From diglossic switching to pure dialect: Gulf accents in Youtube oral advertising

Based on the key-concepts of code-mixing, linguistic choices and communication effectiveness, this paper presents a selection of YouTube advertisements (2015-2019), as an updated source for linguistic analysis about Gulf Arabic. The previously investigated Egyptian or Levantine TV advertising (Bassiouney 2009, Gully 1996), has now been replaced by on-line advertising, mostly spread by the YouTube channel. There, the Gulf accent reveals to be widely used. The domains covered by Gulf commercials belong to upgraded and updated categories, compared with the past. In fact, both men and women are addressed for cars and body-care (e.g.: BMW Kuwait, Nivea Middle East), both young and old people for fast-food items (e.g.: McDonald’s Arabia, Coca Cola Middle East). The stereotypes of “women for food”, and “men for cars” seem to be marginal compared to the main target that is selling the product, with no regard at all to the gender of the potential customer. Audio-visual advertising is mostly based on oral interaction, so it heavily relies on paralinguistic strategies and contexts. Communication takes place by Gulf Arabic, which here resembles a “disjunctive language” with a “disjunctive grammar” (Leech 1966 and 1963). Effectively, due to commercials time constraints, each short sentence seems to be independent from the others, and the degree of linking and parataxis is very low. On the syntactic level, idafas and elatives are predominant, and conditional sentences are substituted by coordination. Sentences are extremely short, the style is essential, prepositions and adverbs are repeated many times. Discourse effectiveness and communication are mostly based on the choice of lexicon, with few ad hoc loanwords from English, for specific terminology. Advertising takes place orally, no script is showed on the screen-except for the final commentator’s remarks-so reinforcing the idea of a more realistic context and daily speech.