Irene Theodoropoulou & Johanna Tovar, Research companion to language and country branding. Abingdon: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 411. Pb. £43.

Abstract

‘I NY’TM, ‘Incredible India’, and ‘Vive la France’ are not only successful slogans, but effective instruments of country branding that help to orient individual and collective choices—from travel to investments. What is the role of language, then, in country branding? Is language limited to linguistics or can it comprise, for example, architecture, politics, and popular culture? Research companion to language and country branding provides answers to these questions and more. Written with both academics and policy and decision-makers in mind, this volume offers not only a comprehensive introduction to the role of language in country branding practices but also an innovative framework for the emerging field of ‘brand linguistics’. This state-of-the-art contribution, as a matter of fact, is radically interdisciplinary, and includes insights from sociolinguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, ethnography, linguistic landscape analysis, semiotics, corpus linguistics, language policy, linguistic anthropology, media studies, architecture, and language-oriented marketing studies. The clear and rich introduction by the editors provides a cohesive and elucidatory overview of the main themes and contributions of the book—language, branding, and country branding. Accessible to both experts and novices, it bestows a very useful literature review on current research on both nation and place branding. Moreover, it frames the book as offering both theoretical and practical contributions relevant to different disciplines: from linguistic anthropology and linguistics, to advertisement, diplomacy, business, politics, tourism, and international relations. The book contains twenty contributions from scholars from different countries, disciplines, backgrounds, and institutions and includes examples from twenty countries—carefully selected to be ‘representative of the world as much as possible’ (15). In addition to BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, and the People’s Republic of China), the book covers countries from the Global South, those with high and low GDP per capita, and most of the top thirteen economies in the world (15).