The data that this paper
considers is taken from three recent advertisements for the German supermarket
chain, Aldi. These advertisements, as
much of Aldi’s recent Irish-based advertising, play on easily recognisable
tropes of Irish culture and Irish English, and are interesting for how they put
this language and culture “on display” (cf. Johnstone 2009) by highlighting salient
linguistic and pragmatic features of everyday conversational routines (cf. Coulmas
1981; Laver 1981). It is these recognisable, represented/reproduced aspects of
everyday routinised communication situations of the advertisements that we
focus on and analyse; first of all, we examine the construction of the represented
routines, and how they might reflect routines as they are enacted in naturally
occurring conversation. Then, in a more global sense, we analyse the phenomenon
of the “As Irish as…” trope by drawing on Agha’s (2003, 2007) notion of enregisterment. Enregisterment is both a
relatively new and conceptually rich notion, albeit now ubiquitous; conflated
by Johnstone, amongst others, with its intellectual counterpart, Silverstein’s indexical
orders (e.g. 2003), for example in relation to the metapragmatic associations
that particular forms, or (we argue), routines, have with social (or, indeed,
national) stereotypes. Essentially, we argue, having interrogated the nature of
the conversational and cultural routines put on show, if enregisterment
describes “the processes by which particular linguistic forms become linked
with social meaning”, and those social meanings become linked with ideological
schemes, these ideological schemes can, in turn, be invoked and commodified
(Fairclough 1992).