In this paper, through the use of informal interviews with twenty owners of commercial stores I seek to understand their reasons to use English features or expressions in the names of their stores. I also examine under the light of the notions of transglossia and transculturality in which ways English lexical and syntactical structures in the names of commercial stores are translated/transformed by Brazilian Portuguese native speakers to mean something. Would the notion of neo-imperialism made in USA transposed to the linguistic domain be reconciliable with the notions of transglossia and transculturality proposed by Cox and Assis-Peterson (2006, 2007)? Would the ordinary man have something to say to the politician and to the language scientist as argued by Rajagopalan (2004)? Through the notions of transglossia and transculturality it was possible to notice marks of deterritorialization of English to be used in the Brazilian context by people of commerce. The signs revealed to be mestizo showing lexical and syntactical processes that go back and forth between Portuguese and English. The transglossic mark of mestizo signs is the transcultural mark that is not merely swallowed but chewed and thrown out in new forms and meanings.
English in the daily life of Brazilians; anglicisms; transglossic and transcultural processes