Glocalisation

This term – a blend of globasation and localisation – describes the way in which practices that spread around the world will be “nativised” by local cultures. Multinational corporations take local practices and preferences into consideration. McDonald’s, for example, uses Asterix instead of Ronald McDonald in its advertising campaign in France. Imported cultural trends get adopted in a modified form by the local populations, resulting in phenomena like Korean hip-hop or Japanese R&B. The flow is not always only in one direction. US comic-book culture, for example, had a strong influence on post-war Japanese culture, this was then transferred into an indigenous Japanese art form, manga, which in turn has been exported back to the US. (Seargeant, Philip: “English and linguistic globalisation”, in: Seargeant, Philip & Swann, Joan (ed.): English in the World. History, Diversity, Change. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012: 179-80)