ABSTRACT
Much of our regular language activity takes place in direct, person-to-person situations; in dialogues of one kind or another, or in correspondence. In addition, most of these personal encounters are interactive, two-way affairs in which we alternate between the roles of producer and receiver. But not all our language activity is of this kind. Some of it, and an increasing amount in complex, modern societies, is of a more impersonal kind, which involves most of us only as receivers, never producers, and which addresses us not as individual persons but as members of an undifferentiated mass, the audience for what are popularly called ‘the media’. In this chapter we propose to look at the kind of language variation to be found in the various media and to discuss the effect media language has on the language as a whole.
