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.