Taco Bell and the Universality of Sound Symbolism

A priori, it seems that fast food advertisers are some of the most effective advertisers in the world. We often assume this is true because of the addictive products they peddle, or perhaps due to the reach of their global ad campaigns.

But advertisers in the fast food industry have long relied on another secret weapon in spreading their message of tacolicious love: linguistics and sound symbolism.

As if it weren't hard enough to keep me from binging on chalupas and gorditas already, companies like Taco Bell routinely utilize sound symbolism—the inherent association of particular phonetics with semantic understanding—to endear consumers to their menus, according to Stanford Prof. Dan Jurafsky.

As Jurafsky details in his new book The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu, advertisers routinely utilize affricates and alveolar stops to name crispy sounding foods, like Ritz, Cheez-Its, and Triscuits. They also call upon stressed long vowels to connote the richness of food—like Rocky Road, Jamoca Almond Fudge, and Coconut. These findings are supported by Yorkston and Menon’s study on the linguistic bases of consumer preferences in ice cream selection, and informally by Jurafsky’s empirical study of ice cream brand names.

It makes sense that using sound symbolism in advertising would be prevalent. In fact, it seems incredibly efficient to implicitly conjure intense phenomenological properties like ‘crispiness’ or ‘richness’ through the use of carefully chosen phonetics in advertising, in the same way that using well-drawn pictures or photos of crispy or rich foods elicits those same feelings in consumers’ minds.

However, unlike photos in advertising, the languages used to elicit these beliefs about food are not universal but differ from country to country, region to region. This may suggest that the sounds (and in the case of signed language, gestures) that the speakers of those languages associate with a certain phenomenological property are distinct among languages.

But are they?

Is the sound symbolism we experience as English speakers universal over all languages? For example, do Polish speakers hear affricates and think of crispy foods? Do Korean speakers hear long vowels and think of the richness of food? What does your experience with language tell you?

Although I do not have the explicit research to answer this question, an evolutionary perspective might suggest that this perspective is true.

As Linguist John Ohala and before him Eugene Morton suggest, sound frequencies are likely associated with certain meanings. Animals apparently tend to use deeper (lower-frequency) sounds when hostile, and higher frequency sounds when acting friendly. For example, we can conceive of a gorilla letting out a hearty and aspirated /ɔ/ in the face of rival primates, but also a friendly and repeated /i/ among friendly members of its community.

Morton interprets this practice as a desire to be perceived as large and dangerous or small and social, respectively. He asserts that these evolutionary trends are the bases for our conception of long-vowel sound symbolism. Thus, it is possible that these associations in language are universal and not confined by country borders or dialects’ reach, but instead are inherent to us as evolutionary beings.

I wonder whether an answer to this question exists along these evolutionary lines. If so, then perhaps the use of sound symbolism in naming foods extends over all regions and languages. If not, however, then naming strategies for products like Taco Bell’s “Crunchwrap Supreme” may need serious linguistic modification before being exported overseas.

Is sound symbolism universal, or inherently language-specific? What does your experience with language tell you? For ESL speakers, please share some anecdotes from your native languages, in the realm of food or otherwise, if any come to mind!