Authority and Authenticity in Media Englishes and the Englishes of Popular Culture

Abstract

Both authority and authenticity have long been an implicit concern of sociolinguistic analyses. Early sociolinguistic work insisted that data collected should be ‘spontaneous and naturally occurring’, a methodological dictum that was, in large part, borrowed from dialectology and the search for authentic Englishes that were thought to be endangered by modernization and, later, urbanization. In many ways, authentic Englishes are imagined to represent both literally and imaginatively authentic identities of the speakers of those languages. The emphasis on authentic Englishes significantly coincides with the development across a number of English-speaking communities of a Standard Language Ideology, which encodes authority. As standardised Englishes are adopted as media languages — and frequently named after the media that use them, (e.g. BBC English or American Broadcast Standard) — these media languages risk losing features that may signal authentic languages or identities. The pursuit of authenticity in media Englishes is amplified in the Englishes of pop culture, where authenticity must be manufactured as part of the process of creation. This essay explores the historical basis for the processes that manufacture authenticity in English varieties as a normal recurring process of standardization in a pluricentric model of world Englishes and examine a pop culture text’s use of authentic and authoritative Englishes.