Companies love to cash in on our unique brand of English by using it to advertise their products. The proliferation of these kinds of ads in Australia helps build a shared identity, as we see ourselves reflected in the media we consume, including advertising.
Aussie Broadband’s lexical choice in this ad is deliberate, as the adverb ‘bloody’ evokes an Australian style of speech, appealing to a local audience. The added alliteration and consonance of the /b/ and /d/ phonemes also makes the slogan more memorable.
In June 2021, American company McDonald's aired this ad (see video here) which ends with the declarative, ‘We came here as McDonald’s, but you made us Macca’s.’ The use of the diminutive suffix is typical of Australian morphological creativity when nicknaming people and things, and helps McDonald's present their brand as culturally connected to the Australian demographic, despite its American roots.
Channel 9 reality show 'Love Island Australia' is using 'Straya' rather than proper noun 'Australia' in its promos for the 2021 season. This colloquial term features assimilation, a connected speech process typical of the spoken mode, which in this case reflects our unique accent.
Earlier in 2021, American company Coca-Cola used packaging featuring Australian slang in order to appeal to the Australian market. Consider the particular lexical choices they have made; why did they choose these particular slang terms? What connotations do these lexemes carry that Coca-Cola may want associated with their brand?
Left and below, Australian clothing brand Skwosh has introduced t-shirts featuring stereotypical Aussie slang terms. As with the Coca-Cola example above, they have only chosen certain lexemes or collocations to include in this collection.
a) The brand appears to have chosen many terms belonging to previous generations of Aussie slang. Why do you think they have made these particular choices?
b) How many metalanguage terms can you think of to describe each expression?
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