Date:  Mon, 23 Jan 1995 17:24:42 -0600

From:  "Jeffrey H. Allen AXIS CONTRACT" <jhaaxis[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]SLATE.TID.CAT.COM.LOCAL>

Subject: TV and dialect



Just a response to Tim Frazer's statement "I assume that TV has little effect on

dialect cause it's all one-way; it's not (yet) an interactive medium".



I agree that TV is far from being interactive, but it is influencial. Much

 depends

on the varieties that we call dialects in the statement. It is interesting to

 see

in the Caribbean the influence that American TV has had on the French creole

 spoken

in St. Lucia where British English has prevailed as the official language of the

country. Loanwords, especially in the area of new technology, (ie kompyouta)

 are

entering into the French Creole.



Now turning Stateside, if we were to consider Louisiana French Creole and the

Cajun French varieties as competing dialects with English, TV has had a profound

effect of English loanword integration into these non-lexically related

 dialects.



It would also be interesting to investigate a diachronic survey of mass media

influence of American English upon Gullah English creole spoken on the islands

 of

the coast of Georgia. Salikoko Mufwene at the University of Chicago has done a

lot of work on Gullah. He may have some comments on the acrolect affecting the

basilectal and mesolectal Creole varieties via mass media.



Jeff Allen

CTE/AMT project

Bldg AD180, Caterpillar Inc

600 W. Washington St.

Peoria, IL 61630

e-mail: allenjh[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]cat.com  OR jhallen[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]indiana.edu