A cross-linguistic and pluricentric analysis of address patterns in automobile brand websites: Swiss Italian is not like any other

Pragmatic variation in pluricentric languages is an area of increasing research interest, although little explored to date in the case of Italian (and even less so in the case of marketing). Examination of a corpus of French, German and Italian car brand websites across language varieties shows patterns of (in)formal address pronoun use in Italian in Italy and Switzerland are very different: informal tu prevails in Italy, while in Swiss Italian a range of forms (tu, Lei, voi, as well as the infinitive) are used, often together. We consider possible reasons for this, including translation and language contact effects (also supported by other evidence in our data and from elsewhere), influenced by the national origin (and language) of the brand in question.