Date: 2004-12-11 10:00 am (UTC)
There are fewer regional accents now than there were fifty years ago, because of broadcast media; that's true. But try the experiment of listening to a thirties radio show, and see if you can hear the linguistic differences. They are there. I think the changes in accent would have been much more pronounced without broadcast media than they were with it, but that doesn't mean there was no change.

I think that broadcast media has slowed the rate of linguistic change in terms of accents. It has also, as you mention, leveled the playing field so that there are fewer accents to deal with. But, and this almost negates the other two, it has sped up the introduction of new, specialized, loan or slang words into the language. Twenty years ago, "access" was a noun. "Yada yada" was something you heard in certain neighbourhoods of NYC. "I ain't got no more" was bad grammar on at least two levels. You get my drift.

Ten years ago, there was a clear dividing line between print and broadcast media. Then the internet became a force, and all of a sudden, we're seeing linguistic change in the written language at a rate that hasn't happened in centuries. At the moment, it's confined to the young or undereducated users, but it's there and it will become a force for change over the next two decades. I predict that written English as we know it will have changed considerably in a hundred years, much the way it did between Chaucer and Shakespeare, because of the influence of the Internet and the linguistic shift that it is creating.
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