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Programme: accepted abstracts

Abstract ID: 311

Part of Session 155: Changing linguistic norms in the audiovisual media (Other abstracts in this session)

Sociolinguistic change, vernacularisation and British media

Authors: Coupland, Nikolas John
Submitted by: Coupland, Nikolas John (University of Technology Sydney and Cardiff University, United Kingdom)

Language standardisation implicates a fusion of linguistic and social changes, for which the phrase ‘sociolinguistic change’ is apt. This is also true of the converse process, which can provisionally be labelled vernacularisation (or destandardisation, already theorised by Tore Kristiansen and others). There are prima facie reasons to believe that a process of vernacularisation (which remains to be fully clarified and evidenced) is ongoing in aspects of contemporary social life inBritain, particularly in and through popular media. Existing treatments by Lynda Mugglestone and Asif Agha make this general case, but they mainly interpret it as linguistic change, according to formal/ descriptive criteria (pointing to new features entering Received Pronunciation) and distributional criteria (pointing to more attested use of vernacular varieties in public life).

            I develop a range of criteria for analysing vernacularisation as a mediated process of sociolinguistic change, suggesting that formal/ descriptive and distributional criteria are relevant, but not in themselves sufficient. Following Agha’s general semiotic principles, evidence of sociolinguistic change should be based in identifying at least (a) new indexical relations constructed in, for example, TV and radio performances, and (b) new discourses of indexicality through which media consumers make sense of the class-related speech variation they encounter in those media.

            In relation to (a) I draw attention to some particular, arguably new, indexical relations characterised in contemporary British TV broadcasting – dialect-bricolage constellations, social role-exchange programme formats, and several new ways in which Received Pronunciation and vernacular voices are severally associated with ‘sociolinguistically surprising’ circumstances of social context. In relation to (b) I analyse discourses of indexicality connected to two specific media episodes, one from BBC Radio 4 and one from BBC 1 television. Each episode thematises ‘posh speech in the media’. Online discussion threads relating to each episode show that commentators tend to reject the indexical values that sociolinguists have up to now associated with RP and vernacular varieties. Like the new broadcast indexicalities themselves, commentators’ accounts suggest a general process of vernacularisation at the level of language-ideological engagement with mass media.