The view from the couch: changing perspectives on the role of the television in changing language ideologies and use

Abstract

Language standardisation in Europe is linked to the mass media in a number of complex ways. On the one hand, historical processes of language standardisation in Europe have always had a close relationship with the mass print media (e.g. Hjarvard 2004; Buchstaller 2008 after Milroy and Milroy 1998). On the other, the role of the broadcast media, especially television and radio, in the recent and contemporary processes of standardisation – and other kinds of change which together might be loosely grouped together as ‘destandardisation’– seems rather less straightforward. This chapter focuses on the latter theme, and falls into four parts. In the first I consider the theoretical context for such a discussion, and in particular the different kinds of claims, assumptions, and evidence for media influence on language change across sociolinguistic research: the picture is complex, and the details seem to relate closely to theoretical context and location/domain of study. The second part gives a brief overview of how media influence on social behaviours more generally is modelled within mass communications: the key insight, whatever the theoretical perspective, is that media influence is crucially contingent on what the viewer brings to the media experience. It seems plausible that a similar assumption can be made if we wish to understand better what might be entailed by assuming that the media ‘influences’ language. In the third section, we test the predictions of such an approach with phonological data from two theoretically different sociolinguistic contexts of (de)standardisation. In the fourth and final part, we make some practical suggestions for improving the empirical base for understanding and modelling media, influence on language change, especially from television. Whilst it is clear that we need much better understanding of media models and their social and ideological meanings as resources for viewers, fundamental research is needed into viewers and the viewing experience, and how this relates to language variation and use in the short, and longer-term. For though even our terminology for the phenomenon (or rather bundle of phenomena), ‘media influence on language’, implies that any kind of shifts in conjunction with media arises from the media somehow doing things to the viewer, it seems much more likely that it is the viewers, in ways thoroughly constrained by their existing linguistic, social and ideological knowledge, and usually without any overt awareness that anything might be happening, who are doing things with the media.