To Örebro University

The purpose of this study was to create a sociolinguistic foundation for the genre video game announcements. By employing the most relevant theoretical frameworks such as Workplace English as Lingua Franca, which was used to examine if there was any bias towards non-native English speakers, three presentations from 2019 were examined. The presentations were sourced from events which announced games that were positively received by journalists/critics and average to poorly received by consumers. The presentations were transcribed using a simplified transcription system to stay within the scope of the study. The transcriptions were afterwards analyzed using the WELF model, multimodal (inter)action analysis and discourse action and interaction analysis. These theories were determined to be suitable for the purpose of providing explanations for the most important aspects of the genre due to their relation to the most salient theoretical concepts, which are pragmatics, semantics, multimodality and multilingualism. The theories were examined through a model that highlights how marketing speech acts travel from the orator to the receiver. After the analysis, it was concluded that non-native speakers were able to use translanguaging to generate a significant response from the audience. Furthermore, emotive and associative meaning were commonly used in an indirect context. Multimodality was also used to interact with stage objects and the game itself. The study concludes that there needs to be more research on the topic to fully define the genre. The scope of this study could not accommodate for the entire sociolinguistic toolset, nor the amount of repetitive research on historic samples. Yet this study functions to create a foundation.