English Influence in Swedish Advertising: A Comparative Study of Recent English Loanwords and Swedish-English Code-Switching in the Printed and Online Versions of Five Magazines and Newspapers

Abstract: This paper investigates to what extent Swedish-English code-switching and recent English loanwords occur in the printed and online versions of five newspapers and magazines. The newspapers and magazines that were included are Aftonbladet, Amelia, Elle, Café, and Helsingborgs Dagblad. The study shows that English was the most common in the printed media, while the hypothesis was that it would be more frequent online. A mix of Swedish and English occurred in 28 % of the printed advertisements and 35 % of the online advertisements. Total code-switching only occurred in the printed advertisements and made up 17 % of the printed advertisements. Ads that contained a mix of Swedish and English had either loanwords, intra-sentential code-switching or inter-sentential code-switching. Some advertisements involved both code-switching and loanwords. Furthermore, the essay investigates what types of products use English in the marketing, and in what parts of the advertisements English is used. For the advertisements on the web pages, ‘online casinos’ was the product category had the most advertisements with instances of English. For the printed media, it was ‘beauty products’ that had most advertisements with examples of English. English appeared mainly in the ‘lead’ of the ads on the web pages, and it was most frequent in the ‘main text’ of the ads in the newspapers and magazines.