ABSTRACT
Since the advent of audio(-visual) mass media-the phonograph, then radio, sound cinema, and finally televisionhopes and fears have been expressed about their potential effects on the language used in the communities they serve. On the one hand, if good speech were used uniformly in the media, the pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar used in everyday interpersonal interaction might be improved, should listeners take media speakers as behavioral models (Franklin, 1929, p. 315). On the other hand, if the speech heard in these media were not kept to sufficiently high standards, the language of the speech community might be degraded (Parsons, 1936, p. 27). Both positions generally assumed that, because the same linguistic messages would be heard by all media consumers regardless of regional and social differences in local speech varieties, there would, over time, be a leveling of these differences with each new generation of speakers,
This double-edged potential for influencing the language of a community is still believed to be one of the powers of television. Some teachers point to television as a source of models that speakers of nonstandard varieties might emulate to enhance career opportunities (Robbins, 1988). Others (and perhaps some of the same educators) have lamented that television provides numerous examples of “bad” language spoken by popular media figures, which are taken up by viewers and incorporated into subsequent face-to-face communication (Vann, 1991; “Mouths of babes,” 1992).
