While linguists were previously primarily
concerned with ‘real’ one-to-one language, interest in the media among
linguists – in particular in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics – has
grown greatly in recent decades. This is probably not surprising due to the increasingly
mediated nature of contemporary life and the blurring of boundaries between
mediated and unmediated language practices in people’s everyday experiences
(Androutsopoulos 2014: 4). What makes language in the media different from
‘everyday’ or ‘person-to-person’ domains is the presence - seen or unseen,
human or technical – of some intermediary or facilitator or controller. This
facilitation or mediation both impacts on language and is impacted on by
language and it is this intersection, in all its facets, that is the focus of
this collection. While the study of language and media has, up to recently,
tended to focus more on discourse aspects, the language aspect in the broader
sense, in terms of e.g. multilingualism, language policy, meta-language and
language ideologies, has increasingly come under academic scrutiny. In this
collection, the understanding of language and media is seen as encompassing not
just discourse (the language in and of the media) but also all decisions around
language and discussions of language in the media. The role of language in the
media is conceptualised in three distinct, but inter-related ways across the
four volumes: language as a means of managing the media audience, which
involves policy-making around which languages to use for which media, which
speakers to select, and the role of language in creating and delineating
particular speech communities; language as a topic in the media, how it is
reported and discussed, and how this thematizing of language assumes, enhances
and maintains, but also potentially challenges prevailing language ideologies;
and, thirdly, how language is used as a mode of media communication and the
linguistic and discursive practices which take place in the media. By way of
introducing the collection, this first chapter outlines the key themes and
concepts underpinning our consideration of the relationship between language
and media, which are identified here as technology, markets, globalization, and
agency. Following this, the themes of the four volumes within the collection -
language policy and management; language as topic and content in the media; and
language practices in the media are introduced and reviewed.