Contrary to common belief, television does not make people sound more alike. It is good at spreading words, like catchphrases (“Yabba dabba do!”), but there is no proof that it affects changes in pronunciation or grammar.
English and its dialects are changing all the time. No one fully understands how or why, but it seems to have little to do with television: some changes are in the direction of television English, some are not.
For example:
- ‘fraid, finna, be – In Black American English saying “‘fraid” for “‘afraid” is dying out while studies show that the use of finna and the invariant durative or habitual be (“He be dancing”) are becoming more common, not less! Even though blacks hear plenty of Standard English on television and at school – and in most cases can speak it on demand (code-switching). Class, segregation and regularly talking to white people seem to matter more than television or school. Musicians, for example, speak a Black English closer to Standard English.
- dove - In southern Ontario most people who grew up without television say the past tense of dive as dived, while most who grew up with television say dove - the very form used in the American North whose dialect has been heard in southern Ontario on television since the 1950s. This sounds like a perfect example – but there are two things wrong with it: First, the change started in the 1800s. Second, dove is hardly a common word on television, certainly not common enough to affect how anyone talks.
- Uptalk – This is where you make a statement into a yes/no question by a rising tone at the end and waiting to see if the other person denies it (“Hello, I’m a student in your phonetics tutorial?”). Uptalk spread to the U.S., Canada, England, Australia and New Zealand in the late 1900s, the very time television came in. This sounds like another perfect example – except that as of the 1990s no one on mainstream television regularly talks that way – not Oprah, not Wolf Blitzer, not Fred Flintstone, not Bart Simpson. No one knows how uptalk spread so quickly to so many countries.
- The 9/11 firefighters – spoke a white working-class New York English little changed from the 1950s. As if they came from a land without television.
An even more telling example is Vincent, a three-year-old boy studied by linguists. He could hear perfectly well but both his parents were deaf and only used American Sign Language (ASL). To learn English they had him watch television regularly. It did not work: he could not speak a single word of English – even though he had no trouble signing.
People mainly learn language not from television or schoolteachers or even parents but from their playmates. A clear example of this are the children of immigrants. They do not speak with the foreign accent of their parents or that of television or even schoolteachers but in most cases with the accent of where they grew up.
Sources: This post is my take on the chapter of the same name by J. K. Chambers in “Language Myths” (1998) edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill. Chambers is an expert on dialects and Canadian English. He is a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Toronto. Also: “Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English” (2000) by John Russell Rickford and Russell John Rickford.
See also:
re: Vincent
confused.
So, did he learn English from television as you say, or did he not understand or speak a single word of it.
@ Jefe
Sorry, that was badly worded. I changed it to:
Thanks.
Uptalk is annoying as hell. I hear people do it when they’re making statements. I don’t even do when I really am asking a question.
I’d say that if the argument is that television makes everybody sound exactly the same, then I’m inclined to agree that it does not. But then again, everyone on television doesn’t sound exactly the same in the first place. Also if the assumption is that television can be used as a surrogate language model during the infant language acquisition phase, then I would agree (based on the studies) that it can’t. However, what television does do is to present slightly varied versions of Standard English sentence structure and syntax to its massive audience.
One hundred years ago, if you lived in Kentucky, 98 % of the people whom you heard speak would be speaking with a Kentuckian accent, vocabulary, and sentence construction. Today a Kentuckian only needs to turn on the television news to hear an anchorman speaking in a practiced, Standard English, with a vague northeastern accent.
Now, that doesn’t mean that the Kentuckian is likely to drop his Southern drawl, or change the vocabulary he uses with his fellow Kentuckian friends and neighbors, but it does mean that he understands what most Standard English phrases and vocabulary mean and could probably tone down his Kentuckian speech patterns to sound closer to Standard English if the situation required it. I think that is what television does, it gives people access to a kind of linguistic plumb line for common comparison.
Well I agree with you if you are talking about accent and the way we speak. But on the spread of ideas and what and how we think and speak it unfortunately has a big impact. I don’t believe Obama would have had a chance in hell on a second term without it (Television).
Now every news station with the exception of Foxnews is pushing his and the “Liberal” agenda. I don’t know if they are scared or paid off, but it seems like it got worse since the election. I guess they want a democratic house in 2014 to really screw us over.
I’m going to start to limit my kids to less then one hour per day. You need to watch some, but keep it limited.
I have to disagree with number 3. It seems like every actress under 35 working in movies and television uptalks. With some, it’s more pronounced than others, but most of them seem to do it. Oddly, I don’t think this is necessarily the case with male actors, but there are a few who do it, too.
It may not have such a profound effect that everyone speaks the same but it does have an effect, a slow homogenisation. Hearing so many Americanisms on the streets of Britain breaks my heart, the kids are even calling the police the ‘feds’ nowadays. We have perfectly good nick names for the ‘filth’ already, why do we need American ones.
Also, that upward inflection may have started and in the 90′s in the States but I’ve only noticed it here relatively recently, within the last 5 years maybe. It’s spread is almost certainly because of TV and not something mysterious.
It is without a doubt the worst American export bar none, and I’m including all the dodgy wars, too. I worry that one day I’m going to hear myself do it and then feel compelled to commit suicide with the shame of it.
Accents are changing over time and I think there is a definite trend towards less accents and less idiosyncratic accents. I listened to some old James Joyce recordings the other day and despite being from Dublin I could barely understand a word his accent was so thick. That’s only a century ago.
As an young woman of Jamaican descent, I understand about three different dialects of the English language:
Ebonics
American English
and
Jamaican patwa
These three dialects are essential to my life because I am Black American of Jamaican descent and I might have some cultural differences but not much.
I believe children should learn different languages and cultures to broaden their minds a bit and maybe even understand cultures different from theirs. I always felt different from the Black kids whose parents, grandparents and great grandparents were American born. I don’t know but I was made to feel different by many Black kids of American heritage down the line because my parents, grandparents etc were Jamaican born. I never wanted to feel different from them but I do and I never fit in with them at all.
Television probably has helped people to code switch more. On the one hand, they still use their local dialect in their closer social circles. On the other hand, they are familiar enough with the television dialect to try to code switch for people of other dialects. We might not know how to code switch to their dialect, but we can code switch to some extent to a more popular dialect which is more likely to be understood by speakers of other dialects.
This is a an enlightening post on language. I have to say the power point on uptalk. I just have to say I want to grind my teeth to powder. That style of speaking makes me crazy. It reminds me of valley girls from the 80′s. It’s comical.
@ Mary Burrell definitely agree about uptalk. It is like a truely valley girl experience. I would love if “Like” was dropped from speech. I don’t know in how many countries I have to explain that like is more place holder than word.
Abagond said:
I never heard uptalk until I was around New Zealanders and Australians. Lots and lots of them.
Young Antipodeans — of European descent — seem to travel a great deal and they take their accent with them and many people caught on to their uptalk.
In my experience, that rising intonation at the end of their sentences seemed to catch on with immense speed. It was like droplet infection! I would see this: you’d have lunch, for instance, with some Australians, and pow! afterwards everybody was ending each statement and question with a lilt at the end! Women did this particularly. It used to amaze me.
When I thought about it more, I could see the reasons behind for it, and agree with the commenters at the end of the short video:
The upward rising inflection you call “uptalk” may or may not have begun in Australia, but it has been heard in Southern California for years and was originally known as “Valley Talk,” the speech of “Valley Girls” meaning those who lived in the San Fernando Valley just north of the Hollywood Hills outside of Los Angeles. How it came to be there, I have no idea, but it was clearly used there by the 1970s quite often.
It was a commonly parodied inflection some years ago usually associated with a kind of brain dead naivete among teenage girls. It was not considered by most people to be, by any means, attractive. Oddly, as a Southern California (who speaks with a Midwestern Northeastern accent since I grew up there), I find my younger daughter (but, strangely, not my older daughter) speaks this way.
I’ve come to associate “uptalk” with insecurity and childishness since it’s so often used by females, rarely by males, often younger, and appears to reflect unsureness as if the speaker were asking “And you agree with what I’m saying, right?” I also find it incredibly irritating to listen to, I have to admit.