Influence of TV (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Influence of TV
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Language Learning Forum : General discussion

beano
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08 January 2013 at 1:56am | IP Logged

I've often heard people from Norway and Netherlands say that receiving English TV broadcasts helps them become fluent in the language.

Tonight I read that 66% of the population in Malta can speak Italian, despite the language having no official status since 1934 (when far fewer people spoke it). Apparently this upswing is due to the nearby presence of Sicily, from which TV signals reach Malta. Moreover, Italian and Maltese are related and share a base vocabulary, much like the Germanic tongues.

The quality of TV ouput in the individual country must also have a strong bearing. Countries with small populations probably lack the funds to produce masses of quality TV shows and so local people are more agreeable to tuning into a foreign broadcast.
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Cavesa
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Message 2 of 5

08 January 2013 at 2:39am | IP Logged

Noone expects them to produce masses of good quality tv shows. It is pleasure to see
one from time to time among that sea of s...t. The unfortunate solution is the dubbing
of gboth good and crappy tv shows from abroad. Vast majority of population, especially
the older ones, doesn't care that the film is much better in original with subtitles
(even when it is in Chinese originally, in my opinion). Fortunately, more and more
young people use the subtitles.

What you say used to be true in some areas here before 1989. People near the borders of
Czechoslovakia and Germany (even though Eastern Germany) or Austria were catching their
tv and some of them improved their German a lot thanks to it. Now there is no reason
for this.

I suppose the country needs to be really small for your hypothesis to work. Even much
smaller than the Czech Republic.
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Cavesa
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Message 3 of 5

08 January 2013 at 2:41am | IP Logged

So, what I meant but didn't probably write too well: The size of the country is much less
important than it may seem at first sight.
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renaissancemedi
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Message 4 of 5

08 January 2013 at 8:00am | IP Logged

Thank heaven shows and films are not dubbed here. In two occasions, two waves of foreign tv shows, we all learned how you get a language by immersion!

Some years ago there was a flood of brazilian series, so we all learned some standard phrases.

These days it's turkish, and believe me when I tell you that people already have a minimum vocabulary. Not to mention all of a sudden the language seems appealing, simply because you get uset to listening to it.

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vonPeterhof
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Message 5 of 5

08 January 2013 at 8:33am | IP Logged

Not sure about the exact percentages, but it is said that a lot of people in Western Belarus speak Polish even today, even though the region hasn't been part of Poland since 1939. Heritage learning and language schools play their part, but TV is also a significant contributor - my mother visited Brest back in the Soviet times, and she says that even then there were more Polish channels on TV than Soviet ones. Then again, Polish and Belarusian are related and the former has greatly influenced the latter's vocabulary, so it's not clear how many people who claim to speak Polish just understand much of it passively and can communicate with Polish speakers in a sort of pidgin.

Speaking of related languages and influences,

beano wrote:

Moreover, Italian and Maltese are related and share a base vocabulary, much like the Germanic tongues.

Actually, in a strict linguistic sense, Maltese isn't related to Italian or any other Indo-European language. It's a Semitic language that is a descendant of the Sicilian dialect of Arabic (Maltese is sometimes called "the only dialect of Arabic that has a solid written literary tradition and the only one written in the Latin alphabet"). While Maltese vocabulary consists mostly of Italian and/or Sicilian loanwords its base vocabulary is actually Semitic. The relationship between the two languages is less like the one between the Germanic languages and more like the one between English and French (except that both English and French are Indo-European; perhaps Chinese and Japanese would be a better analogy).

Edited by vonPeterhof on 08 January 2013 at 8:36am

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