1. Film-making process

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     Film is regarded as an artistic creation, making possible the “re-creation” of phenomena, which requires the complex application of codes and conventions of languages (Monaco, 2000). Also, directors make choices within the set of established possibilities, reorganize and recombine existing factors. In other words, the process of film making covers a wide range of human endeavors. It is almost more an attitude than an activity. The directors have a certain amount of freedom to choose the combination of factors in the film, to select one detail rather than another, in order to recreate and express directors’ own perception of the world (Monaco, 2000). Therefore, the element of choice is highly significant in films to convey directors’ ideas. Dialect use in dialect films is the choice of one of the existing possibilities, which is manipulated by directors and indicating their language attitudes at the same time.

 

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2. Media reception theory

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     Media reception theory is regarded as the reaction to the ‘effects model’, which suggests a passive audience idea, according to which media texts influence the audience who are exposed to them (Stamou, 2015). From this view, the audience were considered powerless to prevent or resist the influence of media messages. For example, director combing linguistic codes in dialect film, reveals his own perception of dialects, and the audience are passively influenced by the language attitude indexed in the film.

 

     However, though audience sense and perceive the ideas from creators when they confront media texts, audience can also situate in a positive position to choose to agree or disagree or negotiate with the ideas shown in media texts. Here, media reception theories also have developed more complex ideas about the reading of media texts, by assigning an active role to the audience. For example, Hall (1973[1980]) proposed an ‘encodingdecoding model’. Specifically, encoding refers to the process that media producers construct a text, while decoding is the process that audience reads a media text. In this view, the same media text may be understood quite differently by different people. Three types of text decoding were proposed by Hall, which are dominant/hegemonic/preferred reading, negotiated reading and oppositional reading. Among three types of decoding, audience can agree or share the meanings of the media text, or partly accept or partly resist the meanings, or stand in the opposite position of the meanings conveyed in the media texts. Here, audience are more active to construct their own ideas and understandings of the meanings in the media works. Therefore, film provides a direct line of communication between the subject and the observer.

 

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3. Media, language attitude and ideology

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     It is crucial to clarify key concepts here, which are language attitude, language ideology and their nexus with media.

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     Language attitude refers to people’s choice of language use, and how they perceive or evaluate different languages. Since languages have different speech features, and the particular features of languages are often linked to the identity of speech community. In other words, language use is an approach that divides people into different groups, and the reaction of the different speech groups indicates the different perception to the group of people and also the region they situate in.

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     According to Oxford Bibliographies, language ideology is the concept related to languages, speakers and discursive practices, which is the nexus of language, culture, and politics. Irvine (1989) defined language ideology as “the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests.” Therefore, language is associated to social order. It includes the way people conceive of language itself, as well as what they understand by the particular languages and ways of speaking that are within their purview. For example, we tend to use the terms “standard”, “formal”, “informal”, “appropriate” or “inappropriate” to evaluate a language or a speech group. The idea of a standard language, can be an evidence of language ideology. Lippi-Green (1997) suggests that the idea of the standard is itself a language myth, especially as it relates to pronunciation: there is no such thing as an accent-less, more objective variety of the language.

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     Attitudes toward language varieties can also be found in the representation of dialect in media. Androutsopoulos (2010) indicated that media discourse may draw on linguistic variability, e.g., phonological variation, lexical or code choice, to index how the characters’ speech in dialect films are related to particular speech style, particular spaces or places. For example, in Disney cartoon, we can easily tell that a particular kind of characters are supposed to use a particular language or accent, according to Lippi-Green’s study (1997).

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     Through the construction of a particular version of language and the world, media act as an influential role in constructing, strengthening or deconstructing language ideology in the society. Usually, media tend to sustain the dominant language ideologies about sociolinguistic variation and strengthening linguistic discrimination (Androutsopoulos, 2010). Stamou (2014) also indicates that the media portrayal of sociolinguistic variability, has shown that the construction or strengthen of the dominant language ideology is commonly achieved through the association of low-status linguistic codes (e.g. non-standard language; dialect speakers) with minor, low-educated, low-class, or bad characters, whereas prestigious linguistic codes (e.g. a standard language) are typically reserved for leading actors and elite characters. Thus, with the booming development of all types of media texts, involving various use of languages, individual language attitude will be inevitably influenced by it.

 

 

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References:

 

Androutsopoulos, J. (2010). The study of language and space in media discourse.

Hall, S. (1973[1980]). Encoding and decoding in the television discourse. In Centre

    for Contemporary Cultural Studies (Eds.), Culture, media, language: Working

    papers’ in cultural studies (pp. 128138). London: Hutchinson.

Irvine, Judith T. 1989. When talk isn’t cheap: Language and political economy.

    American Ethnologist 16:248–267.

Lippi-Green, R. (1997). English with an accent: Language, ideology, and

    discrimination in the United States. Psychology Press.

Monaco, J. (2000). How to read a film: the world of movies, media, and multimedia:

    language, history, theory. Oxford University Press, USA.