Beyond ‘media influence’

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; Journal of Sociolinguistics 18/2, 2014: 242–249