Shooting the subversive: When non-normative linguistic practices go mainstream in the media

Introduction At first glance, Sweden and South Africa might seem to share very few traits. We could go as far as to suggest that they are opposite poles in a geographical, historical and sociopolitical sense, with Sweden as an ‘old’ democratic welfare state in the very north of the world at one end of the continuum, and South Africa at the other as a ‘young’ democracy of the South in which urban opulence exists next to extreme poverty. Despite these differences, the main argument of this chapter is that Sweden and South Africa do have something in common: in both contexts, particular forms of non-normative linguistic practices traditionally associated with youth have been ‘strategically recontextualized’ (Gal and Woolard 2001: 8) in mainstream advertising for consumerist purposes. In order to illustrate this, we will bring into the spotlight three TV commercials that employ Tsotsitaal, on the one hand, and rinkebysvenska (‘Rinkeby Swedish’) and Swedish interlanguage, on the other. In no way do we mean to imply that these advertisements are representative of the entire marketing landscape in the two countries in question. We have chosen them because they are very popular, repeatedly broadcast through a variety of channels in Sweden and South Africa. The main point we make on the basis of this data set is that these advertisements provide us with ‘local’ vantage points from which to tap into larger ‘global’ sensitivities about ethnic and racial identities in late modernity.