The nativization of English in Taiwanese magazine advertisements

Abstract

This study investigates from a sociolinguistic perspective how Taiwanese copywriters nativize English in Chinese‐based advertising copy in Taiwanese magazines in response to the growing impact of globalization over a decade. Two corpuses of magazine ads are used for quantitative and qualitative analyses: 649 ads from a 1999 English‐mixing magazine ads corpus and 1,505 ads from a 2009 corpus. The analysis demonstrates a clear trend of Taiwanese copywriters showing growing bilingual ingenuity by coining English phrases and sentences via recruiting verbatim translation based on Chinese grammar. The results of this study shed light on how nativization of English has been reinforced through copywriters’ linguistic innovation and exploitation of grammatical and collocational deviations in an era of increasing globalization.