Language and Media Dictionary of Key Terms (April 2016) Martin Montgomery

demographics media n. the data resulting from the scientific study of the characteristics of a population as practiced within demography. Such data has become of increasing interest in the cultural industries of broadcasting and marketing in efforts to identify precise types of audience or consumer for particular products or programmes. In this context a demographic is shorthand for a demographic profile of particular interest to an advertiser, broadcaster or film-maker. mmo

deviance media n. violation of social norms to a degree that can be perceived as to a threat to the social order. What counts as deviance will, of course, vary over time and from place to place. For some sociologists, therefore, deviance is not considered to be a quality of the act that a person commits, but rather a consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to the deviant. In this account deviance is an outcome of a labeling process: the deviant is one to whom the label has successfully been applied; and deviant behaviour is behaviour that people label as such. mmo

dialogue media n. **** a literary, or more specifically, a dramatic form that represents the exchange of speaking turns between two or more characters or persons. Theatre scripts take the form of dialogue. The speech of characters in a film is referred to as film dialogue. More broadly, however, the term refers to a foundational property of language as rooted in the exchange between one speaker and another. mmo

dialect lang n. a socially or regionally marked version of a language made up of distinctive patterns of sentence construction, vocabulary and pronunciation. The use of one dialect rather than another depends basically upon the social class and regional origins of the speaker. Examples of dialect differences in English cover a wide range of phenomena and include matters such as: the use of multiple negation (‘I hadn’t got nothing to fall back on’), which is common in some English dialects but not in others; variation in vocabulary (the same object – a sports shoe, for instance, may be designated differently, as plimsoll, dap, sandy pump, etc., in different dialects in different parts of the UK); and distinctive patterns of pronunciation (such as using a glottal stop instead of ‘it/’ in words such as bitter, Luton, letter, bottle, butter, which is common in parts of London).

The latter kind of variation, purely in terms of sound, is also known as accent. Accent, however, refers only to pronunciation, and is thus not as inclusive a term as dialect, which embraces a wider range of linguistic variation. Indeed, in the UK it is possible to find the standard dialect being spoken in a range of regional accents.

Everyone speaks a dialect, whether it be a non-standard regional dialect or the standard dialect. The standard UK dialect itself evolved out of a particular regional dialect of the south-east English Midlands and gained pre-eminence not because of any intrinsic linguistic superiority, but simply because it was the dialect spoken in that part of the country that was particularly influential in the emergence of the modern UK nation-state. It was the dialect spoken at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, and by important sections of the mercantile class. Thus, its growing adoption from the fifteenth century onwards as the preferred dialect in education, in certain key professions such as the law, and indeed for written communication in general, is more a question of historical contingency than any special linguistic qualities.

Its adoption as a standard dialect, particularly for written communication, leads to nominative pressure on other less socially prestigious dialects. This in turn gives rise to the mistaken view that the norms of the standard are inherently more correct then those of other dialects – a judgement which is unconsciously based on social factors rather than a linguistic consideration. From a linguistic viewpoint all dialects are equal in their ability to communicate the intentions of their users, even although a particular dialect can become identified with a particular communicative role. => CODE, DIGLOSSIA, PIDGIN mmo

diffusion media n. the spread, transmission or circulation of elements, ideas, substances. As a concept, diffusion is used in wide range of disciplines including biology, chemistry, economics, physics, and sociology. It can be applied to any subject area to explain the phenomenon of movement and spread, for example, to explain how ideas, styles, technologies, and languages spread through cultures. SJ