Marketing Strategy Of Mixing Another Language In Adverts: Study of English Code-mixing and Code-switching In Indian Advertisements for Cold Drinks

Abstract

Code-mixing and code-switching are the marketing phenomenon researches have been working for around decades. While different types and their properties for code-mixing and code-switching have been well studied for most of the linguistic varieties as a marketing tool, very less is documented about how they are used as communicative and persuasive tool in advertisements. This analysis is an attempt to overcome with this gap by analyzing the level and describing the current phenomenon of English code-mixing and code-switching in Indian cold drink advertisements. It is noticed that the use of English codes in Hindi advertisements or even in few of complete English advertisements made specifically for Indian television is different from other genres of communication since they are creatively utilized to produce persuasive and convincing effects. The paper investigated the level of such mixing in Indian advertisements basically shown  in Hindi speaking area, what kinds of English units are in use as well as certain other aspects related to English mixing which are employed as a persuasive device for the advertisements . English lexical mixing were found to be common English code-mixing elements, while simple sentences, out of all types of sentences, were the most frequent items appearing at the level of code-switching.