For some time now, linguists have been studying a style of speaking known as creaky voice. In the United States, it’s heard particularly heard among young white women in urban areas. New research about this phenomenon, also known as vocal fry, has been making the rounds on the internet. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Creaky Voice”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. It’s back!
Oh.
I’m talking about the style of speaking that’s sometimes called creaky voice.
Now, Grant, we talked about this before on the show a couple of years ago.
Often when you hear somebody doing this, they’ll start out talking normally, but as the sentence goes on, their voice kind of drops and dissolves into something more like this.
Right. They sound a little more serious or a little more confidential, right?
Yeah, something like that.
And we talked about the fact that it’s also known as vocal fry, which is a term I love, that fluttering of the vocal cords, because it sounds like frying, right?
And this is something that we all do to some extent.
But it seems that there’s something going on among some young American women when it comes to creaky voice.
In fact, we had that caller who called us and said, I think I’m going crazy because I feel like I’m the only one who notices this.
He mentioned the Olsen twins specifically.
There are different celebrities who do this.
People have mentioned Lady Gaga in the past.
And creaky voice has been back in the news lately because of a new study.
Researchers at Long Island University in New York listened to recordings of 34 young women reading aloud, and they found that more than two-thirds of them used vocal fry, mostly at the end of their sentences.
And it’s a small sample, of course.
Right. It’s a starting point.
Yes, yes. But news reports of it caught fire. It was all over the Internet for a while.
But it’s not exclusively a new trend, right? We’ve got academics studying this for decades. It’s just that now we have new tools and new ways of figuring out what’s happening.
Yes. And I think it’s one of those things where if you notice it, then you start to hear it everywhere.
And one of the researchers noted, and I think this makes sense, that she said young students tend to use it when they get together. Maybe this is a social link between members of a group.
Because I’ve certainly heard it among young white urban women. Of that particular age. Very interesting stuff. We’ve got all of these different trends and language. Sometimes we can pin them down to groups. Sometimes we can’t. It’s kind of nice when you can, right?
But why young women? Why not young men? That’s a great question. I think in Britain, it’s more common among young men. It makes sense to me that maybe it functions as slang, you know, in that it forms the group, right? If we’re all doing this thing together, then we are like one another and we know that we belong.
Interesting stuff. Very cool.
We’ll post links to the science article about Volkl Fry and we’ll post some links to the commentary among linguists about this. You’ll find that all on our website at waywordradio.org.
