Your intuition that modern technology is slowing down language change, while entirely reasonable, is generally thought to be wrong by experts in language change

Your intuition that modern technology is slowing down language change, while entirely reasonable, is generally thought to be wrong by experts in language change. LETRA MAGNA - How do radio, television, films and popular entertainment affect language? LABOV - Our studies of sound changes in progress indicate that the mass media have almost no effect on the development of every-day language, which is influenced far more by the interaction of peers in every-day life. Passive listening to radio, television, or teachers in school, does not appear to affect the basic machinery of language production. In North America, regional dialects are becoming more diverse even though the mass media are quite uniform. Actprs on television programs will often reflect changes that have taken place in the community a generation before. The same principle applies to grammatical innovations, like the new English verb of quotation, "be like." Rosa Saladino showed that watching television had no effect on the replacement of dialect words with Italian. (from an interview with Bill Labov, "founder of modern sociolinguistics": http://www.letramagna.com/entrelabov.htm http://www.letramagna.com/entrelabov.htm) [edit for whitespace]