From “May the Force be with you” to “Winter is coming”, series and films no longer just captivate our screens - they regularly invite themselves into our vocabulary. Expressions born behind a screen subtly infiltrate our everyday conversations, transforming our linguistic codes and defying cultural barriers. Here's a look at a phenomenon that's as fascinating as it is inevitable.
Our language, shaped by our upbringing and direct social interactions, is today undergoing an implicit revolution. Family, books and school, these traditional pillars of language learning, are now sharing their influence with a new player: audiovisual content: audiovisual content.
In 2022, children aged 0 to 2 were already spending more than 3 hours a day in front of a screen. This time, which increases with age, shapes our cognitive and linguistic systems, all the more so with the exponential presence of VOD platforms in our lives.
This immersion exposes viewers to a plethora of expressions, intonations and accents, often from cultures foreign to their own. It's an unprecedented environment in which the audiovisual language has become the new reference model for an entire generation.
While cinema had already been exerting this influence for decades, the advent of social networks has increased the phenomenon tenfold: a simple line can, in a matter of hours, be picked up by millions of Internet users around the world, demonstrating the incredible power of the media over our linguistic heritage.
It's no secret that many lines have made their way from the screen into everyday language. From The Mandalorian to Stranger Things to Games of Thrones, expressions like “This is the way”, “Friends don't lie” or “You know nothing, Jon Snow” are regularly used outside their original context.
Television humor has also left its mark on our contemporary lexicon: Schitt's Creek popularized the expressive “Eww”, while Letterkenny spurs us into action with “Pitter patter, let's get at 'er”.
More than a simple lexical enrichment, these expressions are sometimes intended to become little philosophies of reality, as when Ted Lasso, in the eponymous series, repeats “Be a goldfish”, inciting us to move on after a failure.
An influence that can finally extend to our own worldview. Are we seduced by Frank Underwood's cynical “Democracy is so overrated” in House of Cards, or do we feel a shiver of excitement at the Joker and his famous “Introduce a little anarchy” in The Dark Knight?
Beyond vocabulary, series and films also evoke certain ways of speaking, popularizing accents and intonations. Mare of Easttown, for example, has highlighted the specific accent of Philadelphia, while British productions such as Peaky Blinders have given worldwide visibility to Birmingham accents.
Aside from simple regional particularisms, other phenomena stand out, such as the trend towards affrication (from the Latin affricare, “to rub against”), which has been growing among teenagers since 2010, driven by pop culture and social networks.
This standardization of accents by the media bears witness to the fundamentally organic nature of our language, shaped by its cultural environment.
So, from the screen to the street, audiovisual productions transcend their initial status as mere entertainment to become authentic linguistic laboratories, simultaneously influencing our vocabulary, pronunciation and manner of speaking. Who knows what expression will invade our conversations tomorrow?
_
#LinguisticInfluence #CultReplications #Interpreting #Translation #PopCulture