AQA GCSE Media Studies Student Book

11 At this stage, you are going to take a short diversion away from the media to have a look at the English language as a code. The signs of English are words (or parts of words) that can be spoken or written. There are over 170,000 English words, but most of us get by with a vocabulary of about 3,000 words. However, we need to know a lot more about these words than just their simple dictionary definitions. Once you are over the age of two, people get a bit bored with you pointing at things and telling them what they are: ‘Lorry’, ‘Tree’, ‘Cat’. As we get older we need more sophisticated ways of communicating. Beyond the age of two (or thereabouts) you need to start putting words together to make more complex meanings such as ‘I feel sick’ and ‘I don’t like carrots’. You soon learn that words can’t be put together randomly (‘Carrots don’t like I’). A set of rules has to be used that are shared by all speakers of English. These rules are the grammar of the language. The interesting thing about these rules of grammar is that nobody ever tries to teach them to us as pre-schoolers. They don’t have to be formally taught because we just pick them up without thinking about them. When we speak or write, listen or read we are not even aware that we are applying these rules. For many of us we only start to think about the rules of language when we have English language lessons at school or when we try to learn another language and have to work things out, like whether to put adjectives before or after nouns and how to change a verb to the past tense. Most codes, including media codes, work just like this. We don’t really think about the rules, we just use them all the time as we create meanings by putting signs together or by understanding signs used by other people. Remember the last key element of the code? It is ‘shared knowledge and understanding’. The English language is a code that is shared by a lot of people: over 1,500 million including 375 million native speakers (those for whom English is their first language). Within this very large group of people, there are many subgroups: people who speak different variants of English and people who only speak English in a particular context such as medicine, for example. British English (Caribbean, British Islands, South Asia, South-East Asia) British English (East Africa, West Africa, South Africa) British English (Philippines, Australia, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand, Fiji American English (Canada) American English (USA, American Samoa) Canada USA Samoa British Islands Caribbean West Africa South Asia East Africa South Africa (Anglophone) South-East Asia Philippines Papua New Guinea Fiji New Zealand Australia English-speaking countries 1 Media Language