MEDIA USE OF ENGLISH

Canada has a federally funded national broadcasting arm called the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), with both television and radio branches, including short-wave transmissions to Canadian military installations overseas. As a federal institution, the CBC is constitutionally bilingual. The form it takes is actually divided, with English-language and French-language (called Societé Radio-Canada) networks independent of one another under the aegis of the Ministry of Culture. Virtually all regions of the country can receive broadcasts in both languages. In addition, there are two private-enterprise national television networks, both English. Newspapers use the language of their communities. For example, Toronto has three daily newspapers, all English, and Québec City has two, both French. Of the major cities in the French-English bilingual belt, Ottawa has three dailies, two English and one French, and Montréal has four, one English and three French. All major cities publish newspapers and broadcast in various immigrant languages as well as the official languages.

CONCLUSION

The main historical thrust of the last fifty years, in the broadest perspective, has been the compression of space and time. Rail and sea travel are supplanted by air travel and jet propulsion, postal and telegraph communication by fax and e-mail, gas and electrical cooking by microwave, radio and phonography by television and laser disk, abacuses and adding machines by calculators and computerized spreadsheets, short wave antennae by satellites, scalpels by laser beams, carbon copies by photocopies, linotype by photo-plates, stroboscopic motion pictures by virtual reality. In 1964, when Marshall McLuhan said that the world was becoming ?a global village, ? his words had the ring of science fiction. Now, a few decades later, they seem very close to the literal truth.

Such global proximity will inevitably affect the way we speak. The consequences are not yet visible (or audible), but it is possible to project from discernible trends into the future. One likely result is that the various and different standard English in Canada, the United States, England, Australia, Scotland, and elsewhere will someday be superseded by an accent that is somehow neutral with respect to all of them. Sociolinguists are beginning to understand some of the necessary conditions that would give rise to an oceanic English.

On the one hand, we know for certain that accents are not transmitted by mass media. Listeners or viewers can be exposed to endless hours of speech on radio or television without significantly changing their own accents or grammars (Chambers 1998d). They may adopt some vocabulary items, and they may develop a tolerance for the media accent and even an admiration for the users of the accent, but they still sound like themselves. For that reason, Newfoundlanders in the outports, for instance, have retained their indigenous accents after more than fifty years of hearing mainland accents daily on the CBC.

On the other hand, we know for certain that accents are altered by face-to-face interactions between peers. People who move from one end of the country to the other come to sound?more or less?like their new work-mates or playmates. Their proficiency in the new accent is determined partly by age. For people over 14, the adopted accent will always be less than perfect, so that they will never sound exactly like natives even though they come to sound quite unlike the people they moved away from; for people under seven, their adopted accent will sound just like the natives; and for people in between seven and 14 it is impossible to predict how fluent they will become.

Now that Canada has become post-colonial both historically and spiritually, CE is likely to undergo a great many linguistic changes. They will come not only from global networking. Modern technology extends our reach around the globe, but in another sense the globe has come to Canada. The largest cities and towns are cosmopolitan; they make neighbours of people of diverse creeds and colours. The majority of the Canadian population no longer traces its ancestry to either the Loyalists or the British Isles. The integration of diverse peoples into the social fabric will have subtle effects just as the integration of the Scots and English did in the 1850s.

REFERENCES

1. Bailey, Richard W. (1981) ?Haliburton?s eye and ear.? Canadian Journal of Linguistics 26: 90-101.

2. Bloomfield, Morton W. (1948) ?Canadian English and its relation to eighteenth century American speech.? Journal of English and Germanic Philology 47: 59-66.

3. Chambers, J.K. (1986) ?Three kinds of standard in Canadian English.? In In Search of the Standard in Canadian English, ed. W.C. Lougheed. Occasional Papers 1. Kingston: Strathy Language Unit. 1-15.

4. Chambers, J.K. (1998c) ?English: Canadian varieties.? In Language in Canada, ed. John Edwards. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 252-72.

5. Labov, William (1991a) ?The three dialects of English.? In New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change, ed. Penelope Eckert. New York: Academic Press. 1-44.

6. Trudgill, Peter, and Jean Hannah (1982) International English: A Guide to

7. Varieties of Standard English. London: Edward Arnold.

Date: 2016-06-12; view: 151