27.3301, Review: Socioling: Androutsopoulos (2014)

[The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST]

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3301. Wed Aug 17 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3301, Review: Socioling: Androutsopoulos (2014)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry,
                                   Robert Coté, Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Michael Czerniakowski <mike at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2016 11:16:00
From: Dave Sayers [dave.sayers at cantab.net]
Subject: Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36185917


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3363.html

EDITOR: Jannis K. Androutsopoulos
TITLE: Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change
SERIES TITLE: De Gruyter linguae & litterae 36
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Dave Sayers, Sheffield Hallam University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

With 22 chapters across six sections, Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change
would be a monumental accomplishment for a team of editors, let alone just
one. Accessible to senior undergraduates yet useful to researchers at all
levels, Jannis Androutsopoulos’ book gives a comprehensive overview of
research in this emerging field. Section I ‘Framing the Issues’ has three
chapters which effectively make up a tripartite introduction. Androutsopoulos
begins Chapter 1 by describing a few mill stones familiar to the neck of
anyone researching language and the media: that researchers in subdisciplinary
silos don’t talk enough; that many linguists simply deny any substantive role
for the media in language change; and that, by contrast, the public at large
basically assume that language change is driven in whole or part by the media.
To these challenges Androutsopoulos offers up his book. This chapter further
explains the rationale for the six sections of the volume. The overall purpose
of the volume is to argue, by mobilising a diverse set of methodologies, that
understanding the link between sociolinguistic change and media needs to
include influence at multiple levels. Because of space considerations, I
confine my discussion to ten chapters: five consecutive chapters, then five
chapters taken at random. I also combine summary and evaluation of those
chapters below.

EVALUATION

Chapter 2 (I give chapter numbers here for reference; they are not actually
numbered), ‘Mediatization: A panorama of media and communication research’
(Andreas Hepp) aims to “outline the present status of mediatization research
and its relevance for sociolinguistics” (p.49). Hepp reviews some
terminological matters (mediatisation, medialisation, mediation, etc.) and
related epistemological debates. A particular strength is the comparison of
how research in different countries, with different linguistic makeups, can
contour the use of alternative terminology. The chapter relates various
milestones in the history of mediatisation research, focusing on the
“institutionalist” and “social-constructivist” perspectives. Hepp raises a
fundamental point, always worth reiterating, that despite such differing
viewpoints, all “reject an understanding of “mediatization research” as
“effect research”” (p.52); that is, nobody assumes a linear beaming of
linguistic change from the TV into people’s minds, and mouths. Perhaps one
criticism is that the chapter is slightly dry. This is a contentious area of
research, and any history of ideas can be enlivened with some details of the
more heated debates. The chapter ends with the most important overture of all,
for further collaboration “between media and communication studies on the one
side and sociolinguistics on the other” (p.62).

In Chapter 3 ‘Sociolinguistic change, vernacularization and broadcast British
media’, Nik Coupland contrasts two broad types of language change:
‘standardisation’ and ‘vernacularisation’. He sees the latter as much less
well defined than the former, but that the two have “always existed in a
tension with” each other (p.86). Destandardisation indicates only the
“weakening … of standard language ideology” (ibid.). To this,
vernacularisation adds “a more positive valorization of vernacularity” (p.85).
And it is this ideological shift that brings the discussion around to the
media. Coupland focuses on British broadcast media and changing attitudes
towards, and use of, regional and non-standard varieties on the BBC. The
discussion is not awash with primary empirical data, and this could be seen as
a shortcoming, but Coupland develops such an intriguing range of searching
questions that the chapter makes for a substantive contribution just by
spurring new thinking and opening new avenues for research. For example: “It
would remain true that most class-linked British accents are deemed non-viable
in “serious” news-presenting roles. A more productive focus might be on …
correspondent roles … where “seriousness” and professional expertise are …
prerequisites … but where accents are more variable and dialect indexicality
seems to be increasingly less salient” (p.89). The chapter is almost like a
catalogue of fascinating possible PhD ideas.

Section II ‘Media influence on language change’ begins with Chapter 4 ‘Does
mediated language influence immediate language?’ (Tore Kristiansen). He
contrasts “immediate language” and “mediated language”: the former “occurring
in the context of face-to-face interaction”, the latter “based on some
technology that ‘liberates’ the transmission/construction of meaning from the
contextual constraints of face-to-face interaction” (p.99). The chapter
compares the role of writing and media (especially TV) in contouring attitudes
and influencing language change in Denmark and Norway: countries with “very
different standard–dialect constellations” (p.101). For Denmark he concludes
“that writing has had limited direct influence on immediate language” (p.110),
though more on language ideology, and consequently on “ordinary everyday
language” (ibid.). He goes on to ask: “Does speech mediated by broadcast
technology have an influence on people’s immediate language?” (ibid.). He
reviews the conspicuous correlation of the rise of TV and social and
geographical mobility alongside reduced dialect diversity and increased
standard language ideology since the 1960s, and ends up asking: “How on earth
(including the western-most small town of Vinderup) does that happen – if not
by exposure to broadcast media?” (p.118). The Danish case is contrasted with
the increased use of dialects in Norwegian national broadcast media. He
concludes that “the broadcast media have beyond doubt made a crucial
contribution to strengthening ‘dialect ideology’ in the Norwegian population”
(p.121) – backed up by attitude surveys on dialects. This is all knowledgeably
argued, and he makes an engaging side argument urging “a less Anglo-world
focused discipline” (p.113). His discussion also includes various little gems
like the long-established convention that it is “forbidden by law for
Norwegian teachers to correct the speech of their pupils” (p.109). But, even
though his argument is cautiously limited only to indirect influence of media
on language change, for sceptics of media influence the evidence may still
feel a little too circumstantial. Compelling though the various
sociohistorical correlations are, correlation is not causation.

A firmer empirical bite into the media engagement cake is provided in Chapter
5 ‘Media models, ‘the shelf’, and stylistic variation in East and West:
Rethinking the influence of the media on language variation and change’ (Jane
Stuart-Smith and Ichiro Ota) which compares possible forms of media influence
in Glasgow (Scotland) and Kagoshima (Japan). The authors give a brief but
comprehensive historical overview of research into media effects generally,
and develop a more nuanced interdisciplinary methodology for understanding the
partial role of mass media in language change (answering the interdisciplinary
overture from Chapter 2). In Kagoshima, reading tasks based on texts from
different media genres (e.g. news reporting) demonstrate respondents’
abilities to deploy different aspects of e.g. Standard Japanese, but also
media genres such as anime. The Glasgow section explores “the diffusion of a
set of consonant features associated with London English, including
TH-fronting … and L-vocalization” (p.151). Evidence is reviewed of increased
dialect contact with London over the 20th century, as a precursor to the
contemporary changes under discussion. A multi-methodological exploration then
shows that viewing – but more particularly emotionally engaging with –
London-based TV had an impact on use of some (by no means all) London-based
variants, principally those that already had some presence in (and
compatibility with) the existing local sociophonetic context. This ultimately
delivers most of the explanatory power back to the speech community, and
face-to-face interactions. Further details are explored about how different
repertoires might be used for different stylistic purposes. Generalised
conclusions are drawn comparing the two case studies, about the partial role
of media engagement. This seems the closest that sociolinguistics has come,
methodologically, to empirically demonstrating the role of media engagement.
It is perhaps frustrating that data collection in these two case studies was
limited to within Japan and the UK respectively. If and when these
methodologies are applied to more conspicuously global innovations (such as
quotative ‘be like’), exciting new insights will doubtless arise.

I move ahead now in my random sample to Section III ‘Media engagement in
interactional practice’. Chapter 9 ‘Multilingualism, multimodality and media
engagement in classroom talk and action’ (Vally Lytra) examines “the
intersection of multilingualism, multimodality and media engagement in
classroom talk and action in a Turkish complementary school in North London”
(p.245). The chapter reports a micro-level ethnography of one 10-year-old
student, investigating his communications with friends and his participation
in classroom activities. The link to the media comes from the ubiquity of
mobile phones, and the consumption of, and discussion about, global music
genres. This broadens the empirical scope of the volume beyond mass media and
into the more personalised consumption, distribution, and adaptation of media
using mobile devices and the internet. Anyone who has recently met a child
capable of operating a phone will justifiably anticipate a chapter awash with
rich ethnographic insights, exploring the interface between the linguistically
conservative expectations of a school designed to reproduce an ethnolinguistic
group, and the expansive creativity of online communication. Moment to moment,
these children take their own linguistic background and meld it together with
contemporary Turkish and American rap music, mashing them up to make something
linguistically and culturally new, turn by conversational turn. This is the
strength of Lytra’s chapter. Another strength is a healthy deference to data
(quoted at length), and clear, accurate analysis.

Moving on to Section IV ‘Change in mass-mediatized and digitally mediated
language’, Chapter 13 ‘Tweets in the news: Legitimizing medium, standardizing
form’ (Lauren Squires and Josh Iorio) “examines the tensions between “new”
text-based digital media and “old” text-based mass media” (p.331), and a
“major tension” between the “vernacularity” of the former and the
“heavily-enforced language standards” of the latter (ibid.). They focus on the
way tweets are used within mainstream media reporting. As the chapter title
succinctly foreshadows, although they find increasing acceptance of Twitter as
a legitimised source of e.g. political endorsements, nevertheless broadcasters
still cling to enforcing editorial standards, “with the vernacularity of the
medium [Twitter] more commonly erased, rather than highlighted, over time”
(p.334). The authors note trends in the way tweets are used as sources in
different reporting domains (sports and entertainment), and how, over time,
tweets became a less “novel and exotic” source of information (p.340). A range
of examples shows journalists variously apologising for the “funky
punctuation” (p.344), “misspellings” (ibid.) and so on in tweets, illustrating
the twitchy embrace of tweets alongside persistent standard language
ideologies. The authors go on to assemble “a diachronically organized corpus
of reported tweets in both the entertainment and sports domains” (p.345),
showing a decrease over time in the number of nonstandard features in reported
tweets – also breaking this down into different types of nonstandard features,
and again comparing sports and entertainment reporting. Explanations are
ventured for these patterns. It might have been useful to include research
interviews with a sample of sports and entertainment reporters, or even just
one each, since these explanations are empirically less well supported than
the identification of trends. Another limitation, not acknowledged at the
outset or flagged as an area for future research, is the geographical and
linguistic scope, namely “U.S. newspapers and newswires from 2006 through
2011” (p.338). One is reminded of Kristiansen’s call for more cross-linguistic
research (Chapter 4). Nevertheless, the chapter constitutes a stimulating
corpus analysis.

Moving ahead again in my random sample to Section V ‘Enregisterment of change
in media discourse’, Chapter 15 ‘Revising the “journalist’s bible”: How news
practitioners respond to language and social change’ (Colleen Cotter) examines
the Associated Press Stylebook to understand journalists’ own views of
language change, style and usage. Editions in three different decades are
compared to track the changes in these views. One minor caterwaul is a rather
frustrating semi-quantitative phrasing throughout the analysis, e.g. “Some
things do not change”, “Most of the Stylebook changes I note in my corpus”
(p.382), “relatively few” (p.383), “Taken together, the examples indicate”
(p.393). These hint at quantitative trends, and the overall suggestion is of
generalisable results, concluding: “The data show the degree to which there is
an ongoing conversation or metatalk about language within the news profession”
(p.392). But the analysis is never actually quantified. The chapter is an
interesting exploration of a sample of professional discussions about media
language use, but its claims are a little over-stated at times. The same
nagging concern as in Kristiansen’s chapter heaves back into view here: that
language and media research can fall short of providing precise empirical
evidence for the actions of real people. A related issue is that, though the
author claims that the Stylebook is “at the elbow (or on the screen) of every
mainstream news practitioner” (p.380), this is not really backed up. There is
information about subscription levels, the Stylebook’s own promotional
messages (e.g. that it is “the self-described “journalist’s bible””, p.372),
and a few testimonials from editors; but it would have been helpful to see
more substantive evidence that individual journalists actually pay the
Stylebook any mind, day to day. Still, part of the data involves the “Ask the
Editor” section of the Stylebook (a kind of dialogue with journalists), which
provides something of a link with the everyday profession.

Chapter 17 ‘The objectification of ‘Jafaican’: The discoursal embedding of
Multicultural London English in the British media’ (Paul Kerswill), brings us
back to firmer empirical territory, with a corpus analysis of online
commentary surrounding Multicultural London English (aka ‘Jafaican’). There is
a (very slightly questionably motivated) section focusing only on the
user-generated website UrbanDictionary.com, followed by a more robust analysis
of newspaper content using Nexis UK to generate a corpus spanning 2006-2012.
Some terminology is a little opaquely defined – e.g. “discourses, put simply,
are ‘ways of talking about something’” (p.428) – but mostly readers are
treated to “a case study of the mediatization of a language variety in real
time” (p.428) delivered in Kerswill’s usual judicious and informed style.
Analysis centres on the way “Jafaican” (variant spelling “Jafaikan”) is used,
including concordance testing to examine contexts of use. There follows more
fine-grained analysis of the way Jafaican is discussed in these newspapers in
relation to the older non-standard London variety Cockney, perhaps being
displaced by MLE, amid familiar conflations of language with migration,
displacement, race, authenticity and so on – one might say dog-whistle
journalism, though Kerswill is more diplomatic. Other sections include media
enregisterment of Jafaican and its peculiar absence outside “media discourse
and readers’ online comments” (though this point is not strictly backed up),
as well as moral posturing over language decay and educational hindrance.
These latter sections of the chapter are based on more isolated media
quotations, but provide a lucid qualitative elaboration of the corpus
analysis.

My random sampling finishes in Section VI ‘Mediatized spaces for minoritized
languages’, and Chapter 18 ‘Circulation of indigenous Sámi resources across
media spaces: A rhizomatic discourse approach’ (Sari Pietikäinen). She
examines “new types of crossings, mixtures, and norms for mediated indigenous
language practices” (p.515), deploying an interdisciplinary
philosophical-sociolinguistic analysis of Sámi languages in “a range of media
spaces, including Sámi television news, Sámi television comedies, press
coverage on Sámi programmes, and social media discussions of these programmes
… complemented by ethnographic data” (pp.515–516). Pietikäinen begins by
briefly charting the history of Sámi language revitalisation, and the role of
Sámi media, before laying out the way “[m]ediated Sámi spaces can … be
understood as a complex set of spaces and their relationships” (p.519). The
emphasis is on the way such media spaces can spur linguistic creativity,
innovation, “new language practices, and even users” (ibid.). The chapter is
part empirical investigation, part intellectual treatise centring on nexus
analysis: “a form of transdisciplinary, multidimensional discourse analysis
that emphasises the simultaneous coming-together of experiences of
participants, circulating discourses, and interactional normativities in any
moment of language use” (pp.521–522). As this quote suggests, the chapter is
partly a hike through some rather dense academic prose. But rich
understandings emerge of, for example, the ideological stance of subtitling
vs. dubbing, language purism, essentialism, linguistic threat and protection –
followed by the way some of these tropes are sent up in a popular Sámi comedy
TV show (an illuminating complement to the prior analysis). Analysis of social
media usage, though a little sporadic, adds intriguing further insights on new
spaces for minority language use. One difficulty with the chapter is the
occasional hint that mediated uses of Sámi languages might increase their use
in certain ways (e.g. “new language practices, and even users” as noted above
– p.519). Pietikäinen cannot be unaware of the perennial concern to increase
the use of not only Sámi but many other minority languages around the world,
so it is a little tantalising to infer such a possible positive effect without
really delving into it. Still, overall the chapter offers a fascinating window
into these “[m]ediated Sámi spaces” (p.519).

In my sample of reviewed chapters, some felt a little under-integrated into
the book as a whole, perhaps particularly 9 and 15, not least because they do
not mention ‘mediate/ise/ation’ at all (terms so painstakingly defined in
Chapters 1-3). Overall the book and its sections are tightly arranged, but
terminological coherence just sometimes felt a little lacking. Given the large
number of chapters accepted into the volume, perhaps the editorial knife could
have been wielded more liberally to produce a leaner and more focused volume.
But then, what harm in delivering more than was promised on the cover? These
are enriching extras in a way.

Sections II-V each end with a ‘Commentary’, a little like a conference panel
discussant. This is deftly arranged, and the calibre of the commenters is
without doubt: in order, Isabelle Buchstaller, Ben Rampton, Jürgen
Spitzmüller, Barbara Johnstone, and Helen Kelly-Holmes. Their commentaries are
invariably meticulous; and although mostly designed to summarise and
inter-relate the chapters of each section, they also provide plentiful fresh
insights. At first glance Section I (the three-chapter introduction) appeared
to be missing the customary summary of all the book’s chapters, but these
commentaries provide a refreshing alternative.

The challenges noted at the beginning of this review should be reason enough
to congratulate Androutsopoulos for attempting to gather research on this
topic. But there are more reasons, namely the exquisitely high quality of most
chapters, from some of the foremost experts in the field. One should never
forget that an edited book does not edit itself, and the scope and quality of
the chapters owes a great deal to its editor. Naturally there remain some
issues to grouse about, some of which are discussed above, but mostly I have
been playing devil’s advocate. This book is an outstanding contribution to the
field.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dr. Dave Sayers is a Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the Department of
Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University, and Honorary Research Fellow in the
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. His ORCID number is
0000-0003-1124-7132; his website is http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

        Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3301	
----------------------------------------------------------