listenership

English

WOTD – 26 October 2020

Etymology

From listener +‎ -ship (suffix denoting a property or state of being).

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈlɪsənəʃɪp/, /ˈlɪsnəʃɪp/

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈlɪsənɚʃɪp/, /ˈlɪsnɚʃɪp/
• Hyphenation: lis‧ten‧er‧ship

Noun

listenership (countable and uncountable, plural listenerships)

1. The audience that listens to a certain form or genre of audio material (specifically (Internet, radio), an audio broadcast such as a radio program or a podcast).

   Synonym: hearership

   • 1953 August–December, “‘Voice’ Move to Washington”, in U.S. Information Agency: First Report to Congress, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 10:

     While Soviet jamming is intense, particularly in the vicinity of Moscow, we have evidence that "Voice [of America]" programs can be heard in areas 25 miles from Moscow and that there are listeners in numerous cities throughout the Soviet Union. Listenership in the satellites, according to refugees, is widespread.

   • 1969 April 28, “Highlights”, in Foreign Radio Listening in Czechoslovakia before and during the Invasion (Research Service; E-7-69), Washington, D.C.: Office of Research and Assessment, United States Information Agency, →OCLC, page ii:

     [A]n increase in VOA [Voice of America] audience size may well have been concealed by a change in recording listenership. In all, VOA tied for third in listenership among foreign stations.

   • 1977, Peter E. Berry, “1969: The Tower of Babel”, in “… And the Hits Just Keep on Comin’”, Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, →ISBN, page 89:

     In the late sixties, as if the result of some galactic explosion, the popular idiom splintered and broke into so many components that a microscopic analysis of each is a difficult if not Herculean task. The cause of this diffusion can be traced to several sources. One was the rapid acceleration and increasing listenership to FM radio, whose alternative programming deviated from hard-rock to progressive country & western, from album cuts to singles, from lush strings to neo-jazz, and away from banal top-forty disc jockeys towards mellowed diplomats who were more influenced by orchestration than sensation.

   • 1996, David Gough, “Black English in South Africa”, in Vivian de Klerk, editor, Focus on South Africa (Varieties of English around the World; G15), Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Pa.: John Benjamins Publishing Company, →ISBN, →ISSN, section B (Pan-ethnic Varieties), subsection 3 (English and the Media), page 56:

     On the other hand, listenership figures from SABC [...] indicate that Radio Metro, an English-medium music programme oriented to urban blacks has one of the highest listenerships of all stations among blacks.

   • 1998, Nandini Prasad, “Electronic Media and Public Service Broadcasting”, in V. S. Gupta, Rajeshwar Dyal, editors, Media and Market Forces: Challenges and Opportunities: Proceedings of the Regional Seminars and the National Colloquium, New Delhi: [F]or AMIC; Friedrich Ebert Stiftung by Concept Publishing Company, →ISBN, page 117:

     What people "want" to read in newspapers, see on television and in films, and listen to over the radio is made available to them by the media owners and their managers. The main objective is to make continuous efforts to increase readership/viewership/listenership so that revenue of advertisements could be attracted.

   • 2000, Mansur Abdulkadir, “Popular Culture in Advertising: Nigerian Hausa Radio”, in Richard Fardon, Graham Furniss, editors, African Broadcast Cultures: Radio in Transition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: James Currey; Harare, Zimbabwe: Baobab, →ISBN, page 128:

     The American research confirmed the figure of 35 million as the average listenership of the station within Nigeria.

   • 2015, Avi Santo, “Putting on the Mask: Character Licensing before the Lone Ranger”, in Selling the Silver Bullet: The Lone Ranger and Transmedia Brand Licensing (Texas Film and Media Studies Series), Austin, Tex.: University of Texas Press, →ISBN, page 34:

     As long-time owners of an independent theater chain who were now in search of inexpensive, reliable content that would capture a young listenership for their fledgling radio network, [George Washington] Trendle and [John H.] Kunsky likely thought the Western was the kind of low-risk, high-reward genre KTBC was in search of.

   • 2021, Byron Dueck, “Music of Ethnic North America”, in Timothy Rommen, Bruno Nettl, editors, Excursions in World Music, 8th edition, New York, N.Y., Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Routledge, →ISBN, page 454:

     As noted earlier, Black musics including the blues have not had solely Black listenerships, or remained entirely Black practices: others have been captivated by these musics, contributed to their histories, and benefitted financially from them.

2. (linguistics) The act of paying attention to a conversation or speech; listening.
   • 1981, Deborah Tannen, “New York Jewish Conversa­tional Style”, in International Journal of the Sociology of Language, volume 30, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, →DOI, →ISSN, →OCLC, page 137:

     Following are the main features found in the talk of three of the six Thanksgiving celebrants. [...] 3. Pacing. (a) faster rate of speech, (b) inter-turn pauses avoided (silence is evidence of lack of rapport), (c) faster turntaking, (d) cooperative overlap and participatory listenership.

   • 1994, Deborah Tannen, “Gender Differences in Conversational Coherence: Physical Alignment and Topical Cohesion”, in Gender and Discourse, New York, N.Y., Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 124:

     Marsha refers to the characteristic which Pam identified, showing verbal agreement, as "a bad habit," claiming that rather than showing good listenership, it often masks not listening ("tune 'em out").

   • 2001, Hiroko Futo, “Turn-taking in Japanese Conversation”, in Laurence Horn, editor, Turn-taking in English and Japanese: Projectability in Grammar, Intonation, and Semantics (Outstanding Dissertations in Linguistics), New York, N.Y., London: Routledge, →ISBN, page 94:

     These categories form a continuum that shows the degree of floor control, i.e. the left end of the continuum indicates that the speaker has little floor control and is more likely to engage in listenership, while the right end of the continuum shows strong influence on floor control (the speaker can dominate the floor, taking away the floor from the previous speaker).

   • 2012, Deborah Tannen, “Turn-taking and Intercultural Discourse and Communication”, in Christian Bratt Paulston, Scott F[abius] Kiesling, Elizabeth S. Rangel, editors, The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics), Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, →ISBN, part III (International Discourse Features), page 149:

     [W]omen tend to provide and expect more listener feedback such as "yeah," "mhm," and "uhuh," so they often get the mistaken impression that men are not listening when they are, while men often mistake women's signs of listenership for signs of agreement, and feel misled when they later learn that the women did not agree.

Coordinate terms

• readership
• viewership

Related terms

• listen
• listener
• listening (adjective, noun)

Translations

audience that listens to an audio broadcast

Cebuano: tigpaminaw Chinese: Mandarin: 聽眾／听众 (zh) (tīngzhòng), 聽衆／听众 (zh) (tīngzhòng) Finnish: kuulijakunta French: audience (fr) f Georgian: მსმენელები pl (msmenelebi) Greek: ακροαματικότητα (el) f (akroamatikótita) Maori: hunga whakarongo Swedish: åhörare (sv) c pl

(linguistics) the act of paying attention to a conversation or speech — see also listening

Further reading

• audience measurement on Wikipedia.Wikipedia
• “listenership, n.” under “listener, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press, 1903.
• “listenership, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.