Intro |
Evaluating English Accents WorldWide: Influence of Media?As can be seen in the results pages, the NAm accents (female and male in that order) are clearly the most favoured in all of the national samples we have obtained thus far. One likely reason for this dominance is the apparently very uniform influence of American media world-wide--what we have referred to as "pax Americana". This includes popular music, films, clothing styles, fast food, and of course television. It is interesting to examine the percentages of locally made versus foreign television programmes in the four Anglophone nations surveyed to date:
Amount of local content in television programming by nation.
*including European Union programmes It appears that the differences in accent ratings in our results parallel the proportions of local content for Americans, who hear virtually only their own variety in the media; Australians, who hear their own variety but with significant amounts of American English as well; and New Zealanders, who hear more foreign than local varieties. However, note that the NAm voice also rated well above the two EE voices as far as the sample of Cornish schoolchildren is concerned, so obviously proportion of American television is only one rather crude index in a complex picture of global US influence.
As an example of this influence, we list below the range of English-language TV programmes screening in Finland in early 2000, at the time we obtained out sample of opinion there; note that of almost 50 programmes, only a handful (italicised*) are not American in origin. The American programmes listed below are screened in New Zealand and Australia, and as well in Sweden and Singapore. A Norwegian scholar has assured Bayard that the lineup on Norwegian television is also almost identical (Bjarne Vandeskog, p.c.). Visitors to this website are invited to compare this menu with that available on their local television. *These are chielfy British.
(Italicised items are not of American origin.) As an example of the pervasiveness of US influence in non-English-speaking nations, observe the following figures taken from Finnish television (Channels 1 to 4) in March 2000:
German, Canadian, Spanish, Danish, and Russian programmes comprised less that 1% each; we are grateful to Ms Sanna Malinen for obtaining this data, as well as the Finnish sample of listeners. Of course the amount of undubbed English-language television watched in non-English-speaking countries varies widely. In nations like Germany, Austria, and France most English-language programmes are dubbed into German or French. In smaller nations like the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries English-language programmes are transmitted in their original accents. We have so far surveyed three countries where English is a second language only: Finland, Sweden, and Germany. The first two broadcast English-language programmes undubbed, while Germany dubs most of its English-language programmes. This is reflected in the hours listeners reported viewing undubbed English-language programmes. We used a scale of 1 to five for this variable:
1 = zero hours per week On this scale, Finland had an average of 2.78--about 5 hours per week. Sweden had a mean of 3.25--about 6 or 7 hours per week. But Germany averaged only 1.42--less than one hour per week of undubbed English-language viewing. To date, our results show little evidence of a direct correlation between the dubbing variable and accent ratings, but further investigations are pending. |