'Vocal Fry' Creeping Into US Speech

sciencehabit writes "A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration — once considered a speech disorder — has become a language fad."

Comments

Nothing new

[InsightIn140Bytes]

Language changes over time. It always has, it always will. Of course the old people will always be grumpy how current generation of kids can't behave or talk correctly. They always have, they always will.

Re:Nothing new

[Kelson]

The article isn't about old people being grumpy about the change, or about change in general. The article is about the change itself.

"Language changes" isn't new, but "This language is changing in this way" is.

Re:Nothing new

[drooling-dog]

And there will always be touchy, defensive people of all ages who perceive criticism behind every simple observation.

Re:Nothing new

[wanzeo]

Yup. This is why it seems like a waste of time to obsess over "proper" English. Words are like clothes, you mix and match and there isn't any right answer.

As for the article, I have easily noticed this in well over 34 women at my college, but only in a certain subset of people. Namely, those who want to sound like pop singers. It's the same class of people who tan. So I have my doubts about it creeping into American English in general.

Also, who scanned the article and thought, "Futurama is influencing American speech!?"

Re:Nothing new

[History's Coming To]

It's much the same in the UK - a croaky "smoked 40 Marlboro Lights in the VIP area of my local club" voice is trendy at the moment for whatever reason. Seems to go hand in hand with fake tan, too much make-up and an obsession with reality TV and "celebrity".

Re:Nothing new

[Slashdot Assistant]

Yeah, and well rehearsed "duck face" poses used whenever a camera comes out. Really, if this becomes the common theme for women, I'd be hanging on to heterosexuality by my finger nails.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

My only complaint is that "vocal fry" is a stupid name for it. It is very obviously a croak, and people have been doing it for generations.

Re:Nothing new

[asdf7890]

Don't switch sides over this as it isn't just women: a similar proportion of gay men appear to be guilty of these things too.

Re:Nothing new

[fractoid]

There was an eloquent and impassioned talk given by Stephen Fry (in fact, one could argue it was Vocal, by Fry) that discussed this very thing. Here it is. It's one of the few things that's transcended the "that's nice" and "oh, cool" barriers and actually changed the way I think about language. Anyone I work with can attest to the fact that I no longer correct "less problems" to "fewer", or "should of" to "should have".

Re:Nothing new

[fractoid]

You might want to talk to the women who are currently bemoaning the preponderance of emo and metro 'men' hoping to become girlfriends-with-a-penis. Gender roles are being shaken up all over the joint.

Re:Nothing new

[jellomizer]

The vocal fry is common amungst men public speakers for years. The movie trailer guys, or political comerical. Think when a GOP comerical says "Liberal Allies".
It come to reason women will take more of the men's speaking pattern as they become more common in public speaking.

Re:Nothing new

[TWX]

You might want to talk to the women who are currently bemoaning the preponderance of emo and metro 'men' hoping to become girlfriends-with-a-penis. Gender roles are being shaken up all over the joint.

If anything, among the privileged of the world, the lack of feminism in male attire was the exception for awhile, rather than the rule. Womens' high fashion was based around clothing that was designed for form instead of function, and definitely fails at allowing women to work while wearing it. Privileged mens' fashion followed a similar pattern with hosiery, ornamentation, even high heels, until within the last couple-hundred years, when it switched to what we attribute as business attire. Womens' clothing everyday clothing evolved into ornamentation on semi-practical clothing, and now some mens' fashion is following suit.

It's actually been this way for some time though. Look at the disco attire of the seventies- that certainly was not a masculine way to dress.

Re:Nothing new

[FatdogHaiku]

Language changes over time. It always has, it always will. Of course the old people will always be grumpy how current generation of kids can't behave or talk correctly. They always have, they always will.

I agree, a language is whatever it's users are doing, so it can't help but change over time... don't know if I'd call it "evolving" as some do. To me if a language is evolving it would become better at conveying better specific meaning with fewer, simpler phonemes. I think we tend to do the opposite, and like, totally crap up the information with, like, things that are SOooo useless. Old people are grumpy about the fact that someone else is young and they are not.
Someone else is getting laid, and they are not.
Someone else is not nearing death's door... and they are.
But it wouldn't be proper to bitch about those things so they bitch about the things the current (and each) generation does to distinguish itself, even though their own generation went through the same process.

Re:Nothing new

[couchslug]

"Yup. This is why it seems like a waste of time to obsess over "proper" English. Words are like clothes, you mix and match and there isn't any right answer."

I don't obsess over it, but exceptionally sloppy speech is not a plus during job interviews. The purpose of speech is to communicate, and if you can only speak "trailer" or "ghetto" then I'll place you (or not) appropriately.

It's fine to be able to SWITCH between speaking styles to suit your audience. That's different than having an accent that's a self-inflicted speech impediment.

Re:Nothing new

[hey!]

I once worked with an Arab guy who grew up in the USA who went back to Bahrain for a year during high school. He went to an exclusive public school, and when his British educated teacher had him stand to read Shakespeare, after the teacher heard a few lines the teacher ordered him to sit down, saying, "your accent is offensive to my ears."

The irony is that while North American and British English have diverged over the centuries, the accent in North America has changed far less, and thus remains closer to how Elizabethan English would have been spoken. In the eighteenth century, visitors to the American colonies remarked on how "correctly" English was spoken by all classes, even slaves. In the early 19th centuries the shifts in pronunciation which characterize "correct" ("Oxford" or "received") pronunciation were decried by language purists in England.

I once read a complaint by an English reviewer of George C. Scott's performance as Scrooge in "A Christmas Carol". The reviewer was put off by Scott's American accent. However if we take the story to occur around 1840, and Scrooge to be about 60 and not a native Londoner, the difference between Scrooge's accent and that of younger characters like Bob Cratchit would have been rather accurate.

Re:Nothing new

[wanzeo]

Thank you so much for that video! I just youtubed it to my pedantic friend who linguists over everything, he was less than impressed.

Re:Nothing new

[Compaqt]

But your company doesn't send out correspondence to clients saying "should of", does it?

Re:Nothing new

[Gaygirlie]

You might want to talk to the women who are currently bemoaning the preponderance of emo and metro 'men' hoping to become girlfriends-with-a-penis. Gender roles are being shaken up all over the joint.

I see what you did there.

While this is certainly off-topic I do wish to grab on to this a little. More specifically, to your wording of 'men': why do you think they're less men than e.g. you are? Is it manly to blindly follow tradition and be afraid of breaking out of the box, and feminine to be who and what you like? Is it manly to not care how you look like as long as you look like everyone else?

Personally I think it shows a lot more character to not be afraid of causing a little stir by exploring yourself and breaking a few taboos. A 'real man' isn't afraid of being himself, so to say.

Re:Nothing new

[MasaMuneCyrus]

This. More specifically, I have heard that the "Southern Bell" accent is the closest accent to the original, proper 18th century English, and that "ain't" was a desirable word by the upper class.

For those not familiar, the Southern Bell accent is the kind of accent you might here from upper class white folk in the Deep South. It's almost gone, now, but maybe still exists sparsely. Most commonly, you hear it in movies set in the old South.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

It is puzzling. The girl I was with last night has a thing for guy liner. I accept its ability to define the eyes does look pretty good, but I don't think I'm quite ready for that. I'll keep myself looking good, and trim or shave hair where in the past it'd be left like a jungle. That's the best I can offer.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall reading a piece by Michael Montgomery (the linguistics professor, not the football player) explaining that this has never actually been true.

I believe it was in a book called "Language Myths", an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing.

Disclaimer: IANALA (I am not a linguistic anthropologist)

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Where, precisely, on the continuum between pedantry and free-for-all should we aim? Rules are there for a reason, you know.

Re:Nothing new

[Belial6]

I agree with you in principal, and your comment would apply to the first emo and metro men. Today, there is nothing taboo about emo or metro. Just like having tattoos is no longer taboo.

In support of your comment... Clearly there are many people are confused about what a 'Real Man' is. It is actually really simple.

Real Men have penises.

Re:Nothing new

[Attila Dimedici]

Yes, "obsessing" is overreaction. However, there is value in there being an established baseline of what is "correct". That baseline will change over time, but if some effort is not made to maintain it, it will become difficult for people from different areas and economic classes to communicate. One of the things that facilitated the traditional economic mobility of the U.S. was the fact that our schools taught everyone to follow the same rules of speech and writing. For the most part, those who failed to learn to speak "correct" english were also those without sufficient ambition to improve their economic lot in life.

Re:Nothing new

[wagnerrp]

Singers are musicians, using their voice as their instrument. The basis of any display of musical talent is ones ability to control their instrument. When they have such a warble in their voice, when they can't hold a god damned note, they are showing themselves to be nothing more than a rank amateur. If they are intentionally adding a warble to their voice, out of some misguided belief that the variation in their voice makes them sound better or more emotional, then they are a lost cause.

Re:Nothing new

[smisle]

Words are like clothes, you mix and match and there isn't any right answer.

Yup, but, just as with clothes, there are certainly WRONG answers

Re:Nothing new

[Runaway1956]

I had to listen to the mp3 to understand what the hell this was all about. And, yes, it's just a frigging croak. I've heard a couple of females make those sounds - usually during late night exercises.

What's curious is, that women are beginning to use those sounds as a form of communication in PUBLIC!! What next? http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=queef in public?

Re:Nothing new

[cshark]

I work with English people all the time. Literally every day. Other than the curious way they kind of sing the language, the only differences in terms of spoken English are related to the slang they use. They're also very conscious of their accents when they talk to Americans. So much so, that it's annoying. Working with them can be challenging, because I'm always sitting there trying to think of how not to offend my English colleagues, or cause them to get jumpy, without sounding brutish or uneducated. It actually makes them more comfortable, when my old Brooklyn accent springs out, like it does occasionally. They'll say, "Hey Sam, say 'quarter.'"

Re:Nothing new

[clickforfreepizza]

Fry adresses this, when he talks about job interviews.

Re:Nothing new

[xaxa]

I once worked with an Arab guy who grew up in the USA who went back to Bahrain for a year during high school. He went to an exclusive public school, and when his British educated teacher had him stand to read Shakespeare, after the teacher heard a few lines the teacher ordered him to sit down, saying, "your accent is offensive to my ears."

Some American accents really do irritate some British people.

It's one particular American accent. The closest I can find on Youtube is this girl. The annoying bit is that the last word of every phrase is drawn out. "Hey everybody----, it's Winifred------, [can't understand] make this video for her-----, [...] I thought it was like perfect----, 'cause, she was like----, ...".

That teacher sounds awful though. I would never ask someone to stop talking because of their accent (unless I can't understand). That's as bad as throwing someone out of class for having the wrong colour skin or something.

The irony is that while North American and British English have diverged over the centuries, the accent in North America has changed far less, and thus remains closer to how Elizabethan English would have been spoken.

People from the North of England are supposedly more difficult for Americans to understand, yet their accent is closer to American. Cheryl Cole apparently had trouble on some TV show.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

your accent is offensive to my ears.

My response would have been:

You want offensive? We're in a period of American cultural imperialism. Our movies and television are watched by billions around the world. Our untalented hacks top the charts around the world, even in countries where English is not a widely-spoken language. In short, you watch our crap and we could care less about yours. The time when your culture mattered is over. The sun has set on the British Empire. So why don't you get with the times and realize you don't run the world anymore. We conquered and enslaved your language...deal with it. And stop adding those damned 'u's to words ending in -or...it's just obnoxious.

Re:Nothing new

[n3r0.m4dski11z]

"the accent in North America has changed far less, and thus remains closer to how Elizabethan English would have been spoken"

[Citation needed]

As a canadian, I hate how americans speak english. I strongly doubt that americans followed the british more naturally. If anything, it would be canadians becuase we were closer to the brits historically. Americans would have wanted to differentiate their speech, what with the wars and all that.

But of course I don't have anything to back this up any more than you do. Since there are no recordings from back then, I would judge it very difficult to know how someones accent would have sounded.

Re:Nothing new

[dargaud]

[...] the accent in North America has changed far less, and thus remains closer to how Elizabethan English would have been spoken [...]

I've heard the same argument applied to french as spoken in Quebec vs the one in France. Namely that small groups (colonies) evolve their language slower, thus remaining closer to the root language. But I have serious doubts. If this were true, then it would apply to all colonies, hence the US, OZ and NZ would talk with accents reflecting the date of the founding and I don't think that's the case. I mean, look at the US and Canada. Founded at the same time, so they should have the same accent, right ?

Re:Nothing new

[dwye]

That girl whose accent that you so hate is speaking a California dialect very similar to ValSpeak, the dialect that Frank Zappa satirized by having his daughter Moon Unit speak its characteristic slang in Valley Girl. It drives me up the wall (as a non-yinzer Pttsburgher), as well.

Re:Nothing new

[PPH]

The irony is that while North American and British English have diverged over the centuries, the accent in North America has changed far less, and thus remains closer to how Elizabethan English would have been spoken.

I've heard both sides of this argument. And since there's no way of comparing today's speech to that spoken in Elizabethan England, that may never be settled.

But what we can do is to compare today's British and American speech patterns to those from the dawn of the sound recording age. Now, I can't speak for the British, but American accents have changed drastically. So unless something pulled our (American) accents back towards those of 17th century Britain, it doesn't seem likely.

To confuse the issue further, the vocabulary and grammar that people use in many English speaking countries was that of the King James bible. One of the most widely circulated printed works in the world. And in many walks of life, one of the only things many people would ever read. So its possible that the grammatical adherence to this 'standard' of English might have something to say about various cultures exposure to newer and more varied written material.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally, dialects that sound rural are oftentimes more true to the roots than the "approved" and supposedly dialect-less formal language.

In (my country) Sweden, there are a plentiful flora of old dialects that big-city people find quaint and redneckish. But when you study them in more detail you find remnants of old language rules and grammar that are ostensibly lost to modern swedish.

Thus, it is actually the modern standard and "neutral" swedish that has deviated more from the origins. It's the rednecks that has it right, so to speak.

Re:Nothing new

[hey!]

"the accent in North America has changed far less, and thus remains closer to how Elizabethan English would have been spoken"

[Citation needed]

OK, here (O'Conner and Kellerman ) you go.

----
Works Cited

O'Conner, Patricia T., and Stewart Kellerman. Origins Of The Specious, Myths And Misconceptions Of The English Language. Random House Inc, 2009.

Re:Nothing new

[CrankinOut]

Actually, you know, I was, like, reading your note when, um, I realized, you know, that you confused vocal patterns with, like, language, you know what I mean.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

We shouldn't recognize new words without first making them fit in with the rest. It just makes English seem inconsistent (some words are simply out of place). You want a new word? Well, it has to conform to a certain set of rules (or else everyone will know you're an idiot and you will be fired instantly).

Idiots who want to ruin everything can turn to dust and die.

Re:Nothing new

[hey!]

This isn't like speculating on the transition between Middle English and modern English. That happened in an era before printing or widespread literacy, and surviving documents from the 15th C are extremely rare. The split between British and American pronunciation started in the mid 1700s and went on through the mid 1800s. We have tons of evidence from the writings of contemporary observers about when and how the changes took place. I actually think that this evidence is *stronger* than the evidence from the early days of recording, since you had to speak in an unnatural cadence and loudness to be heard clearly, and it is highly likely that the pronunciation used was affected and exaggerated. I doubt Teddy Roosevelt talked to his family the way he sounds on recordings. Barack Obama sounds quite different giving a speech than giving an interview, so if you used his recorded speeches as evidence of how Americans normally talk you'd be led astray.

So what were the complaints of the language purists of the early 1800s? Young Lord Byron was castigated by older critics for making rhymes that are now quite valid in modern RP but not in American English. Educated Britons complained of the loss of syllables in "necessary" and "secretary" ("neces-sree" and "secre-tree"), characterizing it as sloppy, lower-class speech. This process of the sloppy becoming the gold standard is still going on today. I suspect that in a hundred years' time Estuary English will supplant the Oxford/BBC/Received Pronunciation as the "correct" dialect.

As for Shakespeare, one can use evidence like rhyme choices, but English poets of yore were rather loose with their interpretation of rhyme. I think it's fairly safe to say that nobody is walking around speaking *exactly* the dialect of 17th C. London. Both Standard American English and RP share a common root in 18th C. English, but RP is more different from the common ancestor dialect than SAE. Nonetheless it's a fair guess that both dialects would sound strange in Elizabethan ears.

Re:Nothing new

[dontmakemethink]

And there will always be touchy, defensive people of all ages who perceive criticism behind every simple observation.

LIES!!! Why do you have to be such a jerk?!

Re:Nothing new

[Pseudonym Authority]

. To me if a language is evolving it would become better at conveying better specific meaning with fewer, simpler phonemes.

Aside from the fact that things almost never get simpler with evolution, this is a terrible idea. Ever look at Japanese? They have so few sounds that they can't even write unambiguously without using kanji due to having so many homonyms.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

You are thinking of a Vaginia accent. Most of deep south has always used rhotic R's.

Re:Nothing new

[datavirtue]

People? I thought it was only my wife.

Re:Nothing new

[gothzilla]

"kids don't behave or speak correctly."
Fixed that for you ya damn whippersnapper.

Re:Nothing new

[datavirtue]

Brooklyn accent....now THAT is annoying.

Re:Nothing new

[datavirtue]

Having a stupid accent is a conscious decision. Having a certain skin color is not, unless you tan too much. If faced with this girl in real life I would simply walk away. If I was a unionized teacher, I would throw her out of my class as well.

Re:Nothing new

[datavirtue]

"If anything, it would be canadians becuase we were closer to the brits historically. Americans would have wanted to differentiate their speech, what with the wars and all that."

[again, citation needed]

Re:Nothing new

[datavirtue]

"Words are like clothes, you mix and match and there isn't any right answer."

Huh? Improperly matched clothes are like pornography; I don't want to see it at work. I recall an observation in "The Peter Principle" when the author was talking about how to not get promoted without getting fired. I think clothing anomalies was one of them, next to missing a spot while shaving.

Re:Nothing new

[CronoCloud]

[quote]And stop adding those damned 'u's to words ending in -or...it's just obnoxious.[/quote]

It's just a variant, both were used before dictionaries standardized spelling. We went one way they went the other.

And another thing, -ize, not -ise, is proper English, even the OED says so.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

People have been doing this since they evolved the ability to speak. Western modern humans didn't invent everything ya know.

Re:Nothing new

[datavirtue]

I try to avoid contractions anymore. Being a pedant I take task with using words that were developed to save time and money when printing a newspaper several hundred years ago. I' have had professors clock on people for using contractions and I wish their use was disallowed in school. Not because they are incorrect, but to make people think about words and what they really mean. When people do not use purposeful speech, irregardless of the color and flavor, it shows that they do not think about what they do or say, everything is a reaction. I find it almost a herculean discipline to filter contractions from my speech, but it does me good in many respects.

Re:Nothing new

[icebike]

the only differences in terms of spoken English are related to the slang they use.
 

Not true.
First, all English speakers, (by this I assume you mean British English) do not speak the same or have the same accents, the accents are markedly different from different areas.

The most noticeable thing to a Midwestern American is the way the swallow the tail end of words, in extreme cases to the point where it becomes an exercise just to understand them. (Wo = what, or "Shu Up and le me go" from the Ting Tings).

Its far more than just the slang. And its quite regional in nature.

Re:Nothing new

[Random Destruction]

A self-professed pedant who uses the non-word "irregardless"? Turn in your card, it's time to retire.

Re:Nothing new

[I Read Good]

Yep! You're absolutely correct! We should leave it up to a "gaygirlie" to tell us what it's like to be a man. Are you fucking serious?

Re:Nothing new

[kittylu]

Inappropriate. But you go, girl. As in away.

Re:Nothing new

[VanessaE]

My husband is from Brooklyn, you insensitive clod!

Re:Nothing new

[Z34107]

Not that I'm any expert on language, but I aim for "clarity" and "expressiveness" with my pedantry.

Examples with everyone's favorite word, "hack":

• "He hacked into Sony's password database." Perfectly clear what "hacked" meant in the context of a computer break-in.
• "That's a clever hack." When looking at code, it's obvious that this "hack" is unique from what befell Sony.
• "He hacked up the turkey." Again, unless your'e autistic, you'd understood what's meant when presented with a clumsily carved bird.

So, "hack" has at least three distinct meanings, all discernible from context. This increases the expressiveness and clarity of language; the people arguing "it can mean two things, but three is too many!" need to get a life.

Where I'll disagree with Stephen Fry is the misuse of "disinterested" (impartial) versus "uninterested" (couldn't care less). Yes, you can usually tell which meaning was meant, but if everyone cluelessly uses "disinterested" to mean "uninterested", we've now lost a perfectly good word for "impartial." Unlike "hack", we can now express fewer things, and language is poorer for it.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all the women who just want to be friends? It will bring out emo in a man after a while.

Re:Nothing new

[ancienthart]

Having a stupid accent is a conscious decision.

No, no it really isn't. I notice that if I spend more than one week with a particular group of people on and off, I start using their speech patterns, including pronunciation, tonality, etc. Every now and again, I cringe over something that I've unconsciously mimicked. Getting rid of a stupid accent is the conscious decision, and not an easy one.
There's a reason people suggest full immersion language learning.

Re:Nothing new

[dltaylor]

That should be "different from", not "different than".

"Being able to switch speaking styles ... is different from having an accent that's ...".

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

It's actually been this way for some time though. Look at the disco attire of the seventies- that certainly was not a masculine way to dress.

You whippersnappers might not remember, but disco came out of the gay bars of New York. I'm not surprised it was less masculine than average.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

So, what in particular do you hate aboat our accent? Does hearing it make you want to act oat?

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't comment about the Southern Bell accent, but the Oxford English dictionary has no record of "ain't" before 1845. So I doubt that it was in use anywhere in the 18th century.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

s/Bell/Belle, btw.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Git orf ma lorn.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

I recall reading a piece by Michael Montgomery (the linguistics professor, not the football player) explaining that this has never actually been true.

I believe it was in a book called "Language Myths", an interesting read if you're into that sort of thing.

Disclaimer: IANALA (I am not a linguistic anthropologist)

Well, I sort of am one and can tell you that the phenomena of "Colonial Lag" has been documented in at least several cases I encountered when I was an undergrad. (The case of the Nicaraguan Vos in Spanish is an interesting case, since the academy eliminated it from the Spanish language after the colony was founded and the ships with the imperial orders on that were lost in a storm before they could arrive in Nicaragua.) The necessary "smoking guns" are linguistic isolation of a population and generational discipline in passing things like pronunciation on (i.e. some sort of educational "system" that inhibits vocal "innovation"). Examples after the advent of radio (or event the advent of centralized educational systems) are pretty useless, since all of that has the effect of "pulling" accents over to a standard.

But yeah, the Appalachian hill people from say, 1855 were probably "closer" to Elizabethan pronunciation but if I recall my History of English language classes, that's not saying much, since that period (Shakespear's era) was one of linguistic chaos (in many cases, the actors would pronounce the "k" in knee or knife, for example) and spelling had by no means been standardized by then. Also, you have to consider the origination point of the people who lived in those areas of linguistic isolation. If they were all Scots, well, then what you would hear is a Scots influenced American English accent from around the time and place they emigrated from.

Also, there's a great deal of defensive nationalism around American accents in Anglophile zones (India, for example). My feeling is that it's mostly about preserving British dominance in certain academic sectors. (Ironic, no?)

Re:Nothing new

[kingturkey]

Here's an interesting article assessing some common "misuses" to decide which words it's worth being pedantic about and insisting on the original meaning and which meanings we should give up on. The author bases the assessment on the frequency of the two meanings and on his view of the word's utility and uniqueness in expressing a concept (i.e. what you were referring to regarding "impartial").

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

What exactly is the point of asking for a citation here? In the very next paragraph, which you seem not to have read, he clearly admits that, like the GP, he has nothing to back up his claim.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

So you're saying . . .your husband is annoying?

Re:Nothing new

[mldi]

<quote> Having a stupid accent is a conscious decision. </quote> No, no it really isn't. I notice that if I spend more than one week with a particular group of people on and off, I start using their speech patterns, including pronunciation, tonality, etc. Every now and again, I cringe over something that I've unconsciously mimicked. Getting rid of a stupid accent is the conscious decision, and not an easy one. There's a reason people suggest full immersion language learning.

This. I have a couple of relatives that grew up in the exact same area with the exact same accents, but 10-20 years later their accents now reflect where they moved to (Kansas, Georgia, South Carolina). Though their accents aren't as heavy as the average joe from the area, it still clearly isn't what it used to be.

At the same time, I moved someone only a few hours or so away from where I grew up. My coworkers occasionally make fun of my accent, while I didn't notice a difference. I finally visited home again after a year, and I immediately knew what my coworkers were making fun of.

On a similar topic, is that some kind of phenomenon? Where you don't notice your own accent?

Re:Nothing new

[Paul1969]

This is typical of all emigrant populations. They tend to "freeze" their language in the form it had at the time of the main emigration. Thus Canadian French is very close to Seventeenth Century European French.
Personal note: My family is of Finnish descent. All 4 grandparents were immigrants to the US. My parents are both fluent in the language of the "Old Country." I can only say a few basic phrases, but my kid sister made the effort to pick up a fair amount from our parents.
When she made a trip to Finland a few years back, her speech caused some amusement to native Finns. They were surprised to hear a young woman talking like a "mummu" (grandmother).

Re:Nothing new

[Z34107]

Interesting article. I had no idea "verbal" originally meant "in words", as opposed to "out loud."

Re:Nothing new

[doccus]

Re: "citation needed".. I don't think you can quote sources fror an opinion .. the fact that the sentence starts out with "If anything" classifies it as such..

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

I' have ...

I guess I've noticed your Achilles' heel then... seems like you're more used to typing "I've" then you like to make out.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

I' have had professors clock on people for using contractions

I find it almost a herculean discipline to filter contractions

So it would seem.

Re:Nothing new

[GrantRobertson]

Red Herring Alert!

This is not a change in language. It is a fad of using a particular vocal style. There is a considerable difference.

I have actually been noticing this irritating vocal style myself. I think it sounds a bit snotty and have attributed it to sorority girls and former sorority girls. A perfect example of how this vocal style sounds is the Grammar Girl podcast (yeah, Google it yourself). It is also a perfect example of how one can adopt a fad vocal style while still adhering to strict usage of a language.

Re:Nothing new

[OolimPhon]

Way to misunderstand the anecdote, there. If you read it carefully, you'll realize that the teacher was probably a Bahraini educated either in England or by a British teacher. He almost certainly wasn't an Englishman. Most Englishmen are quite familiar with accents from all round the world these days, and a US twang of any kind would be no problem at all.

Re:Nothing new

[CptNerd]

I'm a touchy defensive jerk, you insensitive clod!

Re:Nothing new

[CptNerd]

ICWYDT, LOL.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this grammar abortion your attempt at irony?

Re:Nothing new

[antdude]

Get off my lawn, whippersnappers!

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

Being annoyed by that accent has nothing to do with being British. I'm American, and Miss Winfried's accent grates the ears like a rusty cheese grater.

Re:Nothing new

[nobodie]

Hold on hold on, This was a broad generalization that was mistakenly attached to Shakespearean speech at some time in the past. I believe that the problem comes from the source of our "standard" speech which is thought to be based in Midlands British English. Compare that to the Australian which is fairly certain to be based in Southern British English (and some argue especially Cockney, from South London, but this seems a bit tight a specification). In the Chespeake Bay of VA/MD/DE there is a little island that claims to have very authentic midlands speech, which is incomprehensible to everyone else in the world.

Yes, American English might have begun in the midlands, but there were multiple sources from other places and times, as well as other forces that have acted on it. The original statement was challenged and, as usual with mistaken assertions that catch peoples attention, has been repeated to the point where people not only believe it but also apply is falsely to inapplicable situations.

BTW. Shakespeare's play were performed in London, for a London, elite audience. Probably not the midlands type of folks either.

Re:Nothing new

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it new? I've heard many people speaking with this "vocal fry" my entire life. I don't know if it was "cool" to do so back then, but nobody ever made fun of people who spoke that way.

Re:Nothing new

[JDevers]

Closer British ties would actually imply that Canadian English would have evolved with British English. American English without those ties would have had a more pronounced island effect.

Re:Nothing new

[Jmc23]

You're obviously young and know nothing about autists.

Re:Nothing new

[RancidPeanutOil]

Not swallowed. Final t -> glottal stop

Re:Nothing new

[virtualonliner]

This. More specifically, I have heard that the "Southern Bell" accent is the closest accent to the original, proper 18th century English, and that "ain't" was a desirable word by the upper class.

For those not familiar, the Southern Bell accent is the kind of accent you might here from upper class white folk in the Deep South. It's almost gone, now, but maybe still exists sparsely. Most commonly, you hear it in movies set in the old South.

And who is to say that the "Southern Bell" accent is the original original? It might have evolved from something else. Like you rightly said, change is not new. Just accept it.

Just what we need

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

It's early in the morning. I just woke up, so my sarcasm glands need emptying. Just what we need, millions of girls who sound like Britney Spears. There.

Re:Just what we need

[Gr8Apes]

Out of all the "celebrities" that one could imitate, why pick one that can barely talk, much less sing? Should, through some cosmic sense of humor, I ever interview anyone like this, the interview would effectively be over within seconds.Our teams do not need to add affected speech to raise yet more barriers to communications.

Re:Just what we need

[Slashdot Assistant]

Yup, and anyone whose speech is infested with irritatingly repeated phrases, such as "you know what I'm saying?" or "like, you know".

Anyone who can't get through a sentence without inserting this junk may just as well wonder why blowing a tin whistle or air drumming at the end of each sentence causes interviewers to quickly dismiss them as being unsuitable? It sounds retarded, and the vocal breaking thing is not sexy. A husky voice can be sexy, but not one where it's a woman attempting to impersonate Henry Kissinger yawning.

Re:Just what we need

[sFurbo]

So, if your sarcasm gland needed emptying, it WAS just what you needed. Which means that your comment wasn't sarcasm. But then it wasn't just what you needed, so it must have been sarcasm. Are you by any chance from descended from Cretans?

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm amazed at how often those that prefer to debase themselves whine about some "ism" when there is valid criticism of poor behavior. How can you possibly consider the disgusting noise of the "vocal fry" to be a dialect? How can expecting someone to not copy Britney Spears or air drumming be considered racist? Slashtards these days.

Re:Just what we need

[Slashdot Assistant]

The verbal tics I mentioned are from urban culture and California and the south. You want me to list examples of every type of verbal tic for every "race"? That would be clumsily verbose, and I assumed from those two examples it was clear that anyone who wasn't a cock would be able to understand that this isn't racism. Disposing of eye contact in some situations is in fact a good idea. America's a big place, so I don't want to generalize here. Typically eye contact is important, because without it the speaker can appear nervous or insincere. However, just try employing the same level of eye contact you would with typically Japanese that you would with a Texan. How does that work out for you?

Small talk too varies depending on culture. Finns traditionally have fewer social niceties than one would expect in the UK. Nordics in general tend to be more straight to the point. Spanish speak quickly and articulate more with their bodies than northern Europeans would. Have you never listened to Italians or Spanish and thought that they're having an argument, when in fact it's just a discussion? Irish tend to invade body space more than Danish would, as another example.

Communications training is something I've done for over ten years, so I'm pretty confident here in suggesting that anyone who thinks I'm ignorant can go royally fuck themselves.

It's pointless to hire someone whose language (verbal or body) are not appropriate to the job. If hiring for a job that requires moderate technical ability, it's far easier to fix the technical shortcomings than it is to remedy communication issues.

Does the same language employed on an Ealing market stall work for a Norwegian looking for financial advice? Perhaps, but it's in fringe cases. It's more likely to be jarring and distracting to have someone near enough finishing each sentence with "all right?" or "not a bother". There we go, now we have English and Irish added to the list. Does that satisfy your need for a united nations of examples?

When communicating, it's important to ensure that the take away point is clear in the reader's mind. You are a reactionary cock, using reactionary straw man bullshit in lieu of having any experience or the ability to offer insight in to what is in fact a very interesting field of study.

Re:Just what we need

[Gr8Apes]

Neither, as you apparently are.

They aren't dialects, they are artificial affections whose "features" do nothing more than provide a sense if differentiation for a group wanting to separate itself from the rest of society. (and that cuts across all sorts of racial and socio-economic strata, btw)

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Prejudice is not racism. Fuck people, figure it out.

Re:Just what we need

[rubycodez]

Fads are not regional dialect. The only purpose served by those phrases is filling in dead air time by a speaker with less to say than they wished their brains could generate. They are symptoms of an educational disease. A person who uses them will be at a disadvantage in interviews, argument, and discussion.

Re:Just what we need

[garyebickford]

Are you by any chance from descended from Cretans?

No, probably Goedel. :)

Re:Just what we need

[cheekyjohnson]

While we're at it why don't we dispose of eye contact

Agreed. It's overrated, in my opinion.

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh good grief, learn what racism is before throwing the word around. It is racist to think all Asian people are stupid, it is NOT racism to say that people who speak a certain way sound stupid. Grow up.

Re:Just what we need

[theArtificial]

It's still racist to imply that people who use those ticks are less educated than those that don't. Linguistic profiling is one of the last forms of racism that's generally accepted by main stream society and I'm not surprised that some idiot decided to mod me down for pointing it out.

You keep saying it's racist, speech has nothing to do with race! It's an absurd argument you're making that an individuals speech is ethnically based. Guess that means Obama can't ever speak English properly because he's black? How does that work for Eminem? LOL is he a race-bater for rapping?

If one talks like an idiot then don't be surprised if people perceive them as an idiot. Why is this so hard to grasp? There is nothing racist about that you bigot.

Re:Just what we need

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

I'm sorry, this is Abuse. You want Chris Crocker, just down the hall.

Re:Just what we need

[TheGoodNamesWereGone]

Where in the hell do you get racism out of his comment? I agree with him. When someone talks to me and every third word is "uh" and every sentence ends with "ya know?" it makes me cringe. Yes, I use colloqialisms. I say "y'all" and "ain't" but I also tailor my speech to the subject and to the situation. When you meet the Queen, you don't say, "Yo! Whassup Mama?" Any person going in for an interview with a Britney Spears speech affectation is going to find it hard to get a job. It makes you sound stupid.

Re:Just what we need

[datavirtue]

LMAO, oh my god...Kissinger. Anyway, "you know what I'm saying?" makes me stop listening to the person speaking and immediately fantasize about strangling every last bit of life out of them. It is hard to pay attention when you are in that mode of thought. One could certainly do a doctoral thesis on that statement insertion.

Re:Just what we need

[datavirtue]

You can't talk to us that way, your ID# isn't low enough. Go fuck yourself.

Re:Just what we need

[gomiam]

Language has no race, as shown by the fact that anyone can speak a language as well or as bad as anyone else, depending on their education. Next time you want to bandy racism around take the time to check what it really means. Abusing it for shock value just diminishes its real worth.

And no, prejudice is not racism (even if racism can be considered a form of prejudice).

Re:Just what we need

[cheekyjohnson]

Perhaps employers should not be concentrating on such superficial things. "In my opinion, this person sounds stupid. Therefore, they are! Anyone who speaks in a way that I don't like is automatically stupid (even if the way they speak is not relevant at all)!"

Re:Just what we need

[Belial6]

You don't seem to know what the word 'racism' means.

Re:Just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Communications training is something I've done for over ten years, so I'm pretty confident here in suggesting that anyone who thinks I'm ignorant can go royally fuck themselves.

Now that's convincing. We would do as you ask, but we are all out of royals.

That's nothing

[Anonymous Coward]

You should hear my falsetto.

Re:That's nothing

[swalve]

Falsetto what? Teeth?

vocal Fry?

[zill]

vocal fry

I came in expecting an article about the Fry's "shut up and take my money" meme. Boy was I disappointed.

Re:vocal Fry?

[bunratty]

/squints Can't tell if speech disorder or latest fad.

Re:vocal Fry?

[identity0]

Oh I see what you did there.

Re:vocal Fry?

[Jonner]

I also really hoped it was fad of talking like Philip J. Fry, but that seems especially unlikely for women.

"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Hadlock]

Surely on a college campus, you can find more than 34 females to do a study on? I would imagine they spent 10-20 times the amount of time writing about their "findings" than they did surveying for data. Is this normal? A study like this wouldn't be terribly time consuming; I would hope for a sample of at least 100 samples, preferably from more than one region (cities/metro areas like London have at least 7 distinct dialects).
 
It's interesting (I can think of at least two people I know who do this vocal fry) but such a small sample size seems like a poor subject to waste time writing a paper on without doing another hour's worth of research.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Nugoo]

As a matter of fact, it is pretty normal. I took a course this semester on computational perception, and every research paper that came up in the course or in presentations by the students had fewer than 10 subjects, often as low as 2. In some cases, those 2 were the authors.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Anonymous Coward]

With 34 subjects the error in the confidence interval for the proportion is roughly +/- 0.17. They had about 2/3 of their subjects use this vocal pattern. Seems like they can claim that the lower bound is 49% which may be all they needed to make their point. Plus they had to have two speech experts evaluate each sample. It may not be so easy to just sit and listen for a couple of minutes to make a consistent decision as to whether or not the subjects were regularly using this vocal pattern in their speech habits.

As for the backgrounds of the students they do not provide a geographical range in the article. It is not in the abstract of the paper either. Without reading the paper it is not clear what kind of backgrounds the students came from. If they all came from the same college then that is a bigger issue than the sample size and is clearly not a "random sample."

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[wisnoskij]

Yes it is normal, 34 people are far more then enough to get statistically significant results that are almost identically significant to 100.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[jtownatpunk.net]

Well, there are rules about this sort of thing...

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, there is an entire field of study called "statistics" that can be used to assess whether a difference of a certain magnitude is real given a sample of a certain size. And, as a phonetician myself, I can tell you that performing these kinds of measurements on speech recordings in a rigorous, controlled, and reproducible way can take a fair amount of time. Finally, they probably did run more than 34 subjects, but had to throw out various subjects who were not native speakers or were male or so on (often, experimenters are not allowed to discriminate on these grounds when advertising for subjects)

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Anonymous Coward]

In our my household, 50% of respondents wanted to try anal sex.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[SteveFoerster]

Surely on a college campus, you can find more than 34 females to do a study on?

Come on guys, no one took the bait on this one?

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[fotoguzzi]

Have you never heard of Rule 34?

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[snemarch]

You included your dog in the survey? You sick, sick person!

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Surt]

Small studies typically aim to have about 20 samples. Below 20 it gets much less likely that you'll have a significant finding. Going higher requires more work, which means more funding. Who is going to sink big money into research on vocal patterns? If this is something you are interested in, you have to squeeze it into a pretty tight budget.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[gzipped_tar]

As a fellow /.er has posted above, this statement works if the error is purely statistical, that is to say no significant contribution of systematic bias.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Hadlock]

You win the prize for "low content post of the day" and it's not even lunch time yet.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[sFurbo]

True, if you take a 70% larger confidence interval to be "almost identically significant" (not counting the "far more than").

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[sFurbo]

Plus, it is a fine size for a first study, to refine the hypothesis a larger study is going to test, and to demonstrate that the larger study will likely not be a waste of time, thus making funding the larger study easier.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[sFurbo]

Sorry about the autoreply, I of course meant preliminary study in stead of first study.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but there's no way I'm letting Fido stick it up my poop shoot.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Anonymous Coward]

In our my household, 50% of respondents wanted to try anal sex.

Did you ask your daughter yourself?

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[rubycodez]

You should have discussed your sexual orientation with your wife before you married.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[PPH]

Surely on a college campus, you can find more than 34 females to do a study on?

Who's first language isn't Mandarin? I doubt it.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[datavirtue]

How much croaking can you listen too before ending the study? Just sayin..

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[martin-boundary]

With 34 subjects the error in the confidence interval for the proportion is roughly +/- 0.17. They had about 2/3 of their subjects use this vocal pattern. Seems like they can claim that the lower bound is 49% which may be all they needed to make their point.

There is a highly unwarranted assumption here that the proportion sought is constant across the whole US population.

So this argument is really saying: if the trend occurs in the exact same proportion everywhere among all females in the US, then it's enough to look at 34 females at a single university to estimate the global proportion.

Of course this is nonsense. The bolded assumption is highly suspect. There are pockets of culture in the US all over, and in each such pocket, the proportion would be very different (eg among the Amish, expect it to be zero, etc).

So all that their test really shows is that: if the proportion across the one university campus is constant (still suspect), then 34 subjects are enough. But to test the constancy assumption, there's only one way: test close to all the females in that campus anyway, and confirm the proportion across all of them. Repeat for all females in the US.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[caluml]

Who's first language isn't Mandarin? I doubt it.

"Who is first language isn't Mandarin?"

Do you mean whose?

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Macman408]

34 is a perfectly reasonable number with which to say "hey, there's something interesting going on here, maybe we could learn something interesting if we studied it more." Hence why the interviewees note several curiosities they have, such as whether it's a generational difference (they suspect it might be), and whether radio station personalities do it or not based on their target demographic. You're right, if you're trying to just make a be all and end all study, 34 is fairly low.

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely on a college campus, you can find more than 34 females to do a study on?

Come on guys, no one took the bait on this one?

Hell, Steve, most were busy, & it was cold--wtf !!--do a study ON? I thought you said IN!!

Re:"Study of 34 female speakers"

[sydneyfong]

It shows that these days you can't find 34 guys on slashdot whose first language isn't Mandarin.

coming up next

[tverbeek]

Next we'll be hearing autotune in everyday speech.

Re:coming up next

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how you write autotuned speech.

Doolurrlurrooooes it sound like thiiiIiiiiIiiiiIiiis?

Re:coming up next

[Dogtanian]

Next we'll be hearing autotune in everyday speech.

Er, I'm not sure that I'd dismiss that possibility *entirely* out of hand. (*) While I'm not sure how Autotune (**) would translate to speech- since it's used for *singing*- the same could be said for this supposed "vocal fry", which started out as a singing technique, and I'm not sure how *that* got transferred to speech. Autotune is pretty damn common, so really, if vocal fry can make the jump, we shouldn't dismiss that Autotune might have *some* effect on speech, even if it's hindered by the fact that most people don't have a box of digital electronics in their voicebox. :-)

Anyway, as for this "vocal fry's" *singing* origins- having checked out what they mean via YouTube- IMHO it sounds less like "a way to reach low notes" and more like what has *always* happened when people *can't* reach those low notes properly, i.e. "it's not shitty singing, it's a vocal technique".... Yeah, right!

Not sure if I have any opinion about vocal fry as a speech pattern, as I haven't heard enough of it to figure out if it's an annoying affectation, just part of the natural mutation of language... or both. ;-)

(*) Then again, what do I know. While I don't- or didn't- hate Autotune misuse (**) per se, as an interesting technique in itself (I've heard some quite good examples), my problem is its overuse *everywhere*. I got bored of it ages ago, and predicted the fad would have died at least a year ago now. Since this clearly hasn't happened, I've also considered the possibility that it may indicate a permanent change in music tastes- and, as if sods' law wanted to prove how out of touch I am- it will probably turn out to be a fad that goes massively out of fashion at some point after all. Or not- as I said, what do I know, I'm way too old for chart music anyway. :-)

(**) As opposed to the original intended purpose of Autotune, which was to simply correct imperfections in singing. Ironically when people talk about "Autotune" now, it's usually to mean the deliberate misuse/overuse of it for effect- and not simple correction- because the latter is so prevalent (and the former should not stand out if done correctly).

Re:coming up next

[SuricouRaven]

Given how autotune technology is advancing both in capabilities and ease of use, this would be quite possible. Not for everyday use - it's hardly practical to carry around an audio rig everywhere - but for public speeches, television appearances, things like that. Perhaps the US President of 2024 will make his inaugral speech though a voice processor that corrects any momentary stalls, stammers or mispronounciations to ensure he sounds absolutly perfect - and even alters his accent to that which his campaign manager determines will make him most popular.

If GWB had that technology, he would have avoided the national snickering about his inability to pronounce 'nuclear' correctly.

Re:coming up next

[Teun]

Or some middle-eastern men would be still alive had they understood they were meant when he talked about killing terrists.

Re:coming up next

[Greyfox]

If there's not an app for that, there damn well should be!

Re:coming up next

[Dogtanian]

If GWB had that technology, he would have avoided the national snickering about his inability to pronounce 'nuclear' correctly.

Until someone got hold of the pre-processed feed and made it public, or simply decided to make a point of how bad he'd sound without it (if he wasn't too frightened to show us).

OTOH, the American public re-elected the guy in 2004 despite them already knowing what he was like by that point- and his not having Autotune available back then- so I'm not kidding myself that this would make much difference anyway.

Re:coming up next

[Anonymous Coward]

"I'd shake your hand but they're kind of sticky if you know what I mean."

Re:coming up next

[AmiMoJo]

A lot of the vocal fry you hear is actually an effect added in later, not something the singers do. These days I'd say the majority of pop songs have not just autotune but various other subtle vocal effects added. You can hear it very easily in Madonna's singing, and I can only assume that Katy Perry is literally tone deaf by the amount of processing she gets. Current male pop-rock vocalists often make their voices sound a lighter and "floating" too.

For those of us who like to sing for fun (karaoke) it is annoying because you literally cannot sing a lot of stuff without it. It started getting bad in the early 90s when songs sampled the vocals and played them back in a way that wouldn't allow a human being to breath. I find it incredible that rappers started doing it, considering they are all about vocal skill, but if you watch Eminem's live sets on a lot of songs he needs support to sing half of every line! Modern stuff just never sounds anything like the original due to lack of effects so most of us stick to 80s or earlier material.

Interestingly it doesn't seem to have affected Japanese pop music quite so much. For some reason they seem to be okay with singing being less than perfect, I suspect in part because they expect the performers to sing live rather than with a backing track and or heavy processing. If it was perfect every time it would be obvious they were miming. We just seem to accept live sets by proper bands never sound like the album version.

Re:coming up next

[biek]

It's closer than you think: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QEm6JlbrxQ

Re:coming up next

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the opposite. If Auto-Tune is used to correct bad singing, it means the studio is trying to pass off a terrible singer as somebody good. On the other hand, as a deliberate effect, it's just another instrument, I don't believe in shunning instruments on general principle.

Re:coming up next

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't consider it shitty singing, I really like the way it sounds, in both music and speech.

Re:coming up next

[KDR_11k]

Amazon gave away headsets with an autotuning function to people who preordered that game.

Re:coming up next

[Anonymous Coward]

Next we'll be hearing autotune in everyday speech.

In Star Trek they call that a Universal Translator.

Re:coming up next

[psydeshow]

it's hardly practical to carry around an audio rig everywhere

On the contrary. You likely have a very powerful rig that is perfect for audio signal processing in your pocket. All you need is the software that does what you go on to describe.

There are autotune apps already. You can buy an accessory that takes a mic input and provides line-out via the headphone jack. The auto-tuned future is here!

Re:coming up next

[g00ey]

For examples of using vocal fry in singing look at the following clip that is "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" by Aerosmith:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo_0UXRY_rY

pay particular attention at 0:31, 0:39, 0:48, ...

Or look for example att "Angels" by Robbie Williams:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fl4q2WBCywg

at 1:30. So vocal fry is also used for accentuation and is not merely a trick to compensate for lacking vocal abilities in singing. Vocal fry is also used to activate the vocal cords so as to help building up a vocal technique with a smoother transition between what is called "chest voice" and "head voice" without disconnecting or bursting into falsetto when reaching higher registers or "slamming" into chest voice when transitioning from higher registers into lower.

So that's what it's called

[Anonymous Coward]

That creeky sound American girls make has been anoying me for years. That and the constant use of the word "like".

Re:So that's what it's called

[dabooda]

Same here! Guys make the same sound too. I love Marco Arment but sometimes listening to his pod cast is tiring because he's constantly speaking with a creaky voice.

Re:So that's what it's called

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not american but since there are loads of american shows on the tv, and with the internet and whatnot, I noticed a few years ago that young american women tend to let the sentences kind of trail off, lowering the pitch and having a bit of vibratto. I remember thinking a few years back "wow, it must be really annoying speaking to someone that talks like that".

Why do they speak this way? Is it to appear sexy, or something? Kinda like that hoarse bedroom voice, all the time? I find it extremely annoying and not sexy at all.

Re:So that's what it's called

[couchslug]

Thank the stupid ones for self-flagging and exploit that information as you see fit.

Re:So that's what it's called

[magarity]

That creeky sound American girls make has been anoying me for years. That and the constant use of the word "like".

What's worse:
1. This creaky noise
2. Using "like" as a substitute for "said"/"did"
3. Ending statements in an up note as if asking a question

Re:So that's what it's called

[swalve]

My non professional research indicates that it is a couple of things. One: the less forceful the voice, the more an interested listener has to focus in on what you are saying. People have to lean in to listen. It gives an unsure speaker cues to feel more important. Two, they use it when they are making statements they believe the listener will be uncomfortable with. They believe it lends a sort of sincerity to the speech so that people will be less likely to challenge them.

Re:So that's what it's called

[datavirtue]

like...you know what I mean?

Re:So that's what it's called

[bughunter]

That creeky sound American girls make has been anoying me for years. That and the constant use of the word "like".

You mean the intonation of each sentence trailing off in pitch and into vocal fry? I've noticed this speech pattern too, mainly as a vocal affectation teenage girls on the West Coast (21st century valspeak). But lately it's spread into the mainstream and even to radio and TV personalities --most commonly reporters.

It drives me nuts because people who speak that way don't vary their tone or emphasis. Every damn sentence is intoned the same exact way. As a former Toastmaster, that and the "uh" frequently distract me so much that I can't hear what the speaker is saying.

Oh Baby Baby!

[singingjim1]

I am NOT RTFA. But I noticed this in a female voice-over announcer in a radio commercial the other day. It annoyed the crap out of me and I immediately yelled at the radio to get off my lawn. But seriously ladies, it's friggin annoying. It's not fun. It's not funny.

Re:Oh Baby Baby!

[Elbart]

The acoustic duck-face.

Maybe it is from

[Ice Station Zebra]

Brushing their teeth with a bottle of Jack?

Re:Maybe it is from

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't the movie the Ring also make this noise popular?

Re:Maybe it is from

[odirex]

Absolutely. 'Vocal fry' is a lazy/relaxed way of using the vocal cords. When you have a hang-over or smoked a ton of weed the night before, you'll almost always talk that way in the morning. I'm a singer and in all my training I've heard vocal fry is actually good for you to relax the vocal cords. TFA's statement that"Chances of vocal damage are very minimal" implies that there is a chance when there is none at all.

Re:Maybe it is from

[dutchd00d]

No, that's "Vodka Fry". Different thing altogether.

Re:Maybe it is from

[swalve]

I think this isn't so much relaxing the vocal cords, but slowing the flow of air down so much that it fails to keep the vocal folds open. Leading to a sound not unlike a straw sucking out the last few drops of a fountain beverage.

Re:Maybe it is from

[Overzeetop]

Not as I understand it. Vocal Fry is opening the rear of the vocal folds so that they are no longer touching. It's one of 5 ways of making vocalization. Vocal fry and falsetto are the two odd-balls, with the "chest" "head" and "whistle" ranges all having full participation of the folds with both ends closed, and each successive range of the three shortening the length of the freely vibrating folds from full length to a small (1/4 length?) portion, allowing for extremely high notes.

nothing original here..

[Anonymous Coward]

typically a traditional Russian vocal technique for male basses to express very low notes, they are commonly known among musicians as "fry tones." This has been around for a very long time. The only new development is its popularity among female singers.

Re:nothing original here..

[gtirloni]

I couldn't read anywhere in the article that the researchers claimed it was original work by young adult females.

This too shall pass.

[olsmeister]

Remember the 'valley girl' speech pattern of the 80's? You don't really hear that much anymore. Humans of a common demographic need things like this to identify with each other and distinguish themselves from other groups. It's part of our social nature.

Re:This too shall pass.

[Eternauta3k]

Yeah, like the Spanish lisp, it'll be gone in no time.

Oh, wait...

Re:This too shall pass.

[Tink2000]

>You don't really hear that much anymore.

You obviously do not live in a predominately college town. Here in Blacksburg we have a permanent population of around 15,000 and a student population of 35,000. For nine months out of the year, I marvel at how Frank Zappa has pulled off the longest troll in the history of music -- spreading that god-awful dialect all the way out East so that even 30 years after the song, I'm surrounded by what started as an attempt of a daughter to cozy up to her dad by making fun of stupid people from Encino.

If the girls talk like airheads, then the guys here talk like wanna-be thugs. Even at an engineering school, I am subjected daily to "Yeah, but uh, y'know I was like... whaaaaaaat?" But that's a whole other topic. First, let's get rid of the word "like". I am convinced that this generation is so disaffected and removed from everything that nothing is real to them anymore. They don't want a cup of coffee; they ask "can I just get like, a cup of coffee?" They didn't go see the movie 3 times, they saw it "like, 3 times". Nothing is real or concrete to them.

Re:This too shall pass.

[wasme]

If the girls talk like airheads, then the guys here talk like wanna-be thugs. Even at an engineering school, I am subjected daily to "Yeah, but uh, y'know I was like... whaaaaaaat?" But that's a whole other topic. First, let's get rid of the word "like". I am convinced that this generation is so disaffected and removed from everything that nothing is real to them anymore. They don't want a cup of coffee; they ask "can I just get like, a cup of coffee?" They didn't go see the movie 3 times, they saw it "like, 3 times". Nothing is real or concrete to them.

This is not what you think it does. In this context 'like' is being used as a 'filler'. The 'filler like' itself has no meaning, but in a place holder for a pause. Similar to other 'words' such as 'uh' or 'hmm' or 'er'. It does not mean necessarily 'nearly' or 'almost' - although it could mean that too, it depends on context.

Re:This too shall pass.

[Tink2000]

What I am saying is that in search of a filler, they choose a word that accurate reflects their world view.

It's a cynical approach, but it's better than the alternative (the alternative being that people who attend the largest public school in my state and one of the highest-regarded engineering programs in the country cannot express themselves coherently).

Re:This too shall pass.

[Solandri]

Remember the 'valley girl' speech pattern of the 80's? You don't really hear that much anymore.

It didn't go away, it got absorbed into regular American English (and consequently Internet English). Look at the list of example phrases and OMG! you'll see many which are common interjections today. "Like" in particular is now an accepted filler word, used by many people instead of "uh" or "um" or "you know". (You may not notice when people say filler words because it's common for your brain to filter them out. But they're very commonly used when talking - it's an easy way to distinguish TV and movie speech from real speech.)

The affected intonation mostly disappeared, but the phrases got picked up by common culture. Same thing with surfer slang (whoa, awesome, shred, stoked, etc. although I had my bet on bogus entering common English since there isn't a good alternative).

Re:This too shall pass.

[Velex]

I seriously think you're overthinking it. Language does not work that way.

Re:This too shall pass.

[Tink2000]

I seriously think you are missing the joke. I know it doesn't work that way.

Re:This too shall pass.

[garyebickford]

'Like' goes back a long way before Valley girls. It was a common usage among beatniks in the 1950s (as satirized by Maynard G Krebs in the 1960s TV show "The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis"). Now I'm a bit curious to see how it originated - it seems to be connected to a certain way of thinking. I think 'Like' might have a bit more contextual/semantic meaning than 'um' as it seems to act as an approximate, non-committal referent to the following phrase. Perhaps this invites the listener to participate in the decision as to the validity of the relation between the phrases being connected by 'like'.

Re:This too shall pass.

[Anonymous Coward]

Interestingly in Scotland people tend to put "like" at the end of sentences: e.g. "can I get a cup of coffee, like?"

Re:This too shall pass.

[Guppy]

It still exists. I had a co-worker (a cute chinese girl) who spoke with a distinct valley accent. I almost burst out laughing the first time I heard her say "Like, take a Midol!" to another girl.

Re:This too shall pass.

[nadaou]

it is much more than just a meaningless filler word, it's a social grace -- or sign of insecurity.

the Canadian "eh?" at the end of a sentence is the same.
translated to "isn't it so?" it takes the harshness out of an otherwise assertive statement of fact.

You don't want a cup of coffee, now. You want something like a cup of coffee, if that isn't too much trouble, please.

Re:This too shall pass.

[Anonymous Coward]

I married a valley girl. She masks it pretty well most of the time, but when she gets flustered it comes out with a vengeance. Having grown up near the beach in LA in the 80s--we have our own ridiculous accent--with movies like Valley Girl and other mall-based entertainment, I find the accent really cute and endearing. It's a piece of SoCal culture I'm going to make sure our kids appreciate.

Re:This too shall pass.

[Zontar The Mindless]

...the guys here talk like wanna-be thugs. Even at an engineering school, I am subjected daily to "Yeah, but uh, y'know I was like... whaaaaaaat?" But that's a whole other topic. First, let's get rid of the word "like". I am convinced that this generation is so disaffected and removed from everything that nothing is real to them anymore. They don't want a cup of coffee; they ask "can I just get like, a cup of coffee?" They didn't go see the movie 3 times, they saw it "like, 3 times". Nothing is real or concrete to them.

So Blacksburg is finally catching up with the way we all talked in 1970s/80s Ohio?

Re:This too shall pass.

[schroedingers_hat]

Nothing is real or concrete to them.

Maybe they're all solipsists?

Re:This too shall pass.

[Tink2000]

I ... I guess. Ya got me. Buckeye.

Re:This too shall pass.

[Tink2000]

Ah, no. Like is ubiquitous in the speech I am trying to describe. I'll try to give you an example.

"So, like, we went to this totally like random dive bar on Main Street? And like, I was all like, isn't this where Sasha and Greg hooked up? And like right at that exact moment there's this guy in the corner like all staring at us, and I was like, 'hey, what's your problem?' and he just like, I don't know, kept like ... STARING at us like he was like gonna maul us or something. Whatever."

I think that's a pretty reasonable representation of what passes for social conversation around here. And even though the topic is sorority girl speak, everyone does it. It's infectious. I often find myself saying "no, we didn't like look at the motherboard, we looked at the motherboard."

Re:This too shall pass.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a filler, though I'm sure the previous poster knew that.
That said, it's a pretty sad state of affairs to need to use a filler between every other word. I've heard, "uh yeah, can I just get, like, um, a cup of coffee?". In this case the "uh", "yeah", "just", "like", and "um" are entirely unnecessary. And of course, "can I get" really ought to be "may I have".
It seems to me that everyone is constantly distracted. Certainly, you see people use "like" and "um" much more when they are distracted, but they don't even have to be noticeably distracted. People use this more in places with a great deal of commotion, such as busy stores, coffeeshops, or bars. They use it when they bump into someone but their mind is really dwelling on where they need to go. They use it when a teacher asks them a question, but they are distracted by trying to recall what the text said.
It's a symptom of overload. It's an inability to focus on the moment. You're brain begins to think it ought to act like a smartphone, jumping from app to app to handle all the different information. Unless you force it to focus, it is continually interrupting your concentration. Hence, 'like' or 'um' comes out while you get it back on track. Notice, that there is almost always a small pause after 'like' and generally the person's eyes will dart away - the same way someone usually does when they are trying to recall something.

Anyway. That's my two cents.

What in the world?

[sgt scrub]

Britney Spears got mentioned on /. because of her voice?

Re:What in the world?

[rainmouse]

Britney Spears got mentioned on /. because of her voice?

Only because of her voice coaching. They make it sound almost like she came up with the technique, next they will have us believe this performing monkey actually programmes the synths and writes her own music.

Re:What in the world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Natalie Portman gets mentioned on Slashdot all the time due to her hot grits.

Re:What in the world?

[Surt]

Her voice has a lot to do with her throat. How do you imagine she developed this skill? How do you want to imagine she developed this skill?

Re:What in the world?

[swalve]

While casting no aspersions on her, I think that the throat as sexual device theory would make one sound more like Zooey Deschanel than Spears.

Re:What in the world?

[Anubis IV]

It's of scientific interest. No nerd would ever consider listening to it for personal enjoyment or entertainment.

Marge Simpson did it first

[Anonymous Coward]

Marge Simpson did it first

Re:Marge Simpson did it first

[Anonymous Coward]

Marge Simpson did it first

But was only copying Jimmy Stewart.

I don't care about or know about this Vocal Fry

[Anonymous Coward]

But I was just on the phone calling about an appliance delivery, I was just guessing that the person I was talking to was saying what I thought he was.

I can only hope that he was somebody in a foreign country, because if the rest of the country starts to sound like him, I'm going to be in trouble. Because while I can not do business with Sears again (Yes, I really didn't want to go to them anyway, but could I argue with the prices? No. Pity, since I think we'll be paying for the price later. I digress though, you don't need to worry about it.), if it becomes, more pervasive, well, that can be an issue.

Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

Chris Barnes of Cannibal Corpse was doing this years before Britney Spears decided it was "cool".

Re:Not new

[Anonymous Coward]

Chris Barnes of Cannibal Corpse was doing this years before Britney Spears decided it was "cool".

Yeah, Britney stole her whole damn act from Cannibal Corpse- including the dressing-up-as-a-schoolgirl bit. ;-)

Breaking news...

[Mostly Harmless]

...people on Long Island talk funny. I know this, because my wife has been telling me that for years. Now that I haven't lived on LI for quite some time, whenever I speak with my family back home I can hear it. Everyone on that island needs speech therapy, not just the college girls.

Britney or Antares?

[PopeRatzo]

Are we absolutely certain that this effect is not an artifact of Auto-tune?

I have heard kids on the street doing a remarkable mimic of T-Pain.

Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRRs"

[Barryke]

When i hear the example voice ( http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/vocalfryshort.mp3 ) speak -prior to their example- i hear the same sound in her normal speech. Note the R / H usage:

registeRRRRRs.
piCHHHHHes.
tHis.

I know some would call this just pronouncing part of a word, but i clearly hear the same exact thing, and also, if i (as an euopean) try to pronounce these words with those sounds, i only succeed when i "vocal fry" as heared in the example.

I find these URRRRRR sounds in the middle of words make people sound not so smart (ppl that rather be lazy / hippies) just like how the french sound as if they can't find their words with their constant EUGHHHHHH groan in spoken language.

Mongolian Britney Spears

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only they learn to sing like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwANedEkqaY

Fashion influences young people! news!

[fantomas]

News at 11! Young people alter their behaviour to follow the fashions led by pop stars! Shocking news....

Britney my eye...

[Anonymous Coward]

These young girls are imitating the voice of NPR's ultra-hip Diane Rehm.

Re:Britney my eye...

[Anonymous Coward]

She looks like she sounds - an animated mummy.

Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[jabberw0k]

Over the past few years, folks in Phoenix have picked up the Californianesque annoyance of calling Interstate Highway 10, "the" 10... "The 10 what?" I ask, since they are using it as an adjective. I finally got someone to say, "Oh, the 10 'freeway'." Where "freeway" apparently just means "limited access highway" so they are calling it the Highway 10 highway. Ugh. That needs to be quashed by the Department of Redundancy Department, along with the British "the M1 Motorway" (the Motorway 1 Motorway) and "Personal Identification Number number."

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[tgd]

That's not new at all -- the Phoenix area has been doing that for at least 20 years, and probably more.

its spread farther, too, its pretty common in Nevada and Colorado, too. But its pretty much ubiquitous in AZ, and has been since the 80s.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Anonymous Coward]

The use of the article "the" is peculiarily a *southern* california speech pattern. In northern california, they don't use the article.

SoCal: Take the 405 over Sepulveda Pass
NorCal: Take 580 to Livermore

The pattern changes roughly mid-state (say around San Luis Obisipo, if you're taking the coast route)

The other thing that varies somewhat regionally is whether one uses the name of the freeway or the number. 405 or San Diego Freeway (which, naturally ends more than 50 miles north of San Diego). This seems to be a Los Angeles phenomenon (when I grew up in San Diego, we used numbers almost exclusively.. the 8, the 5, the 15).. And some are almost always referred to by number (the 605) some usually by name (Ventura Freeway vs the 101) but depending on where you are. In the San Fernando Valley, it's Ventura Freeway. South of Cahuenga Pass, though, it's usually "the 101"

if you want real excitement, go look up the stuff about caught/cot

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[jabberw0k]

So, take "the" Interstate Highway 15 or take "the" Route 101? How can anyone even think, much less say that?

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Surt]

Interstate Highway 10 has 5 syllables. The 10 has two. Guess which is going to win?

Dropping 'the' to get down to just '10' is hard because there are typically both mileage and time uses of numbers in such conversations.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[penguinchris]

So what do you think "the 10" should be called (I live in CA)? Do you say "Interstate Highway 10" in normal speech (or just "Highway 10", which also sounds unnaturally formal to me, but is not unreasonable)? Or, do you say "the 10 limited access highway"?

I'm originally from Western New York (Buffalo, went to university in Rochester). We have highways there equivalent to CA's freeways (though much smaller), but no one calls them freeways, they call them highways. But then, there are regular surface roads that are also called highways. I never knew how to refer to the freeways there (still don't, though people know what I mean if I'm back in Buffalo and use the CA term freeway). But, people in Buffalo and Rochester refer to the freeways by their numbers - "the 290", "the 90" (which is the interstate thruway but used as a local freeway in the cities it passes through), etc. just as they do here in CA. I've heard freeways referred to in this way many other places as well.

So I'm genuinely interested in what you think people should be saying (and I don't see the redundancy in this method unless you exaggerate what people are saying and add to it, which is what you've done).

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[del_diablo]

Because nobody understands what noting plural and singular is suppose to mean anyhow.
It took me 2 years of studying spansish before I understood that you used the "Lo, la, los, las" and whatever ever similar ones to denote singular and plural just like in my own language.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Anonymous Coward]

So what do you think "the 10" should be called (I live in CA)?

Just "10". "10" is a name. If your name is "Chris" (based on your username), it would feel very awkward to call you "the Chris". That's what it sounds like when people say "the 10". It just baffles me that people would even think to say something like that.

So the short form of "Turn onto Interstate Highway 10" would be "Turn onto 10".

Do you turn off on "Oak Street" or "The Oak Street"?

"Turn the TV to channel 5" == "Turn the TV to 'the 5'" or "Turn the TV to '5'"?

In the context of a book (classroom or something), would you shorten "turn to page 12" to "turn to 12" or "turn to the 12"?

"the road" is a road.
"the sun" is a sun.
"the planet" (as in, "coolest penguin on the planet"), is a planet.
"the universe" is a universe (even if there is only one).
Highway 10 is not "a 10", it's a highway named "10".

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[heinousjay]

On the east coast we get away with saying things like "take 66 to 495" without confusing people.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[swalve]

One particularly grating one is the Edens expressway, named after a guy named "Edens". Traffic reporters have started making it plural. It makes my head explode: "The Ryan is fine, the Stevenson is slow, the Eisenhower is slow, the Adams is slow and the Edens are fine." Argh!

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Miseph]

I'm from Western Massachusetts, and lived in Buffalo for about two years, and I don't remember anyone regularly using "the" to prefix highway numbers. Nobody uses non-numeric highway names, and they seemingly exist for no purpose other than vanity. For example, where I live we have route 202, which is also named "The Daniel Shay Highway", but nobody would ever call it anything but "202" unless they are highly pretentious.

In any event, I normally say things like "take 90 (or I-90) west" or "it's right off 116". I suppose that might confuse non-drivers or non-locals, but most people seem perfectly able to understand what I'm saying.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[swalve]

How is "take 10 for 8 miles" hard?

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Anonymous Coward]

When I arrived in the Bay Area, I started using "the number" for freeways because I wanted to fit in. Then we got to talking about regional speech and somebody told me it was interesting that people from back east talked like they are from LA. That's when I found out that "the 101" is SoCal, not NorCal.

I stopped using it.

In general, I stopped making any kind of effort to talk one way or another. I may or may not have picked up some localisms. I don't pay attention that much.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't "think" that obviously. Here are some alternate abbreviations:

Take highway 101 south... take 101 south. (S.F. syntax)

Take the 101 freeway north... take the 101 north. (L.A. syntax)

Amusingly, from the north we used yet another pattern in some cases: take interstate 5 north... take I-5 north. I only remember hearing this for I-5 and I-80.

Here are apparent reversals: take the Nimitz freeway... take the Nimitz (S.F. syntax). Take the Pacific Coast Highway... take PCH (L.A. syntax).

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[tunapez]

I say "I-10" to denote the Interstate 10 Freeway, just like everyone else I know. If I, or my colleagues/friends, watched the talking heads on the idiot box I'm sure the cutesy names like 'The 10' would eventually slip into our vocab after hearing it repeatedly. What I don't understand is why the OP used that and not the recent media parroting of 'haboob' in the news(I am always amazed by how much I know and hear about what's on TV without even watching it). It's a fucking SANDSTORM, it's what it's been called in this region of the world for at least 20 years I've been here! Sure in the middle east they call them that, but are we now going to call hurricanes typhoons or cyclones? Actually, I'm surprised BigP hasn't paid to have the talking heads refer exclusively to them as 'depressions' to sell more happy pills.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[darth dickinson]

It took me 2 years of studying spansish before I understood that you used the "Lo, la, los, las" and whatever ever similar ones to denote singular and plural just like in my own language.

You must be a slow study. I picked up on that my second week of studying it, in High School 20 years ago.v Of course I can barely speak the language now, but that's because of a lack of practice.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[scruffie]

Interestingly, in Southern Ontario, you do use "the": the 403, the 401, etc.

On the other side of the country, in southwest BC, we have fewer notable highways. The big one is "Number 1", or "the Trans-Canada", and in my town would just be called 'the highway' :). Checking with my parents, others are referred to by number without 'the', or by name with 'the'.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Lakitu]

I think your outrage on this is mostly unfounded. If you had to drive from NYC to New Jersey, would you be upset about being told to take Holland Tunnel?

how about being told to take the Holland tunnel?

how about being told to take the tunnel?

would you get similarly upset if someone were to remove the actual object description from, say, the Tappan Zee Bridge, by referring to it only as "the Tappan Zee"?

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[bughunter]

Take 10 what?

I took two earlier and it didn't help.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[swalve]

Ugh.

"How do I get to Palm Springs?"

"Take 10 for 8 miles."

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[fnj]

Actually "in-ter-state high-way ten" has six syllables.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[fnj]

Everybody I know calls it "route 128" or "route 93". Massachusetts, if that matters.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Surt]

Not the way I say it! ;-)

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[crossmr]

no, it's not. It's also used in Canada as well. People often refer to highways as "the XX" whatever the number may be.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know about Arizona, but in Texas, we usually just say the number without any article or prefix (e.g. "10", "20"). If it's a two-digit interstate, we might put an "I" before it (e.g. "I-10", "I-20"), but we never speak prefixes for US and state highways and three-digit interstates (e.g. US-75 is just "75", SH-114 is just "114", I-635 is just "635"). Also, if the highway has a proper name in addition to the number, we sometimes use that, but without the suffix (e.g. US-75 is sometimes called "Central" because its proper name is Central Expressway, I-635 is sometimes called "LBJ" because its proper name is Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway).

Also, we only ever use numbers when we're talking about controlled-access highways. If it doesn't have controlled access and it has a proper name, we always use the name and not the number (e.g. SH-289 is never, ever anything other than "Preston" or, rarely, "Preston Road").

Of course, if we all already know what road we're talking about, it's just "the highway". "Freeway" sounds weird to us because they all have different suffixes--for example, the northern part of the Dallas area alone has freeways, expressways, tollways, and turnpikes.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Anonymous Coward]

"PIN" is a proper noun, and grammatically speaking, any proper "noun" that does not refer to a unique entity is not really a noun but is actually an adjective. Thus, "PIN number" is grammatically correct but *"PIN" is not. This is also why "Rolex watches" is grammatically correct but "Rolexes" is not ("Rolex", though, is grammatically correct if and only if you're talking about Rolex SA itself and not one of its products). On the other hand, "Walt Disney" is grammatically correct but "Walt Disney businessman" is not because Walt Disney is a unique entity, while there is no one single "PIN", and "Rolex" only refers to a unique entity when you're talking about the company.

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Anonymous Coward]

uhm, when I asked for directions in the states, I was told to take I-somesuch and turn of on exit somesuch then drive straight on route something other. So, why not just say, take I-15 or route 101?

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Anonymous Coward]

Just call it 10. Nobody says "Turn left on the Main St. then go 3 miles down the Broadway ave."

Re:Annoying Valley Girl echoes

[Ritchie70]

I live in the Chicago area.

I usually say I-55, I-294, or 294.

The traffic reports use terms like "the Stevenson Expressway" "the Tristate" "the Bishop Ford" and other names. These are all names for interstate highways. Sometimes the same interstate highway number has multiple names.

It's VERY confusing.

Need a quirky speech style?

[ajlitt]

Why not Zoidberg?

Re:Need a quirky speech style?

[Slashdot Assistant]

Or Zed McGlunk from Police Academy. I am slightly aroused and worried.

Does that make me a vocal hipster?

[muridae]

I've been speaking in the lowest register I can for years. It started after a bad day in the school choir followed by laryngitis, and I found that speaking with a 'fry' allowed me to speak when every other range was still sore and painful. It also got rid of my horrid Appalachia accent.

Oh well, can't be seen to imitate pop stars, guess I have to speak in my normal range for a while til this fad passes. That should surprise/scare a few people.

Re:Does that make me a vocal hipster?

[couchslug]

Keep the fry, unless you LIVE in Appalachia.

Re:Does that make me a vocal hipster?

[swalve]

It's not register, it's airflow. You can do it with any register by being too lazy to use your diaphragm.

Re:Does that make me a vocal hipster?

[muridae]

Haven't escaped the southern appalacia yet. But I meant lost the accent completely; gone save for when I'm really drunk/stoned. Now I have a very neutral one, sounds British to Americans, and Canadian to British folks. Don't know why it worked, or who I learned a neutral accent from. Probably can blame TV.

Please tell me...

[billybob_jcv]

... my tax dollars are not being used to fund this "research".

Re:Please tell me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably. And with a response like yours, I see my tax dollars were wasted on your education.

Re:Please tell me...

[SuricouRaven]

"In the new study, scientists at Long Island University"

I doubt they got a government grant for that one. Looks like your tax dollars are headed elsewhere.

Re:Please tell me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your tax dollars are not being used to fund this research.

Re:Please tell me...

[Surt]

Almost certainly not. This kind of thing is almost universally funded privately by rich people who have eccentric interests.

Re:Please tell me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just don't tell him where, or we'll never hear the end of it.

How low can you go?

[Walter White]

What's really cool is to go so low you can almost count the individual pops!

Re:How low can you go?

[adrn01]

Nah, what's cool is being able to sync with an old modem by using vocal pops.

Oh, god...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not at all surprised... but I still want to throw up.

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[methano]

When I hit the link, it didn't work. WTF!! My browser, Firefox, sent me to the Apple page to get some plug-in. You know, a lot of crap in FireFox has quit working. I used to always auto-login to /. But not anymore. There's all kinds of things that break every time they do one of those weekly version updates. PDF in the browser quit working a long time ago. I keep using Firefox because I'm used to it and I don't want Google or Apple to completely own my ass. I avoid MS at all costs. But don't tell me I need to use Linux. I tried that. Those same people who told me to use Linux are probably the same people who don't want me to listen to this vocal fry stuff because it's not in Ogg Vorbis or maybe they'll tell me that I should just type some 40 word command line statement and just pipe that link into some program that I should be able to write in an afternoon using FORTH if I was worth anything. I played the sound with Safari.

There's a HS gal from NCSSM that works in our university lab on occasion and I think maybe she does that vocal fry thing. I'll have to listen for it.

Idiocracy?

[Anonymous Coward]

I came in thinking of Fry from Futurama and discovered that, in a strange sort of way, I wasn't that far off the mark...

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[Anonymous Coward]

Having been a student of linguistics some 30 years ago, I was intrigued. So I gave the mp3 sample a listen.

Very familiar. Back in the day, we used to call that 'creak'. The woman in the above mp3 even mentions creak.

Details are murky (the ol' forgettory ain't what it used to be), but I seem to recall my linguistics prof indicating that while creaked speech is explicitly part of certain languages, that it does occur in English in certain situations. Like a doting grandparent getting all cutesy wutesy with their toddler grandchild.

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[nleaf]

She was most likely accentuating vocal fry throughout the clip for the purpose of demonstration.

It bothers me that you complain about the speech patterns of other peoples - particularly those you deem to be "lazy / hippies" - yet cannot find the effort to capitalize your I's and fully spell out "people."

This is new?

[haltline]

I'm 53, I remember girls that sounded like this all my life. And I can jokingly say "For an example of vocal fry head on down to the casino and find an old lady by a slot machine". So, my personal life experience tells me there's nothing new here.

Concerning the comments about people not using proper English: What is important is that words are used properly, that their meanings preserved so that communication can be meaningful. Confucius covered this long ago,

And, yeah, I was hoping for Futurama Fry too :)

Re:This is new?

[Anonymous Coward]

ur old lol

Re:This is new?

[sydneyfong]

Concerning the Confucius quote: I dwell quite a bit in Chinese classics. It doesn't mean what you think it means. Heck, unless the translation is from some obscure source I've never heard of, the translation itself is absolutely horrible.

The original text was about teaching gentlemen to acquire proper names and title before attempting to change and improve society. Nothing about language nor linguistics.

A lot of common translations of Chinese classics were undertaken by people who really didn't know much Chinese, much less classical Chinese (which is not in common use today). It's really amusing to read their attempts at making sense of the texts and making it sound wise (and at the same time completely missing the point). :)

Britney's moaning, not vocal frying.

[Anonymous Coward]

I always thought Britney Spears did it because it sounds sexy like moaning and added it later or something.

what?

[Charliemopps]

I, and everyone I know have been doing this forever. Just say "Umm" and there you go. It probably goes back 100 years or more.

They're gearing up for a new career

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

They can always become Airline Pilots with that kind of voice...

"Ladies and Gentlemen, uh-uh-uh-h-h-h-h-h-h.
we're waiting for final clearance, uh-uh-uh-h-h-h-h-h,
before we taxi to the runway, uh-uh-uh-h-h-h-h-h....."

"Throat creak"

[Kalvos]

This was identified, defined and named as "throat creak" on alt.usage.english at least 10 years ago, including its first appearance in television commercials of the day.

Re:"Throat creak"

[mark_reh]

You can hear it on some old Beck discs, not nearly as much as Britney Spears uses it, but it is there.

Smoking....

[David_Hart]

I wonder if this has anything to do with smoking rather than simple speak patterns. According to Wikipedia, approximately 30% of college students smoke. Most smokers I know have "fry" speech patterns. At the back of my mind I seem to remember that smoking was increasing among women, but I could be wrong as I can't find any recent studies with a quick Google search.

Erica Cerra

[suss]

Erica Cerra (Deputy Jo Lupo) has been doing this more and more on Eureka and calls it "acting". I find it extremely aggravating. She sounds like she had throat surgery that went terribly wrong. I wonder how many google searches there have been for "erica cerra throat cancer"...

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[rasmusbr]

I don't know, but I think the woman in the clip is referring to the sort of clicking, two-stroke engine like sound that she makes at the end. I don't hear any of that when she speaks normally. Her R:s sound nice and clean.

I occasionally use that sound and I've always assumed that it signals "I'm too lazy/tired/drunk/confused to think properly about what you just said", so you associating it with laziness makes sense, although it could also mean that the person you're speaking with thinks that you're confusing.

A hippie is something else. Cartman in South Park is meant to be a comical character, you know.

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[Surt]

Yeah, firefox needs to have a wider window between versions for plugins to catch up. To explain, the problem you are having is that some of your plugins (e.g. adobe pdf plugin) are not keeping up compatibility with the latest version of firefox, and are often lagging the release by 3-4 months, by which time people on auto-upgrade may have moved to yet the next version! This has put large numbers of people on semi-functional software, and is driving lots of people to chrome. You might almost believe that Google plants in the firefox development planning team were responsible, but that's impossible because it would be evil, and Google doesn't do any evil.

Placing the blame

[Nebulo]

I blame Kate Mulgrew and Alanis Morissette! And maybe Natalie Merchant, too.

nebulo

Dominant behavior

[Vincent77]

Speaking at lower frequencies is a sign of dominance. See Animal Planet or http://center-for-nonverbal-studies.org/tone.htm If something changed over the past decades is the feeling of dominance by the USA - that reflects in various ways, so it seems.

Oh girlz... ;)

[gzipped_tar]

Well girls do speak a different language XD High-school girls in Beijing are known to develop their own variant of Mandarin, featuring variations of consonants. It isn't usually preserved through adulthood though.

Lots of new sounds creeping in - Van-key-oo-ver

[germansausage]

Lately I've started hearing this a lot: - the oo sound like in moo is becoming the dipthong ee-oo, or maybe y-oo. Now some words were always 50-50 on this ie - "tune" is sometimes t-oo-n and sometime t-y-oo-n. It just lately that it seems to be creeping into all sorts of words that were only oo sounds before. The most common one is the name of the city, Van-key-oo-ver.

Re:Lots of new sounds creeping in - Van-key-oo-ver

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a midwestern invasion?

I found myself having to distort "chapstick" into "chi-yap-stick" to get lip balm at a store in Chicago, where my west coast "chapstick" was being heard as "chop stick"!

Phonemic

[tepples]

In some languages, vocal fry is already phonemic, and the same sounds said with or without it are heard as different words.

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[Anonymous Coward]

My Firefox merely prompted me to download the file, which I was then free to open up in a player of my choice... Yours must be mis-configured somehow.

hormonal imbalance

[Anonymous Coward]

between the synthetic and natural occurring.

What we're exposed to daily is 1000's of times what is considered safe... enough exposure with a decade to offset puberty in girls by years and see an enlarged hypothalamus in boys as young as five.

To disambiguate

[tepples]

"Personal Identification Number number."

Why do pedants complain about this one so much, when it's really just a way to distinguish "PIN" from "pin" and "pen"? Compare to dialects that say "ink pen" because "pin" and "pen" vowels are already close together.

Re:To disambiguate

[mobby_6kl]

When was the last the it wasn't completely obvious from the context which of the PIN/pin/pen it's supposed to be? Like "please type in your PIN", would you try to type in your pin or ball-point pen into the ATM machine? How would that even work?

Re:To disambiguate

[Patch86]

Because redundancy is irritating. It doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it's irritating.

When you mentally expand "Typed my PIN number into the ATM machine" to "Typed my Personal Identification Number number into the Automated Teller Machine machine", it just grates.

Speaking of which, there's no excuse for "ATM machine"; there's nothing to confuse it with.

Other patterns, etc

[russotto]

So in the early part of the 20th century, did people speak with vibrato?

Do the researchers really know if this is new, or are they just noticing something that's always been there.

If James Earl Jones were to drop into the vocal fry register, could anyone hear him and would USGS seismologists notice?

I wonder whether this happens more often

[hey!]

when women speak in the presence of men. The reason is that this sound is produced in a woman's lowest vocal register, and ability to produce a wide range of vocal frequencies might be perceived as a sign of reproductive fitness.

I remember reading about a researcher who studied the perception of female laughs by men. The laughs judged most feminine and attractive had frequency components an octave than the high note of the famous tonsil-busting "Queen of the Night" aria from Mozart's Magic Flute.

hmmm..... Vocal Fry...

[flappinbooger]

Not sure if natural evolution of speech pattern or just stupid youth....

Re:hmmm..... Vocal Fry...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure it's the latter.

Current Speech Patterns

[Anonymous Coward]

The throat creak, I think, comes from partially imitating the sexy voices of actresses from the 1990s who seemed to thrive in in, along with that sexy, husky tone. See Demi Moore for a perfect example.

If you want to talk about emerging youth verbal patterns, you should look into mumbling. This seems to be replacing the incessant use of “like”. I'm speaking as as an English teacher who pays close attention to these things. I think the diminishing of “face time” is a major part of communication, although I see it in students who don't do much electronic media. To be honest, I'd rather have the “like” back. It's easier to correct. The mumbling is part of a lack of communication awareness of the speaker. That's much harder to teach.

Here's how to correct like (at least with a young person): put your hands behind back while the person is speaking and count the “likes” with your fingers. When the person is done, acknowledge what he/she said and then bring out your fingers, saying, “Did you realize you said the word “like” X times?” A little self-awareness in one's speech can clear that up.

But oh God, the mumbling.

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that many people associate it with being tired is that as you get tired, your voice will slowly creep lower and lower and the amount of air provided to speak slowly decreases. Eventually, your voice cannot be full on (modal) in that low register with that amount of air and you start to fry. Another common occurrence are when people are attempting to speak quietly but not whisper, they cannot talk with that little air in the register they want and start to fry.

The one that really gets me is that people in certain circles the vocal whistle is become prevalent to accent certain thoughts. For example, "AH, that dog is so cute." The "AH" will have the high pitched whistle tone that drives me nuts. Then again, maybe that is because I'm a bass and use the fry and modal everyday and the falsetto sometimes, but the whistle almost never.

I can honestly say

[Stan92057]

I can honestly say Ive never herd a women,teen,child talk like that .ever. New to me and im 54. But then who listens to women anyways lol

"Mrs. Parker and the Viscious Circle"

[Sebastopol]

...Jennifer Jason Leigh talks in vocal fry the entire effing movie. Apparently that is how Dorothy Parker really spoke.

On the flipside, why do all audio recordings of politicians from the pre 1940's all sound like they are carnival hawkers? I'd like to understand more about how voicing styles change over time. Very interesting new topic to discover.

Eddie Vedder

[Sebastopol]

So what is that annoying thing that Eddie Vedder always does, where he tries to sing from the back of his throat to sound deeper / more menacing, but sounds like a twit instead? Wait, is anyone here old enough to remember Pearl Jam?

Old News Nothwest

[MountainLogic]

Old news for the pacific northwest. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creaky_voice It is considered one of the few vocal accents used in the area.

Re:Old News Nothwest

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

The Wiki article on Pacific Northwest English is a bit more detailed. I think the creaky voice is distinct from fry; notice the latter has an article of its own, linked to on the CV page.

I grew up in eastern Oregon; a friend of mine is endlessly amused by my pronunciation of "both," spelled b-o-w-l-t-h. Says he hears this in the speech of various natives, including Kurt Cobain. This doesn't seem to be covered in the wiki article I linked to, nor do I remember it mentioned in other pieces on native dialect. Said friend hails from PA and has his mother's very strong Long Island accent so the derision is mutual.

My rather harsh, low pitched and nasal accent is something else I hear in other people from east of the Cascades. It seems beyond "creaky" to me.

You know? What I mean? I hate it a lot?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, the opposite is also occurring: people who insist on ending their sentences on the upswing, as if every utterance is a question.

It sounds ...

[PPH]

... to me to be similar to the 'lazy' speech habits of stoners.

I lost my pen

[tepples]

"I lost my pen" (misplaced a writing tool) vs. "I lost my PIN" (forgot a password) vs. "I lost my pin" (misplaced a tool for ejecting a disc from a malfunctioning optical drive). For a while, it appeared that "I lost my pen" (misplaced a small flash storage device with a USB interface) was heading that way.

Re:I lost my pen

[cheekyjohnson]

"I lost my personal identification number."

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[cheekyjohnson]

Why would that bother you?

Irritating fad

[Anonymous Coward]

I work with several women in the Britney Spears age range, and about half of them do this. I doubt they're conscious of it, but I've found myself in meetings with them wondering why they're trying to make the meeting sound like a music video. It's annoying.

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[maiki]

Creaky voice/Vocal fry is very common. In English it occurs normally as people dip into notes lower than their normal range, and the article is reporting findings that people do it as a speaking style. In other languages, it happens at the bottom of the 3rd tone in Mandarin Chinese, and in Hausa it is a distinguishing feature: [ ja: ] (without creaky voice) means "he" and [ ~ja: ] (with creaky voice... the tilde should be under the j) means "daughter".

ref: Ladefoged, Peter. A Course In Phonetics, Fifth Edition. 2006.

I thought it was me!

[J4]

I've been noticing a certain grating quality when the young girls talk lately.
Good thing I know how to keep 'em quiet.

Spoken like a true child

[Anonymous Coward]

Just out of diapers little boy?

Last time I checked, people of all ages get grumpy about any sort of change, and only idiots believe it's only "the old people" who do so.

I've tried, and I just can't get my voice to do

[mark_reh]

that. I sometimes try to "sing" along with Tibetan monks and Tuuvan throat singers and can occasionally get the extra resonance going, but that vocal fry thing must take a lot of practice to be able to do it. I always assumed that the stuff in Britney Spears records was done by electronic manipulation. Where are the women in the study learning how to do it and where and when do they practice?

SoCal's "the 10", NorCal's "280"

[Onymous Coward]

Note "the 10" is a Southern Californiaism. (And "the 10" is not redundant.)

In Northern California I more frequently hear references to "85" or "280".

Either works fine.

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[Onymous Coward]

Hypocrisy is commonly abhorrent?

Oh, is that what it's called?

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's exactly what I always hated about Britney's singing voice...

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[cheekyjohnson]

It is? I don't really care about it, and I don't think it's even relevant (it certainly doesn't determine whether someone is correct or not).

At least it isn't a bogan voice like the Aussie PM

[Anonymous Coward]

Julia Gillard

kardashian

[brillow]

The Kardashians talk like this a lot, Kathy Griffen does a pretty good impression.

About NPR from the fine article:

[bmo]

Abdelli-Beruh also wants to compare the prevalence of vocal fry on radio stations. For example, she says that the popular-music station on her teenage son's dial features creaky announcers, but she does not hear vocal fry on National Public Radio, which targets an older audience

Obviously she never listens to Car Talk.

--
BMO

Least annoying of the fad vocal patterns

[Sarusa]

Anything? That gets? the tone? Down into? The lower? Registers? is certainly? Better? Than women? Who talk? Like this?

Can we bring back Kathleen Turner voice?

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's an example of someone speaking with vocal fry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Om1XKAiXwk

You'll especially hear the vocal fry when she pronounces vowels at the end of words.

"redrum" voice

[doodaddy]

Haha. My wife does this! I didn't know it was a trend. I call it the "redrum" voice which is only a slight exaggeration.

She does it when she's trying to sound like her words are parenthetical to the conversation.

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[Anubis IV]

I'm certainly no linguistic or speech expert, but it seems to me that while they both are produced by a similar sort of vibration (glottal? I have no idea), the one you are talking about is not at the lowest voice register, which is what this article is talking about. I could be mistaken, however.

Seen the girls practicing

[Anonymous Coward]

I was visiting a college town coffee shop and while I sat there for a couple of hours reading, I overheard a half dozen college chicks actively practicing this voice technique, though it was a meta kind of thing. That is, they wouldn't have admitted to the fact that they were practicing, not even to each other I bet, but it was clear enough that they were trying out their chops and refining technique.

Why? Because that's what the sexy, desirable, socially valuable girls all sound like. It's fashion for the vocal cords. So they either get with the program or get left behind.

I was alternatively annoyed as piss, but also aroused, because, damn it, the same cultural programming they were responding to in feeling the need to adopt this language frill affects me as well.

Fuck media.

One aspect of this

[emeitner]

I think one aspect of this is the trend toward associating low pitched voices with authority. Megamedia news outlets are the best example. When the message in the media is of poor quality they then try to pump up the authority of the messenger. How do they do it? Deep, chest resonating, bass voices.

I've observed people's behavior and noticed that when a person is in a position where he or she wants to seem authoritative that the pitch of the voice drops. And when when females(or males with higher pitched voices) are in a situation where they need to have their authority stand on par with that of males many will use vocal fry to attain the low pitches they seek.

More worrying

[ougouferay]

Although I have no reason to doubt the validity of your point your post highlights a more worrying trend - the inability to differentiate between how a word is spoken and how it is spelt - "Southern bell" is in fact "Southern belle". It comes from the French word for beauty and has nothing to do with the things you find in churches.

Re:More worrying

[jginspace]

the inability to differentiate between how a word is spoken and how it is spelt ...

You might be in the same club considering you harped on about that and missed:

the kind of accent you might here from upper class

Language and success...

[MercTech]

Every time I read a study about changing language I'm reminded of a study done by GM in 1968. That company decided to find out what made for successful executives, the movers and shakers of the company. They started with IQ tests at every level of employment and were not satisfied with the results. They followed with testing for other skills.

The interesting thing seems to be that neither intelligence nor technical skills (math and logic) were different from the top executives to the lowest janitorial staff. What was different was the difference in ability to communicate in "standard" English.

Draw your own conclusions...

Re:Isn't this a normal US-vocal thing? "registeRRR

[RogerWilco]

That's why I'm still on Firefox 3.6.

It's the only version where all the plugins work.

Trying to be masculine...

[Anonymous Coward]

My vocal teacher (a woman) told me that many smart or highly educated women lower their voices unconsciously because they think it makes them sound more intelligent. Listen to a woman slip into tech speech about a topic they work on and you'll hear if for yourself.

(She was trying to tell me that I did this, and it was bad for my voice.)

"Gravely voiced girl"

[jbgeek]

Is this the same thing you hear in many advertisements directed at a female demographic? I've always referred to it in my head as "the gravely voiced girl". It almost sounds like they hire the same voice over person to do "that voice" for lots of different ads (actually wouldn't surprise me much). I'm glad I'm not the only one to have noticed this. :-p

Vocal Fry

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a ridiculous study; "Vocal Fry" is nothing new; it is a form of abuse of the vocal cords.We all did this as kids, because it sounded funny, and is harmless unless it is continuous and forced. As for all of the folks commenting on the social inplications and age- related comments, this has nothing to do with regional styles or dialects,or changing language styles. It's a vocal quality folks, not a form of social commentary..
Singers have been abusing their voices for years in smoky bars and continous alcoholic fueled gigs. It's a personal choice. Many more have had laser surgery lately to try to keep the cords in shape longer.

Barb Speech Pathologist in Illinois

I would call it "growl"...

[Polo]

Throat creak? Vocal Fry?

I think it has a more common name... like growl.

grrr...

Vocal Fry

[Anonymous Coward]

Must be allergy season.

Yeah, it's called a "raspy voice".

[Anonymous Coward]

Who are these researchers who apparently have never heard someone with a raspy voice?