Cover image: © Aleks Dorohovich

Summary and review of the fascinating article entitled ‘TV Makes People Sound the Same‘ by Professor J.K. Chambers.

In this text, J.K. Chambers debunks the following language myth: TV makes people sound the same.

It is natural for a language to evolve. With time, the pronunciation of some words can change, as well as their meaning. For example, ‘dived’ is being replaced by ‘dove’. By comparing different age groups and social groups for instance, it is possible to find evidence of who is ‘leading the change and where it is heading’. But finding the reasons for the change is far more difficult. There are no reasons for norms to change and no one knows why they do change. However, a lot of people seem to believe that these changes are mainly caused by the exposure to the mass media such as the radio or television. But sociolinguists disagree with the idea. Although mass media plays a role in the spread of vocabulary items, mass media have little to no effect on grammatical changes and sound changes.

This popular conviction is conveyed by many works of fiction, including Harold Horwood’s Tomorrow Will Be Sunday. In a passage of its novel, the novelist claims that it is possible for villagers mainly speaking ancient British dialects to acquire an ‘almost accent-less English’ from hearing it on the radio.

The people of Caplin Bight, when addressing a stranger from the main-land, could use almost accentless English, learned from listening to the radio, but in conversation among themselves there lingered the broad twang ofancient British dialects that the fishermen of Devon and Cornwall and the Isle of Guernsey had brought to the coast three or four centuries before.

Tomorrow Will Be Sunday, Harold Horwood

Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley is another novel in which the assumption is made. Indeed, in a passage, rural people are said to have lost their ‘indigenousness in their speech’ partly because of mass media.

And the people lost their wholeness, the valid stamp of their indigenousness . . . In their speech (freckled with current phrases of jocularity copied from the radio), and finally in themselves, they became dilute.

The Mountain and the Valley, Ernest Buckler

What is interesting in this passage is that mass media does not affect sounds and grammar directly, instead, it popularises the use of certain catchphrases.

Mass media can popularise words and expressions, although catchphrases are only ephemeral. But there is no proof that popular media are influencing sound and grammatical changes. For instance, according to the sociolinguist William Labov, even though the most segregated African-Americans are exposed a lot to standard English on television and in schools, their dialects are ‘drifting further away’. Here is another piece of evidence: According to studies made by psycholinguist Ervin-Tripp, hearing children born of deaf parents are unable to acquire language from exposure to radio or television. A third kind of evidence would be the ‘uptalk’ intonation pattern. Uptalk has spread to all English-speaking communities in the world, but is almost never used on television. Thus, television has only little influence on the way we speak. On the contrary, the way we speak greatly influence on the way of speaking on television and on the radio.

Another interesting case study is the evolution of the standard past tense of the verb ‘to dive’. In the past, most people were saying ‘dived’, but ‘dove’ is now becoming the new norm. A study has been made about this particular change in Ontario, Canada, and shows that although this Canadian state has been blanketed by American television since 1950, this evolution is not due to television because the word is not used frequently enough on broadcasts. The study shows, instead, that the change is linked to the age of the speaker (around 40% of Canadians between 70 and 79 years old say ‘dived’ against around 90% of the people from the 14-19 age range).

Source: Language Myths, Laurie Bauer & Peter Trudgill (London: Penguin Books, 1998, pp.123-130)