Brand styling, enregisterment, and change: The case of C’est Cidre

Marketing and advertising texts are important sites for signaling and also contributing to sociolinguistic change. For example, advertising language can maintain, challenge, or create new linguistic norms as well as document usage and practices. Linguistic fetish and styling in advertisements both rely on and contribute to enregisterment processes. This chapter explores one particular example of brand styling using ‘fake French’ and the French linguistic fetish in advertising, namely an advertisement for a cider produced by European lager brand Stella Artois. The analysis highlights how the brand is in fact making use of a metaparodic frame, simultaneously asserting and parodying its stylized ‘fake French’ style, and how the consumer is complicit in co-constructing this metaparody.