Advertisement has been defined as “a public notice […] promoting the sales of marketable goods and services” (Vestergaard & Schrøder, 1985:2), it entered the field of linguistics and thus it is recognized as a genre by itself. By incorporating linguistic phenomena like code-mixing, foreign language features etc, advertising becomes an interesting field of study. This paper aims at investigating (a) Greek Cypriots’ attitudes towards the ‘exploitation’ of the Greek Cypriot Dialect, Standard Modern Greek and English in local advertising; (b) the influence of the medium (oral vs. written) presenting the advertisement; (c) the subsequent effects of the stereotype reflected in the product per se (local vs. foreign). The results support earlier studies that showed preference towards the standard variety rather than the dialect (Papapavlou, 1998; Papapavlou & Sophocleous, 2009). Also, the findings bring forth evidence that linguistic varieties without a standardized writing system are mainly accepted in the oral media. On the other hand, the results do not support advertisers’ firm insistence on associating different types of products with different language codes (Pavlou, 1992, 2004). The last findings may be the consequence of former language policies that did not encourage dialect literacy (Cluver, 2000).
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In-Text Citation: (Papapavlou & Satraki, 2013)
To Cite this Article: Papapavlou, A., & Satraki, M. (2013). Language of advertising in bidialectal settings: Does the code matter? Multilingual Academic Journal of Education and Social Sciences, 1(2), 13–39.
Copyright: © 2013 The Author(s)
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