A Framework for Researching Media Influence in Language Change

Journal of Sociolinguistics 18/2, 2014: 185–212

FOCUS ARTICLE

The mediated innovation model: A framework for researching media inﬂuence in language change1

Dave Sayers Shefﬁeld Hallam University and Swansea University, United Kingdom

Linguistic innovations that arise contemporaneously in highly distant locations, such as quotative be like, have been termed ‘global linguistic variants’. This is not necessarily to suggest fully global usage, but to invoke more general themes of globalisation vis-a-vis space and time. This research area has grown steadily in the last twenty years, and by asserting a role for mass media, researchers have departed intrepidly from sociolinguistic convention. Yet they have largely relied on quite conventional sociolinguistic methodologies, only inferring media influence post hoc. This methodological conservatism has been overcome recently, but uncertainty remains about the overall shape of the new epistemological landscape. In this paper, I review existing research on global variants, and propose an epistemological model for researching media influence in language change: the mediated innovation model. I also analyse the way arguments are constructed in existing research, including the use of rhetorical devices to plug empirical gaps – a worthy sociolinguistic topic in its own right. Les innovations linguistiques qui emergent simultanement dans differentes regions du monde, telles que les verbes introducteurs be like par exemple, ont eterecemment appelees des ‘variantes linguistiques universelles’. Ceci ne suggere pas necessairement l’existence d’un usage mondial a part entiere, mais plutot^ l’invocation de themes plus larges sur la mondialisation en matiere d’espace et de temps. Ce domaine de recherche a connu un developpement regulier au cours de ces vingt dernieres annees, et en revendiquant le role^ que peuvent jouer les medias de masse, les sociolinguistes se sont eloignes avec une certaine intrepidite des conventions caracteristiques de leur domaine. Pourtant, ces derniers ont bien employe des methodes d’analyse sociolinguistique conventionnelles, mais inferant l’influence des medias uniquement apres coup. Force est de constater que ce conservatisme methodologique a recemment etedepasse, mais de nombreuses incertitudes subsistent quant a la structure globale de ce nouveau paysage epistemologique. L’objectif de cet article est d’examiner

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 186 SAYERS

les travaux de recherche qui traitent de ces variantes universelles et de proposer un modele epistemologique destine a la recherche sur l’influence des medias dans les processus linguistiques du changement appele en anglais ‘the mediated innovation model’, c’est-a-dire un modele d’innovations vehiculees par les medias. Dans le même temps, le present article vise a etudier la maniere dont les arguments sont construits dans ces travaux de recherche, par exemple par le biais de procedes rhetoriques, afin de corriger les insuffisances empiriques – en somme un sujet de sociolinguistique qui merite certainement toute notre attention. [French]

KEYWORDS: Global linguistic variants, globalisation, mass media, quotatives, rhetorical devices, television

INTRODUCTION The term ‘global linguistic variants’ (e.g. Buchstaller 2008) has been coined for linguistic innovations arising contemporaneously in highly disparate places. The use of ‘global’ here is not intended to imply usage absolutely everywhere – or even necessarily in different languages – but just to highlight the sheer distances involved, and partly to intimate a possible role for globalised mass media. However, there remains deep division in sociolinguistics about that possible role. Debate has concerned, ﬁrstly, whether these reported global changes are any more than linguistically superﬁcial, with negligible impact on deeper linguistic structure; and secondly, whether and how far the media might be involved. As Eckert judiciously puts it: We have all been told by non-linguist acquaintances that language change comes from the television. The idea that language change could be accomplished in such a trivial fashion is part of the popular ‘bag o’ words’ view of language ... that we’re all tired of dealing with. However, we shouldn’t ignore the possibility that not all changes are equal. We need to ask ourselves what kinds of changes require the kind of repeated exposure that regular social interaction gives, and what kinds can be taken right off the shelf. (Eckert 2003: 395)

On the question of linguistic superﬁciality, Meyerhoff (1991) and Trudgill (2003) discuss the use of putatively U.S.-originating words in New Zealand, like ﬂashlight for torch, or truck for lorry. Trudgill (2003) contrasts this lexical convergence with the steadfast divergence of New Zealand and U.S. vowel systems, to evince the impervious localness of these more complex systemic changes. Similarly, Milroy (2007, after Eckert as above) contrasts ‘off the shelf’ changes in the U.K. – such as nationwide increases in ‘vocalization of /l/ and glottalization of /t/’ (2007: 164) – with what she terms ‘under the counter’ changes, which require prolonged contact in social networks – such as systemic vowel shifts. Relatedly, Dion and Poplack argue: ‘although ...

“off-the-shelf” changes ... can diffuse easily ... the transmission of complex linguistic variables ... requires face-to-face contact’ (2007: 1; cf. Barbieri 2009: 71). The matter of media influence has been less contentious with superficial changes – the ‘diffusion of catch-phrases’, as Chambers puts it (1993: 138–140; see also Charkova 2007; Risager 2006: 96–97). The debate warms up when apparently complex innovations are reported contemporaneously across great distances. One global variant has attracted the most research: quotative be like (e.g. ‘I was like, no way!’), displacing quotatives such as say across the English- speaking world. Meanwhile other changes, though not global, have arisen with similar speed across whole countries, such as TH-fronting to [f]/[v] in the U.K. Milroy (2007) includes both be like and TH-fronting in the ‘off the shelf’ category, suggesting a certain superficiality; but quotatives in particular have been argued to be complex, core grammatical, ‘high-context’ features (Buchstaller 2006a), part of a ‘quotative system’ (Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2004) indicative of systemic change. As such, one might expect these to act as under-the-counter changes reliant on face-to-face contact, yet they are reported in ‘discontinuous geographic settings’ worldwide (Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009: 291; cf. ‘spatially non-contiguous communities’, Buchstaller 2006a: 363). Could all these changes really be driven by contact among itinerant globetrotters? Their speed and reach makes it unclear; the scale seems out of proportion. The quandary deepens in the way such changes tend to be pioneered by adolescents, who lead very local lives yet have strong access to mass media (Altendorf 2003: 148–149). Milroy (2007) does end by tentatively questioning the explanatory adequacy of face-to-face contact, but she seems cautiously silent on the media specifically – only highlighting a dearth of research into the social mechanisms underlying off-the-shelf changes. Her caution speaks to the level of contention at play on this issue. Where to go from here, and whether to invoke the media, has become one of the hottest potatoes in early twenty-first century sociolinguistics. As we will see, research focusing on global innovations has made some claims about a role for the media, though these claims have tended to outpace the evidence. Language corpora have remained the datasets of choice, and that elides two important factors: firstly, the way global variants are actually used in mass media; and secondly, the way individual people engage with mass media – and precisely how that might figure in their appropriation of variants. All this has led to ambiguity as to whether sociolinguistics can really account for global variants, and if so, what the new epistemological landscape might look like. In this article I review recent research on global linguistic variants, together with two concepts that help to fill the above two gaps. First is mediation, a term developed in a different area of sociolinguistics to describe the way non- standard vernaculars are (re)produced in media texts (Coupland 2009). Second is parasocial interaction (Rubin, Perse and Powell 1985), developed in media audience research to describe how media engagement works as a

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 188 SAYERS creative, emotionally involved process, actively reworking media content. As Livingstone notes of soap operas, they ‘thrive on interplay between ... viewpoints’, thereby ‘providing a considerable role for the viewer’ (1998: 42– 52). As we will see, such emotional investment is central to any substantive role for the media in language change. I use these foundations to develop an epistemological model for research on the media and language change: the mediated innovation model. Along the way, I arrange existing studies of global linguistic variants into five identifiable approaches, each one engaging more substantively with media texts and media engagement. All this is intended to clarify the achievements and limitations of current research, and to map out where future research could focus its efforts. There will be some limitations in what follows. The field of research I am reviewing is at quite an early stage, with some critical blind spots. In the last of the five approaches proposed below, I describe a study by a team in Glasgow (Scotland), which goes beyond conventional methods and collects new kinds of data on media influence. Yet, this study focuses on innovations originating in England, meaning a far smaller spatial scope than the transatlantic cases reported elsewhere, let alone the global ones. The new data in the Glasgow study do indicate a significant role for the media, but face-to-face contact also weighs in quite heavily – more than one might expect had the same techniques been applied across global distances. So the overall case for media influence could be sharper than it is presently. But then, my purpose is not to propound media influence, only to build an epistemological model for its interrogation. In any event, the studies reviewed below suggest that local social conditions ultimately decide the linguistic and demographic profile of innovations, and that any role for the media is much diluted by the ‘repeated exposure’ of ‘regular social interaction’ (Eckert 2003: 395). This in turn reflects audience research on the partial, negotiated role of the media in influencing behaviours: [L]ocal realities can ...present an unpredictable interpretive screen through which the intruding electronic screen images are filtered. ... Media reality has not completely erased social reality, ... counterposed as it is by the centrifugal forces of the local micro-circumstances in which people live out their everyday lives .... (Ang 1996: 151–152; cf. Stuart-Smith 2011)

A second limitation is a lack of clarity to date on whether global variants represent lasting changes, or merely fads (Barbieri 2007: 29; Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007: 213). As Mair puts it dryly, ‘generations of teenage linguistic rebellion will not lead to a lasting change in community norms’ (2006: 29). Longevity is not altogether critical in this article, but it could be interesting in future to analyse longevity using the mediated innovation model as a backdrop. Thirdly, my discussion involves only TV and ﬁlm, not the internet. I am limited here by the scope of existing research. Despite interest in globalisation

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. THE MEDIATED INNOVATION MODEL 189 from the wider discipline of sociolinguistics (e.g. Blommaert 2010: 49), and emerging work on computer-mediated communication (e.g. issue 10:4 of this journal), geographically-minded variationists so far have not gone ‘online’. There have been some variationist studies of email (Kuzmack 2010) and newsgroups (Buchstaller et al. 2010; Coppen and Foolen 2012: 271), but these have not tracked the geographical spread of innovations. Still, TV is not a moribund topic; global audiences continue to grow (BBC Worldwide 2011: 26). There is just scope for expansion in future research. I return to that at the end. A final caution: the studies I review here mostly concern native Anglophone societies. Relevance to other contexts remains to be explored – see e.g. Baird (2001: 7), Cukor-Avila (2002: 3), and Kohn and Franz (2009: 262). Perhaps that is for the best though, given the intended applicability to future research. A further contribution of this article is to examine the way researchers construct their arguments in relation to media influence, including the use of rhetorical devices to bolster claims when empirical data may be lacking. This is itself an important sociolinguistic topic; it tells us a lot about the evolution of this field. I do not introduce rhetorical terms separately here, but as they arise.

KEY TERMS Some terminological foundations need to be clariﬁed before beginning the main discussion. I review ﬁve key terms here, to be used in what follows.

Sociolinguistic convention For my purposes, this relates to a prevailing focus in variationist studies on face-to-face contact as a principal factor in language change. Neither theory nor methodology has delved far into media inﬂuence. Moreover, in the wider social science of globalisation, sociolinguistics has been ‘late getting to the party’ (Coupland 2003: 465). This point of departure is elaborated on below.

Diffusion of innovations The spread of linguistic innovations across social and geographical space has been labelled ‘diffusion’ – leading on, somewhat circuitously, from earlier behavioural studies (see seminal work by e.g. Rogers 1962). Labov (2007) reﬂects on his own and others’ sociolinguistic research in this area. Linguistic ‘transmission’ is the ‘unbroken sequence of native-language acquisition by children’ (2007: 346), enabling continuity of dialect norms. Such norms change by ‘incrementation’, starting with ‘faithful transmission of the adult system, including variable elements’ to children, followed by advancement of that variation (2007: 346). ‘This is the normal type of internal language change, termed CHANGE FROM BELOW or change from within the system’ (2007: 346; cf. Macaulay 2006: 280). This is contrasted with ‘CHANGE FROM ABOVE or the

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 190 SAYERS importation of elements from other systems’ (Labov 2007: 346), involving ‘learning, primarily by adults, who acquire the new variants of the originating community’ and then transmit them to the next generation back in their community (2007: 380) – designated as ‘linguistic DIFFUSION’ (2007: 347). Britain (2005: 996–997) compares types of diffusion: • wave or contagion, where an innovation spreads out in a ‘ripple’; • urban hierarchical, from large cities to towns, villages, and so on; • contra-hierarchical, from rural to urban areas; and • cultural hearth diffusion, the innovation taking hold simultaneously in both urban and rural areas before spreading elsewhere – see Britain (2013) for developments and critiques of these models. A crucial point of departure below is that all these types of diffusion are premised on face-to-face contact.

The speech community This term was developed by Bloomfield (1926: 153–154) to refer to the totality of alike utterances (acts of speech) in a given community; he gives Frenchmen and Zulus as examples. Subsequent reworkings of the term from the 1960s onwards, by the likes of J. J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes, zoomed in further than discrete languages, emphasising local variation. Reviewing a broad range of twentieth century sociolinguistic studies, Patrick (2002: 577) arrives at a view of the speech community as a ‘socially-based unit of linguistic analysis’, realised by shared productive and evaluative language norms, and usually some chain of interaction linking its members (cf. Owens 1999: 663). It is not necessary for all these members to actually meet, so some speech communities have grown very large. Most members of the ‘African American speech community’ (Rickford 1999) never meet, but racial divides in the U.S. have helped reinforce the distinctions of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) (Fridland 2003). A relatable speech community comes in the form of a Mexican enclave of a U.S. city, with an ‘emerging Hispanic English’ under little influence from ambient southern U.S. speech communities (Wolfram, Carter and Moriello 2004). Despite this local isolation, there is a flow of migration into the enclave from faraway Mexico. This speech community is locally discrete, yet it has one arm stretched out hundreds of miles south-west, with productive and evaluative norms following a discernible chain of interlocution. Diffusion serves to connect otherwise discrete speech communities, usually via adults traveling between them. Milroy notes that ‘off the shelf’ changes ‘[do] not require the support of ... regular primary interaction and [are] therefore more generally accessible to mobile or marginal individuals’, like commuters (2007: 163), but less accessible to people with low mobility and denser social network ties: ‘Because of the ... time and commitment needed to maintain these strong ties, they ... lack opportunities to form ... weak [external] ties’ (Milroy and Milroy 1985: 367–368). Crucially though,

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. THE MEDIATED INNOVATION MODEL 191 although diffusion involves interaction beyond the speech community, it still relies on contact between interlocutors. A possible role for the media goes beyond that. To return to AAVE, consider a related music genre, hip-hop – also widely appropriated globally (e.g. Cutler 1999; Lee 2011). AAVE hip-hop artists in the U.S. are, at one level, all interacting members of the AAVE speech community. However, when they become superstars, their interlocution becomes heavily imbalanced. Their words are heard by far more people than could ever speak back to them, and who will never meet them. This is more than diffusion of off-the-shelf changes via mobile individuals: it is not limited to face-to-face contact; it follows no identiﬁable geographical pattern; and access to these artists’ linguistic output has no link to the strength or weakness (or even existence) of social network ties. If mass media have a distinct role in spreading innovations between distant speech communities, then it would be a codicil to a model based principally on face-to-face contact and network ties.

Globalisation It is often contested that globalisation is particularly recent. Taking the U.K. as an example, consider a warning from A. J. Ellis writing in the nineteenth century: ‘the present facilities of communication are rapidly destroying all traces of our older dialectic English’ (1999[1871]: vi). So, what’s new? For one thing, the changes bothering Ellis were limited to ‘dedialectalisation’ (Trudgill 2002: 40) – encroachment of Standard English on to local dialect forms. I have argued elsewhere (Sayers 2009: 51–58) that those changes, dominant in the U.K. from the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, were due to increased literacy, and the commensurate influence of written Standard English (cf. Chambers 1993: 141–142). This period saw little transfer of non-standard dialect forms between even contiguous speech communities, let alone distant ones. Geographical space can be defined ‘in terms of relations’ between people (Allen, Massey and Cochrane 1998), which greatly increased in scope in mid- late-twentieth century Britain, alongside rising geographical mobility. In this period, dedialectalisation was gradually eclipsed by dialect contact and mixture (Sayers 2009: 59–155), allowing off-the-shelf changes to accelerate apace. This was a change from Ellis’ day, but did it relate to globalisation? Scholte (2005: 59–84) argues that globalisation only began in earnest in the 1980s. He stresses the quantitative scale of ‘transworld associations, communications ..., finance, investment, travel and trade’, alongside the qualitative distinctness of ‘social connections that substantially transcend territorial geography’ (2005: 61). ‘The newer spread of transplanetary simultaneity and instantaneity takes social relations substantially beyond territorial space’ (2005: 62, emphasis original). Scholte includes ‘global mass media spread[ing] messages simultaneously to transworld audiences’ (2005: 62) in his examples. So, increased mobility and dialect mixture was a change from Ellis’ day, but it

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 192 SAYERS bore no hallmarks of globalisation per se (cf. Buchstaller 2008: 19). Peculiar to globalisation would be the co-occurrence of innovations in discontinuous geographic settings, inexplicable solely on grounds of mobility and personal contact. This is precisely what has motivated discussion of media inﬂuence in the rise of global linguistic variants. Moreover, the aforementioned sociolinguistic concept of mediation is centrally associated with the ‘uncoupling of space and time’ in the conditions of globalisation (Fairclough 2006: 85, after Thompson 1995: 32).

The influence of mass media Altendorf offers a frank reflexivity about media influence on language, in a discussion of innovations co-occurring across the U.K., worth citing at length: We have already identified these variants as ‘youth norms’ ... and not as south-eastern [U.K.] accent features .... We have not been able to explain how they could have spread without extensive face-to-face interaction, which is generally regarded as a necessary pre-requisite for diffusion .... It is possible but not yet proven that the combined effect of linguistic preference + social attractiveness + constant exposure through the media might have an effect .... In any case, the development has reached a point where we might have to re-evaluate the role of television in bringing about new linguistic trends. ... [F]or example, ...if TV watching trends continue, ‘many children will come to spend more time exposed to non-local varieties than to their local vernacular’ (Foulkes and Docherty 1999: 15). (Altendorf 2003: 148–149)

Foulkes and Docherty are similarly circumspect: ‘The possible effects of [media] exposure on acquired speech patterns remain to be formally tested, but are certainly worth considering in the context of continuing changes’ (1999: 15). Kerswill and Williams (2000: 105) describe T-glottaling (on the rise across the U.K.) as ‘particularly evident in the spoken media, to which children are increasingly oriented’. Trudgill (1988: 43) notes of U.K.-wide TH-fronting: What is surprising ...is the extreme rapidity of this change. ...The pattern of geographical diffusion suggests very strongly that face-to-face contact, as a result of mobility and immigration ... must be involved (see Trudgill 1986). The sheer speed of the change, however, may be due to a softening- up process ... through television programmes ....

The media are given a rather minimised role here; the ‘softening-up process’ seems to mean only greasing the wheels for changes occurring anyway via conventional diffusion. This minimisation is not about ﬁngers jammed in ears, just reasoned scepticism that diffusion cannot ultimately explain everything. The studies of global innovations reviewed below have departed from this line.

FIVE APPROACHES TO GLOBAL INNOVATIONS I identify five approaches in existing research on global innovations. Each embodies a further departure from sociolinguistic convention. These five are outlined briefly below, and then each is expanded in its own subsection. Approach 1 comprises studies on innovations conducted in just one speech community, with only tentative mentions of globalisation and media. This is the most local approach, with the highest constraints on any ‘global’ argument. In Approach 2, innovation usage is compared in discontinuous geographic settings worldwide. This is a clearer nod to the global, but only by virtue of distance and conspicuous linguistic similarity; there is still little mention of the media, or other unconventional factors. In Approach 3, the role of the media is asserted more explicitly, yet still not explored empirically. In Approach 4, innovation usage is recorded in media texts as well as speech corpora. This achieves a methodological advance by analysing mediation, but it does not explore how people actually engage with mass media. Approach 5 progresses beyond the methodological conservatism of Approaches 1–4 with a tripartite exploration of conventional speech data, mediation in media texts, and – most importantly – media engagement practices. Crossing this Rubicon enables a significantly fuller interrogation of media influence. Note that although Approach 1 cites the oldest studies, and Approach 5 the newest, overall they are not chronologically ordered. They do not represent a shift in empirical claims over time, just different kinds of argument.

Table 1: Five approaches to the study of global linguistic variants, each representing a further departure from sociolinguistic convention

*Not in all studies cited under this approach.

Approach 1: One speech community at a time Blyth, Recktenwald and Wang (1990) examine be like among respondents at Cornell University, according to age and gender. Ferrara and Bell, at a university in Texas, analyse a corpus recorded by three student cohorts, and the ‘gender-marking, age-grading, ethnic distribution, and rural-versus-urban usage’ of be like (1995: 270). Neither study concerns the way be like arose in

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 194 SAYERS these places. Ferrara and Bell note that be like is ‘readily observable’ among TV entertainers (1995: 288), but this is just a brief aside in a footnote. Baird (2001) takes a similar approach to quotative usage in New Zealand, analysing age, sex, and other factors. D’Arcy (2010), also in New Zealand, and Cukor-Avila (2002) in a rural Texan location, compare usage by ethnicity. Baird brieﬂy mentions the media near the end, then states: ‘How much a trend catches on might depend on our (subconscious) attitude toward, and ... exposure to, the nation responsible for starting it, in this case, the United States’ (2001: 18). This is the penultimate sentence of the article though, almost an afterthought. Tagliamonte and D’Arcy (2004, 2007) analyse realisation of quotatives in Toronto. They give a brief introductory review of localisation patterns in the U.S. and U.K. (2004: 509–511), but focus mainly on the Toronto data. They discuss why be like arose in Toronto after its earlier rise in California: ‘As part of the “preppie” movement of the 1980s, be like gained prestige as a trendy and socially desirable way to voice a speaker’s inner experience’ (2007: 212). Again though, this is quite a casual assertion, right before their conclusion. Detail of how be like might travel is not pursued. Macaulay (2001) reports the pioneering of be like by adolescent girls in Glasgow. He asserts its origin in California (2001: 3), and queries the primacy of conventional diffusion: ‘the question remains of how be like reached teenagers in Glasgow. It is unlikely to have been through direct contact with young Americans’ (2001: 17). He cites a study showing increased use of be like in American ﬁlms over the previous two decades, adding: ‘it is possible that the innovation ...owes something to the media’ (2001: 17). This is a swift remark though, just before the conclusion which simply recommends ‘[m]ore attention to archival media materials’ (2001: 18) to explore such a link. Be like is noted as originating peculiarly far away, and some initial interest in the media is clear, but Macaulay’s attention mostly remains on usage patterns of be like in this one location, not the role of the media in its arrival there. Kohn and Franz (2009) analyse ethnicity and usage of global variants across North Carolina. Early on they lament the lack of research on ‘the impact various social and local identities may have on the distribution of a global form’. But they go on to focus tightly on linguistic data, only returning in the conclusion to a brief and fairly abstract discussion of ‘structural differences’, such as ‘access to telecommunications ... or transportation’ (2009: 285). Meyerhoff and Niedzielski (2003), in New Zealand, analyse the use of innovations considered to have U.K. and U.S. origins, and whether ‘instead of being seen as borrowings, [they] are perceived to be home-grown variants’ (2003: 549). They consider ‘some general principles ... in the social sciences ... associated with globalisation and ... the theoretical and methodological implications ...for the study of language variation’ (2003: 534). They provide a novel discussion of ‘tensions between globalisation and localisation’ (2003: 550). Overall though, they remain cautious about reasons for this co- occurrence, and focus mainly on local attitudes to the innovations. Just before

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. THE MEDIATED INNOVATION MODEL 195 their conclusion, they cite some studies on mass media, and set a future goal for sociolinguists to explore how ‘patterns of language use reify or challenge the interests of globalisation’ (2003: 549). In all, they offer quite a lengthy discussion of globalisation, but they do not directly claim media inﬂuence, nor do they compare corpora from discontinuous geographic settings. Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Tweedie (2007), in Glasgow, examine TH- and DH-fronting, L-vocalisation, R-labialisation, and T-glottalling. Some of these were already familiar in the local dialect, but they were arising in unfamiliar phonetic environments, leading to ‘a consonantal system which in many respects is more similar to that of London English’ (2007: 222). As noted earlier, although this is only between Scotland and England, the authors raise similar queries to those researching global co-occurrences. Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Tweedie (2007: 250) report that middle-class adolescents ‘largely maintain Scottish regional standard norms’ and show no TH- or DH- fronting, low L-vocalisation, and only moderate T-glottalling; middle-class adults maintain standard norms even more so; and while working-class adults are losing some local dialect forms, it is working-class adolescents who are the ‘leaders of change’ (2007: 251). The authors see this as a very normal attempt to sound ‘as anti-middle-class, and anti-establishment as possible’ (2007: 251); the only question is how these ‘less-mobile, strongly-tied, working-class adolescents’ (2007: 224) came to pioneer these non-local variants. The authors discuss the relative placelessness of these innovations – on the rise among young people across the U.K. and apparently existing ‘in “cultural” or ideological space, towards which speakers may orientate’ (2007: 224). Diffusion in social networks ultimately does explain much of their data, but they end with three ‘troublesome “non-local” variants, [f], [v] and vocalised /l/’ (2007: 254), which evade such explanation. ‘Our information for working- class adolescents reduces the likelihood of dialect contact as a direct factor’ (2007: 255). The authors do not probe media inﬂuence, and are careful not to speculate, although they mention (2007: 224) preliminary results of a follow-

Adopters: working-class Innovators: girls, 11% middle-class Non-adopters: girls, 55% working class SPEECH boys, 0%

Adopters: COMMUNITYmiddle-class boys, 20%

Figure 1: Approach 1, illustrated with data from Macaulay (2001)

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 196 SAYERS up study that did examine TV inﬂuence (to which I return in Approach 5 below). Their article ends on what can only be called a cliffhanger (2007: 255, emphasis original): Descriptively they are using a mixed consonantal system, with local and non-local features. Whether they intend this repertoire to sound mixed, or anything other than ‘pure Glaswegian’, seems unlikely, though that in itself does not rule out interaction with television or the media as additional contributory factors in these changes. But that is another story altogether.

Broadly, Approach 1 involves analysis of interesting innovative forms, but not cross-corpus comparisons of discontinuous geographic settings, nor much discussion of how the innovations got from place to place. Some studies brieﬂy mention the media, but only cautiously in passing. Approach 1 is represented in Figure 1, illustrated with data from Macaulay (2001). In Figure 1 the outer oval represents the Glasgow speech community; the inner ovals represent the groups of speakers categorised by Macaulay and their innovation usage rates. Epistemologically, Approach 1 looks a lot like any other variationist study; the only difference is how the authors puzzle over the way the variants arrived.

Approach 2: Compare discontinuous geographic settings Winter (2002), building on Tagliamonte and Hudson (1999) and Ferrara and Bell (1995), compares quotative usage in corpora from Australia, the U.K., and Canada. Comparing corpora from distant speech communities helps to substantiate the spatial scope of the co-occurrence. It also elucidates the localisation of global variants, the unique sociolinguistic profiles they develop in each place. Still, the analysis remains focused on linguistic detail. There is little interest in how this global co-occurrence came about. At one point, Winter recalls an Australian TV character’s ‘stereotypical’, ‘exaggerated usage’ of the kinds of innovative quotatives found in the Australian English corpus (2002: 12). This is an isolated aside though, developed no further. Barbieri analyses quotative use by age and sex in a corpus recorded ‘across numerous US states’ (2007: 31). Barbieri (2009) elaborates by comparing two pan-U.S. corpora recorded a decade apart, noting sustained growth of be like. As for underlying mechanisms, she offers macro-level interpretations based on other attitude studies (2007: 41), but specific mechanisms are not pinpointed; nor are data collected from individual speakers about influences on their usage. Durham et al. (2012) compare usage of be like in two cohorts of undergraduates in York (England) a decade apart. They also provide attitude data on say and be like in different linguistic contexts from a cohort of American English speakers. They very briefly assert that ‘be like has diffused geographically’ (2012: 328) and ‘continues to diffuse globally’ (2012: 327), but they otherwise do not explore mechanisms behind this distant co-occurrence.

Tagliamonte and Hudson (1999) are somewhat bolder. Comparing corpora from York (England) and Ottowa (Canada) to Ferrara and Bell’s (1995) Texas data, they assert the ‘remarkably parallel’ usage rates as ‘evidence for a systematic global diffusion of be like across geographically separated speech communities’ (1999: 147), ‘a very good linguistic indicator of ... developments and changes we might expect from the putative ongoing globalization of English’ (1999: 168). But this venturesome claim is in their ﬁnal paragraph, a pensive postscript where they also stress: ‘the social mechanism(s) underlying these processes are beyond the scope of the present investigation’ (1999: 168). Approach 2 maintains a largely conventional methodology of comparing speech corpora, just ones recorded in highly distant speech communities. Apart from some tentative, isolated asides in the sunset of their arguments, these studies give a sense of either trepidation or indifference towards the media.

Approach 3: Pinpointing the media In Approach 3, globalisation and mass media begin to be discussed more explicitly, yet still within familiar empirical territory. A rift begins to open here between evidence and assertions, bridged in some cases by rhetorical devices. Buchstaller compares U.S. and U.K. corpora to show linguistic, social and attitudinal adaptation of innovations, amounting to changes in ‘perceptual load’ (Buchstaller 2006a: 363, 2006b: 12). Buchstaller (2008) discusses globalisation at length, even distinguishing the role of geographical mobility and media. She argues that innovations spread globally ‘in all probability mainly via the media’ (2008: 37). Ultimately though, out of the ‘global spread of innovations and their localized adaptation’ (2008: 21), only the latter is supported by evidence. Buchstaller and D’Arcy compare linguistic localisation of be like in U.S., U.K., and New Zealand corpora: the unique way be like is used in each discontinuous geographic setting. They conclude that be like has undergone ‘weak transfer’ (2009: 316), with most of its functions decided by local sociolinguistic processes after its global journey. They generally focus on linguistic detail, but make repeated gestures to globalisation, and claim the ‘global transfer’, ‘global spread’ (2009: 316) and ‘global diffusion’ (2009: 317) of be like, describing it as one example of ‘linguistic innovations that ﬂoat globally through real (or cyber) space’ (2009: 293–294; cf. Buchstaller 2008: 19). They assert that be like has ‘spread to numerous varieties worldwide in a very short time span through presumably limited interpersonal contact’ (2009: 322). They also raise the quandary that be like is pioneered by low-mobility adolescents with strong access to ‘meditated forms of communication (e.g. email, IM, blogs, wikis, TV, etc.)’ (2009: 322). They foreground globalisation and media fairly boldly, but the discussions of ‘global spread’ drift free of the empirical support

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 198 SAYERS that underlay their main linguistic analysis. This amounts to the use of a rhetorical device, proof surrogate, where media influence is inferred but not evidenced. Buchstaller (2004) states: ‘The very social group which introduces like into the linguistic system is also the one we can assume to be most likely to pick up a new lexical variant through soaps, talkshows, etc.’ (2004: 289). There follows a countervailing emphasis on the role of face-to-face contact, to stress ‘that mass media are an insufficient transmission channel for the whole variant (surface item, functional value and social value)’ (2004: 290). At first blush, this appears to echo media audience research on the partial, locally contested influence of media stimuli (e.g. Liebes and Katz 1990), but that echo fades at a critical juncture. Unlike audience research, there are no data from participants about their media engagement practices, only the speech corpora. Given that empirical disjuncture, Buchstaller is here deploying a different rhetorical device, namely paralipsis: the media cannot do everything, but this is asserted precisely to suggest they are doing something – yet without evidence for that something. In Approach 3, the methodologies remain largely unchanged, but the claims of media influence grow. As a result, gaps open up in the empirical defence. Overall, Approaches 1–3 do not explore how ‘globally travelling features’ (Buchstaller 2006a: 375) actually travel.

Approach 4: Comparing speech data and media data Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005) analyse intensifiers (e.g. very, so) in the U.S. sitcom Friends, and compare speech data from the U.K. and North America. Linguistic detail dominates their article, in which correlations arise: ‘The Friends data exhibit almost the same overall rate ... as ... contemporary English’; ‘media language actually does reflect what is going on’ (2005: 296). They infer media influence – ‘these media data appear to pave the way; language is more innovative in the media than in the general population’ (2005: 296) – but end inconclusively on that point: ‘At the very least, the inextricable link between language and society – often self-evident for sociolinguists and dialectologists – stands out in this icon of pop culture’ (2005: 297). They seem to inch up to, then step away from, an explicit assertion of media influence. Dion and Poplack (2007) make a similar comparison of speech data and media texts, although ‘quotative use in the scripted media ...diverged wildly from the community norm’ in their data, so they remain doubtful of influence. Approach 4 answers Macaulay’s appeal for ‘[m]ore attention to archival media materials’ (2001: 18). Still, Approaches 1–4 do not probe how individual speakers’ media engagement practices might contour their use of innovations. This is touched on, but only as an addendum to the main linguistic analysis. Amid discussion of the ‘globalisation’ and ‘localisation’ of

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. THE MEDIATED INNOVATION MODEL 199 variants, it is the latter to which such corpus analyses are limited. Precedence does not entail ancestry, and assertions of global ‘spread’, ‘diffusion’, ‘transfer’, etc. are strictly post hoc, assuming cause and effect from temporal succession – cf. Britain’s (2013: 475) distinction between portrayal and explanation of sociolinguistic patterns. As Buchstaller notes: ‘There is still a dearth of detailed micro-linguistic analyses that demonstrate the links between local linguistic mechanisms and global forces’ (2008: 20). That dearth is addressed in Approach 5.

Approach 5: Gauging the effect of the media Media engagement as a factor in language change is empirically substantiated in only one study, by a team led by Jane Stuart-Smith in Glasgow. This was a follow-up to their earlier study in Glasgow, included in Approach 1 above. That earlier study failed to explain its data with social networks alone, but lacked the means to explore media inﬂuence. The consonantal changes of TH- fronting, DH-fronting, and L-vocalisation are seen by Milroy as ‘off the shelf’ changes, ‘accessible to mobile or marginal individuals’ (2007: 163). But, as Altendorf notes, these are ‘youth norms’ (2003: 148–149). As the Glasgow team found, the quandary for contact-based explanations was the way these changes were being led by adolescents, typically with the lowest mobility. [O]ur results seem odd: middle-class speakers with more ... contact with English English speakers [i.e. in England] and weaker social networks are maintaining Scottish features, while less mobile, strongly-tied working-class speakers are losing some Scottish features and using innovative [London- originating] features the most. (Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Tweedie 2007: 222)

Trudgill includes TH-fronting in Glasgow in a list of ‘extremely similar phonological changes ... taking place in varieties of English around the world more or less simultaneously’, which evade ‘explanation in terms of diffusion’ (2003: 56). Ever sceptical of the media, he argues that these changes are in fact independently driven by predetermined structural linguistic trajectories. Meyerhoff and Niedzielski (2003: 546) set a similarly high bar, stating that ‘the possibility of independent, parallel development’ must first be ruled out. A further possible explanation for the Glasgow data could have been adolescents adopting variants from geographically mobile adults, then simply using those variants more. With the new data in their follow-up study, Stuart-Smith and her team found that such conventional influences did play a part, but only alongside, and indivisibly from, an empirically substantiated role for the media. To collect their new data, an interdisciplinary methodology was developed with academic collaborators specialising in audience research and statistics – see Stuart-Smith et al. (2013). First, London-based TV shows were identified

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 200 SAYERS by the participants. That decisive role for the participants was an advance from e.g. Tagliamonte and Roberts (2005), giving a firmer basis for subsequent claims of influence on those participants. The researchers then recorded rates of the above consonantal variables in these media texts, to operationalise ‘media-Cockney’ as a source variety. As discussed at the outset, this step illustrates the process of mediation. To explore media engagement (as well as other conventional sociolinguistic factors), speech data were combined with participant observation, interviews and questionnaires over a four-month period in 2003–2004. This was geared towards fine-grained mapping of social networks, and specific examination of how media engagement correlated with and contoured innovation usage. Following the measurement of innovation usage in the Glasgow data, the first attempt to account for these patterns was a large-scale regression analysis of [f] and [v] ...and numerous extra-linguistic factors ...: potential for dialect contact within and beyond Glasgow, attitudes to urban accents, social practices and identity, entertainment preferences, engagement with computers and the internet, involvement in sport, and exposure to and engagement with television, both generally and with specific programmes. (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2009: 42)

The analysis showed multiple influences: ‘limited contact between weakly tied individuals, ... positive attitudes towards London accents (Milroy 1987: 203; Trudgill 1988), and/or orientation towards ‘youth norms’ experienced partially via ... broadcast media (Williams and Kerswill 1999)’ (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2009: 41). ‘Adopter categories’ were used to distinguish participants by their level of innovation use; these included ‘innovators’ and ‘early adopters’ (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2007; cf. Milroy and Milroy 1985: 367). Regressions of the linguistic and extra-linguistic data showed that innovation use correlated with local contact among adopter categories, media engagement, and contact with people from the London-southeast region (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2009). However, each extra-linguistic factor alone gave a poor overall explanation of innovation use; ‘the final models with the full range of social factors’ explained innovation use ‘at least three times better than any single category model alone’ (2009: 42). Recalling the explanatory ponderings in Approaches 1–4 between media and face-to-face contact, here is the first empirical illumination of that balance. Different factors coincide, overlap, and interrelate; their effects cannot be analysed or asserted discretely. At the level of individual participants, influences varied. For some, contact with people outside Glasgow emerged as the strongest factor (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2009: 52). For others, media influence had a firmer correlation. The respondent with by far the most DH-fronting had no interpersonal contact outside Glasgow – not even much inside – yet very high engagement with the London soap opera EastEnders (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2007: 20). Media

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. THE MEDIATED INNOVATION MODEL 201 engagement functioned as a form of parasocial interaction; indeed it is those with limited social contact for whom Rubin, Perse and Powell (1985) argue that parasocial interaction is the most potent. More generally, there was a robustly significant relationship between innovation use and prolonged, emotionally-invested media engagement (Stuart-Smith 2012). Such participants were innovators and early adopters (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2009: 46). Importantly though, prolonged exposure without emotional investment had no such significance. This reaffirms the importance of parasocial interaction for media influence. All of this being said, engagement with London-based TV did not mean positive evaluation of Cockney accents. Similarly to the attitude studies cited earlier (e.g. Meyerhoff and Niedzielski 2003), London accents received mixed evaluations, while the innovations themselves were considered by participants as ‘pure Glaswegian’ (Stuart-Smith 2007: 12). Indeed, subsequent reanalysis of the data (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013) has further lessened the significance of attitudinal factors. These innovations in Glasgow gained a new ‘perceptual load’ (Buchstaller 2006a: 363, 2006b: 12). They did not keep their ‘functional and social boots on’ (Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009: 282). The authors provide an illustrative vignette from their data collection process, when they were recording the young people reading word lists: the teenagers treated the task as an opportunity to display ...‘their’ speech, and one can hear them laughing and playing up to the microphone .... The adolescents are ... representing their own group, or at least a possible version of their ... repertoire .... What is interesting is that the non-local non-standard variants are selected for this particular stylistic repertoire. (Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Tweedie 2007: 247; cf. Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2014)

Keen to emphasise the complexity of overlapping inﬂuences, the authors point to historical evidence that these innovations were present at some level in Glasgow before their contemporary surge – perhaps due to historical contact with Londoners – and that media engagement served only as an accelerating factor (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2014). This supports, and augments somewhat, Trudgill’s (1988: 43) ‘softening-up process’ from TV. Approach 5 may be the furthest departure from sociolinguistic convention, but Stuart- Smith and her team are no iconoclasts. Stuart-Smith considers their argument amenable to Trudgill’s (pers. comm. 23 May 2012), indeed building upon the insights from his work in Norwich. As she notes, Trudgill had reported TH- fronting there among low-mobility, working-class speakers, driven partly by contact with Londoners, but he also speculates about the potential role of television programmes based in London in promoting positive attitudes towards London dialect features: ‘television may be part of a “softening-up” process leading to the

adoption of the merger [of /f/ with /th/], but it does not cause it’ (Trudgill 1986: 55). (Stuart-Smith 2006: 141)

Stuart-Smith and Timmins reject the idea of ‘blanket transmission from media source to passive speaker/viewers, a notion long abandoned within media effects research’ (2009: 54). Overall, the picture that emerges is one of ‘different causal pathways, and combinations of pathways, for different speakers’ (Stuart- Smith and Timmins 2007: 28). The innovations in Glasgow arrive via cross- cutting and interrelating routes, in which the media play a demonstrable part, but indivisibly from concurrent social processes. Approach 5 progresses beyond inferences derived from macro-level theories (characteristic of Approaches 1–4), and answers Buchstaller’s appeal for ‘detailed micro-linguistic analyses that demonstrate the links between local linguistic mechanisms and global forces’ (2008: 20). As for the construction of their arguments, Stuart-Smith and her team are of course advancing claims based on inevitably limited data, but they strike a shrewder, more painstaking balance between evidence and assertions. Collecting actual data about media engagement practices has led, perhaps counter-intuitively, to a more subdued assertion of media inﬂuence – emphasising uncertainty and deferring to complexity. Truth is stranger than ﬁction, as it were. The Glasgow study serves to query the idea that only weakly tied individuals introduce non-local variants. If there is a discernible role for the media, then it is not limited in this way, since there were innovators and early adopters in Glasgow with high, positive media engagement, strong local networks, and weak external ties (or none). This reprises an overarching point: if there is a role for mass media, it is qualitatively distinct from conventional diffusion. Approach 5 involves a combination of different methodological tools for analysing media engagement alongside other factors. It is the epistemological mapping of these different methodologies to which I now turn.

THE MEDIATED INNOVATION MODEL Following Coupland (2009), as cited at the outset, vernacular forms used in media texts can be said to have been mediated. If these mediated forms are adopted as innovations in discontinuous geographic settings, then I suggest the term mediated innovations. Figure 2 depicts the mediated innovation model, an epistemological model for visualising methodologies used to research media inﬂuence in language change. The conventional processes of transmission and diffusion rely on contact among interlocutors. Diffusion occurs between speech communities via weakly tied mobile individuals. If there is a role for media engagement, which does not rely on personal contact and occurs regardless of tie strength, then I would refer to it as innovation broadcast. Mediation can be seen as a prior step to this. As the

ADOPTING ADOPTING SPEECH SPEECH COMMUNITY COMMUNITY broadcast social social networks MEDIA TEXTS networks mediation

SOURCE SPEECH COMMUNITY

Figure 2: A hypothetical mediated innovation model

Glasgow study in Approach 5 shows, mediation and broadcast occur alongside, and intertwined with, conventional diffusion. It is precisely this rich mix of influences for which the mediated innovation model is designed. Figure 2 is a diagrammatic representation of a mediated innovation model. It depicts the datasets resulting from the various methodologies used to probe ‘different causal pathways’ (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2007: 28). The ovals in the diagram represent language corpora, from distant speech communities and from media texts. The dotted backgrounds represent social networks through which diffusion occurs – denser within speech communities, weaker between. The dots do not permeate either the media texts or the processes of mediation and broadcast. As argued so far, although these interrelate with conventional diffusion, they are qualitatively distinct, and require different empirical data. Figure 2 sacrifices detail for simplicity, which exposes certain risks. At a glance, it might even seem to suggest a highly deterministic role for ‘media texts’, downplaying the complexities of media engagement and localisation. Figure 2 could be redrawn in various ways, perhaps better in three dimensions, but the aim is only to set out clearly the different sites for analysis. It is not a theoretical model but an epistemological model, depicting the columns of Table 1 as a kind of checking exercise to see what has been empirically substantiated. The model also inevitably falls back inelegantly on some sociolinguistic convention which it would have been ideal to progress beyond. The distinction of ‘source’ and ‘adopting’ speech communities may seem curiously linear in a discussion of global flows. That distinction emanates from the studies reviewed above, all of which compare innovation usage in a putative antecedent speech community and one or more adopting speech communities. Such distinctions

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 204 SAYERS may well be deconstructed in future research, in which case the model will hopefully adapt. ‘Adopting’ may also seem a little simplistic; it is intended here as shorthand for the multifarious adaptations, appropriations and localisations that incoming innovations go through. As Mair puts it: Particularly when it is nonstandard forms of American English which are spreading ... we are rarely dealing with simple ... linguistic Americanization but with a more complex ... negotiation of vernacular norms in a globalized communicative habitat. (Mair 2006: 195)

Let me walk through how the model helps to elucidate the limits of the studies reviewed above, with a view to how it can help structure future work. Macaulay’s (2001) study, cited in Approach 1 and represented in Figure 1, would fit inside just one ‘adopting speech community’ oval in Figure 2. None of the rest of Figure 2 applies. The studies in Approach 2 compare innovation usage in discontinuous geographic settings, like the U.K. and Canada (Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999). In such studies, the two ‘adopting speech community’ ovals in Figure 2 are present. If usage in the putative source variety is also analysed (as in Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009), then the ‘source speech community’ oval is present. Still, throughout Approach 2 the ‘media texts’ oval is absent, as are all the arrows; those methodologies are not in use. Much the same is true of Approach 3: despite explicit mention of globalisation and mass media, neither mediation nor broadcast is interrogated or evidenced. Approach 4 makes a substantial methodological advance, comparing speech corpora to media texts – for example Tagliamonte and Roberts’ (2005) comparison of Friends scripts to speech corpora from North America and the U.K. Here, both ‘adopting speech community’ ovals in Figure 2 are present, as are the ‘media texts’ oval and the ‘mediation’ arrow. The ‘broadcast’ arrows are absent though; no data are collected about media engagement practices. Although the Glasgow study in Approach 5 does not fill Figure 2 entirely, it does have the means to do so. The ‘source speech community’ oval is present, given the identification of London English features. The ‘media texts’ oval and ‘mediation’ arrows are present, given the operationalisation of ‘media- Cockney’ in TV shows identified by the participants. The ‘broadcast’ arrows are realised by the exploration of media engagement practices. As it stands, only one ‘adopting speech community’ is present (Glasgow), but if the study had incorporated another in a discontinuous geographic setting, then Figure 2 could have been illustrated fully. With all these applications of the mediated innovation model to the studies reviewed so far, my purpose is not to claim things are missing from those studies, but to clarify what can be reliably asserted with their data. In turn, the mediated innovation model can help to apply some foundational sociolinguistic concepts to mediated innovations. First of all, actuation:

What factors can account for the actuation of changes? Why do changes in a structural feature take place in a particular language at a given time, but not in other languages with the same feature, or in the same language at other times? (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 102)

Milroy and Milroy (1985: 342–344, 364–366) regard Labovian diffusion as an aspect of actuation, insofar as it connects distinct speech communities via weakly tied mobile individuals. Mediation and broadcast similarly connect distinct speech communities, though in a qualitatively distinct way. Actuation can therefore be expanded to accommodate mediation and broadcast as well as diffusion. Like diffusion, broadcast will vary in its intensity in different places, and may not happen at all in some – as reflected in the varied localisations of mediated innovations, noted in the studies reviewed above. The mediated innovation model helps arrange the analysis of these localisations. All this gives a new slant to Kerswill and Williams’ (2000: 92) comment: ‘Essentially, a close-knit network will resist ... changes, unless these changes come via an “insider” who also has “weak ties” elsewhere (Milroy and Milroy 1992)’. In its original sense, this comment relates to Labov’s ‘CHANGE FROM ABOVE or the importation of elements from other systems’ (2007: 346) as cited earlier – actuated by weakly tied mobile individuals. But if there is a definable role for the media, then actuation may happen regardless of tie strength, and media input may constitute a quite different kind of link to ‘outside’. Next, embedding: ‘How are the observed changes embedded in the matrix of linguistic and extralinguistic concomitants of the form in question?’ (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog 1968: 101, emphasis original). For mediated innovations, embedding relates to the distinct local realisations in each adopting speech community. The mediated innovation model helps map out these local idiosyncrasies and the methodologies that interrogate them. Mediation and broadcast, like diffusion, can connect distant speech communities. Unlike diffusion though, they are not limited by the extent of contact between weakly tied mobile individuals. The mediated innovation model helps to discern these qualitatively distinct and diverse links. For clarity, a contrast can be made to the ‘linguistic community’. Silverstein (1996) defines this as a group of disparate speech communities sharing an external target variety – either a standard language, or a less formal orientation to another target variety. Mediated innovations do not depend on recognition of a target variety, as evinced by the recurrent perception that they are in fact local (Meyerhoff and Niedzielski 2003; Stuart-Smith 2007: 12). It is also worth drawing a brief contrast to ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983); this idea describes the importance of print media to nationalist sentiment, not the influence of media (printed or otherwise) on sociolinguistic variation. To sum up then, what use is the mediated innovation model? As an epistemological model, its main purpose is to arrange the methodologies used

© 2014 The Authors Journal of Sociolinguistics Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 206 SAYERS to research mediated innovations. Those methodologies account for previously unaccounted-for findings, namely the pioneering of non-local innovations by strongly-tied, low-mobility adolescents. The mediated innovation model brings in mediation from a different area of sociolinguistics, and specifies a further sociolinguistic process for investigation: broadcast. The model also distinguishes mediation and broadcast from conventional transmission and diffusion. All this helps to draw apart the different kinds of data and methodologies relevant to exploring these qualitatively distinct and concurrent processes. The model also throws into sharper relief the limitations in existing research, and clarifies the remit of future work. The model itself, and the emerging body of research it describes, will help sociolinguistics contribute to the social-scientific study of globalisation.

CONCLUSION This fact of different places becoming swept up in similar economic, political and cultural ﬂows ... does not necessarily mean that places worldwide are becoming more alike. ... ‘[N]on-local’ processes combine with existing local differences to yield unique outcomes. Places ‘internalize’ these processes in distinctive ways, which is why place interconnection does not imply increased homogeneity among places. (Castree et al. 2004: 68, emphases original)

Milroy (2007: 163) argues that ‘socially embedded sound changes should be distinguished with respect to their different underlying sociologies and social trajectories’. For mediated innovations, I have argued that Approach 5 is currently the most advanced distinction of these sociologies and trajectories. The mediated innovation model offers perspective for whatever partial, negotiated role the media might play in the complex pathways that innovations take between discontinuous geographic settings, in conditions of globalisation. [T]hough even our terminology for ... ‘media inﬂuence on language’ ... implies ... 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. (Stuart-Smith 2011: 223)

As cautioned earlier, Stuart-Smith and her team did not conduct their research on a global scale. If they had, then there could have been a smoother transition through Approaches 1–5; that may also have lessened the significance of conventional diffusion in their findings, perhaps strengthening the empirical basis for media influence. As Macaulay noted back in 2001 (cited in Approach 1): ‘how be like reached teenagers in Glasgow ... is unlikely to have been through direct contact with young Americans’

(2001: 17–18). Stuart-Smith and her team stress that the London innovations were likely already present in Glasgow, and that the media only expedited their recent surge. This prevents any extrapolation of a decisive media role for innovations that had no such prior presence, such as be like. That question remains open, and it is precisely such questions which the mediated innovation is designed to help coordinate. Similarly, in terms of linguistic features: ‘a fruitful line for further research would be to develop a more comprehensive account of the social and linguistic conditions which permit some [linguistic] elements to be more widely available than others’ (Milroy 2007: 165). The mediated innovation model could be a useful backdrop for such a comparative analysis. Lastly, to return to a caveat at the outset, the mediated innovation model does not cover the influence of the internet. Buchstaller et al. (2010) and Coppen and Foolen (2012: 271) analyse innovation use in online discussion forums, but do not specify the whereabouts of specific participants, their duration of involvement, or really much at all about them individually. That curtails any account of innovation movement across spatial or social distance. Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2009: 42) did include ‘engagement with computers and the internet’ as an extra-linguistic factor, but its significance was low: the only detectable result was a negative effect on TH-fronting in wordlists (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013). However, their data were collected in 2003–2004, a very long time ago in internet terms (predating the rise of social media like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace). Engagement with the internet has changed almost beyond recognition in the intervening decade, and a great deal of research remains to be done there. My own sense is that using social media is much closer to interpersonal interaction and conventional diffusion than the communicative imbalance and parasocial interaction characterised by TV viewing. For now though, as Stuart- Smith, Timmins and Tweedie (2007: 255) put it, that is another story altogether.

NOTE 1. The idea behind this article has been under development (on and off) for seven years. It formed a chapter of my PhD thesis (Sayers 2009) at the University of Essex (ESRC award PTA-030-2005-00968), where Dave Britain’s painstaking supervision honed my ideas. I also had many useful discussions there with Peter Patrick and Gareth Price. Swansea University’s generous award of an Honorary Research Fellowship gave me access to useful resources during a period of non- academic employment, and I am pleased to remain afﬁliated there. To complete the write-up I used part of the research allocation of lecturing posts at #Abo Akademi University, the University of Turku, and Shefﬁeld Hallam University. Jane Stuart-Smith has been very patient providing and discussing her unpublished work. She also gave useful comments on a draft – as did Robert

Lawson. A version of the paper was submitted for the Richard M. Hogg Prize; those reviews provided constructive criticisms. I have had further useful comments over the years from Dave Elder-Vass, Isa Buchstaller, Peter Trudgill and David Hornsby. Many helpful pointers came from conference and seminar audiences at the University of Essex (U.K.), the University of Groningen (Netherlands), the University of Cambridge (U.K.), City University (U.K.), the University of Regensburg (Germany), and the University of Kent (U.K.). Two anonymous reviewers motivated a major overhaul, including a rethink of the main neologism – ‘mediated innovation model’ had previously been ‘linguistic virtual collective’, which appeared in the above conference abstracts (most of which remain online). Veronique Lacoste kindly translated the abstract. Allan Bell and Devyani Sharma have provided painstaking editorial oversight, and Trish Brothers has conducted excellent copy-editing. Remaining mistakes are of course my own.

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Address correspondence to: Dave Sayers Department of Humanities Shefﬁeld Hallam University Shefﬁeld S1 1WB United Kingdom [email protected]

DEBATE

MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE

The question of whether media can promote language change has been a controversial one in sociolinguistics, at least for variationist approaches, for which language change is a central focus. The general lay view is that the answer is a self-evident ‘yes’: language is going steadily downhill, and the media are taking it there. But sociolinguists have rarely examined the issue head-on or in depth – as opposed to dismissing it out of hand as implausible. Nor has it often been the subject of direct, relevant empirical investigation. So when Dave Sayers submitted to this Journal his paper on ‘The mediated innovation model: A framework for researching media influence in language change’, we decided it offered the occasion for an exchange of views on the matter – and this Debate suite of articles was born. We have invited participation from six scholars from a range of viewpoints and disciplinary backgrounds. Most are sociolinguists of some stripe, but we were pleased to secure a contribution from a specialist on media effects (Gunter) who has worked with sociolinguists on the leading project to have investigated the issue. The views below range from the antagonistic to the sceptical to the supportive, with the nuances depending in part on the methodological and theoretical inclinations of the commentator. In the seventh short piece in the suite, Dave Sayers has been given the right of a brief reply to the six commentators. And finally Nikolas Coupland, who blind-reviewed the contributions, wraps up with a meta-commentary which seeks to redefine the terms of the Debate beyond the sometimes reductionist limits within which the question has been addressed. We editors are grateful to Dave Sayers for agreeing to his article being the subject of such uncomfortably public and intense scrutiny, and for accepting the publication delay that has involved. And we express our thanks to the seven other contributors to this Debate for their insights, collegiality and willingness to engage with Sayers, with us and especially with the issues.

ALLAN BELL, DEVYANI SHARMA Editors

Diffusion, drift, and the irrelevance of media inﬂuence1

Peter Trudgill University of Agder, Norway

There is a good case to be made for arguing that linguistic change is totally dysfunctional. As a language changes, it changes in different ways in different places, for reasons which are not clear, leading to divergence. And it is this propensity which leads to the development of regional dialects and, in the fullness of time, to the development of these dialects into different and no longer mutually intelligible languages. English, Dutch and Swedish speakers are descended from Germanic speakers who were able understand one another; but we are no longer able to do so. This is truly rather startling. What could possibly be the advantage, evolutionary or otherwise, of an arrangement whereby the main means of communication between human beings has the inherent characteristic that it is subject to changes, the outcome of which is precisely the loss of the ability to communicate? Dialectologists and sociolinguists, especially, have also been concerned with another challenge posed by linguistic changes, namely their diffusion (Trudgill 1973). The mechanisms involved are clearly not as mysterious as those involved in change itself. Innovations of all kinds diffuse across human societies from place to place. But the fact that linguistic forms and structures generally diffuse below the level of conscious awareness, with the exception of – often – lexis, makes this more of a challenge than the diffusion of technology or fashion. And, in connection with Sayers’ paper, this ‘below the level of conscious awareness’ aspect renders his – and Stuart-Smith et al.’s – usage of terms such as ‘attempt’ and ‘intend’ for linguistic behaviours somewhat misplaced. There is, too, the perhaps related difference that linguistic changes typically diffuse outwards from the lower social classes, which is often not the case with other phenomena. Wolfram and Schilling Estes (2003: 714) write, ‘much change in American English is initiated in the working class and lower middle class and spreads from that point to other classes’. Trudgill (2008: 3) similarly writes, for England, that ‘there is a long history of changes spreading ... from the lower prestige southeastern local accents into RP’. Recently there has been increasing interest, as Sayers shows, in the fact that diffusion of certain sorts seems to be leading to increasing amounts of convergence rather than divergence. I have argued that the diffusion of linguistic forms normally requires face-to-face interactions in which

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 215 accommodation is the fundamental mechanism (Trudgill 1986). To deny that face-to-face contact is the ‘principal factor in language change’ would be foolish – though Sayers does raise the interesting question as to whether frequent telephone conversations might have the same consequences, and of whether therefore we should ﬁnd some term other than ‘face-to-face’. Accommodation is, in turn, the result of the fact that all human beings operate linguistically according to a maxim which Keller (1994: 100) calls ‘talk like the others talk’. Keller’s maxim is the linguistic aspect of an apparently universal, innate human tendency to ‘behavioural coordination’, ‘behavioural congruence’, ‘mutual adaptation’ or ‘interactional synchrony’. This is a biologically given drive to behave as one’s peers do: Pelech (2002: 9) says that ‘the innate biological basis of interactional synchrony has been established’. The copious literature on this topic, e.g. Cappella (1997), suggests that linguistic accommodation is not driven by factors like identity or intention but is an automatic consequence of interaction: ‘mutual adaptation is pervasive’ and is ‘arguably the essential characteristic of every interpersonal interaction’, so we can assume that linguistic diffusion is ultimately due to ‘the relatively automatic behaviors manifested during social interaction’ (1997: 65). Labov agrees: ‘a large part of the problem of explaining the diffusion of linguistic change is reduced to a simple calculation’ (2001: 19). It is purely a matter of who interacts most often with who – density of communication:

The principle of density implicitly asserts that we do not have to search for a motivating force behind the diffusion of linguistic change. The effect is mechanical and inevitable; the implicit assumption is that social evaluation and attitudes play a minor role. (2001: 20; my italics)

This is how the diffusion of phonological and grammatical features has always proceeded, and how it continues today. This is also obviously how the diffusion of lexis has traditionally proceeded, albeit at a higher level of awareness. But since the invention of writing, there has been an additional avenue for its spread. The written media – including the new social media – and, for the last century or so, the electronic spoken media, mean lexis can be spread at a distance also. I recall acquiring American words like campus and freshman in the 1960s, without ever having visited the U.S.A., from reading American novels. My recall shows that, unlike with the diffusion of core linguistic features, this happened above the level of conscious awareness. The term ‘lexis’ also of course includes features such as idioms, intensiﬁers like so – referred to in Sayers’ paper – and ‘catch phrases’ – also mentioned; and, I submit, quotatives. The suggestion that quotatives such as be like are ‘core grammatical features’ (Buchstaller 2006) is quite untenable: replacing said with was like or went is no less lexical than replacing wireless with radio or clever with smart. There can be no comparison with the diffusion of truly grammatical innovations such as the current complex of changes involving

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 216 TRUDGILL stative and dynamic have and have got (Tagliamonte 2003; Trudgill, Nevalainen and Wischer 2002). Unlike phonology and grammar, words and phrases are easily acquired, and all of us continue to acquire new lexis throughout our lifetimes as a result of simple exposure, in a way that just doesn’t happen with other more central aspects of language structure. This is why, as Sayers mentions, varieties of English are currently diverging markedly at the level of phonology but, for the first time in history, converging lexically. The frequent acknowledgment of this fact by sociolinguists (e.g. Trudgill 1986, 2003) means that it is not true, as Sayers supposes, that ‘by asserting a role for mass media, researchers have departed intrepidly from sociolinguistic convention’ (p. 185). There is nothing intrepid here, and there has never been a sociolinguistic convention stating that media play no role in the diffusion of lexis. The temporary and superficial nature of much lexical change is rightly alluded to by Sayers. This seems particularly the case with highly colloquial vocabulary. It is unlikely that British people will go back to saying portfolio rather than the originally American briefcase, but items such as be like seem likely to be as short-lived as, say, fab which arrived and then disappeared in the 1960s. Be like is also not only trivial as a linguistic phenomenon, but relatively superficial in terms of its penetration into different varieties of English. I can personally attest to the fact that at least one dialectologist in their 60s living in Norwich, England, with no children, and no longer employed at native-English-speaking universities, and, if they may say so, an acute and diligent observer of linguistic usage, has never been personally involved in a single face-to-face interaction involving this locution (even if they have of course heard it). It is not only ‘linguistically superficial, with negligible impact on deeper linguistic structure’ (p. 186) but also probably one of the innovations which are ‘merely fads’. There is, however, a genuinely interesting question which Sayers raises again here for students of diffusion. There is one obvious, fundamental difference between the written (including social) media and the electronic-spoken media: media involving recorded or broadcast speech are, it goes without saying, heard rather than read. This might seem to open up the possibility that, for the first time in history, phonological innovations could be diffused at a distance, as well as lexis – the suggestion does deserve consideration. However, consideration shows that the evidence we have indicates rather strongly that this type of diffusion is not in fact happening at all (with the – actually lexical rather than truly phonological – exception that new pronunciations of individual words can be diffused, such as the pronunciation in Britain of harassment with second-syllable stress). The rapid phonological divergence going on in Englishes around the world just alluded to testifies to this. If the electronic media influenced phonology significantly, everyone in the British Isles would now have an American accent, or at least there would be progress in that direction. We would be witnessing, say, an increase in rhoticity in English English, when the reverse is happening; or some signs of the Northern

Cities Shift – when in fact this hasn’t even spread beyond the Northern Cities themselves. And if the media influenced grammar in any significant way, we would be witnessing a large increase in the numbers of people using Standard English grammatical forms, which is certainly not happening. There is also one other factor to consider in contemplating a new diffusing role for the media. A well-known problem in the human sciences, most notably historical anthropology, concerns diffusion versus independent development. If a change happens at place A at time X, and then occurs at a later time Y in place B, is this because it spread from A to B, or were they separate events? This is the question that must be asked whenever we encounter ‘linguistic innovations that arise contemporaneously in highly distant locations’ (p. 185). In some cases the question can immediately be dismissed as irrelevant. The spread of be like is obviously not an independent development. It is no different from lexical changes like the spread of radio, or smart, or harassment from America to the Britain. It is a media-induced change of the type which has been happening since the advent of sound-recording introduced American English to an initially uncomprehending British audience in the 1920s. There is nothing mysterious about it. The media were necessarily involved; and this is a conclusion which it needs no research programme to establish – there can be no other explanation and there’s no point in looking for one. But phonological change is different. Phonological diffusion typically involves the spread of lower social class forms; it is gradual, geographically and socially, and below the level of conscious awareness; and it is more difficult to determine whether it is actually diffusion or not. Sayers cites Trudgill (2003), which treats changes which are currently appearing in many varieties of English around the world. All the evidence indicates that the phenomena I cite there, like GOOSE-fronting, are separate developments due not to diffusion but to drift. Sapir (1921: 150) wrote that ‘language moves down time in a current of its own making. It has a drift. ...the momentum of ...drift is often such that languages long disconnected will pass through the same or strikingly similar phases’. Sapir argued that language varieties may resemble one another because, having derived from some common source, they continue to evolve linguistically in similar directions as a result of similar changes. They have not maintained shared characteristics from some parent variety but have inherited a shared propensity to the development of the same characteristics, even after separation. In Trudgill (2003), I outline what the structural preconditions are which give rise to the development of GOOSE-fronting and other similar features in these English varieties. So geographical diffusion should certainly not always be the default explanatory factor for ‘global linguistic variants’. This is especially so when the phonological changes are unmarked, common and predictable: the voicing of intervocalic voiceless consonants in different locations is as likely to represent separate development as it is geographical diffusion. This maxim is a commonplace in historical linguistics: the more usual a change is, the more

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 218 TRUDGILL likely it is to be an independent development, and vice versa. As Harrison says, ‘unnatural changes are less likely to be repeated independently than are natural changes’ (2003: 234). One such natural change involves a feature cited by Sayers from the work of Stuart-Smith, L-vocalisation. We can conclude absolutely nothing about the role of the media from L-vocalisation in Glasgow. L-vocalisation is a sound change which is always just waiting to happen, anywhere. It is a change which occurs very frequently; and many examples could be cited from French, Polish, Italian, German, English and scores of other languages. We would be ill-advised to suppose that the vocalisation of /l/ in Australia (Horvath and Horvath 1997) results from diffusion from London; and I see no reason not to apply the same degree of caution to Glasgow. The same is true of TH-fronting in Britain. The loss of /h/ and /ð/ is belatedly taking British English down the predictable path already followed by other Germanic languages, and by many other varieties of English, in losing these marked articulation types. British TH-fronting is a perfect candidate for ‘independent development’ status. As it happens, however, it is entirely clear that, while the independent development label is accurate for TH-fronting in world Englishes generally – e.g. New Zealand English and African American English TH-fronting are unconnected developments (Trudgill 2003) – it is definitely not the case for TH-fronting in Britain. We know this because the pattern of spatial diffusion of this innovation outwards from London over a period of some decades is very well attested. It reproduces the same pattern of geographical innovation-diffusion as occurred over the centuries with other London-based innovations, from the time before the rise of the media: the FOOT-STRUT split, H-dropping, diphthong shift, rhoticity loss. The diffusion of TH-fronting has been plotted very revealingly by Kerswill (2003). The geographical patterning illustrated in his map (Figure 1) is clear for all to see: TH-fronting arrived in Reading before Derby, in Derby before Middlesbrough, and in Middlesbrough before Glasgow, with places in the English northwest, the north of Scotland and, as we know from other sources, Wales, as yet unaffected. Kerswill’s work gives the lie to the often touted idea that the spread of TH-fronting is due to media influence, with speakers imitating London accents heard on TV. Media influence would have led to more or less simultaneous innovation nationwide. The chronologically gradual geographical spread means that there is absolutely no evidence from TH-fronting that electronic media play any role at all in the diffusion of phonological, as opposed to lexical, innovations. As Sayers quite rightly says, claims of this type ‘have tended to outpace the evidence’ (p. 187). It is an example of, as Sayers shows, a ‘rift ... between evidence and assertions’ (p. 197). It is quite true that we don’t altogether understand how geographical diffusion takes place, but it is a process which has always occurred, with isoglosses occurring at points where diffusion stops, and it would be pointless

Figure 1: Map of the diffusion of TH-fronting in the United Kingdom (Kerswill 2003: 234). Earliest dates of birth of cohorts using the innovation occasionally but non-idiosyncratically. The size of the circles indicates the relative populations of each town/city

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 220 TRUDGILL to attempt to use the modern media as an explanatory factor generally. The 20th and 21st century spread of TH-fronting in Britain requires the same kind of explanation, no more and no less, as the 16th and 17th-century spread of the change of /kn-/ to /n-/. The suggestion that in Glasgow we are now witnessing the pioneering of non- local ‘London innovations’ by ‘strongly-tied, low-mobility adolescents’ (p. 206) is unlikely to be true, because the ‘London innovations’ are probably no such thing. L-vocalisation is a good candidate for a case of independent development, as we have seen. T-glottalling is certainly not a ‘London’ innovation: Andresen (1968) argues that it actually began in Glasgow in the 1860s, and arrived in London only some decades later. And TH-fronting, though it certainly began in London, has arrived in Glasgow gradually and overland, as it were, rather than directly from the capital. This means that it is not the case that ‘media engagement as a factor in language change [has been] empirically substantiated’ (p. 199). And I find none of these features ‘troublesome’ (p. 195). It is true that I have used the term ‘softening up’ when wondering about whether the media have played a role, not in the diffusion of the innovation which was clearly part of the normal geographical process, but in the speed with which the diffusion has taken place. This is perhaps worth investigating, as is clear from Stuart-Smith’s work, but at this stage even this is speculation, given the predictable, as noted above, nature of the loss of interdental fricatives. There is of course something to be said about the modern phenomenon of the long-distance spread of lexis – but not very much. With lexical features like quotatives it is already obvious that media influence is crucial. People hear new words and phrases on the TV, and sometimes start using them themselves. That’s about it. It seems, though, that we are not short of sociolinguistic researchers who belong to a ‘it-must-be-like-that’ school. Noting that young people in some parts of the world spend a great deal of time exposed to the media, they assume, like our ‘non-linguist acquaintances’, that some language change must come from the television. They do not, as they should, ask themselves ‘what kinds of changes require the kind of repeated exposure that regular social interaction gives’ (Eckert 2003: 395). And indeed, even Eckert’s view is somewhat unnuanced: it is the interaction itself which is crucial, and not the repeated exposure. Repeated exposure does indeed come from the media. But one does not interact verbally with the TV. Lexical change does not require interaction; but we have been presented with no convincing evidence so far that core phonological and grammatical change can be diffused without it. To repeat Labov’s point, diffusion is purely a matter of who interacts most often with who. Sayers has what is perhaps a complaint that ‘neither theory nor methodology has delved far into media influence’ (p. 189), but my feeling is that this is likely to be because, for students of linguistic change, there is nothing very much to delve into. This is all the more so since time is short in our research into the fundamental questions raised by language change,

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 221 which must now necessarily be undertaken very urgently, before the vast majority of the world’s languages – where the processes of linguistic change have played out over the millennia – tragically disappear for ever.2 The fascinating and important challenges posed by language change for linguistic scientists relate to human languages as they have been spoken throughout their history. We do not know for certain how old human language, as we understand it, is. Evans (2010: 14) suggests that language dates back to ‘long before’ 150,000 years ago. Foley (1997: 73) says that ‘language, as we know it ... was born about 200,000 years ago’. This puts the role of our modern print and electronic media into perspective. Linguistic changes have always occurred, and they have always spread. Written media, on the other hand, have been available for only around five percent of language history – and very much less for most human societies. And electronic media have been available for very, very much less – perhaps 0.1 percent of language history. The uniformitarian principle (Labov 1972) tells us that the question of what role the electronic media may play in linguistic change as such is therefore of no great interest in solving the big challenges of linguistics. And I have no confidence at all that further research will show a lessening of ‘the significance of conventional diffusion in their findings, perhaps strengthening the empirical basis for media influence’ (p. 206).

NOTES 1. Very many thanks to Enam Al-Wer, David Britain, Magdalena Charzynska- Wojcik and Helge Sandøy for their help with earlier drafts of this paper. 2. The possible role of the media – including especially the social media, it seems – in countering as well as promoting language death is of course an important but quite different topic.

REFERENCES Andresen, B. S.. 1968. Pre-glottalisation in English Standard Pronunciation. Oslo, Norway: Norwegian Universities Press. Buchstaller, Isabelle. 2006. Social stereotypes, personality traits and regional perception displaced: Attitudes towards the ‘new’ quotatives in the U.K. Journal of Sociolinguistics 10: 362–381. Cappella, Joseph. 1997. The development of theory about automated patterns of face-to-face human interaction. In Gerry Philipsen and Terrance Albrecht (eds.) Developing Communication Theories (SUNY Series in Human Communication Processes). Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. 57–83. Eckert, Penelope. 2003. Dialogue – sociolinguistics and authenticity: An elephant in the room. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 392–431.

Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have to Tell Us. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Foley, William. 1997. Anthropological Linguistics. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Harrison, S. P. 2003. On the limits of the comparative method. In Brian Joseph and Richard Janda (eds.) The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. 213–243. Horvath, Barbara and Ron Horvath. 1997. The geolinguistics of a sound change in progress: /l/ vocalisation in Australia. In Miriam Meyerhoff, Charles Boberg and Stephanie Strassel (eds.) WorkingPapersinLinguistics:ASelectionofPapersfromNWAVE25.Philadelphia,Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. 105–124. Keller, Rudi. 1994. On Language Change: The Invisible Hand in Language. London: Routledge. Kerswill, Paul. 2003. Dialect levelling and geographical diffusion in British English. In David Britain and Jenny Cheshire (eds.) Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins. 223–243. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic Patterns. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov,William.2001.Principlesof LinguisticChange.Vol. 2: Social Factors. Oxford,U.K.:Blackwell. Pelech, William. 2002. Charting the interpersonal underworld: The application of cluster analysis to the study of interpersonal coordination in small groups. Currents: New Scholarship in the Human Services 1: 1–12. Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language. New York: Harcourt Brace. Tagliamonte, Sali. 2003. ‘Every place has a different toll’: Determinants of grammatical variation in cross-variety perspective. In Gunter€ Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf (eds.) Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. 531–544. Trudgill, Peter. 1973. Linguistic change and diffusion: Description and explanation in sociolinguistic dialect geography. Language in Society 3: 215–246. Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter. 2003. Linguistic changes in pan-world English. In Cornelia Tschichold (ed.) English Core Linguistics: Essays in Honour of David Allerton. Berne, Switzerland: Peter Lang. 55–68. Trudgill, Peter. 2008. The historical sociolinguistics of elite accent change: On why RP is not disappearing. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 44: 1–12. Trudgill, Peter, Terttu Nevalainen and Ilse Wischer. 2002. Dynamic have in North American and British Isles English. English Language and Linguistics 6: 1–15. Wolfram, Walt and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 2003. Dialectology and linguistic diffusion. In Brian Joseph and Richard Janda (eds.) The Handbook of Historical Linguistics. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. 713–735.

Address correspondence to: Peter Trudgill 32 Bathurst Rd Norwich NR22PP United Kingdom [email protected]

Situating media inﬂuence in sociolinguistic context

Sali A. Tagliamonte University of Toronto, Canada

Everyone wonders if media has an influence on language. Indeed, regardless of what audience I address on the subject of language variation and change, someone always asks, ‘but aren’t the internet and television responsible for the way language is changing?’ The question of media influence has been debated in the sociolinguistics literature at least since Trudgill (1986), but from the 1990s onwards it has come increasingly to the fore. Sayers’ paper problematizes the study of media and language by reviewing and categorizing research that has arisen over 20 years based on television and film. Sayers’ goal is to outline approaches to the study of global linguistic variants across the existing range of research studies that have invoked television and film as an explanation for this linguistic behavior. The studies reviewed are multifaceted in their methods and orientation, ranging from simply identifying interesting innovative forms, e.g. th-fronting ([f] for /th/ in e.g. think – Approach 1, p. 193), to actually gauging the effect of media by asking people about their television viewing habits, Approach 5 (Stuart-Smith et al. 2013). Sayers’ exposition is a discussion of why and how he has categorized these studies, i.e. according to their degree and nature of orientation 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 are critical 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; and 5. the nature of linguistic change.

1. THE MEDIA EXPLOSION1 Sayers focuses on television and film, presumably because he is restricting his discussion to speech; however, it is not clear what type of media he intends to include. The sources of media influence in the 2000s are so much more than the spoken language of television and film. Further, the media has evolved dramatically in the last 20 years. Even if one were to make a distinction

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 224 TAGLIAMONTE between broadcast media and communication media such a division does not suit the contemporary facts – the boundaries between different types of media have blurred. This confounds Sayers’ discussion of Approaches 1–5, which is ordered by engagement but is crucially tied to chronological developments. I found this disorienting. Research on media and language is necessarily demarcated by emergent research questions, available data, and changes in the media itself. For example, in 1998 I conducted a study on the television sit-com Friends (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005) because at that time so-called ‘media influence’ was predominately focused on television and film. By 2001, there was a groundswell of new written media emerging, particularly Instant Messaging (IM) among teenagers. Concomitantly, many linguistic changes were picking up speed (Tagliamonte 2006). From these early days, written computer-mediated communication (CMC) has been considered a source for changes in spoken language. I investigated this development by embarking on a study of adolescent language use in IM. Criticisms leveled against this research said, ‘a direct comparison with the same individuals’ spoken language is required’ 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 to the same individuals’ spoken conversations. Surprisingly, IM patterned systematically along with the spoken language with respect to the layering of variants and ongoing change; however, it also demonstrated a unique fusion of formal (shall, must) and colloquial variants (deontic gotta) as well as innovations (quotative be like, intensifier so, etc.; Tagliamonte and Denis 2008). By then an array of varying types of written CMC had developed, Facebook, blogs, reviews and comment/response systems galore, all with the potential to influence language use, whether written or spoken. In the context of these rapidly shifting media developments, Sayers’ focus on television and film may seem obsolete. Yet taken in context, it is actually a solid foundation for ongoing research both theoretically and practically. If we are going to tackle the issue of global innovations then an epistemological road map is a good way to start. Yet Approaches 1–5 should not necessarily be evaluated as a straightforward progression towards ideal practice. Each one will have value for tracking innovations, 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 remember that he is talking about English only, and even then not English in all of its social contexts of use (e.g. styles, registers, etc.). Further, notice that these ‘global innovations’ are always referred to in the plural. But how many truly global features are there? Sayers inserts an important caveat into his discussion when he says ‘the use of “global” is not intended to imply usage absolutely everywhere’ (p. 186) but he nevertheless intends to underscore that there are a plurality of changes that are arising in discontinuous geographic locations. In

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 225 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’m like, ‘Oh no!’. There is no mention of the broad scale changes that are sweeping North America, e.g. the Northern Cities Shift, the southern shift, the Canadian shift, (Labov, Ash and Boberg 2006). Presumably, there are also nationally circumscribed changes in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere, but if there are research projects documenting such changes, they are not reviewed here. As Stuart-Smith et al. (2013) and others have been quick to point out, the changes in the British Isles are locally situated changes (however supra-local) and, further, they have been underway for decades, rooted in structural 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 different trajectory of change, e.g. high speed acceleration. This is eminently visible in D’Arcy’s (2012) diachronic study of the quotative system in New Zealand English where in Figure 4 (D’Arcy 2012: 361) at least 100 years of history can be viewed graphically. The assiduous reader will notice that various quotatives rise and fall over the period, e.g. think, go, zero, but when be like comes on the scene, it rockets upwards in frequency usurping all other quotatives. Having studied be like extensively, I can say that be like is not only increasing at high speed, but its patterns of use are complex, globally diffused and (for the most part) consistently deployed at least in the English-speaking world. Moreover, we have been able to pinpoint precisely what generation of individuals began using it: regardless of locality, individuals born in the 1970s started using be like (Rodrigues-Louro, D’Arcy and Tagliamonte 2013). Thus, it is not surprising that media inﬂuence is thought to be the explanation. More on this later. The point I want to highlight here is we need to be more discerning about 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 ideally compare spoken language in the world to spoken language in the media. I agree, though, it is critical to situate the data that will be compared in time and context. We must be certain that we are getting the right linguistic models for the appropriate time period. In Rodrigues-Louro, D’Arcy and Tagliamonte (2013), we demonstrated that the inception of be like across cities in Canada, New Zealand and Australia can be pinpointed to individuals born in the early 1970s and that it accelerated rapidly among those born in the 1980s. This means that in order to assess media influence on the first generation of users, media from the 1970s and early 1980s is required. What media were available? Research by Dion and Poplack (2007) examined the language of popular television and films from this time. They discovered that while many quotatives were present, be like was not among them

(notwithstanding Ferrara and Bell’s (1995: 288) observation to the contrary). These findings suggest that neither television nor films are the culprits for the acceleration and spread of be like. Social media as we know it today could not have played a role in the inception of this change either. In the early 1970s there was no Facebook, Twitter or even extensive use of the internet by the generation of individuals who spearheaded the use of this form. So, what explains its global spread? We argue, in part, that the internal linguistic system was already changing to permit a novel form to enter and the socio- cultural pathways were in place for global diffusion, precisely along the routes and in the places be like arose. But even this does not offer an entirely satisfying explanation. An additional complication for studying spoken broadcast media is that spoken language and television language are not on a temporal par in terms of the stage of development of a linguistic change. We know that other language registers 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 rather than the other way around. Therefore, I suspect that broadcast media language lags behind innovative changes, at least in the beginning. Of course, this is an empirical question. My main point here is that comparing spoken vernaculars and the language of television and films at the same point in time may not be the appropriate design for a research investigation. One has to go back to the source time period. Sayers argues strongly that Approach 5 with television/film language analyzed alongside engagement with these media is the way forward, but I would argue equally as strongly that the nature of the media data and any other data must be carefully justified. The point here is that comparison is critical, but we need to be sure we have the appropriate temporal and contextual associations.

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

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 227 predictor) was captured only when individuals reported that EastEnders was their favorite show and that they engaged with it psychologically and emotionally (e.g. by criticizing the characters). This suggests that watching television is not a causal effect, but indirect, one of many other factors contributing 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 between evidence and assertions’ (p. 202). And yet, as researchers we cannot not address the possibility of media influence. I can remember back in 1995 how perplexed I was when I realized that the quotative system of the American, Canadian and English data we were analyzing demonstrated such parallelism in the use of the be like quotative (Tagliamonte and Hudson 1999). Even at that stage of the development of be like (just over 10% of the quotative system), some mention of the influence of media, whether television, 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 been pure conjecture. What was necessary was a study of a relevant media language. Television shows, especially those that were reaching millions of people around the world seemed to be the most appropriate way forward at the time. This is how the Friends study was conceived (Tagliamonte and Roberts 2005). This progression of sociolinguistic research on media and language has thus been a logically motivated and evolving enterprise. Who knew back in the 1970s that be like was coming? Similarly, Trudgill (1972) did not know in the summer of 1971 when he was collecting the Norwich data that the seeds of glottalization had already been found. We could not easily have predicted that social media were going to take over our lives as they have. In the past, researchers have pondered media influence, but they were thinking of television and film, etc. as in the Trudgill debate (1986) and in Sayers’ paper. However, the nature of media and its influence has changed exponentially since that time. In many cases, it is no longer passive. Even television and film have become interactive with summaries, commentaries and interactions about every broadcast. The media have become increasingly immediate, supra-local/global and often now face-to-face. Skype allows us to see as well as hear the people we are interacting with, as does Facebook Chat, FaceTime and other visual interfaces. Nowadays, I cannot remember when I meet a friend at a conference just exactly when I last saw him or her in person, because we have been meeting up over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee on-line all the time. Further, the nature of media and engagement with media is a rapidly moving target. I taught a course entitled ‘Internet Language’ for the first time in 2005–2006, again in 2007– 2008, and again in 2011–2012. Advancements in the way my students were engaging with media were so markedly different across those years that I could not conduct the same class project in the same way. In 2005–2006 young

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 228 TAGLIAMONTE people were exposed to way more than simply television and film. They were engaging with a constant audio-visual barrage while simultaneously traversing different media registers such as IM (on computers) and Text Messaging (on phones). By 2012, everyone was doing all this on the same device, typically a smart phone, and no self-respecting person under 30 was using email at all unless he or she was communicating with an ‘old person’ (typically his or her professor 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 the present but come from the full range of historically available materials from silent 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 in particular ways to specific times (years) and places. In this context, research in language inevitably follows a trajectory driven by intellectual as well as technological development. We cannot study media and language without a time stamp and a GPS reading because language use is unfolding in a whole new, non-geographically tethered, non-temporally anchored, terrain. The question is what are the dimensions of this new landscape that matter? Does place 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 is piqued by the lack of global innovations. It seems to me that be like is the only one. 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 and Rodrigues-Louro 2014).

5. WHAT TYPE OF CHANGE? Not all types of linguistic change are the same. Transmission comes from within communities as an unbroken chain of linguistic evolution from parent to child while diffusion comes from individuals who move from one community to the next or from one social network to another (Labov 2007). This is repeated numerous times in the short article. Sayers argues that ‘if there is a role for mass media, it is qualitatively distinct from conventional diffusion’ (p. 202). This must absolutely be true. Labov too has noted that not all changes follow the same model of diffusion (Labov 2003). In Tagliamonte and Denis (2014), we outline how a strict distinction between transmission and diffusion cannot be sustained in the current global climate because we have discovered deviations within them. Indeed, the increasingly complex contact situations in which the modern world ﬁnds itself embroiled will necessarily impact the nature of how language changes progress,

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 229 whether geographically or otherwise. The question is how and to what extent the local, supra-local, G20-local, global, etc. have a role to play and under what circumstances. The surprising finding is that variance within patterns of diffusion and innovations as linguistic change spreads can be traced to the nature of the community (size, founders, social networks, etc.; Trudgill 2011) as well as the stage of development of the change itself, at least for diffusing changes in the early 21st century (Tagliamonte and Denis 2014). Sayers advocates two additions that he believes are critical to research media influence 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 deploy to rework media content add to this picture (p. 188)? I think the only way to grapple with the intricate and multi-faceted influences that potentially lead to these ‘multifarious adaptions, appropriations and localisations that incoming innovations go through’ (p. 204), is to scrutinize the linguistic behavior itself. By this I mean careful, accountable, quantitative and qualitative analyses of linguistic variation and change. For example, my most recent research systematically and consistently compares the linguistic usage of the same individuals across four media – traditional email, instant messaging on computers, texting on phones and a standard written essay as a control (Tagliamonte 2013). The results show that while individuals use different forms for the same function throughout, they do so in varying proportions and select different forms in different media (e.g. shall, will, going to, gointa, gonna, gon, ima). Further, their use of linguistic variation is highly circumscribed to the nature of the linguistic change itself, the media involved (email vs. texting on phones for example) as well as the interactional device employed for the communication (type of phone, computer). Most important, the complex internal linguistic constraints on the variation between competing variants (e.g. go future vs. modal future will) remain constant across the media, indicating no ‘breakdown in grammar’ as is often claimed in populist reports. The point I want to emphasize here is that, among the resources required to assess media influence on language, detailed linguistic information about the frequency and patterns of variable systems and 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 down a direct connection. To reach beyond television and film, as we must, will be even more challenging. For example, when I ask my students to record all the individuals they have had contact with in any given day, the social networks in global space are mind-boggling. If we were to extend that question to the interactions those same individuals have with media in general, the

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 230 TAGLIAMONTE possibilities are exponentially increased. When my 10-year-old asks me ‘What does “chaperone” mean?’ how will I know where or how he was exposed to the word because at any given time he is watching YouTube, television, playing video games and reading simultaneously. At the same time, while so much of the new media rhetoric champions an ongoing disconnect between space and time, I think old-fashioned local identity may still come to the fore in language use just as it did in Martha’s Vineyard in the 1960s (Labov 1963) and continues 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 not replace the networks that exist in the real world. Instead, they reinforce them and make them stronger. Sociolinguistics is poised for an uncommon and unprecedented new research frontier as a burgeoning wave of new internet media and rapidly evolving engagement patterns leave their mark on language. One of the most promising research pursuits will be tracking whether global networks imprint on language or whether local practices (and allegiances) will prevail. Some combination of these two is most likely, but in what mix? It will be incumbent upon us as analysts to stalk these developments. For me, this can most reasonably and objectively be done through careful linguistic analysis, evaluating forms and patterns across contextually deﬁned parts of the grammar and according to the extant and emergent social networks to see just what patterns are preserved, which are extended and where the patterns break down. This will be a mirror of the connections and pathways of language as it traverses both the geography of our physical environment and the networks of our emerging virtual experience.

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

REFERENCES D’Arcy, Alexandra. 2012. The diachrony of quotation: Evidence from New Zealand English. Language Variation and Change 24: 343–369. Dion, Nathalie and Shana Poplack. 2007. Linguistic mythbusting: The role of the media in diffusing change. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) 36, 11–14 October, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Ferrara, Kathleen and Barbara Bell. 1995. Sociolinguistic variation and discourse function of constructed dialogue introducers: The case of be+like. American Speech 70: 265–289. Labov, William. 1963. The social motivation of a sound change. Word 19: 273–309. Labov, William. 2003. Pursuing the cascade model. In David Britain and Jenny Cheshire (eds.) Social Dialectology: In Honour of Peter Trudgill.Amsterdam,TheNetherlands/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Benjamins. 9–23. Labov, William. 2007. Transmission and diffusion. Language 83: 344–387. Labov, William, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg. 2006. The Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. Berlin, Germany/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pintzuk, Susan. 2003. Variationist approaches to syntactic change. In Brian Joseph and Richard Janda (eds.) Handbook of Historical Linguistics.Malden,Massachusetts/Oxford,U.K.: Blackwell Publishers. 509–528. Pope, Jennifer, Miriam Meyerhoff and D. Robert Ladd. 2007. Forty years of language change on Martha’s Vineyard. Language 83: 615–627. Rodrigues-Louro, Celeste, Alexandra D’Arcy and Sali A. Tagliamonte. 2013. Global perspectives on linguistic innovation. Paper presented at New Ways of Analyzing Variation [NWAV] 42, 17–20 October, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Gwilym Pryce, John Benjamin, Claire Timmins and Barrie Gunter. 2013. Television is also a factor in language change: Evidence from an urban dialect. Language 89: 501–536. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2006. ‘So cool, right?’: Canadian English entering the 21st century. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51: 309–331. Tagliamonte, Sali A. 2013. So Sick or So Cool? Student Language in the New Media. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto, Department of Linguistics. Tagliamonte, Sali A., Alexandra D’Arcy and Celeste Rodrigues-Louro. 2014. Outliers, impact and rationalization in linguistic change. Paper presented at the 88th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, 2–5 January, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Derek Denis. 2008. Linguistic ruin? LOL!: Instant messaging, teen language and linguistic change. American Speech 83: 3–34. Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Derek Denis. 2014. Expanding the transmission/diffusion dichotomy: Evidence from Canada. Language 90(1). Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Rachel Hudson. 1999. Be like et al. beyond America: The quotative system in British and Canadian youth. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3: 147–172. Tagliamonte, Sali A. and Chris Roberts. 2005. So cool, so weird, so innovative!: The use of intensiﬁers in the television series ‘Friends’. American Speech 80: 280–300. Takhteyeva, Yuri, Anatoliy Gruzdb and Barry Wellmanc. 2012. Geography of Twitter networks. Social Networks 34: 73–81. Trudgill, Peter J. 1972. Sex, covert prestige, and linguistic change in urban British English. Language in Society 1: 179–195. Trudgill, Peter J. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishers. Trudgill, Peter. 2011. Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Address correspondence to: Sali Tagliamonte University of Toronto – Linguistics 130 St George St Toronto Ontario M5S 3H1 Canada [email protected]

Knowing the driving force in language change: Density or subjectivity?

Tore Kristiansen Copenhagen University, Denmark

My own engagement with ‘media influence in language change’ yields a perspective which is quite different from Sayers’ perspective on the topic. Among the keywords listed for Sayers’ paper – viz. ‘global linguistic variants, globalisation, mass media, quotatives, rhetorical devices, television’ – only ‘mass media’ and ‘television’ are suitable keywords also for my approach. The concern with ‘global linguistic variants’ of English is replaced by an interest in what role the media have played in how the relationship between standard and non-standard varieties has developed in Denmark, with a particular focus on the role of language ideology in that development. Thus, my contribution will partly be to stress the potential benefits of conceiving the object of study as something else and more than ‘global linguistic variants’ in English, and furthermore, to stress the potential benefits of construing the object of study so as to comprise the ideological aspect of language variation and change. I’ll get back to these two points, but first I want to take Sayers’ labeling of the model in earnest and discuss it in terms of epistemology.

BELIEFS ABOUT THE DRIVING FORCE IN LANGUAGE VARIATION AND CHANGE It is unclear to me, actually, why Sayers talks of an epistemological model for researching media influence in language change (p. 185). Epistemology is concerned with questioning the nature and extent of human knowledge. However, Sayers’ intention is clearly not to discuss whether or to what extent knowledge about ‘media influence in language change’ can be acquired. So, in my terms, what Sayers proposes is rather a research model: a model for how the subject of ‘media influence in language change’ should be conceptualised and operationalised in order for knowledge of it to be acquired. Which is fine with me, and in line with how I myself prefer to approach and discuss the issue. However, I actually do think that there is an epistemological aspect to the issue, which I find both worthwhile and important to consider. As far as I can see, the question about ‘media influence in language change’ has to be

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 234 KRISTIANSEN answered in two steps, so to speak. The first and basic question to be answered is whether we can know why language changes; in other words: can we know what the driving force in language change is? If the answer to that question is negative, the follow-up question about the role of the media loses both in meaning and in interest. One might argue that the persistence of serious disagreements about fundamental principles of language change is an indication that the answer is ‘no, we cannot know’ what the driving force is, or at least that ‘we are far from knowing with any certainty’. We may propose and investigate ‘factors’ involved in language change (external/internal, linguistic/social/cognitive, subjective/objective) and make progress by developing the concepts and methods we use to better know the object, but we seem to be far from any definite conclusion about the role of the many ‘factors’. This, of course, is the condition under which all empirical, or a posteriori, knowledge is established. Empirical knowledge is beliefs that we hold to be true to the extent that they are based on reliable justification (evidence). We do what we can to justify our beliefs, in awareness that these beliefs may eventually turn out to be unjustified and false. Since very different beliefs are in play in our discipline concerning the nature of the driving force(s) in language change processes, I cannot see how a model for researching media influence in these processes can be built without addressing the driving force issue. In Sayers’ paper, I do miss an explicit statement of belief about what the driving force in language change is. Sayers reasons in terms of a distinction between conventional diffusion – which happens in face-to-face interaction – and mediated innovation. ‘If there is a role for mass media, it is qualitatively distinct from conventional diffusion’ (p. 202), Sayers says and calls this claim the ‘overarching point’ of his reasoning. But it remains unclear to me what is implied. Does the claim say that what happens in media influence is qualitatively different from the influence which happens in face-to-face interaction? That would be a very interesting claim, indeed, and a claim which one would expect to be explicated in the model. As this does not happen, it is more likely that this reference to a qualitative difference is just a way of saying that conventional diffusion happens in face-to-face interaction while mediated innovation results from media exposure (only). Which makes it a rather trivial claim. So let us go back to the non-trivial issue: what is the driving force in language change, and might it be the case that the processes of influence involved in TV-watching are different from the processes involved in face-to- face interaction? The traditional answer in sociolinguistics is well known, as it has been persistently stressed and defended by leading figures of the discipline. According to Chambers (1998: 126), ‘[t]here is no evidence for television or the other popular media disseminating or influencing sound changes or grammatical innovations’; so the lay belief that ‘TV makes people sound the same’ belongs with the unjustified beliefs – it is a ‘myth’. In the learned belief,

TV-watching cannot trigger the kind of processes that inﬂuence people’s everyday language and lead to (systematic) language change. The justiﬁcation is that it takes face-to-face interaction for such processes to work:

The point about the TV set is that people, however much they watch and listen to it, do not talk to it (and even if they do, it cannot hear them!), with the result that no accommodation takes place. (Trudgill 1986: 40)

[A]ll of the evidence (...) points to the conclusion that language is not systematically affected by the mass media, and is inﬂuenced primarily in face-to- face interaction with peers. (Labov 2001: 228)

I shall refer to this approach as ‘the received view’. Notice, however, that so far nothing has been said about the nature of these processes of inﬂuence. Words like ‘accommodation’ (Trudgill) and ‘peers’ (Labov) make my own associations go in the direction of social-psychological processes of the kind that take care of face-work and social identity construction. But this is unlikely to be a congenial interpretation, as both Trudgill (2004; and see the discussion in Language in Society 37/2, 2008) and Labov have repeatedly addressed the driving-force issue in recent years by stressing the role of mechanical factors at the expense of social evaluations. Labov now advocates priority for Bloomﬁeld’s principle of density: that the more often people talk to each other, the more similar their speech will be. [...] The principle of density implicitly asserts that we do not have to search for a motivating force behind the diffusion of linguistic change. The effect is a mechanical and inevitable one; the implicit assumption is that social evaluation and attitudes play a minor role. (Labov 2001: 228, 20).

Expressed in the terminology of epistemology adopted here, we may say that Labov, having at first been a believer in the driving-force nature of covert social values, turned into a sceptic as the truth of this belief could not be reliably justified in his investigations. (See Kristiansen 2011 for an analysis and discussion of this development in Labov’s work.) Now, my point is that if we want to re-examine the received view concerning media influence in language change, we have to decide which belief about driving forces our model for that re-examination is to be built on: are we to look for ‘mechanical and inevitable effects of frequency’ (density), or are we to look for ‘motivation in terms of social evaluation and attitudes’ (subjectivity)? Even though this issue is not explicitly addressed in Sayers’ paper, it is fairly straightforward to infer his belief. Judging by what is said about social networks and their role in the model, Sayers seems to take for granted that the driving force in conventional diffusion is ‘social’ (subjectivity) rather than ‘mechanical’ (density). And this is clearly the case as far as media innovation is concerned, as Sayers here refers to ‘parasocial interaction’ (‘developed in media

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 236 KRISTIANSEN audience research to describe how media engagement works as a creative, emotionally involved process, actively reworking media content’ – p. 187) and the viewer’s ‘emotional investment as central to any substantive role for the media in language change’ (p. 188). The justification for this belief relies primarily on work in Glasgow by Jane Stuart-Smith and her colleagues, who found ‘a robustly significant relationship between innovation use and prolonged, emotionally-invested media engagement’ (p. 201) among innovators and early adopters. When Sayers adds that ‘prolonged exposure without emotional investment had no such significance’ (p. 201), it is offered as a finding which ‘reaffirms the importance of parasocial interaction for media influence’ (p. 201), but it might also be read as a negation of media influence as a frequency-dependent mechanical rubbing off on people’s speech. Thus, regardless of whether we are talking of ‘conventional diffusion’ or ‘mediated innovation’, Sayers appears an implicit denier of density as the driving force, and an explicit believer in such a role for subjectivity. In other words, Sayers’ model for researching media influence in language change builds on a belief about the nature of the driving force in language change which is radically different from the belief which the received view is based on. I think a dimension of awareness and reflexivity relating to this fundamental discrepancy should be integrated in the model. This could help clarify discussions in our discipline about media influence on language use, and strengthen the model’s potential as a challenge to the received view. Actually, the received view appears somewhat paradoxical to me. In my logic, media innovation would be a more likely phenomenon if influence is a matter of ‘mechanical frequency-dependent copying’ (density) than if it is a matter of ‘social-meaning-and-identity making’ (subjectivity). As I myself am a believer in subjectivity as the driving force in language variation and change processes, my argumentation for a media role in these processes will, in what follows, refer to language-ideological evidence.

MEDIA INFLUENCE ON LANGUAGE CHANGE THROUGH LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY (THE CASE OF DENMARK) At the level of language use, regional dialects are moribund in Denmark. The occurrence frequency of ‘local’ segmental features (not to mention grammatical and lexical features) is down to very low percentages. The ‘standard language’ (Copenhagen speech) has spread to the whole country, including much of the segmental variation between ‘conservative’ and ‘modern’ features in which Copenhagen speech is very rich. To the extent that a ‘non-standard’ colouring is retained in the speech of young non- Copenhageners today, it is almost exclusively in terms of ‘local’ prosodic features. Thus, the speech of young people in any local community (outside of Copenhagen) can be described as ‘more or less’ of three accents (which we shall call LOCAL, CONSERVATIVE, and MODERN), and all evidence from variationist

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 237 studies shows that they can be ranked as follows in terms of vitality-in-use: MODERN > CONSERVATIVE > LOCAL. In other words, studies of change, in both apparent and real time, show the use of ‘modern’ features to be rising and dominating, ‘local’ features to be declining and vanishing (see overview and references in Maegaard et al. 2013). At the level of language ideology, we have investigated how young people relate to the accents both consciously and subconsciously (i.e. respondents were ‘aware’ and ‘non-aware’, respectively, of giving away language attitudes). Studies of this kind in Denmark since the late 1980s have consistently found that the evaluative ranking of accents is turned upside down when the response condition changes from ‘conscious’ to ‘subconscious’. In the ‘conscious’ condition (in a so-called label ranking task), assessment in terms of ‘liking’ yields the ranking LOCAL > CONSERVATIVE > MODERN, which does not at all correspond to the vitality-in-use of the accents (as this was described in the previous paragraph), but is straightforwardly explainable as a reproduction of the ‘official’, public discourse ideology in this matter. In the ‘subconscious’ condition (in a so-called speaker evaluation experiment), assessment in terms of positive vs. negative personality traits yields the ranking MODERN > CONSERVATIVE > LOCAL (NB, the LOCAL voices used in the experiments corresponded to most youngsters’ own speech by being ‘non-standard’ only in some prosodic feature). This ranking counters the ‘official’ ideology but corresponds to the vitality-in-use hierarchy. MODERN does particularly well on the evaluative dimension of ‘dynamism’, while CONSERVATIVE does as well or better on the evaluative dimension of ‘superiority’. This subconsciously offered evaluative pattern is reproduced by young people across Denmark to such an extent that the average results in the studied communities look like copies of each other (see Figure 8 in Maegaard et al. 2013). (For detailed presentations of these studies, see Kristiansen 2009; Grondelaers and Kristiansen 2013.) We have argued (e.g. Kristiansen 2001, 2009; Grondelaers and Kristiansen 2013; Maegaard et al. 2013) that the ‘dynamic’ values (such as ‘self-assured vs. insecure’, ‘fascinating vs. boring’) represent what it takes to be successful in the late-modern public sphere of broadcast media, while the ‘superiority’ values (such as ‘intelligent vs. stupid’, ‘trustworthy vs. untrustworthy’) represent what it takes to be successful in the more traditional public sphere of school and business. However, the split evaluative pattern with regard to CONSERVATIVE and MODERN is not the main point of the argument in favour of a possible influence from the media. The main point is the copy-like similarity of the patterns. Adolescents across the whole of Denmark ‘know’ not only the relative social values of their own LOCAL accent in comparison with Copenhagen speech, they also ‘know’ the relative social values of the CONSERVATIVE and MODERN accents of Copenhagen speech. How on earth does that happen – if not by exposure to broadcast media? Agreed, as Sayers rightly points out about much of the argumentation he reviews: ‘This amounts to the use of a rhetorical device, proof surrogate, where media influence is inferred but not

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 238 KRISTIANSEN evidenced’ (p. 198). It should also be stressed, of course, that what our results indicate is an indirect inﬂuence from media on language use – through language ideology (see further in Kristiansen forthc.) In so saying, I need to stress another point: our Danish results do indicate that it is important in language attitudes studies to theorise and operationalise a distinction between overt (consciously offered) and covert (subconsciously offered) attitudes. I think a model for researching media inﬂuence in language needs to take this distinction (or a more general ‘levels-of-consciousness’ issue) into account. To the extent that Sayers addresses the attitudinal aspect, the message seems to be that attitudinal factors are of little interest. The Glasgow studies referred to have found that ‘engagement with London-based TV did not mean positive evaluation of Cockney accents’ (p. 201). Based on our Danish experience, I’d like to suggest that the data elicitation condition may be a factor here. It is true also of our MODERN accent – which like Cockney includes features from traditionally stigmatised capital city (i.e. Copenhagen) speech – that it is strongly downgraded when informants are aware of evaluating accents. At the same time, the ‘emotional investment’ – which Sayers, as mentioned above, sees as ‘central to any substantive role for the media in language change’ (p. 188) – is likely to be of a more subconscious kind. There may well be interesting parallels between the Glasgow and Danish situations in terms of how conscious (overt) and subconscious (covert) subjectivity relates to changes in language use. What we have established in our studies in Denmark, is that the three contemporary Danish accents that are relevant to social identity processes among young Danes in any community (i.e. CONSERVATIVE, MODERN, and LOCAL) are surrounded by the same subconsciously offered evaluations all over Denmark – and that these evaluations correspond well to the general patterns of change in language use among young Danes. In itself, I see this as fairly convincing evidence that the national Danish broadcast media have a strong effect on covert language ideology, and that covert language ideology is a main driving force in language change.

ANGLOPHONE SOCIETIES AND GLOBAL LINGUISTIC VARIANTS Sayers does himself point out that the studies reviewed in the paper ‘mostly concern native Anglophone societies. Relevance to other contexts remains to be explored’ (p. 189). He goes on to comment that ‘[p]erhaps that is for the best though, given the intended applicability to future research’ (p. 189). From my Danish perspective, and in prolongation of the Danish picture outlined above, I have to say that the general relevance and applicability of Sayers’ model in its present shape appears problematic in several of its aspects. Not the least, this holds true for the model’s prioritising of ‘global linguistic variants’. This aspect of the model is linked to its basic distinction between ‘conventional diffusion’ and ‘mediated innovation’ – the former process

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 239 following from influence in face-to-face contexts, the latter from influence in media contexts. It is telling that Sayers lists it as a limitation of the Glasgow (Scotland) studies, which otherwise weigh heavily in his argumentation, that ‘this study focuses on innovations originating in England, meaning a far smaller spatial scope than the transatlantic cases reported elsewhere, let alone the global ones’ (p. 188). The problem is that ‘face-to-face contact also weighs in quite heavily – more than one might expect if the same techniques were applied across global distances’ (p. 188). I, for my part, can see that a focus on ‘global linguistic variants’ may provide methodological strength to this research – to the extent that the emergence of similar innovations in ‘discontinuous geographic settings’ is the more likely to be explainable as a media effect the more the geographical discontinuity makes explanations based on mobility and personal contact improbable and impossible – but it goes without saying that no exploration is needed to establish that the prioritising of ‘global linguistic variants’ strongly reduces the model’s relevance and applicability from a Danish perspective. If global spread of variants is going to be the prioritised evidence for media influence in language change, such influence can never be an object of study in a small speech community like Denmark. The methodological reliance on ‘discontinuous geographic settings’ might in fact be applicable only to the Anglophone world and English as the language of globalisation. More generally, I see the one-sided preoccupation with linguistic variables and their variants as a significant, and unnecessary, weakness of Sayers’ model. It may be true, as claimed in the received view argumentation, that no secure justification of media influence has so far been established at the level of linguistic variables. I think the picture looks different, however, if evidence about the relative strength between the standard variety and non-standard varieties is accorded importance in the argument, like in our Danish studies. I am convinced that the model will stand stronger as an alternative to the received view on media influence in language change if some interest in what happens at the level of varieties can be added. Furthermore, if the ‘Danish-type’ approach to media influence in language change is absent from Sayers’ model, as from sociolinguistics more generally, I’d like to suggest that this is a weakness which is caused by the Anglo-world focus of our discipline. With its strong U.S. and U.K. basis, the discipline’s relative lack of interest in developments at the level of varieties probably reflects a different relationship between standard and non-standard varieties in the U.S. and the U.K. compared with what we find in many, say, continental European countries, where the standard variety in recent decades has gained much territory at the expense of regional varieties. One of the main received view arguments against media influence is actually that wholesale shifts to the standard variety have not occurred: the diversity of non-standard dialects is still with us. Stuart-Smith (2011: 224) reports the argument as typical of ‘[s]ociolinguists working in the variationist paradigm on varieties of English in America and the UK’, and goes on to say and document that ‘[t]his position

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 240 KRISTIANSEN contrasts strongly with that expressed by linguists and sociolinguists working outside English-speaking countries’. In brief, I find it likely that the received view would have been less dismissive of media influence on language change had it been developed in a less Anglo-world focused discipline. (This is not to deny, of course, that some of the main challenges to the received view also stem from Anglophone societies. In addition to its role in Jane Stuart-Smith’s work, as testified by Sayers, questioning of the assumption that TV-watching does not involve social identity work has been a central theme not least in work by Nikolas Coupland, see e.g. Coupland 2007).

CONCLUDING REMARKS I have focused on three aspects of Sayers’ model which from my perspective seem problematic, as well as interrelated: • indifference regarding the nature-of-the-driving-force issue (density or subjectivity?); • preoccupation with Anglophone societies and the level of linguistic variables, global variants in particular; • lack of interest in the level of language varieties and the contribution of language-ideological forces to how the relationship between standard and non-standard varieties evolve. I’d like to stress, however, that I think Sayers’ efforts to propose ‘an epistemological model for researching media inﬂuence in language change’ (p. 185) is a timely and much welcome enterprise. So is the Journal of Sociolinguistics’ invitation to discuss the proposal.

REFERENCES Chambers, Jack. 1998. TV makes people sound the same. In Laurie Bauer, Peter Trudgill (eds.) Language Myths. New York: Penguin. 123–131. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Grondelaers, Stefan and Tore Kristiansen. 2013. On the need to access deep evaluations when searching for the motor of standard language change. In Tore Kristiansen and Stefan Grondelaers (eds.) Language (De)standardisation in Late Modern Europe: Experimental Studies. Oslo, Norway: Novus. 9–52. Kristiansen, Tore. 2001. Two standards: One for media and one for the school. Language Awareness 10: 9–24. Kristiansen, Tore. 2009. The macro-level social meanings of late-modern Danish accents. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 41: 167–192. Kristiansen, Tore. 2011. Attitudes, ideology and awareness. In Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnston and Paul Kerswill (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics. Los Angeles/ London/New Delhi/Singapore/Washington, D.C.: SAGE. 265–278.

Kristiansen, Tore. Forthc. Does mediated language inﬂuence immediate language? In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.) Mediatisation and Sociolinguistic Change (FRIAS Linguae & Litterae series). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change, Vol. 2: Social Factors. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Maegaard, Marie, Torben Juel Jensen, Tore Kristiansen and Jens Normann Jørgensen. 2013. Diffusion of language change: Accommodation to a moving target. Journal of Sociolinguistics 17: 3–36. Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2011. The view from the couch: Changing perspectives on the role of television in changing language ideologies and use. In Tore Kristiansen and Nikolas Coupland (eds.) Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo, Norway: Novus Press. 223–239. Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Trudgill, Peter. 2004. New Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press.

Address correspondence to: Tore Kristiansen Scandinavian Research Copenhagen University Njalsgade 136 2300 Copenhagen S Copenhagen 2300 Denmark [email protected]

Beyond ‘media inﬂuence’

Jannis Androutsopoulos University of Hamburg, Germany

The ‘mediated innovation model’ proposed by David Sayers in this issue of the Journal of Sociolinguistics comes in a period of lively debate on the role of media in the social life of language. As Sayers points out, the question of media influence in language change has been largely marginalized in variationist sociolinguistics, neglected by some researchers, forcefully rejected by others. But in the last few years, scholars from various sociolinguistic subfields have examined media as an important site of sociolinguistic heterogeneity, innovation and change (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014a; Stuart-Smith 2012). Both the complexity of the processes involved and the dearth of relevant research make the relationship of media and linguistic change – in a sense that includes, but is not limited to the variationist understanding – a thorny and intriguing subject, which Sayers’ contribution sets out to address by focusing on two points: a review of previous studies on the role of media in linguistic innovations in English and a ‘mediated innovation model’ that is visualized and outlined in theoretical terms. I discuss them in turn before moving on to a critical discussion of his proposed framework. Sayers’ classification distinguishes five approaches to linguistic innovations, ranked by the theoretical and empirical relevance they assign to the media, especially television. The first two approaches make hardly any reference to the media, whereas the fifth approach, represented by the research of Stuart-Smith and her associates (cf. Stuart-Smith 2011, 2012), makes the question of media influence on speech centre stage. The implicational ordering of this overview offers a handy scheme that could also be used to examine how the media has been positioned with regard to other aspects of language in society. As researchers in this area are well aware, a lot of sociolinguistic research that references the media as a potential factor in linguistic change does not examine media language as such, but rather attempts to operationalize the construct of ‘media influence’ on spoken language in the community in terms of ‘consumption’ of or ‘exposure’ to media, particularly television. Other researchers in sociolinguistics and social dialectology have evoked the notion of media influence in a post-hoc manner, in order to provide an explanation for attested patterns of linguistic innovation and change such as the shift from local dialects to standard variety in the second half of the 20th century in continental Europe (cf. Lameli 2005 for German; Kristiansen 2014 for Danish;

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 243 and chapters in Kristiansen and Coupland 2011). This kind of approach corresponds to Sayers’ Approach 3, which evokes the notion of media influence to explain patterns of linguistic diffusion, even though neither media language nor audience engagement is empirically examined. Sayers’ Approach 4, which compares speech data and media data, is particularly promising despite its misleading heading (the ‘media data’ in question are also speech data). The fact that it is represented by only two studies (of which one is unpublished) goes to show that comparisons of this sort are still difficult to carry out as long as we lack adequate corpora on both sides of the issue. Linguists who do not work with media language may think that compiling a corpus of media language is an easy task, but this is not the case when it comes to an informed selection and contextualization of data. Contextual parameters such as type of media, broadcasting institution, target audience and genre have an impact on the language styles disseminated by broadcast media (cf. Bell 2001, 2011). Therefore, confirming or dismissing the media influence hypothesis cannot be based on data from just one single television show or series. Drawing generalizations requires as much caution here as in any other area of sociolinguistic research. This confirms a point raised by Sayers and other current work: in order to understand the role of media in linguistic change, we need to go beyond spoken language in the community and examine both media language and audience practices of media engagement. Taking media language and discourse into consideration is necessary because today’s mediascapes feature a vast range of sociolinguistic styles and representations of speakerhood for audiences to respond to. And looking at media engagement practices is necessary as it is by now established that the bottom line of any potential impact of media on non-mediated community speech is not consumption or ‘exposure’ per se but situated audience engagement with specific media narratives and characters (cf. Stuart- Smith 2011). The presentation of the ‘hypothetical mediated innovation model’ that follows up on the discussion of the five approaches is rather short and not accompanied by a case study to demonstrate how the model would work in empirical practice. The model’s visual structure basically replicates the sender- message-receiver pattern that is familiar from communication models in the social sciences. Its three nodes, laid out on the vertical axis, are termed ‘source speech community’, ‘media texts’, and ‘adopting speech community’. The link between source community and media texts is termed ‘mediation’, which Sayers defines as the uptake of vernacular speech forms by media texts, and the link from media texts to adopting communities is termed ‘broadcast’, defined as the process by which media texts make innovative linguistic features available to a new audience community or population. The term ‘social networks’, which appears in the surrounding visual space, indicates the sociolinguistic contexts in which mediated innovations are negotiated.

One issue here is terminology: Sayers’ usage of ‘mediation’ and ‘broadcast’ is not compatible to established meanings of these terms in other disciplines. While ‘mediation’ is notoriously polysemous across humanities and social sciences, Sayers’ ‘broadcast’ is particularly idiosyncratic in that it denotes semiotic features of mass-mediated messages rather than the institutions that produce and disseminate these messages. Far from suggesting that linguistics ought to sheepishly follow the usage of other disciplines, I nonetheless believe that some consideration of terminology across the border would be conductive to interdisciplinary dialogue. In addition, the model’s components remain underspecified in my reading. For example, the bottom part of the visualization suggests that linguistic forms from a speech community find access into media texts. But who produces these media texts, what kinds of speakers do they represent, and how do they frame the vernacular features they contain in terms of e.g. genre or narrative? As researchers of media discourse are well aware, the relation between media texts and the language practices in the communities these texts claim to represent, on the one hand, and the communities that consume these texts, on the other, entails very complex issues of audience design (Bell 1984), representation (Hall 1977) and style (Coupland 2007), which are neither visualized in the model nor addressed in the discussion. Sayers points out that his model affords a visualization of ‘methodologies used to research media influence in language change’, but this is not evident in the model itself. There are very different methods for studying ‘mediation’ and ‘broadcast’, the two processes represented by arrows in the model. The uptake of vernacular features in media discourse can be examined quantitatively, e.g. by comparing a sample of relevant media talk to a corpus of community speech, or qualitatively, by focusing on the contextualization of these features in media genres. Likewise, the adoption of media language features by audiences can be explored quantitatively, thereby drawing on questionnaires and speech production experiments (cf. Stuart-Smith 2011) or qualitatively in terms of the interactional appropriation of media language features. The model’s arrows erase these differences. Therefore, the author’s claims about the model’s potential use as a backdrop for comparative analysis are neither supported by its visual design nor exemplified by a practical example. Against this backdrop, the key question is whether Sayers’ framework can ‘cross the Rubicon’, in his own words, i.e. go beyond limitations of previous theorizing and offer an integrative perspective on the issues it addresses. In my reading, the ‘mediated innovation model’ moves towards, but does not quite achieve a turning point in theorizing the complex and multi-layered impact of media, in the widest sense of the term, on sociolinguistic developments in contemporary societies. I suggest there are two reasons for this: the model’s limitation to evidence from just one language, i.e. English, and its understanding of ‘media influence’ within a variationist approach to language change. I discuss them in turn in the remainder of this commentary.

First, the focus on English. Since neither the title nor the keywords of Sayers’ paper limit the scope of his claims to the English language, his framework is in principle understood as potentially applicable to a broader range of languages. In practice, the paper discusses two cases of diffusion of linguistic features across varieties of English: a small number of phonological variables that diffuse from Southern to Northern varieties of British English, and the spread of the quotative be like across Englishes world-wide. Sociolinguistically speaking, these represent two distinct types of diffusion. One is diffusion across varieties that are roofed by a common standard language and partake in the same order of indexicality (Blommaert 2007) within a given nation-state. The second represents the transnational spread of innovations within a polycentric language (Clyne 1992) whose varieties are located in different nation-states and embedded in distinct orders of indexicality. These differences are too complex to be boiled down to a matter of continuous or discontinuous geographical setting, as Sayers seems to suggest. While the case of be like may well be instructive for similar developments in polycentric languages such as German, Spanish or French, I don’t see what it has to offer to the study of linguistic innovations in small, sociolinguistically centralized societies such as e.g. Greece or Denmark. Moreover, the focus on English erases the fact that in late modernity, the English language itself is a key resource of global linguistic innovations for basically any other language (or speech community, depending on one’s perspective). From their viewpoint, English represents a specific type of input for sociolinguistic innovation and change: a globally available resource with globally familiar points of cultural and intertextual reference, which is locally recontextualized in many different ways at the structure and discourse level. The introduction of different layers of English linguistic material in other- language speech communities has always been associated with various types of mediated communication (Hjarvard 2004). Think of lexical Anglicisms in the press, non-standard registers of English that diffuse globally with hip-hop lyrics, the calquing of English formulaic expressions in Hollywood film dubbing, or so-called internet memes whose understanding requires considerable idiomatic competence in English. These processes show striking translinguistic parallels in terms of globally circulating resources and patterns of repertoire shift. But all this is erased from the picture by limiting the evidence deemed relevant to a ‘mediated innovation model’ to English- speaking countries. I therefore argue that as soon as we exit the small circle of Anglophone speech communities, the English language becomes highly untypical with respect to a range of globally observable processes of contact- induced innovation and change, in which media play a role. Note that Sayers is quite reflexive on the limitations of his model. He self- critically acknowledges his focus on ‘native Anglophone societies’ as well as television and film. Yet these issues ought, in my view, to be addressed at a fundamental level in the conception of a framework for the study of media and

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 246 ANDROUTSOPOULOS language change. For such a framework to be cross-linguistically adaptable, starting from English may not be useful, for the reasons outlined above. And a framework that starts by thinking about the media in rather traditional terms – broadcast media that target mass audiences with products that largely consist of professionally produced, standardized language – may overlook the specific conditions of participatory networked communication (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011). The internet makes the trajectories of semiotic circulation and diffusion too complex and unpredictable to be handled by the framework’s notion of ‘media texts’. My second point departs from the observation that the ‘mediated innovation model’ limits itself to the traditional framing of language change in variationist sociolinguistics, i.e. structural changes at the level of sociolinguistic variables within a single language. Wordings like ‘within the system’ or ‘from other systems’ as well as the selected examples are telling in this regard. This adoption of a monoglot, structural perspective on language variation and change goes hand in hand with the uncritical reproduction of the ‘influence’ metaphor, a trope that assigns ‘the media’ – note the implied limitation to mass media – the power to influence ‘language’. While Sayers’ framework on the one hand brings the speakers back into the picture in terms of audience engagement with media texts, it still keeps them under the influence of an undifferentiated thing called ‘the media’. I argue that the notions of ‘the media’ and ‘media influence’ have become too narrow to address the role of media institutions, technologies, discourses, and practices in contemporary sociolinguistic developments. As the current discussion in media and communication studies suggests, theorizing the media in socio-cultural change entails unpacking the bracket term ‘the media’ into finer theoretical and analytical distinctions (cf. Couldry 2008). Two concepts that are used to this aim are mediation (though in a sense that differs from Sayers’ usage) and mediatization. In communication studies, these the two terms are not always clearly distinguished (cf. Couldry 2008; Hepp 2014; Krotz 2009). When a distinction is made, mediatization refers to the role of mediated communication in processes of socio-cultural change at a higher level of abstraction, whereas mediation focuses on the material and semiotic conditions of communicative action. These notions will be useful to sociolinguists in developing a theoretical vocabulary that goes beyond technologically determined ideas about media (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014a). Refining our notions of media and mediation is, in turn, crucial in order to reassess the nexus of media influence and featural language change, which has dominated sociolinguistic imagination so far (cf. Herring 2003). Indeed, the interest in media in the context of linguistic change has been so closely associated with the variationist conception of language change and the concomitant ‘influence’ metaphor that other views and approaches are often not sufficiently acknowledged. Fresh ideas on language, media and socio-cultural change currently originate in interactional sociolinguistics,

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 247 linguistic anthropology, media discourse, and communication studies (cf. chapters in Androutsopoulos 2014b). But the orientation of the ‘mediated innovation model’ to variationist sociolinguistics goes hand in hand with a closure from this impetus, as indicated for instance by the fact that research on audience engagement with media is positioned as a new development, even though it goes back to the mid 1990s (cf. Shankar 2004; Spitulnik 1997; and recent papers in Ayaß and Gerhardt 2012). Integrating insights from a range of research ﬁelds is, in my view, indispensable in order to develop a broader research programme on sociolinguistic change in mediatized societies. Part of this programme is the very notion of sociolinguistic change, which positions linguistic repertoires, language practices and language ideologies as interrelated objects of inquiry on the same footing with structural change (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014a; Coupland 2009). Sayers does move in this integrative direction by including media engagement practices into his model, thereby following Stuart-Smith (2011, 2012). But language ideology and linguistic repertoires as dimensions of change are absent from his argument, thereby perpetuating the gap between language and metalanguage and the focus on single linguistic variables, which characterize variationist accounts of language change. Ultimately, Sayers’ approach points to the right direction: that of broader thinking and methodological synergy. But I believe more needs to be done in developing an integrative approach to the study of media and language change. In my view, such an approach entails four elements (cf. Androutsopoulos 2014a): • First, it does not prioritize by default structural change within one particular language, but approaches structure, repertoire, practice, and ideology as interrelated dimensions of sociolinguistic change. • Second, it does not limit the operational conception of ‘media’ to mass media and in particular television but develops an inclusive perspective on institutions, technologies and practices of mediation as elements of the sociolinguistic condition of late-modern societies. • Third, it synthesizes relevant insights from the entire range of socio- cultural linguistics, from variationism to minority language studies. • And fourth, it draws on ﬁndings from as many languages and speech communities as possible, the rationale behind this being that the role of media in sociolinguistic change is so multi-layered and complex that its understanding cannot be limited to just a single language.

REFERENCES Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2011. Language change and digital media: A review of conceptions and evidence. In Tore Kristiansen and Nikolas Coupland (eds.) Standard

Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo, Norway: Novus Press. 145– 160. Androutsopoulos, Jannis. 2014a. Mediatization and sociolinguistic change: Key concepts, research traditions, open issues. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.) Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. In press. Androutsopoulos, Jannis (ed.). 2014b. Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. Ayaß, Ruth and Cornelia Gerhardt. 2012. The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins. Bell, Allan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13: 154–204. Bell, Allan. 2001. ‘Bugger!’: Media language, identity and post-modernity. New Zealand Sociology 16: 128–150. Bell, Allan. 2011. Leaving Home: De-europeanisation in a post-colonial variety of broadcast news language. In Tore Kristiansen and Nikolas Coupland (eds.) Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo, Norway: Novus. 177–198. Blommaert, Jan. 2007. Sociolinguistics and discourse analysis: Orders of indexicality and polycentricity. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 2: 115–130. Clyne, Michael. 1992. Pluricentric Languages. Differing Norms in Different Nations. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. Couldry, Nick. 2008. Mediatization or mediation? Alternative understandings of the emergent space of digital storytelling. New Media & Society 10: 373–391. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Coupland, Nikolas. 2009. Dialects, standards and social change. In Marie Maegaard, Frans Gregersen, Pia Quist and Jens Normann Jørgensen (eds.) Language Attitudes, Standardization and Language Change. Oslo, Norway: Novus. 27–50. Hall, Stuart. 1977. The work of representation. In Stuart Hall (ed.) Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. London: Sage. 1–74. Hepp, Andreas. 2014. Mediatization: A panorama of media and communication research. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.) Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. In press. Herring, Susan C. 2003. Media and language change: Introduction. Journal of Historical Pragmatics 4: 1–17. Hjarvard, Stig. 2004. The globalization of language: How the media contribute to the spread of English and the emergence of medialects. Nordicom Review 1–2: 75–97. Kristiansen, Tore. 2014. Does mediated language inﬂuence immediate language? In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.) Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter. In press. Kristiansen, Tore and Nikolas Coupland (eds.). 2011. Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo, Norway: Novus Press. Krotz, Friedrich. 2009. Mediatization: A concept with which to grasp media and societal change. In Knut Lundby (ed.) Mediatization: Concept, Changes, Consequences. New York: Peter Lang. 19–38. Lameli, Alfred. 2005. Standard und Regionalsprache – Konstanz und Wandel. In Eckhard Eggers, Jurgen€ E. Schmidt and Dieter Stellmacher (eds.) Moderne Dialekte – Neue Dialektologie. Stuttgart, Germany: Steiner. 495–513. Shankar, Shalina. 2004. Reel to real: Desi teens’ linguistic engagement with Bollywood. Pragmatics 14: 317–335.

Spitulnik, Debra. 1997. The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. In Alessandro Duranti (ed.) Linguistic Anthropology: A Reader. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. 95–118. Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2011. The view from the couch: Changing perspectives on the role of the television in changing language ideologies and use. In Tore Kristiansen and Nikolas Coupland (eds.) Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo, Norway: Novus. 223–239. Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2012. English and the media: Television. In Alexander Bergs and Laurel J. Brinton (eds.) English Historical Linguistics (vol. 1). Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. 1075–1088.

Address correspondence to: Jannis Androutsopoulos Institut fur€ Germanistik I Universit€at Hamburg Von-Melle-Park 6 Hamburg 20146 Germany [email protected]

No longer an elephant in the room1

Jane Stuart-Smith University of Glasgow, United Kingdom

Sayers’ paper presents an interesting and thought-provoking perspective on sociolinguistic research on media influence on language change, particularly the diffusion of innovations (and especially global be like). He offers a brief review of previous views of media influence on diffusing innovations, defines some terms, gives a structured critique of how existing sociolinguistic (and variationist) research has dealt with the broadcast media as a factor in the diffusion of global (and other) innovations, and concludes by proposing the ‘mediated innovation’ model as an epistemological framework ‘to map out’ future work (p. 188). Probably because I do not share all his views, I find Sayers’ work a stimulating point of departure for debate about the media and language change. I also hope it will encourage variationists to include questions about speaker/viewers’ exposure and engagement with broadcast media in their protocols, because a fundamental problem for any informed discussion is just how little evidence of this kind there is (p. 199; though see e.g. Naro 1981; Saladino 1990; Carvalho 2004). Even a glance at previous issues of this journal show that interactional sociolinguists have been at the party for some time, though what we really need is work that embraces the full remit (e.g. Coupland 2007). I begin with two key definitions which highlight some tensions within the paper, then revisit some relevant findings from the Glasgow project, i.e. what we have been able to identify in terms of patterns and relationships. Finally, I consider two inferences from this evidence, which are drawn from observations about linguistic detail and social meaning, which together take us beyond Sayers’ model to consider modelling possible processes, i.e. how language change could be affected by engaging with the broadcast media.

DEFINITIONS AND TENSIONS Media influence Sayers’ model is presented as ‘a framework for researching media influence in language change’. Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, he does not define either notion, though they are core to his proposal. It is extremely difficult to discuss media influence on language change because the remit of either concept is variable and depends so much on the perspective of the analyst. Should we

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 251 assume a ‘strong’ media whose content is difficult to resist, overriding everyday behaviour? Or are viewers in some way active, using their own experiences of the world to make sense of the media? More recent work in mass communication studies prefers the latter view, though with different emphasis and conceptualisation depending on the approach (e.g. McQuail 2010). Media effects research, using quantitative methods, has identified that media, for example media violence, is not ‘the cause ...or even ...the most important cause ...[but] one factor that contributes significantly to aggression and violence in our society’ (Bushman and Huesmann 2001: 223–224, their emphasis). Work on para-social interaction shows how viewers can develop strong emotional relationships with characters in media dramas (p. 187). At the same time, media studies research shows that viewers’ own real-world knowledge constrains and shapes interpretations – and hence the possible impact – of media (e.g. Philo 1999; see also cognitive psychological approaches, e.g. Gunter 2000). Extending these insights to language, I understand media influence as a broad concept encompassing a range of relationships and processes. Standing back, media influence can refer to the numerous relationships between different aspects of language presented in the media (Coupland’s/Sayers’ ‘mediation’), the appearance of similar elements in community language, and psychological engagement with those media, alongside other social factors which are likely to include interpersonal contact within and without the community. Moving closer, it can also refer to the processes entailed by speakers whilst engaging with broadcast media, which – given that spoken language comprises continual loops of perception and production (e.g. Kuhl 2010) – we would expect to be strongly constrained by personal experience of linguistic interaction. There is an additional difficulty that ‘influence’ entails direction and degree, neither of which may be very helpful for language, which brings us to the first tension in Sayers’ paper. Despite acknowledging the role of the viewer in filtering ‘media reality’ (e.g. by quoting Ang, p. 188) and reference to likely complexity behind a notion like ‘adoption’ (e.g. p. 204), his use of metaphors of strength (e.g. p. 188) and intensity (p. 205), together with the structure of his model – represented in Figure 2 – of media texts broadcasting variants to adopting communities, are reminiscent of a powerful media transmitting messages to passive audiences. And though he argues that the model is not intended to be deterministic (p. 203), the single arrowheads pointing only from media to community, together with their label ‘broadcast’, implies direction from media to speaker even more eloquently than influence. But I am more puzzled by an implicit quest for ‘true’ media influence, through which ‘broadcast’ alone should lead to the ‘[adoption] of innovations in discontinuous geographical communities’ (p. 202). The model’s focus on the role of the media, whilst perhaps an attempt to redress previous neglect, at the same time ignores not only the observation from media effects research discussed above, but also a key assumption within diffusion research itself,

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 252 STUART-SMITH namely that mass media and interpersonal channels are both involved in the diffusion of innovations (Rogers 2003). It is also odd, given the theoretical backdrop of Sayers’ presentation in terms of social networks and dialect contact, and their clear importance in historical language change (e.g. Milroy 1992), that these factors are so downplayed that the communities in Figure 2 are presented as entirely discrete. Surely these must be empirical questions for investigators, as are the kinds of social meaning that these variants might carry for their speakers (e.g. Eckert 2008), which is not included at all. In these respects, the model appears to be like a small section of a larger sociolinguistic model, whose other parts are not shown; it also highlights the extent to which the model is in fact theoretical (p. 203).

Language change The second tension arises with respect to the other key term, ‘language change’. In terms of potential media influence on language, what needs to be explained? People appropriating mediated catch-phrases from programmes into their discourse with their prosodic quotation marks still audible and which are well above the level of community awareness (e.g. Ayass and Gerhardt 2012)? Shifts of some traditional dialect features towards standard forms (e.g. Lameli 2004; Ota and Takano fc. 2014)?2 Or long-term shifts to the grammars of local varieties, which result from the rapid diffusion of innovations like quotative be like or TH-fronting, which may or may not be available for explicit social evaluation? The difficulty is that Sayers’ real interest is in understanding the role of broadcast media in the diffusion of global innovations (and especially be like), but the only substantial investigation to date that examines speakers’ media exposure and engagement with their linguistic usage, the Glasgow Media Project, looks at sound changes, which do show a trajectory of rapid acceleration over time and space, but they are not global.3 They are also at a different linguistic level, and possibly related to this, they are not available to the same level of explicit social evaluation and comment, as be like, for which speakers can easily identify stereotypical social types (‘Californian’, ‘Valley Girl’; Tagliamonte and D’Arcy 2007). These two changes have been linked by Milroy (2007) following Eckert (2003) as ‘off the shelf’ changes given their accessibility and the speed of their appearance, but is this sufficient? We consider some details of the Glasgow project below. In general, though, we will probably make more progress in developing our understanding of media influence on language change if we try to maintain a broad definition of what might be included. The underlying thread which connects the numerous different kinds of linguistic behaviour, where engagement with the media is thought to play a role, relates to social meaning. These aspects of each sociolinguistic system, at whatever linguistic level they might be, offer special stylistic resources for their speakers (cf. Coupland 2007 on be like). Modelling media influence clearly also needs evidence about the indexicality and

MEDIA AND DIFFUSING INNOVATIONS: SOME EVIDENCE FROM GLASGOW Sayers’ summary of the results of the Glasgow Media Project is largely based on a single paper, Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2010). Here I present a brief recap and update from more recent work (e.g. Stuart-Smith et al. 2013). The original purpose of the project was to investigate the potential role of television, especially London-based programmes, in the appearance of ‘Cockney’ phonological features in Glaswegian vernacular. The three features concerned were TH-fronting (e.g. [f]ink for think), DH-fronting (e.g. bro[v]er for brother), and L-vocalisation (e.g. peop[o] for people). We also wanted to evaluate any potential role for television in changes for which it had never been mentioned. These included vowel quality in a range of vowels, whose phonology and phonetic realisation is thoroughly Scottish, and the derhoticisation of postvocalic /r/ (e.g. car, card), which is a long-term, ongoing vernacular change, consisting of the gradual erosion of the articulated /r/ until words are fully nonrhotic (though still with Scottish vowel qualities). Negative evidence for the role of television would be as useful as discovering any significant relationships, since a major challenge for modelling the influence of media on language change is to be able to circumscribe how and why features might not be affected. As an interdisciplinary project across media effects, statistics and sociolinguistics, our assumption was that media exposure and engagement might be a contributory factor alongside a wide range of other social factors (see also Gunter this issue). This means that from the outset our expectations of what might constitute evidence for media influence for these changes did not align with Sayers’ implicit notion of media as a sole causal factor. Furthermore, we were aware from our previous research on 11 consonantal variables in the 1997 corpus, reported rather late in Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2007), that at least TH-fronting had been noted in Glaswegian since the 1950s, and was reported anecdotally by Macafee in the early 1980s. This also means that our research on these diffusing innovations could not provide any evidence for television as a factor in the actuation of these changes, since they arrived many years earlier. I note some key findings (see Stuart-Smith et al. 2013): 1. We compared the use of innovating variants in episodes of ‘media-Cockney’, such as EastEnders, recorded during the period of our data collection, with those found in our Glaswegian adolescents. The Glaswegians used more of the variants than the characters, and with differing social and linguistic constraints; the patterning of the innovations in Glaswegian is determined by existing local variation.

2. The innovating variants showed evidence consistent with apparent- and real-time change. They also showed the same kind of ‘inverted’ stylistic variation that had been found in the 1997 corpus, with increased use of innovations in wordlist speech, where local Scottish non-standard variants were effectively blocked by the reading task. Again, DH-fronting was almost exclusively observed in read speech. 3. An initial regression analysis did not find evidence to support Trudgill’s (1986) suggestion of ‘softening up’ in terms of attitudinal change promoting adoption: positive attitudes towards London-based programmes were not correlated with positive attitudes towards London accents (Stuart-Smith 2006). 4. A large-scale, multi-factorial regression analysis was carried out with the innovating variants as dependent variables, and some linguistic factors and a very large range of social factors as independent variables, for the entire adolescent sample. Linguistic factors were usually the most significant effects in the models, for example, TH-fronting in conversational speech is very likely in word-final position (where we also note that local [h], e.g. I [h]ink for I think, may not occur). After linguistic factors, significant social factors varied according to the degree of significance. Most significant was participation in specific social practices, such as altering school uniforms in favour of Glasgow street style. Strong psychological engagement with one drama, EastEnders, came next. (Self-reported media exposure, such as how many hours informants watched TV, was either not significant or negatively correlated.) Dialect contact with friends and relatives in England was significant in some models but less than social practices or TV engagement. Much weaker were attitudinal variables capturing positive attitudes towards London or a London recording. The regression models for the innovations in wordlist speech showed much higher explanation of variance than for those in conversational speech. 5. Similar regression analyses were carried out for the first two formants of the vowels, but these showed predominantly linguistic factors to be significant. The regression results for the derhoticisation of postvocalic /r/ was split according to speech style (Stuart-Smith, Lawson and Scobbie 2014). In conversational speech, nonrhotic variation appears to be constrained only by linguistic factors; no social factors were significant. This pattern of significance was like that found for the three vowels. But in the read wordlists, nonrhotic productions showed a similar pattern of significance to the innovations. Linguistic factors were most significant, but the model also included significant social factors, especially social practices and engagement with television (dialect contact with English speakers was not). 6. Two imitation tasks were carried out (Stuart-Smith 2006). One used picture cards to elicit first informants’ own productions, then how they

thought a character from EastEnders might say the words. The other was an acting task, during which informants watched a clip of a London- based, or Glaswegian-based, television programme, and then acted it out. In the first task, the alterations were very subtle and mainly to voice quality, with few segmental changes. The acting task revealed few audible changes to our informants’ usual Glaswegian vernacular accents, bar a couple of boys who shifted (oddly) to stage Scots to represent the EastEnders men. 7. A separate analysis considered the changes at the level of the individual, and qualitatively considered the usefulness of Rogers’ (2003) model of adopter category, individuals’ relative propensity to innovate (Stuart- Smith and Timmins 2010). The best fit was found for the most recent change, DH-fronting. An interesting finding was that strong parasocial interaction alone was not enough to predict usage of linguistic innovations; the most engaged informant who was also socially a ‘laggard’ used no instances of TH- or DH-fronting at all. How do these results fit with Sayers’ discussion? It was interesting to see that our original assumption in Stuart-Smith and Timmins (2007), that the Glaswegian adolescents who were leading the innovating changes had no contact with English English speakers, was not correct. The area is one of very low inward mobility, and our adolescent informants also showed low active mobility. But some experienced some passive mobility when relatives returned to Glasgow. Thus, the relationships of Glaswegian vernacular and (popular/ working-class) London do not fit the mediated innovation model in Sayers’ Figure 2, because the boundaries of these communities are in fact not discrete but permeable and even linked (arrows are needed between Source Speech Community and Adopting Speech Community). The situation may be different for the diffusion of global innovations, but it would be useful to consider carefully opportunities for contact with different kinds of community, alongside broadcast media, if carrying out a new study. Also, our original assumption that media factors might be observed as distinct factors alongside other social factors was confirmed. We interpret this as showing that engaging with broadcast media does play a distinct role in the acceleration of these changes, in conjunction with participation in shared social practices and, less so, with dialect contact with English speakers. (We consider qualitatively how this might work at the level of the individual in Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2010.) But, unlike Sayers, we do not think that recognising that other social factors are also involved means that media influence in the acceleration of these changes is ‘diluted’ (p. 188) or equates to ‘a more subdued assertion’ (p. 202). From the outset we had assumed that if factors to do with the television were significantly correlated with using innovative variants, these would appear alongside other social factors; the

POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF MEDIA INFLUENCE ON SOUND CHANGE Linguistic detail matters Sayers’ discussion of the Glasgow study, as well as many others on be like, frequently notes the focus on ‘linguistic detail’, but he does not report it. However, linguistic detail deserves closer inspection. The linguistic embedding of these changes is very strong indeed, and the comparison of linguistic constraints in usage between Glaswegian and EastEnders shows that the Glasgow variants do not mirror those of the media, they are local. Interestingly, this result for sound change is very similar to the observations made by Buchstaller and D’Arcy (2009) about quotative be like, who also uncover different linguistic and social constraints across varieties of English. These changes might look superficially as if they have been ‘taken right off the shelf’ (Eckert 2003: 395), but if they have, it is difficult to understand how, because the constraints of the two varieties are so different, and the Glaswegian forms are so thoroughly embedded into their local linguistic system. It looks rather as if these variants are now somehow being reinforced or enhanced through media engagement. The results for derhoticisation add more support for such a view. Postvocalic /r/ has been undergoing weakening of the primary apical articulation since at least the turn of the 20th century. Broadcast media have never been mentioned in conjunction with this change, but in read speech, engagement with EastEnders was a significant factor, along with participating in anti-school social practices, and being able to identify their local accent from a recording. If media influence is a factor in this otherwise system-internal change, it can only be interpreted in terms of the enhancement of existing variation, because the fine-grained phonetic realisations of the nonrhotic variants, especially the resulting vowel qualities, tend to be subtly different from those of English English. In fact, though it is still to be established empirically, it seems unlikely to me that parasocial interaction with characters in broadcast dramas alone could ever lead to the use of an entirely new realisation of a phonological variable. Studies on first language acquisition suggest that primary linguistic contrasts cannot be acquired without interaction (e.g. Kuhl, Tsao and Liu 2003). Taken together, reports or suspicions of the media being involved in accent change across a range of sociolinguistic contexts (e.g. Stuart-Smith 2011), point to shifts in existing accents (perhaps quite peripheral), or the development of additional accent variants. This in turn suggests that speakers may need to already have acquired a linguistic, and perhaps especially a phonological, system in order to parse media representations of language (cf. observations of

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 257 young children’s difﬁculties in parsing television narratives and content, Gunter and McAleer 1997). Media inﬂuence on speech may be rather the effective enhancement of existing variation. In this way, media may act as another means of enabling existing or latent variation to ‘bubble up’ into changes (see Joseph 2006).

Social meaning matters We have just seen that for both morpho-syntactic and phonological innovations, the similarities between variation on the media ‘shelf’ and in the community can be rather superficial. But both kinds of changes are highly amenable to stylistic variation, and associated with a range of social meanings, and could be construed as indexical fields (Eckert 2008), given the way they link locally-relevant meanings for speakers in everyday interaction with supralocal meanings or associations observed across much greater distances (Stuart-Smith and Ota 2014). For example, in Glasgow, the diffusing changes are more apparent in more performative speech styles, such as reading a wordlist to the fieldworker. DH-fronting was almost only observed in this speech style. The models for the innovating variants in read speech showed a higher explanation of variance, and a sound change which is not diffusing at all is linked to TV engagement in this style. All this is reminiscent of observations by interactional sociolinguists working on the appropriation of media language, such as Rampton (1995), who found that media-related crossing was more common at thresholds or boundaries in the talk. We suspect that speaker/viewers may make (subconscious) associations between stylised meanings represented in media language and their own experience of stylistic variation, as the drama unfolds before them. Thus if media influence occurs, it is not simply because the linguistic features are present in a media text, as in Sayers’ model, but because there are potential overlaps between linguistic features and social meaning in speaker/viewers’ own variety, with the media language that they are watching (Stuart-Smith 2014). That media influence both affects specific features and is so infrequent is probably because usually there is insufficient congruence in linguistic detail and social meaning, so media language is effectively blocked by the strong filter of actual language experience (Stuart-Smith and Ota 2014).

CONCLUDING REMARKS Responding to Sayers’ interesting proposal entailed returning to the Glasgow project, and so inevitably narrowing our focus to sound change. But the findings are interesting first because they confirm that, as in media effects research more generally, the profile of media influence for these changes is as a distinct factor alongside other social factors. Sayers’ model should probably be

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 258 STUART-SMITH expanded to admit more factors, including social practices and explicit acknowledgement of the possibility of dialect contact. The second point takes us beyond Sayers’ model towards processes. A closer look at the linguistic detail of these changes, in conjunction with social meaning, suggests that at least for sound change, the mechanisms underlying media influence are contingent on speakers’ own experience of linguistic interaction: Glaswegians parse London-based programmes through the strong dialect filter of being and speaking Glaswegian. Future researchers hoping to implement Sayers’ model in their own studies of media and diffusing innovations (or other changes) should take care not to lose sight of the importance of the local sociolinguistic context, and especially linguistic detail and social meaning, if they wish also to consider mechanisms of media influence. Sayers emphasises the scarcity of evidence for this venture. If we compare our understanding of media influence on language with that of other social factors, such as social class, or gender, the journey is hardly begun. We need far more studies in more contexts with different, and similar, features. We also need to know much more about the phonetic, linguistic and social processes that take place for speakers at the screen, just after the screen, and some time after the screen. There is a pressing need for experimental work to test the assumptions offered here, as well as for detailed ethnographies of social interaction and media engagement (with all kinds of audio-visual media, interactive and non-interactive). Sayers’ contribution makes this particular journey one which many can join, either along the paths that he has identified, or those which are mentioned here, or perhaps even more interesting, in discovering new ways altogether.

NOTES 1. I am very grateful to the editors for giving me the opportunity to respond to Sayers’ paper, and to the reviewers and Trish Brothers for their comments and help, but especially to Dave Sayers for sticking his head above the parapet, and making me think even harder than I already have been about these issues. I am grateful to Claire Timmins, who worked as Research Fellow on the project, and as collaborator subsequently, and to project collaborators Gwilym Pryce and Barrie Gunter. I am also grateful to the ESRC for grant no R000239757 for supporting the main body of data collection and ﬁrst analysis of this work in 2002–5. 2. Broadcast media have also been shown to play a role in learning vocabulary, for example, by children (e.g. Rice et al. 1990) and second-language learners (e.g. Charkova 2007). 3. It is not at all clear whether the reported instances of L-vocalisation which have been observed in many varieties of English could be considered as any kind of global diffusion (cf. Stuart-Smith, Timmins and Tweedie 2006); my feeling at present is that they are not, but further research especially on the distribution and phonetic quality of the reﬂexes is needed to resolve this issue.

REFERENCES Agha, Asif. 2003. The social life of cultural value. Language and Communication 23: 231– 273. Androutsopoulos, Jannis (ed.). 2014. The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. Ayass, Ruth and Cornelia Gerhardt. 2012. The Appropriation of Media in Everyday Life. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins. Buchstaller, Isabelle and Alexandra D’Arcy. 2009. Localized globalization: A multi-local, multivariate investigation of quotative be like. Journal of Sociolinguistics 13: 291–331. Bushman, Brad and L. Rowell Huesmann. 2001. Effects of televised violence on aggression. In Dorothy Singer and Jerome Singer (eds.) Handbook of Children and the Media. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage. 223–254. Carvalho, Ana Maria. 2004. I speak like the guys on TV: Palatalization and the urbanization of Uruguayan Portuguese. Language, Variation and Change 16: 127–151. Charkova, Krassimira. 2007. A language without borders: English slang and Bulgarian learners of English. Language Learning 57: 369–416. Coupland, Nikolas. 2007. Style: Language Variation and Identity. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. Eckert, Penelope. 2003. Elephants in the room. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7: 392–397. Eckert, Penelope. 2008. Variation and the indexical ﬁeld. Journal of Sociolinguistics 12: 453– 476. Gunter, Barrie. 2000. Media Research Methods: Measuring Audiences, Reactions and Impact. London: Sage. Gunter, Barrie and Jill McAleer. 1997. Children and Television (2nd edition). London: Routledge. Joseph, Brian. 2006. On projecting variation back into a proto-language, with particular attention to Germanic evidence. In Thomas D. Cravens (ed.) Variation and Reconstruction. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins. 103–118. Kuhl, Patricia. 2010. Brain mechanisms in early language acquisition. Neuron 67: 713– 775. Kuhl, Patricia, Feng-Ming Tsao and Huei-Mei Liu. 2003. Foreign-language experience in infancy: Effects of short-term exposure and social interaction on phonetic learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100: 9096–9101. Lameli, Alfred. 2004. Dynamik im oberen Substandard. In S. Gaisbauer and H. Scheuringer (eds.) Tagungsberichte der 8. Bayerisch-osterreichischen Dialektologentagung. Linz. September 2001. 19–23. Macafee, Caroline. 1983. Varieties of English around the World: Glasgow. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamin. McQuail, Dennis. 2010. McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory (6th edition). London: Sage. Milroy, James. 1992. Linguistic Variation and Change. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell. Milroy, Lesley. 2007. Off the shelf or over the counter? On the social dynamics of sound changes. In Christopher Cain and Geoffrey Russom (eds.) Studies in the History of the English Language III. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. 149–172. Naro, Anthony. 1981. The social and structural dimensions of syntactic changes. Lingua 57: 63–98.

Ota, Ichiro and Shoji Takano. 2014. The media influence on language change in Japanese sociolinguistic contexts. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.) The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. Philo, Greg. 1999. Children and film/video/TV violence. In Greg Philo (ed.) Message Received: Glasgow Media Group Research 1993–1998. London: Longman. Rampton, Ben. 1995. Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. Harlow, U.K.: Longman. Rice, Mabel, Aletha Huston, Rosemarie Truglio and John Wright. 1990. Words from ‘Sesame Street’: Learning vocabulary while viewing. Developmental Psychology 26: 421– 428. Rogers, Everett. 2003. Diffusion of Innovations (5th edition). New York: Free Press. Saladino, Rosa. 1990. Language shift in standard Italian and dialect: A case study. Language Variation and Change 2: 57–70. Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2006. The influence of media on language. In Carmen Llamas, Peter Stockwell and Louise Mullany (eds.) The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics. London: Routledge. 140–148. Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2011. The view from the couch: Changing perspectives on the role of the television in changing language ideologies and use. In Tore Kristiansen and Nikolas Coupland (eds.) Standard Languages and Language Standards in a Changing Europe. Oslo, Norway: Novus. 223–239. Stuart-Smith, Jane. 2014. Language and the influence of the media: A Scottish perspective. In Robert Lawson (ed.) Sociolinguistics in Scotland. London: Palgrave. 177–196. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Eleanor Lawson and Jim Scobbie. 2014. Derhoticisation in Scottish English: A sociophonetic journey. In Chiara Celata and Silvia Calmai (eds.) Advances in Sociophonetics. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Benjamins. Stuart-Smith, Jane and Ichiro Ota. 2014. Media models, ‘the shelf’, and stylistic variation in East and West: Rethinking the influence of the media on language variation and change. In Jannis Androutsopoulos (ed.) The Media and Sociolinguistic Change. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. Stuart-Smith, Jane and Claire Timmins. 2007. ‘Tell her to shut her moof’: The role of the lexicon in TH-fronting in Glaswegian. In Graham Caie, Carole Hough and Irene Wotherspoon (eds.) The Power of Words: Essays in Lexicography, Lexicology and Semantics. Amsterdam, The Netherlands/New York: Rodopi. 171–184. Stuart-Smith, Jane and Claire Timmins. 2010. The role of the individual in language variation and change. In Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (eds.) Language and Identities. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press. 39–54. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins, Gwilym Pryce and Barrie Gunter. 2013. Television is also a factor in language change: Evidence from an urban dialect. Language 1–36. Stuart-Smith, Jane, Claire Timmins and Fiona Tweedie. 2006. Conservation and innovation in a traditional dialect: L-vocalization in Glaswegian. English World Wide 27: 71–87. Tagliamonte, Sali and Alex D’Arcy. 2007. Frequency and variation in the community grammar: Tracking a new change through the generations. Language Variation and Change 19: 1–19. Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell.

Address correspondence to: Jane Stuart-Smith English Language/Glasgow University Laboratory of Phonetics 12 University Gardens University of Glasgow Glasgow G12 8QQ United Kingdom [email protected]

Discovering theoretical models to explain mediated inﬂuences on language

Barrie Gunter University of Leicester, United Kingdom

INTRODUCTION There has been an ongoing debate in sociolinguistics about the role played by the mass media in shaping changes in the lexicon and use of language. Most scholars in the field dismiss the proposition that the media have any influence, while others have taken the position that the media can have effects on the everyday language people use. Against this backdrop, Dave Sayers has opened up this debate and argued that there is sufficient evidence to indicate that these kinds of media influences can occur and that more attention should now be given to establishing a fresh approach that departs to some degree (although not totally) from traditional sociolinguistic methods to understand and measure these influences. This new approach needs to be informed not just by new methodologies but also by a revised epistemological and theoretical base informed by the extensive empirical research literature concerning the effects of mass communications media. The solution here is not for a radical new form of sociolinguistics but rather for a merger of disciplines with communications and media theory, deriving in particular from cognitive and behavioural psychology, being integrated with sociolinguistic analysis to forge a combined approach to the investigation of potential effects of speech portrayed in mass media on people’s everyday language. Some research of this kind has already begun, but still has a long way to go (Stuart-Smith 2011; Stuart-Smith et al. 2013).

SPREAD OF LANGUAGE FEATURES – MEDIATED OR NOT? In conventional sociolinguistics, there is acceptance of the idea that linguistic nuances from one geographical location can turn up in another. This phenomenon can take the form of the migration of specific words that originate in one dialect of the language and then spread to another. Without going into detail here, because the varied forms of this phenomenon (transference of words, dialectal pronunciations, and so on) have been outlined by Sayers, I want to propose that as a media researcher I would feel comfortable with the idea that local speech influences could conceivably flow

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 263 from media experiences that, for example, involve hearing actors in television programmes who speak the same language but in a different dialect from the viewer. There is no logical or theoretical inconsistency between this hypothesis and evidence from a vast body of extant empirical research that has demonstrated many different mediated verbal and non-verbal, social- behavioural influences among diverse communities of media consumers. Insofar as everyday speech represents an aspect of social behaviour, it can be conceived within media theory as a human activity that could be influenced by the mass media. A key question in relation to the speech characteristics that appear to spread from one part of the world to the next is ‘what is the mechanism of this process?’ Sociolinguists have often argued that linguistic features travel with people and that their transmission tends to occur through face-to-face conversations (Dion and Poplack 2007). This conception is undoubtedly true. But is it the only mechanism at play? The possibility that language changes can occur through mediated experiences has received some support among sociolinguists, but has generally been regarded as being restricted to the cultivation of ‘catch-phrases’ or ‘slang’ (Chambers 1993; Charkova 2007; Risager 2006). Nonetheless, questions have also been raised about the possibility that speech occurring in mass media outputs such as television programmes might play a part in promoting other more complex linguistic changes within specific communities (Buchstaller 2006a, 2006b; Buchstaller and D’Arcy 2009).

CAN MEDIA MODELS ENHANCE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF LANGUAGE CHANGE? Sayers identified five approaches that have already made reference to mediated language change in the context of language changes that have seemingly migrated from one geographical location to another – often on global scale. With the first four of these, the mass media received either tangential mention or were examined in parallel to real-world speech patterns without incorporation into a model that was equipped to measure media influences. Hence, there is ample evidence that linguistic patterns with a genesis in one geographical location can migrate to far distant localities and further evidence that patterns catalogued in television programmes also appear in everyday speech (Baird 2001; Macauley 2001; Winter 2002). However, these studies failed to conduct tests to demonstrate causal connections or even the possibility, through associative statistical analyses, that a mediated effect might exist (Buchstaller 2004, 2006a; Dion and Poplack 2007). One of the key weaknesses of all these approaches has been that they failed to use a model of analysis equipped to measure causal connections between sources of specific types of language use (whatever they may be)

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 264 GUNTER and the migration of nuances in pronunciation, lexicon or grammatical expression from one community to another. To do this, in the context of analysis of potential influences of mediated language use, we must collect data that demonstrates types and levels of exposure on the part of recipient communities to media messages conveying specific language features. We must then be confident that this media content was encoded and internalised and that other possible factors of influence on subsequent behaviour change were ruled out. Such models of analysis are normative in media audience effects research. Simply observing that certain new speech patterns have turned up in a specific community and that these forms of speech also appear in a television series that has been recently broadcast in the same location does not supply compelling evidence of a mediated effect. In media research, we seek evidence of a more direct link between exposure to relevant media content and a behavioural outcome while also controlling for other possible influences. This usually entails the application of carefully designed surveys of media audiences or intervention studies in which behavioural responses are measured in relation to specific types of media exposure that occur under controlled conditions (e.g. social experiments). This approach has been in short supply in sociolinguistics so far, although some recent headway has been made by one research group (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2007; Stuart-Smith et al. 2013).

CAN MEDIA EFFECTS RESEARCH APPROACHES PROVIDE A SOLUTION? Turning to the extant communications and media research literature there is every reason to believe that media texts such as movies and television programmes can influence the speech behaviours of people in the audience. To understand these effects, however, it is important to embrace relevant theoretical models that can explain how mediated experiences and subsequent behavioural responses intersect. Relevant methodologies should also be adopted that have been proven to yield the types of data needed to substantiate those theories. Theoretical models of media consumption and effects have evolved since the earliest research in this field appeared in the 1920s when the first mass speech broadcasts became established. Dominant early on was the view that the mass media could exert direct psychological effects on people usually in the form of persuasion to adopt mediated ideas and opinions. Later thinking shifted to an alternative viewpoint that such effects could occur but were in turn further mediated among audiences by other people in their social communities (Gunter 2000). A further view emerged that people acted upon media in terms of making choices about which media content to consume. Media effects could therefore be shaped by the underlying audience motives for media use (Katz and Foulkes 1963; Wright 1960). Later still, recognition was given to the importance of

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 265 internalised cognitive processing of mediated content by individual media consumers which could determine whether they adopted behaviours witnessed in the mass media (Berkowitz 1984). Over this period, media theorists have wrestled with increasingly sophisticated ideas about how people engage with and are influenced by the mass media (Gunter 2000). They also developed methodologies designed to test and to measure in precise ways degrees of association and causal connections between media experiences and real-life behaviour. These media research developments have relevance to the investigation of the role that might be played by spoken content in mass media on the spread of speech patterns from one geographical location to another. Within psychology, theoretical models from operant behaviourism were dominant in the 1950s and 1960s. In later decades, cognitive theory emerged to provide more complex models of media influences on behaviour. Initial behaviourist approaches offered explanations of media effects on human behaviour in terms of social learning theory. Media depictions of behaviour were conceived to serve as role models that provided examples of social actions that could be learned and subsequently copied by observers (Bandura 1965, 1983). In addition, it was envisaged mediated portrayals could trigger emotional arousal in observers creating psychological conditions under which specific types of behavioural response were promoted if social conditions evoked those kinds of behaviour. Most of the relevant evidence here derived from the study of mediated portrayals of antisocial or violent behaviour. It was widely believed that scenes of violent behaviour (including both physical assault and verbal abuse) could either be directly copied or could create an enhanced state of arousal promoting the use of violence by those media observers when provoked in real life (Berkowitz 1965; Berkowitz and Alioto 1973). There were further conditions that could determine whether and to what degree such media effects occurred. Observed behaviours in the media were more likely to be noticed and copied if they were seen to produce positive end results for the actors. Further, a narrative context in which specific behaviours were shown as justifiable also rendered them more powerful. The attractiveness of the actor (speaker) on screen emerged as another factor that controlled how much attention their behaviour received from observers (Maltby et al. 2005). Then the perceived degree of relevance of a mediated behavioural scenario to observers’ own lives was important. The more observers identified with scenes or actors in television programmes, for instance, the more likely they were to be influenced by them in terms of their own real-life behaviours (Feshbach 1976; Gunter 1985). During the 1970s and 1980s, theoretical thinking in psychology evolved, and operant behaviourism was superseded by cognitive theory. The aim of behaviourism was to create a science of human behaviour modelled on the laws of physical sciences where behavioural effects of interest were restricted to

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 266 GUNTER actions that could be externally observed and quantitatively measured. Growing recognition of the fact that with human beings, behavioural responses to real or mediated experiences were frequently controlled by internal cognitive processes meant that such factors might also provide relevant theoretical underpinning of research into the effects of mediated experiences. Behaviours observed in the media might be integrated into a person’s existing behavioural repertoire or rejected or alternatively stored away but never used (Gunter 2000). New behavioural models emerged that posited that behaviours observed on the television screen, for instance, could be learned and stored away in memory as ‘behavioural scripts’. This idea was articulated by the cognitive neo-association theory of behavioural effects of the media (Anderson and Bushman 2002; Berkowitz 1984). Hence, rather than learning specific actions seen on screen, observers internalised entire sequences of behaviour along with the details about the surrounding contexts and settings in which they were portrayed (Potter 2003). Such internalised behavioural scripts could also be accompanied by internalised concepts and beliefs about the real world based on repeated exposure to specific patterns of behaviour in the media. The emergence of cultivation theory in the 1970s and its subsequent theoretical and empirical development in the 1980s and 1990s embraced the notion that media such as television display stereotyped patterns of behaviour – often linked in idiosyncratic ways to particular demographic and socio-economic groups in society – that are learned over time and can come to distort people’s perceptions of everyday reality or lead them to adopt specific behavioural nuances that are believed to be appropriate to achieve specific end goals (Gerbner et al. 1980, 2002). In a further empirical validation of cultivation effects in which direct intervention methods were used, the psychological mechanisms that were believed to underpin this type of media influence were elaborated and theoretically linked to the concept of the ‘availability heuristic’ that was first articulated by cognitive scientists in the early 1970s (Kahneman and Tversky 1982, 1984; Tversky and Kahneman 1974). The core proposition underpinning this work was that repeated exposure to televised depictions of specific types or forms of behaviour could bring internalised representations of these actions to the top of mind. This phenomenon was also termed ‘construct accessibility’. It could render specific behaviours, behavioural scripts or thoughts about objects and behaviours more salient, and this in turn could create a false impression about the frequency of occurrence of specific phenomena in everyday life. Such effects could also be triggered even after a single exposure if that experience was sufficiently cognitively and emotionally engaging (Shrum 1996; Shrum and O’Guinn 1993).

The relevance of these theories of media effects in the current discussion stems from the fact that speech patterns represent forms of behaviour. As such, if specific types of speech pattern recur in a mass medium such as television, they could cultivate language-related constructs within viewers that encourage the adoption of those verbal behaviours. If those features are clearly different from anything the listener has heard before, they could stand out in a way that renders them particularly attention-grabbing or influential. I do not propose to go into details about specific linguistic utterances or speech patterns here, because I do not have the space to do so. For the purposes of theoretical modelling and research design, these language features can be conceived as behaviours that could be susceptible to influence by media representations of such phenomena.

CONCLUSION For the future then, a cross-disciplinary approach might be recommended that combines traditional linguistic analysis of speech patterns, applied both to everyday speech users and to media texts, with media audience research that adopts methodologies linked to relevant theoretical models designed to measure media exposure and behavioural (i.e. speech) effects. Research designs (e.g. experiments using controlled exposure to media texts) equipped to test cause-effect hypotheses directly should be combined with methods able to collect data based on self-reports from normative samples of media consumers about their media habits and speech patterns. Linguistic analyses are needed to classify and define target dependent variables (e.g. linguistically verified speech attributes) and to guide their measurement in media outputs to which research participants are exposed. Media theory can then be applied to define the nature of media content in terms related to prior research on media effects. The analysis of media speech outputs need to be further defined in terms of the settings in which they occur, the characteristics of media speakers, and other content factors known to mediate audience responses. Recent research by Stuart-Smith and her colleagues (cf. Stuart-Smith this issue) is illustrative of this approach but represents an early exploration in need of further theoretical and methodological refinements. Interest, here, centred on the potential effects of a popular televised soap opera set in London in which many characters displayed a ‘Cockney’ dialect (local to central London) on the speech patterns of people resident in Glasgow, Scotland, with a dialect quite different from any found in the south of England. The researchers measured a range of sociolinguistic factors in speech data obtained from young Glaswegian residents to detect any infiltration of dialectal characteristics from other parts of the United Kingdom. In addition, data were obtained from questionnaires and interviews about the types of

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 268 GUNTER people they had contact with locally and from other parts of the country, their attitudes to urban accents, and their leisure and entertainment-related activities including exposure to different types of television programmes and use of the internet. It emerged that some local Glaswegian participants had adopted dialectal speech characteristics of London ‘Cockney’ speakers, and others had not. Multiple regression models were used to identify the key predictors of language change here and these models revealed that a combination of factors may have been at play. These included amount of contact with people from outside their own locality who had different dialects from their own, and openness to other regional dialects and exposure to certain kinds of media content. In this case, reported exposure to and enjoyment of the London-based soap opera EastEnders emerged as a predictor for some (but not all) language changers (Stuart-Smith and Timmins 2007, 2009). Mere exposure to a televised soap opera was insufficient to produce significant language changes on its own. Viewers of this programme also needed to be emotionally engaged with the narrative and the characters (Stuart-Smith 2012). This is a well-known phenomenon in media audience research called ‘parasocial interaction’ and it represents a form of emotional and social attachment that viewers forge with favourite television characters that resembles, psychologically, a real friendship, even though it is not (Giles 2002; Rubin and McHugh 1987). In other media contexts, the potential of soap operas to influence the behaviour of viewers can be enhanced by their serialised nature, which encourages people to develop long-term relationships with the fictional characters and engage in repeat exposure. Whether this opportunity to develop a remote psychological relationship with on-screen actors over time is critical to their influence on speech behaviours in viewers needs further examination. In conclusion, in the empirical investigation of media effects on speech sociolinguistic analyses are necessary as part of any wider investigation of media effects on language change, but they are not sufficient. Suggestions that media could have played a part in introducing new speech patterns to specific communities because media texts to which those communities may have been exposed conveyed those linguistic features does not provide a sufficiently powerful empirical basis to draw conclusions about mediatised causalities. At the very least, it is also necessary to know whether individual members of a receiving community had exposure to relevant media texts. Even establishing that such exposure occurred is also not sufficient because of evidence that the nature of media consumers’ involvement with media texts, and whether other non-mediated factors were at play, are further factors.

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Address correspondence to: Barrie Gunter Department of Media & Communication University of Leicester Bankﬁeld House 132 New Walk Leicester LE1 7JA United Kingdom [email protected]

Model answers: A rejoinder to the responses to the mediated innovation model

Dave Sayers Shefﬁeld Hallam University and Swansea University, United Kingdom

As a long time listener, ﬁrst time caller to the Journal of Sociolinguistics, I was surprised and delighted that my contribution should grow into a discussion forum with such a distinguished line-up. The invited responses have judiciously highlighted important snags and wrinkles in my argument; but still, happily most of them express an underlying harmony with the basic tenets. This is a constructive and positive place to be, not just for me but for sociolinguistics overall if we are to progress in mapping out this new research landscape. In all, this feels like a robust discussion of a contentious area of research, and I am pleased with how constructive it is. As the various responses forbearingly point out, I have inevitably overlooked some relevant research, particularly Tagliamonte’s recent work on social media and Stuart-Smith’s latest article, which both authors helpfully summarise in their responses – a highly instructive extension to the discussion. Hopefully, from here we can progress towards a rigorous interrogation of the role of mass media (and niche media, and social media, and so on) in language change. In the remainder of this short rejoinder, I offer a few brief remarks in relation to each of the invited responses, aiming to continue the spirit of constructive dialogue and clariﬁcation.

To begin at the sharp end, if anyone were feeling convinced about the role of the media, Peter Trudgill provides a characteristically refreshing glass of water in the face. This may seem an unusual reaction but it is a genuine pleasure to see Trudgill in full stride, guns blazing, having none of it. I think his contribution is indispensable in holding our feet to the ﬁre, nudging (shoving?) us to provide clearer evidence and never to rush to judgment. I hope Trudgill continues to engage with this topic in a penetratingly critical manner. In particular, I hope he reﬁnes his scepticism and engages more closely with the empirical details. He cautions: ‘We would be ill-advised to suppose that the vocalisation of /l/ in Australia ... results from diffusion from London; and I see no reason not to apply the same degree of caution to

Glasgow’ (p. 218). It may be a little unfair to infer that the research in this field has ‘supposed’ any given factor. What comes across in Stuart-Smith and her team’s Glasgow project, and in Tagliamonte’s recent work, is a painstaking refusal to suppose anything, instead meticulously interrogating which factors provide evidence of influence, and to what degree. If Trudgill could bring his eminent expertise to bear on those new forms of data, then some truly productive insights could emerge. Later, he asserts: ‘Repeated exposure does indeed come from the media. But one does not interact verbally with the TV. ... To repeat Labov’s point, diffusion is purely a matter of who interacts most often with who’ (p. 220). Again, this doesn’t really do justice to the interdisciplinary contribution of media audience research – usefully summarised in Gunter’s response – and the way media engagement can constitute parasocial interaction. True, this may not involve volubly chatting to one’s TV set, but it appears to have some of the cognitive features (and effects) of interpersonal interaction, in some instances. Backed up by targeted surveys, questionnaires and ethnographic methods, followed by statistical analyses of interrelating factors, there does seem to be better evidence available than Trudgill’s response would suggest. It will greatly benefit the ongoing debate if critical voices like his can zoom in and really scrutinise the details.

I found Tagliamonte’s summary of her recent research into the inﬂuence of internet shorthand on spoken language to be an illuminating extension of the debate on broadcast media. As she notes, any headline focus on mass media may be somewhat behind the times, and she points out the dramatic changes that have occurred since around 2004 in terms of internet usage. This timing is perhaps the nub of the issue: in my article I reviewed publications up until 2013, but the actual data collection in Approach 5 – which showed greatest methodological interrogation of mass media – ended in 2004. A whole slew of new ways to interact and engage with linguistic innovations has sprung up since then, fuelled by emergent technologies. For my part I think television is still worth investigating, but it will be essential to combine this with an ever- expanding set of other factors, exactly as Tagliamonte urges. The mediated innovation model is designed to be overlain in time with these additional factors, and hopefully our discussion here will provide a spur to explore more diverse methodologies and datasets.

Kristiansen asks: Does the claim say that what happens in media inﬂuence is qualitatively different from the inﬂuence which happens in face-to-face interaction? That would be a very interesting claim, indeed, and a claim which one would expect to be explicated in the model. (p. 234)

That was certainly my intended claim, although if one hoped for explication in the mediated innovation model itself, one would probably be disappointed. I think this was explicated more by the findings of the Glasgow study in Approach 5. In drawing up an epistemological model, my intention has been to map out a framework for future research to explore these various influences. Kristiansen questions the use of ‘epistemological model’ for the mediated innovation model, preferring ‘research model’ – in order to focus more on the conceptualisation and operationalisation of ‘media influence in language change’. I had intended ‘epistemological model’ to mean something along the lines of ‘a model of what we can know’ about this subject, but his suggestion of ‘research model’, emphasising concepts and methods, seems perfectly well reasoned. Kristiansen goes on to review the possible effects of Danish national media on language use in Denmark. This seems an exciting terrain for developing empirical measures of media influence. I sincerely hope that his future work on variation in Denmark helps to address the blind spots highlighted in the mediated innovation model and in the research field on which it is based – particularly a ‘preoccupation with Anglophone societies’ and shortfall at ‘the level of language varieties’ (p. 240). Whilst presenting the ideas behind my article in various places over the last seven years, I have had engaging discussions about possible applications around Europe and beyond – not least Arabophone countries. My overtures to future researchers, therefore, very much include those in non-Anglophone societies. I look forward to seeing the results of Kristiansen’s work in this area.

After expediently highlighting some important terminological and conceptual quandaries, Androutsopoulos suggests that the mediated innovation model ‘moves towards, but does not quite achieve a turning point in theorizing the complex and multi-layered impact of media ...on sociolinguistic developments in contemporary societies’ (p. 244). If the mediated innovation model acts as a brick on the road towards a fuller understanding of these multifarious inﬂuences, then all this has been time well spent. Androutsopoulos goes on to urge extension of our collective focus to other languages; and, recalling Kristiansen’s response, I agree this extension is an essential next step. He later argues – echoing Tagliamonte’s response – that progress is also vitally needed to understand the inﬂuence of ‘participatory networked communication’ (p. 246) online. It is extremely constructive to have these concerns highlighted, and solutions proposed. Progress on these matters depends on it.

Stuart-Smith provides a useful elaboration on the meaning of media ‘inﬂuence’, and – in tandem with Gunter’s response – important scrutiny about the terms of debate. In raising concerns about the nature of the mediated innovation model, she illustrates the risks run by representing complex social

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 275 processes with a small diagram. ‘Sayers’ model should probably be expanded to admit more factors, including social practices and explicit acknowledgement of the possibility of dialect contact’ (pp. 257–258). I had hoped that the model did admit those, both in the text and in the way the diagram uses a dotted backdrop to represent social networks permeating within and between distant speech communities. In this I intended to emphasise the overlapping influence of media and dialect contact, even between apparently remote locations. If I gave an ‘implicit notion of media as a sole causal factor’ (p. 253), then I articulated things rather unclearly. But if there was any ambiguity, then her clarification is welcome. If nothing else, she rightly redoubles the warning about being rashly deterministic in considering media influence. She also aptly summarises the mediated innovation model as ‘a small section of a larger sociolinguistic model’ (p. 252), ready to be overlain by a wide range of other influences. Stuart-Smith shrewdly scrutinises the semantics of a term like ‘broadcast’, which could invoke a sense of distant directive control of inert recipients, swaying like docile reeds in the breeze. One of my greatest fears about the mediated innovation model, and the diagram especially, is ‘broadcast’ being seen as a one-way beaming of linguistic innovations into viewers’ minds and mouths. I fully endorse Stuart-Smith’s cautions about the complex web of causal pathways, amongst which media can only play a part. I am reminded of the etymology of the word ‘broadcast’, which began life in the early nineteenth century as a compound word meaning to scatter seeds widely. That feels like a good analogy for the partial role of mass media: scattering seeds which might grow in their new location, but reliant on local conditions on the ground, developing differently in each place, and always dependent on human movement. By this flowery metaphor I mean to echo Stuart-Smith’s assertion that sociolinguists must ‘take care not to lose sight of the importance of the local sociolinguistic context, and especially linguistic detail and social meaning, if they wish also to consider mechanisms of media influence’ (p. 258).

Gunter beckons us powerfully towards genuine interdisciplinary dialogue, crossing big divides in academia for mutual enrichment. This is great to see. That invitation for interdisciplinary, multi-methodological analysis, involving diverse datasets and analytical techniques, was really the most fundamental purpose of my article. And the motivation for that – in line with Gunter – is not to back up predetermined notions of media inﬂuence, but to propose better ways of interrogating that possibility. It is heartening that Gunter has been invited into this discussion, and that he is already a part of this interdisciplinary endeavour (having worked in Jane Stuart-Smith’s team). Particularly important is his encouragement of ‘carefully designed surveys of media audiences or intervention studies in which behavioural responses are measured in relation to speciﬁc types of media exposure’ (p. 264). I was once cautioned as an undergraduate that if you

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 276 SAYERS search hard enough for a pattern then you will probably find it, or convince yourself that you have. Gunter’s methodological insights urge not only incisive interdisciplinarity, but also caution and rigour: controlling for extraneous influences, pinning down what role the media might have, and staying comfortable with the idea that there may be no role at all. Likewise, I have hoped to advocate treading a path carefully between open dismissal and hasty embrace of media influence, instead mobilising diverse methods to get to grips with the matter, systematically, intricately, and agnostically. Gunter’s extensive review of media audience research, and proposals for future interdisciplinary work, show just how far we have to go. This is even before we grapple with the influence of media forms rapidly superseding broadcast media – as urged by Tagliamonte in her response. I hope Gunter’s input continues, and I hope sociolinguists continue to reach out across disciplines, to enrich understanding of these overlapping causal pathways on language change.

As a summative thought, recalling the interdisciplinary overtures from Stuart- Smith and Gunter, and the innovative approaches suggested by Kristiansen and Tagliamonte, I couldn’t agree more with Androutsopoulos when he asserts: ‘Integrating insights from a range of research ﬁelds is, in my view, indispensable in order to develop a broader research programme on sociolinguistic change in mediatized societies’ (p. 247). This collaborative clarion call feels suitable as both an end to our current discussion and a foreword to this nascent area of research. We are in exciting times in sociolinguistics, perched on the precipice of a very new way of understanding the relationship between language and society. Stay tuned.

Address correspondence to: Dave Sayers Department of Humanities Shefﬁeld Hallam University Shefﬁeld S1 1WB United Kingdom [email protected]

Language change, social change, sociolinguistic change: A meta-commentary

Nikolas Coupland Copenhagen University, University of Technology, Sydney and Cardiff University

Allan Bell and I founded the Journal of Sociolinguistics to provide a forum where different treatments of the language-society interface, less or more traditional, could come into productive dialogue with each other, to help carry forward a more comprehensive, better-integrated, more self-critical discipline of sociolinguistics. The main themes woven through the present suite of papers – language, change, media – couldn’t be more pertinent to sociolinguistics or to this journal’s concerns. Thank you to Dave Sayers and to the journal’s current editors for opening up a space where we can debate these themes. Thank you to the respondents for bringing their individual perspectives and expertise to bear on a thought-provoking lead paper. And yet ... if we try to assess, on the basis of this collection, what sociolinguistics has to offer in the area of language, change and media, if we try to identify the principles according to which sociolinguistics engages with change and media, it is the narrowness of the ﬁeld and the lack of theoretical and empirical integration that are most striking. Fundamental concepts being dealt with, including ‘language’, ‘change’ and ‘media’, are open to different interpretations, and different contributors have different priorities in relation to them. The set of papers does an excellent job of exposing these divergences. Some contributors make valiant efforts to build a theoretical infrastructure that might lead to better integration in the future – that, of course, is Sayers’ explicit intention, in proposing his model. But my own reading of the papers leads me to think that we need to ‘start further back’, not only to model (and so to consolidate) the best of current approaches, but also to consider alternative ways of construing the ﬁeld. So, what does ‘the sociolinguistics of change’ refer to? How does sociolinguistics theorise change? What matters, sociolinguistically speaking, about change, and why? Sayers builds his model as a set of alternate approaches within the dominant sociolinguistic paradigm, where ‘language change’ and ‘linguistic innovations’ are central keywords. Most of the responses to the lead paper are contained by, and subordinated to, these formulations too. (These keywords appear in the titles chosen by Tore Kristiansen, Jane Stuart-Smith and Peter Trudgill, as well as in Sayers’ title.

Interestingly, Sali Tagliamonte’s title elides ‘language change’, perhaps because it can be taken for granted, but her second sentence refers to ‘the way language is changing’. In his title Barrie Gunter opts for ‘mediated influences on language’, but his first sentence mentions ‘changes in the lexicon and use of language’.) There is no doubting, therefore, that we are dealing here with change in the shape and placement of something called ‘language’, which then gets specified as something infinitely more particular than the term ‘language’ might imply. In this set of papers language mainly refers to a rather small set of phonological forms, plus the quotative BE + LIKE. Language change then refers to the ‘innovative’ use of these forms in places (like Glasgow) where the forms may not have been detected previously, or where their contexts of use or distributions were previously different. There is plenty to argue over within this paradigm and in relation to these examples, even before we get to considerations of ‘media’. Should we consider some of these features to be ‘global linguistic variants’ or not? Is BE + LIKE an instance of a wider category of features that ‘change’ in the same way, or is it a rogue feature? The most important differences in interpretation are surely the ones represented in the responses by Trudgill and Kristiansen, who hold to mechanistic and motivational accounts of language change, respectively. Language (in the particular sense of that term in play here) changes either as a simple consequence of the density of people’s interactional involvement with others or because of specific patterns of social evaluation that ‘drive’ them to adopt new features or styles of speech. Interpretive tussles of this sort are very cogently expressed by Sayers and by his respondents, in ways that I am sure will be helpful to other researchers in the language change paradigm. But I would like to dwell for a moment on what is broadly shared here, in relation to the concept of ‘language change’. I will then go on to argue for a concept of sociolinguistic change that brings language change and social change into dialogue with each other. In the set of responses it falls to Jannis Androutsopoulos to point out that framing language change as ‘structural changes at the level of sociolinguistic variables within a single language’ is a very considerable restriction. In many ways it has been, and is, a particularly useful restriction, because it has allowed variationist linguists, and William Labov most spectacularly, to find new ways of addressing what Trudgill here calls ‘the fascinating and important changes posed by language change for linguistic scientists’ (p. 221). But the language change paradigm severely restricts accounts of both language and change. As Androutsopoulos notes, it sustains a view of language as a specifiable system of particular forms and features, mainly at the level of dialect, which, under certain conditions, can be shown to diffuse from one environment to another. Trudgill is particularly clear about this. He recognises a hierarchy among linguistic features which have different degrees of significance for the study of language change. He distinguishes phonological and ‘truly grammatical’ innovations from lexical innovations, considering BE + LIKE to be a lexical

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 279 feature and, to that extent, ‘trivial as a linguistic phenomenon’. Trudgill is like, ‘I don’t need to even go there’. A ‘featural-systemic’ view of language is difficult to reconcile with the priorities of interactional sociolinguistics, or indeed with contemporary variationist research that foregrounds style, genre and the local contextualisation of indexical meaning (cf. Coupland 2007). These perspectives are not within the scope of classical language change research, although Stuart-Smith’s summary of her most recent research with colleagues in Glasgow intriguingly shows that aspects of interaction, style and social meaning do need to be taken into consideration to explain their multi-faceted empirical data (cf. Stuart-Smith 2011). But the general question that arises for language change research is where and how to locate ‘language’ that might be deemed to be changing. Whose language, in relation to which of the contextualisation demands and opportunities that sociolinguistics has been able to specify? In some of the papers there is the suggestion of a covert norm having settled around this issue, in the assumption that change should be sought out in the vernacular speech (if this can be defined) of working-class young people in specified speech communities. But even if we work to a specification of this sort, it surely requires a suspension of disbelief to work with such a small-scale and contextually thin account of language, in the interests of reducing language and language change down to quantifiable concepts. For other reasons too, the status of ‘the social’ becomes attenuated in classical language change research. Labov and Trudgill’s conception of interactional density is of course a social one, in the same way that ‘the vernacular speech of working-class young people’ is a social one, and so are many of the categories that Sayers fits into his model. But how deeply does the social reach into models of language change? There is a sense in which the privileging of featural-systemic linguistic change necessarily excludes some key social considerations. In the language change paradigm, society is ‘where language change happens’, but we are often dealing with linguistic changes that have no necessary social significance in themselves. The phonetic profile of a particular group’s speech may change over time in qualitative or quantitative respects, and this is sufficient evidence of language change. Yet, there may be no demonstrable associated change in social meaning. The group might not be perceived, or perceive itself, to have changed its place in any social matrix in any socially significant way, and the research design may have no means of demonstrating this. Indeed, it is often necessary to assume that social contexts have not changed, if the empirical design compares separate cohorts of speakers over time. For example, the formal shape or distribution of a linguistic feature that carries a particular social class indexical value at Time One may have changed at Time Two, but the findings are muddied if we want to also argue that the meaning of social class has changed in the interim, and social class is known to be a rather malleable social attribution (Rampton 2006; Snell 2010). Language change research does not speak to social change.

Stuart-Smith and her colleagues certainly do go looking for social factors that might be significantly associated with linguistic changes, and the sophistication and detail of this sort of quest is inspiring. Stuart-Smith is emphatic that ‘social meaning matters’ (p. 257). But even here, the research doesn’t primarily set out to find socially meaningful change. In his response, Kristiansen comes at this same issue by a different route when he argues that language change is based in social forms of subjectivity. He operationalises subjective meaning as a group-level phenomenon, located in shared ideological beliefs, in the social judgements that young people make of their peers, collected under experimental conditions. Kristiansen gently takes Labov and Trudgill to task for their commitment to a sort of social automatism, which he contrasts with his own but also (he says) Sayers’ belief that we need to appeal to language-ideological processes (which are matters of social cognition) to understand and to explain language change. Gunter’s socio-psychological perspective inclines him this way too. Labov’s reticence to look for explanations of language change in social evaluations and identities is certainly puzzling, particularly because at one prominent place in his writing (Labov 2001: 357–363) he points to similarities between change in language and change in female fashion. ‘Fashion leadership’, he says, ‘offers the closest parallel to linguistic change’ (2001: 357) and he cites studies that show fashion leadership among women being associated most closely with youth and gregariousness and with high education and wealth. Even though Labov is interested in what he sees as objective social factors underpinning fashion leadership, it would be difficult to argue that adopting the clothes trends of others is not based on social judgements and interpersonal comparisons of attractiveness. My argument so far is simply that, if we try to gauge what sociolinguistics has principally offered to the interface between language and change, we see a strong and well-defined paradigm, centred on ‘language change’, in which (for cogent empirical reasons) a highly restricted, featural conception of ‘language’ is fused with a rather asocial conception of both ‘language’ and ‘change’. But concurrently, sociolinguistics has engaged with change in a radically different and thoroughly social sense, traces of which are also apparent in the present collection. I am thinking of a broad field that we could refer to as ‘language and social change’, with language and globalisation being its most visible field of concern to date (e.g. Blommaert 2010; Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Coupland 2010; Fairclough 1992, 2006; Pennycook 2007). More than ten years ago I suggested (in a probably inapt metaphor) that sociolinguistics was ‘late getting to the party’ of globalisation research (Coupland 2003), and that is clearly no longer the case. Attention to globalisation across the humanities and social sciences was stimulated by people’s growing awareness of social change – economic, social and cultural change linked to increasing mobility, complexification, inter-dependence of communities and reflexivity in social life. Sociolinguists recognise that many

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 281 aspects of these changes are as much linguistic as they are social, or socially significant in their linguistic dimensions, although of course they reach well beyond ‘language change’ of the sort considered in the present collection. But as Sayers notes, it is in this new climate of awareness of global inter- connectedness and social change that variationist interest in ‘global variants’ and trans-community language change, and hence the role of ‘media’ in language change, has surfaced. All the same, there is a stark contrast between the social and socio-political motivation of (multi-disciplinary) globalisation research and the muted sociality of language change research. The mediated diffusion (or not) of specific linguistic features of English speech between urban centres is not the most socially significant manifestation of linguistic globalisation. On the other hand, what undoubtedly is a significant manifestation of globalisation, and a key facet of contemporary social change in general, is mediatisation. Following Androutsopoulos (in press), I take this term to refer to the rapidly increasing reliance of ever-more dimensions of social life on technologically mediated systems and practices (cf. also Busch 2006; Jaffe 2011), what Livingstone (2009) refers to as ‘the mediation of everything’. Tagliamonte’s response vividly captures the impact and dynamism of mediatisation, and the ways in which contemporary media are experienced as plural and hybrid. But it seems important to insist (as Androutsopoulos and Stuart-Smith do in their responses) that ‘the media’ cannot be viewed as something separate from ‘language’, and that phrases like ‘the media’s influence on language’, even though they set the agenda for the current collection, are not entirely well-formed. There is no reason why ‘language change’ should not include new formats and tendencies of linguistic and discursive practice carried in and through technological media themselves, although we know that this is not conventional usage. BE + LIKE may be a lexical feature (as Trudgill suggests), but its sociolinguistic significance might well be as a key discursive resource through which heightened performance in social interaction, especially amongst young people, is achieved (see Buchstaller 2014 for a broad treatment of BE + LIKE). The dualistic framing of ‘media influencing language’ is also troublesome if it implies that the two ‘modes’ of language use are in some fundamental sense qualitatively different, particularly when it is reasonable to speculate that off-screen/ off-air speakers, at least in some groups and situations, show framing characteristics that we have traditionally associated with on-screen/ on-air sociolinguistic performances. Thinking of television-watching as parasocial interaction (as Sayers and Gunter do here) blurs the conventional distinction between agentive broadcast performances and a pattern of presumedly passive ‘real-life’ media consumption. The causality implicated in the concept of ‘influence’ aligns with the variationist approach to modelling social dimensions as factors that may or may not predict linguistic outcomes. This is why the present collection of papers are mainly organised around the question of

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 282 COUPLAND whether ‘media’ are or are not a ‘social factor’ that motivates ‘language change’. Mass-mediated talk not only has its own diversity but its own contextual contingencies. A less dualistic conception considers all interaction to involve mediation – all talk and all indexical meaning has to be shaped into local contexts of projection and consumption, under particular constraints. Different formats of technological mediation certainly impose specific normative frameworks of their own on interaction, but the resources we need to analyse ‘broadcast talk’ and ‘non-broadcast talk’ are not different in kind. In reaction to what seems to be an overly restrictive concept of language change and a rather limited programme of work on linguistic aspects of social change, I have suggested that we might explore a concept of sociolinguistic change (Coupland 2009, in press). This concept: a. challenges the theoretical dualism that underlies two traditions in the study of change (language change and social change) and brings them together; b. offers more perspective on the social value of language change within the language change paradigm itself; c. opens a window on changing language-society relations that are not consequential on changes in linguistic forms, features and distributions (e.g. changes in language ideology); and d. offers a framework that is sensitive to historical and epochal conditions (e.g. what it means to be a speaker of a minority language under post-nationalist conditions, cf. Jaffe and Oliva 2013). In Coupland (in press) I discuss five theoretical dimensions that are implicated in sociolinguistic change, and then discuss ‘vernacularisation’ as a media-relevant sociolinguistic change (in relation to standardisation [Kristiansen and Coupland 2011], which is of course a core concept in sociolinguistics). Here, I can only briefly introduce the five dimensions. They are: • discursive practice; • language ideology; • social normativity; • cultural reflexivity; and • media(tisa)tion. Each of the five dimensions is subject to change. In fact, it is reasonable to assume that sociolinguistic change is endemic in language-society relations, but it more particularly implies changing relations among the five different dimensions. Change over time in the formal makeup and distribution of speech styles (the classical concerns of the language change paradigm) is part, but only part, of the discursive practices dimension. Emphasis on ‘practice’ (rather than ‘speech or ‘sound’ as in ‘sound change’) broadens the analytic perspective by implying far more elaborate contextualisation processes than those typically

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd DEBATE: MEDIA AND LANGUAGE CHANGE 283 considered in language change research. For example, informalisation is a sociolinguistic change that changes the footing for interpersonal relations in public (cf. Bell 2011), as are other changes in the selection and deployment of speech styles or ‘registers’ (Agha 2007). The interface between discursive practices and language ideologies – culturally consolidated value-judgements of how language and discourse sit within social environments – is a rich seam of sociolinguistic change. As examples, we could take well-theorised instances of language-ideological changes over time in what is deemed to be ‘proper’ or ‘refined’ language (Bourdieu 1991; Elias 2000). Ideologies can run ahead of or behind existing social norms at the level of practice (Hymes 1974). As Kristiansen argues here, changing language ideologies can build pressure for language change, but this multi-layered sociolinguistic process goes well beyond ‘language change’ in the canonical sense. The concept of sociolinguistic change invites us to examine language-ideological values and priorities, and to keep reassessing relationships between norms of discursive practice (‘how things generally work nowadays’, sociolinguistically, context by context) and potentially shifting value structures. One instance is the historical shift to validate youth experience and transnational performance norms in popular song in the 1950s (Coupland 2011). Although it is a less familiar sociolinguistic concern, cultural reflexivity is central to the experience of language-related change; the concept gives us perspective on when and how sociolinguistic change has social significance. Reflexivity is a component of Greg Urban’s theoretical account of socio-cultural change, in his discussion of metaculture and ‘how culture moves through the world’ (Urban 2001). As with ‘language’ and indeed with sociolinguistic variables in the classical sense, many cultural changes happen in a technical and descriptive sense, but they are not salient to community members. Urban argues that culture only truly moves through the world by virtue of people’s reflexive awareness of change at a ‘meta’ level. Metacultural awareness is visible in evaluative discourses about cultural forms and practices, and we can count metalinguistic discourse within these. This leads to the conclusion that investigation of metalinguistic and metacultural discourses should be part of the account of sociolinguistic change. They are part of sociolinguistic change. Media(tisa)tion certainly includes the process of technological change, where the advent of diverse new technologies both facilitates and demands new discursive literacies and practices. As I suggested earlier, this means that mediatisation is itself not only a social change but a complex of sociolinguistic changes, whose full diversity and complexities we have yet to discover. As Tagliamonte points out, there is a good deal of enthusiasm among sociolinguists to understand opportunities and constraints associated with ‘new’ (social and interactive) media, and for good reason. But a different point of departure is to recognise that all language is mediated, but that technologised mediation enriches and complicates how we experience sociolinguistic diversity and meaning (cf. Androutsopoulos 2011). The

© 2014 John Wiley & Sons Ltd 284 COUPLAND challenge is to understand how mediatisation is changing the terms of our social engagement with language. If we look at the present collection of papers through the lens of sociolinguistic change, it becomes obvious that ‘media influence on language’, and the manner in which this conception has been put to work in the language change paradigm, represent only one corner of the sociolinguistics of change. But across the papers, there are repeated suggestions that this broader framing of research questions is both possible and necessary: • Sayers on the limits of speech community and territoriality as bases for language change; • Tagliamonte on the historical periodisation of language norms and linguistic practices in relation to rapidly evolving communication technologies; • Gunter on cultivation theories of media influence; • Kristiansen on the ideological appeal of ‘dynamic’ Modern Copenhagen speech and its link with changing speech norms; • Stuart-Smith on the importance of social meaning and contextualisation in linguistic innovations; • Trudgill on language death and dialect death (which are clear and radical sociolinguistic changes); • Androutsopoulos on globally mediatised appropriations of English and on translingual syncretism, and indeed on the importance of a broader sociolinguistic framing of change. Stuart-Smith is undoubtedly right to say that ‘media’ need no longer be treated as ‘an elephant in the room’ (Eckert 2003) in connection with change. This, by the way, is another elephant, a friend for the elephant called ‘authenticity’, as discussed in a 2003 issue of this journal (volume 7 issue 3). But I have tried here to ask questions about the nature of ‘the room’ that the language change paradigm allocates to media. What sort of ‘living quarters’ does the ‘media’ elephant inhabit? Are we giving it enough ‘room’? My suggestion has been that the current ‘room’ for media in sociolinguistics is unnecessarily claustrophobic, and that the concept of sociolinguistic change leads us away from such unnecessary confinement.

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Address correspondence to: Nikolas Coupland Department of Scandinavian Research University of Copenhagen Njalsgade 136 DK-2300 København S Denmark [email protected]