Article published in:
Thematising Multilingualism in the MediaEdited 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
Alexandra Jaffe | 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: 05 December 2011
https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.10.4.05jaf
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).
Alvarez-Caccamo, Celso
1996 The power of reflexive language(s): Code displacement in reported speech. Journal of Pragmatics 25(1), 33–59. 
Bauman, Richard
2004 A World of Others’ Words. Oxford: Blackwell.
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.
Briggs, Charles and Bauman, Richard
1992 Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2), 131–172.
Bucholtz, Mary
2003 Sociolinguistic nostalgia and the authentication of identity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3), 399–416.
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.
Coupland, Nikolas
2003 Sociolinguistic authenticities. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7(3), 417–431.
Culler, Jonathan
1975 Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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.
Etudes Littéraires
. Vraisemblance. http://www.etudes-litteraires.com/figures-de-style/vraisemblance.php. Accessed 14 Ma 2010.
Fought, Carmen
2003 Chicano English in Context. New York: Palgrave-MacMillan.
2006 Language and Ethnicity. New York: Cambridge University Press.
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.
Goffman, Erving
1981 Forms of Talk. Oxford: Blackwell.
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.
Hill, Jane H. and Irvine, Judith T
(eds) 1993 Responsibility and Evidence in Oral Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Iedema, Rick
2003 Multimodality, resemioticization: Extending the analysis of discourse as a multisemiotic practice. Visual Communication 2(1), 29–57.
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.
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.
2009 Entextualization, mediatization, and authentication: Orthographic choice in media transcripts. Text and Talk 29(5), 571–594.
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.
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.
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.
Lacey, Nick
1998 Image and Representation. New York: Palgrave.
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.
Montgomery, Martin
2001 Defining ‘authentic talk’. Discourse Studies 3(4), 397–405.
Park, Joseph Sung-Yul
2009 Regimenting languages on Korean television: Subtitles and institutional authority. Text and Talk 29(5), 545–568.
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.
Rampton, Ben
1995 Crossing: Language and Ethnicity among Adolescents. London: Longman.
Rasmussen, Susan
1992 Speech by allusion: Voice and authority in Tuareg verbal art. Journal of Folklore Research 29(2), 155–177.
Ronkin, Maggie, and Karn, Helen E
1999 Mock Ebonics: Linguistic racism in parodies on the Internet. Journal of Sociolinguistics 3(3), 360–380.
Seifert, Lewis C.
1996 Fairy Tales, Sexuality and Gender in France, 1690–1715. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Silverstein, Michael
2005 Axes of — E vals: Token vs. Type Interdiscursivity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15(1), 6–22.
Silverstein, Michael, and Urban, Greg
(eds) 1996 Natural Histories of Discourse. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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.
Cited by
Cited by 21 other publications
Caporal-Ebersold, Eloise
2018.
In Language Policy and Language Acquisition Planning [Language Policy, 15],
► pp. 55 ff.
Coupland, Nikolas
2014. Language change, social change, sociolinguistic change: A meta-commentary.
Journal of Sociolinguistics 18:2 ► pp. 277 ff.
Anna De Fina & Alexandra Georgakopoulou
2020.
In The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies,
Deschrijver, Cedric
2020.
In The Cambridge Handbook of Discourse Studies,
► pp. 687 ff.
Georgakopoulou, Alex
2021. Small stories as curated formats on social media: The intersection of affordances, values & practices.
System 102 ► pp. 102620 ff.
Hiramoto, Mie
2012. Don’t think, feel: Mediatization of Chinese masculinities through martial arts films.
Language & Communication 32:4 ► pp. 386 ff.
Hiramoto, Mie
2015. Wax on, wax off: mediatized Asian masculinity through Hollywood martial arts films.
Text & Talk 35:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Hiramoto, Mie & Yanning Lai
2017. Building a body of followers.
Journal of Language and Sexuality 6:2 ► pp. 262 ff.
Hiramoto, Mie & Cherise Teo
2014. I Am the Invincible Sword Goddess: Mediatization of Chinese Gender Ideology through Female Kung-Fu Practitioners in Films.
Societies 4:3 ► pp. 477 ff.
Jaffe, Alexandra
2013. Minority language learning and communicative competence: Models of identity and participation in Corsican adult language courses.
Language & Communication 33:4 ► pp. 450 ff.
Jaworska, Sylvia & Christiana Themistocleous
2018. Public discourses on multilingualism in the UK: Triangulating a corpus study with a sociolinguistic attitude survey.
Language in Society 47:1 ► pp. 57 ff.
Miller, Laura
2020.
In The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology,
► pp. 1 ff.
Pardo, Rebecca
2013. Reality Television and the Metapragmatics of Racism.
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 23:1 ► pp. 65 ff.
Patrona, Marianna
2018.
In Crisis and the Media [Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture, 76],
► pp. 1 ff.
Peng, Chun-Yi
2018. Mediatized Taiwan Mandarin.
Chinese Language and Discourse. An International and Interdisciplinary Journal 9:2 ► pp. 162 ff.
Peng, Chun-Yi
2021.
In Mediatized Taiwanese Mandarin [Sinophone and Taiwan Studies, 2],
► pp. 1 ff.
Perrino, Sabina
2015. Narrating authenticity in northern Italian historical cafés.
Language & Communication 40 ► pp. 82 ff.
Pua, Phoebe & Mie Hiramoto
2018. Mediatization of East Asia in James Bond films.
Discourse, Context & Media 23 ► pp. 6 ff.
Stamou, Anastasia G.
2018. Fictionalization of Germanness in the times of Greek crisis: deconstructing the ‘two strangers’ frame in TV sketch comedies.
Journal of Multicultural Discourses 13:4 ► pp. 377 ff.
Stamou, Anastasia G.
2018. Sociolinguistics of fiction.
Discourse, Context & Media 23 ► pp. 1 ff.
Stengs, Irene
2018.
In The Sociolinguistics of Place and Belonging [IMPACT: Studies in Language and Society, 45],
► pp. 149 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 19 april 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.