Markennamen als sprachliche und kulturelle Identitätsträger
Brand Names and Cultural Identity: A Short Overview

Summary/Abstract: Brand names play a special role for companies: they both convey and guarantee brand value. Despite their special status in brand management, and although the number of brand names is estimated to be over 43 million (!) worldwide, brand names are an underresearched area of linguistics. Brand names are often researched in a marketing context: the effectiveness of brand names is analyzed and suggested catalogs for “good” and “bad” brand names are created. Brand names are however also part of the language and can therefore be also analyzed using linguistic methods. As part of language, brand names are the bearers of a culture’s identity: they can be used to identify a specific culture, or even a specific historical epoch. This cultural identity-bearing and cultural identity conveying function is also recognized by companies: they often create and use brand names in order to consciously associate the given brand with a certain culture. In the article, these identity-giving and -bearing specifics of brand names are analyzed: we show how the Country-of-origin can be pointed out with linguistic and nonlinguistic devices, we show how Foreign Language Display can help to transfer cultural connotations to a brand and we show the possibilities for translating brand names. We argue that brand names should thus be better integrated into interdisciplinary linguistic research; also with the aim of showing new career prospects for (applied) linguists.

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