Englishization of the Bangla Print Advertisement: An Ideological Apparatus for the Capitalist Regime

Abstract

The Bangla text of the print advertisement is continuously being changed due to the influence of English for diverse reasons. This sheer impact may be termed as the Englishization of print advertisement. This paper analyzes the feature and frequency of the Englishization of Bangla sentences in print advertisements. Ultimately, this study scrutinizes how the Englishization of Bangla Print Advertisement works as an ideological apparatus for the capitalist regime. Data were collected from 50 advertisement taglines. The researcher selected advertisements directly from the widely- circulated national dailies in Bangladesh. The data were analyzed from the perspectives of Raymond Williams’s essay “Advertising: The Magic System” and cultural studies scholar Stuart Hall’s Encoding and Decoding Model of Communication. The findings of this research included: the romanization of Bangla texts, code-switching and code- borrowing in the Bangla texts, merging of English words with Bangla suffixes, both Bangla and English numerals in the same Bangla sentence, evidence of English and loan word acronyms in the same Bangla sentence. This research confirmed that the Englishization of Bangla print advertisements has developed further with time and has become an inevitable trend. Moreover, the Englishization of Bangla print advertisements is used to transform commodities into “fetishes”, which protects the interests of capitalism.