LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Tamil Advertisements in Television

A. Boologa Rambai, Ph.D.

Introduction

Advertisements facilitate the advertiser to seek the needed publicity for his or her products. Advertisements promote the sale of the products and educate or inform the customers about the products offered to them on sale, and then, in some manner, help the customers to evaluate and choose from the many choices before them for the best price possible.

Advertisements find expressions through mass media, such as Radio, Television, Newspaper and Weekly and/or Monthly magazines, etc. Apart from these, we find advertisement in wall posters and in handbills distributed door to door.

One of the most widely used and easily accessible medium for advertisement is the television. TV advertisements provide powerful visual associations using both linguistic and non-linguistic or extra-linguistic representations, through the use of bodily movements, frowns, shrugs, head-shakings and so on.

The linguistic or the language part of it an advertisement is supported usually by the extra- or the non-linguistic features in most cases. There is a very interesting "dialogue" between the two in every TV advertisement.

The Focus of This Article

This article deals with the linguistic features of Tamil advertisements found in TV advertisements. I analyze the deviations (from the norm in Tamil usage) found in the language of these advertisements and correlate these with the types of advertisements in which these deviations are introduced and used in different contexts.

Norm and Deviance in Ads

Creativity is very important for an advertisement. Like poets the creators of advertisements also take liberties with the use of the language structure whenever necessary to attract the attention of the consumer. Advertisements should catch the attention of the consumer; otherwise they fail. Ads should also incite curiosity without affecting the subject matter, and develop interest about the product in the consumer. Ads should attract the consumers' attention and engage them. To achieve this, creators of ads take liberty to violate some of the rules and conventions of the language.

Language use is the proper subject matter of Sociolinguistics and can be studied taking into account the different social contexts found in the society. These contexts may be related to social factors such as commercial problem, trade and commerce, mass contact, public announcement etc. We find variations occurring in form, expressions and content from one usage to the other and most of the usages exhibit structural variations also. So as language use varies we find language structure also varies accordingly.

A brief attempt is made in this paper to find out the various linguistic techniques used by the creators of ads and some of the linguistic features/structures commonly used in the language of Tamil advertisements.

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