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Douglas Quenqua in the NY Times reports that linguists are far from calling the “Valley Girl” trend called uptalk and the use of “like” in sentences as markers of immaturity and stupidity.
They are now explaining that young women use these embellishments in much more sophisticated ways than people realize.
Says Penny Eckert, professor of linguisitcs at Stanford
A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute. But they’re not just using them because they’re girls. They’re using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end.
In December, researchers from Long Island University published a paper in The Journal of Voice. From an admittedly very small sample — recorded speech from 34 women ages 18 to 25 — they found evidence of a new trend among female college students: a gutteral fluttering of the vocal cords they have called “vocal fry.”
Vocal fry is best described as a raspy or croaking sound injected (usually) at the end of a stentence. Says Quenqua, it can be heard when Mae West says “Why don’t you come up and see me sometime;” or when Maya Rudolph on Saturday Night Live imitates Maya Angelou.
Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, a speech scientist at Long Island University, says we shouldn’t scoff. “They use this as a tool to convey something. You quickly realize that for them it is as a cue.”
And another linguist, Carmen Fought, professor at Pitzer College, says “If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid. The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.”
“It’s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people, and women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average,” according to Mark Liberman, linguist at the University of Pennsylvania.
Why Women?
Some linguists suggest that women are more sensitive to social interactions and hence more likely to adopt subtle social cues. Others feel women use language to assert their power in a culture that has asked them — in days gone by — to be sedate and decorous. A third theory is that young women are simply given more leeway by society to speak flamboyantly.
“Uptalk”
It is well established that female vocal fads eventually make their way into the general vernacular. Starting in the 1980s in America (after possibly emigrating from Australia), “uptalk” was common among Valley Girls.
In the past 20 years, uptalk has traveled up the age range and across the gender boundary, according to David Crystal, a longtime professor of linguistics at Bangor University in Wales. “I’ve heard grandfathers and grandmothers use it. I occasionally use it myself.”
The same can be said for the word “like,” when used in a grammatically superfluous way, or to add cadence to a sentence. It has found its way into Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition, which explains that people use ” like” in a sentence “apparently without meaning or sytactic function, but possibly as emphasis.”
“Like” and uptalk often go hand in hand. There are studies that show uptalk can be used for many purposes, and sometimes to dominate a listener.
Cynthia McLemore, linguist at Penn, found that senior members of a Texas sorority used uptalk to make junior members feel obligated to carry out new tasks. (“We have a rush event this Thursday? And everyone needs to be there?”)
Vocal fry, also known as “creaky voice,” has some history. Dr Crystal cited it as far back as 1964, when he noticed it was a way for British men to denote their superior social standing.
In the United States it has been gaining popularity since 2003, when Dr. Fought detected it among the female speakers of a Chicano dialect in California.
Actresses like Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon have used creaky voice when portraying contemporary American characters (“Shallow Hal,” “Legally Blonde”).
What does it denote? Ikuko Patricia Yuasa, lecturer in linguistics at UC Berkeley, calls it a natural result of a woman lowering her voice to sound more authoritative.
But it can also be used to indicate disinterest, which teenage girls are fond of doing.
According to Dr. Liberman,
It’s a mode of vibration that happens when the vocal cords are relatively lax, when subvocal pressure is low. So maybe some people use it when they’re relaxed and even bored, not especially aroused or invested in what they are saying.
Dr Eckert says that language changes very fast, however. Most people — particularly adults — will almost surely make mistakes when they try to divine the meaning of new forms of language used by young women.
“What may sound excessively ‘girly’ to me may sound smart, authoritative and strong to my students.”
For Douglas Quenqua’s article: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?_r=1&ref=science
Note: Every Tuesday the NY Times has a Science Times insert, chock full of great reports from the world of research as well as little known facts to intrigue any student!
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