Television is by far the most powerful agent of linguistic change the world has ever known. In this function it has already, in the few years of its existence, outstripped both literacy and universal compulsory education.
This may seem a gross exaggeration. Yet consider: both literacy and universal compulsory education bear primarily upon the written language, which even in these days of widespread reading and writing accounts for less than ten per cent of our total communication. Television bears primarily upon the spoken tongue, which is communication's primary tool, to the extent that almost ninety per cent of all communication uses it as a medium. One may quibble about the relative importance of the content of written as against spoken communication. One may even reasonably advance the claim that the sort of communication that really counts, and is therefore embodied into permanent records, is primarily written; that "words fly away, but written messages endure," as the Latin saying put it two thousand years ago; that there is no basic significance to at least fifty per cent of the oral interchange that goes on among all sorts of persons, high and low. But there are equally cogent counter arguments. Today, permanent records may be inscribed on discs and tapes, to be stored away and repeated at will, and even combined, TV-style, with a lifelike picture. This means that words no longer "fly away." In fact, they may be blended with the image of their speaker, to endure as a perennial record both of the speaker and of what he said.
But this is only a side issue, like that other recent discovery of the outside world (the professional linguists had known it for decades) that each individual's recorded voice, traced visually on a spectrogram, is as distinctive as are his fingerprints, and constitutes just as sure a means of positive identification. The point that concerns us is that at no time in history prior to the present has there been so powerful and swift-working an instrument of linguistic change as the one supplied today by TV, flanked by two other recent innovations that share some of its characteristics, radio and film.
The younger generations of all countries, exposed to a steady, inexorable bombardment of the standard national language dispensed by movie actors, radio announcers, and, above all, TV newscasters, anchormen, advertisers, and feature actors, are well on the way to discarding all the dialectal features of their parents' speech and adopting the standard tongue they hear on their favorite programs, spoken by people who have in their eyes the highest prestige.
Let me illustrate. Italy is a land of numerous and persistent dialects. Even where the Italian speaker is thoroughly educated and speaks with full command of both grammar and vocabulary, it seldom fails that his local intonation shines through and acts as a dead giveaway of his regional background. I left my native Italy in 1908, at the age of seven; returning for the first time in 1921, at the age of twenty, and landing in Genoa, I was a bit surprised to be told by a Genoese student: "You're a Roman, aren't you?" My native intonation had given me away.
But that was in pre-TV days. In 1959, riding a Naples bus with a Neapolitan friend, I was surprised to hear a group of young people on the bus speaking a correct, unidentifiable general Italian from which all features of local intonation were absent. I asked my friend whether they could be tourists from central Italy. "Not at all," he replied, "they are local boys and girls." "But what about the Neapolitan accent, which no Neapolitan has ever been known to lose, no matter how educated?" "Is that so?" came the answer. "Wait until we get home and you'll find out."
When we arrived at my friend's apartment, I made the acquaintance of his three children, aged eight, ten, and twelve. All spoke in the same unidentifiable general Italian I had heard on the bus, Papa and Mamma kept on speaking, as they had always done, in their own cultured Neapolitan.
"This" said my friend, "is what is happening all over Italy. The youngsters don't take their language from their parents and relatives any more. In part, they take it from the schools. But we had schools, too, in our days. What really makes the difference is films, radio, and, above all, TV. Those are the speakers who carry prestige in their eyes, and whom they consciously or unconsciously imitate. If this sort of thing goes on for another fifty years, there won't be a trace of a dialect left in Italy. All Italians will be speaking the same flat, monotonous, colorless national language. Maybe it's a blessing, maybe a curse. There won't be so much local color, but everybody will be able to understand everybody else, which is more than could be said of our generation."
Even before this revelation, I had been conscious of the same phenomenon in the English-speaking world. I had noticed how, with the first spoken British films, much of what was said was unintelligible to the American ear. Then we got used to the British accent, as they undoubtedly got used to ours. But don't imagine for a minute that it is all pure passive acceptance. There is also an insensible active merging of the two pronunciations. Our speech becomes more British, as the British speech becomes more American. If one day, a century or so from now, the two mainstreams of the English language, which began to diverge with the founding of the Jamestown and Plymouth Bay colonies, converge again into a single mighty river, to film, radio, and especially TV will go the power and the glory.
What happens internationally happens also locally. If you want to hear the general American of the future, Hollywood and TV-studio based, go to California and listen to the speech of the California-born though in their younger generation (not, of course, to the immigrants from other states, who will carry their local intonations with them to their dying day). Do you recall how in the Presidential campaign of 1960 Kennedy's ahsk and Africar stood out like sore thumbs, while Nixon never drew a lifted eyebrow? Nixon spoke the general American of the future, an American shorn of all local peculiarities. A couple of years ago, Miss Arkansas became Miss America. Brought up on a diet of films, radio, TV, and one or two eastern colleges, she addressed the TV audience in a general American that bore absolutely no trace of Southern influence. Then Papa and Mamma were asked to say a few words. Arkansas honey simply dripped from their lips as they spoke. One thing is certain. Miss Arkansas's future children, brought up under modern conditions, will be using their mother's general American, not their grandparents' Southern intonation.
The omens are clear enough for what concerns individual national tongues. They are being and will be standardized and unified by our modern communications media. Whether all traces of local dialects will finally be obliterated it is difficult to prophesy, but certainly they will be driven more and more into the background. The time will come when it will require a real expedition into the Appalachian fastnesses to get a recording of the Ozarks speech, and when the last surviving speakers of Brooklynese will be hunted down by the linguists for recording purposes in the wilds of Greenpoint and Flatbush as were the last speakers of the dialect of Veglia in the Adriatic at the end of the last century.