Language Log

According to Marissa Fessenden, "'Vocal Fry' Creeping into U.S. Speech", Science Now 12/9/2011:

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

This story has been picked up elsewhere, e.g. Cory Doctorow, "Deep-voiced 'vocal fry' thought to be creeping into American women's speech", BoingBoing 12/11/2011; Ben Flanagan, "Vocal Fry a new language fad mainly among college females", AI.com 12/12/2011; Meredith Engel, "Vocal fry: Your creaky throat noises are now an actual scientific trend", Jezebel 12/12/2011; "‘Vocal Fry’ Is the Hot New Linguistic Fad Among Women", Gawker 12/12/2011; Melissa Dahl, "More college women speak in creaks, thanks to pop stars", MSNBC 12/12/2011.

It's nice to see a piece of phonetics research getting this kind of play. But Fessenden's take on this story will be surprising to those who have looked at a few pitch contours — these "low creaky vibrations" have been  common since forever. And moderate use, especially at the ends of phrases, has never been considered a speech disorder.

Puzzlement increases after reading the cited paper.

The linguist Zellig Harris (he was Noam Chomsky's mentor and doctoral adviser) drew an important distinction between imitation and repetition. You can imitate the sound of anyone saying anything, even in a language you know nothing about, and you might even do it quite well, but you can only repeat something in a language that you know. When you repeat, you use the sound system (or at least, you can use it) in your own usual way. You know the phonemes of the language, and you know what is just linguistically insignificant low-level phonetic detail that you don't need to replicate. You know which utterance in your language you're repeating, and your target is to say that, and you have some license about doing it in your own voice, your own pronunciation of the language. It's not at all clear that Alice, the aggressive engineer in the Dilbert strip, has got this right:

Not long ago I went out to see Cockney comedian Micky Flanagan perform at the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh. (One man alone on stage with one microphone. His two-hour mission: to seek out new laughs and new ways to mock civilization; to boldly zing where no man has zinged before. Standup is the bravest of all the performing arts that don't involve a high wire.) Hearing that East London dialect again (I grew up in the London area) was like slipping into a comfortable old pair of shoes.

Flanagan says he was in a posh Italian restaurant in London and ordered the bruschetta for a starter, and the waiter had the nerve to correct his pronunciation. He had said -sh- for the -sch- part, and of course there were glottal stops where the geminate [t] should have been: [bɹʊˈʃɛʔɐ] is how he said it.

"Bruschetta, said the waiter; "Not broo-SHET-a: [bru&#x02C8sketta]. In our-a language, is pronounced, [bru&#x02C8sketta]."

And in a flash Flanagan retorted: "Yeah? Well in our language it's pronounced 'tomatoes on toast'."

Long-time readers will know that I sometimes attend films that I deem to be of linguistic interest and report on them for Language Log (here and here, for example). I attended another screening today: I went to see Johnny English Reborn.

Was there serious linguistic content to report on, you instinctively ask? Of course there was, of course there was. You surely cannot seriously think that I would attend a lowbrow Bond-spoofing comedy starring Rowan Atkinson and pretend there was linguistic interest just so that I could charge the price of my ticket on Language Log's corporate American Express card! Ha! No, no, no.

John Kingston's comment on "Jill Abramson's voice" (10/18/2010) suggests that what's going on in her final low-pitched syllables is a kind of difference tone, or "beat":

I wonder if the modulation is a rather extreme form of tremolo, which is a regular variation in level. Now, giving it a name doesn't explain how she does it, but in two-reed instruments it's a product of tuning them slightly differently, and as a result producing beats. The question then becomes how this could be produced with vocal fold vibration, in particular, how the vocal folds could be caused to vibrate at two frequencies at once about 25 Hz apart. I haven't got a clue, but suspect that it is related to the low F0 she produces at the same time.

The oscillation of the vocal folds is a physically complex phenomenon, and both in numerical simulations and in real observations, two or more different periodicities can sometimes be observed (though I have no idea whether that's what's behind the observed low-frequency modulation in Ms. Abramson's voice).

Ken Auletta, "Changing Times: Jill Abramson takes charge of the Gray Lady", The New Yorker 10/24/2011:

The first thing that people usually notice about Jill Abramson is her voice. The equivalent of a nasal car honk, it’s an odd combination of upper- and working-class. Inside the newsroom, her schoolteacherlike way of elongating words and drawing out the last word of each sentence is a subject of endless conversation and expert mimicry. When she appeared on television after her appointment as executive editor, the blogger Ben Trawick-Smith wrote, “Speech pathologists and phoneticians, knock yourself out: what’s going on with Abramson’s speech?” He was deluged with responses. One speculated that, like a politician, she had trained herself to limit the space between sentences so that it would be hard to interrupt her; another said she had probably acquired the accent in an attempt to not sound too New York while she was an undergraduate at Harvard. The writer Amy Wilentz, a college roommate of Abramson’s, has said that the accent probably has something to do with trying to sound a bit like Bob Dylan.

The cited blog post is  "Jill Abramson’s Accent", The dialect blog 7/28/2011. LLOG readers were apparently all playing beach volleyball that week, and so no one drew my attention to Ben Trawick-Smith's plea for assistance.

A couple of days ago, Greta van Susteren interviewed Sarah Palin on Fox ("'Maverick' Palin vs. 'Quasi Reality Show'", 9/27/2011).  Out of the whole 16-minute segment, one word got the lion's share of the coverage.  Thus Sheila Marikar, "Sarah Palin: ‘Is a Title and Campaign Too Shackle-y?’", ABC News 9/27/2011:

A Palin presidency: Too “shackle-y?”

That’s what Sarah Palin suggested on Fox News’ “On The Record with Greta VanSusteren” tonight […] “Is a title worth it?” she asked, rhetorically. “Does a title shackle a person? Are they someone like me who’s maverick? I do go rogue and I call it like I see it and I don’t mind stirring it up in order to get people to think and debate aggressively.”

“Is a title and a campaign too shackle-y?,” she continued.

Reader KR asks:

How can I prove to an acquaintance that the word "truck" in English is standardly pronounced with an intial "ch" sound?

KR presupposes a conclusion that's a bit over-simplified. There's some variation here, and I don't think we have very good evidence about the distribution and relative frequency of the variants. But he's basically right: the initial consonant of "truck" in American English is often (usually?) palatal or at least post-alveolar rather than alveolar, and its release is often (usually?) strongly affricated.  And in some pronunciations at least, the /t/ and the /r/ are completely co-articulated as a sort of labialized retroflex affricate.

Reader SL asks for intervention in an disagreement about whether newspapers should use "gonna" in quotations:

I got in an argument with a colleague, who used to be a journalist, even, about this. She said there is nothing wrong with transcribing what someone says accurately. My point is that this is a clear case of diglossia in English; everyone always says "gonna" but it should always be written as "going to". She disagreed, and I said, "Well, I'm going to write to Language Log about that." Actually, I said "I'm gonna", but I wouldn't write that.

Jason Eisner writes:

Language Log readers might enjoy the syllabic /l/ extravaganza from the most recent Prairie Home Companion.

Another volcano in Iceland is erupting. But the projected effect on air travel is less serious than the disruptions caused by last year's Icelandic eruption:

University of Iceland geophysicist Magnus Tumi Gudmundsson said this eruption, which began Saturday, was Grimsvotn's largest eruption for 100 years.

"(It was) much bigger and more intensive than Eyjafjallajokull," the volcano whose April 2010 eruption shut down airspace across Europe for five days, he said.

"There is a very large area in southeast Iceland where there is almost total darkness and heavy fall of ash," he said. "But it is not spreading nearly as much. The winds are not as strong as they were in Eyjafjallajokull."

He said this ash is coarser than last year's eruption, falling to the ground more quickly instead of floating vast distances.

The projected disruption of newsreader self-confidence is also less serious this time, since the names involved are shorter and less confusing to non-Icelanders — the glacier that the vocano is erupting through, for example, is Vatnajökull rather than Eyjafjallajökull.

Time for some pop-music phonology! Erin McKean directs our attention to a video for "Saskia Hamilton," a song by Ben Folds and Nick Hornby from their 2010 album Lonely Avenue. The video is performed by Charlie McDonnell, known on YouTube as "charlieissocoollike."

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1JP5lUN_4Eo

A striking recent paper by Quentin Atkinson ("Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa", Science 4/15/2011) has been the subject of a lot of discussion recently. Its abstract:

Human genetic and phenotypic diversity declines with distance from Africa, as predicted by a serial founder effect in which successive population bottlenecks during range expansion progressively reduce diversity, underpinning support for an African origin of modern humans. Recent work suggests that a similar founder effect may operate on human culture and language. Here I show that the number of phonemes used in a global sample of 504 languages is also clinal and fits a serial founder–effect model of expansion from an inferred origin in Africa. This result, which is not explained by more recent demographic history, local language diversity, or statistical non-independence within language families, points to parallel mechanisms shaping genetic and linguistic diversity and supports an African origin of modern human languages.