Spelling and Grammatical Errors on Written English Advertising Billboards

Citation: Muhammed Sagir ABDULLAHI & Saifullahi Dahiru USMAN (2020). Spelling and Grammatical Errors on Written English Advertising Billboards. Yobe Journal of Language, Literature and Culture (YOJOLLAC), Vol. .8 Department of African Languages and Linguistics, Yobe State University, Damaturu, Nigeria. ISSN 2449-0660

SPELLING AND GRAMMATICAL ERRORS ON WRITTEN ENGLISH ADVERTISING BILLBOARDS

Muhammed Sagir ABDULLAHI

&

Saifullahi Dahiru USMAN

Abstract

There are many mistakes on most of billboards mounted on highways, streets and corner shops in town. This paper provides Linguistic Analysis of Spelling and Grammatical Errors on English Advertising Billboards in Kano metropolis by employing descriptive and qualitative research methods. Survey based on cross-sectional study was carried out on thirty-two (32) English advertising billboards on major streets of the most locations and data for the research were collected through observation. Data collection focused on spelling and grammatical errors in the written English billboards on words, phrases and sentences that create communication gap between the message and the intended recipients. For the purpose of data analysis, Wing and Baddeley (1980) and Cook’s (2004) eight categories of spelling and grammatical errors were adopted. The findings reveal that the main reasons behind the errors were attributable to inadequate knowledge of English writing skills, poor knowledge, grammar, influence and negative interference of the mother-tongue and the attitude of copy-and-paste by billboard inscribers. Four categories of spelling and grammatical errors were identified in the forms of grapheme substitution, grammar, substitution and omission. Inconsiderate attitude of Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) coupled with that of advertising partners to scrutinize the printed billboards prior to its final printing for public display escalate the problems.

1.0 Introduction

It is human to make errors during communication, in either spoken or written language, at four levels: lexical, syntactic, semantic, and contextual (Eastman & McLean, 1981; Young, Eastman, & Oakman, 1991). Second language users often make a lot of errors in the processes of representing their thought in both written and spoken languages, basically orthographic and grammatical spelling errors. Nigeria is a multilingual society, where more than one language is used to transact businesses, either corporate or local, by individuals or companies. As the trend warrants, advertising is an inevitable part of modern capitalist consumer society whose outstanding feature is its competitive fight. Both individuals and companies resort to other sources of marketing promotion through newspapers, magazines, billboards, television, radio and so on in order to create awareness about their products, goods and services so as to reach target consumers. Marketers see advertising as part of an overall promotional strategy where the idea of billboards was employed as medium through which new products, goods and services were advertised. Billboard advertising being a particular type of communication, involves the use of large stationary structures placed along roadsides and other transit routes to display messages to passersby. It is a component of the advertising category known as outdoor or out-of-home advertising which seeks to engage audiences. According to Fortenberry (2010), billboard advertising is used to communicate with current and prospective customers, with the usual goal being to entice them into some sort of exchange. In the designation of billboards, writing systems were employed in the form of scripts and orthography “as a set of visible or tactile signs used to represent units of language in a systematic way and rules for using a script in a particular language” (Coulmas, 1996, p. 560).

Languages are written in a variety of scripts, some of them share the same script, whereas, others use different scripts to represent their writing systems. Sampson (1985, p. 21) states that “one language may be written in different scripts, and the same script may be used to write different languages”. Script is not a language itself. According Charles (1997, p. 243), it is a “sets of discrete, articulated and arbitrary signs, which enable any constructed message to be transmitted without necessarily using natural means”. According to Baron (2005) and Birch (2007) all languages of the world can be classified into three categories in terms of their writing systems which are logographic, syllabic and alphabetic systems. An example of the logographic writing system would be the kanji system in Japanese in which “one symbol represents the concept or meaning of an individual word or part of a word” (Birch, 2007, p. 16). Syllabic writing on the other hand exemplifies a system in which the “symbols represent the syllables of the language” (Lado, 1964, p. 18). When one symbol links to one sound, this is known as an alphabetic writing system. Hence, both Hausa and English are practicing alphabetic writing systems according to the above description.

In the processes of representing language in a written form, orthographic and grammatical spelling errors may be encountered, either alphabetical misspelling or incorrect insertion of letters in the writing system. Grammatical errors were observed at lexical and syntactic levels. Therefore, the focus of this paper is to identify and analyze orthographic and grammatical spelling errors on Written English billboards advertisement in Kano.

1.1 Spelling Errors

As cited in Wayar and Saleh (2016), errors according to Omojuwa (1979) can be classified along two main dimensions, both of which are essential for slightly different reasons: Errors are classified linguistically, that is in terms of language, to what area does error belong (tense agreement, spelling infinitive, etc)? Errors are also classified psycho-linguistically, that is, in terms of what stage in the process of language learning the error has occurred (e.g. at the hypothesis formation stage, hypothesis testing stage or application stage). Also According to Eyisi (2003), there is a world of difference between an error and a mistake. You can readily correct your mistakes but not your errors. All users of a language, native speakers and competent users inclusive are prone to mistakes which are slips of the tongue or of the pen due to negative physical and psychological conditions such as fatigue, haste, memory lapses, strong emotions, nervousness or uncertainty, or when attention is divided or absorbed in some non–linguist activity. Errors are deviant structures or unacceptable utterances which are signs of imperfect knowledge of linguistic code.

According to Kukich (1990, p. 350), spelling errors can be divided into two types: typographic errors and cognitive errors. “Typographic errors have something to do with keyboard adjacencies (insertion, deletion, substitution, or even transposition)” for example, *ttheir (their), *whre (where). While “cognitive errors usually stem from phonetic similarity” (Kukich, 1990, p. 352), for example, *tirm (term), *acedemy (academy). Other factors include shifting key characters, shape similarity. Formal mis-selection is another type of error which occurs when words that look and sounds similar. For example, this is the course [cause] of the accident. Another related error is attributed to misconstruction of word which refers to the words that do not exist in the target language. They can originate either in mother tongue or be created by the learner from the resources of target language itself. Chinese students usually will not make inter-lingual misconstruction errors, because Chinese and English belong to quite different language families. But if the Chinese students have learned some other languages, it is possible for them to make such errors. For example, in the sentence “the *preise [price] of tomato is high” (preise means price in German). The student uses German word preise. It seems that the student has learned some German words. Distortions refer to the intralingual errors of form created without recourse to first language resources. The outcomes are forms non-existent in the target language. They result from the misapplication of one or more of the processing operations: omission, overinclusion, misselection, misordering and blending. Here are some examples: (1) omission: *seris [serious]; (2) overinclusion: *polloution [pollution]; (3) misselection: *folgen (follow); (4) misordering: *soceity [society]; (5) blending: *populution [population + pollution].

1.1.1 Stages of Spelling Errors

Typing texts consists of three main stages in which invariably an error may occur at each of them. In the first stage, the verbalization, an idea crystallizes into a thought word. Usually it is simple, but sometimes may not be as such, e.g., one may want to write a negative form of a word and is unsure which of the negative prefixes should be used in that particular case. As there are a few negative prefixes, e.g., im-(imperfect), in-(incorrect), un-(unnatural), one may create a negative form choosing the improper one like perfect to imperfect. An error can also occur when one tries to create a word from a different part of speech, e.g., typical suffixes for adjectives, e.g., -ical (cynical), -ly (mannerly), -ally (magically); so when one does not know the correct adjective derived from the adverb tragic, may write e.g., “tragicly” instead of “tragically”. Spelling errors of this kind, called vocabulary incompetence, are typical for children and non-native language users.

In the second stage, the thought word is converted into its spelt form. In this stage, an error may occur when one is unsure of its spelling or pronunciation. When the pronunciation is known, one may use a different grapheme (letter representing a phoneme) for the phoneme existing in the word. This is reflected in such errors like “occurrance” instead of “occurrence”, “fourty” instead of “forty”, “grammer” instead of “grammar”. When the pronunciation is not familiar or conversant with the speaker, only resolved to approximation, one may try to write a different phoneme, e.g., “egsistence” instead of “existence”. Thus, Misspellings are frequent in languages in which phonemes are rendered by several graphemes. These error types are usual for children, non-native and incompetent language users.        

The third stage is typing. In this stage, one knows the word, knows its proper spelling, but makes a spelling error, a mistyping, while pressing the keys. Damerau (1964) cites Pollock and Zamora (1984) define four main kinds of mistyping: insertion of a letter, e.g., *speklling instead of spelling; deletion of a letter, e.g., *speling instead of spelling; substitution of one letter by another, e.g., *spolling instead of spelling; transposition of two adjacent letters, e.g., *seplling instead of spelling. All these errors appear when one types a word, so the keyboard layout influences the introduced mistyping. It is much more likely to press the wrong key which is close to the one in question than another, e.g., many people use QWERTY keyboards, so pressing the letter e instead of o is unusual, but for those using DVORAK keyboards this is typical.

1.2 Advertising

Advertising is generally believed to be of critical importance for the success of companies, and also is one of the oldest forms of marketing in the world. Bovee and Arens (1986, p. 5) define it as “the non‐personal communication of information usually paid for and usually persuasive in nature about products, services or ideas by identified sponsors through the various media”. The word advertising comes from the Latin word “advertere” which means to “turn the mind towards”. Companies advertise “to stimulate demand” (Brierley1995, p. 4). “Although advertisements are ephemeral in that each one is short‐lived, their effects are longstanding and cumulative: they leave traces of themselves behind, which combine to form a body of messages about the culture that produced them” (Goddard 1998, p. 3). “Advertising can be used for a number of reasons: to motivate consumers to buy goods, or certain consumers not to buy goods, to change attitudes or to encourage retailers to stock produce” (Brierley 1995, p. 2). Additionally, advertising can also be used to reassure loyal consumers. The main purpose of companies is then to increase brand awareness or consumption and their advertising is the art of persuading more people to buy. The advertising domain is growing very rapidly and becoming a domain where everything possible is done to have new adherents, users and buyers and where the motto “the end justifies the means” is more and more operative. Marketers use many different media to get their messages across: television, radio, newspapers, magazines, facile, billboards, bus shelters, buses, phone booths, sales letters, plastics and the internet. Advertising is therefore a crucial means of marketing when a company wants to expand its brand and increase the number of its consumers. The prosperity of companies greatly depends on advertising because a bad advertisement might tarnish the image of that company. Through advertising, companies and institutions expose their products, services or views. Cook (1992) argues that the issue of defining advertising is closely linked to that of defining categories of advertisements. He identifies four categories of advertisements namely: medium, product, technique and consumer.

1.3 Billboards

The term billboard comes from the medium’s early origins where handbills (i.e., papers containing promotions of some sort) were posted onto boards (i.e., wooden panels erected for the purpose of displaying handbills) to inform passersby of events, product promotions, and other advisories (Hendon & Muhs, 1986). Billboards are a form of outdoor communication medium that is still relevant and effective due to their ability to target a wide audience. In many cases different scholars also distinguish it from outdoor media and see them as a form of advertisement (Anna, 2006). According to Meurs & Aristoff (2009), this form of advertisements presents an appeal for the brands and products which could be used to gain more market share. Moreover, it develops clear branding through large text sizes, pictures of celebrities and brands/products, clearly explained features and benefits and other such information such as prices. The properties of billboards are compared with prominent features of speech and writing to better understand and appreciate how the language of billboard can be used to effectively communicate messages to target audiences. Given the current technological advances, traditional billboards have indeed enabled new and sophisticated means of communication. Language effects on these new mediums are similarly experienced while societal impacts are partly a result of the nature of billboards as a medium. Billboards can be both factually communicative and socially interactive. Like writing, billboards aim to communicate some ideas, and can also be used as a medium to express some facts about a product service, or simply to convey public information. Their main objectives are using visual impact and innovative message that is easy to be read and understood by target audience, and to also communicate details effectively and affordably. Billboards with properly communicated information were regarded to be an effective medium of message transmission, and in communicating their beliefs and values in a far-reaching manner (Baffoe & Asimeng-Boahene, 2011). Conversely, billboards can be socially interactive whereby similar to speech, the billboard message can express the advertiser's attitudes and opinions. The effectiveness and success of this medium depends on the choice of language and its use, billboards behave like speech and can reveal inherent views. The advertiser may have personal feelings about the preference of the public and the choice of language used to achieve intended effects on the audience. In addition, some billboards make use of non-verbal features to stand out and innovate themselves from their competitors. Enterprises are very much interested in having promotional activities because they actually want to give enlargement to market-share because to attain competitive advantage over all business rivals. There is a large distance between manufacturer and customer and which seems unbelievable of direct marketing and this billboards advertising giving a very fine advantage and thus everyone have to accept real essence of advertising in this competitive world.

2.0 Methodology

This study is purely descriptive in nature and qualitative research method is employed. A survey based on cross-sectional study was carried out on English advertising billboards in Kano metropolis. Thirty-two (32) billboards on the major streets in different locations in Kano were identified, survey and photographed through observation for the purpose of data collection. Though, there are many writing problems on most of the billboards in the town, data collection processes focused only on the spelling and grammatical errors in the written English billboards on words, phrases and sentences that create communication gap between the message and the intended purpose for public consumption. For data analysis, Wing and Baddeley (1980) and Cook’s (2004) eight categories of spelling and grammatical errors were adapted. They are as follows: Addition (insertion), Omission, Substitution, Transposition, Grapheme substitution, Word space, Capitalization, and Others.

3.0 Data Presentation

The English spelling and grammatical errors as data for this study were identified on billboards’ advertisement from different locations on major streets, highways and shop corners in Kano metropolis. The data were also observed at word, phrasal and sentential levels with errors underline in bold italics and re-write in the corrected manner as presented in the following table:

Phrases/Sentences erroneously written on English advertising billboards

S/N	Phrases/Sentences with Spelling and Grammatical Errors	Phrases/Sentences with Correct Spelling and in Grammatical Order
	Grapheme substitution
1.	Once beaten twice shall.	Once beaten twice shy.
2.	The Lord is my stranth	The Lord is my strength.
3.	4 Bird room flate for sale.	Four bed-room flat for sale.
4.	Food & papper soup is ready.	Food and pepper soup is ready
5.	Who knows tumolo only God.	Who knows tomorrow, only God.
6.	Snacks, meat piles, do not and roseted meats.	Snacks, meat-pie, donut and roasted-meat.
7.	Your fitness for mail & femail.	For male and female fitness.
8.	Plate your head here.	Plait your head here.
9.	Stop maching flauwar.	Stop matching over the flowers.
10.	To God be the gloly	To God is the glory.
11.	Toyin van for sale.	Towing van for sale.
12.	The devil is a layer	The devil is a liar.
	Grammar
13	We sell dog childrens, boys & girls.	Get your puppies here.
14	Vacancy! A male sales girl is wanted.	Vacancy! A sales-girl is needed.
15.	Come and cut your head here.	Come and do your hair here.
16.	If you need living nanny and non-living nanny.	If you need a house-maid and a Day-care nanny.
17.	Please climb upstairs to study overseas.	For study overseas, please go upstairs.
18.	We develop dull children.	We rehabilitate dull children.
19.	Couple with bride alone and Couple with groom alone	Couple only.
20.	Liquid tea available here.	Tea is available here.
21.	In trust we God.	In God we trust.
22.	A femal computer is needed.	A female computer operator is needed.
23.	Shoplifters will be prostituted	Shoplifters will be prosecuted.
24.	Your fitness for mail & femail.	For male and female fitness.
25.	A femal computer is needed.	A female computer operator is needed.
26.	This property is not 4 sale. Buy the owner	This property is not for sale, by the owner.
	Substitution
27.	Liking finger restaurant.	Licking Finger Restaurant.
28.	Feeling station now open.	Filling station now open.
	Omission and Others
29.	A femal computer is needed.	A female computer operator is needed.
30.	Intanacional baber	Professional Baber
31.	Stop troing riabash here	Stop throwing rubbish here.
32.	Save me ho God.	Save me oh! God.

 

4.0 Analysis and Discussion

The procedures for the data analysis of this paper were based on the assumption of Wing and Baddeley (1980) and Cook’s (2004) eight categories of spelling and grammatical errors. Typographical and cognitive errors from the data focus on grapheme substitution, grammar, substitution, omission and other errors from the above table.

4.1 Grapheme Substitution

Grapheme substitution is an error involving letters substitution, for example when the pronunciation is known, one may use a different grapheme (letters representing a phoneme) for the phoneme existing in the words as in the above table under grapheme substitutions 1-12, examples: Shall instead of Shy, *Stranth instead of Strength, *Birdroom instead of Bedroom, *Tumolo instead of Tomorrow, Do not instead of Donut, *Roseted instead of Roasted, Mail instead of Male, Femail instead of Female, plate instead of Plait, *Gloly instead of Glory, *Yoyin instead Towing and Layer instead of Liar. All these substitutions happened as a result of some causes of action, lack of vocabulary knowledge, influence of mother tongue or poor perception of the wordings and attributed to the problem of phoneme by the billboard inscribers. These causes stimulate spelling errors due to differences in orthography, morphology and phonology of both the language involved as stated in the works of Holligan and Johnston (1991) and Tonga et al (2009). On the other hand, first language interference (e.g Yoruba language native speakers in South-western Nigeria) also play a role in making spelling errors in English by transferring first language phonological and orthographic rules into English processing as in 5, 9 and 31 from the above table: *Tumolo instead Tomorrow, *Flauwar instead of Flower and *Riabash instead of Rubbish”.

4.2 Grammatical Error

Error in grammar or grammatical error is an unacceptable or an incorrect sentence, phrase or clause as determined by the rules and conventions of the grammar or morpho-syntax of the language. As obtained in the above table, the data items 13-26 buttress different grammatical errors at phrasal and clausal level in the billboard advertisement, examples: “we sell dog’s *childrens, boys and girls here” instead of “Get your puppies here”, “A male sales-girl is wanted” instead “A sales-girl is needed”, “We develop dull children” instead of “We rehabilitate dull children” etc. The essence of every meaningful advertisement is to reach and convey message as appropriate as possible to the target audience with full comprehension and accuracy. Unclear communication is the biggest issue caused by incorrect grammar when writing or speaking, poor grammatical skills can form a negative impression on the recipients. This corresponds with Jackson (2005) who asserts that grammar has been concerned almost exclusively with analysis of the level of the sentences and the rules that govern how a language‘s sentences are formed to convey message. Grammatical errors made by language users resulted to incomplete and unintelligible sentences in which the use of part of speeches, phrases and clauses were not in agreement with the rest of sentences parts. Writing and speaking correctly provides good appearance of credibility in building organizational reputation especially as regard with advertising activity of a particular goods and services.

4.3 Substitution

Substitution is the act of substituting or the state of being substituted or replacement of an item with another. Substitution error refers to when a letter is replaced by another one as a result of orthographical semblance or homophonic resemblance in which a word is pronounce the same as another word but differs in spelling or meaning or origin such as in 27 and 28 of the above table. The “liking” is used instead of “licking”, where ‘licking’ is the target word, meaning to stroke something with the tongue like food and any other eatable because of its delicacy quality. It is something appealing, usually a pleasing food, especially a choice of certain dish. These two words were used as one was wrongly substituted in the advertising billboard that is “liking” whereas “licking” is the correct one to capture the message put across as in “Licking finger restaurant” to connote and create the impression. In the other instances, “feeling” is used instead of “filling” where ‘filling’ is the target word to mean anything that is used to fill something in the form of liquid content. The first word ‘feeling’ was wrongly used on the billboard instead of ‘filling’ to mean a place where vehicles are refilled as in “Filling station now open”. Substitution error occurs as a result of homophonic misrepresentation due to lack of consideration and inadequate knowledge of linguistic features of English vocabulary to represent the message lexically.

4.4 Omission

Omission is the act of omitting or deleting something not done or neglected and it is also a shortening of a word or phrase using an apostrophe to replace the missing letters. Omission error is an action connoted when a letter is deleted or missed from a word which may make that word incomplete and fall short of the intended meaning. Deletions of words are synonymous and habitual act of advertising billboard inscribers and do negligently discarded or omit letters from their selected text. This is symbolized in item 29 of the above data table, where a letter is missed from a given word ‘femal’ instead of female which give unintelligent sense due to inaccuracy work of the inscribers of advertising billboards. Omission error is the normal and basic features of billboard advertisement due to lack of proof-reading to mark the work well done.

5.0 Conclusion

In conclusion, English spelling and grammatical errors seemed to be one of the pervasive mistakes committed in the written tasks of advertising industry. The main reasons behind the widespread spelling errors were attributable to several factors such as inadequate knowledge of English writing skills, poor grammar knowledge, the influence and the negative interference of the mother-tongue and the attitude of copy-and-paste by the inscribers. Lack of phonological, morphological and orthographical knowledge of English language by the billboard designers played a significant role in promoting the behavior. Inconsiderate attitudes of regulating agency (APCON) and the advertising parties to scrutiny the printed billboards fail to yield positive result. Four categories of spelling and grammatical errors have been identified in the forms of grapheme substitution, grammar, substitution and omission. Among various types of spelling errors, inaccuracies in spelling vowels have been highly pervasive in the billboard advertising written works. The Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria at state levels should coordinate the manners on how to mount advertising billboards which must conform to the standard and laid down rules and regulation. Also, to check-mate the activities of improper billboards display on highways to safeguard the prestige, image and integrity of the state. Owners of the billboard advertisements erroneously written should work cooperatively with the authority in charge to get the advertisements rewritten correctly. Professional artists, inscribers and publishers of billboard, sign-post and signboard should consult language professionals with a proposal draft of billboard advertisements prior to its final printing and public display.

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