>To what extent, and in what ways, do you think exposure to TV has altered perception and use of language? Does this vary from country to country?

I'm glad that you came back to his topic Mav. Sometime ago I asked a question about the difference between accents coast to coast in Canada and Australia.

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bel told us:
"Well, in Canada there is not much difference in the way people from Vancouver or Toronto sound. Both have a majority of English speaking inhabitants, both are business hubs."

Marty told us:
"I'd be hard-pressed to pick any difference in accent between people from any Australian cities."

Yet the distances between these cities are enormous. To travel the same distance in Europe would give rise not just to a change in accents along the route but marked changes in the languages spoken.

The difference must be that both these countries experienced their main growth in population when mass communication (via radio and cinema, in the first instance) was already established.

The impact must have increased once television entered daily life. In England, for example, accents had been established in days of much greater isolation, when travelling a short distance was time consuming. Rhubarb Commando tells us of changes in dialect over very small distances. In the early days of radio the BBC said that it was not able to broadcast the stonger regional accents as people from other areas would not understand them. I have listened to excerpts which were not just hard to understand, they were completely unintelligible.

With the growth of television in the English speaking world we have all been exposed to wide range of accents from all over the world and this cannot fail to have had an impact on our pronunciation, even without the minor "fashion" changes which occur due to the popularity of programmes like "Neighbours" in the late eighties and "The Simpsons" in the nineties. Even the attempt at emulating an accent must have an impact. As a child I remember that everyone could "do" John Wayne and later Marlon Brando.

So I think that television has accelerated change in language, rather than being starting the process of change.