How Television Affects the Way We Speak

Speech Television has a significant influence on the way that we speak. Entertainment is a strong cultural influencer of how we communication, and television has for decades been among the most prominent entertainment mediums in our society. Our speech patterns are influenced by the norms of our society in that not only do we imitate the way we hear others talk, but we also learn from it. Stamou et al.

(2012) note that television is often a leader in changing societal norms, and this influence extends not only to the way we talk but how those ways change our view of the world around us. Profanity is a good example to use, because of television's longstanding ban on the use of profanity. Specific words were long-deemed obscene (a few still are) and were not allowed by the FTC on public broadcast.

In that way, television essentially defined the line between "civilized" and "uncivilized" speech, and the utterance of any of those banned words was deemed to cross that line. In some societies with different television rules, those words might not be considered to be as offensive and might be more socially acceptable. Beyond profanity, television also influences speech coding and accommodation. Certain subjects were for a long time taboo on television, so addressing them directly was not possible. Coded speech would instead be used to describe issues of race or sexuality.

That coded speech eventually became normalized in society, because of its use in television. When rules governing such directness, and profanity as well, were relaxed, these forms of speech became more socially acceptable. Now in polite conversation somebody's sexual orientation can be mentioned directly, albeit in specific accommodating language. An interesting way that television does not affect speech patterns is that people do not replicate the perfections of television speech.

Professionally written speech in programming is generally free from error, stutters, grammatical mistakes, malapropisms and other elements that are common in speech. In addition, television characters often indulge in soliloquy to an extent uncommon in modern speech. The influence of television in speech, therefore, is only partial. We only absorb norms of language from television, as opposed to norms of speech. We do not learn to speak like newscasters or characters, but we will use words the same way, and we will use the same words.

Television helps to define the stratification of speech, but not its form. There are two bases for this. The first is that people take their cues about speech from their surroundings. This is why accents and slang become regionalized, for example. The second base is that influencers that cut across a wide swath of society will have a greater degree of influence than those that do not. Shakespeare's neologisms have entered the English language because his work is widely-read.

Any lesser known contemporary would have had a much smaller influence on the English language today. It is evident that television is a strong cultural influencer because of its ubiquity. Thus, it has a noticeable influence on our speech, at least in terms of.