ENQUANTO HÁ CAFÉ, HÁ ESPERANÇA: The landscape of multilingual sugar packets

The back and front of a packet collected in a Portuguese bakery in Esch-sur-Alzette (on the Place de la Resistance).

Since January 2006 I have been collecting sugar packets, a hobby which trickled down from a great aunt, which was not unusual in the Netherlands in the 1950s but is now far less common. Most of the packets come with cups of coffee, drank by me or by friends and family on holiday trips. There is a sense of excitement in walking past a terrace and seeing the coffee cup of someone who already left still sitting there, the packets untouched; sneaking by and letting them slide in my pocket. In the summer when I stay at my dad’s house I tally up what I have gathered the past year. I cut small slits in the sides of the packets, let the sugar run out, and arrange them in self-adhesive photo books, matching and categorizing. On the internet I have so far found three clubs for sugar packet collectors: one in the Netherlands, one in Portugal and one in Hungary. I haven’t traded much yet, but I have been given the collections of some people who were clearing out their attic, one of them counting thousands and alphabetized on place name. 

Initially one thing that fascinated me about the Dutch packets I collected, was that many of them only have the word “SUGAR” in English, pragmatic, in capitals. These packets are very different from those my great aunt collected in the 50s. On those, there is just Dutch – not a hint of German or French even in the holiday resorts. At that time it must have been cheaper to have personalized packets pressed, as every small cafeteria had their own. Now most cafés give out sugar packets from the brand of coffee they serve. 

On closer inspection, it is not just the Dutch packets that feature interesting language choices. There are McDonalds packets with Swedish and Finnish; packets that feature slogans in Italian; and obviously the Luxembourgish packets, each of which seems to interpret the language situation in Luxembourg differently. The packets I collected in the United States, the United Kingdom, and interestingly also South Africa are all exclusively in English. An interesting case on their own are the very multilingual packets, which feature four or more languages. Which languages do they combine, and why those? 

To an extent, language on sugar packets is not even really needed. If you get a small packet with your coffee that rustles when you shake it, you probably have an idea of what is in it. The function of the language is somewhat symbolic. Language choice serves an ideological function, even on something as small as a sugar packet, or maybe especially there. When designing the packet, the business is making predictions about what their customer will understand, and what connotations different languages will have to them. The business is presenting itself as allied to what the language choice represents. 

I believe the collection could be a very interesting corpus for a thesis on multilingualism and the economic and ideological motivations of language choice. It is a type of linguistic landscaping study: what languages are featured, in what order and prominence? Is everything translated or just a part? What types of businesses make which kinds of language choices? Yet because of the nature of the collection, there is potential for comparison across different countries and through different time periods, which would be harder to achieve in studies of language choice on shop signs and advertisements. A lot of sugar packets have been documented and dated precisely by collector collectives in the Netherlands and Portugal, and possibly elsewhere; this can be used to supplement and date my own sugar packets. 

For the literature review, I would search for texts on language choice in business-customer interaction. For the methodology it will be useful to review texts about linguistic landscaping, as well as texts about sugar packets, if available. I am curious to see if business-customer interaction has been specifically written about in linguistic landscaping studies before. Also, it might be fun to see if Bourdieu’s theories about the economy of linguistic exchanges applies here, or if he just meant that metaphorically. It would also be good to read up on the linguistic context of the countries from which I am analyzing packets. 

Film review: Crimson Peak

Warning the following is made of spoilers.

Edith sees a ghost in the corridor. Image used by another review of the film at Tale of Two Dans. Also interesting: WrongReel review

Gintarė and Mariana took me to a film that I don't think I would have thought of going to see if it had been just me. It wasn't part of the CinÉast festival that we have been seeing films from over the past few weeks - films that are all very realistic and based on all sorts of pressing social issues (dealing with pedophilia, terminal illnesses, being transgender, lesbianism, poverty, learning disabilities, losing a loved one etc.) This was a big Hollywood film with an impressive budget, by the looks of it, and a fantastical story (in the sense that it wasn't convincingly close to everyday reality). The costumes had elaborate puffed sleeves and colour themes to express the personalities of the characters. The setting was partially in a dilapidated castle with a quaint mechanic elevator and a number of inexplicable but worrying basins of thick red liquid in the basement. The story was set in fin-de-siecle New York and England, so I'm not entirely sure if that is the kind of costumes that would have been worn at the time. Something tells me at least their nightgowns wouldn't have been as intricately puffed and pleated. 

Yesterday me and my mother went to see Ciało (Body), which dealt with different understandings of the relation between body and soul, according to the flyer. There was a cynical procurator who thought when a person died, or is stuffed in a toilet as an infant for that matter, they don't go anywhere. They just die. He didn't really seem to grieve his deceased wife very much, ostensibly, but his daughter really did and was openly suffering. Then he brings her to a therapist who is a medium and who senses the presence of the mother near to the father and the daughter and who is convinced the mother wants to contact them. 

That story dealt with ghosts in a subtle and philosophical sort of way. The way people experience the death of others becomes almost just a sort of personality quirk to help characterise the people in the film. In Crimson Peak, however, the ghosts are not a subtle presence whatsoever. They are maimed blood-dripping skeletons, dragging themselves over the floor and screeching, suddenly bursting through closed doors while the music plays dramatically. Yet as I understand it, the ability to see them is still somewhat of a personality quirk of the main character. In the film, the ability to see ghosts is compared to (not) being colour blind. The girl (Edith) is initially scared of the ghosts, which I suppose I would be what with all the dramatic music, but eventually she realises they are conveying useful information on how to further the plot, and she tries to communicate. When she first goes to the castle and starts seeing ghosts, she tells the others about them, but they don't understand what she is talking about. Then again, the others (poor but noble English siblings Thomas and Lucille Sharpe) may be trying to hide their awareness of the ghosts, as it turns out they originally caused them to haunt the place by brutally murdering them. At the end, it seems Lucille is able to see Thomas' ghost when Edith points him out to her. 

The cause for the siblings' brutal murder rampage seems to be that they need money to keep on living in their dilapidated castle, hiding away their twisted sexual relationship from the world, and to start a clay mine to dig up their weird red clay for some reason. Thomas tempts rich young female outcasts into marrying him, Lucille makes sure their parents are dead too; then she poisons the girls slowly while prohibiting her brother from sleeping with them and while all their dead parents' money is being transferred to the castle's accounts. The explanation for especially the sister's evil mind is that their mother was very harsh and loveless to them, and the sister stood up for her brother and took all the beatings, which made her rather crazy in the head (the CinÉast films probably wouldn't have taken this rather socially irresponsible route of depicting someone with mental illness as relentlessly violent). The brother however is mainly motivated by love: he participates in the crimes out of love for his sister, and he eventually tries to stop them out of love for Edith.

I saw some parallels to the horror stories David Graeber analyses in Debt: the story is really about how the nobility exploits the working people to pay their own debts. The Sharpe's family fortune has been squandered by the siblings' father (who disappears out of the picture mysteriously after Lucille kills their mother). Thomas originally meets Edith because he is trying to convince the council her father is on to fund his mining project. Her father chews him out about never having had to work for his money (he gets killed for that later, the father); at the start of the film Edith herself also says a Baronet (Thomas' title) is probably a parasite. And she was not wrong: indeed they turn out to be pretty much literally parasites. The nobles are not exactly vampires in this film, but it bears a lot of similarity: they are dressed the part for it and they kill hardworking people such as Edith and her father in order to continue their own disturbing life. Thinking about it it seems like vampires are usually nobles in most depictions of them.

What's more: the moral of how the nobility exploits the working people is itself a device to promote the USA as a great country, versus its former feudal overlord England. England is the place where the castle of the Sharpe siblings is situated. Edith and her father live in Buffalo, New York, but when the father is berating Thomas' request for money he says now he's come "to America" to ask for money (so not just to NY but it's generalised). It fits into the greater picture where America has always profiled itself as a place where you can become rich through hard working, and where class differences are abolished -- everyone wears jeans, everyone drinks Coca Cola. England on the other hand is ruled by a monarch and a House of Lords (also a House of Commons but that is not relevant here). Those with fancy birth-given titles help themselves to e.g. mines they haven't earned. Most of all, the clearest stab at England is the method through which Lucille kills her victims: by making them drink poisoned tea.

Mariana laughed when I said the bit about the nobility - as far as I understood, she and Gintarė thought the film was about the horrible things people will do in the name of love. Which is also a fair interpretation. One thing I still missed in their analysis, though, was the role of the ghosts. Edith writes ghosts stories, but whenever anyone reacts cynically, she explains it's not really a ghost story: the ghosts are just a metaphor. So what are they a metaphor for? I say it's the stories of exploitation from the past, well as bloody as this film's dripping ghosts, to which people shouldn't close their eyes if they want to know how to further the plot.