Myth 15: TV makes people sound the same.

• myth of 'bidialectal' young people who acquire a speech foreign to their community exclusively via television, as popularised in literary characterisations.
• in fact, dialect acquisition (like language acquisition) requires live face-to-face contact with real language use, i.e. human beings.
• while we may pick up individual words or expressions from TV or any other media (just like any other element of passing fashion), nobody really learns language just from exposure to TV.
• for example, hearing children of deaf parents, formerly exposed to TV because it was thought it would help them learn to speak, do not in fact learn any spoken language just from passive exposure.
• on the other hand, the phenomenon of 'upspeak' (Hi, I'm David? I'm your linguistics prof? We' ll be having a midterm, a final exam and regular quizzes?) has spread throughout the English speaking world very quickly, despite NOT being reflected on TV during this period of spread. This intonation pattern now sometimes appears in TV program dialogue which portrays younger speakers, but this is clearly the reflection of a change which has already taken place in society (again, the electronic media are followers, not leaders, of change); upspeak likely spread due to increased face-to-face contact (through increased travel) and perhaps also the rise of easier and cheaper international phonecalls.
• which is not to say that one cannot deliberately learn some aspects of language varieties (e.g. 'desirable dialect features') from TV, movies or other media: this Myth states that TV somehow "makes people" sound that same, which is different from TV being used by people to change how they sound
• why does such a myth exist? It seems to satisfy a need for explanation by putting together two phenonena: we are all aware of language change (through personal experience, and perhaps through exposure to older texts), and we are all aware of the increasing importance of electronic media in the last half century.
• but if the media were responsible for recent language change, how could we explain (well-documented) language change from earlier centuries? by getting away from this Myth, we do not come much closer to understanding the causes of language change, but at least we can now hypothesize that these causes are likely uniform (or at least similar) throughout human history.

Last updated: September 19, 2006 by David Heap4