American soft power extends, not shrinks, by Coca-Cola’s multilingual commercial

The difference between a melting pot and an alphabet soup obviously is that the constituent parts coalesce in the first but retain their individuality in the second. With the US selfimage resolutely rooted in the former, the idea of a fizzy American icon speaking in many (foreign) tongues does seem heretical.

But those protesting against the “Balkanisation” of the US by this subversive multilingual commercial —that has America the Beautiful sung in Hindi too among other foreign languages — should actually rejoice about the untranslatable, true-blue American word that the sponsoring company has taken to the remotest corners of the planet: cola. Admittedly, like “burger” and “hotdog”, the origin of the word “cola” may lie elsewhere — in this case, Africa — but its current usage is definitely American in origin, as opposed to the majority of other words the US inherited from its former colonial master across the Atlantic. As long as those words remain unique, the ego of the average American should be assuaged.

The use of Hindi was probably with an eye to the cola’s market in India than a reflection of the Indian community in the US. Indeed, looking at just the Indian-origin Americans who are currently in the news, Telugu and Tamil, not to mention Punjabi and Bengali, would be more appropriate.