It’s all about you...: The discourse of banking in the UAE

Abstract

Al Hilal Bank, a national bank was established in 2008, and since then they managed to change people‘s perceptions on banking and their interaction with this financial institution.  This change was marked by the distinctive ‘syntactic personalization’ represented by its slogan “it’s all about you..” and extended to the constant ‘intertextuality’  and ‘interdiscursivity’  which redefined  the relationship between this local bank and society.  Thus, this era was not only marked by the marketization of public discourse but also promoting their business through the promotion of social and public events.  They adopted two major directions: 1. The promotion of ‘patriotism and nationalism’, 2. Their promotion of religious occasions, and using religious references in posters that do not refer to any of their banking services.

Using Critical Discourse Analysis as our framework, we analyze a selected corpus of Al Hilal Bank’s discourse through analyzing both text and talk in addition to the semiotic practices represented in the posters that appeared on national Billboards.  The aim of this paper is to study and document the shift that took place in the Banking discourse in the United Arab Emirates, describing the main tools which are used to indirectly promote the bank, by either appealing emotionally to their audience targeting the most important and sentimental occasions or exploiting the authority of theirs.