Page 229 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

STANDARD LANGUAGE

1997 election. Hence, ‘spin’ could work both ways – as official
manipulation to protect the government and as the revenge of the
disenfranchised, to ‘keep them honest’.
One of its more peculiar claims to fame was that spin could cause an
event to occur before it happened. Part of the art of spin was to use
selected briefings, leaks and media releases to provoke coverage in the
press and on the morning radio and TV shows before the publication of
something risky – for example, a critical report or less-than-perfect
figures on the economy.

STANDARD LANGUAGE

A dialect that has assumed ascendancy within a language community
to such an extent that its internal rules become the standard of
correctness for the whole community. A standard language tends to
have abrogated more prestige and authority to itself than the varieties
with which it competes, principally because it usually emerges from
the dialect of the dominant group. The emergence of a standard
language is often related to the process of nation-building; and just as
nations are imaginary communities within the social sphere, so
standard languages are imaginary systems within the linguistic sphere –
not many of us actually speak the standard language, although most of
us either think that we do or believe that we should. Their imaginary
nature is suppressed by elaborate processes of codification in
prescriptive grammar books, guides to usage and dictionaries. All
these help to give the standard a spurious air of reality, perhaps with a
greater degree of success than that achieved in the UK by the Queen’s
televised speech at Christmas, which attempts to convince us that we
all belong to one nation (or Commonwealth).

See also: Dialect
Further reading: Leith (1983); Milroy and Milroy (1987)

STAR/STARDOM

The study of stars arises from film studies. Stars demonstrate the
relation between production and consumption, and between produ-
cers and consumers. Unlike the notion of celebrity, the concept of
star is specific to cinema history. It originated with Hollywood film
production.

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