Girls are just smarter than boys. There’s really no debating the subject. So why, then, do people constantly mock the way they talk? Honestly, I’d rather listen to a million girls jabber on about anything than have to sit through the drone of my uncle, the tax accountant, at a family reunion or the meathead dum-dum who rattles off sports statistics in a monotone that’s akin to a drill bit going into my temple.
Girls' voices are pretty, I say! And trendsetting! And now, according to the New York Times, there’s scientific proof.
The cutsy-wootsie affectations that dads across America love to poke fun of at their teenage daughters are actually setting trends for how everyone speaks, regardless of age or gender. A study done at University of Pennsylvania monitored over 12,000 phone calls and found that the majority of the people who used the word “like” in the way that, like, you might, like, imagine teenage girls would, were actually men. As if!
Besides adding definitions to the English language (the use of “like” as a word used “without meaning or syntactic function, but possibly as emphasis” is in the most recent Webster’s New World College Dictionary), “girl-speak” has actually shaped the way that some of the most important people in the world use language. Take “uptalk,” for example: the practice of ending sentences with an upward inflection. This was an innovation of the valley girls of the eighties, made popular by the “Clueless” generation of teen girls in the nineties, and by the turn of the new millennium even George W. Bush was ending sentences with an upward inflection for emphasis!
The most recent trend that has caught linguists’ attention, though, is called “vocal fry.” Almost the opposite of uptalk, vocal fry is when the speaker ends a sentence going down in pitch with the sound becoming a growly rasp. Just like with uptalk, it’s used for emphasis (usually sarcasm) and also like uptalk, it is already starting to show up in the language patterns of guys, as well.
So, the universal thinking in the linguistic community has basically done a complete 180 from a decade or so ago. Talking like a sorority sister doesn’t mean you’re dumb and vacant. It means you’re a sophisticated trendsetter who interprets social cues through the intricate use of language and cadence. Does that mean that Ke$ha is the next George Bernard Shaw? Perhaps.
What do you think about the much maligned tuneful chatter of the stereotypical teenage female? Are they being unfairly mocked and ridiculed? Or are the slings and arrows of outrageous language well deserved?
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