M. O. DOROKHINA

Post-graduate student of the ISAA of Lomonosov Moscow State University

Key words: advertising, Swahili language, language game

I found out that I was going to study Swahili only when I received an ISAA MSU student ID. Back then, all I knew was that it was spoken in East Africa: a classmate of mine whose father was originally from Kenya told me about Swahili. Today I can say that being enrolled in the Department of African Studies at ISAA, I found myself in "my" place.

Swahili is the largest African language in sub-Saharan Africa. In the East African region, it is used as a language of interethnic communication, and the number of speakers of it as a first and second language, according to various estimates, reaches at least 150 million ¹. Swahili is the official language of the United Republic of Tanzania and the Republic of Kenya, one of the official languages in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo( DRC), and is widely used in neighboring countries - Burundi and Rwanda. It is spoken in southern Somalia and Sudan, northern Mozambique, and western Madagascar. It should be noted that since 2004 Swahili has been used as the working language of the African Union: it has become the sixth-after English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic.

In August 2006, at the end of the second year, my first business trip to Tanzania took place, thanks primarily to the assistance of the Department of African Studies of ISAA and the then director of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Tanzania, R. K. Pateev (a graduate of my department in the early 1970s, one of the best Swahili experts).

The main goal is to get acquainted with the country and practice the language. Already at the exit of the J. Nyerere International Airport, huge colorful billboards attracted attention. Some of them have drawings in the form of comics, which is rarely used on advertising posters that are familiar to our eyes. Others somewhat reminded me of advertisements found on Moscow streets, but on closer inspection, they still differed in a large number of details and diversity...

I have accumulated a whole collection of photos of Tanzanian advertising, which colorfully conveyed, in my opinion, the diversity of life in the African metropolis.

I visited East Africa several more times. In addition to Tanzania - in Uganda and the DRC, thanks to the sponsorship of K. A. Melik-Simonyan (also a graduate of my department), President of the Russian - African Foundation for Science, Culture and Business Cooperation, During these trips I have already carefully studied Swahili-language outdoor advertising patterns. And I found that the texts were different from the standard literary language: vocabulary, syntax, and grammar were played out in a sophisticated way by the authors to achieve their goals.

A LANGUAGE GAME. what is it?

Communication in advertising is now one of the most active and interesting areas of speech activity all over the world, including in the countries of East Africa.

Today, the informative content of advertising text is fading into the background, and the language game is gradually taking on a leading role.² Almost all advertising texts are characterized by the use of various game techniques, which attracts the attention of the addressee (which is initially the essence and purpose of advertising).

The term "language game"was first introduced into linguistics by the Austrian philosopher and logician L. Wittgenstein. ³ The interpretation of this concept is ambiguous. The following definition is possible: "Language play (in the broadest possible sense of the term) is an unconventional, non-canonical use of language, it is creativity in the language...⁴ The well-known Russian linguist V. Z. Sannikov believes that " a language game is a certain linguistic incorrectness (or unusualness) and, what is very important, an incorrectness that is realized by the speaker (writer) and intentionally allowed... Only deliberate inaccuracy will cause not annoyance and confusion, but a desire to support the game and try to reveal the deep intention of the author who proposed this game. " ⁵

In linguistic research-

in the last decade of the XX century. The idea that the "norm - error" relationship is being replaced by the "norm - another norm"relationship is becoming more and more insistent. "Other norm" - what was traditionally qualified as an error (for example, unjustified use of a capital letter in modern advertising texts or abbreviations), is perceived in this approach not as a violation of the spelling norm, but as the implementation of the communicative norm determined by the tasks of the advertising text.

The language game has become an integral part of advertising, the ultimate goal of which is not just to attract attention and entertainment, but to sell goods and services. For this purpose, a huge number of advertising texts are based on violations of language norms and rules of speech communication, traditional for the literary language.⁶

LANGUAGE GAME FEATURES

The sound appearance of the advertising text is an important component of its success with the recipient. That's why ad creators pay so much attention to the sound of the text. Today, when a large number of advertising products are available in printed form, new graphic techniques are being created that help convey to the addressee not only the graphic, but also the phonetic form of the word.

Within the framework of our research, we can trace trends and note a number of features.

Consider the following example: "Sikika ki saasa "("Sound modern"). The standard spelling is kisasa. We can say that in this advertising slogan we observe onomatopoeia of a certain manner of pronunciation in speech, which is recorded graphically. The use of phonetic speech distortion attracts attention by its "incorrectness" and helps you remember this ad.

The distorted phonetic appearance of a word delays the gaze of a potential consumer, says Kenyan researcher Mutonya Mungai7, and gives an example: "Zii! Kamatafinje!" ("Down with it! Grab 50! "(phone card to top up your account. - M. D.). Here, " Zii " is an onomatopoeia of the whistle that Swahili speakers often use to express their disapproval.

Or: "Hatubipu! Tafadhali nipigie!" ("We don't ring the horn!"). The neologism bipu (bibikat) is used to express the meaning of "call", i.e. dial and "reset" the subscriber's number before they pick up the phone to call you back. The use of onomatopoeia makes even a person who is fluent in the language think about their meaning

and thus attracts their attention and helps them remember the ad.

The modern generation with a new rhythm of life responds faster to bright, expressive, concise texts. In addition, the human eye does not perceive individual letters, but groups of letters or words.

Numbers are one of the most frequently used elements when creating advertising text, which allows you to resolve the conflict between the maximum information content of advertising and the minimum number of characters.

For example: "KuMe2U (emphasis added) ni kugaraa upendo" ("Me and you - to share love"). We see almost a tracing paper from English, where " Me "is the English pronoun" me", and the number 2 and the letter U are used instead of" to you "in English (i.e."to you")*.

This ambiguity of the advertising text is quite an effective way to attract the reader's attention.

The usual punctuation marks in advertising texts in Swahili take on a new meaning: they can perform a signaling function. Exclamation marks and question marks are especially often used: "Ishi kwa matumaini! Tunza familial "("Live with hope! Take care of your family!"). Or " Nimekuona! Umecheza leo?" ("I saw you! Did you play today?" (from a lottery ad).

WAYS AND TECHNIQUES FOR CREATING NEW WORDS IN ADS

We also note interesting cases of word formation. "Chizika siku nzima! Jumatatu - Ijumaa "("Have fun all day! From Monday to Friday") (see photo).

The verb chizika (in modern Swahili - "to have fun, fool around, go crazy, have fun"), apparently, was formed from the slang English noun cheese > " chizi "("bully, fool") using the suffix-ka. In this case, this suffix, attached directly to the root of the word, forms a hybrid-a neologism.

Or take the noun mshiko - "grabbing", which in today's Swahili also gets the meaning of "bonus", "money". This word is already recorded in the new " Swahili-Russian dictionary "(Moscow, 2012. Approx. 30,000 words): "Pata mshiko ukipokea simu! Pokeash 20 kwa dakika" ("Get a bonus when you receive calls! Get 20 shillings for every minute").

Thus, we can say that unusual word-forming forms, such as the verb chizika or the noun mshiko, play a certain role as a vivid expressive tool.

* * *

The abundance of advertising texts in Swahili in East Africa is undoubtedly due to the development of the urbanization process in these countries, as well as the increasing role of the media. The language situation in Tanzania, for example, currently contributes to this, and the authors of advertisements are usually Tanzanians themselves.⁸

The studied material shows a variety of language game techniques. It is with the help of the language game as an element of the "advertising" language and its manipulative nature that advertising creators manage to achieve maximum impact on the addressee.

¹ Miaka 50 wa Uhuru wa Tnzania na Lugha ya Taifa (Kiswahili) (50 years of independence of Tanzania and the national language (Swahili) - http://sluhwago.blogspot.ru/2011/10/miaka-50-ya-uhuru-wa-tanzania-na-lugha.html

^{Dyer G.} 2 Advertising as Communication. London. 1995, p. 1.

³ Stylistic encyclopedia of the Russian language (edited by M. N. Kozhina). 2nd ed., ispr. and add. M, Flint. 2006, p. 657.

^{Norman B. Yu} . 4 Yazyk znakomyi neznazvetets [The familiar stranger language], Moscow, 1987, p. 168.

^{Sannikov V. Z.} 5 Russkiy yazyk v zerkale yazykovoy igry [Russian language in the mirror of the language game]. 2002, p. 36.

^{Ilyasova S. V., Amiri L. P.} 6 Language game in the communicative space of mass media and advertising. Moscow, Flint. 2009, p. 36.

^{Mungai Mutonya.} 7 Swahili advertising in Nairobi: innovation and language shift // Journal of African Cultural Studies. Vol. 20, N 1, June 2008, p. 3 - 14.

^{Mwansoko H. J. M.} 8 Maj ina ya kibiashara ya Kiswahili. Jinsi yanavyobuniwa na mwelekeo wake katika karne ya ishirini na moja (Swahili Trade terms. How they emerged and develop in the XXI century) / / Kiswahili katika karne ya 21 (Swahili in the XXI century). TUKI. Dar es Salaam, 2004, p. 79-85 (in English). swahili).

⁹ See also the American greeting "How R U?" (How are you? "How's it going?") or "U R here 2 obey" (You are here to obey - You are here to obey). This way of writing words is typical for e-mail. It is becoming more and more popular in advertising. See: Krasnykh V. V." Svoi "sredi" chuzhikh": mif ili real'nost ' ["Your" among "strangers": myth or Reality]. 2003, p. 326.

Permanent link to this publication: