AOTA-231117 - Sociolinguist Dr. Valerie Fridland

This week on Out of the Air, our whole program features University of Nevada at Reno professor of linguistics, Dr. Valerie Friedland, a sociolinguist, discussing her book, Like Literally Dude, Arguing for the Good in Bad English, exploring through a series of stories about the historical origins and social uses of an array of annoying language features. Our spotlight is on the Port County Symphony Orchestra's Holiday Practice Concert on December 9th. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. You're in the know with Esther and Larry, out on the air today. They're in the know with Larry and Esther, out on the air our way. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. Express yourself you are, and show the world your heart. Welcome. You're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, WVLP 103.1 FM, our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond. I'm Larry Breckner of New Perspectives Photography, right alongside here with Esther Golden of The Nest in Michigan City. Aloha, everyone. We're your hosts for Art on the Air. Art on the Air is supported by an Indiana Arts Commission Arts Project Grant, South Shore Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Art on the Air is heard every Sunday at 7 p.m. on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, also streaming live at lakeshorepublicmedia.org, and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast. Also heard on Friday at 11 a.m. and Monday at 5 p.m. on WVLP 103.1 FM, streaming live at wvlp.org, and Tuesdays at 4 p.m. on WDSO 88.3 FM. Our spotlight interviews are also heard Wednesdays on Lakeshore Public Media. Information about Art on the Air is available at our website, breck.com slash AOTA. That includes a complete show archive, spotlight interviews, plus our show is available on multiple podcast platforms, including NPR One. Please like us on Facebook, Art on the Air, WVLP, for information about upcoming shows and interviews. I'd like to welcome back from Art on the Air Spotlight, the Executive Director of the LaPorte County Symphony, Emily Iannis. Welcome back to Art on the Air Spotlight. Thanks so much. Glad to be here. Well, you had a busy time. You just had a concert not that long ago that was your first subscription concert, as well as the Children's Drayton concert. So tell us a little bit about both those events. We sure did, yes. On October 11th, we had roughly 5,000 children enter the LaPorte Civic Auditorium over the course of the day. Three concerts, and it was just fantastic to watch them interact with the music. I told the symphony, this may be the only time as classical musicians you get to feel like rock stars, because the kids were literally cheering, like it was a rock concert, when they would play the Star Wars theme and the Super Mario theme, and it was just very cool to witness that. And so memorable for them, as well. Oh, yes. And that concert, you have time for like an instrument petting zoo or anything like that? Not for that one, but we did have one at our November 4th concert that was sponsored by Quinlan and Favish, and that's a very popular thing. They get to put their hands on the instruments, try it out, try playing one, and kids just love that, and some adults, too. So tell us about that concert on November 4th. How did that go? Yeah, it went really well. We had two incredible guest artists, Sally Koo on violin and Chester Englander on cymbalom, and it was just really great to hear them play with our orchestra, and it sounded fantastic. That's great. You're coming up to the Holiday Pops concert, and this one, Carolyn is stepping aside and handing the baton to the associate director, so tell us a little bit about that. That's right, yeah. Chuck actually retired last season as associate conductor, but he is making a guest appearance this year. He is just beloved, especially in this program. He does such a great job putting the Holiday at the Pops together. So Chuck's deck will be conducting, and it will be its usual festive, exciting, kind of a mishmash of popular tunes, a few classical tunes, lots of pop fun. We are going to have a few special guests, so you can maybe imagine who those special guests might be, and then some might be a real surprise, so we're excited about that. We're also going to have the Illuminations Choir back with us, singing on a few of the numbers, and I actually am going to be singing solo as well, so you'll get to hear your truly singing. Oh, excellent. So my LCSO debut. Yeah, we were excited when we first interviewed you that you'd get a chance to perform, and then just glad that that's happening already. Yeah, I'm excited. Chuck asked me, and Chuck and I were colleagues at VU for many years, and so he wanted to get me up there and singing with the orchestra. That's fantastic. And he hasn't revealed his entire program yet. Not his entire program, but I can tell you they're playing a suite from the Polar Express, which I think will be really popular. And I'll divulge what I'm singing, the soprano classic, O Holy Night. Oh, beautiful. In a very high key so that everyone can enjoy that high B-flat. Well, it's great that you get to perform. So outside of the holiday season, what are some other things coming up for the orchestra? Yeah, so we have our second subscription concert coming up in February at the Holdcraft Center in Michigan City, and that is going to be a side-by-side concert with a twist. Last year's side-by-side was with the LaPorte High School Symphony, playing alongside our symphony. And this year we're welcoming the area music educators to come in and play. These are people who maybe haven't picked up their instrument in a while, or they're working on brushing up their skills, and their students will be able to see them play, so practice what they preach, on stage next to the LCSO. So we're really excited about that opportunity to work with local music educators. And then you have something that's kind of into the popular music realm for your next event, I think. Yeah, well, so we do have another classical one in between. We have the March concert, which is classical, and we have a guest composer in residence, Ingrid Stoltzl, who's going to be here, and we're going to play one of her original compositions. And then in April we are going to have Beatlemania. So we're very excited. We have this classical mystery tour, which is a Beatles cover band, complete with costumes and with orchestra accompaniment, and it should just be a really fun, fun time, hearing all those Beatles tunes orchestrated and played by our symphony. Programming for next season, has that even started yet, or is it a little too early? It's a little too early, not quite yet. But we hope to start in late December, early January. So it won't be too long before we're thinking about it. And I know that Carolyn already has some ideas brewing, as do I. So we're very excited. Maybe briefly tell us about that process, you know, how that works. Yeah, so usually Carolyn puts something together, and with input from the executive director, Tim would always have some input on that. So I'm really looking forward to that aspect of the position. And then she would share that with our performance committee. So we have a performance committee made up of board members, LCSO musicians, and myself. And so the performance committee will review her recommendations and maybe say, you know, we'd like to hear something a little more popular, or we'd like to hear something in this genre. And so just kind of getting that input from a larger group is really helpful. And so then after the performance committee deliberates on it, ultimately it's the executive director and the music director who make the decision, but definitely not without lots of input. Quickly, information about where people can find the LaPorte County Symphony and the upcoming concert. That's right. You can purchase tickets online, lcso.net. For the Christmas concert, we have main floor seats available for $75. Those table seats go fast. So be sure to pop online and get your seats. Balcony seats for adults are $25, and balcony seats for children are $10. All can be purchased online, lcso.net. That's Emma Yiannis, executive director for the LaPorte County Symphony. Thank you so much for coming on Art on the Air Spotlight. Thank you for having me. Thank you. Art on the Air Spotlight and the complete one-hour program on Lakeshore Public Media is brought to you by McAuley Real Estate in Valparaiso, Olga Patrician, Senior Broker. This is Karen Maravilla with It's Just Serendipity, and you're listening to Art on the Air on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM and on WVLP, 103.1 FM. We would like to welcome Dr. Valerie Friedman to Art on the Air. Valerie is a professor of linguistics in the English department at the University of Nevada, Reno. As a sociolinguist, with her main focus on varieties of American English, the work explores the links between social factors and speech processing. Valerie has written and co-authored many publications, including a monthly language blog in Psychology Today called Language in the Wild. She also has a video lecture series entitled Language and Society, released by The Great Courses. Her most recent book is Like Literally Dude, Arguing for the Good in Bad English. Thank you for joining us on Art on the Air. Aloha and welcome, Valerie. Hi, happy to be here. Well, Valerie, we're so happy to have you on. I have to, by way of disclosure, heard your interview on 1A, and that's what inspired me to get in touch with you. I first sent you an email telling you about that, and I said, well, we have a broad definition of art on our show, so we thought this would be good. We had authors on, but I thought, yeah. Linguistics and the history of English especially has been one of my personal favorites. But what we want to know first is about you, your kind of personal journey, your origin story, which I think is very interesting because it was also in the book. I would like to see how you got from where you were to where you are now. So, Valerie, tell us about that journey. Well, sure. Well, where I'm now, of course, is as a sociolinguist, and I'm an academic, but I started off as a kid like everybody else who never thought or heard the word sociolinguist in their life. So clearly that wasn't my five-year-old plan. I wanted to be an astronaut or a doctor or something much more simple at that point in terms of pronunciation at least. But my parents moved to the United States right before they had me. I was actually the first member of my family born in the United States. My father was Belgian by way of Israel, actually. He grew up in Israel. And then my mother was French-Canadian, so French was their first language and English was their second language. We moved to the South in, well, let me just say a while ago. I'm not going to date myself. But it was a time when there weren't a lot of foreigners in the South, and, you know, as Southerners go, they're lovely and very polite and warm, but they also tend to have a really in-group mentality so that if you're not Southern and you don't sound like a Southerner, you stand out. I was a young child, but even at that time, my speech sort of sounded a little bit more like my parents when I was, you know, 4, 5, 6. And I remember friends saying things about either the way my parents would say words or the way I would say them that made me feel different. It made me notice language had power. It had social power. It had social power to make me belong or make me not belong. And I think that's what really piqued my interest in languages, that and the fact that my parents often spoke French when they didn't want me to know what they were saying. So I was really interested in learning to speak French just so that I could understand where the ice cream was or what they were going to do to me when I was bad, because that was all a French discussion. So I went away to Georgetown for my undergrad, and I studied languages. That was my major. So I was in the School of Languages and Linguistics. I had never heard of linguistics at that point, no idea what it meant. But as a requirement of my major, I had to take a linguistics course. I had to take several, actually. And my first linguistics course, I remember sitting in the classroom, and my mind was blown because it made me understand so much about language I hadn't understood before, about the ways that we use messaging that is over above the informational content of what we're going to say. So if I say, you know, get out of here, that says move your body into a different room. But rarely is that all it's saying. It can be an angry word when you're upset with each other. Get out of here. And that's communicated by the context in which you speak it and the way you say it. Or it can be a sort of joking, you know, like dismissal, like, oh, get out of here. Again, the same thing can communicate so many different messages, and I had never really understood the power of language to do that, the power of language to not just share information, but share social belonging, social exclusion, social facts and meaning about us. And that really changed the course of my life, that one first course, because after that I decided to go on and study more linguistics, and when I was basically deciding whether I wanted to get a job or go to grad school after school, I decided to go to grad school in linguistics, and that was what set me on my journey. Because what you just said about community and group, so when you have a varied background, let's say you kind of grew up in the South but then moved to the Midwest, your roommate was from Boston, you pick up the phrases that make you belong in that particular culture sometimes, like in the South you pick up y'all, and in the West it was you bet, and it's kind of interesting how, while we don't imitate the actual sound of the language, we pick up these other clues in societies that help us belong in those communities. Absolutely, language is a huge sign of belonging, and your choice to either assimilate to another group in language in terms of what you just were saying, saying y'all or you bet, or not to do it can also speak volumes. There are numerous studies on what's called accommodation theory in language, which suggests that when two people are in conversation, they do things to adjust to each other's speech, and it can be things like you're talking about where someone's saying y'all, and so I start saying y'all, and that shows that we're aligned, and we're trying to express companionship and community, but it actually can be even more subtle things like the pitch or tone of a voice, so if someone's speaking with a higher pitch, I actually might adjust my pitch a little bit higher to meet their pitch, or I might even start to say sounds a little more like they're articulating them. Without even realizing I'm doing this, when we measure people in conversation, the more interested they are in talking to each other and sharing a space and thoughts, the more their speech assimilates, the more their speech accommodates to the other one, and you could even speak different languages and do this, where you start to mimic the tempo and the speed at which each other is talking, but we also find when there's disassimilation, meaning you don't like someone, you do just the opposite, and sometimes at a level you don't even realize, so I think it's really important to understand how much our language communicates even at a subconscious level. You know, and the story about that is, of course, living in the Chicago area, the old Mayor Daley used to deliver two different things. He had kind of his normal polished politician, but then when he didn't want to talk to the media sometimes, he would switch to his Bridgeport accent, like very, very hard, so that's very true. Well, I had a question about your academic background. I saw that you went from a bachelor's to a PhD, and then maybe tell our audience about what a sociolinguist is. Sure, yes. My bachelor's was simply in languages and linguistics. It was with Chinese as my focus, but when I went to grad school, I did a theoretical linguistics degree, which means I studied the underlying structure of language, so when I'm talking about sounds as a linguist, I'm talking about what does the brain do with sounds? What sounds might you be born with? How do babies acquire sounds? Why do sounds differ across languages? Can we predict what are the most natural sounds by how many languages share those things? How does English build its sentences compared to German, for example, where we were just talking about that before we went on air, where German has inflectional markers and a different kind of structure than English does, which uses word order to let us know who's doing what to whom. So those are the types of things you study as a theoretical linguist. As a sociolinguist, which was the specialty I ended up in, I'm really interested in how those small aspects, like the way you make your sounds, the inflections you add to your nouns, the way that you structure your sentences in certain ways. For example, if you say something like, go do this versus, hey, do you mind going to do this? So whether I say it as an imperative or a question, how those things are driven by our social relationships and social facts about us. So how our society, and being a member of society in certain ways, actually impacts language structure and vice versa. And that's pretty much what I study as a sociolinguist. So interesting, because I've always found words so delicious. And when I'm stuck writing a poem or something, I will stop by writing my favorite words. And they're not always words. I'm not talking about the meaning. I'm talking about the roundness of the words and the way they actually feel in my mouth and my head, which is so interesting with what you just said. I just love words so much. Well, I know you often focus on art, and it's really interesting because what you're talking about, the feel of the word or the feel of the sound, we have these really interesting underlying predispositions to feel certain ways about certain words and certain sounds. And there's a whole field of linguistics that looks at that called sound symbolism. And sound symbolism looks at what kind of inherent or intrinsic meaning certain sounds might carry. Because it makes sense a word has meaning because we use words to describe things around us. But it doesn't really make sense to say, no, that sound feels good or that sound sounds good or that sound reminds me of something. Right? That seems arbitrary. But actually, if we look at different speakers that speak different languages and we ask them to identify objects with nonsense words, we can actually push them to identify certain objects by certain nonsense words because of the correlations of sounds in those words. And what you said about that feels rounder. For example, if you say a word like booba, booba, that tends to correlate with rounder sounds. So even though that's not a word in English, if we ask English speakers to label either a circle or a square with the word booba, they have a statistical tendency to label the round sound. And why is that? Well, you're rounding your lips when you say that word. Another thing is, why do you say cheese when you're smiling for a camera? Right? Cheese. It's because it helps show your teeth. But what's really interesting is you actually are activating the muscles, the same muscles when you say the word cheese because of the E vowel, as the muscles when you smile. And we find that people actually report feeling happier when they say words like cheese because it seems to activate this muscle memory of smiling. So there's really some interesting connectedness between the way we feel and our emotional response to things and the words we use to describe it, particularly the sound. Cheese equals oxytocin. Yeah. Exactly. Well, in your book, like literally, dude, you have, well, there's so much in there, but we'll try to hit some of the high points. You talk about discourse markers like the, and of course in radio we have this problem, and I do sometimes edit this, like the ums and uhs and everything like that. But also address that, and I'll call it the modern vowel shift. I think that's kind of interesting. There was the great vowel shift like the, what, 1400s or 1700s or something like that. But tell us about some of those things before we move into that, and even semantic bleaching. Oh, sure. I mean, there's so many things to talk about. I'll have to try to hold myself back from talking too much about any one. But, yes, the book does cover sort of all the features we love to hate. So, you know, of course the title, like literally, dude, are three features that people comment a lot. The overuse of like is one I hear a lot about. In fact, that's sort of what inspired me to write the book because so many people ask me about that, and I realize that most everyday speakers don't have access to the history and the evolution of things like discourse markers, things like the way we use like, and they believe things about it that are often erroneous. And discourse markers are things that have been in our language since Old English. In fact, the discourse marker the, which meant essentially then or next or, yeah, I'm getting to something, it occurs so often in medieval manuscripts that it basically has been assigned with no meaning because it just seemed to be a structuring or sequencing device, much like modern like is often accused of. So the idea that these are new is wrong. Like itself is not new. Like has existed since about the 1700s in our speech as a discourse marker. So these things are mistakes we make when we judge things on the values we assign them today without looking at the history and their purpose. But um and ah are great, and in fact, I've done a lot of interviews for this book, and I had someone the other day tell me, I listened to you in this interview, and it's amazing you didn't use any ums or ahs. And I laughed, and I said, I probably did, but they took them out because, as you said, in radio and broadcasting, ums and ahs are anathema, right? No one wants them in there because they seem to signal that you're doing something wrong or you don't know what you're going to say or you're uncertain or you're hesitating and people don't like that. But when we actually look at ums and ahs and the science behind them, both how we use them and how we perceive them, it is astounding how useful and purposeful they are, both to a speaker and a listener. So there's three really quick things I can tell you about your ums and ahs. One is that when we look at when people use them, they tend to use them before more infrequent, less common, more difficult words or larger syntactic structures, which is why we use them often at the beginning of a sentence because we're building this very large syntactic structure in our brain, and the um and ah are just a pause as our brain is really doing this hard cognitive lifting. So the deeper in thought we are, the more we're working hard cognitively, the more likely the um and ah. So that means people are doing work for you in conversation. The second thing is um signals to a listener that you're going to take a longer delay than ah. So when we measure how long it takes someone to start talking again after an um or ah, we find a significant correlation between pause length afterwards and whether they use an um or an ah. So ah is like, I'm just going to be a second. Um is like, hold on, go get a sandwich because I'm going to be a while. So it's actually useful. It's useful, right? It's information your listener can use. And then the final really amazing things about um and ah is that they seem to actually help a listener remember what you say better. When we give a pop quiz to participants in an experiment on things they heard in the experiment, and in the experiment, if we had used an um or an ah before that word and then we pop quizzed them on it later, they remember it better when it was preceded by an ah. So that tells us it seems to ramp up my cognitive processing when I know you're thinking hard about something. So it's really funny that we hate them so much when they're doing really, really good work for us. That was question number one I think you asked. There's several more things in there. Well, and I talked about the vowel shift, maybe what's happening with that, and semantic bleaching. I mean, there's so many things we can talk about, but those are two ones that I, that come out to me to pop out. Well, I'm really glad you asked about the vowel shift because you have a wonderful example of something called the northern cities vowel shift going on in your speech. So especially in Chicago, in the northern cities, in areas like Detroit, Chicago, upstate New York, we hear vowels changing in a way that's making them actually more distinct from vowels in other regions. Even though we tend to think of our language getting more similar because of media and travel, we are getting more similar in the big things. So a lot of non-southerners, for example, will say y'all, so those are easy to transmit. But we're actually getting more different in some little things that keep us apart, which are our vowel sounds. And think of how often you use a vowel. Pretty much every single word you say has a vowel in it. So if you're changing your vowel very subtly in one word, you're changing it in hundreds of words you use a day. So the impact of that difference is pretty big. So for example, in the northern cities shift, one of the most famous examples of it is the at vowel, like the word cat, gets raised, meaning the tongue is lifted higher than it is traditionally in that vowel. So you have things like cat, can, right? And I know in the northern cities, when I lived in Michigan, every time I heard this one commercial for Annie Ray and Betsy Ray Chevrolet, it was Annie Ray and Betsy Ray Chevrolet. I was like, oh my gosh, I can't stand it. It's so high. So that's the northern city shift. And I had already noticed in your speech that you definitely have a raised at vowel when you say words like that. Now I'm going to do a little test, and I want you to say these two. I'm going to spell the words. I want you to say them back to back, and then I'm going to tell you about why that's important from a vowel shift perspective. So get ready. I'm spelling the first word, and then the second word, and I want you to say them back to back. The first word is C-O-T. Cat. Cat. Okay, and the second word is C-A-U-G-H-T. Caught. Okay, now say those together. Caught. Caught. Okay, do you say them the same way, Esther? No, they're different. Okay, say them again, the first one and the second one. Caught and caught. Okay, what's interesting is she actually has the same, she has a merger. You do not have a merger. So that's called the low back vowel merger. What's really interesting is northern city speakers have two distinct vowels, which are historically the accurate vowels. So C-O-T, I don't say them because I'll prime you to say it a certain way, so that's why I spelled them out. But the word C-O-T is historically a different vowel than C-A-U-G-H-T. Other words with those contrasts are words like collar that a dog wears and a collar on a telephone. I have the merger. So it's collar, collar. Collar, collar. Traditionally those are different, but for speakers that have the shift, which are speakers that live on the West Coast and in the Midwest, they don't distinguish between those vowels. And that's also a big vowel change that's happening separating speakers in the United States. So if you're from the Midwest or the West Coast, you typically will not have a difference in those vowels. They have merged, these historical classes that are usually distinct. But if you live in Chicago or New York or Boston, you will have very distinct vowels. So that is why you have very distinct vowels. Esther, where are you from? So many places. The South, the Midwest, the Pacific. So that exactly is blank. So just right there, from just that one vowel, that little test, I can tell that you are not from the same area because he has the merger and you don't. So that's another big vowel shift that's happening and that one is called the low back vowel merger shift, which is a mouthful. So this is interesting. So where did I, and I've, you know, it's been noticed in myself and my children because they got it from me. I pronounce those T's. I say butcher, watcher. And I've always been, I called out on it. So where did I pick that up? And could it be when your parents are non-native speakers, do they enunciate much more carefully than when they learn the language? You know, I would hesitate to say that's a better enunciation because what it is, it's a different enunciation. So American English speakers have what's called a flap in those words. So words like butter or button or kitten, right? Typically between a stressed and an unstressed syllable, T's become flaps. So instead of the meeting of the tongue to the alveolar ridge, which is how you make a T, so if you do a T sound, ta, ta, ta, you can feel it hits that alveolar ridge and it stays there for just a minute. But between a stressed and an unstressed syllable, because you have to move so rapidly and there's a lack of stress on the second syllable, your tongue doesn't make full contact with the alveolar ridge. Instead, it flaps it. It just flaps it. So we call it an alveolar flap. So it actually is a different sound and it's typical of American English speakers in that context. If you're British, however, you do not do that. British speakers don't use a flap in that context. The alternation they make is if you're a speaker of standard Southern British English, you make a T sound. Butter, kitten. If you're a Cosmese speaker, you use a glottal stop. Button, butter. And so we get butter and kitten or butter and kitten or butter kitten, depending on which dialect you speak. So as an American English speaker, if that's in your speech, there's usually one of two reasons why it would happen. One is that you have non-native speaker parents and they have that T, which may mean that they don't necessarily need to speak British English, but they see the spelling and they might have learned from a British English speaker or learned from other models and they don't have the flap as a natural rule. That's an American English rule. So they pronounce it as its original form, which would be T. Or it could be that you have a spelling pronunciation. So often we find that when people are well-educated and do a lot of reading, they will add things to their speech because of the spelling, even though the actual word is differently pronounced if you weren't relying on the spelling. So a lot of times people will say butter because they have seen it spelled and it's called a hypercorrection. So you're actually correcting what you think that should be, even though it actually goes against the American English speech rule. So there are a number of different reasons why you might have it. You're listening to Art on the Air with our guest today, Dr. Valerie Friedland, on Lakeshore Public Media, 89.1 FM, and on WVLP, 103.1 FM. We hit semantic bleaching, but the one thing I thought would be very interesting for our broadcast audience is about vocal fry and how, especially in broadcasting, how women get sort of less important for them. And the only comment I have on that is like in the early days of broadcasting, the frequency range of what's broadcasting was not very wide, so the higher frequencies were lost. But nowadays, of course, you have the full frequency, but tell about vocal fry and what that means. Sure. You know, I think it's really fascinating the correlation between vocal fry and broadcasting, and it's absolutely true. Historically speaking, women were not liked on the airwaves for many reasons. One is, historically, women's voices weren't really welcome in public forums, and we find that going back to antiquity in Greek and Roman times. And so that's continued, and broadcasting was no different. But part of the reason for that is that the women's voices are at higher pitches, and they tend not to broadcast as well for just the reasons that the spectrum wasn't represented then. So there were a long pressure on women to lower their voices in professional circles, but particularly in broadcasting, where they were often described in the 60s and 70s as being shrill and painful to listen to. And so, of course, we hear a lot of women that in the early years of broadcasting would even say, I purposely tried to lower my voice. And, you know, Margaret Thatcher is also another good example of someone in a position of power, a woman in a position of power, who felt that to get authority in her voice, she had to lower her voice pitch. So she worked with a speech coach to try to get that to happen, and, in fact, did lower her voice about 30 or 40 hertz over the course of her career. We also see some studies done on women's voices over the last 50 years that have found a more general trend of women having slightly lower pitched voices over time. Now, what has been the big shift in the last 30, 40 years? Well, women have entered professions like broadcasting at much higher numbers than they were before, but they have also faced a lot of prejudice and bias in those areas, in part because they're often treated as hesitant, weaker, less certain. There are so many studies on voice pitch and voice quality that show us that when you have different pitches, it really creates differences in the personal attributes that people assign to those speakers. So higher pitched voices tend to get associated with weakness, hesitancy, incompetence. Lower pitched voices are unanimously judged as more dominant, more competent, more professional. So here you have the perfect storm of women entering professions like broadcasting and professional jobs in greater numbers, but their voice is still being criticized for being too low and not appropriate for those contexts in terms of having dominance and professionalism. So a solution is to lower your pitch, but the problem is women also get judged about attractiveness and sociability by their voice. And if we do studies on vocal pitch with men and women, what we find is that men get both professionalism and attractiveness with lower pitched voices. Women get professionalism with lower pitched voices, but attraction with higher pitched voices. So vocal fry is a wonderful way of combining a traditionally higher pitched voice with a descent into a lower pitch at the end of an intonational phrase to accommodate this need to be both attractive and professional and competent. And if you ask those young women who vocal fry, and that's that really kind of scratchy, sort of staccato voice that often accompanies the drop of a pitch like this where I get a low crackly voice and my tone of voice, most young women say it sounds urban and professional to them and kind of relaxed. A lot of older speakers that don't like that attribute of women's voices hear it a very different way. But I think what we have to remember is being put into play because of the position we've historically put women in and it's a great compromise solution for them. It's interesting that you say that because when so many times women, and this is just like I guess historically that lower voice, while you're saying it's authoritative, it's also considered very sexy as well. And so you've got that kind of dual thing happening, I think. Well, I think especially if it's breathy. So breathy, low pitch voices, which is, so all of this is made in the larynx. So the difference between a normal pitch voice and a vocal fry voice and a breathy voice is all how the larynx, which is sort of where your vocal folds are, how it's positioned. So you have these vocal flaps and they can do different things. They're sort of like little muscles. You can bunch them up and make them thicker. And that's how we adopt vocal fry is when you start pushing air through it at a slower rate and then you bunch them up and they're heavy, they kind of go blomp, blomp, blomp, blomp. Kind of like when you're boiling oil versus water. You know, the oil boils thicker because it's thicker. Same thing with your vocal folds and it gives off that vocal fry. Breathiness is actually where you pull the vocal folds together and then you leave a little hole at the bottom, like you open a little space and the air flows through at the same time while you're speaking so it gives off that breathy, sexy kind of Marilyn Monroe voice. And then normal phonation, normal position for voice is simply where you're just holding your vocal folds fairly long and tense and that just gives your, we call it modal phonation. That just gives your normal voice pitch. So you can do a bunch of different things with your larynx that gives rise to different vocal attributes that then get assigned with different kinds of social meaning depending on how they've been used historically. So Marilyn Monroe had a very, very breathy voice. Mae West had a very, very breathy voice. Often it is also lower pitched but it's a little different than the vocal fry that women are using at the end of their intonation patterns. Like I just did vocal fry right there at the end of my intonation. Interesting, in the book you brought up that section, I think it was on the movie My Cousin Vinny and how he was, like no matter how impassioned or correct his message is, the way it was heard then changes the way people or the way people feel about things. Language is just so fascinating. And it changes the impact as well. So no matter what he said it was going to not be heard the way he was intending it to be heard. Absolutely, because language is not just in the mouths of speakers it's in the minds of listeners. One thing I think is important for us to know about is the history of how new words and new things get adopted. I know a little bit about that. That's usually through women and young people. Women have, and I think this goes all the way back to well the example I will use like Old English and kind of when Norman invasion occurred and you had the Normans who spoke Norman French but then they married into the Anglo-Saxon society and their kids were weak. So how they became the creator of this mesh of language and also new words. So maybe explore a little bit about the history of that. Sure. Well language change is so fascinating. There are a lot of different factors that enter into why things change over time. Not only at the word level but also at the system of English or the system of any language. Because of course if you go back a thousand years English was not even legible to English speakers today. We could not understand it. If you read a text written in Old English you have to know German to know any of it. So the structure of language itself has changed in vast ways over time. So the question is what makes that happen? Well obviously fun is due to contact with other speakers of different languages. So for example William the Conqueror came over with the Norman conquest and then French. Norman French was spoken for several hundred years as the language of power. English was only the vernacular street language so it was really the language of the peasants and the poor because if you wanted to be high in court or a cleric in sort of religious areas you had to speak French or Latin and that was really what you would work in. So that's a class-based thing. So class often drives language change. Innovation tends to happen with groups that are less worried about what people think of how they're sounding and making relationships. So when you're a peasant and you're with your family or a working class person today your community is very valuable to you and that's really where you're going to focus on communicating in the style of speech. So if you work in a factory or you're cutting down trees or there's a lumberjack no one cares if you say Pota! They don't want that. What you want is if a tree is falling Yay! Get out of the way! You want that ability to make a connection and have people listen to you and pay attention. But people don't listen to you when you're very, very formal and distant because you haven't built a relationship. And the language of power is often the language of formality and distance. The language of intimacy and the language of connection tends to be with language of casual less high class speech. And so changes often bubble up where people aren't so worried about sounding posh and they're just interested in making connections. And often what happens is then normal changes that would happen in language if it was left alone without any external pressures come to the fore. So we have certain tendencies in terms of how we structure syllables for example. We have certain tendencies in terms of how sounds that get blended together will be pronounced. So for example if I say miss you like I miss you but if I say it in fast speech I miss you. Right? The S and the Y become shuh. That's a natural tendency all speakers do. But if you're a lower class speaker and you're not as worried about regulating your speech what you'll do is you'll do that at a higher rate than someone who's really trying to be super articulate to impress people. And so that's how changes evolve in lower classes. But we also know that young speakers tend to have the most plastic brains. They're in the process of acquiring language. So any low level features that are slightly changing in their environment they're going to be more able to analyze the statistical patterns and the probabilities of where that occurs and use it in their speech. This is particularly true with adolescents in this last 100 years or so. We didn't really have a period of adolescents before the 1940s and 1950s. So it didn't happen to the same degree then but adolescents are very cued into the social meaning of language because adolescent society is very much driven by social meaning. And language has become a key way to express social meaning in ways that set you apart from your parents. So they capitalize on these low level statistical changes they hear around them by doing the new thing especially because it's different than the old thing. And the last person you want to sound like is your parents. Anybody who has teenagers knows this is true, right? And they sound very different. So part of it is the more plastic brain that children have to observe these probabilities in language that are occurring around them that we ignore and filter out. Part of it in the contemporary times is that young speakers have more interest in the social meaning associated with language. And finally women have both now and historically seem to be the main drivers of change. This is probably because of their role in society. Women back in the 1600s and 1700s could be married into a high class situation but they were not highly literate or educated. And their worth was really their relationships. And so to the same degree that working class speakers or the peasants back in the days of the Normans were really driven by having connections and talking about informal casual things about their relationships and about the world they lived in and experienced every day. That was the same thing that women did. Women were the ones that talked about intimate and sort of familial kinds of topics. And again formal highly you know hyper articulated language doesn't fit those kinds of topics. So women without being literate so they weren't relying on spelling to help them you know there was an R there there was a T there so I should say it and also because of the types of relationships they had in their families talking about intimate topics but also with a lot of the working servants that had the different kinds of languages they tended to be most primed for innovation. So for example the switch from saying ye as a subject to you as a subject because historically ye is correct in subject position ye was an object pronoun. The same way we do he and him it was ye and you. That was the paradigm. But slowly women and working class speakers started using ye at the beginning of sentences probably because of how both of them reduced in fast speech the ye like sounds like what you doing right? And ye and ye sound very close. And so it probably was because written words were not important it shifted to being a subject pronoun. The same way that we him and I are doing things now it's doing that same process. Well it seems to be women in the working class that led that change. That was hundreds of years ago. But today we look at changes coming into the language like those vowel shifts I talked about earlier. Guess who's leading those changes? Women. And now it's not because they're less educated and literate. In fact women tend to be more likely to go to college. It still seems to be the role that women play in society as social brokers much more than men do and language helps you with social meaning and social relationships. And so innovation can be something really new and novel and bring more social meaning to your interactions and so it seems to be more valuable to women to do that. You're listening to Art on the Air with our guest today Dr. Valerie Friedland on Lakeshore Public Media 89.1 FM and on WVLP 103.1 FM. It's so interesting because even the evolution of a word can so drastically 360 change like the word dude. Like when Bowie in the 60s wrote All the Young Dudes he was using the word in its historical context where that is not the meaning in your book you know with the word dude. Not the modern meaning of dude at all. No, I mean I think sometimes we don't understand how language changes drastically over time when we get really hung up for example on someone saying literally, non-literally. I can't tell you how many people have said that to me as if it's the end of our linguistic reality. But if you looked at all the words that you as a non-literal literal user uses you'd be shocked at how many words that you use have completely changed in meaning to the opposite of their original meaning. I mean dude is a great example because dude in the 1800s was basically an effeminate dandy. That's what dude meant and if you call someone a dude today it definitely isn't an insult, right? It's kind of like yo, you're a cool chill dude. In the late 1800s you would be challenged to a duel for calling someone a dude. It was that graven an insult. And it really brought up questions about their masculinity and the normativity which of course now it doesn't have that at all. But even a word like soon, right? I'm going to do that soon. Well the word soon to us means not right now but in a bit. The original meaning of soon was actually immediately. But guess how come we don't use it for that anymore? Because we're procrastinators. It's part of our human nature. So when I say yes, I'm going to bed soon meaning at once and then I didn't go to bed for ten minutes it gradually stretched the meaning of that to this new meaning where it no longer meant immediately. So it's the exact opposite sort of of its original meaning. So when we use literally non-literally we're doing that same kind of beautiful creative extension of language because of the way we use it. Which is what language has been formed on our whole history. Well even ecclesiastically language or words and their meanings were withheld from the general public which is why everything was in Latin so the common people would not you know would be this high exalted thing that you know would have to be passed down now through the actual words and when they you know when it was I don't know was it even Anne Boleyn who wanted the scriptures to be in the common language so everybody could understand them. I mean language is so fascinating. I think it was about the 15th century maybe it was John Tyndale I think that wrote the first vernacular bible and that was his role and it was actually some place a bandit because it was considered a degradation of using the words for God but also thou is the same thing right? The Quakers were very upset about this move to not use the distinction between you and thou anymore because it suggested that humans put themselves on par with God. So there's a lot in the history of language that's tied up with these other evolving kind of belief systems that we have. I have so many questions and I don't know if we'll get to all of them for the whole interview but I always found it interesting the ing versus the in and the evolution of that and what that means so talk a little bit about that progress and how that's changing. Sure you know I think all of us use words like I'm walking I'm talking I'm going I'm singing and we think oh you know I'm walking I'm talking I'm singing and people tend not to like that. In fact it was a really interesting study done by the linguist Bill Lebove and some of his colleagues about 10 years ago where he had a passage recorded and what he did is he instrumentally inserted either an in or an ing ending so it was you know professional set up as a professional passage someone was reading something for a job interview and so he'd have them I was going to do this or I was going to do this and so he would have it shortened and it was not gonna going it was sort of like walk in organize and that kind of thing. What he found is as little as one in even if every other ing ending was the full ing sound was enough to change people's ratings of that speaker as being non-professional and less hireable. So it has a huge impact when you alter that little ending because we think of it as dropping the g but the funny thing is there's no g except in spelling on those endings and that's a perfect case of a spelling pronunciation. So we look at the ing written in our letters and our writing and we think oh, there's a g on the ending but actually there's not because you don't say king it's not an n and then a g right? You don't say I'm saying hi to the king or I'm gonna sing you say sing king where it's actually one sound called a velar nasal. So sin sing sin sing you can feel that your tongue goes from the alveolar ridge to the velum alveolar ridge to the velum and the only difference between sing and sin is where you're putting your tongue in that one sound. So it's a one-to-one sound switch it's not two sounds to one sound so there's no such thing as dropping the g but even despite the fact that people are erroneously believe there's a g on the end the more fascinating thing is if you look back in time in Old English the accurate ending for a participle a verb participle was not ing it was in right? So the the historical root of that ending is inday in Old English and then the ending dropped off because in Old English we lost our our final syllable stress so the ending dropped off and it became in so the in sound is actually the authentic correct progressive participle ending and if you look back in Old English that was what was used for a verbal participle was the inday ending where we get the ing is from a different ending in Old English that was a noun ending and it's the same ending that gave us words like ceiling and evening and it was ingay in Old English and it said it meant noun right? So hergion was using that ending and that meant the act of pillaging right? in Old English so it was a noun and in fact how you would define that word is it really meant raid like a raid that was the word for raid and it was done with this ending that made it a noun so actually ing is a noun ending and in is the verb ending from Old English and if you look at the pattern of where people do the dropping what you find is still today we tend to drop the g on verbs not nouns and that but if I say darling unless you're southern it sounds kind of weird but I say walking and talking all the time so we find that somehow we even our little brains that don't remember the history of the word remember enough somehow that ing is the correct ending for nouns but in is the correct ending for verbs and if you measure how much people delete the g it tends to be off of verbal endings rather than noun endings so that's a pretty complex tale but it's fascinating to me that people actually believe the wrong form is the right form today and that didn't happen until the 19th century you know you only have a couple minutes left literally but I want to ask you a little bit about the they as a singular which is coming into our language and tell us a little briefly about that ok that one in a nutshell we have done a lot of stuff with our pronouns all through the history of English and if you look back at Old English and they didn't exist in Old English they actually didn't come in until the very beginning of the Middle English period from Old Norse with essentially the Vikings it was a Old Norse word that because we didn't have a very good third person plural pronoun we didn't have a separate third person plural pronoun we didn't have a feminine pronoun either we need to get new words for that and so they came in around the 12th century we also didn't have a feminine pronoun at that time so the idea that somehow pronouns aren't supposed to change is not true it's not born out in the history of English because then you hop 300 years later till 15-1600s and we start switching up vowel which we don't use anymore and ye which we don't use anymore and it changes all around so they is simply we lack in English is a generic third person a way to talk about people without their gender getting in the way they was a very organic way of people just naturally using that term we can go back to Chaucer and find him using they that way as a generic term for when we weren't specifying gender so it was just an organic development to start using it in this non-binary way which is actually pretty recent well we only have a few moments left so if you have any questions people can reach out to you oh sure well my book is available anywhere books are sold so just look for like literally dude and my name Valerie Friedland and you can find it also is in an audio book which I highly recommend because we have some fun accents in that one and if people are interested in reading more of my work elsewhere you can always look at my blog it's Valerie Friedland a professor of linguistics a sociolinguist like literally dude arguing for the good and bad in English we appreciate you coming on Art on the Air and sharing so much with us yeah thank you absolutely it was so delicious it was a lot of fun thanks for having me thank you we'd like to thank our guests this week on Art on the Air our weekly program covering the arts and arts events throughout Northwest Indiana and beyond Art on the Air is aired Sunday at 7pm on Lakeshore Public Media and is available on Lakeshore Public Media's website as a podcast Art on the Air is also heard Friday at 11am and Monday at 5pm on WVLP 103.1 FM streaming live at WVLP.org Our spotlight interviews are heard every Wednesday on Lakeshore Public Media thanks to Tom Maloney vice president of radio operation for Lakeshore Public Media and Greg Kovach WVLP's station manager Our theme music is by Billy Foster with a vocal by Rene Foster and the 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that's a-o-t-a at breck b-r-e-c-h dot com or contact us through our Facebook page Your hosts were Larry Breckner and Esther Golden and we invite you back next week for another episode of Art on the Air Aloha everyone have a splendid week Express yourself you are and show the world your heart Express yourself you are and show the world your heart You're in the know with Esther and Larry Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air Art on the Air