Bilingual newspapers as sites of multilingual practice

This paper discusses multilingualism in three publications aimed at bilingual communities in Britain: speakers of Russian, Greek and Tagalog. Despite the fact that the editorial content in such publications is almost completely monolingual, they are sites rich in multilingual written practices. The focus here is on display advertisements, which make up a large part of these publications. The paper looks at what language mixing practices are present, and what insights they may give into the nature of bilingualism in the community of intended readers. I identify two types of language alternation: in-line alternation involves integrating words from two different languages within one textual unit. Compositional alternation involves juxtaposing units in two (or more) different languages within a more complex visually delimited text, such as a display advertisement. While the advertisements themselves are good examples of multilingual writing, the mixing of languages itself is unremarkable and unremarked. Content in one language is rarely translated into another, while at the same time ‘seamless’ switches from one language to another are common. The advertisements in these publications seem to reflect the language competences and literacies of their intended readerships, where the ability to read more than one language (though to different extents) is taken as given.