Arabinglish in multilingual advertising: novel creative and innovative Arabic-English mixing practices in the Jordanian linguistic landscape

ABSTRACT

This article explores linguistic creativity and innovation in multilingual advertising in Jordan through the use of signs displaying Arabinglish with multiple forms in the Jordanian linguistic landscape (LL). Drawing upon notions of nexus analysis [Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2004). Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging internet. Routledge.] and principles of geosemiotics [Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. W. (2003). Discourses in place: Language in the material world. Routledge.], this study analyses and discusses novel, creative, and innovative code-mixing practices in the Jordanian LL. A corpus of 88 signs displaying a wide range of interlingual Arabic-English words (i.e. blends, compounds, and affixed words) were collected in order to examine the semiotic construction of the Jordanian LL. To provide some ethnographic context for the data, 12 interviews were also conducted. The results show that different cycles of discourse (i.e. (trans)national, economic, and cultural) emerge from the use of Arabinglish in signage. Being thought of as ‘a semiotic modality’ and as ‘a mainstream resource’ in the LL, Arabinglish code-mixing practices are presumably an index of global identities and one of the mechanisms that contributes to the visual dominance of English in Jordan, despite Jordan being constitutionally a predominantly monolingual country.

KEYWORDS:

• Arabic
• Arabinglish
• code mixing
• English
• Jordan
• linguistic landscape

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).