Vocal fry is in the news again! Bethany Brookshire explains:
Bringing to mind celebrity voices like Kim Kardashian or Zooey Deschanel, vocal fry is a result of pushing the end of words and sentences into the lowest vocal register. When forcing the voice low, the vocal folds in the throat vibrate irregularly, allowing air to slip through. The result is a low, sizzling rattle underneath the tone. Recent studies have documented growing popularity of vocal fry among young women in the United States. But popular sizzle in women’s speech might be frying their job prospects, a new study reports. The findings suggest that people with this vocal affectation might want to hold the fry on the job market — and that people on the hiring side of the table might want to examine their biases.
I’m at a liberal arts college that is attended by at least 60% women, and I hear it all the time — and it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. People have different voices, there are patterns that mark men and women, young and old, regions and races, and it’s no big deal — I actually find that the vocal fry becomes more common as people become less formal and more friendly, so it’s more a signature of a kind of knowing familiarity.
I thought that if it were off-putting in a job interview, as that study finds, it might be because that’s a situation with an expectation of greater formality, or as Language Log suggests, it’s because the recordings used in the study were a bit forced, and people trying to use an unnatural (to them) style of speaking can easily come across as insincere. But surely we don’t judge people by small variations in their speech, do we?
I forgot. People suck.
In an article on vocal fry on NPR, the commenters persuade me that there probably actually is considerable discrimination going on.
Ms. Eveleth admitted that she “sometimes” catches herself in her own high rising terminal (“upspeak”). How could she miss it, considering the number of people it must cause to void the contents of their stomachs?
More alarming than Eveleth’s contemptible defense of creaky speak was prominent on-air talent Rachel Martin’s claim that she’d never even heard of “vocal fry”. This is the state of broadcast journalism.
Upspeak bothers you? So much that you want to vomit? I suggest that the problem isn’t so much with the speaker as it is with people who want to so thoroughly police others’ speech patterns to the degree that they feel physically ill when they hear variants. I’m wondering how this commenter reacts to a Southern accent, which I find lovely, or to a Black American accent (which I also heard all the time when I worked at Temple University), or, horrors, the pitch accent of so many people in the upper Midwest.
Vocal fry is so subtle that most people don’t recognize it as a discrete entity, but apparently it is an indictment of all of journalism that a reporter should fail to deplore it with the vigor this commenter demands.
This one is even worse.
Also funny that Rose Eveleth doesn’t think vocal fry would interfere with job performance. I’d suggest that she consider how impossible it is to work with someone who habitually scratches out the final words of every statement. Vocal fryers don’t hear each other doing it, I guess. A community of unconscious croakers.
It’s not just women, either. You hear it in interviews with young male media hipsters. Guy Raz of the Ted Radio Hour has a curious sing-song vocal fry.
Awareness is the first step toward a cure. America needs mass speech therapy in the worst way. Up speak, vocal fry, and Valley Girl princess speech all constitute a national cultural emergency.
Edit: On second listening, Ms. Eveleth is not that bad a fryer, mostly lapsing into it in the egg story. And fortunately, Rachel Martin is completely fry-free, and a full vocalizer.
It’s a national cultural emergency! Speech therapy must be administered immediately to eradicate all variation from General American!
Jebus. I’ve been all over the country, and one of the things I like is that people have their own unique ways of speaking — ways that are distinctive and regional and act as indicators of identity. I’ve been to the United Kingdom and heard the range of voices there — I don’t know what that is they speak in Scotland, but it deserves a more appropriate label than “English” — and that makes the addition of a faint growl to the end of sentences trivial.
This isn’t about language at all. These vocal variations don’t affect communication in the slightest. This is all about language as a marker for class, race, and sex, and providing the excuse of subtle differences in speech as a way to publicly air prejudices. That guy who detests “Up speak, vocal fry, and Valley Girl princess speech” isn’t actually perturbed by how they speak — he has singled out a set of patterns associated with young women.
I also notice an omission. If we’re going to have mass speech therapy for the entire country, why is it to correct everyone to the General American standard? Flat and nasal isn’t pretty. If we’re going to do this and enforce uniformity, I’m going to insist that we use Shelby Foote as a model and get everyone to talk like that, with voices like soft music. Or maybe the casual, confident, laid-back style of Snoop Dogg. I also wouldn’t mind Sarah Silverman as a voice coach.
Anything but the boringly level voice of standard radio announcers everywhere.
The only accent I can’t stand is that “General American standard” you’re talking about… but only when British/Australian people use it in American TV shows. And the only reason I hate it is that it reminds me that America is so racist that they’d rather hire white actors from across the planet to play “Americans” with flat accents that kill any performance subtlety, than to hire talented non-white American actors who aren’t struggling to act through a fake accent.
And the less said about those of us whose language and pronunciation patterns were not set in “standard ‘murikan”, the better. Such as the ever-increasing bilingual Spanish/English population in this country; or the wide-variety-of-Asian/English population in the San Francisco area…
I think the word you may be looking for is Scots. Although to be fair the two languages* are close enough there is a continuum between Scots and English.
*To complicate it a little many linguists argue that the Scots of different areas is distinct enough to make it several languages.
Slightly, only because it’s usually used to denote a question. Or it was, when I was growing up. It seems far less common now, but the association is still in my head, and the perceived incongruity bothers me some.
Also, I tend to engage in “upspeak.” The opposite (a quick drop in pitch at the end of the sentence) implies that the speaker is done speaking for the moment. Since my speech impediment often keeps me from finishing, I find myself using upspeak to make sure the person I’m speaking to doesn’t misunderstand my sudden silence.
Did she really say that we all need speech therapy?! OK, I am a speech-language pathologist and I’ve heard ignorant assertions like this one. Glottal fry (or vocal fry) is what naturally occurs at the end of a phrase or sentence, with the exception of questions where your intonation generally rises (languages are different. I guess people think all languages are like English?). Is it being asserted that glottal fry is something people consciously do? This sounds like total ignorance of how the human voice works.
We demand that everybody speak with the same good AMERICAN accent as Peter Jennings, Christiane Amanpour, Wolf Blitzer, and Ted Koppel.
In Russian, the voice buckles in questions – it goes first up and then down.
Vocal Fry? What the fuck are they talking about? Who cares about this shit.
Now if you want to hear some awesome accents…come to my corner of the world (Atlantic Canada).
Well, that depends… We speak a lot of different things in Scotland. There’s various dialects of English with various wildly different accents, there’s various different Scots dialects (Scots is actually a different language, derived from a parallel branch of Middle English to the one modern English evolved from, although there are enough similarities for a lot of mutual comprehension), and then there’s Scots Gaelic. Gaelic is a whole other kettle of fish, with a huge amount of variation from place to place.
But mostly you’re just hearing different accents and dialects. We have far more variation in accent and dialect even just within Scotland that you have across the whole of North America. Basically all Scots speakers are at least Scots / English bilingual, and I would expect most people would revert to English when speaking to a visitor. But even as a native, there are people from other parts of Scotland that I struggle to understand. Doric (the dialect spoken in the north-east, around Aberdeen) in particular is quite challenging.
Actually, there’s much less variation than there used to be. People from previous generations used to be able to tell exactly which village you came from by your accent, even across the space of just a couple of miles. Shaw’s Pygmalion is not exaggerated in that regard.
Darn. All of my efforts as a second-language English-speaker to extirpate all inflection and affect may have been ill-advised. On the other hand, my friends and colleagues agree that we all speak English without any accent at all. It’s those other people who have accents.
Yeah.
Vocal habits like vocal fry (which I just got introduced to as a concept. Nice to have a term for that!) up-speak, etc. are a big part of individuality and expression. I (somewhat) understand the classist basis of accent corralling (yay history) but I try to reserve judgement on a person based on actions and demonstrated positions, rather than snapping to conclusions based on accent. A recent example was being introduced to the ‘Smarter every day’ youtube channel, and it’s host, Destin, who has a VERY distinct texan speaking pattern, including the slight lilt. Instant snap reaction is ‘guy is a twangy jackass,’ due to my own built in prejudices, but I persisted, and found that he’s actually a really neat guy that does neat stuff. Yay for challenging personal prejudices!
Accents are not indicators of intelligence level. Accents are the result of your language environment while growing up.
I was once taken to a Chicago Cubs baseball game and found myself sitting behind a Welshman and a Scotsman (I’m English). My unfortunate American companion said he didn’t understand a word of our short conversation.
I expect there’s a few Rab C. Nesbit videos on YouTube…
I’d never heard the term before, and now that someone has explained what it is, my reaction is “Who the eff cares?” New agencies are doing reports on young women because they make their voice slightly raspy at the end of sentences??? WTF?
I hope that doesn’t auto-play. Apologies, if it does.
” ” I don’t know what that is they speak in Scotland, but it deserves a more appropriate label than “English””
I think the word you may be looking for is Scots.”
That’s true, but some speakers prefer “Lallans” which means Lowland. In the Highlands they used to speak Gaelic– and road signs tend to have both.
+1 for Shelby Foote. Was it Ken Burns’s Civil War where he did a lot of narration? In any event, he could teach you buckets of stuff and you’d never notice for the peace he brought merely by speaking.
These nice folks need to travel to Canada, eh?
It would be fun to watch their heads explode…
As someone from an island with so many accents you can tell which neighbourhood of a city someone is from, I find it remarkable thatpeople complain about the comparatively few accents spoken in the US of A.
or, as I’d say it:
As sumone frum a small oiland with so diffrunt languages yiaow can tell which noiberhood of a city somewun’s frum, Oi find it remarkable that people cumploin about the comparatively few accents spoke in the Yoo-ess of oi.
I didn’t know what it was called, but that audio example of vocal fry set my brain on edge. My immediate response was the same as the first few comments to the article – it sounds sarcastic and bored. It’s not an accent, it’s more of a tone, and that tone is not a good one. I had a surprisingly visceral negative reaction to that vocal fry voice.
So what exactly is wrong with sounding like Stephen Fry again?
From henceforth I declare that all men must talk like Cecil Baldwin from Welcome to Night Vale, and all women must talk like Paget Brewster in the “Beyond Belief” segments of The Thrilling Adventure Hour.
I demand that Congress take action! Not like that budget deficit or health care nonsense; this is important!
@3, @16: Actually, there aren’t that many people that really speak Scots these days, and it’s basically never used except within the company of people who deliberately choose to use it with each other. There may be one or two words that leak over, but you’re almost certainly just hearing English with a Scots accent.
And they still do speak Gaelic in some parts of the Highlands, particularly in the Western Isles. Phone up the local government offices (I used to have a job which required me to do this from time to time) and they’ll answer the phone in Gaelic.
I recently saw a program on NatGeo TV, where they discussed how easy it is to be a liar, and to be lied to, and tricks to avoid it it, and tricks to accomplish it , etc. One of the segments was about an “interviewer” who was effectively a “human lie detector”. She interviewed two (physically) similar candidates, one who told the truth and one with a script of falsehoods; and the interviewer identified the liar correctly. She then explained what her technique for detecting liars was. The most prominent was that liars often speak with a vocal fry voice. while truth-tellers generally don’t. Not that lies are indicated by vocal fry, but that when lying, the liar generally speaks with a vocal fry. They were not saying that vocal fry == liar, just that it is something that correlates with lying. [correlation is NOT causation].
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this here note was triggered by seeing vocal fry. did not read anything more of the OP.
voidhawk, I’m crap at accents but are you a Brummie? (I can hear Timothy Spall talking when I read your post :-) )
Accents don’t usually bother me, but I’m afraid Mark Cousins’ particular Belfast upspeak rendered his documentary The Story of Film: An Odyssey unwatchable to me. My loss.
Whews ‘enry ‘iggins when ya need ‘im?
I can only imagine what judgment a person might come to upon hearing the accent of those people who are complaining about others’ accents. People are really awful sometimes and it’s incredible just how much information some people think they can glean from someone’s voice alone.
Anyhow, if the whole of North America should have an accent inflicted upon them, it should obviously be mine. It’s a disappearing accent, now almost peculiar to Toronto (though it exists on a continuum from Windsor right up through to Ottawa), exemplified by people like Margaret Atwood and in use at the CBC (though diminishing). It’s like an echo of Canadian Dainty and it’s a very hard accent to come across.
In my everyday life I know exactly one other person with this accent. I have no one to teach it to and that may be just as well, because it does get met with laughter, ridicule or quizzical looks. Which is exactly why everyone should use it; I’ll have saved a lovely, disappearing accent and I won’t get looks for the way I speak.
I had the pleasure of hearing Shelby Foote speak at an awards presentation not long before his death. Even old and in ill health his voice was absolutely wonderful. His message was even better.
Sadly, because of his health, he did not attend the reception afterwards. I would have greatly enjoyed having a few words with him.
I too have often caught myself stereotyping entire regions by the accent, that I have actually only heard from a few people from that region. EG Northeast = talk fast, very fast, hardly stopping. Texans = talk very, very, slowly. wake me up when you finish that word. And very loud so you can’t nap through their oh so long sentences (timewise, not number of words). And of course there’s the “valley girl” stereotype. (not regional but age related). But, to be clear, those are the things I try to catch myself doing, cuz I know it is wrong to do that form of bigotry.
So i gotta say it: Britain and America, two people divided by a common language.
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So what was the OP sayin? That some are using accents as an excuse for bigotry? Or that they are mistaking their own bigotry as the speech impediments of others? Either way, it would be nice if people would just accept everyone’s speech habits as just an accent, with no implication of mental abilities.
Here in Worcester, Massachusetts (for those who aren’t aware, “Worcester” is two syllables, no “r” sounds) we have a bar trivia/gaming group consisting of a few people raised in the area, someone from Rhode Island, me (father from Presque Isle, ME, where they do say their “r”s in the same place as the “r”s appear in the written word; mother Midwestern) and one woman with the most wonderful and broad Boston-area accent I have ever heard. It is a joy to hear her talk.
cartomancer @ 21:
is more or less what “vocal fry” made me think of, and then I couldn’t help thinking of Ross Noble saying “Toblerone-Rolo combo”.
I think they’re misidentifying the whole thing, personally. The ‘bad’ example sound bad because of intonation not register. I would contend you could ‘fry’ yourself all day long and sound fine.
But this stuff is such a non starter anyway, as mentioned.
There’s a cliche in Australia of the Whingeing Pom, which contends that English immigrants complain a lot. I think accent has a lot to do with this. Australians are world class whingers and amazingly self important (which seems to overcompensate for a certain cultural insecurity, but enough theorising…). But when an Australian complains it’s in a boisterous forceful way which we admire, so that’s ok. Our endless complaining is merely a show of vigorousness!
The English, particularly from the Estuary Accent group and Birmingham and a few others, sound mopey to many ears and every word registers as a hard luck story. Which is kind of culturally offensive.
When you give a hard luck story in Aus you must sound righteous
@1 (Improbable Joe), as an Australian I agree. Not that we shouldn’t be allowed to come over here and take all your acting jobs, but that we should be able to appear in a ‘merikan tv show and keep out own accent (obvious context specific situations aside). Presumably the thinking is that audiences can’t cope with someone saying things in an unnatural (foreign) way and they would stop watching the show in confusion. Especially interesting as the reverse is true overseas (at least in Australia) where characters are *given* an American accent (or an American is hired) when an element of credibility, or glamour is required. Which can be galling.
So I think you country is pretty spoiled when it comes to local (even insular) content.
Although I agree with PZ’s larger point, I admit to being slightly annoyed by both vocal fry and upspeak.
Upspeak is used (in my dialect at least) to denote a question. When people (mostly Canadian) end every sentence with upspeak, I actually feel an urge to answer their question, for a brief instant, before I process that they didn’t ask me any questions. It’s at least slightly annoying to have a conversation with someone who tells you, “I have to work today? But I’d like to have dinner with you? Let’s do it tonight? We can do Chinese? I like Chinese? Especially Szechuan?” Sometimes I give in to the urge to respond to each sentence by saying, “Don’t ask me!”
It’s less easy to nail down my reaction to vocal fry. I think the trouble is that it sounds casual (as PZ says), but not just casual: casual to an extent that’s alien to my subculture. It makes me think of a California teenager failing to take things with the appropriate level of seriousness. It also sounds like an affectation, since it’s foreign to my dialect/subculture. In small doses I probably don’t notice it; in California I accept it as a local idiosyncrasy. But in my accustomed setting, it irks me at least a little.
I deal with prejudice caused by a voice problem every day. I have spasmodic dysphonia. If you’ve ever heard Diane Rheem on NPR, that’s what my voice is like.
Botox injections into my vocal cord used to help a lot, but they are no longer very effective.
SD ruined my teaching career. Now, it’s difficult to be understood in a telephone conversation, and almost impossible in a noisy situation. It makes me feel like a child when my husband has to repeat things for me so that a person can understand what I’m asking.
I hope that these young people aren’t doing damage to their vocal cords with this vocal fry thing.
If they suffer from problems like mine when they are older, they may regret such an affectation.
A Masked Avenger, I find it amusing that you are able to articulate your problem with a Canadian accent without ever describing your own accent. You know, so that others can have a chance to tell you what’s a least slightly annoying about the way you sound.
I can only imagine what you’d think I’d sound like. Slightly annoying would probably only being to describe it.
In HS there was an indian pair of siblings who had grown up in france and of course had learned english as well by default (envy envy envy multilinguals envy envy)…EVERYONE should be forced to speak in their accent…OMFG it was just sublime…
I think I got roughly 30 % of that. I hope that’d improve if I watched the video through.
Why do you think this is a concious choice?
I have to confess, upspeak annoys me. So does the Central Canadian/Great Lakes-US accent. The Ottawa Valley accents grates on my nerves, and I couldn’t finish watching “Fargo”, not because of the wood chipper scene, but because of the way people talked. But if I have to deal with people from that area, I realize that it’s a problem with me, not with them, and listen as carefully to them as to anyone else.
I love European accents, except the Dutch accent, which depresses me, as it reminds me of my own failure to learn that language.
Wow, that sounds like a mixture of Swiss German and Swedish; and I understand about as much as of Swiss “German” from middle altitudes, too.
NitricAcid, and what do you sound like?
Also, Central Canadian/Great Lakes-US accent are vastly different. Does Northern Cities Shift mean anything to you? A Windsorite sounds as different from a Chicagoan as a San Antonian does from a San Franciscan.
Thomathy, #36:
True, but I was focused on the topic, which mentioned upspeak and vocal fry. I hope it was obvious in my post that I fully recognize that my viewpoint is centric on my own subculture and dialect–for example, I hope it was conspicuous that I never made any references to “correct” English.
Since you asked, my own speech is pretty plastic: I do tend to take on easily the speech patterns around me. I’m from the part of New England that pronounces its R’s, but was schooled in “standard” English sufficiently that I don’t add extra R’s to words like idear. A Rhode Islander once told me I sound like I’m from Connecticut, but that “after talking to you for a few minutes, you staht sounding nohmal.” Overall, as best I can tell from feedback received, I speak something very close to “standard English,” but in casual conversation can lapse into the ambient dialect.
In A Masked Avengers defense I do find upspeak and vocal fry a bit annoying as well but at the same time I really don’t give a crap and certainly don’t judge content of speech by it. The vocal fry thing was way sexy back when it wasn’t so ubiquitous IMO. I also agree with Masked Avenger that it’s an affectation, at least for the moment but every culturally significant feature began as a quirk somewhere. I’m generally put off by affectation in general; backwards baseball caps, bro-speak, and that other mumbly thing some younger men do, etc… Affectation is a kind of fakey peice of information people give to get you to think about them in a pre-packged way…But again, It’s low on my ‘frustration-maker’ list and I would never tell someone they should stop doing it. I take ‘mind your own damn business’ pretty seriously
The first persistent upspeaker I ever knew was a straight, white, 30YO man (he’s 35 now). And it annoyed the shit out of me. I kept wanting to smack him on the head and shout, “Make a simple declarative sentence, dude! Do you really not know what you did this morning?”
(Seriously. He speaks like this: “I went to the store? And I bought a loaf of bread? And then I made French toast?”)
It’s adding misleading–often contradictory–information to the sentence. To my ear it declares uncertainty where there shouldn’t be any.
I’ve gotten more tolerant of it in most contexts. Sometimes a person really does want to leave room for uncertainty in their sentence, and it genuinely is half-question. In that context it doesn’t bother me, because it’s adding useful information to the sentence. I’ve adopted this use of upspeak, certainly.
But the continuous use when there’s no contextual reason I can see…ugh, it bugs. To me it’s a vocal equivalent of someone who peppers their speech with “you know?” If I knew, we wouldn’t be having this conversation–why are you asking me?
I know. My interpretation is on me. I try to listen to upspeakers and mentally delete the “this is a question” part of my interpretation. But then it can be like listening to someone speaking in a monotone–every sentence is interpreted with flat emotional affect.
(That guy is still my friend, I should note. He’s smart and has interesting things to say. So do my friends who say “you know” all the time. Because friends tolerate each others’ quirks.)
Hmmm. Now I need to pay more attention to my female friends’ speech. Do they use upspeak and perhaps I don’t notice it because they’re women?
Vocal fry doesn’t bother me in the slightest. I think it’s most effectively used to enhance sarcasm, but it alone doesn’t make me think the speaker is being sarcastic. It doesn’t add false positives for information. And it’s rarely used at the end of every sentence, which prevents it from feeling monotonous. (Rather the opposite, imo–it gives a little color to the speech.)
Plus there’s the phenomenon of voice-matching that generally happens within groups where people in the group match the pitch and pattern of a dominant person in that group. The ‘Valley Girl’ effect was kinda neat to watch emerging when I was in Junior High. I grew up in the Roanoke valley in SW Va, and watching that speaking pattern emerge in real time was a hoot. Me and my freinds were already very familiar with the actual movie so we sorta knew what it was when we started hearing the accent. Whats also really intersting is that those ‘accents’ seem to skew by gender and that itself is across cultures… Japanese women and men have very different speech ‘effects’ from each other as do the French and Brazillian portuguese speakers
Well, Standard English doesn’t have an accent and it’s defined regionally. It’s not at all monolithic. Do you mean that you typically have a General American accent? Also, note that there isn’t really a strong case that can be made for there being different dialects of English in North America, except perhaps along vast regional lines. An accent is a part of a dialect, but a dialect is importantly distinguished by a difference in vocabulary and grammar. For the most part, North America can be said to have two dialects with many accents, Canadian and American. Arguments can be made for finer divisions and of course there are obvious cases like African American Vernacular English.
In any case, I won’t point out anything about any given accent that may have annoyed me once. It took some doing, but I’ve learned to appreciate the variety of sounds that people produce and I’m happier for it. I would suggest that you try to find a way to enjoy them too, since they are largely intrinsic to a person and it is a poor reflection on you.
And that message isn’t directed only at you. The parallels between something like racism and finding the speech of others’ ‘annoying’ aren’t merely superficial.
Moving fast. To be clear, I’m responding to A Masked Avenger @ #43.
What’s different about upspeak and vocal fry (this was the first time I had seen named) is that they are not accents of region…They’re spread by TV and movies mostly I would think…Then as memes, well they take on a life of their own…No batteries needed
I was born in California but grew up speaking Portuguese because that’s what my parents spoke in the home. When I was 23 and a new teaching assistant at a UC campus, the Azorean-born custodian for the math department building told me which island my grandparents came from after I spoke two words to him in Portuguese (the equivalent of “You bet!” when he asked if my family name indicated I was of Portuguese descent). He was right, too. The way we talk carries markers of our heritage and geography. Its says nothing, however, about whether we’re naughty or nice, stupid or intelligent, or much of anything else.
Everyone should speak with the accent of the first girl in this clip.
TSW – Nefertari the Younger
If anyone can tell me where people speak like that, I will move there and just listen to people talk. *nodnod*
Ha! So Zeno, should I assume that you grew up speaking Continental Portuguese and not Brazillian? So, I was wondering. How easy is it for Continental and Brazillian spekers to understand each other. I’m only familiar (through Tropical and Bossa Nova) with the Brazillian variety but BOY is that a freakin’ beaaautiful languge… By far my favorite!
I have a very neutral, well annunciated Australian accent, and I have been asked at least twice now in the US:
“oh, is your accent British, or gay…”
neither for the record, and odd that the two are apparently mutually exclusive…
Roy G @51: Sounds like early Emma Watson to me.
voidhawk@19: I gather from context that you aren’t American. My guess would be that most of your experience of American accents would, therefore, be from TV/movies. I assure you, they don’t demonstrate anything remotely close to the true variance of American accents.
For instance: I’m from Queens, New York. You may have heard of it, in context with the accents of Cyndi Lauper and Fran Drescher, or the character Archie Bunker. I know lots of people with similar accents, but also lots of Queens natives with entirely different accents. I sound nothing like Ms. Lauper, Ms. Drescher, or Carroll O’Connor as Archie Bunker (though I can fake those accents easily).
People frequently don’t believe I’m from New York because I don’t have “a New York accent.” Except of course I do–it’s just not one television has trained them to associate with New York. It’s not middle American neutral–I make every distinction between vowels on all those key words (pen/pin, marry/merry/Mary, etc.)
And my accent changes radically in different contexts. Calm and cool? “Not NY (except it is).” Aggravated? “Oh, yeah, there it is.” (Yet still not like Fran Drescher. More like Jerry Orbach’s accent.)
And that’s barely scratching the surface of 109 square miles (283 sq km). This is a big country. It has a so many different accents we don’t even bother thinking about it most of the time.
speaking of accents [pun]. My most humorous “stereotype of accents is this one:
Boston shipped all of its “R”s to New York. Boston accent’s lose every R, such as Harvard, pronounced as Hahvahd; while New Yawkahs throw extra R’s in all over the place. (like ‘wahtah’, vs ‘warr-terr’, for that clear liquid out of your tap, and ‘erl’ instead of ‘oil’ for yer cah.). We even, at MIT, had T-shirts for sale, imitation of college t-shirts, emblazoned: “Hahvahd U.” cuz MIT’ers hated their big brother up the river. (google “MIT hacks of all time”) and the Welcome Guidebook noted, that even though it is a common phrase to “pahk yah cah in hahvahd yahd”, you really can’t park your car there. [it’s not a parking area]
..
OK too silly
Like RP and GA you mean?
I can only wish we could all sound like Shelby Foote
From reading the comments, it would appear that “upspeak” is when people pronounce statements as if they are questions. That is indeed very irritating. It makes the speaker sound stupid.
However, I also agree with PZ in so far as, if someone were to list all the accents they dislike, and all those accents related to only one group of people (in PZ’s example, all were accents most commonly used by young women), that is very suspicious and indicates that your problem probably isn’t the accent at all.
Well, technically, all of this is English, just English with accents:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOX5Q4wg26U
But you also get Scots, an arguably distinct variant of Scots called Doric, and, of course, Gaelic.
As an american teenager not living in the US, I spent quite a bit of time perfecting my ‘not-american’ accent. I was really quite good. People guessing would go through pretty much every other english speaking country, and generally ended up guessing canada, new zealand or south africa (maybe they all just sucked at guessing?) When I then moved back to the states, I really struggled with my accent, and all the kids thought I was an exchange student. These days I feel like I have a pretty generic us accent, but I enjoy picking up on the unique qualities that people carry with them in the way they speak.
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I also watch everything with sub-titles, you wouldn’t believe how much you miss without them. There was this one film, however, from Australia, called the Post Card Bandit that did not have subtitles available, and it was super difficult to understand! We finally figured out that they were saying “rat cunning!” when talking about the bandit’s cleverness.
AtheistPowerlifter @8
Atlantic Canada? Lord Tunderin’ bye! Have ya walked yer dag yet? :-)
From a fellow Canuck on the Other Coast.
frog @45
If I were to put on my MagicPsycholinguisticHat* maybe people use upspeak because they lack confidence when they talk. I see the sentence above like this:
“I went to the store? [Acknowledge me] And I bought a loaf of bread? [Acknowledge me] And then I made French toast? [Acknowledge me]”
*I have no training in linguistics or related psych and this should be taken as pure speculation. Just making a wild-assed guess.
Thomathy, #47
Sorry, yes. General American is commonly referred to as Standard American English, which is usually shortened to Standard English. But having identified myself as a New Englander, you had more than enough context to conclude which “Standard English” I meant, so I note your didactic statement above and do wonder whether it’s intended to imply something.
It assuredly does have an accent, though. That part of your statement strikes me for its ridiculousness. There is no such thing as speech without accent, since accent is just a particular choice of phonetics. It is regarded as “unaccented” only via the social normativity that defines it as the default and everything else as a deviation. The General American accent is closely related to the Midwestern accent. Which, as a New Englander, is not my native one.
Your linguistic broad-mindedness hasn’t prevented you from coming off mighty smug, friend. Reread my previous posts and ask yourself whether I’m sensitive to unconscious bias in myself. Then, fuck off.
Oh, what a relief. Thanks ever so much, great sahib.
@jrfdeux:
The hypothesis I favor is that it’s intended to be conciliatory. I.e., that upspeak derives from its use in questions, and conveys that the statement is open to question or debate. That fits my non-scientific observations from my years in Canada of the context and speakers where upspeak is most used. For example, it seems to be used more by women, who are expected to be more conciliatory due to sexist assumptions, than by men. It’s used more by subordinates, or children, than by authority figures or adults. Etc.
One more quip:
When I was spending a summer working in Hamburg, Germany; I was blown away by the Germans I was working, with who all spoke English (as a second language) with a strong British accent. I once asked them “why British accent?”, and their “mater of fact” reply was simply, “our teacher was British, we noticed it too, that you speak English with a different accent.”. Correspondingly, my Shakespeare Director (at MIT) was a Rhodes Scholar with a strong British accent. When I commented about his accent, he proudly stated that his accent was NOT British but South African.
[seems I have too many “accent” stories, bottled up…]
(As an aside, I used upspeak with Canadians myself, specifically when I was aiming for a conciliatory tone, and it seemed to work.)
I’ve been told that I speak French with a British accent. Same reason, I would guess.
re “upspeak”:
I tended to think that the “upspeak” was lack of self-confidence, that every sentence was ended in a tacit question of “Don’t you agree?” Coming from always being dissed by their “peers” after every statement.
And being the “bigot”, I always felt sorry for such a speaker (while simultaneously, arrogantly feeling so superior to them).
[contradictions; I’m full of ’em]
IJoe! Hi!
On topic, I have to say that there’s a particular New Jersey accent (The one that’s very loud and nasal; I honestly don’t know where more particularly it might be from) that I personally find really jarring, but I recognize that that’s me, not the accent. I very rarely have trouble understanding local dialects/accents of English, though, it’s just that that New Jersey one and a couple of other really nasal accents/voices I’ve run across that I can’t place and may be individual rather than regional variations hit my ears badly.
It’s my understanding that he goes by Snoop Lion now.
A Masked Avenger @ #64
Okay. I don’t see it shortened to Standard English and I exclusively refer to the accent as General American, because Standard English is a thing and is defined regionally and is marked by written English.
It implies that I thought you had made an error and sought to correct it without confirming that you actually had. Miscommunication.
Well, ‘it’ doesn’t. Not when we’re talking about Standard English, as I thought you were. Since it is defined regionally and is marked by the written language, Standard English doesn’t sound like anything, although obviously the people using their variety of Standard English will have accents.
Accent is much more than just phonetics and it may be produced without any choice. Of course there isn’t speech without accent.
I would agree with this statement for people who consider their accent to be the default.
Okay. It sounds like you have a pretty dynamic accent, anyhow, and that’s rather interesting.
I don’t think your bias is very much unconscious at all, and it’s certainly a step in the right direction that you are sensitive to it. I’m fine sounding smug about this.
Well, you’re not the only one who has twinges when they hear certain sounds, even if you appreciate that you have them and it’s your problem.
I had no idea what the heck ‘vocal fry’ was. I’ve heard an example of it, and I’m still left scratching my head. It seems like nothing more than a difference in tone. I still don’t get the big deal about it and I certainly don’t understand the opposition to it, as exemplified by the two commenters mentioned in the OP.
Having read more of the comments here, I think I understand what ‘upspeak’ is. I suppose it could be annoying, but I can’t think of any times that I’ve heard it?
****
carlie @20:
I don’t share that visceral negative reaction. I can see how vocal fry might seem like someone is bored though.
(Are you overcompensating for upspeak? :-) )
I’ve seen it work pretty well.
…It’s a bit scary that you say that, because the link isn’t there. There’s no URL in the source text even – there’s an <a> tag without any
href=""or anything in it.Two reasons: 1) For 19th-century reasons, English teachers all over mainland Europe traditionally aim at RP (“BBC English”). 2) It so happens that RP and most kinds of German drop their Rs in exactly the same places, making RP easier than GA for most native speakers of German.
French is Not American, so you speak it with your dedicated Not-American accent. :-| That’s a pretty common phenomenon.
It’s also why so many native speakers of English pronounce the j in Beijing as if it were French, producing a sound that doesn’t exist in any kind of Chinese! The English j would be a much closer approximation.
Well, it’s phonology in general: accents often also differ in which phonemes they distinguish, as well as which sounds they use to realize the same phonemes.
I’m torn about this one. Clearly this is hegemonic douchebaggey, yet at the same time the voice major in me legitimately cringes at the sound of vocal frying, male or female.
I wish there was more appreciation for American regional accents.
There’s a whole lot of regional accents in New York City alone, and I love all of them.
I must say, I love seeing other Atlantic Canadian accented people pop up in threads like this, though there are so many different kinds of them! I love all of them, though I’ve worked hard to get rid of mine because of the classist prejudices against it. I do get mine back now and then when I’m either drunk enough, have visitied home recently or both.
I used to be really, really bothered by the Fargo-Scandihoovian accent, to the point where I couldn’t watch media with it. No idea what about it bothered me so much, I’d never met anyone with it in meatspace or anything. Eventually, it went away, partly after being exposed to lots and lots of accents when I worked at a call centre. While I do have some preferences in terms of accents I find lovelier than others to listen to, I can’t say that any truly bother me, they’re just all interesting.
It is very interesting to me that young girls/women are generally the adopters of new vocal and language patterns that then diffuse into the rest of culture. And rather telling to me how despised these patterns are when they’re still associated with young women as opposed to just being “normal” and casual.
New here.
I agree with the sense of lack of confidence with upspeak and I agree with the sense the speaker being bored with vocal fry. Like…oh alright I’ll finish this sentence.
I’d be curious to know the origins of saying where (in standard North American news reader accent) for when the speaker is saying were.
Where they were…stating where someone was…and saying it like where they where.
For many years I only knew of one speaker. Then I met someone else and realized it was not unique.
I must have some sort of filter going because I’ve never noticed this “vocal fry” you speak of, and I have a teen daughter. But then I’m probably the only person in North America who has never heard Kim Kardashian speak. Lucky me.
Personally I love accents, adds spice to the sound of conversation. Just don’t, like, pepper your speech with like repetitive meaningless words because like that like annoys the shit out of me, as my daughter is often reminded as her math-nerd dad lets her know how many “likes” she said. Your audience is kind enough to listen, the speaker ought to be kind enough to not give them a bunch of gibberish to slog through.
I have heard that the only difference between various languages, and accents within a single language; is vowels. That consonants are very common, but vowels vary all over. And accents are just local phenomena, but contribute largely to the spawning of new languages. EG English from German (with lots of French influence). English is a hodgepodge of many different languages, not just a dialect of German, etc.
Oh gosh, I didn’t read everyone’s responses but I am guessing I’m in the minority here. Vocal fry irritates the heck out of me! I love regional accents but do not consider “fry” to be regional. The woman who just won close to half a million dollars after appearing about 20 times on Jeopardy recently (her name is Julie Collins) does it. I doubt she even knows it.
I was like. And he was like. Then I was like. Then we were all like. Y’know?
FUCK. ME.
The only response I can think of to accent criticism is “You must not get out much.” I work with people that have all different ways of saying things, sometimes because of regional variation, and more often because English isn’t their first language. Granted, I don’t interview radio announcers, so I might have a different set of criteria, but clear communication is only slightly related to accent, and clear thinking is entirely independent.
scienceavenger:
I love this!
@twas brillig, 79
A moment’s reflection should disabuse you of that. Just think of the various ways English speakers pronounce the /t/ in “butter”: a quick flap (that may sound like a /d/) in most American English dialects, an aspirated /t/ in many dialects, a glottal stop in some. Or think of how much of the population of Spain pronounces the letter “z” (like the “th” in “bath”) compared to the rest of the Spanish speaking world (/s/).
There are a lot of ways to create a language, but it’s roughly analogous to the creation of species (in fact, Darwin was inspired by the linguists of his day). Western Germanic dialects form a continuum that reaches from Belgium and the Netherlands down through Germany to Austria and Switzerland and even into Italy. Linguistic continua are common all over the world, and occur because, on the one hand, language is constantly changing from one generation to the next, but on the other hand the changes can spread from one village to the next as the people in those villages talk to each other. So in some areas you can travel from one village to the next and find only minimal changes, but when you look at two points in that continuum the differences are enough that you’d classify them as a different language.
In the case of English, the Germanic invaders of Britain came from somewhere (or somewheres) along the modern-day Dutch and Danish coastlines and brought along their versions of West Germanic. Once they were settled in Britain, they mostly lost contact with their former neighbors and so the languages drifted apart. As a result of the Norman invasion the language borrowed a lot of Norman French vocabulary, and then for various legal, scientific, and religious purposes borrowed a lot of Latin and Greek words, but English (and Scots) is still a West Germanic language.
David M @73:
Why scary? I guessed it was youtube, and looked there for ‘Nefertari the Younger’.
Thomathy, 47,
I’m curious where you’re getting your definition of “dialect”. In any case, it’s definitely not the case that regional varieties of English in the US don’t differ in vocabulary and grammar. “Soda” vs. “pop”, “bubbler” vs. “water fountain”, “bag” vs. “sack”, various forms of the second person plural pronoun (youse, y’all, you guys), the use of double modals (“might could”), “so don’t I” in Boston, these are just some common examples. For a more exhaustive list, go here.
What a Maroon @86: Also; by any definition, Newfoundland English would qualify as (at least one) dialect.
I was educated at an English public (posh) school and Oxford University. I speak BBC English even after 20 years in the US.Quality is timeless.
If anyone were to dig up the Hangouts I was on (back when PZ did Hangouts with the horde) they could hear truly glorious examples of American Flat Midwestern.
Here is how to speak Flat Midwestern:
(1) Take your vowels
(2) Run a steamroller over them.
Given that I haven’t actually lived in the Midwest since 2003 (I live in the Northeast now), my accent is modulating a bit. Still very flat, though.
Rob Grigjanis, 87,
Hell, build yourselves a navy and you can call it a language.
I’d never heard of usppeak or vocal fry before, so to me it sounds like the linguistic equivalent of “when I was your age we respected our language” or “get off my indefinite articles” or something.
Zeno @10:
I lived in NE Brazil for a couple of years back in the eighties and learnt Portuguese sufficiently well to speak fluently and gain accreditation here in Australia as a translator. Even now it gives me indescribable pleasure when a Brazilian client asks me what part of Brazil I come from. I think of my accent as Bahian, but obviously it’s not quite right although good enough to sound (I assume) at least NE Brazilian (or not carioca or paulista, anyway).
I wouldn’t ever try to extinguish the accent I use in my adopted language. To my mind it gives my Portuguese some integrity. No native Portuguese speaker ever guesses I am Australian. Bahian Portuguese spoken with an Australian accent must be a rarity…
Hey, I’d be happy to do more hangouts. Make a suggestion!
I doubt anyone is doing fry on purpose. I think we’re hearing people–women and teenage girls, mostly–trying to avoid the stigma of a “little girl voice” or a squeaky voice. When I’ve listened to examples, what I think I’m hearing is people trying to keep their voices low-pitched beyond what is a voice coach would say is natural while avoiding flat intonation. In other words, the way for them to avoid the fry would be to speak at a higher pitch. I think that this may be one of those no-win situations. I’m going to guess that most of the people who really hate fry would also think the higher pitch was an annoying affectation.
Of course, if a person is using intonation that has a lot of pitch drop below the, for want of a better name, center pitch, the fry effect is going to become more noticeable than it would be with a flat intonation. The kind of intonation I associate with teenage sarcasm has just that kind of pitch drop. I’m guessing that part of what’s happening is that people who really hate fry are conflating the sarcastic intonation with the fry it sometimes produces.
My voice fries a lot as a result of a definite pathology, so guess I have some interest in persuading people that fry, as opposed to intonation, is not usually strictly voluntary.
What a Maroon, el papa ateo @ #86
Well, one source for a definition of use within linguistics that I can pull off my shelf is David Crystal’s A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics. But I could pull down several other books, some more concise and some more expansive on the subject. I do actually know what I’m talking about.
I never said anything like what you’ve written in that second sentence. If you had gone on to read what I wrote following that sentence you’d have come to this,
That’s not controversial. I fully recognise that there are differences and I clearly accept that there are regional variations that amount to dialects as well as the existence of other kinds of dialects. I don’t fully accept, however, that all of those differences are necessarily great enough to distinguish most varieties as dialects. I prefer the use of the term variety where dialect doesn’t seem appropriate. It’s always difficult to decide at what boundary a variety amounts to a dialect, because they exist on a continuum. Rarely are there definitive boundaries.
I also favour a more conservative approach to describing dialects of North American English. I don’t see the utility in describing most regional varieties as dialects because along the continuum of North American English there isn’t usually so much difference that two speakers 8000km a part can’t fully understand each other. Contrast that with the German-Dutch continuum, where at any two distant points the dialects are not mutually intelligible, even though they are representative of the same language. It’s not necessary, of course, for dialects to not be mutually intelligible in order for them to be described as such, but it certainly makes it easier to make the case that they should be so described when compared with each other.
I’d say that there are far more than two dialects of English in North America than just American and Canadian.
But I suppose that enters semantic debates: at what point does AAVE become a “dialect”? What about the pidgins? Creole? Gullah?
Those who think there is a connection between lack of confidence and upspeak/uptalk should read this Language Log post. Some highlights:
*waves at Marjanović*
Thomathy,
OK, your juxtaposition of this:
and this:
led me to believe that you were claiming that there weren’t serious differences in vocabulary and grammar among the varieties of American English. My mistake.
But now this intrigues me:
It’s been a while since my undergrad days, and my career took me in the direction of applied linguistics, so I may not be up on things. But back in the day, “mutual intelligibility” was proposed as a criterion for determining if two dialects were the same language; in other words, if two dialects weren’t mutually intelligible, they were different languages.
I’m not here to defend that standard–it runs into obvious problems (suppose A and B are mutually intelligible, as are B and C, but not A and C–how do you define the languages?), just to point out that I’ve never seen it used as a criterion for determining differences in dialects.
In the end, of course, it doesn’t much matter whether you say A and B are different varieties, different dialects, or different languages, as long as your clear that your describing points on a continuum, but I don’t recall ever seeing such a conservative definition of dialect.
Vocal fry, aka my early morning/hungover voice.
“Vocal Fry” is the name of my new Hole cover band.
Speaking of Scots, I coöincidentally recently re-watched this:
Voice Recognition Elevator in Scotland
Freedom!
Upspeak is also a very common thing here in Australia.
I wonder what he would say about typical Aussie men using it? Would he hate it as much?
Personally, I can’t stand it. It turns every statement into a question and sounds indecisive.
Berylmaclachlan,
Interesting theory, sounds plausible.
I have a “little girl” voice and it’s become an unconscious habit to try talking in a deeper voice. Hmm, maybe I do my language equivalent of vocal fry
I loathe upspeak only fractionally less than I loathe the meaningless use of ‘like’ at least twice in every sentence. The sole reason I bought an iPod was that I frequently travel by train and was being driven mad by Compulsive Likers. Mind you, I also loathe the witless screeching that passes for applause in England nowadays thanks to the pernicious influence of American TV, so perhaps I’m just turning into a Grumpy Old Lady.
I had to go on Youtube to figure out what vocal fry was. My stepmother and one of her daughters have always spoken like this, at least since the beginning of the 1970s when I met them. I have three nieces living in California who all speak this way too now. I thought it was just them and kind of cute. I’m disappointed to find out it’s a phenomenon and also decried. I’ve got a daughter living in Boston whose mother tongue is French, she still makes some English-as-a-foreign-language mistakes which sound really funny when she occasionally throws some upspeak over them.
I love my Australian Questioning Intonation, though :S It’s one of the few features of my speech that I’m actually happy with.
If anyone wants to get technical, here’s what my anatomy and physiology textbook on speech and hearing has to say about the clinical implications of glottal fry:
“Because this type of vocal production is often heard at the very end of sentences, particularly when both pitch and vocal intensity are beginning to decay, it should be considered a normal part of our ‘vocal repertory’. The production of glottal fry ought to be regarded as an extension of the lower limits of the normal or modal pitch range, and as a voice register in the true sense of the word. The use of glottal fry becomes objectionable when it is superimposed on voice production at places other than at the very end of sentences.”
Speech and Hearing:Anatomy and Physiology, 4th edition; Willard R. Zemlin
“voidhawk, I’m crap at accents but are you a Brummie? (I can hear Timothy Spall talking when I read your post :-) ) ”
Ar, bab, Oi am, that.
What a Maroon, to be fair my career also took me out of sociolinguistics. I can only go back to my grasp of concepts and my reference materials. I have a feeling that we may have been studying sometime a part from each other, too.
The reason I like such a conservative definition (it was also one that a professor I very much respected favoured), is because it seems to leave room for more meaningful descriptions at smaller scales. There just aren’t rigorous definitions for concepts like a dialect or a variety outside of sub-fields of linguistics and even then they’re still pretty broad, so I guess it doesn’t really matter. I (think I) know that some sociolinguists prefer to use variety in a way more similar to jargon, including specific speech that isn’t professional, for instance.
Anyhow, as long, as you say, that we’re clear that we’re describing a continuum and that very real differences exist, it doesn’t matter how those differences are defined in aggregate.
You know, I’ve considered going back to study more, but then I get into discussions like this and realise that, no, it’s quite alright. But then, I also think, I have this bit of research that I’ve always wanted to do and my desk job precludes it …oh well!
I’m old enough to have met Raven McDavid as an undergrad (um, that is, when I was an undergrad, not him…).
Yeah, I know, I really wish my job included more actual linguistics. Anyway, come back–the world needs more linguists!
Wasn’t sure what this was describing, so I figured it would be easier to just look up some examples on YouTube. Ugh. Huuuuuge mistake. There were a lot more videos of people excoriating vocal fry than there were videos providing straight examples of it. I need brain bleach.
Awesome.
Got me there. Note than when I said the thing to be disabused of, I said “…consonants are pretty constant…”, not “absolutely constant..” just ‘mostly constant’. Your examples are variations of consonants between different languages. Your example of the /tt/ in “butter”, often pronounced as /d/ or ‘tee’, vs. ‘tuh’ is just sloppy usage, not language relative (not even really ‘accent’, just lazy mouths). All my linguistics comes from The Story of Human Language”. I am Not a Linguist, by any definition. I was just expressing my limited knowledge to be educated more fully. Thanks for reading, and responding to my mistakes.
@twas brillig
It’s only lazy mouths if you assume Standard American to be “correct” and all other accents to be variants. They aren’t. The glottal stop used in place of a “t” in London accents, for example, is interpreted as laziness by most upper-class English people who speak BBC English, but it isn’t. It’s just a different accent. I get the feeling you just did the American equivalent.
@ButchKitties
Yeah, I got that too. I managed to find a less-biased one with plenty of examples of real people doing vocal fry. I now think I know what it is.
Perhaps because the vowels sound like Not-English? I’ve been to the north end of Slovenia – people there speak an unremarkable Slavic language, except their l (merged with lj) and r are identical to those of German (or for that matter French), which totally boggled my mind. (It goes without saying that it makes perfect geographic sense: German is spoken next door.)
1) On a global average, vowels vary more often than consonants; but that’s it. 2) Of course. 3) The closest relative of English-including-Scots is Frisian, which is quite distinct from the German/Dutch dialect continuum. 3) English isn’t some kind of mixture; it’s a West Germanic (more precisely North Sea Germanic, even more precisely Anglo-Frisian) language with lots of Old Norse loanwords, a few grammatical peculiarities that are a compromise of sorts with Old Norse, a huge helping of Old Norman French loanwords, and so on. Very, very few languages can really be called “mixed”.
…I sort of thought of that, but you made it sound like the link worked for you. :-]
Anyway, that accent is from somewhere in England. I’m sure that helps. :-]
…There are people who use that criterion for language rather than dialect.
Come on, that’s nonsense. I’m from close to the southeastern corner of that continuum, and with not much cheating I still understand about half of dialects close to the southwestern and northwestern corners, yet there are easily noticeable differences in sound system and vocabulary across 200 km within one corner.
^_^ ^_^ ^_^
BTW, about regional differences in intonation: in most of the world, stressed syllables get a higher pitch than unstressed ones (unless tone systems interfere too much); in the abovementioned southwestern corner of German, stressed syllables get a lower pitch instead. Then the pitch jumps up for the next syllable, and the one after can still have a falling pitch. That’s extremely easy to notice.
I laughed so much at the end!
It doesn’t pay them, though.
:-) Let this be a teachable moment to you!
1) “Lazy mouths” is one of the two drivers of language change. (The other is the desire to still be understood.)
2) People in different places have different, often opposite, ideas of what is “lazy”! That’s why such different things happen to the /t/ in butter in the US and in England: lazy Americans ( = all Americans who aren’t playing Hollywood villains) find it easy to articulate a flap, lazy English (again all of them not striving for… let’s call it BBC pronunciation this time) find it much easier to drop the [t] from their glottalized /t/ and leave a naked glottal stop behind.
Nowadays you can find many native speakers of German who try to flap their /t/ between vowels when speaking English. Almost all of them fail and just say [d], because for them, a flap requires a lot of effort. They’re simply not used to articulating a flap.
Oh wait, that’s nonsense. I forgot about those kinds of Scouse that are now imitating the High German consonant shift, meaning that butter gets a [ts] in the middle! Instead of taking the aspiration of /t/ away by glottalization, they let it break loose. At least one of the Doctors, I think the Tenth, does that (subtly).
And to further the discussion of flaps, to a Spanish ear an American English flap sounds like an /r/. For the same reason that, to an American English ear, the “r” in Spanish “caro” sounds like a /d/ or a /t/.
Sure it does. Just not to do linguistics.
Another interesting change: in American English, an initial tr- tends to be pronounced [tʃr]. So “tree” sounds like “chree”. Similarly, initial dr- is pronounced [dʒ].
Vocal fry does not bother me in the least. The two things I really hate:
1) When girls and young women affect a high voice and then raise it (volume-wise) in an attempt to speak over someone. Worse, when several such people are in competition to speak over one another. Naturally high voices aren’t a problem. Seems like people raise their voice differently if they’re speaking normally versus speaking in an unnaturally (for them) high pitch.
2) That whining, pleading voice that children adopt when they think they’re being treated unfairly. I do not get how parents can let their children speak in that tone at length. If I was a parent, I’d be like, “If you can’t speak in a normal tone, not only are you never getting what you want, but I’m going to ground you for a year.”
twas brillig (#112)
No, it flapping well isn’t. It’s a relic of classism, racism and linguistic imperialism to pretend that one dialect is more correct than another or features of a dialect are mere laziness. A feature gets labeled as “lazy” because it’s characteristic of the speech of people who are already stereotyped as lazy.
Take, for instance, how AAVE uses other sounds where Standard American English uses voiced and voiceless “th.” That gets called lazy all the time, yet there are actually particular rules governing which sound can be used where. Nothing about those sound substitutions supports the idea that AAVE speakers are more incautious or inattentive than anyone else when they talk.
Not even just there.
Likewise, the change of /stɹ/ to [ʃt͡ʃɹ] (with a less rounded [ʃ] than usual) occurs on both sides of the Atlantic, even though it’s more common in some parts of the US. Some people have even extended it to cases where other consonants occur in the middle – a recent Doctor had a sonic shkshewjriver!
That doesn’t mean it’s not “lazy” in the sense of requiring less effort from the speaker; but, as I said, such “laziness” is absolutely everywhere, and it goes in different directions in different dialects.
A. Noyd, @120,
Also, AAVE has a more complex tense/aspect system than General American English (see here, starting on p. 117.)
David Marjanović, @121
I don’t like to speak for my cousins across the pond. Also, it’s been ages since I’ve seen Dr. Who.
Also explained in the Wikipedia article.
David Marjanović (#122)
That seems like a completely different meaning than what most people have in mind. Others look at dialects and accents as lackadaisical deviations from a standard language. They don’t believe the features of standard languages are ultimately arbitrary, either. (Not that, if you challenge them, they can make a case for the features being non-arbitrary. I guess they just don’t think about it much.)
“Lazy” carries a strong pejorative sense to it; even if it didn’t already mean a failure to speak “properly,” it’s a terrible choice for something as nuanced as a shift in speaking that requires less effort relative to an individual’s dialect or accent.
~*~*~*~*~*~
What a Maroon (#123)
Yep. Though, all some people seem to hear is the absence of a copula and lack of inflection in the present tense.
re @125:
Sorry, I was sloppy to use “lazy”, not realizing how pejorative it reads. I was lazy to not spend much time to think about how to write more informatively. What I was trying to say, when I used “lazy”, was that the motions the tongue has to make to do the /t/ (flap?) instead of the /d/ sound, have to be much more precisely controlled. the /d/ version of “tt” is much more casual(?). And I did not mean to imply that the speakers were being lazy, just that the tongue was not being precisely controlled over a continuous period of time; /d/ only requires momentary control and seems a little easier. I did not mean to imply that one form is correct and the lazy form is incorrect. Just badly trying to describe the difference. Sorry I failed to convey my poor thinking. The discussion has been well worth reading.
twas brillig (#126)
Ah, okay. Well, first off, the flap isn’t really a t sound as such. It’s the consonant some of us use in certain words that are spelled with t’s,¹ but the flap also shows up in some spelled with d’s, too!² To get a clear t or d sound (as in the initial sounds of “torque” and “dork), I pop my tongue off my alveolar ridge with more force than a flap. And then d is distinguished by voicing, not precision, so a distinct d sound in the middle of “butter” would be the least “lazy” going by the way you meant.
However, it’s not like all words with t’s and d’s end up with flaps instead. As with all allophones, the pronunciation for a particular accent depends on the sound’s location in the word, syllable stress, the other sounds in the word, and the sounds at the beginning or end of adjacent words. I say “bitter” with a flap but “bitten” with a glottal stop instead because of the n sound. And “bit ten” (like “he bit ten other children”) has an exaggerated, clear t sound not because those are separate words but because both syllables are equally stressed.
Second, what’s easier to control is really relative to one’s language background. An obvious example is how people learning English whose native languages require vowels after certain consonants have a hell of a time not adding vowels after those consonants when they occur at the ends of English words.³ Even dialects and accents with lots of sounds can have limited sound combinations, which will affect the effort it takes to speak in a different dialect or accent.
Anyway, if you’re interested in pronunciation, you’d do well to learn a bit more about allophones of consonants in English and how different ones are used predictably in different places and how different patterns of predictability distinguish various dialects and accents. The reality of consonants in English is a wee bit more complicated than our spelling would indicate. Here’s somewhere to start, which explains a lot of terms and gives examples to try out for yourself. (Note, that refers to a “flap” as a “tap.”)
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¹ Spelling in English a really a rough guide to what sounds go where. Which isn’t a bad thing—one set of spellings (or two) can cover a gajillion and a half dialects and accents.
² For instance, I say “wetting” and “wedding” the same, both with a flap.
³ And boy do us English speakers love consonants and consonant clusters at the ends of our words. Like “sixths” has four. I can’t even fucking say it when I’m thinking about it.
That’s not even reliable in most kinds of English, especially at the beginnings of words; another part of the distinction is that /t/ is aspirated, especially at the beginnings of words, then there’s glottalization, and then we get into the underresearched territory of the terms fortis and lenis. :-]
That still leaves a lot of room for improvement, though.
I believe my tongue is broken now.
I started watching Fargo, mainly to cringe and be offended by their depiction of the Minnesota accent (my son refers to it as ‘Minnesota blackface’). It’s pretty bad because it’s pretty accurate (although exaggerated). Had to laugh at the vocal coaches for the show who described it as ‘lilting’ and ‘melodic.’ Those are not two terms that come to mind when I catch myself speaking Minnesotan.
There are so many regional distinctions in speech that it seems ridiculous to single out one pattern for abuse. Never heard of vocal fry, but I have heard of southern drawl, midwestern vowels and west coast Valley girl, which sounds an awful lot like how vocal fry is being described.
I mean, seriously. What the heck with all this, then, anyway?