Summary myth 15

TV Makes People Sound the Same

Why and how languages change isn’t really known, but a lot of people ( students, colleagues, newspaper reporters or even dinner-party guests) know exactly why the changes take place. It’s because of television. Sociolinguists see some evidence for the mass playing a role in the spread of vocabulary items. When they look deeper at the language change – sound and grammatical changes – the media have no significant effect at all. The media can make words more popular than others, but can’t change grammar or sound. White and black people from the same city sound different and they all watch TV. It is more likely that we pick up things from travelers, salesmen, neighbors and work-mates from distant places, they speak to you and maybe unconsciously you borrow some features from their speech and they do it with yours.