The Sociolinguistics of Marketing

This book explores connections and commonalities between sociolinguistics and marketing and examines current overlapping paradigmatic shifts taking place in both fields. While the collocation of sociolinguistics and marketing may not be immediately obvious, they share a common concern with categorization and differentiation, whether in the context of languages and speakers or markets and consumers. Helen Kelly-Holmes argues contemporary sociolinguistics and marketing can be more fully understood by looking at these fields in the context of global trends, and identifies current shifts affecting both domains. Both language and consumption are conceptualized as increasingly globalized yet and intensely localized, individualized, or personalized, in contrast with previous eras which demarcated speech communities or niche/target markets along regional/national lines. Kelly-Holmes also suggests that we are witnessing a visual turn in not only marketing and consumption, but also in the study of sociolinguistics and multilingualism. The book considers the way in which both domains have moved towards a less hierarchical, more user-driven structure, in which speakers and consumers are recognized as active agents who co-construct the value of brands, and both resist and establish new language norms. Finally, Kelly-Holmes looks at the development of long-tail markets as a concept that can be usefully applied to the case of minority language communities and speakers in multilingual contexts. This theoretically rigorous study pushes the boundaries of the discipline of sociolinguistics and will provide scholars in other fields with the tools to take up a sociolinguistic perspective.