Chinese-English code-switching in Fashion Magazines Essay

Chinese-English code-switching in Fashion Magazines - Essay Example The essay "Chinese-English code-switching in Fashion Magazines" concerns the Fashion Magazines and Chinese-English code-switching in them. Editors of fashion magazines pay close attention to the contexts of linguistics and how they relate to the reader. Catalogues of genre and cultural meaning play important roles in determining and feeding into target audiences so that the magazines make a profit. Both utilizations of code-switching describe how readers view text and absorb it from various geographical areas. The term code-switching derives from the linguistic term denoting the concurrent utilization of more than a single language in conversation. John Gibbons made the first major attempt to study it at Hong Kong University where the students spoke ‘university talk’. It is especially used in context of sociocultural linguistics, which is the study of how linguistic structure clarifies how a speaker’s selectivity of a specific language is influenced by social cont exts in which it is given. In the middle of the English sentence, the Chinese symbol for â€Å"a† and â€Å"whose† is inserted rather than the English word. The hypothesized reason to why this occurs is due to the fact that bilinguals are not completely efficient in the second language. The variety of contexts may be race, gender, ethnicity, age, and sexuality. These factors are acknowledged when implementing code-switching into media forms like magazines. Magazines are a main media source used because of how broad of an audience it reaches. The age group can vary from teens to the elderly and has the capability to reach its audience members via stores, mail, street stands, etc. Fashion in particular has dominated the market since the eighteenth century when the first Gentleman’s magazine came out in London (Ashish, 2009). This is why code-switching has been incorporated into this form of media outlet in an effort to get the target audience to respond in the des ired manner. In Japan, the implication of foreign language into magazines of fashion is not subsidiary to any subject restrictions (Haarmann, 2000). With such a limitless palette in which to work with, the editors as well as advertisers were able to target their audience better. The four context motivators to utilizing code-switching first came to light in the late 1970s when Cantonese-English code-switching arose in Hong Kong (David and Li, 2003). Euphemism was a sociolinguistic phenomenon that illustrated relation connections with the community with its focus being to relay the intended message of the speaker (Wenzhao, 2001). It is the act of replacing a potentially rude or offensive word with a lesser one, not only to appease the listener but to protect the speaker from trouble. Although, it can be amusing, it can be misleading. Bilingual punning derived from the intent to assign double meaning (David and Li, 2003). The way it is done is by taking two different words in two diffe rent languages and combining them into a sentence to form a joke or amusing sentence, hence the term pun. In this context, the meaning of specificity is not far from what it implies in that English is used in place of Chinese/Cantonese words for either the reason that the English word is more specific or general (David and Li, 2003). Therefore, the sentence is issued the way it was initially intended. Lastly, the