Contemporary social identities are hybrid and complex,
and the media play a crucial role in their construction.
A shift from political identities based on citizenship
to economic ones based on participation in a global consumer
market can be observed, together with a concomitant shift
from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant
ones. This transformation is here explored in a corpus
of German advertisements. Multilingual advertisements accounted
for 60–70% of all advertisements released on various
television networks and in two national newspapers in 1999.
The subject positions that are created by multilingual
narrators and multilingual narratees are characterized
by drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, and
on point-of-view more generally. In order to test the acceptance
of or resistance to these identity constructions outside
the discourse of commercial advertising, the uses of multilingualism
in nonprofit and personal advertising are also explored.
All these discourses valorize German–English bilingualism
and set it up as the strongest linguistic currency for
the German business elite.