Exploiting the social meanings of urban vernaculars: Differentiating effects of Citélanguage in advertising

Due to several migration flows in Flanders many urban areas have become increasingly multicultural and multilingual, as is the case in the former ghettoized areas ( ) of Limburg, where a new urban vernacular – often called Citélanguage – has emerged. This vernacular has recently gained popularity in mainstream media and has been adopted in public and commercial campaigns to address Flemish youth, although its effectiveness had hardly been studied. In this contribution we join theoretical insights from language accommodation theory, sociolinguistics and advertising studies to examine the persuasiveness of this exemplar of youth slang. We study the impact of advertising slogans in Citélanguage on youngsters from Limburg, while taking into account their local identity (living inside or outside Genk), their ethnic identity (youngsters with or with no ethnic background) and other sociodemographic features as possible predictors of advertising responses. In addition, the social meanings attributed to Citélanguage are scrutinized, as Citélanguage has been previously found to evoke both positive and negative language associations. These social meanings are elicited by means of an experimental free response task and then quantified based on previous affective norms studies. The results confirm that language accommodation may be a viable strategy to address the wider youth population in Flanders, as it transcends classic sociodemographic segmentation criteria. The valence attributed to Citélanguage accounts for variances in advertising attitudes and particularly steers the behavioral intentions of Flemish youth with no migration background. Departing from these findings as well as the limitations of our study we discuss the caveats, opportunities and added value of urban vernaculars in advertising and stipulate a tentative agenda for future interdisciplinary work.