweets in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, and which implements the same campaign in the four countries.The second case is that of a Swedish university whose promotional text is English.Considering the on-going internationalisation of students and staff at universities all over the world, it is easy to understand why some universities choose to advertise in English as a tactic to attract new students.An issue that would be interesting to explore in connection to this is why, among the four universities whose advertisements are included in the sample, one produced a message written exclusively in Swedish, two mixed Swedish and English, and the third one chose to use only English.Unfortunately, the present study is not able to provide an explanation for this discrepancy, although the reasons could be connected to differences in the student populations the three institutions usually receive, or expect to attract.
The second aspect explored in this paper refers to the location of English within the advertisements.This has been studied through the tools offered by genre studies.In particular, Bhatia's schematic structure of print advertisements has been used to survey which moves are more commonly selected as carriers of English elements.These, as mentioned above, have been found to be mainly the headline, the signature, and the lead, while Swedish is resorted to for the copy, where the main information about the product or service is offered.Only some cases have been found where English is present in the copy.In these cases, however, English is mostly used to quote either the name of the product, or the text on its label.Therefore, English may be used in the advertisement as a way to help the consumers identify the product when they see it in the retail outlet.
All in all, the results of the moves analysis seem to indicate that English is used in those moves that, following Bhatia (2005: 213-225), typically seek to catch the readers' attention, and will remain in their memory as catchphrases and slogans, while the main informative loaddetails about the terms and conditions, the qualities and benefits of the products, etc.-is conveyed in the local language, perhaps to ensure the audience's full understanding.This tendency might be connected to the aforementioned concept of glocalisation.In other words, companies may be using a strategy that consists of keeping the attention-grabbing moves in English, while adapting the copy for each local audience.In that sense, it would be interesting to explore why English is resorted to as a way to catch the audience's attention; a plausible reason may be that companies use English because, surrounded by Swedish, it stands out from the main text-because it is different-and will be remembered more easily.
A different explanation, however, may be connected to the third aspect analysed in this paper, namely, the advertising appeals realised by means of English elements.In this sense, the most frequent in the sample are effectiveness, adventure and distinctiveness.The recurrence of these appeals could indicate some common association in Swedish advertisements between English and these qualities.In other words, it might be that Swedish advertising professionals see English as a particularly successful strategy to activate the three aforementioned values in the mind of their audience, and to attribute those values to the products they are publicising.These ideas are not new, however; previous studies have pointed in this direction (e.g.Larson 1990;Piller 2003;Pahta and Taavitsainen 2004;Cheshire and Moser 2010), and have claimed that English is often used to make certain products or services more attractive for the reader by associating them with certain values, such as modernity or distinctiveness.
An interesting issue that has been revealed by the analysis is the fact that in some industries there seem to be common practices regarding the use of English in commercial texts.In particular, a significant number of advertisements for videogames analysed in this study display a similar strategy; companies seem to create a global campaign in which the attention-grabbing elements are written in English, and then the local language is used to provide the information which probably varies from country to country, e.g. which retail outlets sell the videogame, or when the product will be launched (see Figure 5).Nevertheless, more empirical data that illustrates what is done in other countries-and maybe even interviews with advertising agencies-would confirm whether this is a common strategy used in this specific sector.

Conclusions
The present study has explored the presence and uses of English in Swedish print advertising.The main motivation for this research has been the fact that little attention seems to have been paid in the past to the incidence of English in Swedish advertisements for goods and services, despite the apparent ubiquity of English in the Nordic countries.In particular, the focus has been on the frequency of English words in phrases in a sample of Swedish print advertisements, the moves in which English is used, and the appeals it brings into the message.
Regarding the ratio of English and Swedish in the sample, English has a relatively low frequency, and it is mostly employed in combination with Swedish; campaigns written exclusively in English are quite rare in the texts analysed.As mentioned above, the sample included publications targeting different population segments, which may have had an effect on the results in terms of the presence of English.Nevertheless, this has been a rather unexpected outcome, especially in light of previous studies which suggested that Nordic citizens are heavily exposed to English in the media.These findings may indicate that, when it comes to print advertising, companies tend to prefer glocalisation strategies by which certain parts of their campaigns are reused-e.g. the headlines or the slogans-, while the rest of the text is adapted so as to consider the idiosyncrasy of each specific audience.It would be interesting, nevertheless, to see whether research on advertising in other media yields different results.
As far as the location of English and its role in the message, more often than not English is used in the sample to give linguistic expression to the moves that seek to attract the reader's attention, namely the headline, the lead and the signature.On the other hand, the copy is usually written in the local language, except for some instances where English is used to refer to the product's name or the text on its label.A plausible explanation for this practice may be that English stands out from the rest of the message as being different and it may, therefore, make slogans or catchphrases easier to remember.However, the details about the product or service are usually conveyed in Swedish; this may be a strategy companies resort to when they want to make sure this information is easily understood by the local audience.In fact, previous studies (e.g.Gerritsen et al. 2000) claim that, in some cases, local audiences may not fully comprehend the message when this is written in English.
As for the specific appeals English is more likely to represent, the findings seem to support the results of previous studies which indicate that English may be used to make products or services more desirable in the eyes of the prospective consumers.In fact, the data suggests that the appeals more commonly evoked by English are effectiveness, adventure, and distinctiveness, which are used in a positive manner.
These conclusions may help advertising professionals and students, as well as researchers and instructors working in the field of languages for specific and professional purposes.However, the present study was designed as an initial attempt to survey the current situation of print advertising in Sweden, and should therefore be regarded as a first approach to the issue.The findings are, thus, not comprehensive enough to fully explain some related aspects, such as why some advertisers choose to mix English and Swedish, while others prefer to promote their products only in one of those two languages.Further research could make use of interviews with advertising professionals to try to answer this question.Another issue that remains unexplained is whether advertising professionals and audiences are fully aware of the associations these messages seem to reflect.Finally, it will also be interesting to see how the advertising landscape evolves in the future.As Larson (1990: 368) already indicates, nowadays it is the younger audiences who are perceived as more receptive to the English language, but as time goes by, its presence in slogans and phrases may gradually become commonplace for wider segments of the population.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Advertisement for Gotland University

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Advertisement for TePe tooth care products

Figure 5 .
Figure 5. Advertisements for videogames Syndicate and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning

Table 1 .
Magazines selected for this study and their market segment

Table 4 .
Examples of appeals in English from the sample