Wordslut

by Amanda Montell

  Fortunately, sociolinguistics has come a long way since Lakoff’s book, and there are plenty of twenty-first-century language experts who’ve taken “Valley girl” speak seriously enough to figure out what it actually is. One of these scholars is Carmen Fought, a linguist from Pitzer College (who, incidentally, has one of the butteriest, most soothing speaking voices I’ve ever heard). As Fought says, “If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional, or even stupid.” But the truth is much more interesting: Young women use the linguistic features that they do, not as mindless affectations, but as power tools for establishing and strengthening relationships. Vocal fry, uptalk, and even like, are in fact not signs of ditziness, but instead all have a unique history and specific social utility. And women are not the only people who use them.

  In many languages around the world, vocal fry is not some random quirk—it is built into their very phonology. For instance, in Kwak’wala, a Native American language, the word for day cannot be pronounced without using creak, or else it wouldn’t make sense (kind of like pronouncing the English word day without the y). What’s interesting about English speakers’ use of vocal fry is that early studies actually attributed the speech quality primarily to men. One of the first official observations of vocal fry in English was made by a UK linguist in the 1960s, who determined that it was British dudes who employed vocal fry as a way of communicating a higher social standing. There was also an American study of creaky voice in the 1980s that called the phenomenon “hyper-masculine” and a “robust marker of male speech.” Many linguists also agree that using a bit of creak at the ends of sentences has been happening in the United States among English speakers of all genders, with no fuss or fallout, for decades.

  But in the mid-2000s, folks started noticing an increase of vocal fry usage in the voices of American college-age women, but not so much in their male classmates. Researchers were intrigued, so they decided to take a gander and see if these observations were accurate. Long story short, they were: in 2010, linguistics scholar Ikuko Patricia Yuasa published a study showing that American women use vocal fry about 7 percent more than American men. And we’ve been getting creakier ever since.

  But, like, why? What is vocal fry good for? (Other than to annoy beardy old guys, that is.) As it turns out, a bunch of things. First, Yuasa points out that since vocal fry is so very low in pitch, it could be a way for women to compete with men’s voices—to sound more authoritative. “Creaky voice may provide a growing number of American women with a way to project an image of accomplishment, while retaining female desirability,” she wrote in her study. Personally, I have found myself unconsciously dropping into vocal fry during presentations at work to convey this sort of laid-back authority. “You always sound like you know what you’re talking about to me,” said my boss when I asked her if I ever came off as insecure during meetings. (Then again, she’s a woman in her twenties too.)

  On the flip side, Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, told the New York Times in 2012 that vocal fry can also be used to convey a sense of disinterest in a topic (which, as a teenage girl, I certainly loved to do). “It’s a mode of vibration that happens when the vocal cords are relatively lax. . . . So maybe some people use it when they’re relaxed and even bored,” he said. Like a subtle way of telling someone you find them unstimulating.

  To sum things up, over the first two decades of the twenty-first century, women began speaking with increasingly lower-pitched voices, attempting to convey more dominance and expressing more boredom—all things that middle-aged men have historically not been in favor of women doing. Perhaps this could explain why Bob Garfield and his peers have scrutinized vocal fry so mercilessly?

  Like and uptalk are two more subjects of deep linguistic ridicule—they are probably also the most recognizable aspects of Valley girl speak. When making fun of teenage girls, imitators go for these sorts of phrases: “I, like, went to the movies? And I was like, ‘I want to see Superwoman?’ But Brad was like, ‘No way?’ So we, like, left.” (I’m not certain why people love satirizing teen girls so much, but my theory is that it’s just an excuse to speak in this highly entertaining fashion.)

  Despite the word’s detractors, like is in fact extremely useful and versatile. Alexandra D’Arcy, Canadian linguist at the University of Victoria, has dedicated much of her research to identifying and understanding the many functions of like. D’Arcy ebulliently describes her work for UVic’s YouTube channel: “Like is a little word that we really, really don’t like at all—and we want to blame young girls, who we think are destroying the language,” she explains. But the truth is that like has been a part of English for more than two hundred years. “We can find speakers today in their seventies, eighties, and nineties around little villages in the United Kingdom, for example,” D’Arcy says with a smile, “who use like in many of the same ways that young girls today are using it.”

  According to D’Arcy, there are six completely distinct forms of the word like. The two oldest types in English are the adjective like and the verb like. In the sentence, “I like your suit, it makes you look like James Bond,” the first like is a verb and the second is an adjective—and even the crabbiest English speakers are fine with both. Today, these two likes sound exactly the same, so most people don’t even notice that they’re different words with separate histories. They’re homonyms, just how the noun watch (meaning the timepiece on your wrist) and the verb watch (meaning what you do with your eyes when you turn on the TV) are homonyms. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the verb like comes from the Old English term lician, and the adjective comes from the Old English līch. The two converged at some point over the last eight hundred or so years, giving us lots of time to get used to them.

  But four new likes developed much more recently than that—and D’Arcy says these are all separate words with distinct uses, as well. Only two of these likes are used more frequently by women, and only one of them is thought to have been masterminded by young Southern California females in the 1990s. That one would be the quotative like, which you hear in, “I was like, ‘I want to see Superwoman.’” As lampooned as it is, pragmatically speaking, this like is one of my favorites because it allows you to tell a story, to relay something that happened, without having to quote the interaction verbatim. For example, in the sentence “My boss was like, ‘I need those papers by Monday,’ and I was like, ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’” you’re not repeating what you truly said but instead using like to convey what you wanted to say or how you felt in the interaction. Thanks, Valley girls. This very useful quotative like continues to explode in common usage.

  The other like that women tend to use more frequently is categorized as a discourse marker and can be found in contexts such as, “Like, this suit isn’t even new.” A discourse marker—sometimes called a filler word—is a type of phrase that can help a person connect, organize, or express a certain attitude with their speech. Other discourse markers include the hedges we learned about in the last chapter, like just, you know, and actually.

  There are two last forms of like: one is an adverb, which is used to approximate something, as in the sentence, “I bought this suit like five years ago.” As of the 1970s this like has largely replaced the approximate adverb about in casual conversation, and it has always been used equally among men and women (so it isn’t hated as much). And last, there’s the discourse particle like, which we hear in, “I think this suit is like my favorite possession.” This like is similar to the discourse marker, except that it’s not used in quite the same way syntactically or semantically; plus, dudes use it just as much as women do (D’Arcy doesn’t know quite why that is), though they’re almost never ridiculed for it.

  Objectively, we can see that using one, two, or all of these different likes in the same sentence isn’t inherently bad. As a matter of fact, some studies have demonstrated that speech lacking in likes and you knows can sound too c
areful, robotic, or unfriendly. So next time someone accuses you of saying like too much, feel free to ask them, “Oh really? Which kind?” Because D’Arcy says that ordinary speakers tend to buy into the Valley girl stereotype so hardcore, blaming young women for all of these likes, simply because they don’t notice the differences among them.

  Uptalk is the other disfavored feature of teen girl speak that, as it turns out, is quite practical when you look closely. Linguists say uptalk made its splash into everyday conversation in the 1980s and ’90s—the era of Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless. This time line contributes to the much-believed lore that uptalk is another Valley girl invention (so much credit given to such a small group of people!). In reality, it’s believed to have been stolen from Australia. That high-rising terminal is a classic characteristic of Aussie dialects—we forget that “G’day, mate?” is not actually a question.

  Over the past twenty years, everyone from corporate executives to high school English teachers have criticized uptalk for sounding unassertive. I even had a linguist admit to me that she’s not a fan—“It’s unfortunately true that even I don’t like uptalk,” NYU professor Louise O. Vasvári whispered to me over the phone, a twinge of guilt in her voice. “I think it makes women sound insecure because it sounds like they’re asking questions. I’m not supposed to say this.”

  But no matter how people feel personally about uptalk, studies have shown that in certain contexts, it’s actually used to convey the opposite of insecurity.

  Consider a University of Pennsylvania study from 1991, which looked at a Texan sorority and found that senior members often used uptalk to assert power over juniors. (“There’s a very important Greek event tomorrow? And we expect everyone to attend?”) Lakoff once theorized that one reason why women might use a question-esque intonation when communicating authority is because they’ve trained themselves to, either on purpose or subconsciously, so they don’t come off as “bossy” or “bitchy.” By Lakoff’s account, uptalk allows women to express confidence without being attacked for not sounding “ladylike.” In my own speech, I have noticed that I’ll use uptalk to soften a declarative sentence, especially when discussing a topic that’s a bit controversial, but I don’t think it’s necessarily to seem less bitchy. Instead, it feels like a way for me to state an opinion confidently while at the same time opening myself up for others’ responses. Which I don’t think is necessarily a bad thing?

  Uptalk is by no means exclusive to women’s speech. A 2005 study conducted in Hong Kong, which examined the intonation patterns of English-speaking business professionals and academics in meetings, found that the meeting chairs (aka the highest-ranking people in the room) used uptalk as much as seven times more than their subordinates. Here, uptalk was also used to assert dominance—to pressure listeners to pay attention, get on the same page, and respond. But this time, nobody misinterpreted it as insecurity, because most of the speakers were men.

  These misconceptions that women use uptalk more than men do and that it’s always used to express insecurity are very similar to the myths commonly believed about how women use hedges, like just, you know, and like. A series of studies on hedges from the late twentieth century revealed that overall, the statistical significance between men’s and women’s total frequency of hedging is almost nonexistent. Plus, not all hedges serve the same purpose. Take the case of you know: linguists have discovered that not only do men and women use this phrase in equal numbers, but that in many instances, women actually use it as a way to communicate active confidence. In the 1980s our New Zealand linguist Janet Holmes analyzed a large corpus of speech and found that when used with a rising, question-like intonation, you know does indeed connote hesitancy or doubt (“It’s not, you know, fair.”), but, when spoken with a flat intonation (“It’s not fair, you know.”), it does just the reverse. Holmes’s numbers demonstrated that the total number of you knows collected were almost identical between genders, but women used the phrase with a flat pitch, communicating confidence, over 20 percent more than men. And yet, most people don’t hear it that way*—at the first sign of a woman hedging, they automatically assume insecurity.

  The only type of hedge young women really do use more frequently than men is the discourse marker like, but again, it’s not due to insecurity. Studies on adolescent speech indicate that young people hedge with like in order to “partially detach themselves from the force of utterances that could be considered evaluative, either positively evaluative of self or negatively evaluative of others.” Our genderlect expert Jennifer Coates postulates that men might use this type of like less overall due to their choices of conversational subject. “Unlike female speakers, male speakers on the whole avoid sensitive topics,” she says. By and large, men do not self-disclose or talk about personal matters as liberally. Thus, the need for this particular hedge does not apply.

  So why is it that young women get the harshest dose of criticism for vocal fry, uptalk, like, and other hedges? According to linguists, the way that these speech qualities are perceived has way less to do with the thing being said and way more to do with who’s saying it. In other words, judgments about linguistic prestige depend a whole lot on how we feel about the speaker. A study from 2010 conducted by two linguists from Stanford University and UC Santa Cruz found that participants who listened to someone positioned as a political “expert” did not interpret the person’s uptalk as a sign of insecurity. But when the uptalker was introduced as a “nonexpert,” listeners questioned their competence. UPenn linguist Mark Liberman says that even one of our American presidents was known to uptalk. “George W. Bush used to do it,” he recalls. “And nobody ever said, ‘Oh, that GWB is so insecure, just like a young girl.’” (Although, to be fair, that was the least of W’s problems.)

  Over the past two decades, vocal fry, uptalk, and like have transcended genders and generations. Brian Reed, thirtysomething host of the blockbuster 2017 podcast S-Town, used uptalk just as much as any female podcaster I’ve ever listened to. There have also been formal studies of Jeopardy! contestants and dads at Jamba Juice that show that modern dudes definitely uptalk like crazy. I’ve heard my sixty-one-year-old father, a neuroscientist, use vocal fry hundreds of times. And according to a 2003 analysis Liberman did of phone conversation recordings, men overall use like in its many forms more frequently than women do.

  People don’t seem to care or even notice when men talk this way. Only when it comes from female mouths does it cause such an upset. This fact makes it clear that our culture’s aversion to vocal fry, uptalk, and like isn’t really about the speech qualities themselves. Instead, it’s about the fact that, in modern usage, women were the first to use them.

  For decades, linguists have agreed that young, urban females tend to be our linguistic innovators. As South Korea is to beauty products and Silicon Valley is to apps, women in their teens, twenties, and thirties create—and/or incubate—future language trends. (Though not on purpose or for money.) “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,” Liberman says. (Fun fact: linguists have also determined that the least innovative language users are nonmobile, older, rural males, which they’ve majestically given the acronym “NORMs.”)

  Exactly why women seem to move language forward like this is not as clear. One hypothesis is that women are simply given more freedom in society to talk with pizazz. Studies of internet slang have shown women to use language more expressively: creative punctuation, descriptive hashtags, emoji, and fun abbreviations like OMG and AF. Another theory is that women are more attuned to social interactions and thus likelier to pick up on subtle linguistic cues. But to me, the most compelling argument is that young women innovate because they see language as a tool to assert their power in a culture that doesn’t give them a lot of ways to do that.

  Language can be an empowering resource for women who wish to move
up in the world; it has been for generations. A striking example: In 1978 award-winning linguist Susan Gal traveled to Austria to study a small, poor Hungarian-speaking village that had ended up on Austrian soil due to how the borders changed after World War I. This border shift was bad luck for these Hungarian villagers, because now they were forced to live in a country where everyone else spoke German. So, the women—the young women at least—began learning it. This was a smart move because having some German under their belts would allow them to leave the village, get better jobs, marry hot Austrian husbands if they were into that sort of thing, and generally climb the socioeconomic stepladder. Gal noticed that it was too late for the old women to make this move, but for those who had the chance, language was a way to escape the community and have a better life.

  This story jives with Louise O. Vasvári’s theory that young women in poorer communities, as well as young immigrant women, are more likely to need language for social mobility. Why? Generally, dudes have better access to blue-collar jobs, which have traditionally paid more than many working-class jobs for women. “Historically, in coal-mining areas, a miner would make more money in a week than his waitress girlfriend would make in a month,” Vasvári explains. A woman could theoretically get a coal mining job, and many have, but the work is brutal and the social environment unwelcoming. So, for a woman to earn more dough in a culturally acceptable manner, she would have to get what is called a “pink-collar” job, like a receptionist or bank teller. And these sorts of jobs require new language skills, whether that means learning a more “prestigious” dialect or an entirely new language. As Vasvári recalls, “There was a study in Spain where women were learning Catalan because they wanted to be able to go out and get a secretary job, and the men would actually make fun of them for becoming bilingual.”