Commercial use of English in Downtown Lausanne
Carolyn Miller & Gentianne Graham
Abstract
This blog entry focalises on the commercial use of English in top-down banners, posters, and signs throughout the Lausanne city centre. In total eight pictures were studied during this research of which two were restaurants, a yoga studio, a wax bar, swatch, a bank add, and a few clothing stores. It was found that the linguistic landscape was influenced by the commodification of English in the city centre of Lausanne. Throughout this paper this research question will be explored through the results found and will be elaborated on in the discussion portion of this blog entry.
Introduction
This blog entry will be covering the way in which English is used in downtown Lausanne for commercial purposes. We will be focusing our attention on the linguistic landscape of English in downtown Lausanne and how this influences a given consumer. When we were walking around downtown Lausanne we notice the evident use of English on banners, posters, and signs of commercial businesses. It was noticed that many of these businesses used English in bigger and broader fonts compared to the main language of use in Lausanne, French. The question is, has English become commodified in downtown Lausanne?To further this research question we will be looking at multiple research papers as well as our own observations to come to a relative conclusion. Throughout this research paper many examples from the Lausanne city centre will be explored to understand what kind of public is attracted to the to this multilingual destination where English is used by businesses. Do people notice the linguistic landscape as they walk around downtown Lausanne or has this become something that is ambiguous to people? In the article Linguistic Landscapes in a Multilingual World by Durk Gorter he explains that the:
linguistic landscape was already multilingual in some places, but today, due to globalization, a pure monolingual linguistic landscape is a rarity, if only because of the spread of English And non-English-speaking countries and the spread of foreign brand names, shop names, and slogans in monolingual English-speaking countries. (2013, p.191)
What Gorter is saying is that to find an urban area that does not use English for commercial use is a rarity due to globalization. Therefore a place such as downtown Lausanne with such a prominent use of English is not unusual as there is a diverse community of people that reside in Lausanne. In this blog entry we will explore all of these aspect through a theoretical framework, contextualisation, methodology, results and a discussion of our findings. In the theoretical framework we will discuss linguistic landscapes, the commodification of language, top-up productions versus bottom-down productions, the construction of space, and commercial discourse. In the contextualisation an overview of the history and social political background of Lausanne will be presented. In the methodology section the results from our findings will be expressed and a reflection of our research process will be given. Lastly we will discuss our observations and results in the discussion portion of this blog entry as well as discuss our research question.
Theoretical Framework
In this blog entry we will be focusing on a few specific terms in order to answer our research question. The commodification of language is a subject that is present in downtown Lausanne, it is defined as “the expression we use to describe how a specific object or process is rendered available for conventional exchange in the market.” as Heller, Pujolar & Duchêne (2014, p.545-546) in the Oxford Dictionary (2010). The commodification of English will be touched on throughout this research paper as we explore the linguistic landscape in the city centre of Lausanne. A Linguistic landscape as defined by Landry and Bourhis is the “visibility and salience of languages as on public and commercial signs” (1997, p.23). When walking around in downtown Lausanne there are many different types of visible signs, posters, and banners that are multilingual as they incorporate English along with French or another language. The production that we explored consisted mainly of top-down design and not bottom-up design. Dr. Maria Rosa differentiates top-down as being something that is produced by the government, local councils, or the owner of a building or site in which official languages and strategic multilingualism is used. As compared to bottom-up production that is produced by individuals or small groups that fabricate productions in a non-official manner and would for example use migrant languages (Rosa, 2018). The construction of space is “the emergence of new relations, be they economic, social or linguistic, tends to cause the emergence of new communicative and interactional spaces in a context of visible multilingualism.” (Rosa, 2018). Language constructs urban areas and it seems as though in downtown Lausanne, English is an important factor in doing so as it is used on many signs, banners and posters. For the purpose of this research we concentrated on commercial discourses which is characterized as “advertising and related signage” (Rosa,2018) instead of the different types of signs such as; Regulatory discourses, infrastructural discourses and transgressive discourses.
Contextualisation
For our blog entry we chose to research the linguistic landscape in downtown Lausanne, with close to 130 000 inhabitants, Lausanne is the fourth largest city in Switzerland (Hello Switzerland, 2018). This district was chosen because of the large amounts and varieties of commercial businesses. The city centre includes the featured areas of Rue de Bourg, place and Church Saint-François, Palud Square, Palais de Rumine, Bel-Air Tower and Salle Métropole, Tour de l’Ale, and Lausanne-Flon. Between all of these locations many clothing shops, beautician shops, high end name brands, bakeries, and restaurants can be found. We wanted to analyse the linguistic landscape of this lively area of Lausanne. The main ethnolinguistic group of the city centre is french as it is in the French Canton of Vaud. There is a large variety of migrants in Lausanne which include; “people of French origin, 8% of the total population, are the largest group of residents of foreign origin, of which they account for 18%, followed by the Portuguese (17%), the Italians (11%), and, in equal place, the Spanish and citizens from countries of the former Yugoslavia (8%).”(Lausanne Tourisme, n.d.) This makes it evident that downtown Lausanne is a very international and multilingual area.
The first signs of activity in the Lausanne area were found through 8,000 years old traces of carved flint, some weapons, and hearths that were found where the cathedral is now located. In the 12th century the heart of commercial activity of lausanne was dominated by the port of Ouchy which was protected by a castle. By the 13th century lausanne had about 9,000 French-speaking inhabitants. In the 18th century, Lausanne was booming economically as there was tanners, textile specialists, clockmakers, stone-cutters, printers, and even some bankers were doing trade with Savoy and Geneva, as well as Europe and overseas. The 19th century was characterized by a boom in population of 20,000 people and was politically dominated by conservatives and liberals. The Flon river which used to cut through downtown was covered to allow for more economic development. The 20th century was when the urban development took a dramatic turn and the vineyards were retreated for the installment of roads. Lausanne became the cantonal capital in 1803 after the Canton of Vaud was created as an entity of the Swiss confederation. Since 1874, Lausanne has been home to the main headquarters of the Federal Supreme Court and of the International Olympic Committee since 1915. In 1993 thenternational Olympic Committee awarded it the privileged status of Olympic Capital.
Figure 1: Map of Lausanne, the area of relevance are between the numbers 101 to 110 under the district (centre).
Methodology
After this assignment was given to us we debated on where the data collection should happen. It was finally decided that it would take place in downtown Lausanne which is a very central place in Lausanne Switzerland. This area is known for its great shopping, amazing restaurants and fun night clubs. It is a very commercialized area and therefore it was the perfect location to answer our research question.
Once our location was chosen we decided to head downtown and start looking around the area. Our experience consisted of two separate visits to the the area in order to get the jist of it. The first time we visited, we simply walked around to see how present English really was.
Our initial expectations were that it would be quite difficult to find multiple examples of English being used in a commercial way in downtown Lausanne. Having both gone there multiple times and never noticed a strong English influence we expected this to be a little bit challenging. However, once we arrived with a fresh mindset and a clear objective it was very surprising to see how often English was used in commercial ways to promote a business. No pictures were taken during our first visit, this first excusion was just to get an idea of our surroundings and to get a first glimpse of the English influence. During our second trip we walked around and took twenty pictures of English being used to sell. We made sure our pictures represented different aspects of life but were still somehow all used in a commercial way.
Once our pictures were taken we gave ourselves a few days to look at them and think of the ones that would best fit in the purpose of this experience. We got together two days later to choose our top eight pictures based the following criterias; the description, if it was multilingual or Monolingual, the main language, the secondary language, the neighbourhood in which it was located, the medium/support, the activity domain, the type of sign, the production (top-down vs bottom up) and further observations. We analyzed all twenty pictures based on the criterias before choosing the top eight. The decision was quite difficult due to the amount of material we were able to collect and this is not something that we were anticipating. Once the final pictures were chosen we posted them on the shared google maps with our classmates. The main difficulty that we encountered was trying to narrow down the twenty pictures to eight since there was a lot of material that could have been used for this assignment. We gained a lot of knowledge on the amount that English is currently being used in downtown Lausanne.
Results
A breakdown of the results found after the analyses done on all eight of our final pictures following the criteria in our methodology.
Picture 1:
A multilingual poster for yoga classes that used both French and English as main languages. This was a commercial sign for a Health and well-being activity domain that used the top-down production. The name of the company is in English, however, the courses available were listed in French.
Picture 2:
A multilingual French BCV (Banque Cantonale Vaudoise) commercial sign uses the catchphrase “win back” in English by using a Top-down production. In this picture the main language is French and the secondary language is English
Picture 3:
A Multilingual top down window display on a cafe window with the word sandwich which is known as a English word, however was also a French term used in the 19th century. It is a Commercial sign used in a gastronomy domain.
Picture 4:
A Multilingual commercial top down sign for an outlet shop called Mouton with the main language as French and the secondary language as English. The first words you read are in French, however the line right underneath is in English. This is the only example that used French is such a big way to attract the buyers.
Picture 5:
This was a monolingual English poster used for commercial purposes to promote Swatch watches, also known as Swiss watches. This poster was completely in English and situated in downtown Lausanne. It was a top-down production.
Picture 6:
This sign was for a waxing bar in downtown Lausanne. It was a multilingual banner used in a healthcare domain for commercial reasons. It was a top down sign with English as the main language and French as the secondary language since English was the language used to attract the customers.
Picture 7:
A sign for a restaurant called “eat me” that was monolingual English.This poster was a top down production used for gastronomy commercial purposes.
Picture 8:
A multilingual poster for a hairdresser salon with French as the main language and
English as the secondary one. It was a top down production used to promote a beauty salon. The whole poster was in French, however, under the main title the word Hair and Colour are found in English.
After getting all the raw data we analysed all of our results. All 8 of our pictures were used for commercial purposes and were being used in a means to sell a product of attract an audience. Since all the signs were professionally made by the owners they are all considered top-down productions. Out of the 8 pictures 6 were multilingual and 2 were monolingual English usually being the main language being used to attract the buyers.
Discussion
The purpose of this blog entry was to analyse the linguistic landscape of top-down signs, banners, and posters in the city centre of Lausanne. What caught our attention was the fact that the construction of the space was dominated by English. Lausanne’s main ethnolinguistic group is French and has been know to be this way since the 13th century. It can also be noted that the most prominent migrants within the city of lausanne are French, Italian, Spanish, and Yugoslavia. None of these migrants come from monolingual English speaking countries yet English dominates in the construction of space of downtown lausanne. This thus spiked our interest, as we asked ourselves is English being commodified within downtown Lausanne? We chose to select eight pictures of different businesses which included a yoga studio, a wax bar, swatch, a couple restaurants, a bank add, and few clothing stores. For the most part all of these top-down identities were multilingual in French and English yet the English seemed to be the attracting component. The English could be characterized as the attracting component to the consumers because it was either in a different font, in a larger font, in a different color, or surrounded by a different color compared to the French. There was one outlier which was a clothing store called “le mouton” which had French as the main language followed by English. We were interested in the influence that English holds on the consumers and why it is such a popular technique of attraction in all kinds of commercial enterprises. In The Commodification of Languageby Monica Heller she indicates that:
Among the earliest critiques of globalization are those about the use of English by British and American corporations to open up markets and create consumers, indeed, to eliminate competition and impose the tastes and habits of the English-speaking world on the rest of the planet in ways that, not coincidentally, leave control of products and their circulation squarely in the hands of British and American English-speaking citizens; this process is often referred to as “McDonaldization” (2010, p.105)
What Monica Heller is saying is that the English language has in a way weaned itself into the world of marketing and has almost taken control over non-English speaking communities, such a downtown Lausanne, because of its massive globalization. As Mikko Laitinen also mentions the omnipresence use of English in public spaces is dominated throughout the world and is widely documented. Another interesting research remark made by Ingrid Piller was that “the use of English tends to be associated with modernity, success, fun,and international orientation.” (2003) This is perhaps also another reason why businesses tend to add English into their top-down productions even in non-English speaking communities as it gives a care free affect. Lausanne is a town with a large student population; therefore when the businesses use English they are trying to target the younger consumers.
One of our other theories as to why English is such a present language in downtown Lausanne is that Lausanne is the olympic capital of the world, which is mainly held in English, this perhaps is another reason why English has a large role in the linguistic landscape of Lausanne even though it is not one of the official languages. The Olympics is a world renown event that occurs mostly in English. Therefore, the Olympics is usually associate with the English Language. Lausanne being the Olympic capital it is reasonable to find many English posters throughout the downtown. There are most likely many more factors as to why English is so often being used in the commercial setting. It would be interesting in future research to collect more data to reduce error. Another component that would be important for this topic would be to investigate how English is used in rural areas as well as urban areas. Perhaps urban areas have a more diverse linguistic landscape compared to rural areas because of the people’s diversity?
Conclusion
Ultimately, English has been identified in the linguistic landscape of downtown Lausanne on top-down productions as yet another tactic to sell to consumers. Throughout this paper the research question on the commodity of English in the Lausanne city centre has been explored through many lenses. It was found that English is used mainly along side French to enhance and to indicate “modernity, success, fun, and international orientation.” (Laitinen, M., 2003). Our research was limited to studying eight pictures of different commercial businesses that incorporated English into their top-down productions, the research question could have been more explored if there was a larger sample of pictures to study. Businesses are always changing their poster, banners, and signs as the seasons and trends change, perhaps more English is incorporated into their sales tactics in summer as there are more tourists during this season. For further research it would also be interesting to observe how the commodification of English is in rural areas since we only analysed an urban area.
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