In spite of the centrality of the visual image in television, this medium uniquely combines visuality with both oral and written varieties of language. Television is thus distinguished from print media by its predominantly aural-oral mode of language use, while visuality separates it from the exclusively aural medium of radio.

Orality is generally viewed as the "normal" or "natural" mode of communication through language. Being face-to-face, interactive, immediate and non-mediated (e.g. through writing, print or electronic media), oral communication and the oral tradition are considered by some theorists to be indispensable to a free and democratic life. Unlike oral communication, which is usually dialogic and participatory, written language separates the writer and the reader in space and time, and relies on the sense of seeing at the expense of other senses. According to this perspective, audiovisual media, especially television, restore the pre-print condition of harmony of senses by using the ear and the eye and calling into play the remaining senses of touch, smell and taste. This view is rejected by those who argue that the "mechanized" orality of radio and television provides a one-way communication flow from the broadcaster to the hearer or viewer, thus eliminating a fundamental feature of the spoken language: its dialogue and interactivity. Television, like writing, then, overcomes the barriers of space, reaches millions of viewers, and may contribute to the centralization of power and knowledge.

Many viewers see television as an oral medium, a perception constantly reinforced by announcers, anchors and reporters who try to engage in an informal, conversational style of speaking. Among their techniques are the use of direct forms of address, (e.g., "Good evening," "Thank you for watching...," or "Please stay with us...,"), the maintenance of eye contact with viewers while reading the script from teleprompters or printed copy, and the attempt to be, or at least appear, spontaneous.

This on-the-air conversationality is, however, different from everyday talk in significant ways. For instance, television talk aims at avoiding what is natural in face-to-face conversation--errors such as false starts or pauses, and repetitions, hesitations and silence. A manual of script writing advises the beginner: "Structure your scripts like a conversation, but avoid the elements of conversations that make them verbose, redundant, imprecise, rambling, and incomplete" (Mayeux 1994:47). Furthermore, the broadcaster is required to have a good or "polished" voice, and is advised "to articulate, enunciate, breathe from the diaphragm, sound authoritative, stay calm under fire, and, all the while, be conversational!" (Freedman 1990: viii).

Viewers, by contrast, engage in an aural or auditory communication with the medium. Even in call-in shows, the majority of viewers are not able to speak. The few who go on the air via telephone are selected through a gatekeeping process, and are often instructed to be brief and to the point. Language, then, much like studio setup and camera position, is used to create a sense of intimate involvement, a sharing of time and space. Phil Donahue, for example, uses words such as "we," "us," "you," and "here" in order to create a sense of communion between the host, and the studio and home audiences, e.g., in "You'll forgive us, Mr. X, if we are just a little sceptical of your claim that all we need to do...." Similarly, another linguistic code, the frequent use of the present tense, is used to create a sense of audience involvement, and apparently allows the host, the guest and the home audience to share the same moment of broadcast time, even though most shows in the United States were, by the early 1990s, either pre-recorded or packaged as syndication reruns.

In spite of the presence of seeming spontaneity in talk genres, they are usually semi-scripted, and involve a preparation process including research, writing, editing and presentation. As Timberg points out, over a hundred professionals were involved in producing and airing a "spontaneous" talk show like The Tonight Show each evening, for example, and as much as 80% of the interview with guests on the Letterman show was worked out in advance. Non-scripted, ad lib and unprepared talk shows do, however, appear both on mainstream networks (e.g. Larry King Live), and on low-budget or semi-professional programs of local, community or alternative television.

While some theorists admit the written bases of television's spoken language and conceptualize it as "secondary orality", there is a tendency to explain the popularity of television by, among other things, equating its orality with that of the face-to-face speech. Some researchers see in popular talk shows (such as Donahue or Kilroy) a forum or a public sphere where audiences, in the studio and in front of the screen, engage in oppositional dialogue. Others find the talk shows essentially conformist, contributing to the maintenance of the status quo.

Romanticizing the orality of television is as problematic as denouncing it as an impoverished form of speech. Language changes continually, and television, as a social institution and powerful technology, creates new discourses, new modes of language use, new forms of translation, and new forms of communication between communities with different linguistic abilities. "Natural" and TV languages coexist in constant interaction, influencing each other and contributing to the dynamism of verbal communication. Language consists of numerous varieties rooted in socio-economic differentiation (e.g., working class language, legal language), gender (male and female languages), age (e.g., children's language), race (e.g., Black English), geography (e.g., Texan English), ethnicity, and other formations. Each variety may include diverse styles with distinct phonological, lexical, semantic and even syntactic features. Television genres provide a panorama of these language varieties and styles, a presentation of amazing language diversity which the viewer will rarely if ever encounter in daily face-to-face communication.

Television fosters an appreciation of the way writing and speaking merge, not only in the production of speech (the oral text), but also on the screen (in print), in genres ranging from weather and stock market reports to commercials and game shows. Even live interviews carry captions identifying the interviewees, their status, location or affiliation. Moreover, "writing for television" has emerged as a new art, which aims not at a literate readership but rather an aural-visual audience. It has developed, for instance, "aural writing styles" or "writing for the ear" allowing the incorporation of music and sound, "visual writing styles" for envisioning images, and "broadcast punctuation" codes for indicating the nuances of on-the-air speech. Training in this new realm of writing is provided in courses offered by academic and professional institutions and in dozens of textbooks and manuals with titles such as Wylie's Writing for Television and Blum's Television Writing. On a different level, some popular American programs in the United States have generated extensive fan writing, published and exchanged through the Internet. The fandom of science-fiction series Star Trek, for example, have produced no less than 120 fanzines (fan magazines), and some novels written by fans are commercially published.

Unlike radio and print media, then, which create meaning primarily through language, television engages in signification through the unity and conflict of verbal, visual and sound codes. The dynamics of this type of signification has not been studied adequately. Viewers and media professionals often claim that the visuality of television is a sufficient form of communication, as evidenced in the popular belief that "seeing is believing" and "the camera never lies." Much like verbal language, however, the visual and sound components of the television program are polysemic, i.e. they convey multiple meanings, and lend themselves to different, sometimes conflicting, interpretations. Moreover, the verbal text, far from being a mere appendage to the visual, has the power, as Masterman suggests, to "turn images on their heads." McLuhan's well-known aphorism "the medium is the message" implies that all these meanings are, to a large extent, determined by the technology of television, its audiovisuality. But this view has been rejected by, among others, producers and script writers who are rather self-conscious about their independence and claim freedom from the dictates of the medium.

Despite this multiplicity of meanings, language in television, as in all its other manifestations, written or spoken, does not serve every one equitably or effectively. Far from being neutral, language is always intertwined with the distribution and exercise of power in society. Dichotomies such as standard/dialect or language/vernacular point to some aspects of the unequal distribution of linguistic power. In its phonetic, morphological and semantic systems language is marked by differences of class, gender, ethnicity, age, race, etc.; similarly, the speakers/hearers are also divided by their idiosyncratic knowledge of language, and often communicate in "idiolects," i.e., personal dialects.

Television attempts to control these differences and overcome the cleavages in order to reach sizable audiences. Thus, for example, the Program Standards of CBS requires broadcast language to "be appropriate to a public medium and generally considered to be acceptable by a mass audience." This implies, among other things, that "potentially offensive language" must be generally avoided and "blasphemy and obscenity" are not acceptable. In conforming to standards such as these, many television genres, especially news and other information programs, have developed a language style characterized by simple, clear and short sentences, read or spoken in an appropriate voice.

Born into this unequal linguistic environment, television followed radio in adopting the standard, national or official language, which is the main communication medium of the nation-state. While the schools and the print media established the written standard long before the advent of broadcasting, radio and television assumed, more authoritatively than the "pronouncing" dictionaries, the role of codifying and promoting the spoken standard. In Britain, for example, broadcasters were required until the 1960s to be fluent in the British standard known as Received Pronunciation. In spite of increasing tolerance for dialectalisms in many Western countries, news and other information programming on the public and private national networks continue to act as custodians of the standard language.

Thus, much like the language academy and the dictionary, television actively intervenes in the language environment, and creates its own discourses, styles and varieties. In the deregulated television market of the United States, genres known as "tabloid" or "trash" TV usually feel free to engage in potentially offensive language. And, citing an economic imperative to compete with less restrictive programming on cable television, dramas such as Steven Bochco's N.Y.P.D. Blue, use language once prohibited on network television.

Television and radio have also actively participated in the exercise of gender power through language. In the U.S., female voice, especially its higher pitch, was marginalized for "lacking in the authority needed for a convincing newscast," whereas male lower-pitched voices were treated as "overly polished, ultrasophisticated." Thus, in the 1950s, about 90% of commercial copy in the United States was "specifically written for the male voice and personality." According to a British announcer's handbook, women were not usually "considered suitable for the sterner duties of newscasting, commentary work or, say, political interviewing" because of their "voice, appearance and temperament." By the 1970s, however, television responded to the social movements of the previous decade and gradually adopted a more egalitarian policy. Women appeared as newscasters although male anchors still dominated the North American screens in the mid-1990s. The 1979 edition of an American announcer's manual added a chapter on "the new language," which recommended the use of an inclusive language that respects racial, ethnic and gender differences.

Despite this kind of professional awareness, television's role in the far larger configuration of world-wide language use remains far more constricting. The languages of the world, estimated to be between five to six thousand in number, have evolved as a "global language order," a system characterized by increasing contact and a hierarchy of power relations. About one-fifth of the 5,000 existing languages are used by at least ten thousand speakers each; they are too small to survive. Only about 200 are spoken by more than one million. About sixty are spoken by ten millions or more, comprising 90% of the world's population. Twelve languages are spoken by one hundred million or more, accounting for 60% of the world's population. Although Chinese is spoken by one billion people, it is dwarfed by English, half a billion, in terms of cultural power. Most of the world's languages remain unwritten while half of them are, according to linguists, in danger of extinction; if state policy was once responsible for language death, the electronic media, including satellite television, are now seen as the main destructive force.

Before the age of broadcasting, contact between languages was primarily through either face-to-face or written communication. Overcoming spatial barriers and the limitations of literacy, radio and television have brought on-the-air languages within the reach of those who afford the receiving equipment. However, contrary to a common belief that access to broadcasting is easier than to print media, small and minority languages have often been excluded by both radio and television. Being multilingual and multiethnic, the great majority of contemporary states seek national unity in part through a national or official language. As a result, the states and their public television systems either ignore linguistic diversity or actively eliminate it. Private television is equally exclusionist when minority audiences are not large enough to be profitably delivered to advertisers, or if state policy proscribes multilingual minority broadcasting (as is the case in Turkey). Even in Western Europe, indigenous minority languages such as Welsh in Britain had to go through a difficult struggle in order to access television. Both the centralizing states and minorities realize that television confers credibility and legitimacy on language. The use of a threatened language at home, even at school, no longer ensures its survival; language vitality depends increasingly on broadcasting.

Although broadcasting in the native tongue is increasingly viewed as a communication right of every citizen, the majority of languages, especially in developing countries, have not yet been televised. In Turkey, where Turkish is the only official language, some twelve million Kurds are constitutionally deprived of the right to broadcast in their native tongue, Kurdish. Even listening to or watching transborder programs in this language is considered an action against the territorial integrity of the state. In countries where linguistic and communication rights are respected, economic obstacles often prevent multilingual broadcasting. In Ghana, for example, there are over sixty languages or dialects, but in 1992 only six out of 55 hours of weekly television air-time were devoted to "local" languages; the rest was in English, the official language. Television production could not satisfy local tastes and demands. While the rural population did not afford the cost of a TV set, the urban elite tuned to CNN.

New technologies such as satellites, computers, cable and VCR have radically changed the process of televisual production, transmission, delivery and reception. One major change is the globalization of the medium, which has for the first time in history created audiences of the size of one billion viewers for certain programs. Satellite television easily violates international borders, but is less successful in crossing linguistic boundaries. This has led to the flourishing of translation or "language transfer" in the form of dubbing, subtitling, and voice-over. Although the linguistic fragmentation of the global audience is phenomenal, English language programs, mostly produced in the United States and England, are popular throughout the world. Television has accelerated the spread of English as a global lingua franca. For instance, in Sweden where subtitling allows viewers to listen to the original language, television has helped the further spread of English. Also, since the United States is the most powerful producer of entertainment and information, American English is spreading at the expense of other standards of the language such as Australian, British, Canadian, and Indian.

While some observers see in the new technologies the demise of minority languages and cultures, others believe they empower them to resist and survive. Cable television, for instance, has offered opportunities for access to small and scattered minorities. Satellites empowered the refugee and immigrant Kurdish community in Europe to launch a daily program in their native tongue in 1995. Thus, unable to enjoy self-rule in their homeland, they gained linguistic and cultural sovereignty in the sky, beaming their programs to Kurdistan where the language suffers from Turkey's harsh policy of linguicide. While this is a dramatic achievement, other experiences, e.g. aboriginal languages in Western countries, are mixed.

Truly empowering is television's potential to open a new door on the prelingually deaf community. The World Federation of the Deaf in Helsinki demands the official recognition of the sign language(s) used by the deaf as one of each country's indigenous language. Television is the main medium for promoting these languages, and providing translated information from print and broadcast media.

While it is possible to launch channels in sign language, it is important to note that the same technology is used by the more powerful states to promote their linguistic and political presence among the less powerful. Thus, the Islamic Republic of Iran's state-run radio was made available via satellite to the sizeable refugee population in North America in 1995, and television was to follow soon.

It is a remarkable achievement of the small screen to allow a home audience of diverse linguistic abilities to communally watch the same program. This is made possible in some instances by simultaneous broadcasting in spoken language, closed captioning, and sign language through an interpreter in an insert on the screen. In another strategy, The McNeil-Lehrer News Hour allows viewers to choose between English and Spanish versions. And in a more popular vein, television has even popularized an artificial tongue, Klingonese, the "spoken and written language" of the fictional Klingons, a powerful "humanoid warrior race" who built an empire in Star Trek's fictional universe. Fans are speaking and studying the language, which is taught in a Klingon Language Institute, with learning materials such as The Klingon Dictionary, an audiotape, Conversational Klingon, and a quarterly linguistics journal.

Television itself, then, is not a monolithic medium. Moreover, there is no great divide separating the language of television and other media. Throughout the world, television airs old and new films and theatrical performances, while in North America some popular programs such as Roseanne and Star Trek are simulcast, i.e. broadcast on radio. Linguistic variation is found even within a single genre in mainstream, alternative, local or ethnic televisions. And while a cross-media study of each genre, e.g. news, would reveal medium-specific features of language use, the diversity of genres does not allow us to identify a single, homogeneous language of television. In spite of this rich variety of voices, however, it remains to be seen whether or not a combination of official policies and market forces reduces the overall range and heterogeneity of languages and their uses throughout the world.

-Amir Hassanpour

FURTHER READING

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See also Closed Captioning; Dubbing; Subtitling; Talk Shows; Voice-Over