Everybody Hertz Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi, and welcome to The Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination.

Carrie Gillon: I’m Carrie Gillon.

Megan: And I’m Megan Figueroa. Alright, Carrie, who did you meet in Telluride?

Carrie: I didn’t really meet anybody, but I did speak to briefly Michaela Watkins.

Megan: That sounds familiar.

Carrie: So Michaela Watkins is In a World among other things.

Megan: Oh, okay. That’s from a while ago.

Carrie: 2013.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah. And she’s been in more recent things, but nothing I don’t think that I’ve seen plus TV. But anyway, so I recognized her and I did actually talk to her because she asked a question.

Megan: Yeah, sure. You’re a volunteer.

Carrie: Exactly.

Megan: Sometimes people are going to ask you questions.

Carrie: Exactly.

Megan: It’s great.

Carrie: But yeah, I saw Felicity Jones, supposedly Jones and Eddie Redmayne and Green Goblin who the name is blanking.

Megan: Ryan Reynolds.

Carrie: Nope, that’s Green Lantern. [laughs]

Megan: Damn it.

Carrie: Willem Dafoe.

Megan: Oh, right. That Green Goblin. Okay. Got it.

Carrie: So the three of them were eating dinner together and Chris and I were at the bar at the same Thai restaurant. And Chris was like, “Oh, there’s Eddie Redmayne.” And I turned around, I’m like, “Oh my God, there’s Eddie Redmayne.” And then Willem Dafoe walked in. And he’s like, “There’s Willem Dafoe.” And I turn around, I’m like, “Oh my God, that’s Willem Dafoe.” And then he’s like, “Wait a minute.” Felicity Jones is also sitting there. She’s been sitting there the whole time, but she just looks like a normal person. So it took a long time for us to realize, “Oh my God.”

Megan: They were all eating together.

Carrie: All eating together.

Megan: What a world.

Carrie: Well, Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones were in a movie together that was playing called Aeronauts, which I did not see. So I have nothing to say about that. And then I guess Willem Dafoe just knows them because all famous people know each other. I don’t know.

Megan: Well, you were having fun in Telluride. I watched the cinematic classic Speed for Keanu Reeve’s birthday and stood the test of time.

Carrie: Have not seen it.

Megan: Perfect movie.

Carrie: Have not seen it.

Megan: What?

Carrie: Nope. I think it came out around the time I was not really watching movies. I was in university being boring.

Megan: Well, I was seven years old and I thought that’s how all relationships should be from then on out. If someone didn’t save you from a speeding bus that was going to explode, then what are we doing here?

Carrie: We also want to thank Clarence Barton Hagen. I hope that is the right way to pronounce that, for being our newest Patreon. And if you want to join him in supporting us, you can join. You can support us at patreon.com/vocalfriespod.

Megan: And then, oh, so you’re traveling again to Boston?

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: In when October?

Carrie: Mid-October 9th through the 12th. I’ll be in Boston. You can see me at the Sound Education Conference at Harvard.

Megan: Yes, yes. Some of the people at Harvard are good.

Carrie: Whoa.

Megan: Not everyone’s terrible.

Carrie: I guess that’s true. Oh, my God. Both Harvard and MIT have had recent issues to deal with.

Megan: Yeah. Come on Boston. Oh, speaking of Boston, I saw a license plate that said Boston, but then they had a bumper sticker that said, shit, what did it say? “Use your turn blinka.”

Carrie: Funny.

Megan: With like a B-L-I-N-K-A. Anyway, that’s cute.

Carrie: Well guys, that reminds me of one of the things we were going to talk about today.

Megan: Yes.

Carrie: Beth Rigby says, someone has been kind enough to update my Wikipedia page. I don’t know what they’re talking about. And so someone actually added to her Wikipedia page. Severe speech impediment. She vehemently refuses to ever pronounce the ending G in words, which makes her sound like an uneducated idiot who should not be allowed to work in broadcast media. This is an affectation, although others have tried to call it a speech impediment.

Megan: First of all, just all the ableism there. Can we point out it’s disgusting?

Carrie: Yes. Also, it’s neither of those things. It’s neither an affectation.

Megan: Sure, yes. Absolutely.

Carrie: Nor a speech impediment.

Megan: Absolutely not.

Carrie: It’s just a different pronunciation. Talkin’ instead of talking.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: That’s it.

Megan: And this is a British person.

Carrie: Yeah. She’s British. She works for Sky News in the UK.

Megan: Okay, yeah. Yeah, not that that matters, I’m just saying like, it depends on a number of factors like where you’re from, but also the sentence or the context of the conversation if you use the G or not because I sometimes use it, and sometimes I don’t.

Carrie: Well, we should point out. There’s nothing to do with G. It’s just written with a G.

Megan: Sure, sure, sure. Yes, yes.

Carrie: So it’s just -in versus -ing.

Megan: Yeah. So it’s one sound. So when it’s written like ING, maybe trick you into thinking it’s three sounds in that word.

Carrie: Instead of it being, yeah. Like you pronounce each letter. The two letters N and G are pronounced -ing for most people. Although there are some people who pronounce it -inga. So then there are people who do have a G. But I don’t think that’s the case for her. I think even if she pronounced it -ing, she wouldn’t say -inga probably, anyway.

Megan: Right. I don’t think I’ve actually heard someone say -inga.

Carrie: Really? Oh, it’s pretty common on the East Coast of the United States.

Megan: Oh. Maybe I’m just not noticing. I don’t, yeah.

Carrie: Yeah. It’s pretty common. You might not hear it in your day to day, but if you watch certain TV shows, you might. Yeah.

Megan: Okay. But anyway, so yeah. This is all sorts of terrible. And I’m not surprised that a woman’s Wikipedia page was updated to say something like this at all.

Carrie: Well, I’m a little surprised because it’s a whole subcategory. You have a heading. This person created a whole heading for it.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: That is to me, beyond anything I’ve seen on Wikipedia before. I’ve seen certainly really worse shit in terms of grossness. But the fact that they put a whole heading about it, I’m surprised.

Megan: Well, they thought it was a sick burn.

Carrie: They definitely did. It was a sick burn.

Megan: They’re like, this is, adding a heading. This is making it like a whole thing because we all know from context if we didn’t really learn it in English class, that headings denote a separate section of information, whatever. So we’re like naming it. So him adding this section is like, yeah. I said he, I’m assuming it’s a man who’s really angry at a woman’s speech.

Carrie: It’s 99% likely.

Megan: Right. But yeah. So it’s- go away. And it’s perfect because we’re actually interviewing the interview today, this will be perfect for it. And another thing that’s perfect is an article in the New Yorker talking about sound again. So it’s called A Century of Shrill: How Bias in Technology has Hurt Women’s Voices. So I expected it just be like any other article I read about Shrill or how people hate women’s voices. But this was about how it’s actually like technology and how we’ve developed technology has fucked over women.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: It talks about how everything from something like a microphone, as simple as a microphone, has been optimized for lower voices. So we’re talking about hertz here. And then apparently, what is it called? Voice band? So what’s transmitted over AM radio was also optimized for a certain range of voices that are lower.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Yep. So women’s voices don’t sound as clear or anyone’s voice who’s over this voice band range won’t sound as clear because of how they’ve optimized this. And other things like how some people will turn up the volume on a microphone when a woman comes to speak because they believe that she’s going to be speaking lower. So then it sounds terrible because that’s not necessarily true. And by lower I mean like softer. Sorry.

Carrie: Yeah, that’s what I was going to ask.

Megan: So they think that she’s going to speak softer. So they preemptively turn up the mic and then it sounds like she’s yelling. So all of these things that are just undermining any sort of message the woman could be trying to express.

Carrie: Yeah. I shouldn’t have been surprised by this because of course it would be optimized for male coded voices. But I just didn’t think that it would be because you don’t know there are children. Even back in the day, there were children on radio. So if you didn’t even optimize it for boy children…

Megan: Right, right, right.

Carrie: I don’t know. I was actually surprised by this and I guess I shouldn’t be.

Megan: Right.

Carrie: But you know what else, what it also reminds me of, film was optimized for white skin.

Megan: ‘Course.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Oh, wow.

Carrie: Yep. So technology is not the great equalizer that everyone, well, that white men claim it is.

Megan: Yeah. No, not at all. And this is important too. And I think our guest today helps us make this point. It’s important because it’s affecting the way that we view people like our presidential candidates. So even in this article, it says that at the first Democratic primary debate, Kamala Harris has measured tones as she addressed Joe Biden were widely lauded, whereas Kirsten Gillibrand was labeled as shrill affected, and inauthentic. Shall we get to it then?

Carrie: Let’s get to it.

Megan: All right.

[music]

Megan: Today we have Dr. Lisa Davidson, who is a professor and chair of Linguistics at New York University. She is the director of the Phonetics and Experimental Phonology Lab. Thank you so much for being here with us, Lisa.

Lisa Davidson: Thank you so much for having me.

Megan: I’m really excited to talk to you because I feel like all of the insights that I get about Vocal Fry come from you. So just to orient our listeners first, you’re a phonetician and I just think phoneticians are the coolest because you do stuff that I don’t dare touch [laugh].

Carrie: Same.

Megan: But you’ve done some really important work on Creaky Foundation/Vocal Fry, and we want to get to that last because we want to spend a little bit of time on it. But first, we want to just, what we’re doing here today is, I guess being a little bit more media savvy and kind of like diving into kind of the words and descriptors that we see in articles and media about accents and the way that people speak. And this is something you’ve been following.

Lisa: Yeah, so this is, I guess I could call it a side project. It’s something that I’ve noticed years ago, right? We’re linguists, we all read articles and think about how people write about language. And I, as a phonetician I’ve noticed that people use words to describe sort of phonetic aspects of language or phonetic aspects of accents. And lots of times I, like, as a professional, I don’t really know what they’re trying to convey because they’re using words that look like technical terms, but they’re not using them in the way that linguists use them.

Megan: And so I wonder if you think that this might be worse for phonetician than someone like me who’s not a phonetician because I’m like, I don’t really understand what they’re trying to get at, but I’m like, okay, I guess that might be a way I would describe something if…[crosstalk]

Lisa: Really?

Megan: I don’t know, since I don’t know about,

Carrie: I get just as annoyed I think.

Megan: If I’m getting in the mind of a non-linguist, I’m like, I kind of see how you got there. But I feel like that might be harder for a phonetician.

Lisa: Well, the problem for Phoneticians is that either a technical term gets misused. It doesn’t mean what a linguist would use it to mean, or a phonetician would use it to mean, or it’s not a technical term. And then I’m just frustrated because I think, man, if we just had better education about linguistics, then everybody could just have this set of terms at their disposal and we could all just know exactly what we’re talking about.

Megan: Can we start with some of the non-technical terms and then get into the technical terms?

Lisa: Sure.

Megan: Because I feel like the non-technical ones are so much fun. I mean, fun, I say this laughing where I’m also like, this has a problem where it could perpetuate some really bad stereotypes about the way people speak, but it’s just like, so out of left field, so bizarre. Some of these words that they use. So what is your favorite non-technical term?

Lisa: Well, [laughs] one of the ones that I first encountered and I thought, man, this is so weird. Like, where did they come up with this? And then I realized that actually, it’s a descriptor that gets used, seems to be used much more than I realized, which is with reference in particular to British speakers. So I think it’s probably referring mainly to receive pronunciation or RP and in particular to royal speech. So it’s this phrase cut glass. So [laughs], I discovered this article, I don’t know, I was just reading some article in the BBC and they were talking about Queen Elizabeth and how she has lost some of the cut glass vowels of her youth. And, as an American, I didn’t realize that this was a thing, but I’ve since seen it in a couple of other places. And I guess it’s used to mean upper crusty, but more than upper crusty like royal, you know?

Megan: Oh.

Lisa: Yeah. It does.

Megan: Okay. So I was like, okay, does that mean like sharp? And what does it mean to have a sharp accent or a sharp pronunciation, right?

Lisa: Yeah.

Carrie: I think it means like really perfectly quote unquote perfectly enunciated.

Lisa: Yeah but of course, like that itself can’t possibly be right. Because like even the royals just speak when they speak, they just speak [laugh]. So they’re using the same kind of connected speech implementations that the rest of us are. But yeah, so I take it to mean especially higher class, I take it to refer mainly to something about the class of the speaker rather than about the accent itself.

Carrie: It means the class, but it also means it’s also a reference to the idea that the royals speak with the correct accent and the correct pronunciations. I know this because I have like many British friends who would yell at me saying, no, no, no, no, no. There is a correct way to speak English and it’s the queen.

Lisa: Right, right. In fact, I realize I’ve forgotten I did this, but I looked it up in the Cambridge English dictionary, and it’s there as an entry and it says, used about a way of speaking in which words are pronounced very clearly and carefully in a way that is typical of someone from a high social class.

Carrie: Yes, exactly.

Lisa: Right.

Megan: Okay. Interesting. So, for me, I would just want to say someone who pronounces things very carefully, or I’ve never heard cut glass before in this.

Carrie: Really?

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Oh, it’s very common. Yeah

Megan: Yeah. Okay. I mean this was a British journalist writing about a British speaker.

Lisa: Yeah. So, there’s a lot of things get used for American dialects right? Okay. So if we start with one that is non-technical, but very common, I guess we could start with something like lilting. Lilting is an interesting case, right? Because I think we all have an impression of what lilting means, but if you look at lots of different articles, it gets used in a variety of different ways, right? So one thing I noticed when I was looking at a variety of articles is that it often gets used to refer particularly to the Irish, like to Irish English.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. That’s what I was thinking when I saw that word.

Lisa: Or Scottish. I’ve also seen it used for Scottish. But when it gets used with respect to American English it’s a variety of things. So I’ve seen it used. So here’s a quote, for example. Well, now that’s an interesting story. Thelma Crowder started in her lilting Virginia accent before launching into the story. So it gets used, I’ve seen it used with respect to Southern accents before. But then here’s another one that I think is also kind of interesting. So this one is about Ayana Presley, who’s the congresswoman from Massachusetts. And it says, Presley talked with a lyrical lilt about growing up in Chicago with a single mother. So I find that kind of interesting because say she’s from Massachusetts, now, she grew up in Chicago. [laugh] These are not usually places that are referred to as being lyrical. So one thing I wonder about this is if it’s in this sense, a euphemism for African American language. I’m not super familiar with the way Presley talks, but I just think this is kind of a, it’s interesting. It’s not necessarily how it’s often used when you pair it with various dialects or various regions, it’s not exactly a common one from what I’ve found.

Megan: So would you say, do you think that sometimes these words, these descriptors are used in a way to get around saying that someone spoke like they’re African American, or someone spoke like they’re Chicano or something like that? Are people avoiding saying what they really mean?

Lisa: Well, I think there’s two things here. One is that I think there might be some avoidance in that sense. And the other thing I think is that lilt in general, right? It’s a positive term. So it gets used when somebody wants to convey that they have a positive attitude toward the accent that they’re listening to.

Carrie: I’m wondering, because I don’t think Presley has like, like she sounds pretty standard mainstream English to me. So I’m wondering if it’s like a, she’s black, but she doesn’t sound black.

http://clip%20playing: Working for Congressman Kennedy and Senator Carey, what was crystallized for me is that at the core of all things politic is relationship.

Lisa: So it’s curious though, because if we want to briefly transition to another term here. So when you’re talking about Chicago in the Midwest, usually what you find there is a term more like flat or broad, right? So if she doesn’t have identifiable Chicago features and she doesn’t have identifiable Massachusetts features, then I think lilt is kind of a curious phrase to use there when, for Chicago, normally people would do something more like broad or flat, because that seems to be used to represent like the northern city shift type of A[?] sound.

Carrie: So maybe what they’re saying instead is she doesn’t sound Chicago.

Lisa: Yeah, that could be.

Megan: And what do people normally mean then when they say flat? [laugh] Yeah, what the heck? What?

Carrie: [inaudible] this one. I’ve always been curious about because I’ve heard about it for like 20 years now, and I’m like, I don’t get what it’s supposed to refer to [laugh].

Megan: Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah. So I’ve sort of identified two ways that flat is used. One is that it means quote unquote, no accent, which we’re not going to condone. But, it either means also, quote unquote mainstream American English or standard American English, neither term of which I love, but I don’t have a good alternative.

Carrie: Yeah.

Lisa: So, it either means something like that. So here’s a quote, ‘Her broad flat, quintessentially American Midwestern accent doesn’t hurt.’ That’s one. Or here’s another quote about a guy who grew up in Georgia, but now he says in this article, he’s not very identifiable, and he says, ‘I speak English with a flat accent that gives no hint as to my origins.’ So that’s one way in which it’s used. The other way is more specifically about the Midwest, which that first quote did refer to. So here are some other things that people have written. So this is about Gina Haspel, right? The former CIA director. I welcome the opportunity to introduce myself to the American people for the first time. She said in a flat accent that belied her Kentucky roots.

Carrie: Huh

Megan: Huh.

Carrie: Okay

Megan: Okay

Lisa: Actually, I guess that one is more like the no accent, right?

Carrie: Yes.

Megan: Yes.

Lisa: Yeah. So it belies her Kentucky roots. Okay. But here’s another one. They described him as an aloof and awkward saying that for all his everyman rust belt persona, marked by a flat nasal Midwestern accent, he bristled at criticism and didn’t form relationships with colleagues easily.

Megan: [laugh] For some reason, it’s incompatible for me to use flat and nasal. I don’t know why. I don’t know what it is. And I also, there was another, aloof. There’s a lot of descriptors in this sentence that I feel are incompatible. I don’t know. It’s just my feeling that a lot’s going on.

Carrie: Well, are you saying that aloof doesn’t go with Midwest?

Megan: Huh.

Carrie: Because why not?

Megan: Maybe that’s some sort of unconscious bias I have [laugh], but I was like, you can’t be aloof and be… I don’t know. I don’t know what it is. [laugh] Well, that’s why I think these things are so interesting because whoever wrote it or however we read it and perceive it are going to play on our unconscious biases and all these things that we’ve learned about how people speak.

Lisa: So I will say one thing, that I don’t want to forget to say while I’m talking to you, which is that there is a branch of linguistics called Folk Linguistics, right? Where people have looked into people’s attitudes toward using these kinds of words, right? From what I’ve read the two of the kind of accent-related terms that people have most focused on are nasal, which we can get to, and twang. So there’s some literature by Dennis Preston and by Bill Labov on words like twang and nasal. But it’s a little bit different. What I’m interested in is how journalists use these terms right. Which seems to be a little bit different than how people seem to be using these words because journalists want to convey something, right? It’s not just about their own attitudes towards things, although it’s influenced by that. But, they want to convey something. So they’re trying to find these terms that they think we’re all going to understand, or that we’re going to be able to interpret what they mean. It’s not always clear to me that they’re successful in that because we don’t share a common understanding of how to interpret these words.

Megan: Absolutely.

Carrie: Yes. So, you noted in what you sent to us that flat, get used differently outside of the United States as well. So I’m from Canada originally. Maybe that’s part of the reason why I don’t understand what flat’s supposed to mean [laugh].

Lisa: Right.

Carrie: But yeah, so what does it mean outside of the United States?

Lisa: So I think the example I had of flat was coming from somebody who is East Indian, but lives in Canada now, and he says, as an Indian, East Indian to you who has a flat accent, people are even more curious about me. I look Indian, I am Catholic, and it sounds like I have a British accent.

Carrie: That quote is so interesting to me because, so this is from the Vancouver Sun, which is my hometown newspaper, ‘And flat and British going together is interesting.’

Lisa: Yeah. Right. So at first, you want to interpret that use of flat as, I have no particular regional accent, but then since he’s an Indian person with a British accent in Canada, he can’t be using it that way.

Carrie: No, not at all.

Lisa: So it’s, yeah, it’s unclear to me exactly what this writer himself thinks that, that he sounds like to people, which is an example of, you’re picking these terms or journalists are picking these terms and they’re not exactly interpretable to everybody who’s reading them.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Right. And so I’m actually, I find it interesting that flat would be associated with like Chicago or the Midwest for some people. Because I took a screenshot of this at the beginning of an article and posted it on Twitter. It was describing a Chicago accent as brash.

Lisa: Right. [laughter]

Megan: And so yeah. So with a brash Chicago accent blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I posted and I was asking people to tell me how their accents or how they speak have been described. And so what you’re getting at is like exactly what people are saying. But, sorry, going back to the Chicago accent brash is something I think I’ve seen more than flat when it comes to Chicago.

Lisa: Yeah.

Megan: So…yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, Chicago may be different than the rest of the Midwest in that sense, in terms of words that people use to describe Chicago. Whereas something like the Midwest writ large. Generically the Midwest, that gets referred to as flat. But Chicago may have, people may perceive that Chicago has its own separate version of a quote unquote Midwest accent.

Carrie: I mean, they do, right?

Lisa: Yeah.

Carrie: Because like when they mock it, they mock it with different features than the Midwest. Yeah.

Lisa: For sure.Yeah. Yeah. Chicago’s different than I think what people mean by this.

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Megan: So, someone else said that they’re from Michigan, they get nasal a lot. So can we talk about nasal?

Carrie: Yeah, let’s talk about nasal. [laugh]

Megan: What the heck?

Carrie: This one’s bothered me so much ever since I first took linguistics.

Lisa: Yeah, totally. So nasal is super interesting, right? Because this is a technical term. So when you read the literature about this, the people who have done work in folk linguistics. In the seventies, I guess, Bill Labov wrote an article where he also had some consternation about how people use nasal in the sense, in the folk linguistic sense because he observed that it can be used both to mean hypernasal and totally de-nasalized and right. So he was kind of critical I would, I don’t want to ascribe meaning to him, so he observed that people are not using it consistently because it really could mean either of these things. Now Preston’s response to this in a later article is something like, yeah, but you know, at least they notice that there’s something about the nasality, whether it’s hyponasal or hypernasal right? Now, I don’t know for sure that that’s really what’s going on. I’m always super doubtful of these kinds of things unless I have the recordings in front of me and can measure something like nasal airflow or a one minus P zero or whatever.

Carrie: What is a one minus P zero? [laughter]

Lisa: It’s an acoustic measure that allows you to kind of determine how nasal something is with respect to something else. So…

Carrie: Okay.

Lisa: Yeah. It’s looking at the amplitude, of various harmonics that are said to be related to each other that allow you to look at nasality in the acoustic realm.

Carrie: Okay. Thank you.

Lisa: You’re welcome. So, I don’t think that’s what people are doing. I don’t think that’s what journalists are doing. So, even if Labov was right, and even if Preston’s analysis of this is fair this isn’t what people are doing, I think, right? So if you look at a bunch of quotes, people just mean a whole variety of different things. So here’s just a boring one. So this is about Natasha Leone, in the show Russian Doll, and she’s described as elongated vowels sung in a nasally pitch, reflect the unforgiving life of a true urbanite.

Carrie: What? That might be my favorite quote so far. What?

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So that’s…

Carrie: There’s just so much there.

Lisa: Yes. That’s awesome.

[music]

http://clip%20playing: Are you going to tell me what’s going on? I keep dying and reliving the same night. Here’s another one. Yes.

Lisa: So this is about an actor in a version of Mama Mia that was done in Spokane, Washington. And it says, Musako[?] gives an impressive performance maintaining a perfectly nasal British accent throughout the show.

Megan: Huh.

Lisa: Which is like, okay really? Like is that the right description of British, of a British accent? I’m not certain.

Megan: Huh.

Carrie: Yeah. I don’t know what it would mean in that case at all.

Lisa: Yeah. Or here’s to get to our all-time favorite topic of women’s voices. [laughter] If you can get over the nasal quality and unrelenting annoyingness of presenter, Wendy Zuckerman’s voice, then you’re in for a scientific treat. So this is about…

Megan: Oh.

Carrie: Whoa.

Lisa: This is about the host of science versus the podcast.

Carrie: Right.

Lisa: Right. So, one thing about Wendy Zuckerman that’s interesting is, I listened to this podcast so I know, she’s Australian.

http://clip%20playing: Well, what scientists have shown is that the rage that’s shown toward cyclists is really coming from the motorists, dividing cyclists into another.

Lisa: So it’s unclear there again, do you recognize that she’s not a speaker of American English? Oh, no, I’m sorry. Well, this is actually from a New Zealand website, so I don’t, yeah well, that’s…Other research has shown that there’s some rivalry between Australians and New Zealands with respect to their accent. So…

Carrie: 100%. [laughter]

Lisa: So, there you go. There it seems to be used. It’s almost always used in a pejorative way, right?

Carrie: Yes, it definitely is.

Megan: Nasal, yeah.

Lisa: Here’s another one that I’m surprised about because, so this is written by an author that has an undergraduate degree in linguistics and previously has written some, what I consider to be impressive descriptions of people’s languages or of people’s dialects anyway. So this is about Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter Apple. [laugh]

Megan: Yes.

Lisa: And says, I’m so tired. Apple says frustrated, rubbing her eyes with her fists. She sounded exactly like her mother down to the slight soft nasal on the vowels. Hi apple guys. Wow. Tired. So these are written with multiple vowels. Like, hi, is H-I-I-I-I-I, that kind of thing. So this one’s kind of confusing to me because this is like, well, do you not like that she elongates things or that you perceive that she elongates things or do you think that there’s a nasal quality to her speech?

Carrie: And is it, and is it more noticeable because the vowels are longer?

Lisa: Right.

Carrie: If it’s there.

Lisa: Right. Also.

Carrie: Ugh. [laughter]

Megan: I feel like this is some insight into why nasal is often used with women and in a very pejorative way is because of this like, elongated vowel thing that is associated with the Kardashians and how that’s associated with uptalk and vocal fry and all of the whole package kind of thing. I wonder if that’s what you’re seeing.

Lisa: It’s certainly another thing you can stick in there. It’s not exclusively used with female speakers though, for sure.

Carrie: Yeah. No.

Megan: Okay.

Carrie: No, it’s not.

Lisa: So here’s a quote about a man while they ate, he told them stories in a nasal Brooklyn accent. So that’s just like, you don’t have a better descriptor to use of this Brooklyn accent. So you just say nasal, it’s kind of like a catchall, I think.

Megan: A catchall for sort of like accents that are dispreferred by the listener, by the journalist maybe.

Lisa: Yeah. In that, it seems more negative than something like lilting, for example. So people really like, lilting is, like I said, has a positive connotation, whereas nasal usually has a pretty pejorative connotation.

Megan: And so the person that had said the nasal Michigan accent when I asked Twitter he also provides some insight that says that his accent’s not particularly nasal we just really like, ah, the vowel ah,

Lisa: Great. [laughter]

Megan: So, is that the shift, the vowel shift happening there? Is that what he is picking up on?

Lisa: Yeah, but I mean, that would be about vowel quality being different than standard American English/mainstream American English. Not about the fact that the ah itself is particularly nasal, although without getting into the weeds too much, that vowel does change its quality even more when it’s in front of a nasal consonant than when it’s in front of a non-nasal consonant. So if for some reason they’re observing that that vowel is a little bit different, depending on whether it’s followed by a nasal or not, then I suppose that might have something to do with it.

Carrie: Right. So in the nasal context, maybe it just sounds so different from the ah from other areas of the United States that, so the nasal is kind of helping you pick up on the fact that it’s shifted more. I don’t know.

Lisa: Yeah. I mean, presumably, there are some people that have really good linguistic intuitions in that way and would notice that. So maybe this person that you talked to is somebody like that.

Cassie: Or they might not even know that that’s what they’re picking up on. It’s just that it’s so different when it’s nasalized that they’re noticing the difference, but without noticing why maybe. Yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, yeah. Maybe.

Megan: I’m thinking about the ones that maybe seem like they’re kind of like nice or like a compliment but are just, I don’t know if that’s necessarily what they are, but where it’s like old-timey or quaint.

Lisa: [laugh] Yeah.

Megan: Like what is going on there? What white[?] people be picking up on with that?

Lisa: Well, I suppose what could be going on there is if somebody has a particularly noticeable regional accent. Then if people are assuming that our accents are getting more and more leveled as time goes by, maybe because of more social media influence or just more media influence in general, I think that people are showing that this isn’t true. People don’t think that regional accents are leveling as much as one might think. So the assumption might be that they are leveling quite a bit, but the truth is that regional accents are pretty much going strong still. But I suppose if you take somebody who speaks a more standard variety and then hears somebody with a more regional accent then, it might seem kind of anachronistic in the sense that the standard speaker would think, aren’t we all becoming the same? Why aren’t you the same?

Megan: That makes sense.

Lisa: But in fact, that’s not even really true. Regional accents are very much alive in the United States.

Megan: Right. And so do you think that if someone used that descriptor, they might have some experience with that accent that they’re talking about? Or is it people that have maybe no experience and are assuming that this is like, something they might hear on an old movie or something like that?

Lisa: [laughs] Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know the answer to that, although that does remind me. I was just reading an article when I was looking into some of this stuff. I was reading an article about I don’t know if either of you watch the, TV show, Schitt’s Creek,

Carrie: Of course.

Megan: Obsessed.[laughs]

Lisa: It was an article about Moira Rose’s accent.

Megan: Yes.

Lisa: Right. And she speaks that. There’s tons of articles about this, that Mid-Atlantic. The writer’s hypothesis is that she’s supposed to sound like that Mid-Atlantic accent that actors in the fifties and sixties used to use.

Megan: Oh, yeah.

Carrie: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Megan: Yeah.

Lisa: Right. And so that kind of accent strikes me as something that you could kind of plausibly describe as old-timey.

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Lisa: Because nobody realistically speaks that way anymore, neither in the media nor another example of somebody in that, that they talked about in that article was Jackie Kennedy.
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http://clip%20playing: The thing I care about most is to make it more of a museum with more pieces of beautiful furniture that belong to old presidents. There’s very little antique furniture here now.

Lisa: But not even politicians sound like that. So that’s a kind of example [laughs] of something that like, it wouldn’t hurt, I don’t think it would be too bad if you described that as old-timey, because nobody speaks like that anymore.

Carrie: Yeah. The only person who sort of speaks kind of like that, and it’s a slightly different accent, is Christopher Plummer has what’s called Canadian dainty.

http://clip%20playing: Well, there was a marvelous part, and I love the Lord of the Rings. I grew up on it actually. It’s a great, great, great book. And it became a great film. And then Ian played it, Ian McKellen, who was absolutely marvelous in it, and he couldn’t have been warmer, which I might not have brought to it. I might have been a little cold and imperious. He was warm and, and I hate the son of a bitch. [laughter]

Lisa: Yeah. That was mentioned in that same article too. I’d never heard that term before, but I like it.

Carrie: [laughs] Yeah, me too. [laughs].

Megan: So another one I just have to bring up, since it’s your neighbor, someone said that Pittsburgh English, it gets called gritty. [laughs]

Lisa: [laughs] Gritty.

Carrie: Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm.

Megan: What is that? For some, my instinct is to think that maybe they’re picking up on vocal fry, just because of, or creaky fun. But what…

Lisa: Oh, I would guess that it’s because they’re working class.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: You’re describing the people, right? This always goes back to describing the people, but yeah.

Lisa: Yeah, definitely. I didn’t go back to look at this, but one thing that might be useful is a couple of years ago, Gawker had this world’s worst accent bracket.

Meghan: Ugh, yeah.

Carrie: Oh God. I forgot about that.

Megan: Yeah.

Lisa: Which is terrible. And something I bring up in my classes about how we talk about accents in a way that we wouldn’t talk about anything else. Like about people’s appearances or about their weight or whatever. All the things that are generally gone from conversation these days. But you can see examples of these things where people will talk about accents in these verily pejorative ways. But I bet that if you go back to that bracket, you’ll find [laugh], you’ll be able to mine it for some really good terms for the discussion we’re having right now.

Megan: Yeah. I’m hoping that people that listen to this show have begun to realize how terrible something like that is [laughter] because we are speaking ultimately about the people. And so that makes me think of, okay, so a lot of, since ultimately this is always about like something deeper like sexism, classism, whatever, some accents like an Australian accent by an American might be described as sexy, but then we’re going to have very more pejorative terms for people that we may not admire so much. Or like people that we denigrate in our society somehow. So…

Carrie: Not all Americans would describe Australians as sexy. I’ve seen very negative terms used for that.

Megan: Yeah. And it depends on what regional stuff as well. Maybe people are thinking about a Chris Hemsworth Australian accent when they’re not thinking about Crocodile Dundee or something.

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Megan: One descriptor that I find particularly problematic and hurtful is shrill. So can we talk about shrill?

Lisa: [laugh] Yes. So yeah, we’ve talked about shrill before. Like out there in the world. Shrill is not about accents. Usually, it’s about somebody’s voice quality. But again, it’s not a technical term. No linguist uses that phrase to mean anything. I didn’t look this up, but I guess is that if you categorized how many times it was used to refer to a female speaker’s voice versus a male speaker’s voice, there might be the occasional case where a man gets referred to a shrill, but like 90% of the time it’s going to be a woman.

Megan: And then I gotta wonder if a man is being described as shrill, if it’s in some way saying that this person is speaking like a woman usually speaks or female coded language is being used by this person. So there’s shrill. I wonder if that’s what’s happening when it’s not used with that.

Lisa: That would be a really interesting thing for somebody who works on big data and text analysis does. We could do corpus mining for good and look at how many times shrill is used to mean something like that. So if anybody needs a research idea out there, you should mine corpora for this.

Megan: And then come on the show and talk to us about it [laugh] because I’m very curious. So the big, you couldn’t get away from the word in 2016 because of the presidential campaign and Hillary Clinton, so she was called shrillery. Just, it’s so many pieces that I read. Shrill was used a lot with her. So what do you think shrill is getting at?

Lisa: Doesn’t it mean nagging?

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah.

Lisa: You would think that it would. If I had to assign a phonetic quality to it, I would think of it more as something like high-pitched or loud. But it doesn’t mean that. I don’t think people use it to mean that. And I don’t think you could use that to mean what Hillary Clinton sounds like because she isn’t particularly high-pitched. She isn’t at all high-pitched. And she’s not loud or normally speaking, she’s not like a yeller or anything like that.

http://clip%20playing: I went to the inauguration with that hope and, it was a painful and disappointing experience. Yeah, it was the start…but the march the next day was terrific.

Lisa: So it can’t mean that. So it has to mean something more about how people perceive something more like a discourse interaction. I would guess.

Carrie: Many people brought up the point that she reminded men of their mothers or their wives. So I think it’s, yeah, I think it’s about nagging. Yeah.

Megan: Yeah. And horribly since I grew up in this society, I always associate the word nagging with women because…

Carrie: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Megan: …of course, why wouldn’t I? Yeah.

Lisa: Well, yeah. [laughs]

Carrie: Yeah. I’m sure if we do the same corpus analysis, we’ll find that nagging is almost always associated with women.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: And probably very similar percentages as shrill.

Lisa: Yes.

Carrie: It’s true.

Lisa: If you’re out there, somebody we’ll give you a list of words and you can [laughter] You can look at how they’re distributed…

Carrie: Yes. Happily, happily.

Lisa: …among various texts.

Carrie: Yeah.

Lisa: One thing I’ve found that I thought was really really funny, I posted about this on Twitter a while ago, is there was this article on Refinery 29 about Elizabeth Warren, and it was kind of hilarious because it says she’s very definitive when she makes a statement. Her voice comes down at the end.

Carrie: [laughter] Oh, wow.

Megan: Oh.

Lisa: So it’s like observing that she doesn’t use uptalk.

Megan:Yeah.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: That’s some shade [laugh]

Lisa: But what’s funny about it is I think the joke that I made on Twitter when I posted about this was that it’s surprising to me that she didn’t get called too old as a result of this. Because if uptalk incorrectly, but if uptalk is attributed to younger people or younger women, then it’s, here’s an opportunity where you can take this woman and insult her by pointing out that she has this quote-unquote positive aspect of her speech that people like to think is a positive, but criticize her for it by, by calling her too old. This is a marker. That’s not what happened in the article. But I thought [laughs] in a way, in terms of these political observations, it was shocking to me that she wasn’t criticized for this.

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely.

Megan: I have noticed it’s better than 2016. I don’t know if people have learned or if we’re, we’ve shifted, to talking about different things, but it feels like the way that we described the female presidential candidate’s voices has improved from 2016.

Lisa: Except that recently the Washington Post had an article, like a, their cover article in the magazine about Kirsten Gillibrand, and it says Gillibrand begins with a 15-minute, very well-rehearsed one-woman biographical show delivered in her creaky trill.

Carrie: What the hell is a creaky trill?

Lisa: I know. It’s a new one, right?

Carrie: Yep. Well, at least to me.

Lisa: I know. I was like, wow. So Gillibrand is, so I will say [laughs] she’s my senator. And I like her a lot, but I noticed that her pitch is quite high for a politician.

Carrie: It is, yeah. Mm-hmm.

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Lisa: And so she inspired me to look at the pitch of, I think 30 female elected officials, mostly senators and Congresspeople. And to look at the range of the pitch and to see whether the pitch of American politicians is generally higher or lower than the average. And what I found is that it does span the range that has been reported for American English speech, but that it is on average much lower. It’s lower by about 30 hertz, which is quite a bit lower, but Gillibrand was one of the higher people on that list. So I think Creaky Trill here is probably trying to describe that she has a higher pitch than you might otherwise hear in a female politician.

Megan: Huh. Interesting. Who did you notice, or who did you find were on the lower end of the pitches?

Lisa: The lowest is Claire McCaskill.

Megan: Oh, okay.

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Megan: And I wonder if that has to do with age as well.

Lisa: Maybe. I did look at their age at some point I did factor their age into it, and it didn’t seem to be super correlated. And the other thing is that a lot of what I used wasn’t necessarily current. So the way that I did this was to pull out there, from their advertising, the phrase, and I approved this message because every single one of them had to say the same phrase. So that’s what I looked at to assess their overall pitch. The context that was held constant there. So Clara McCaskill was the lowest and Gillibrand was not the highest. Tammy Baldwin was one of the highest, so she was the third-highest.

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Lisa: Gillibrand was not as high as Tammy Baldwin. She was in the upper third around 190 hertz. But, Baldwin was 200 hertz. The highest person was 240 hertz. The very highest is a congresswoman named Vicki Hartzler from Missouri.

http://clip: I’m a lifelong farmer. I’m a public school teacher. I’m a small business owner. I’m a wife and a mom.

Carrie: Okay. Don’t know her at all.

Megan: [inaudible] heard of her.

Lisa: When I know how Tammy Baldwin sounds, I know how Claire McCaskill sounds, and maybe I’m just, I’ve taught myself not to notice these things, but I wouldn’t have noticed their pitch, either one of their pitches before it being pointed out. But like I, when you say it, I’m like, okay, I can, I can hear that, but before then, I’m not paying attention to it.

Carrie: Interesting. Because I did notice Kristen Gillibrand’s voice being kind of high.

Lisa: Yeah.

Carrie: That was something that stuck out to me. And also AOC’s[?] voice is kind of high too.

Lisa: Yes.

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Megan: Well, is that a younger thing? Like maybe…no, not related to age at all. Yeah.

Carrie: No, no.

Lisa: I don’t think so. Gillibrand’s always been this high as far as I can tell.

Megan: Okay.

Lisa: As high as she is, I don’t know if she’s higher or lower than AOC, I didn’t look at her because she hadn’t run yet when I did that work, but my impression is that AOC is really on the high end, and I have noticed that. And I think it’s great. I think it’s great because I think that there is this skew like either, whether it’s intentional or not, like either I don’t, you know what I mean? Like either women who have lower pitch are the ones who are more likely to run for a variety of reasons, or they run, but they lower their pitch because they probably perceive it as being an asset to have a lower pitch. so I think AOC could pave the way for women who have higher pitch, to flourish.

Megan: Except I was saying that I feel like it’s getting better in journalism not using words to describe Congresswomen in particular in negative terms, but AOC is described as infantile, or the way that she speaks is baby-ish.

Lisa: Yeah.

Megan: It’s kind of like talked about as if she sounds very young, but they say it in a very pejorative way.

Lisa: Yeah.

Megan: So that is something that I have noticed for sure.

Lisa: Yeah. Right. That’s true. And I think that is probably because of her especially high pitch. I should probably pull out one of her ads and do this using my same methodology because she has to have them. Like anybody who runs for office and had ads somewhere has to say, and I approve this message so I could find it and pull it out and see how high she is relative to the others. [laughs]

Megan: Yeah. Now I want to know. Yeah, I want to know if she’s going to be the highest. But yeah, so saying stuff like this is just another way to undermine women’s messages.

Lisa: Yeah, for sure in this case. So she gets described with respect to her voice in a way that I don’t think lots of politicians necessarily do specifically unless, I mean, of course, some do. So we would be remiss if we didn’t talk about then how somebody like Lindsey Graham or Jeff Sessions gets described in the media because their accents are also reviled.

Carrie: At least with respect to [crosstalk]

Lisa: Yeah. Absolutely.

Carrie: …Lindsey Graham, I also think there’s some homophobia in there, regardless of whether he is gay.

Lisa: Yeah, there could be.

Megan: Ugh, yeah. Definitely. So since we just talked about shrill and we were talking about women’s pitch, let’s talk about Vocal Fry [laugh]

Carrie: All right.

Megan: Sorry, Creaky foundation [laugh] is what a connotation[?] would call it, right? [laugh]

Lisa: Yes. I prefer that.

Megan: So, could you just give us a quick, what’s the difference between vocal fry and modal voice, because I, sorry, creaky and modal voice. Because I think that’s important before we go forward.

Lisa: Yeah. So, creaky, so, modal voice is, the kind of regular vibration of the vocal faults. What a speaker would produce if they didn’t have any pathological aspects to their speech. And if they’re not trying to implement any other kind of phonation, like breathy or creaky or harsh or whatever, I often think about that as somebody’s habitual voice, right? Or their habitual pitch. So when I have measured people’s pitch and they’re not producing any other kind of phonation, and they’re just producing the sort of normal vibration of the vocal folds, that’s what I think of as their habitual fundamental frequency or their habitual pitch.

And then creaky, it has certain articulatory properties and certain acoustic properties. So you know, some of the articulatory properties are the vocal folds in a cycle of vocal folds, opening and closing. They’re closed for a longer period of time. The vocal fold vibration is damped between the opening and the closing more than they normally would be. It’s also a little more irregular. So, the rate of opening and closing isn’t perfect. There’s going to be some irregularity between, the period of the opening and the closing, and of course, it’s a much longer period. So that’s the main thing, and that’s what leads to the main acoustic property, which is that people hear a low pitch when they hear creaky voice.

Megan: And what is the difference between when people perceive someone as having vocal fry quote unquote all of the time, versus maybe having it only sometimes? What is the difference there?

Lisa: Yeah. That’s a good question. So the main way that creak is used in lots of languages, not just American English, but since we’re speaking English on this podcast, we’ll start with that, is that it’s used to mark the ends of sentences. So I’m sure you guys have covered that before, but that’s like, that’s like the prosodic use of creaky voice, and that’s used in lots of other languages too. People have observed it in Spanish, they’ve observed it in Finnish, they’ve observed it in a variety of other languages. And so I think in that case, when somebody just has phrase final creak, that’s when it doesn’t get noticed because it’s expected there. And as listeners, we use it to understand that a speaker’s coming to the end of an utterance. So it’s useful.

If it extends beyond that location, I think that’s when people start to think of creaky voice as more than normal. That said there’s now a lot of sociolinguistic work where people are starting to look at how creaky voice gets used other than just in phrase, final creak position. And depending on the speaker, and depending on the context, it can be used to mean a lot of different things. So for one, in one paper, for example, one researcher found that it seems to be used to mark parentheticals. So that’s one thing, right? So if you say something and then you describe it in a parenthetical, the parenthetical itself is going to be creaky.

Megan: That makes a lot of sense when you think about how you do it in writing, you’re kinda like putting it off, offsetting it from something. And then maybe if you change your pitch, you’re offsetting it from like the bigger discourse or something.

Lisa: Yeah, right.

Megan: So that’s kind of cool. Do people that use vocal fry all the time or a lot of time like me, what does our modal voice then look like?

Lisa: Do you want me to look at your modal pitch [laugh] and send a recording of you and let you know?

Megan: Yeah, I do. But we would still have someone who uses vocal fry a lot would still have a modal voice, right?

Lisa: Absolutely. Yeah. So, even if you use phrase final creaky voice, and even if you use it extensively, like maybe you start it further back in this sentence, than other speakers do, you almost always start a phrase with modal voice. So the first, like half of a sentence, usually at least half of a sentence, often more than that is going to be modal voice. The other thing that people will say, and it’s true, is that of course, creaky voice is found at the end of the sentence because it’s when we’re losing air pressure and one of the aerodynamic properties of Creek is that it has lower pressure. So when we’re running out of breath, basically we don’t have as much air to force through the vocal folds. And that is one thing that leads to the kind of vocal fold vibration that is creaky. So that’s the phonetic precursor to it. And then the question is like, can you extend it and start using it for other things? And the answer is of course, because that’s always what we do with things that have a phonetic precursor. We turn them into all sorts of things.

Megan: What’s your favorite use of vocal fry in the media in journalism?

Carrie: Or just use of the term?

Lisa: [laugh] Like my favorite description of it?

Megan: Yeah. Or, someone use of the term that may be incorrect or…

Carrie: That’s horrible.

Lisa: So here’s, this is from an article in Fast Company and the title of this article is The Verbal Tick of Doom, why the Vocal Fry is Killing Your Job Search.

Carrie: Yep. I’ve read that one.

Megan: The vocal fry?

Lisa: Yeah, the vocal fry.

Carrie: The vocal fry.

Lisa: I think this is the most shocking one that’s out there in a way of all the ones that are out there. So he tells his story about how his assistant gives him a stack of resumes, and he says the staffer did a great job because the resume on the top of the pile looked like a perfect match of background and experience. Okay, so great. A perfect match of background and experience. But when I spoke with the candidate, I ruled her out immediately. Why? Because of how she talked on the phone. Every sentence ended in a gravelly, low vibrato, it was a grading kazoo-like effect that made the candidate sound immature, unconfident, and frankly annoying. There was no way we could risk having her represent us with a senior executive audience in spite of her considerable track record and credentials.

Carrie: Yeah, that one also shocked me. I wrote about it in Babel. Because I was like, how dare you, how dare you.

Megan: You’re admitting what you’re not supposed to say out loud basically. Yeah, the quiet part out loud.

Carrie: Yeah.

Lisa: This seems like [laugh] she could sue him for this or something, maybe.

Carrie: Yeah, she definitely could if she knew that she was the one.

Lisa: Yeah. Right. So that’s one of my favorite media descriptions of it because it’s just so straightforward. It’s like you didn’t think that [laugh] maybe you shouldn’t rule out your best candidate just because of this. So what I’ve been looking at more recently is the perception of vocal fry rather than the production of it. So a study that just got accepted [laughs] both the media and also other academics have been wondering about. This has been conjectured about a number of times in both kinds of publications is whether people who have habitually higher pitch. So women, either women who are in a professional setting or I think you guys talked to Laal Ziman about this also. So one possibility is that trans men also, it’s been conjectured, but I don’t necessarily think it’s been kind of conclusively shown, but that one option for speakers like these two groups would be to use vocal fry to lower your pitch in a professional setting.

So that’s something that people have talked a lot about, but it was, I was curious about this because, I mean, this is related to the question you just asked Megan, which is what is your habitual pitch sound like? And so I wondered, when you hear somebody who uses both their habitual modal pitch and also creak at some points when they speak, what is a listener hearing in terms of their pitch? Are they hearing just their modal pitch, and assessing their pitch based only on their modal pitch? Maybe because they know that creak is not modal, or are you kind of combining the two? And the reason this is relevant is because if you’re a speaker who’s trying to use creaky phonation to get a lower pitch, can that even work for you? So I didn’t talk to anybody about whether they’re actively trying to do this, whether they’re consciously trying to do this.

I didn’t interview people in a workplace setting for example. But what I did do was take three types of stimuli. So I looked at both completely modal stimuli, completely creaky stimuli, and then I looked at things that started as modal and ended as creaky. So it had the phrase final creak, and I was able to find the same speakers producing all three of those types of utterances because I use podcasters. That’s how I get my stimuli for these studies. So there’s hours and hours and people usually have all kinds of those utterances, so that’s cool. And so I presented these, there are four women speakers and I presented them to I think 70 some listeners. And I look to see whether if you just rate somebody’s pitch on a scale of one to nine, do you make a distinction between these three different kinds of stimuli?

So there were two speakers were higher pitched. So their habitual pitch was around 200 hertz and 200 and, sorry, and two speakers who had lower pitch. So their modal habitual pitch was around 150 hertz. And it turned out that listeners when they rated their pitch on a scale of one to nine, for the higher-pitched speakers, they made a three-way distinction. So for the fully modal tokens, they rated them as the highest of all, for the fully creaky tokens, they rated them the lowest of all. And for the ones that were a combination of modal and creaky, they rated them in the middle. For the lower-pitch speakers, that didn’t happen. So there, they’re already so low that going creaky doesn’t gain them anything. So there, the modal pitch and the partially creaky pitch were rated the same. And then the fully creaky pitch was rated the lowest. So significantly lower.

Megan: Huh. Did you say that these were all women that, voices you use?

Lisa: The speakers were all women, yeah. The participants were men and women, but they behaved the same. There was no effect of the listener gender on these ratings.

Megan: Oh, that’s…that’s actually nice.

Lisa: Yeah. [laugh] That’s very nice. Yeah.

Carrie: That’s really cool.

Lisa: Yeah. So if you are somebody who, look, I’m not advocating that people should use this technique because of course, you’re going to get dinged for it. So you can’t win if you use this technique is what [laugh] the reading of the vocal fry popular articles in the creaky voice literature tells you, this is not necessarily the best technique to use, if what you want to do is lower your pitch because you’re going to get dinged for it. But it is, it will lower what people perceive your pitch to be. [laugh]. I just don’t know that it’s going to be a winner for you.

Megan: Wow. Well, now I want to see how people perceive accents and voices that are described as old-timey or quaint or all of this [laugh] obvious. So the folk linguistic nasal, so you said the folk linguistic stuff just kind of looks at nasal and which other term did they look at?

Lisa: Twang. They looked at twang.

Megan: Twang?

Lisa: Yeah.

Megan: We need to have like an extension of that and see what people are picking up on because it’s really interesting.

Carrie: We should talk about twang actually, now that you bring it back up. I had to look this up when we were doing our Southern American English episode, the first episode. But what is twang supposed to mean?

Lisa: Twang also means regional dialect. I mean [laughs] very generally it seems to me regional dialect, but also, and this is also something that the people who have worked on, on folk linguistics have looked at. It also gets used in sort of the rural versus urban descriptors. So it’s not just regional accent. I don’t think that Pittsburgh, for example, would be described as twang, although I’m sure if you go out there and look you’ll find that, but it’s probably, it seems to be more representative of rural dialects, like rural regional features. Yeah, I mean that’s just, again, I haven’t done the corpus study that needs to be done to look in at this, but that’s my impression of how it gets used.

Carrie: Yeah, that makes sense because yeah, now that I’m thinking about it, I’m sure I’ve seen it for rural Washington state accents.

Lisa: There’s one article, like one scholarly article looking at the use of twang by speakers in Oklahoma and Oklahoma is kind of an interesting geographical region because it’s not southern and it’s not Midwestern. So kind of doesn’t have a great classification in that respect. But twang is something the author interviewed a whole bunch of, just people who live in the region who use the word twang to describe their own dialect.

Carrie: Interesting. I totally think of Oklahoma as being South.

Megan: I do too just because I have family there and they sound like what I associate with the South in my head. Or maybe I’ve associated Oklahoma with the South because I do have family there, so.

Lisa: Oh, maybe. Yeah, I don’t have a strong feeling about it myself. But I’m also that familiar with the dialect, but I don’t know. Has Elizabeth Warren been accused of speaking in twang? Because she’s from Oklahoma.

Carrie: Not that I’m aware of, but she also does not sound like an Oklahoman to me.

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No, but I’m just saying where he is right now is a nightmare.

Megan: All of this stuff is fantastic fodder for having discussions like these and doing research. I wonder as the last thing, what might you want to see journalists do instead?

Lisa: So I will call out one journalist, the one who does have a background in linguistics, that’s Taffy Brodesser Akner. She writes for the New York Times. And she writes well in this way that’s interesting. Because she knows she has to write in a way that’s interesting. I’m sorry. She knows she has to write in a way that’s understandable to her lay readers. So she doesn’t use technical terms that linguists would use. The thing is, what I ideally want right, is for people to have like basic understanding of linguistic terms. If people could take the first three weeks of my phonetics class not a super huge time commitment, just a small time commitment. Then for people who write about language, I think it would be worthwhile to invest in understanding some linguistic terms and how linguists use them and then deploy them in a way that is maybe not its most technical use, but in a way that isn’t contradictory to their technical uses. Because the problem right now, is not only, look, we’re expendable as linguists. It doesn’t matter, that we get upset about this. But to me, the real problem here is that because these terms aren’t universally agreed upon by speakers, they don’t, journalists aren’t conveying what they mean to convey because we don’t all have the same background knowledge of these terms. And that seems problematic to me and it seems like something a journalist would want to avoid.

Carrie: Yeah, absolutely.

Lisa: The solution to this is we should teach some linguistics in schools, or at least in your foreign language acquisition classes. That’s what it always comes down to, right, [laughter]

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. And I think a lot of people would like it. They’d realize it’s like kind of I don’t know. I first saw it as a science that I felt was very relevant to being a human being and it was really cool.

Carrie: Yeah. And it also helped me understand what the hell the French vowels were. [laughter]

Megan: Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: Definitely, with respect to second language learning, we would have benefits for sure.

Carrie: Oh my God. How many years of French was I in before I finally understood what was going on? Uh, anyway. [laughter]

Megan: Yep. That’s another episode. [laughter]

Carrie: Yeah. Right.

Lisa: If you haven’t done that, you should get somebody to come in and talk about that.

Carrie: Yeah, we should we should.

Megan: Absolutely.

Carrie: Oh, so many people we need to talk to still.

Megan: Yeah. I’m so glad we got to talk to you though, Lisa. You’ve been someone we wanted to have [inaudible]

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for inviting me.

Carrie: Of course.

Megan: Oh, absolutely. Someone that we wanted to have on for a long time and we could’ve talked to you about so many things, but I’m glad that we talked about this because it’s so relevant and so like out there and so everyone can connect with it in some way.

Carrie: Well and also as linguists, we complain about this stuff all the time, but we don’t do anything about it. So at least this is something we can send to journalists.

Megan: We do. Yeah, absolutely.

Lisa: Maybe it’s incumbent upon us to write a guide for describing…Oh my god, I’m like signing myself up for this.

Carrie: We should.

Megan: Yeah. Oh,

Lisa: Well maybe in a future project [laugh]

Megan: Yeah, you are.

Lisa: One thing I could do or people could do, it doesn’t have to be me.

Megan: Yeah.

Lisa: But maybe somebody, if not me, could take on writing a guide for terminology use for journalists that would help to start to standardize these uses.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: I think that’s a great idea.

Megan: Yeah, it’s a great idea. Because then we get away from this kind of racist, sexist tropes, classist tropes that we see being played out over and over again, which is important. So.

Lisa: Yes, that would certainly be a benefit of that.

Megan: Absolutely. Awesome. Thank you.

Carrie: Thank you so much.

Lisa: Well, thank you, guys.

Megan: Thank you. And we always leave our listeners with Don’t be an asshole. [laughter] Thank you.

Lisa: Thank you.

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The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon for Halftone Audio. Theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @vocalfriespod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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