The worse impact is hoe many of these new children's shows make them dumber, like Spongebob and the like. Nothing beats good old Coyote/Roadrunner, Bugs Bunny, etc and then the classic Sesame Street. This new stuff really sucks. Everything after Ren & Stimpy is just horrible, with a few notable exceptions...
As for 'adult' type shows, there is an increasing diversity in accents on many, such as the SyFy shows. It's really amusing to see actors who have no foreign accent on screen talking in normal conversation with their regular accent, like Hugh Laurie. It amazes me how they can drop the accent like that. It took Arnold years! On Wed, Nov 9, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Patience <[email protected]> wrote: > " > What happens when a show like Doctor Who becomes popular in the US --> > does it affect our speech patterns much? How big a deal is American > > television/movie to the rest of the English-speaking world -- are we > > affecting their speech patterns?" > > I know The Wiggles had an impact on the young ones in the US. Some mothers > found and did not like their kids having aussie accents. Thats what you will > get if the tv is the baby sitter. > > I think the amount of U.S shows showing increasing every year would have > more of an impact on the younger generation than the older generation. I > have not spent enough time with the Y generation to find out how much if it > has if at all. The English accent still had a very strong infulence on > Australian speech (as a whole) as early as the the 60's. > > With languages varying in the same country none is as diverse as Papua New > Guinea, it has more languages than the rest of the world combined - 850 > languages. I am always amazed that some natives have just recently seen > white man for the first time, and other villages where no outisder has been. > > On Nov 10, 2011 6:25 AM, "Raymond E. Feist" <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Nov 9, 2011, at 9:57 AM, Earl Borah wrote: >> >> >> A language is a living, evolving thing, and could change rapidly before >> >> it became "fixed" by print. >> >> >> >> Best, R.E.F. >> > >> > How much has modern media (radio, television, movies) helped "fix" >> > language? When an entire country - or even much of the world - is >> > watching the same television shows and movies, does the pronunciation >> > and dialect from Hollywood help minimize the local variances we'd >> > otherwise have? >> > >> >> > Specifically -- while I recognize there's still a difference in >> > southern speech and New York speech compared to what I hear every day >> > here in Oregon, are those differences less than they'd otherwise be >> > due to the prevalence of audio media? How does that effect compare to >> > the effect of print media? >> > >> > What happens when a show like Doctor Who becomes popular in the US -- >> > does it affect our speech patterns much? How big a deal is American >> > television/movie to the rest of the English-speaking world -- are we >> > affecting their speech patterns? >> > >> > Not that I expect anyone to have a definitive answer, they're just all >> > questions I find interesting. >> > >> >> >> Very good point. First radio introduced Americans to "mediated speech" >> which was more or less eastern, upscale (even among some broadcasters sort >> of a "Mid-Atlantic" half US/half British, witness someone like Alistair >> Cook) which is a bit like monied Americans like FDR spoke. That evolved >> into what is now modern "Mediated American Speech," which pretty much is a >> bit of a broad midwestern twang toned down a great deal and softened, >> witness Walter Cronkite or Tom Brokaw. If you go to cities like Atlanta, >> you don't hear the broad southern accent you here in more rural parts of >> Georgia. If you go to San Francisco or L.A. among non-ethnic neighborhoods, >> you hear a westernized melding of accents from all over the nation. >> >> Yes, media is making us all slowly sound alike. >> >> Importing shows from Britain has little effect. Ironically, a much >> smaller nation, there's almost nothing like the melding of speech we have in >> the US. Perhaps it's due to there being more of a connection between accent >> and class and neighborhood in the UK? I don't know. >> >> Best, R.E.F. >> >> ---- >> www.crydee.com >> >> Never attribute to malice what can satisfactorily be explained away by >> stupidity. >> >> >> >> >> >> >> > -- Nick A "You know what I wish? I wish that all the scum of the world had but a single throat, and I had my hands about it..." Rorschach, 1975 "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759 "Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them." Bill Vaughan "The price of apathy towards public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." Plato
