Euro Jackpot (ONCE)
Euro Jackpot (ONCE): THE USE OF ENGLISH AS A LINGUA FRANCA TO ATTRACT MORE CUSTOMERS?
By Genís Sánchez, Isaac Escolá and Mincho Minchev
Figure 1. Lottery stall in Gran Passeig de Ronda, Lleida.
PICTURE TAKEN BY:
Genís Sánchez, Isaac Escolá and Mincho Minchev. March 12, 2021
1. INTRODUCTION
The main objective of the Linguistic Landscape project is to analyze and understand the different landscapes that we are able to find in the public spaces within Lleida. In the case of this city, and the whole of Catalonia, the main languages are, on the one hand, Spanish, and, on the other hand, Catalan. Both are co-official but Spanish seems to be the nation-state language and the one with more prestige and values, while Catalan is the historically minorized language here in Catalonia. We can also resemble that we have been truly motivated by Multilingual Laussane, which was one of our inspiration focuses. (Garrido-Sardà, 2018)
Our Linguistic Landscape token is a lottery purchase point located in Gran Passeig de Ronda, Lleida. This lottery point is in front of the huge mall where shops and supermarkets such as "Carrefour" or "Movistar" are located. By this, the lottery stall is located around multinational commercial emplacements in order to have more impact and customers.
From the text written in the lottery point, as we can see in the "figure 1" it can be read the following sentence: "EURO JACKPOT - Per només 2€ pots de fins a 90.000.000€. Extra, dia del pare 19 març. Ser pare compensa i molt. ONCE". This is directly related to the sale of lottery tickets, inciting passersby on these streets to buy a ticket, since as the slogan of this position says, with only 2 euros of investment they can win up to prizes of 90 million euros.
The main language used is Catalan followed by English and Spanish more secondarily. The acronym ONCE means National Organization of the Spanish Blind, Organización Nacional de Ciegos Españoles in Spanish. The activity domain according to Mooney and Evans (2015, p. 92) is commercial.
2. CONTEXTUALIZATION
The token is displayed in the Catalan province of Lleida, specifically in Joc de la Bola neighbourhood at Gran Passeig de Ronda's street.
According to Lleida's Official Socioeconomic Bulletin posted in 2012 and the sociodemographic profile of the Joc de la Bola neighbourhood, 94.74% of the inhabitants living in the neighbourhood are Spanish, while only 5.26%, the rest to reach the 100% are foreigners. If we take a look at the 21 different neighbourhood that conform to Lleida, 78.43% are Spanish people, and 21.57% are foreigners as we can see in "figure 2" below.
Our Linguistic Landscape is the lottery point that belongs to "ONCE" which is a National Organization of the Spanish Blind, a non-profit public law corporation of a social nature that, has the fundamental purpose of improving the quality of life of blind people, people with visual loss and people with disabilities throughout Spain. Their main aim is to integrate people with disabilities to see and bring them a normal life. In order to make that, the workers within this organization are only this type of people with vision loss or disabilities. Thanks to these organizations such as ONCE the society keeps improving gradually and it helps people to fight their disabilities which condition them to not be able to lead a normal life.
3. METHODOLOGY
To collect all the information that we needed to carry out the activity, our group has gone around the city several times and we have looked for a linguistic landscape that is striking to the eye and that involves both aesthetic and productive functions, making passers-by look at the landscape and spend some money which helps the local economy of the city and, in general, the economy of the whole Spain. Our firsts fieldwork where around smalls shops and markets, but we could not find anything that fit our ideas since the languages they used were Spanish, Catalan or Arabic, but not English and our project was intended to investigate the Anglicisation in Lleida.
Since Covid-19 entered Spain in March of last year and a pandemic started, it caused severe damage, making many companies related to the tertiary sector and the sale of their products or services to the public close for a long period, causing great economic losses to be suffered and leading to create a micro crisis in the country.
For lottery stalls, the effect produced by the virus did not wreak havoc and all stalls remained standing following the normal sale of tickets, obviously maintaining the measures proposed by the government such as safety distances, the use of a mask and the disinfectant gel.
As we mentioned before, in Spain Spanish is the official language, but in specific autonomous communities such as Catalonia or Galicia, there is another co-official language being in the former Catalan. Both languages are treated in the same way having almost the same importance inside the community and within its bureaucracy. (Paeria, 2012)
Regarding our token, both languages Spanish and Catalan are used, but English has also an importance on it. The word ‘Jackpot’ is in charge of catching passers-by by making them believe they can be rich by only investing 2 euros. This lottery price is played around Europe so the possibilities of winning are almost none, but by uniting ‘jackpot’, which is a gambling top prize, ‘2 €’ and ‘90.000.000€’ people are left hypnotized and decide to spend their money. By and large, the word "Jackpot" is in English because it is an international money game, and due to that it is assumed that the English as a lingua franca is the common vehicle of communication all over Europe and worldwide.
4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
The values or functions of the landscape according to the Council of Europe Landscape Convention (n.d.) are aesthetic as it has some cultural appreciation, it has a beautiful and eye-catching design that attracts customers as well as it index productivism, the lottery point is built for profit and benefits.
Our token has 2 main values, social and productive, both of them closely related. The social value resides in making believe to the inhabitants they can become rich by doing nothing but it also allows people to interact and to have a conversation topic. The productive value comes from the profit they get from selling these tickets. ninety million euros are nothing compared to all the money people spend week after week around Europe until someone wins the prize. As we can see, the letters of the lottery stand are striking and, above all, it stands out, seeing at a glance the number of ninety million euros in prizes. This makes people feel attracted and they tend to buy more tickets in order to aspire to win that incredible sum of money.
Apart from these two main values, we can see a secondary value when it comes to the acronym of la ONCE that a sense of identity can be found. Since the main point of selling this lottery is to raise funds for the organization as it is involved with blind people. The sense of identity is committed through the use of the Spanish language as the national language of Spain.
It is important to use an English word so that everybody in Europe can understand what they are buying tickets for, if instead of ‘Jackpot’, they had used ‘Gran Bote’ the impact out of Spain would have been completely different and reword.
It is true that even if the possibility of winning is probably negligible, people hope that by buying week after week the same number, they will be lucky one day and they will be rich. This is a government’s strategy to make people believe that their life will change and their awful streak will finish, it is also a way to maintain them distracted while they govern without them to take part in.
5. CONCLUSIONS
Doing this research, our token has taught us something really important, English can have a great impact in our country, but also around Europe since it is used in all the countries of the EU. Here in Lleida, English used in that way makes us realise that it also has a huge impact on us, making us believe that if something is written in English automatically it is true or it has more importance than if it is written in Polish or Spanish, but mainly because if it is written in English you know that it is something that its objective it is not only Spain but more places. Moreover, when it comes to winning money, seeing the message written in this language makes you feel more important, and also emphasises the quantity of money you could win. To sum up, in our token English is used to make people believe, as we said before, that they can be the winners of a prize that is raffled among many countries, and being the winner means being more than rich.
Regarding our experience, even though we had some troubles with the blog, the experience has been enriching for our critical spirit and for our way to see how important marketing is and the importance of the messages and the language in which it is written in order to be impacting and engaging for the people.
6. REFERENCES
Comments
Post a Comment