Situating media influence in sociolinguistic context

Situating media influencein sociolinguistic context

Sali A. TagliamonteUniversity of Toronto, Canada

Everyone wonders if media has an influence on language. Indeed, regardless ofwhat audience I address on the subject of language variation and change,someone always asks, ‘but aren’t the internet and television responsible for theway language is changing?’ The question of media influence has been debatedin the sociolinguistics literature at least since Trudgill (1986), but from the1990s onwards it has come increasingly to the fore. Sayers’ paperproblematizes the study of media and language by reviewing andcategorizing research that has arisen over 20 years based on television andfilm. Sayers’ goal is to outline approaches to the study of global linguisticvariants across the existing range of research studies that have invokedtelevision and film as an explanation for this linguistic behavior. The studiesreviewed are multifaceted in their methods and orientation, ranging fromsimply identifying interesting innovative forms, e.g. th-fronting ([f] for /th/ ine.g. think – Approach 1, p. 193), to actually gauging the effect of media byasking people about their television viewing habits, Approach 5 (Stuart-Smithet al. 2013). Sayers’ exposition is a discussion of why and how he hascategorized these studies, i.e. according to their degree and nature oforientation to the media itself. In my commentary on Sayers’ thought-provoking paper, I would like to bring five issues to the fore which I think arecritical to add to the discussion:

1. what media are we talking about?;2. whether globalizing features are actually a plurality;3. media vs. language use in the world;4. the ever-present issues of methodology and evidence; and5. the nature of linguistic change.

1. THE MEDIA EXPLOSION1

Sayers focuses on television and film, presumably because he is restricting hisdiscussion to speech; however, it is not clear what type of media he intends toinclude. The sources of media influence in the 2000s are so much more thanthe spoken language of television and film. Further, the media has evolveddramatically in the last 20 years. Even if one were to make a distinction

Journal of Sociolinguistics 18/2, 2014: 223–232

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

between broadcast media and communication media such a division does notsuit the contemporary facts – the boundaries between different types of mediahave blurred. This confounds Sayers’ discussion of Approaches 1–5, which isordered by engagement but is crucially tied to chronological developments.I found this disorienting. Research on media and language is necessarilydemarcated by emergent research questions, available data, and changes in themedia itself. For example, in 1998 I conducted a study on the television sit-comFriends (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005) because at that time so-called ‘mediainfluence’ was predominately focused on television and film. By 2001, therewas a groundswell of new written media emerging, particularly InstantMessaging (IM) among teenagers. Concomitantly, many linguistic changeswere picking up speed (Tagliamonte 2006). From these early days, writtencomputer-mediated communication (CMC) has been considered a source forchanges in spoken language. I investigated this development by embarking on astudy of adolescent language use in IM. Criticisms leveled against this researchsaid, ‘a direct comparison with the same individuals’ spoken language isrequired’ since features of CMC had started migrating into conversations, e.g.lol, smiley face, etc. This led to the next study in which I compared written IM tothe same individuals’ spoken conversations. Surprisingly, IM patternedsystematically along with the spoken language with respect to the layering ofvariants and ongoing change; however, it also demonstrated a unique fusion offormal (shall,must) and colloquial variants (deontic gotta) as well as innovations(quotative be like, intensifier so, etc.; Tagliamonte and Denis 2008). By then anarray of varying types of written CMC had developed, Facebook, blogs, reviewsand comment/response systems galore, all with the potential to influencelanguage use, whether written or spoken. In the context of these rapidly shiftingmedia developments, Sayers’ focus on television and film may seem obsolete.Yet taken in context, it is actually a solid foundation for ongoing research boththeoretically and practically. If we are going to tackle the issue of globalinnovations then an epistemological road map is a good way to start. YetApproaches 1–5 should not necessarily be evaluated as a straightforwardprogression towards ideal practice. Each one will have value for trackinginnovations, whether global or not, as new media evolve into the future.

2. GLOBAL INNOVATIONS?

When Sayers refers to ‘global innovations’ (p. 193) it is important to rememberthat he is talking about English only, and even then not English in all of itssocial contexts of use (e.g. styles, registers, etc.). Further, notice that these‘global innovations’ are always referred to in the plural. But how many trulyglobal features are there? Sayers inserts an important caveat into his discussionwhen he says ‘the use of “global” is not intended to imply usage absolutelyeverywhere’ (p. 186) but he nevertheless intends to underscore that there are aplurality of changes that are arising in discontinuous geographic locations. In

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actuality, all the examples are either particular to the British Isles (t-glottaling,l-vocalization and th-fronting) or a single feature, the quotative be like – e.g. I’mlike, ‘Oh no!’. There is no mention of the broad scale changes that are sweepingNorth America, e.g. the Northern Cities Shift, the southern shift, the Canadianshift, (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006). Presumably, there are also nationallycircumscribed changes in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere,but if there are research projects documenting such changes, they are notreviewed here. As Stuart-Smith et al. (2013) and others have been quick topoint out, the changes in the British Isles are locally situated changes (howeversupra-local) and, further, they have been underway for decades, rooted instructural changes in the history of the variety. But what about be like?In fact, this feature has quite a different profile than any of the other changes

Sayers discusses. It has a shallow history and it exhibits a qualitatively differenttrajectory of change, e.g. high speed acceleration. This is eminently visible inD’Arcy’s (2012) diachronic study of the quotative system in New ZealandEnglish where in Figure 4 (D’Arcy 2012: 361) at least 100 years of history canbe viewed graphically. The assiduous reader will notice that various quotativesrise and fall over the period, e.g. think, go, zero, but when be like comes on thescene, it rockets upwards in frequency usurping all other quotatives. Havingstudied be like extensively, I can say that be like is not only increasing at highspeed, but its patterns of use are complex, globally diffused and (for the mostpart) consistently deployed at least in the English-speaking world. Moreover,we have been able to pinpoint precisely what generation of individuals beganusing it: regardless of locality, individuals born in the 1970s started using belike (Rodrigues-Louro, D’Arcy and Tagliamonte 2013). Thus, it is notsurprising that media influence is thought to be the explanation. More onthis later. The point I want to highlight here is we need to be more discerningabout what we label as ‘global’ variation and change.

3. MEDIA VS. LANGUAGE USE IN THE WORLD

Sayers argues strongly that research on media and language should ideallycompare spoken language in the world to spoken language in the media. Iagree, though, it is critical to situate the data that will be compared in timeand context. We must be certain that we are getting the right linguisticmodels for the appropriate time period. In Rodrigues-Louro, D’Arcy andTagliamonte (2013), we demonstrated that the inception of be like acrosscities in Canada, New Zealand and Australia can be pinpointed to individualsborn in the early 1970s and that it accelerated rapidly among those born inthe 1980s. This means that in order to assess media influence on the firstgeneration of users, media from the 1970s and early 1980s is required. Whatmedia were available? Research by Dion and Poplack (2007) examined thelanguage of popular television and films from this time. They discovered thatwhile many quotatives were present, be like was not among them

DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 225


(notwithstanding Ferrara and Bell’s (1995: 288) observation to the contrary).These findings suggest that neither television nor films are the culprits for theacceleration and spread of be like. Social media as we know it today could nothave played a role in the inception of this change either. In the early 1970sthere was no Facebook, Twitter or even extensive use of the internet by thegeneration of individuals who spearheaded the use of this form. So, whatexplains its global spread? We argue, in part, that the internal linguisticsystem was already changing to permit a novel form to enter and the socio-cultural pathways were in place for global diffusion, precisely along the routesand in the places be like arose. But even this does not offer an entirelysatisfying explanation.An additional complication for studying spoken broadcast media is that

spoken language and television language are not on a temporal par in terms ofthe stage of development of a linguistic change. We know that other languageregisters do not evolve in tandem, i.e. written vs. spoken (e.g. Pintzuk 2003),why would others? Further, given the results from Tagliamonte and Roberts(2005), it seems more likely that television is modeling the vernacular ratherthan the other way around. Therefore, I suspect that broadcast medialanguage lags behind innovative changes, at least in the beginning. Of course,this is an empirical question. My main point here is that comparing spokenvernaculars and the language of television and films at the same point in timemay not be the appropriate design for a research investigation. One has to goback to the source time period. Sayers argues strongly that Approach 5 withtelevision/film language analyzed alongside engagement with these media isthe way forward, but I would argue equally as strongly that the nature of themedia data and any other data must be carefully justified. The point here isthat comparison is critical, but we need to be sure we have the appropriatetemporal and contextual associations.

4. METHODOLOGY AND EVIDENCE

Sayers argues that once research studies started specifically invokingglobalization and mass media ‘a rift begins to open . . . between evidence andassertions’ (p. 197), and ‘empirical disjuncture’ (p. 198) ensues. This is not thecase regarding Stuart-Smith et al.’s (2013) exemplary research on theinfluence of television, which is ground breaking in design, implementation,methods and analytic techniques. These researchers went to the nth degree toseek out, track down and capture television influence, but in the end theevidence is slippery. One would have hoped for some kind of direct correlationbetween watching EastEnders and using EastEnders forms on the televisionbroadcast (the linguistic forms under investigation in Glasgow, Scotland), butthere were none. Instead, linguistic constraints were the strongest predictorsfor using th-fronting or l-vocalization, along with street style dress and contactwith friends and family in England. Media influence (as a relatively minor

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predictor) was captured only when individuals reported that EastEnders wastheir favorite show and that they engaged with it psychologically andemotionally (e.g. by criticizing the characters). This suggests that watchingtelevision is not a causal effect, but indirect, one of many other factorscontributing to the acceleration of an already diffusing linguistic feature(Stuart-Smith et al. 2013).Sayers is on the mark when he argues that attestations of media influence

would do well to ‘strike a shrewder, more painstaking balance betweenevidence and assertions’ (p. 202). And yet, as researchers we cannot notaddress the possibility of media influence. I can remember back in 1995 howperplexed I was when I realized that the quotative system of the American,Canadian and English data we were analyzing demonstrated suchparallelism in the use of the be like quotative (Tagliamonte and Hudson1999). Even at that stage of the development of be like (just over 10% of thequotative system), some mention of the influence of media, whethertelevision, film or the then prevalent internet media, email, was necessary.I had to say something, but to say any more than I did would have beenpure conjecture. What was necessary was a study of a relevant medialanguage. Television shows, especially those that were reaching millions ofpeople around the world seemed to be the most appropriate way forward atthe time. This is how the Friends study was conceived (Tagliamonte andRoberts 2005).This progression of sociolinguistic research on media and language has thus

been a logically motivated and evolving enterprise. Who knew back in the1970s that be like was coming? Similarly, Trudgill (1972) did not know in thesummer of 1971 when he was collecting the Norwich data that the seeds ofglottalization had already been found. We could not easily have predicted thatsocial media were going to take over our lives as they have. In the past,researchers have pondered media influence, but they were thinking of televisionand film, etc. as in the Trudgill debate (1986) and in Sayers’ paper. However, thenature of media and its influence has changed exponentially since that time. Inmany cases, it is no longer passive. Even television and film have becomeinteractive with summaries, commentaries and interactions about everybroadcast. The media have become increasingly immediate, supra-local/globaland often now face-to-face. Skype allows us to see as well as hear the people weare interacting with, as does Facebook Chat, FaceTime and other visual interfaces.Nowadays, I cannot remember when I meet a friend at a conference just exactlywhen I last saw him or her in person, because we have been meeting up over aglass of wine or a cup of coffee on-line all the time. Further, the nature of mediaand engagement with media is a rapidly moving target. I taught a courseentitled ‘Internet Language’ for the first time in 2005–2006, again in 2007–2008, and again in 2011–2012. Advancements in the way my students wereengaging with media were so markedly different across those years that I couldnot conduct the same class project in the same way. In 2005–2006 young



people were exposed to way more than simply television and film. They wereengaging with a constant audio-visual barrage while simultaneously traversingdifferent media registers such as IM (on computers) and Text Messaging (onphones). By 2012, everyone was doing all this on the same device, typically asmart phone, and no self-respecting person under 30 was using email at allunless he or she was communicating with an ‘old person’ (typically his or herprofessor or boss). Today, my children rarely watch a television, they stream –videos, demos, games and of course, films and television shows, simultaneously.Crucially for the sociolinguist, however, these are not time-stamped to thepresent but come from the full range of historically available materials fromsilent films to recent blockbusters.My point is that whatever is going with media and language, it is

developing faster than we can imagine and it is very highly differentiated inparticular ways to specific times (years) and places. In this context, researchin language inevitably follows a trajectory driven by intellectual as well astechnological development. We cannot study media and language without atime stamp and a GPS reading because language use is unfolding in a wholenew, non-geographically tethered, non-temporally anchored, terrain. Thequestion is what are the dimensions of this new landscape that matter? Doesplace matter anymore in this jumble of time and space? Do social networks(however non-local) prevail? These are most compelling empirical questions.Most intriguing is why there are not a whole host of global innovations.Given what researchers are claiming in their research papers, my curiosity ispiqued by the lack of global innovations. It seems to me that be like is the onlyone. Indeed, my collaborators in Victoria (D’Arcy) and Perth (Rodrigues-Louro) and I think that be like is actually a very important anomaly; however,I will not go into the rationale for that here (Tagliamonte, D’Arcy andRodrigues-Louro 2014).

5. WHAT TYPE OF CHANGE?

Not all types of linguistic change are the same. Transmission comes fromwithin communities as an unbroken chain of linguistic evolution from parentto child while diffusion comes from individuals who move from onecommunity to the next or from one social network to another (Labov2007). This is repeated numerous times in the short article. Sayers arguesthat ‘if there is a role for mass media, it is qualitatively distinct fromconventional diffusion’ (p. 202). This must absolutely be true. Labov too hasnoted that not all changes follow the same model of diffusion (Labov 2003).In Tagliamonte and Denis (2014), we outline how a strict distinction betweentransmission and diffusion cannot be sustained in the current global climatebecause we have discovered deviations within them. Indeed, the increasinglycomplex contact situations in which the modern world finds itself embroiledwill necessarily impact the nature of how language changes progress,

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whether geographically or otherwise. The question is how and to what extentthe local, supra-local, G20-local, global, etc. have a role to play and underwhat circumstances. The surprising finding is that variance within patterns ofdiffusion and innovations as linguistic change spreads can be traced to thenature of the community (size, founders, social networks, etc.; Trudgill 2011)as well as the stage of development of the change itself, at least for diffusingchanges in the early 21st century (Tagliamonte and Denis 2014). Sayersadvocates two additions that he believes are critical to research mediainfluence in language change – mediation and parasocial interaction (p. 187).What will the nature of ‘non-standard vernacular reproduced in media texts’(mediation) or the ‘creative, emotionally involved process’ individuals deployto rework media content add to this picture (p. 188)? I think the only way tograpple with the intricate and multi-faceted influences that potentially lead tothese ‘multifarious adaptions, appropriations and localisations that incominginnovations go through’ (p. 204), is to scrutinize the linguistic behavior itself.By this I mean careful, accountable, quantitative and qualitative analyses oflinguistic variation and change. For example, my most recent researchsystematically and consistently compares the linguistic usage of the sameindividuals across four media – traditional email, instant messaging oncomputers, texting on phones and a standard written essay as a control(Tagliamonte 2013). The results show that while individuals use differentforms for the same function throughout, they do so in varying proportionsand select different forms in different media (e.g. shall, will, going to, gointa,gonna, gon, ima). Further, their use of linguistic variation is highlycircumscribed to the nature of the linguistic change itself, the mediainvolved (email vs. texting on phones for example) as well as the interactionaldevice employed for the communication (type of phone, computer). Mostimportant, the complex internal linguistic constraints on the variationbetween competing variants (e.g. go future vs. modal future will) remainconstant across the media, indicating no ‘breakdown in grammar’ as is oftenclaimed in populist reports. The point I want to emphasize here is that,among the resources required to assess media influence on language, detailedlinguistic information about the frequency and patterns of variable systemsand suitable data to assess change are vital.

6. SUMMING UP

The impact on language of media is surprisingly difficult to substantiate.Stuart-Smith et al.’s (2013) research exposes just how difficult it is to pin downa direct connection. To reach beyond television and film, as we must, will beeven more challenging. For example, when I ask my students to record all theindividuals they have had contact with in any given day, the social networksin global space are mind-boggling. If we were to extend that question to theinteractions those same individuals have with media in general, the



possibilities are exponentially increased. When my 10-year-old asks me ‘Whatdoes “chaperone” mean?’ how will I know where or how he was exposed to theword because at any given time he is watching YouTube, television, playingvideo games and reading simultaneously. At the same time, while so much ofthe new media rhetoric champions an ongoing disconnect between space andtime, I think old-fashioned local identity may still come to the fore in languageuse just as it did in Martha’s Vineyard in the 1960s (Labov 1963) andcontinues to do in the 2000s (Pope, Meyerhoff and Ladd 2007). Indeed,research on Twitter demonstrates that place and proximity continue to matter(Takhteyeva, Gruzdb and Wellmanc 2012). Apparently, social media do notreplace the networks that exist in the real world. Instead, they reinforce themand make them stronger.Sociolinguistics is poised for an uncommon and unprecedented new research

frontier as a burgeoning wave of new internet media and rapidly evolvingengagement patterns leave their mark on language. One of the most promisingresearch pursuits will be tracking whether global networks imprint onlanguage or whether local practices (and allegiances) will prevail. Somecombination of these two is most likely, but in what mix? It will be incumbentupon us as analysts to stalk these developments. For me, this can mostreasonably and objectively be done through careful linguistic analysis,evaluating forms and patterns across contextually defined parts of thegrammar and according to the extant and emergent social networks to seejust what patterns are preserved, which are extended and where the patternsbreak down. This will be a mirror of the connections and pathways of languageas it traverses both the geography of our physical environment and thenetworks of our emerging virtual experience.

NOTE

1. Naming and categorizing ‘media’ is particularly problematic due to itsmultifaceted nature as mediated vs. non-mediated, synchronous or non-synchronous, whether one refers to channels, styles or practices and thenature of the device employed. I will use ‘media’ to refer to the variegated inputfrom all forms of media communication in the world.

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Address correspondence to:

Sali TagliamonteUniversity of Toronto – Linguistics

130 St George StToronto

Ontario M5S 3H1Canada

[email protected]

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Situating media influence in sociolinguistic context