The choice of our blog's name is based on the well-known phrase "London Calling" and Queen Elizabeth II.
"This is London Calling" was the opening sentence of the BBC news used during the World War II and also, the name of the magazine that contained a list of the programs if the BBC World Shortwave Radio Broadcasting Service.
Queen Elizabeth, has been for 60 years ruling Great Britain and represents the nation as a whole.
This blog will focus on the language used in the media (newspapers and magazines, TV programs...) as well as the language used in British films, dialects and by the most influential figures in Britain today.

BBC´s Language

Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, 20 November 2012
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Television news programmes have to have a formal language , understandable, clear and attractive to their respective audiences. The most known programme of news is called BBC in Great Britain so I am going to talk about this programme and the sort of language that BBC employs:
  • They employ a standard and formal language.
  • The programme provides information and public discourse.
  • The programme tries to entertain the audience in a serious and curious way.
BBC does not employ direct audience references because it would sound a little bit rude, so they employ some sentences like "You can see all the latest developments on BBC news 24" and they said "our" to their incorporation as a group because "me" sounds very bizarre.

The salutations in BBC are formal and educated as "Good Evening".
The reporters are not represented with titles and their names below, the presenters give their names and their location so it makes them more professionals and also we can see more than one reporter in a piece of news. For example " all the information will give us our correspondent Mark Simpson who is in Newry now, Mark". And when he finishes to talk about , the presenters always say "thank you very much"
The audience wants a very serious and informational programme so the informal language can not be used in BBC. It uses a serious linguistic style.

Others examples are: "no one was injured", "members of the presbyterian group" instead of "the people of the presbyterian group" "many business were forced to close" instead of "shops close"
A very used sentence is "thanks very much ,the time is coming up now too quarter past six" because they have a limit of time to say each section and it is a formal way to say that it is a little bit late. They do not use the contraction form as "isn´t " or " aren´t", they say "are not" or "is not" because it sounds better and formal. Another form that they do not use is the hesitation fillers as "you know" that is a daily form.
Also they always say things as "Discussing the elections.." or " Congress is still planning the electronic elections.." instead of "I think the Congress is still planning..", they do not use so much the personal pronouns.

When they are presenting some sections that they are going to talk about later they say "coming up..." because if they present every section of the programme it would give an "attractive view" so that people watching the news will wait to see them.
To the companies, business,etc. they called them , for example ,as "lucrative companies" because it sounds better. Also BBC employs neutral terms as "members" or "delegates".

To sum up, the language used in news are very formal, they employed neutral terms and general references. In this post you can see a few examples of this kind of language (BBC is only an example where you can see this language, you can see it in other news).
At last, I let you a video with this kind of language:

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