One thing that we do notice is when people are more dynamic speakers, when they say something that's more interesting and more engaging, people actually don't tend to note their us and ums as much as people that give sort of monotonous boring delivery and maybe don't have content that's really interesting. So a lot depends on what you're saying. What do you study? I am what's called a sociolinguist.
Don't try to say that after a few drinks at cocktail parties. It's a hard one. But it basically means that I study how the underlying linguistic patterns that we take for granted and we don't even notice anymore vary not just by language or dialect, but by social facts about us that are much smaller than these things that we tend to think of as language differences. Why do languages change at all then?
Why isn't it just that we have a language and then people use it and people use it and it gets locked in for the rest of time? Well, that's why I make the big bucks or actually not, but that's why they pay me some salary. That's a big question, actually. And, you know, that is what keeps linguists and psychologists and cognitive scientists employed because we don't understand all the forces.
But the short answer to that big question is we have underlying cognitive and articulatory pressures that constantly affect us as speakers. So an example of that would be the fact that take a word with a lot of consonants on it. That's a single syllable like whisks, which is, you know, what we use every day when we're cooking. And notice that when you say it in fast speech or just really anytime you say it in speech, you're going to naturally just delete some of the consonants off that.
So you'll say you'll whisk it fast. You're not going to say all the whisks because it's a hard thing to say. Or fifths, that's another word. Sixths, those are all tricky words.
Well, the reason you delete those consonants is there's a natural inherent pressure, a cognitive preference, we think, for languages to have very minimal syllable structures. And that means no consonants at the end, if possible. Some languages actually prohibit all consonant clustering, but English allows a lot. I call it a promiscuous language for that reason.
And so it's natural to delete them. That's sort of a cognitive, trying to get back to this cognitive preference we have. There's also some articulatory issues. So, for example, words like th or words that begin with th, that consonant cluster, that's where the th, but it's actually single sound.
Many, many languages don't have that sound. So, for example, my mother's a French speaker, and I used to make endless loads of fun of her because she would say one too twee, because she couldn't make the th sound, right? And she loved it, of course. That was her favorite aspect of our relationship, I'm sure.
But she couldn't say that because it's not a sound in French. That also tells us that it's either articulatorially a dispreferred sound or cognitively a dispreferred sound. So languages will naturally, if they have that sound, try to move towards not having it anymore, which is why a lot of dialects of English say things like brava or teeth, because they're trying to get back to that more natural consonant structure. So those are natural tendencies we have that exist all the time.
Pressure on us, all speakers, all languages, all the time. The part that I'm interested in is the other pressure, which is social pressure. So how is my social identity a factor in which of those pressures I succumb to? So if I'm a female, if I'm a young person, if I'm an African-American, if I'm a second language speaker, a non-native speaker, what do those pressures, coupled with those linguistic pressures, create in terms of dialects?
And it's because these things swirl around us all the time. We're always having these natural pressures. We're always something socially. We're always changing who we are socially.
And that has a big impact on which of those pressures that we allow in our speech and which we don't. And in the end, it's the cosmic language change that results. So language has always had these pressures on it. It hasn't changed.
The language might change, but the pressures don't. We've always been social, right? You know, back in Caveman days, I'm sure they did some social fun stuff. So, you know, it's always been there.
And we just kind of interact and engage. And then that creates language change over time. Obviously, it's a lot more complex, but that's sort of the short, long answer. Is it right in saying that languages seem to change in a particular direction towards simplicity, towards being more straightforward, easy to pronounce?
Well, OK, that's a trick question, because I think the problem is a lot of times when people think simplicity, they think simplicity in a cognitive sense. And that's really not what we're moving towards. And languages don't always get simpler. Certain types of languages tend to get less complex over time from a standpoint of how they're articulated, maybe how they're structured, morphosyntactically.
And those tend to be large languages spoken by a lot of speakers. So like English, for example, or Chinese or Russian. They actually have a lot of speakers. A lot of non-native speakers learn it.
A lot of adults that may have to acquire it not perfectly. And that causes language to simplify over time, because the very complex morphosyntactic and phonological patterns that babies are born into and able to acquire because of the greater cognitive plasticity does not exist in that case as widely. And therefore, over time, the rules that are less transparent to pick up atrophy. And that is what causes sort of a less complex structure.
I wouldn't call it simpler, but less complex. So English, for example, was really complex in its early days. It had a lot of endings on all words, so nouns and verbs and all nouns. So, for example, think about how we say, I do, he does, right?
Where you have that little S that comes on. Well, imagine that we had to do that every time we used a noun, an adjective or a verb to make sure it fit with all the other words in the sentence. So like German today has, first of all, it has grammatical gender, which means that if I have a noun like the moon or the sun, I have to know whether it goes with other male or female things, depending on which grammatical gender it belonged to. So that was one ending, and that had to stick on not just the nouns, but the adjectives.
There were several verb classes in Old English, so there were strong classes and weak classes. So all the ED verbs that we use today are weak class verbs. So they were a very sort of minority class in Old English. The majority were the things like the sing-sang-sang or drive-driven kind of class, where they had these extra endings that you put on.
And those weird irregular verbs that we have in English, like I drive, he drove, I have driven, that's actually a holdout from the strong classes of Old English. Now, they're the minority today, and we just memorized them, but back then they were a regular rule. So another fun example is the plural S. We have just one ending to make plurals in English.
Super simply, you want to make something plural, stick an S on it. You want to make a new word plural, stick an S on it. But in Old English, S was actually the minority way of forming plurals. And it wasn't just an S, it was an AS, typically.
Many, many other forms of plurals existed. And the reason we have words like oxen and children is because they're holdouts from Old English plurals that were much more frequent. And in fact, shoes and eyes used to be shoe and iron back in the day. So these are examples of complexity that we lost over time.
I think the trick is we think of simpler as being sort of stupider or primitive, and that's actually false in the way of language. And a perfect example is, you know, no one thinks English is a stupid language. And in fact, we've created all sorts of things. We've made airplanes fly.
We've created incredible life-saving vaccines. You know, we've created the internet. In English, we do all these things in English. So if we were really getting simpler, that probably wouldn't happen.
We'd be back in the days of Beowulf, which no one wants. Okay, so you have a pressure which is on language, especially languages that are widely used and popular, ones that need to be adopted by people perhaps later in life, because they are the cognitive limitations that you have, just being an older person trying to learn a language as opposed to a child. Right, old heart attack, right, when it comes to language acquisition. There we are.
So because of that, you inevitably decomplexify, you reduce down the complexity, and that causes some of the quirks, some of the sticky-out bits that may be less logical to be eroded away. We end up, therefore, with a less complex end result, but that can't be the same for every language. And also, why, if that's the case, that languages are, on average, especially when they're widely used, turning toward the less complex, why are they complex to begin with? Why not just make it simple from the start?
Well, okay, so these are a couple different questions in there, I think, that you packed in. One thing just to say, since languages don't always simplify over time, a lot of times through language contact, they get more complex. So it's this constant battle between what's good for us as language speakers, which is to make it easier to communicate in the most efficient way possible, which tends to lead to slightly simpler, less complex structures, versus the need to sort of have all the aspects there to form the different things we want to do with language, which is complex in its own right. So there are constant pressures.
A lot of times more complexity happens when languages come in contact, so we actually acquire new things on top of the things we already had. But I think one thing to be careful of is when we're talking about complexity here, we're talking about morphosyntactic or phonological complexity, which just means we have a lot of stuff put on words. There's different types of complexity you can gain. So while English lost morphosyntactic complexity, meaning all those endings fell off, because who needs them, right?
We gained sort of lexical or what would be the pragmatic complexity, meaning, for example, our word order became more fixed. So it used to be in old English, you could kind of be willy-nilly in what you stuck at where, because there were little endings on all the words that told you, oh yeah, this adjective goes with that noun over there, right? They're friends. So you don't have to put them together because they know they're friends.
But we lose those things over time, and then we don't know they're friends anymore if we're sticking the adjective at the end of the sentence, and the noun it modifies at the beginning. So as you lose the endings that tell you you worked together, like the wedding rings are gone, so we no longer know they're together, then we have to do other things that make up for it. So what English did instead is get a more fixed word order. So now our adjectives go before our nouns, right?
And our subjects go before our verbs, and our objects go after that. And so that allows anybody listening to an English sentence to know, okay, first, so it has to be the subject. Oh, it's last, it has to be the object. We didn't have to do that back then.
So it's a different kind of complexity. So I do want to be careful, and so we're not saying that everything's simplifying. But what happens over time is generally that smaller languages that have very few speakers, which was the origin of all language. I mean, back in the day, if we go back, you know, 50,000 years, when we think language first started, it wasn't thousands and thousands and millions of people that spoke them.
It was very small groups, and they could transmit that kind of complexity. And so what happens is when you move away from small groups and you get to millions of speakers, the original purpose of language, which was sort of to allow communication in a small group, has changed, and then language changes with it. So we're talking about evolutionary processes, and that's really what has caused languages to change. And when you look at indigenous languages, for example, those, you know, Austronesian languages or Native American languages that have very few speakers, often in the hundreds, those languages tend to be much more complex than languages like English, Chinese, or Russian.
And that's because their purpose is to communicate in a small group. And therefore, they don't need to simplify over time because they're not having this transmission across large slots of speakers. And when we transmit, and when I'm saying things change over time, I'm not saying all of a sudden someone wakes up and is like, okay, who needs that morphosyntax? Let's just get rid of those stupid endings.
I feel like saying I's instead of I in today. That's not what happens. It's transmission to children. So when you get larger groups of speakers, then the rules become more opaque to the adults, and they transmit those sort of inconsistencies to their children who then acquire this sort of simpler morphosyntax.
Oh, so morphosyntaxes die one generation at a time in that way? All language change works that way. Basically, old people don't pick up new tricks. We're kind of like old dogs.
We just don't do it. Now, certain superficial things like a vocabulary word, you know, I can learn to twerk. But that doesn't mean I should. That definitely doesn't mean I should.
But it's a lot harder for me to learn something like front vowel tense and lastness, which we have in New York, where you hear like, ca, ca, can't, versus some words like last wouldn't be tense, and some would be last. So it's really kind of tricky. And it's a very, very, very complex rule where you tense the a vowel before so-called fricatives, which are sounds like S or F. So we laugh, but cat.
So you hear the slight difference. That's something that's really hard to transmit to any speaker learning English, or even an English speaker that moves to New York as a 15-year-old is not going to get that very complex sort of types of pattern in there. So I think what we need to think about is sort of when we're talking about language change, what general people think about as language change is like a new word I picked up. But what linguists think about as language change is a new sound system I picked up, new vowels I picked up, new morphosyntax, new endings on my words, new pronouns, which of course we're all upset about picking up these days.
But that has happened through history. We've had a bunch of different pronouns. And in fact, most of the pronouns we have today, like she and they, didn't even exist at the beginning of English. So they have both come into English in the middle of English, period.
Therefore, we obviously have changed our pronouns a few times. They've been around the block on that front as well. What about um and uh? Because these seem like words that are not only very common in English, depending on who you're speaking to, but I speak to friends who are native speakers of a different language who make ums and uhs sounds in different, it's a different sound even when they're trying to speak English to me.
So that seems like a human universal. It is, actually. I mean, are fascinating. And you know, you call them words, but there's actually a huge debate in linguistic circles.
You know, this is what we do late at night about whether they're in fact words or not. They sort of act like utterances that things that sort of just come out that aren't necessarily governed by the same rules that words are. But we also find them written in things where it's like, um, no. And so that suggests a more word like employment.
So, you know, there's kind of a debate over whether we call them words. But regardless of what we call them, philpauses, which is what those are, are things that are universal. They've been found in every language study. They do differ slightly.
So some languages will have a lot more than two. Some languages only have two. But basically all languages have at least two. And most Proto-Indo-European languages have something along the form of uh or um.
And usually they differ by the vowel. Why that sound? What is it that's about the physiology of the mouth, perhaps? The way that the brain tries to make sounds come out?
What is it that's causing so many different languages to zero in on um or uh or something similar? Right. Well, there are a lot of different answers to that depending on which aspect you're trying to answer. But just for the sound itself, actually, it's a really interesting question.
Because if we look at most languages, most of them have sort of a vowel-like philpauses, like uh, that we write with a UH, but it's just a vowel. You know, like someone punches you in the gut and you just go, uh, right? And then we have one with a nasal sound. And nasal sounds are things like N's or M's.
And so English has um. But so, for example, in Japanese, you have ano, which also has a nasal sound. That's two syllables. That's interesting.
Yeah. Well, some languages like Chinese and Japanese actually use demonstrative pronouns as philpauses. So it can be a range of things. And in Spanish, esta is a philpaus.
So that also is something that functions as a word in other cases, but it's brought in as a philpaus. So sometimes languages do that where they use another preexisting word. Other languages, mostly Germanic, languages use uh and um because that seems to have inherited from a proto-language. So we suspect that since English is very similar to German and other languages like Finnish and Danish and Swedish, they all have these similar um types of sounds that they probably were inherited from proto-Germanic, which may even have been inherited from Proto-Indo-European.
So they're very old. But the reason we probably do that sound is if you say the uh sound, just say uh. Uh. All right.
So your mouth is kind of just at rest, right? So if you didn't do much with your mouth and then someone punched you in the gut, that's the sound you would make. So it's an easy kind of just simple sound and it's central to the mouth. So you're not moving to get to different targets like you are in speech sounds.
It's just what is emanated sort of as your brain is thinking. So that's probably why that sound in English was inherited. The um is interesting because one of the reasons we think that sound might be used more than uh or have developed is partially because from a sound symbolism standpoint, it's a more polite sound. So if you go uh, you know, it's kind of ugly.
Your mouth's hanging open if you can just wander in there. But if you say um, it's much more pleasant, isn't it? Um is the form of uh. Exactly.
You kind of have synonyms for everything, right? But actually the really interesting about uh and um is they do different work for us. So both of them are basically speech planners. So as we're thinking of more complex things to say, of harder vocabulary, less familiar terms, or really long syntactic structures, they tend to come out.
But uh signals to a listener that you're going to just take a really quick delay. I'm thinking about it. It's coming out in just a second. But when you um, it actually tends to precede longer delays, which means that we're actually pretty intentional about which one we're using.
We don't have synonyms typically that don't develop different meanings. So, you know, there's really no point in doing the exact same thing. So language just automatically tries to give different meanings to them. So uh seems to signal, I need a short delay.
Um seems to signal, it's going to take me a little longer to figure this out. Why would people choose to use this? I understand that it's a sound, but is this uh mental cognitive processing? Is this a buffering screen?
Is this something else? What's going on? Yeah, you know how the internet has that little twirly thing? That's basically what um and uh are.
And have you noticed that, you know, when you're really in a hurry and trying to do something complex, it tends to give you that little twirly signal more? Same thing with um and uh. They tend to occur when we're doing more difficult cognitive processing. So, you know, the idea that um and uh are or sort of signals that we don't know what we're saying or we're uncertain or hesitant are not true in the sense that they signal that we don't know what we're talking about.
In fact, what they signal is that we're doing a lot of work to say the right thing or to come up with the right word, but it does signal that we're doing cognitive work and that our processing is going. So it's basically a sort of signal of brain churning. But what we find is it's not just brain churning if we're doing simple tasks. The more likely it is that we're actually doing harder things, like coming up with words we don't use very often, coming up with more technical vocabulary, or coming up with a more complex embedded sentence structure, so morphosyntactically more complex.
So we tend to correlate our uh and um use with how difficult the thing we're doing is, which is probably why we ump and ump more when we're in contexts that require, you know, higher, more flutant sorts of speech, like in the workplace or at school, that kind of thing, where we want to impress people, so we're trying to come up with those big vocabulary words rather than, you know, twerk. How does this, how is this interpreted by other people? So from our side, let's say that it is a byproduct of this cognitively demanding high RAM 64 gigabyte required processing speed that we're going through. That should be the case, if it's true, that other people should always interpret ums and uhs as signals of authenticity, somebody that is working incredibly hard to get their sentence across, I really should pay more attention, yet ums and uhs aren't exactly valorized as this fantastic introduction into somebody's speech passage.
Right, so this is one of those really interesting places where things that offer as linguistic benefits, which uh and ump really, really do, they're actually very beneficial to us as both speakers and listeners, they don't match up with social benefits because they don't really offer social benefits. On the whole, people don't really like uh and ump, and in fact, they often think it signals someone doesn't know what they're talking about or they're hesitant or uncertain, so if you go listen to someone give a presentation and they're uh-ing and umming their way through it, you're probably going to sort of shut down or stop listening, or you'll say to your friend, oh my God, if that person says another uh, it's going to kill me, and when people overdo it, we really, really notice them. So they're not really considered great speech features, but that's kind of funny because they're actually pretty great speech features if we look at them from a linguistic and cognitive standpoint. Part of the problem is, in the context that we notice people's umming and uh-ing, which is usually presentations or speeches, those are contexts we'd expect people to have practiced, to have rehearsed, to know what they're going to say, and since we know that uh and ump signal someone's sort of thinking through things, I think part of the reason we dislike them in those contexts is because they signal to us that someone hasn't done their homework.
So if someone's giving a presentation and they're uh-ing and umming their way through it, I'm thinking, God, did you not read this before you came up here and bored me? One thing that we do notice is when people are more dynamic speakers, when they say something that's more interesting and more engaging, people actually don't tend to note their uhs and ums as much as people that give sort of monotonous sort of boring delivery and maybe don't have content that's really interesting. So a lot depends on what you're saying, but also the practice issue, I think, in places where we expect someone to have rehearsed and know their content, signals that we're working through it is not a great thing to have. On the flip side, though, when we look at the research on what an um do for us, they both help us as a speaker with speech planning, they signal to the listener that my turn's not done and how long a delay to expect.
So those are both beneficial things. But even more so, for listeners, if we look at studies that do either eye tracking or event-related potential studies, things that sort of are measures of cognitive processing on the listener's part, they actually seem to help us have faster recognition of what someone's going to say, be able to better predict what someone's going to say, are better at new information processing and remember things better later. So that's not bad for a little field pause. Wow.
So we have a bunch of different dynamics crashing up against each other here. One is the buffering requirement or the advantage that using these filler words offer us. Another is that it is potentially useful at helping the people that we are speaking to both retain and understand what it is that we're saying. But all of this gets filtered through the social expectation, which disincentivizes both the speaker and the listener from this happening.
So that's very interesting, the fact that this is good for you as a listener, but might not be what you want to hear as a listener. Right. But if you look at language over time, anyway, most of the things that we think of as bad speech are actually not bad at all. It's just sort of social historical accident that we don't like them.
So a lot of things. So think about like use, you know, the way that people say like all the time. People hate that. I hear nothing but bad things about like.
If I go give a talk, it can be on a completely different topic and then afterwards people come up and say, oh my God, I love your talk. Tell people to stop saying like all the time. And yet because they're not the right speakers that do them or because we take them to signal something else, we socially interpret them negatively. So with I and I think it's because a lot of times we do associate them with hesitancy or uncertainty.
And it's true they do signal the fact that someone is working through things. But is that a bad thing? You know, why do we think that's bad that someone is working through what they're going to tell us? I don't want someone to just spout off, you know, incoherent stuff because they're not thinking it through.
If you step back to consider why we are an um, it's actually for pretty good reasons. It's just that we don't like it because it signals to us someone isn't sure about what they're saying and maybe they haven't practiced enough. What about the difference between using um and uh versus just having silence? You know, that's an interesting question.
Certainly it's been studied. So in some of the research that looked at the gain that listeners get by hearing an uh or an um before a word in a series of sentences, they would also do those same experiments where they had a silent pause instead of inserting an uh or um before the word. To see if maybe it was simply that people have more time to think and that's why they do better at comprehension. And what they found is a silent pause didn't have the same effect, nor did something like a cough that also gave the same amount of time but was a different kind of distractor.
In fact, things like cough actually hindered comprehension. So clearly we are treating uh and um differently than both other distractors and silent pauses from a cognitive standpoint. So silent pauses don't give us the bump that uh seems to give us. On the flip side, silent pauses are sometimes better in a context like giving a presentation.
So I'm not telling people go stick an um into your presentation because unless I talk to that audience before you get there, it probably will still not be taken as great speaking. But especially at the beginning of the sentence because we do find that people either uh or um at the beginning of the sentence, depending on how long they think it's going to take them to answer the question. So it does seem to be taken as a marker of uncertainty, particularly at the very beginning of the sentence. So that might be one to stay away from.
But when we again do studies that look at how people take silent pauses versus filled pauses, in some cases they can take silent pauses as greater signals of anxiety than when someone filled their pause with uh or um, probably because they weren't sure when someone paused in that context whether they were just not sure what they were going to say or whether they forgot what they were going to say. It doesn't give the listener the same clue that you know you're working on it. Instead, it might lead to some misconception when you silently pause that either you haven't finished but you don't know what you're going to say or you suddenly abruptly did finish and it's someone else's turn. So it can get a little more confusing whereas uh and um are signals to a listener.
Specifically, I'm working on it, I'm going to keep talking. So while silent pauses certainly in speeches are sometimes very effective, especially when you want to add power to what you're saying so you give people a moment to think about it, it's not always beneficial in casual conversation to do that. I have a friend who does a lot of debates and he uses turn transition cues in a similar way to what you're talking about but he doesn't use um or uh and he learned it from Christopher Hitchens. So he's having a debate with somebody and one of the things that he's conscious of is that if he gets anywhere close to a pause point within his sentence, the other person is potentially going to jump in and then try and make a point.
So what he does is he'll start the beginning of a sentence like that, take a sip of water, give himself the breathing room to go through things and then keep going because no one's going to jump in after a the, that's so rude but if he started it before the beginning of a sentence or halfway through at a point that seemed like a more natural break, it allows somebody to come in. So yeah, I understand that ums and uhs are a nice firm finger that you can wave in the air that says I got a little bit more to talk about here, just hang fire one second, I know that I might not get the next word out immediately but just I require a bit more. Don't jump in here, right? It's sort of like hey dude, I'm still talking kind of signal but that's exactly right.
In turn transition cues, I'm impressed, that's a big linguistic term and it basically just is anytime we're indicating to someone that it's their turn and that can be something that we do spoken like saying you know stop talking and just have silence or we can select somebody so I can say Chris, what do you think? And that is definitely a turn transition cue. I can even just look at people but it's very because there's so many of them and they do different work in terms of how people interpret them, it can be very confusing when someone just stops talking or doesn't use some sort of signal that they're either not done or they are done so uh and um are a great solution for that and they just seem to work that way. I know that you're coming at this from a linguistic perspective but it would be stupid of me not to bring this up with you.
No one on the podcast that's ever listening to this is ever going to see the volume of nods that I put in while the guest is speaking so as I'm here I'm just going away like a little nodding dog sat on the back of a car that has to be kind of not quite like a turn transition cue but it's like an encouragement so what I'm doing while I'm here is yep that's good keep on going keep on going that's good yep enjoying it enjoying it and then if I need to take if I stop oh maybe he's got something to say so this is a silent equivalent of a whatever the opposite of a turn transition cue my turn transition cue of a keep going cue you know that it's called back channeling what you're talking about you're doing a silent back channel but a lot of times we do it when we say things like uh-huh yeah right uh-huh oh that's a perfect person to take cues from and you know it's funny because actually it signals that you're a more conscientious nicer listener turn transition cue I mean back channels are actually a very lovely thing to do it's conversational support you're encouraging someone to keep going you're showing listenership it has all those sort of aspects to it but when you do things like interview guests or I have learned not to back channel too much because I do a lot of sociolinguistic interviewing and the last thing you can do is analyze someone's speech when you're talking over their speech with uh-huh yeah great wow so you just sort of learn not to do it but in casual conversation it's weird if you don't and in fact there have been some really interesting studies about how people take people that don't back channel very much or how they misread their intentions a famous study of course was done between men and women with the idea that men tend to not use back channeling as much as women which is why women think men are assholes I mean I'm sure there's other reasons that we think there has been some there were some studies one I'm thinking about was done in the 80s by Pamela Fishman who did some research on conversational discourse and she found among couples that men tended to not back channel or did delayed back channeling which is worse which is where you don't do it in time so you know there's very normal places to insert that uh-huh yeah uh-huh that shows excitement and like you're right there and you're keeping up with them you're listening and you know yes keep going and then there's the yeah uh-huh that really slow kind of three seconds too late that means I'm reading the newspaper I'm not even paying attention so what she found was men use more delayed back channels than women did I think you know it's changed I haven't read any recent studies of that hopefully it has changed I think a lot of things have changed at that time and we don't find it quite as distributed by male and female anymore and it certainly can be personality type you know there are people that are really avid engaged listeners more conscientious listeners and you can do psychological tests to test out those people and there was a really interesting study on discourse markers and those are things like you know well so and we found that more conscientious people it wasn't my study but it was found that more conscientious people tend to use more of those as well so I think it also is by personality type and it's probably by sociocultural background as well but yes there was there was a gender difference initially in back channeling okay what about the word like why does anybody use it oh I love like I mean what's not to love about like you know a lot of people hate that word they hate it except for the verb you know where they like ice cream for example but the like that's used as a discourse marker are a quotative verb so those would be things such as I'm gonna have to watch my like use here like he goes to school like you know or and that's sort of discourse marker like that's overdone but that's an example or a quotative like would be something where you use it instead of the verb to say so if you're talking about a party and you're talking about what John said you might say well John's like I don't think I'm gonna go tomorrow and I was like I think you should right that's a quotative verb so those are very different likes and in fact there are at least three if not more different very legitimate uses of like that are not the traditional uses of like which would be like as a verb like as a noun or like as a preposition so in assembly construction for example the ones that are less accepted are like as a conjunction so if you say something like I feel like or it seems like or he pretends like those types of likes even though we all use those are actually frowned upon by the grammar navens but the newest forms that we really dislike are those discourse marker likes that sort of dot to our linguistic landscapes when we're saying things but if you think about where they show up and it's not random or chaotic despite what people might believe they actually tend to show up when a speaker is trying to do some sort of subjective approximation estimation or apply this sort of impreciseness of meaning so that their listener gets that sense that this is their own evaluation of a situation so if I said like he was a lawyer or something that means I'm telling you this is my own opinion I don't really know for sure but I'm estimating or approximating what I think he was or she's like popular or something means it's not quite that that's not the exact fit that's not exactly how I describe it but that's the best I can do because there's not really words available to describe my meaning so those are actually very valuable because what they're communicating to you as a listener is I'm not making any strong claims about this is exactly how the world is I'm telling you this is my perception of how the world is in this case or it can intensify or emphasize something so if I said I ran like 20 miles today well you know I didn't run 20 miles I don't look that exhausted or that fit but what I'm saying is I ran a lot I'm emphasizing just for effect how much so in all those cases whether I'm using it as a quotative verb which then tells you I'm not verbatim quoting what someone says or sort of estimating what they said or if I'm telling you an estimate of how much I ran for emphasis they're actually serving a really useful purpose it's simply that age-wise older speakers tend not to use them they use about instead or they use you know as a discourse marker instead or some sort of other discourse marker younger speakers people under 40 tend to use like a lot more and so that's where we really see a generational divide and how acceptable people find it when did you get introduced well for the popular belief if you'd say the Valley Girls in the 1980s with I think it was Moon Unit Zappa who sang that fabulous song Valley Girl you know where she liked and gagged me with a spoon all over the place but that was actually just picking up on an undercurrent of something that was already in Southern California speech at the time and in fact if you're going to like this like is a British feature and we find that traces back centuries in British speech and if you look at old criminal court transcripts from the 1700s the old bailing proceedings which are great documents for when we look at how colloquial speech was back in the day before we had cell phones and smartphones to record everything and we find that like actually occurred as a discourse marker as far back as the 1700s so it's been around a long time and I'm afraid we have to blame the Brits for this one okay I've got a I've got a little video that I want to show you can you see that I see that yeah okay I think like the biggest thing that annoys me in the whole dating world is like fucking talking stages like that shit's so annoying like the whole like and just like the inconsistency in them like I literally like hate that like so much but I think that's like my biggest thing what specifically just like the fact of just like you like I don't know how to word this in like talking stages and it's just like you're like labeled that and it's like people like are considered like you can't like you're just like confused and like most of the time like the girl gets like attached or something and they like see it like it's gonna lead to a relationship and it's always not and it's just like that's like my biggest thing is like I just hate the whole like how like talking stages are so like normalized like traditional dating does not exist in a generation so that was 27 likes in 48 seconds there all right and you know when you draw attention to it it really stands out right so the fact that we're talking about like it definitely stands out a couple things I would say is that's obviously a young woman and that tends to be who we sort of diss in terms of like use more than young men although actually studies don't show there's really significant difference generally between young men and young women older men and women there is some difference but generally speaking it's a young teacher and what we find with like is if we look at how it distributes over a lifespan younger speaking tend to like at a much higher degree than they will as the same speaker 10 years later. So part of that is the stage of life she's in. But notice when she was talking, it's all estimation. She's giving her own impressions, her own opinions, her own sort of approximation of what she likes, what she doesn't, of her opinion.
And so, for example, she was saying, I hate when it's like, I can't remember what she was saying, truthfully. But she was talking about how she feels when things happen. So this is a perfect example of why like was so prevalent in her speech, because almost every instance, she's talking about something that is her own subjective sensibility. Now, was it excessive?
Certainly. But a lot of times when we look at young speech, we find overuse of something, and that's called age grading, which atrophies as they get older, because it's sort of cool in their set to talk that way. It's part of just sort of learning to use that feature, and it's a novel feature coming in, so it gets overused. Then as they go into the working world, and people frown upon them as the, you know, one million people probably wrote nasty comments under that, you tend to lower your use, especially in settings where you would be expected not to use them.
So for every parent out there who's freaking out about how their daughter or son uses life all the time in that context, don't worry, I promise they're still employable, despite what you might think. What is the social interpretation of the use of the word like? Well, I think it depends on the age group among the younger speakers. So I think when that young woman is talking to other young women, it's not noticed at all.
I have a teenage daughter, and she uses life quite a bit. And when she has her friends on the way to volleyball in the back of the car, it is a like fest. I hear a lot, I hear a lot. There's a lot of low-key, there's a lot of sleigh, there's a lot of like.
But again, that's in her own peer group, and that's very normal. And it's kind of, I think part of the reason it's used a lot is it gives us her young hip kind of urban sort of sense, and that's very much what young women and young men are trying to pull off when they're with their friends. So as she gets older, I'm expecting she won't use it. But the social benefit to her is it gives off that sort of cool hip, not too concerned with, you know, academics and scholasticness.
You know, it's sort of this chill, you know, kind of the chill vibe, sort of Southern California chill vibe, and that's what I think young women are going for. And young men, it is also quite prevalent with young men. But I do know that people all the time bring up, just like that example, people that use it excessively. And I think the reason we notice and call those out is because they are excessive and unusual.
So I teach 20-somethings every year, and they're delightful. And I will tell you, they're very concerned about their like use. At the very first day of class, I said, you know, I'll say, what do you notice about speech? Just tell me something.
I don't say, tell me something bad about speech. I just say, tell me what you notice. Every single year, every single class period, like, like, like, like, I hate like. And they'll even say, I have them have a conversation and record where they use it and how they use it, which gives them two tools.
It first lets them see that it's purposeful. Most of the time, people don't use it as excessively as that example. And you use it in cases, for example, where you're using as a quotative, where you're using as approximating adverbial, or you're using as a sentential adverbial. So if you can put a name to it, it makes it seem a little more like it has a function.
But the other benefit is if they want to lower their use, and they know how they use it, you can think to yourself, okay, wait, I know I use it as an approximating adverbial. I'm going to use about instead. So instead of saying, I ran like 10 miles, you can just think to yourself, I ran about 10 miles. And so if you give some of the tools by understanding their speech, then they have tools to help themselves, whether they want to justify its use or change its use.
So I think that's my approach to like. Right. So rather than feeling as if like is a curse that gets thrown and scattered across a sentence, and it's essentially impossible for you to get rid of, what you're doing here is saying, it's there for a purpose. Here are three different distinct purposes.
If you want to reduce the usage of the word like, one of the things that you need to do is look at where it gets brought in. And then in advance, perhaps at the start of that sentence, just take an extra half beat and think, I will use about. I will use one of the other. Replace alternatives.
Exactly. Exactly. As a sociologist, I love like. You know, I think it's a fascinating thing to study.
And I love the fact that it's actually much more powerful and purposeful than people get credit for. But as a person and as a mother, I do get that concern with women and men using like, and especially women, because we diss their speech so much that a man can use, a young man can use the same amount of like and not be judged in the same way. And it can have professional consequences. At least we worry about that.
So I want to give people the tools to look at like either way. And as long as you realize there's nothing bad about it, there's nothing wrong with it, but it may not be professionally and socially beneficial for you to do it. And if that's the case, understanding it will give you some tools as well. What's happening with vocal fry as well?
Speaking of dissing women's voices, right? Now this is vocal fry is a really interesting feature. And for people that don't understand what vocal fry is, it's that sort of crackly, poppy sort of noise that sometimes comes into particularly women's voices as they get through the end of the sentence. So that would be something like, I don't know about that, where you can hear that kind of fry, that crackliness come in.
We call it creak in wisdom. We actually don't refer to it as vocal fry. We refer to it as creaky voice, which I think is way more descriptive of what it sounds like. And actually what happens with creak or vocal fry is that you have the vocal folds.
And I'm going to give you, for those of you that are looking, you can see that these are your vocal folds, which are kind of these muscular flaps at the top of the larynx. So usually we have them kind of pulled tight and long. And so you can either open them a little to make a voiceless sound where the air flows through freely. And that would be like a tata sound.
Or you can close them and push the air through and that makes them vibrate. As you do your pitch, too, you push them through the vocal folds. And the vibration of the vocal folds is what determines your average pitch. So in normal cases, just your everyday average pitch, the thing we recognize when we talk to our husbands or our wives or when someone we know calls us on the phone, that's just normal phonation, it's called.
That's just a certain vibration of the vocal folds. But when we get into creaky voice, what happens is we take those same vocal folds and we kind of bunch them up so they're thicker. Do you see how they kind of get thicker? And think of a rubber band.
If you have a rubber band and it's pulled really tight and you ping it, it's going, well, if it doesn't snap you and you go, shit, that really hurts. If it stays together, it's going to vibrate at a very regular rate. But if you kind of let it fall and get soft and you kind of ping it, it's just going to be like, meh, right? It's not going to really do much.
It's not going to be a regular vibration. Well, when you bunch your vocal folds up and you make them thicker and heavier, they vibrate at a slower rate because they're heavier and they tend to vibrate regularly. Now, lower pitch in general is just a slower vibration of vocal folds. If you add on top of that in a regular vibration, that's when you get creaky voice.
And so it happens at a low pitch. What happens is we actually find that men do it, too, but because men operate a lower pitch more generally, that drop in pitch to make vocal fry is not as obvious. So when we notice women doing it, it's because they go from a higher pitch at the front end of their sentence to a much lower pitch to enact vocal fry. What we find is women have been doing it in professional settings, particularly.
So one of the biggest complaints you hear is in radio shows or broadcasting where people have women's voices. So NPR is an area where people have complained. In fact, there was a show, This American Life, that was completely dedicated, one of the episodes, to vocal fry and how many haters wrote in because of the women on that show, the broadcasters, the journalists that actually had vocal fry in their voices. What we find is early studies in the 1990s and the early 2000s showed that women in broadcasting settings actually vocal fry more than men in those settings and more than women elsewhere, which suggests that they're actually responding to that pressure for women in broadcasting to have lower pitch voices, which is something that they've had a pressure on them since the 1950s.
I mean, I think Barbara Walters spoke a lot about the fact that as a woman in broadcasting, she was expected to put a certain voice on. There have been lots of complaints by women saying that their high voices were called shrill and unacceptable on the airways. Well, what's the solution? Throw in a little low pitch vocal fry.
And why don't you do lower pitches in general? Well, because women get the double bind of being less attractive in terms of ratings that people give them when we hear them with a lower pitch voice. So women with high-pitched voices are more attractive, but not very professional or competent. Men with low-pitched voice are both professional, competent, and attractive.
So women have this double bind in a workplace where they have to adopt a lower-pitched voice to be taken seriously, but then their judge is less attractive. So what if you have a high voice with a little vocal fry? That gives you a little bit of two birds with one stone, right? Where you get this attractive rating with the higher-pitched voice, which is your more normal voice.
You have a little vocal fry on the end to kind of get that more professional urban feel, which is really how women hear that feature. And that kills the problem of being not attractive but professional or being not professional but attractive. So it's kind of a really cool solution, I think. Yeah, what you're saying there is other women seem to interpret vocal fry more positively than men do.
Is that right? Well, I think young men actually don't dislike it either. A lot of times what we see is the judgment of older speakers, particularly the ones that would listen to NPR. Not many of my 20-year-old males listen to NPR in my class, nor my females.
Not all of them. I'm sure there are some. But they tend to listen to a little different kind of more hip stuff. So when you get to be an older speaker, you have these ideas and norms in your head, and you might be more judgmental.
But young women hear vocal fry as urban, as professional, as sort of chill and relaxed, as intimate. So we find positive attributes with vocal fry among younger speakers. And those don't seem to translate so much to older speakers. And part of it is also just the fact that we dis women's voices in professional context.
So when women do it and we notice it, it's a bad thing. But if you look at longer-term research on vocal fry in British speakers, which is where it was first studied, British men actually use vocal fry at a rate of 3 to 10 times more than British women. So it wasn't considered an epidemic or sort of a vocal pandemic until women in America started doing it at a much higher rate. But in Britain, even today, it's still men that find more.
Are you familiar with David Putz? Do you know him? Evolutionary psychologist. Yes, I do.
I know. He's done a lot of research on voice and evolutionary theories of voice. Correct. Yeah, so he was on the show a little while ago, and he was telling me, I think his master's thesis, perhaps, or his PhD, was done on vocal pitch.
And he was looking at, he used this brilliant example from when he was at uni doing his undergrad. And apparently he was stood in a checkout queue, and there was a couple of guys behind him. And he heard how low both of their voices were and couldn't believe it. He thought, he's going to turn around and see these man mountains, or a guy with a Siamese twin that's got a second neck.
Like, it's impossible to have such a low voice. And he turned around, and it was just two normal dudes. But stood in between him and the normal dudes was a pretty hot girl. I was going to say, I'm sure there was a hot woman somewhere in this story.
Correct, yeah. Right. You know, interpretations of both prestige and dominance. Like, lower vocal pitch is associated with longer and bigger vocal folds, which is associated with being a bigger animal over time.
That's the same reason that before animals try to fight, they're actually going to growl or make roars at each other. This is how big I am. You don't want to fight me. Look at the amount of sound that I can make.
If you can hear the amount of sound, you don't want to come near these hands, bro. Yeah, I'm going to bang my chest while I make low, federal noises. Precisely, yeah. I actually saw a gorilla do that.
A silverback gorilla did that five yards away from me in the windy, impenetrable forest in Uganda. And that was not too much. It was just a little reminder that he wasn't happy that we were lurking around him. So I wanted to try to tie together a bunch of the different trends that we're seeing at the moment.
It seems like we're leaning toward less formal language. It seems to be like going toward an informal side of language is something that's happening at the moment. How much has social media contributed to the changes that we've seen in language? And given the fact that probably for the first time ever we have a high proportion of people communicating with each other non-verbally, probably ever, ever in history, ever, have you considered how this and the introduction of social media and its propagation and mass use has changed the way that people relate to each other linguistically?
Well, you know, that's a pretty new thing, social media. Of course, there have been studies on more sort of traditional forms of media. So television, for example, and radio, and started to look at how that affects speech. And certainly I think the last few years, the last several decades, not only has social media opened up the world, but transportation networks.
I mean, there really are no very few undiscovered parts and that you can't just go on vacation and hang out, right? So it's really changed massively our communication networks and how we talk to each other. So, you know, there have been some studies. I know the ones on television news about how that spreads changes.
And what we tend to find is television is one of those things, and social media is the same thing. It doesn't have natural social engagements in the way that everyday conversation does. And so if you stick a baby in front of, you know, TikTok, or if you stick a baby in front of Tom Brokaw, you know, some sort of television show, they're not going to learn language from that, not because they're not hearing it, but because they're not having engagement from it. And what we find with language is it's social engagement in an authentic kind of space that really leads to both child language acquisition being optimal and adult transmission of changes.
So most of the things we see on social media or most of the things that we see in the world on television are things that are already there at some low level, so they're already in the community. Television and social media doesn't invent anything, but what it does is disseminate it. So once it gets in a place where it's done by someone who has some sort of quality or some sort of emotional resonance with people, and they do something cool with their language, whether it's something they're aware of or not, then if I see it on social media and I'm sort of young and influenced easily, or even if I'm old and influenced easily, or they have some quality that I want in body, it's a very natural thing to kind of move towards that speech style or move towards that word or move towards the way that they physically move or the way they dress. And, of course, language operates the same.
So I would say that the impact social media has is one on dissemination, not innovation. So no one is doing things on social media and starting a trend in terms of language change. But what they're doing is they're disseminating changes that were in their communities. So I've got an example, and this is a really superficial one, but a good example is the word riz.
I don't know if you've heard that word. So if you have maximum riz, it means you're really sexy with the ladies. Generally, it was started by a young African American male, so it's usually used by men, and it became the TikTok storm. In fact, I know it because my kids were both joking about who has maximum riz in their high school.
And that just means, you know, you can just like look, serious riz is when you just look at someone, you know, with the sort of Zoolander gaze, and they come running to you. And in fact, there are all sorts of TikTok memes where boys would go in from the track team and be like giving them the eyeball, and then sort of all these track women start running toward them because he's at the finish line, not because he actually had riz. But then, you know, it kind of became a joke. Well, that went viral, and not in the community where it started, which was sort of the hip-hop African American kind of genre, but because that embodies something that a lot of young men want to emulate.
A lot of young white men love to talk with a hip-hop kind of vocabulary. So they pick up words like that to take those qualities of sort of machismo and toughness, which are actually stereotypes about the people that use it, not really why they use those features, but those are the stereotypes that young white men have about young African American men, that they're tough, and they have a lot of physicality, and they're hot with the ladies, and therefore we take those stereotypes, we see those features, and then we pick them up. And that is the power of social media, and it certainly has been very influential in that. I think the question you asked about informal language use is not something that social media has inspired.
That's been a tendency in our language over time. And if you think about the 18th and 19th century, who wants that kind of formality? I mean, it was the height of formality, where, you know, you had to wear like 50 layers, and you had to use these very, very extravagant politeness routines, and it took you forever to just get a coffee at Starbucks. I mean, it was a real pain in the ass.
Who needs that? And just like our forms of dress have become less formal, you know, so if you look at most workplaces, people don't wear two-piece suits anymore, not happy workplaces at least, but no one is saying, okay, my God, the downfall of man has happened because we're not wearing really uncomfortable suits and ties, and I think we have to look at language that way as well. There's nothing wrong with being less formal in our language, and really, formality in language is a relative cultural belief. If you look back to old English, the English accents were not the height of fashion or formality.
So, you know, more blood feuds and killing. So I'm sure they weren't saying, sir, kind sir, would you mind, shall we do this? I mean, they didn't say that kind of stuff. So they were very informal in their speech.
In fact, you didn't ask someone to do something. You told them to do it. You shall do X was how you would say it, not, would you mind, please, kind sir, do X. So that kind of really fancy formality is really something that was an early modern and early, early true modern period.
So it's really not the, you know, death of modern decorum. It's simply we've changed to be a more informal society, and language is changing with us. And still, when we go to formal cases, formal places, and give speeches or go to workplaces, we know how to ramp it up and be dressed up in our speech. So anybody who's worried about that, I think you can rest easy tonight.
The black Twitter to white boy pipeline for language is one that is not lost on me. words like bus in no cap um it's just it's i find it so funny and one of my friends is tapped in hard to black twitter and he will be able to tell me about trends that are going to happen six months before they do so there definitely is a trickle-down effect coming from black twitter one thing that i read uh probably about six months or a year ago now a judge in new york had had to work out the interpretation of an emoji because a big chunk of a case rested on what this emoji had meant in the form of a conversation i'm not surprised that probably did happen yes i haven't heard that specific case but we actually find a lot of hip-hop lyrics being used in criminal trials to the detriment of descendants usually because of this interpretation well a lot of times uh rappers for example will be put on trial and we're not talking about well big name rappers but just sort of everyday people that have rap as part of what they do and you know rap music is built on sort of the experience of being in a place where you know you're fearful for your life you're having to fight a lot of times it's sort of machismo as well it's rebuilding yourself up it's not truthful or necessarily reflective of anything that actually happened but lyrics can be very misogynistic and very violent and in cases where the hip-hop um sort of lyrics were done by the defendant they've been used in those trials to suggest that they were actually talking about what they had done uh this is not performance art this is an indication of what this person's true nature is like absolutely and not only that but actually we look at research on when defendants or witnesses use african-american english when giving their depositions or when being a witness at a trial or when speaking on their on behalf the outcomes for them tend to be much more negative than the outcomes for a speaker that would have used more mainstream english so there are a lot of problems with the way that we interpret african-american english even though we glorify in some context young white men love it um but what they don't do is recognize the negatives that are faced by people that use african-american english and can't just put it on the way that they do yeah part of the reason as well is with the the white guys on tiktok that using the language trickled down from black twitter is that it feels a little bit like a lap right it's them playing with the language as opposed to being locked into it as opposed to being almost native something else so one of the um one of my favorite stories i came up with i'd learned from a few years ago was the um development of goodbye going from god be with you to god be with ye to just goodbye have you got a favorite or any other favorite word stories of where something developed from that we all use nowadays well one of my favorite is um hello right because actually hello was in competition when the phone was first created as a way to answer and hello used to be used in british english for sailors a lot of time i'm sorry for sailors but for people that wanted to call to someone who was not near them so if someone's walking across the street you want to get their attention it would sort of be a way to yell out hello hello you're like look over here dude i'm here it wasn't a greeting in the way that we use it today and it certainly wasn't the way to answer the telephone but um i think it was alexander bell and thomas edison were having a little war at the beginning of the phone creation about what should be the way that you get someone's attention on the other line because the old phone lines didn't have a ring or anything you'd have to say something like someone would be walking through the house you'd be like hello hello pay attention so you'd say it because it was the same sort of attention getting device as yelling to someone on the street but alexander bell who had created a similar technology as edison but you know for competing i think it was on mobile right for a competing group he thought ahoy made more sense so people should say ahoy when they enter the phone because this is the way you greet you know people on a ship so he would answer the phone ahoy ahoy that was his attention getting way but obviously what happened is uh edison went out in the end and the reason is because in the first phone book when they were giving instructions about how to use the phone instead of ahoy they suggested hello and so that was really the way that hello one out for our attention when we wanted to talk on the phone or just now when we greet each other so we think of hello as being this really long-term formal way to do it but it's actually instead of ahoy which i think we should go back to ahoy because i kind of like that what about hi is hi short for hello i think i don't know the history of hi so much but i'm pretty sure it is short for hello i'm not sure i know i've read that but it's been a long time i'm trying to think about what ahoy and hello have in common they're both similar sounds they both don't have any hard like plosives or any of those fricatives or there's not it's the sort of thing i imagine you could shout at a pretty loud volume quite easily is that what's what's ahoy and hello what do they have in common well hello is voice right a lot of voiced sound which can be louder um and vowels which are the loudest and hi i think you know i'm i'd be curious i'll have to look up the history of hi and figure out how it happens but a lot of times something might be optimal in its full form but we as speakers tend to like to shorten things and so it probably just came up in sort of simple reading of the shortening of hello a lot of times what we'd see is these things happen when people are very intimate and they know each other well they sort of do these little cute shortenings of things and so hi probably evolved that way uh it's not that different than any other word that would have a vowel because all words have to have a vowel so hi on its own doesn't stand out more than any other word because basically hi is just a vowel sound hello has two syllables so we give you two chances to get someone's attention and else which starts the second syllable are tend to be louder than a voiceless consonant so that could be it but i don't know it from a sound symbolism standpoint that they studied hello there are a lot of interesting sound symbolism studies but um i don't think hello has been among them your area of work is absolutely fascinating i think it's so interesting to look at the it's almost like linguistic archaeology in a way it actually you know a lot of anthropologists study linguistics so linguistics in the specialty field i do is kind of a cross between sociology and linguistic anthropology so we look back in time and that's really cool some of the old socio-historical linguistics where they go back and we try to recreate how sound change happened by looking at written documents but in modern speech i get to go out and interview people and talk to them and figure out what they're doing differently so you know for example chris i could record you stick you on a machine and then sort of do an analysis of your vowels and sort of show just by looking at your vowels i'd be able to tell who's chris versus you know who's an american male just from where your vowels are positioned you know and plus your r list right so you delete your r's post vocalically have you not noticed that you've probably noticed something like the instead of there or here you don't have your r's that'll be northeast of the uk i managed to reintroduce i had a brutally bad glottal stop uh because yeah you don't have really glottal stops that stand out not too bad but that's me i've worked with a vocal coach miles for two years now um to try and just give myself a little bit more of a middle england i already did quite a lot i didn't have a massive northeast of the uk but when i was growing up i would miss the t's out of the word butter and i'd get slapped on the back of my wrist by my mom who would say there's two t's in butter christopher you're not pronouncing either of them um so which is just part of the course northeast of the uk that's the way that you would speak right well now if you're american you don't have any t's in that better oh it's these well it's actually called a flap it's actually called a flap but that's for a different episode so anyway that's an interesting right because you have the glottal stop which is a perfect example of a feature that has a really strong social stigma attached and what i study is why do we get these really strong social feelings about something that's a sound you know glottal stop is a sound and when you say the word up every english speaker if they say the word up actually has a glottal stop at the beginning of that word so think about up you can feel that your glottis catches right it's because you're making glottal stop so no one you know criticizes you when you're saying up but yet if you say but or what oh my god like you know linguistic argument argument argument argument no argument i can't even say that word it's linguistic hell so that's a perfect feature there that exemplifies why i study what i study okay but you gave a great example of your r so you said yes instead of years yes that's true another one is yeah i get the piss taken out we've been a lot of friends for years and years but it's years right and you know that's a fascinating one from a historical perspective because that is really sort of high class british speech right to drop your r's so if you have your r's not so not so fabulous in britain now in america if you drop your r's you're kind of pretentious and uppity or you're a new yorker right you're either a new englander and you're like a brahman you know kind of upper class or you're a new yorker and you just sound cool but generally americans don't do it but fascinating fact about those r's is british speakers until the 19th century did it because it was considered bad english to not have your r's but in the 19th century it flipped around because it started to be the way that speakers women particularly in court in the royal court spoke and then it became cool to drop your r's but prior to that you actually will find write-ups from the 1700s that criticized that nasty vulgar r-dropping that some british speakers i'm part of the new era of r-dropping okay you're the cool slav r-dropper thank you i knew you would understand all of the people in america that take a piss out of me for the way that i say yours no longer need to because i have the seal of approval from someone who's professional trained well i mean americans love british accents so i don't think you have to argue with that i in fact was talking to somebody very very successful who has a regional dialect he doesn't like and so on his voicemail he had a british speaker record it for him because you know british speech is so fancy well look if my accent is a competitive advantage over here then i'll take it as a win given the fact that i had to survive uh independence day last year which is very difficult for me personally obviously as i was watching watching your country dance on the ashes of mine's lost ambition but look where should people go if they want to check out more of the work that you do because this is fascinating well first of all it's been really fun to talk to you about it and uh yes i think if you're looking for a second career social linguistics would be for you but if people want to learn more about me they can obviously pick up my book which is like literally dude but you can also go to my website which is just valeriefreakland.com and you can read some of my other work and sort of learn about the types of research i do you can participate in a research study if you click on that link there's all sorts of fun to be had there valerie i appreciate you thank you sure thanks for having me