Cover not available
Article published In:
Thematising Multilingualism in the Media
Edited by Helen Kelly-Holmes and Tommaso M. Milani
[Journal of Language and Politics 10:4] 2011
► pp. 562–586

Sociolinguistic diversity in mainstream media

Authenticity, authority and processes of mediation and mediatization

| California State University Long Beach

This article explores the attribution of authority and authenticity to speakers of “accented” or dialectal speech portrayed in the American documentary on dialectal diversity, “Do You Speak American?”. The focus is on the role of mediation and mediatization in this fundamentally political and ideological process: that is, the extent to which particular sequences of the documentary foreground the work of representation being done by media producers. The central claim made in the analysis is that speakers’ authenticity is produced through the backgrounding of this work of representation, but that speakers are attributed greater authority when they are depicted as having some control over how their images and speech are mediated and mediatized. Speakers who have both authority and authenticity benefit, it is argued, from media verisimilitudes: they are understood by media audiences as having control over the believable rather than the “real”.

Keywords: mediatization, mediation, authority, authenticity, language, media
Published online: 5 December 2011
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.10.4.05jaf
References
Agha, Asif and Wortham, Stanton
(eds) 2005 Discourse across speech-events: Intertextuality and interdiscursivity in social life. A special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1).Google Scholar
Alvarez-Caccamo, Celso
1996 The power of reflexive language(s): Code displacement in reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics 25(1), 33–59. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauman, Richard
2004 A World of Others’ Words. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bauman, Richard and Briggs, Charles
1990 Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 191, 59–88.
Branston, Gill and Stafford, Roy
2002 The Media Student’s Book. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Briggs, Charles and Bauman, Richard
1992 Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2), 131–172. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bucholtz, Mary
2003 Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3), 399–416. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chun, Elaine W.
2001 The construction of white, black, and Korean American identities through African American Vernacular English. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1), 52–64. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coupland, Nikolas
2003 Sociolinguistic authenticities. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3), 417–431. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Culler, Jonathan
1975 Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dunn, Cynthia
2006 Formulaic expressions, Chinese proverbs, and newspaper editorials: Exploring type and token interdiscursivity in Japanese wedding speeches. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 16(2), 153–172. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Etudes Littéraires
. Vraisemblance. [URL]. Accessed 14 Ma 2010.
Fought, Carmen
2003 Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan. DOI logo
2006 Language and Ethnicity. New York: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gal, Susan and Woolard, Kathryn A
2001 Constructing languages and publics: Authority and representation. In: Susan Gal and Kathryn Woolard (eds). Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority. Manchester: St. Jerome Press, 1–12.
Gieve, Simon and Norton, Julie
2007 Dealing with linguistic difference in encounters with Others on British television. In: Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin (eds). Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. London: Continuum, 188–212.Google Scholar
Goffman, Erving
1981 Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H.
2001 Mock Spanish, covert racism, and the (leaky) boundary between public and private spheres. In: Susan Gal and Kathryn A. Woolard (eds). Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority. Manchester: St. Jerome, 83–102.
2007 Crises of meaning: Personalist language ideology in U.S. media discourse. In: Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin (eds). Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. London: Continuum, 70–90.Google Scholar
Hill, Jane H. and Irvine, Judith T
(eds) 1993 Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Iedema, Rick
2003 Multimodality, resemioticization: Extending the analysis of discourse as a multisemiotic practice. Visual Communication 2(1), 29–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Irvine, Judith. T
1996 Shadow conversations: The indeterminacy of participant roles. In: Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban (eds). Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 131–59.Google Scholar
Jaffe, Alexandra
2007 Corsican on the airwaves: Media discourse in a context of minority language shift. In: Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin (eds). Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. London: Continuum, 149–171.Google Scholar
2009 Entextualization, mediatization, and authentication: Orthographic choice in media transcripts. Text and Talk 29(5), 571–594. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaworski, Adam, Thurlow, Crispin, Lawson, Sarah and Ylänne-McEwan, Virpi
2003 The uses and representations of local languages in tourist destinations: A view from British holiday programmes. Language Awareness 12(1), 5–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jaworski, Adam
2007 Language in the media: Authenticity and othering. In: Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin (eds). Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. London: Continuum, 271–280.Google Scholar
Johnson, Sally and Ensslin, Astrid
2007 Language in the media: Theory and practice. In: Sally Johnson and Astrid Ensslin (eds). Language in the Media: Representations, Identities, Ideologies. London: Continuum, 3–24.Google Scholar
Lacey, Nick
1998 Image and Representation. New York: Palgrave. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
MacDougal, David
2002 Complicities of style. In: Kelly Askew and Richard Wilk (eds). The Anthropology of Media, Malden MA: Blackwell Publishers, 148–155.
Matoesian, Greg
2000 Intertextual authority in reported speech: Production media in the Kennedy Smith rape trial. Journal of Pragmatics 32(7), 879–914. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Montgomery, Martin
2001 Defining ‘authentic talk’. Discourse Studies 3(4), 397–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Park, Joseph Sung-Yul
2009 Regimenting languages on Korean television: Subtitles and institutional authority. Text and Talk 29(5), 545–568.Google Scholar
Park, Joseph Sung-Yul and Bucholtz, Mary
2009 Introduction: Public transcripts: Entextualization and linguistic representation in institutional contexts. Text and Talk 29(5), 583–500.Google Scholar
Rampton, Ben
1995 Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Rasmussen, Susan
1992 Speech by allusion: Voice and authority in Tuareg verbal art. Journal of Folklore Research 29(2), 155–177.Google Scholar
Ronkin, Maggie, and Karn, Helen E
1999 Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies on the Internet. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(3), 360–380. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Seifert, Lewis C.
1996 Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690–1715. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael
2005 Axes of — E vals: Token vs. Type Interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1), 6–22. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverstein, Michael, and Urban, Greg
(eds) 1996 Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Silverstone, Roger
1999 Why Study the Media? Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.
van Leeuwen, Theo
2001 What is authenticity? Discourse Studies 3(4): 392–397.
van Leeuwen, Theo Van
2008 Discourse and Pratice: New Tools for Critical Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by