Our Bula Spirit Awaits You! The Usage of Interlingual Compound Words Consisting of English and the Fijian Greeting Bula in Fijian Tourism Advertisement Online

Abstract

This study investigates the Global English variety spoken in the South Pacific Island nation Fiji, often referred to as Fiji-English. Specifically, this paper examines how interlingual compound words consisting of the Fijian greeting bula + various English words are used in Fijian tourism advertisement on the social media platform Instagram. This was done by using both a quantitative and a qualitative approach. Firstly, data was gathered manually from the Instagram posts of the official Instagram page for tourism in Fiji as well as from the pages of five Fijian resorts. Thereafter, the data was used to create a specialized corpus consisting of 214,032 words. Three commonly used interlingual compounds and the contexts in which they appear were identified. Subsequently these three words were analyzed with a qualitative discourse analysis in order to explain how and why these words are used in Fijian tourism advertisement. The results show strong indications that interlingual compound words consisting of bula + various English words are used in Fijian tourism advertisement in order to display the uniqueness of the destination and its people. Generally, the words emphasized a type of unique ‘Fijiness’ and the authentic, happy and welcoming attitudes of the Fijian people. Fiji-English is a growing field of research and this study aims to fill in a gap concerning how a unique characteristic from the Fiji-English vocabulary is used in Fijian tourism advertisement.