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Active and engaged television viewing can help accelerate language change, a new UK study has found.
The research provided first evidence that watching television can be a factor in accent change, researchers said.
In particular, the study looked at how watching the British television soap 'EastEnders' is altering certain features of the Scottish accent.
Linguists at the University of Glasgow found two particular features of pronunciation typically associated with London English that were becoming increasingly apparent in the Glaswegian dialect among people who regularly watched the television soap opera.
"Our study shows that the programmes that we watch on television can help to accelerate changes in aspects of language which are also well below the level of conscious awareness," Jane Stuart-Smith, Professor of Phonetics at the University of Glasgow and lead researcher on the project, said.

"In particular, this study was investigating why certain linguistic factors that are normally found within the Cockney dialect in London were gradually entering into Glaswegian. Although this trend was apparent in people who had contact with friends or family living in London, there was a stronger effect for people who had strong psychological engagement with characters in EastEnders," said Stuart-Smith.

However, the study also concluded that simply being exposed to television is not sufficient to cause accent change; for someone's speech to alter, they need to regularly watch the show and become emotionally engaged with the characters.
Researchers caution that television and other forms of popular media constitute only one of many factors that help accelerate language change and other, more powerful factors, such as social interaction between peers has a much stronger effect on language change in this study.

"We don't properly understand the mechanisms behind these changes, but we do see that the impact of the media is weaker than that of actual social interaction. We need many more studies of this kind in order to appreciate properly the influence of television and other popular media on language change," Stuart-Smith said.
The study was published in the journal Language.