Bilingualism in the Mass Media and on the Internet

Abstract

In Spanglish, a Hollywood movie released in late 2004, the mixed code usually referred to as Spanglish is conspicuous by its absence. The movie’s title turns out to be a metaphor for the cultural confl icts that arise when a Mexican housekeeper moves in with an Anglo family — and an eye-catcher that exploits the increased media interest in Spanglish for promotion purposes. Current examples of the marketing of Spanish/English bilingualism in the US are not hard to find. Language mixing is no doubt part of the symbolic capital that lifestyle magazines like Latina (the ‘Magazine for Hispanic Women’) and rap stars like N.O.R.E. (‘Oye Mi Canto’) sell to their audiences. Beyond the US, music with bilingual lyrics thrived in the 1990s, ranging from Algerian rai to African hip-hop, from Bollywood soundtracks to Korean pop. While popular music audiences ‘seem more receptive to music using other languages than their counterparts of 20 years ago’ (Bentahila and Davies 2002: 190), other sorts of bilingual media messages look back to an even longer tradition, such as multilingual advertising (Piller 2003) and the use of English in the fringe media of youth subcultures, which Hess-Ltittich (1978) has termed ‘bilingualism as a style resource’. Research findings on various other sites of media discourse strengthen the impression that linguistic diversity is gaining an unprecedented visibility in the mediascapes of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.