144: Sociophonetics Deep Dive (with Jennifer Nycz, Lauren Hall-Lew, and Kelly Wright)

Introducing sociophonetics

0:00Hello and welcome to Because Language, a show about linguistics, the science of language. My name is Daniel Medgley, and with me now, my esteemed colleague and co-host, Hedvig Hürgaard.

0:33Hello, hi. Hi, Hedvig. You excited for this episode? I am, I am. I'm looking forward to having a good chat about sounds, is how I'm going to say it. Sounds and society. Also with us, our esteemed co-host, Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright. Kelly, welcome to the show. Hi, good to have you. We don't always have you. What impelled you to join us today? I'm such a super fan of these two guests that I had to pop in. Thanks for having me as just a super fan.

1:09You got it. You got it. Anytime. And let's talk about the two great researchers and linguists that we have with us. We've got Dr. Jennifer Neese and Dr. Lauren Hall Liu. Lauren is a professor and personal chair in sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Jennifer Neese is associate professor of linguistics at Georgetown University. Hello, Lauren and Jen. Hello. They've written a book. The book is Sociophonetics Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory.

1:41And with a title like that, how could you not do a deep dive on sociophonetics? Also, I've been wanting to talk to the both of you just forever. So you ready to talk through this edited volume with us? Sure. Absolutely. Okay, cool. Now, this is a different kind of episode where we're doing a deep dive, which means we just, get straight to it. Let's talk about sociophonetics. I think I know what that means. Phonetics is sound. Socio is socio. So the way that we use sounds in a social context?

2:13Yeah. Pretty much. Nods. Nods. Yeah. So, yeah, language and social context. But we're looking at things like how sounds of languages vary across speakers, depending on aspects of their social identity within speakers, depending on aspects of the context, like who they're talking to, what they're talking about, the setting they're in, how language and the sounds of language change over time, how people acquire the sort of socio-indexical knowledge they have about the sounds of language. So the links that we all make between social meaning and language form, we have to learn that somehow. It's not like inherent or

2:48anything like that. And how changeable this knowledge is. So how can we kind of alter the way that we think about sounds over our lifespan? And to what extent are we flexible in that way?

Personal language backgrounds

3:00Okay. Then I think it's time to get a little bit personal here. I will reveal that I used to live in the United States where I was a speaker of Pacific Northwest US English. Now I've been living in Australia, in Perth, Western Australia, and I have lost my caught-caught merger. I used to say caught and caught the same, and now I say them differently. Amazing. That was about 10 years ago. And I think I might be cultivating a trap-bath split where I say trap and bath differently. People

3:33have a bath and then they fall into a trap. That's me. Lauren, do you want to tell me a little bit about your language background? What do you notice about yourself? A little bit of self-reflection. Yeah, I'm also West Coast American, lower down California. So none of that raised big that you might have up in the Northwest. But yeah, I've been living in Edinburgh, Scotland for going on 16 years. Scottish English has a caught-caught merger as well. So I have not acquired a split there. But when I'm

4:07lecturing, I do some kind of British things like I don't flap my T's, right? And the certain vowel pronunciations I make, a little less American, just so I'm sure that they are clearer to a British audience. But when I'm talking to you today, I think I'm probably going to still sound the way that I sounded 16 years ago. So acquiring additional styles rather than changing my underlying grammar. Do you actually say butter instead of butter? Well, I wouldn't say it like that because I retain the R's because I live in Scotland.

4:38But I might say butter instead of butter if I'm lecturing about butter, which I don't usually, but if I were. Okay, that's great. Jen, what's going on for you? A bit of self-reflection, if you don't mind. Yeah, well, I'm from New Jersey, the part of New Jersey that orients towards New York City. So from kind of north central Jersey, which means I grew up making all the vowels. So I've got a cot-caught distinction. I do marry, marry, marry. What else? I mean, of course, pin-pen because I'm

5:11from the north. Pretty much all the things. I don't have a north force split, which is really unfortunate. I wish I had really all the vowels, but I'm doing pretty good. And I don't think that has changed too much. I have lived in a few places. So I went to grad school in New York. I had a sort of postdoc thing in the north of England for a couple of years. I did spend a year in the Pacific Northwest in Portland, but not enough to, I think, make any impact on my speech.

5:42And now I'm in D.C. So I think my vowels are pretty stable and intact, although I do style shift a lot. So if I'm talking to a Canadian or somebody with a merger, I will hear things like cot for past tense of catch come out of my mouth. And I feel a little sheepish about that. But the low-back vowel distinction is strong. I maintain it. From my cold, dead vowel space, will you take my cot-caught distinction? Can you perform a north, sorry, north and force split for me? I'd love to hear what that sounds like.

6:16I cannot. I'd have to first remember like which words are, well, obviously, north and force. They're the key words for the sets. But I don't know that I could pronounce it. Laurie, maybe you're around a north force split a little more than I am. It would have a more accurate pronunciation. I should, but I'm afraid I don't. You're pronouncing them the same? Yeah. Do you have a difference? I can't tell if it's just the consonants around it, but it's north and force. Those are pretty similar. Wait, do it again.

6:49I feel like they sound different, but I feel like I'm also like, like gaslighting myself. North and force.

7:00Aren't they a little bit different in openness? Am I just imagining things? This is the problem when you start like actually reflecting. There's someone listening right now who's an expert in this and they're shaking their fist at us going, why don't you know? Yeah. I don't know. You're the sociophoneticians. You had one job. Absolutely. Yeah. Turns out it's a really big job. Can't keep it all in my brain. Kelly, I'm going to you. Tell us about something that you've noticed about yourself sociophonetically and there's a lot to talk about. You've done research here.

7:30I have. I merged before L. I have fill and full and pill and pull and all of those are, I connect with you, Lauren, in that I make an effort when I'm teaching. I'm in Wisconsin to be like, feel.

7:49I really have to think about it. I really have to think about it. Okay. Yeah. That's what that got pointed out to me once I left the South. An observation that was made in my speech was like, what do you mean they sound different? Okay. So I get this whole north and forth. Yeah, no. Those are the same vowels. I think I only have like six. Six vowels? Okay. And Hedwig, yours? I'm a second language speaker of English and I'm very accommodating, so I will change a lot.

8:21So I often get linguists who know me, who talk to me in different settings, will be like, Hedwig, you're doing this now and you did this before. And I'm like, I don't, I don't want this. I'm not playing this game to like, I want to be understood and I think this is the best way. Uh, sometimes I may accommodate what some people think is too much. Um, so they're like, this sounds like you potentially could be making fun of your interlocutor, but it's literally me just desperately trying to accommodate. Um, so I try to have that in the back of my mind, but usually I just let it go and I just do what feels right. I've had some linguists

8:55like record my vowels, like right when I arrived in Australia and they wanted to record me repeatedly, but they didn't. But I have like an old recording of all like goose, trap, blah, blah, north sun, you know, all the things. You did me and Ben once and you plotted our vowels. I did little graphs for our different vowel spaces. It's fun. Um, I, uh, I find this kind of research really interesting, especially with vowels because you can have this like granular distinctions and that's really fun. Um, but I'm hoping maybe that I'm, we are also going to be hearing some things about consonants a bit more today as well. Um, because they're,

9:30they're fun as well. Like the, the tap thing or stuff like that. Cause I feel like sentence socio-phonetics is, is very heavily vowel. I don't know if that's a, that's a rude thing to say, uh, Jen and Lauren, but it's a lot of vowels and I love vowels, but sometimes. There's, there's an English bias there because we could talk about voice quality. We could talk about intonation. We could talk about tone. We could talk about rhythm. We could talk about all sorts of things. We don't have to talk about vowels, but there is a sort of historical foundation of English vowel variation.

Why vowels carry social meaning

10:03Do you think, uh, Daniel, can I ask a question before you do? I want you, I'm going to offload a lot of the questions onto y'all. Yay! Okay. Do you think that out of all the different sound things that we can do, like consonants and vowels and things in between and diphtongues and intonation and stuff, do you think the vowels are especially like easy to recruit for social meaning because the consonants are so distinctive, so there's not as much information pressure on the vowels, so they can do another job besides meaning and that job becomes identity?

10:39In English? In English, yeah. Because it's going to be language specific, yeah. Well, so what I love about sociophonetics is the granularity that you talked about, and you can get that granularity with consonants too, right? So with more or less nasalization or with higher or lower fricatives center of gravity. And so all that stuff is sort of equally amenable to marking social information. But because English has so many vowels and because they're changing all the time and different in different places, there's just, they have kind of

11:10an advantage in the game, I guess, of what constitutes gradient phonetics. Yeah. Contrast that with Spanish, for instance, where if you, in the world of Spanish sociophonetics, it's really consonants where all the action is, and the vowels are comparatively uninteresting, and because there's, you know, five vowels. So it's a more stable system than what we have going on in English. Well, you could imagine that if there's, because, like, if you were just thinking, you could think that if you have fewer vowels, and if they're all spread out over the dimension

11:41space, you could imagine that each vowel phoneme would have, like, a lot of room to roam in, right? Like, a bigger territory, and, like, could be in all different parts of it, and that could do some work. But it doesn't seem to be that way, because English has more vowels than Spanish, and also uses them for social meaning, which seems, like, a little bit, like, if you just naively think about it, it seems contradictory. But that's why we do empirical things, so that we learn how things actually are. Absolutely. I mean, you're getting at, like, a main research question in sociophonetics and

12:15sociolinguistics in general, which is sometimes called the actuation problem. Like, why do changes start? And, like, why is it that out of, like, the, you know, the range of variability that is just present in a sound in a language, which could be because of some maybe inherent instability in the linguistic system, could be because of the range that a sound has? For some reason, sometimes this variability gets connected to social meaning. And this is kind of, like, one of the big ongoing mysteries and things that people want to address. Like, how can we kind of, like, find the moment

12:48where that starts to happen, where that link starts to be made? Are there, like, clear linguistic precursors for it? You know, how do we sort of nail down the onset of a change that can result in this

Variation and comprehension

13:01socially meaningful variation? I want to just probe a little bit into that because language needs to be comprehensible. And it would be easiest to be comprehensible if we all sounded the same. And yet that's not what we see. We see lots and lots of variation. Why don't we all just sound the same as each other? So there's this issue of what, when you say the same, you know, you can imagine, like, a single robotic voice that doesn't vary in any way, prosodically, arrhythmically, or pitch.

13:36Anatomically, that's impossible. So anatomically, at least, that's not possible. So then once you start to have anatomical differences, you see people playing with that. You see little boys and girls with the same vocal track anatomy who are accentuating gender differences, for example, because that's important to their social world. So the second that you have variation, which is introduced just by differences in the meat of the human body, then that variation becomes available to be used for all sorts of interesting things. So variation is just inherent to speech. And so once

14:12it's inherent to speech, then it can be exaggerated and change and all sorts of things. And there's also the fact that there doesn't seem to be a big problem. Like, humans who are listening to the speech don't seem to have a problem to understand that when Daniel speaks and when I speak, we say things differently, but we're saying the same word. Humans are, like, really good at it. So there's no real penalty for being a bit varied. In fact, we're so good at it that if you looked physically really different but sounded exactly the

14:43same, it might actually impede comprehension because we are so wired to normalize what we hear based on what we see. Say that again because I think I missed something about that. So if you see, like, a really large, tall person and you see a very small person and they acoustically produce the exact same sound, that would go against your expectations of how sound maps onto anatomy. I remember that experiment where people could hallucinate a different accent by just seeing

15:16a photo and telling them that, oh, that's the speaker. I love that about us. I agree. It's one of the most captivating phenomena. We call it the social McGurk effect because, you know, the McGurk effect is the one where somebody mouths a labial, but the sound is a dealer and you hear a coronal or something. So it's about this interface between the visual and the audio. But sociolinguistically, it's fascinating because there's studies that show people of different ages, different genders, different types of gender presentation, like

15:51just how masculine, just how feminine. All sorts of things show that we expect different sounds to emerge from different people.

Sound and sexuality

16:00I was interested in the intersection of sound and sexuality because we've talked about what's colloquially known as gay voice. In the book, it's mentioned that this has to do with variability in vowels. Could you just talk me through that a little bit? Well, the information that's in the vowel can certainly contribute to our percept of gender and sexuality. So there's a lot in the signal, right? We can look at how vowels are produced

16:31and look at things like, well, the pitch of the voice overall. And there is this association generally with high pitch and smaller vocal tracks, low pitch and longer or bigger vocal tracks, which maps to a certain extent onto, you know, physical size, which correlates not perfectly, but to a large extent with gender. The relationship between gender and sexuality is kind of interesting and ideologically laden. But certainly that sort of pitch information can

17:03help inform that. Also, the resonant frequencies within those vowels. So I don't want to go down too much of a rabbit hole in vowels. I will, if you prompt me. But one of the ways that we sort of analyze vowels associated with noticians is looking at what are the most prominent frequencies in the complex sound wave that corresponds to a vowel. And the sort of a space between the harmonics of a vowel can also give you information about the size of a vocal tract. So that can happen. A lot of the

17:37work that's been done on language and gender and sexuality has also looked at consonant sounds, particularly fricatives like S. S as well is like a complex sound with lots of different frequency components. And again, we can look at sort of like what are the most, the loudest or the most prominent frequencies. And that again relates to the size of a part of the vocal tract, specifically the size of the vocal tract that is anterior to or in front of the place where you're pronouncing your S. So if you have a S, you know, typically you have your tongue tip kind of behind your teeth

18:13somewhere. You've got this like little cavity between the tip of your tongue and the end of your mouth. So your lips essentially. And in very fine-grained ways, just like moving that tongue tip forward or backward, that changes what those most prominent frequencies are. And listeners seem to be able to track that and use that information to discern things about the speaker who produced it or the artificial voice who produced it. So it's really fascinating. We get so much information and, you

18:45know, drawing on our own experience. This is not like a universal thing, right? So depending on what kind of talkers you've had exposure to, you're going to use that information in different ways. There's some really interesting work being done now looking at like cis versus trans listeners and how they use that information in the phonetics to discern things about the identity of speakers. And it differs across these populations. But like these things can change over time, right? So like I know that like when it comes to gender expression, for example, it used to be in a lot of places in like medieval Europe that like children

19:19barely kind of had a gender. And when they did get a gender, there's like the blue and pink famously had swapped around. So you can imagine that like as some sort of change, like some sort of mutation just happens to be a little bit overrepresented in one group that then becomes like an identity market for that group and spreads to that group. So it could be for gender, sexuality or other kinds of groups as well. Like, I don't know, people listen to certain music or like certain things and then it spreads, but then it could also die out. Right. So like when we're talking about this,

19:50like North American English gay voice, that could just be a thing of the last couple of decades, right? How much do we know about like the history of these things? That's a really good question because there's so much work on sound change and then there's so much work on language and sexuality, but there's not a lot of work looking at sound change and sexuality. So we have seen the emergence of the kind of work that Jen had mentioned of like expanding what we know gender to be, expanding what we know sexuality to be and the interaction between the two. So

20:25there's like more work on more different kinds of people, which is awesome. And we need more of it. But then in terms of looking at like how people of the same-ish identity spoke in the 60s versus now, like, I don't know that we really do know that, but we do know that all of this is culturally specific. And to the extent that a previous time is just a different culture, then odds are that what you're describing is exactly right. I've been trying to coin and spread the word chronolect.

20:56Nice. As in like the way people speak in a certain time. I realized it would need to be combined. So like chronolect, you probably combine it with a place as well to like make it more specific. But sometimes you can, you hear something and you're like, ah, this person, I don't know, I have a better sense for this than Swedish, my native language. But like when people are interviewed in the 1970s on TV, I'm like, yes, I know this is the 70s. Like they, they speak very different. And not very different, but I can, I can tell.

21:27There's been a little bit of a move in American dialectology studies of English from looking at variation over time, just by the year someone's born to looking at them by generation. So comparing baby boomers with Gen X, for example, because those are culturally relevant, culturally acknowledged, culturally oriented to categories. And so we have every reason to think that that's how language works as well. So yeah. So people have found differences according to generation, depending on the place. I don't know if they would call it like a boomerlect or a Gen Xlect exactly,

22:01but there's definitely things like in the direction you're talking.

Teens and language assimilation

22:04Okay. Well, since we're mentioning generations, I want to ask you a question about my young daughters, a couple of tweens. They are seven and nine years old. They're heading toward, they're barreling toward adolescence. What kinds of things should I expect to see them do with the sounds that they use and how that expresses their identity? Can you give us some more information about your, so like, were they born in Australia? They were born in Australia, but they've got me, so they sound like dang Americans. A lot.

22:36Do they? A lot. Like that strongly still? Still. And in fact, my 30-something young boys do as well. There's a strong American bit to their repertoire. But as their peer group becomes more important to them, are they gonna assimilate toward Australian-ness? What do you expect? What should I, please help me. So I have a nine-year-old and a 13-year-old who are both born in the UK. And when they

23:07were really little, and I think this is true for my younger one as well, the American family thinks they sound entirely British or Scottish, and the Brits and Scots would think they sounded American. So I wonder if that resonates. I think I kind of in between. Yeah. But yeah, all signs point towards their social group mattering more for their phonetic production once they hit high school than their parents' ways of speaking. But it, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean they'll become more Australian. It depends on exactly which Australians they hang

23:41out with, right? So there's varieties of Scottish English that sound fairly close to an American accent, actually. And I hear teenagers who do sound not like me, but like not really markedly Scottish. Edinburgh's got quite a lot of variation. Whereas the kids that my 13-year-old decided to identify with and hang out with, like, they speak Scots. And she started switching, you know, to Scots language a little bit. Not syntactically so much, but lexically for sure and phonetically for

24:15sure as soon as she hit high school. So yeah, it has a lot to do with the things like orientation towards particular lifestyles, both in teenagerhood, but also the culture that orients more towards work versus university, for example, after high school. All those differences start to be found within speech in the early stages of high school. I find these kinds of blends really interesting. I actually have a, I feel very embarrassed as a linguist often because I'll often hear someone speaking English and I'm like, I should be able

24:48to tell if they are like British American or something else. But there are some people who I'm like, I don't know. My British husband are like, obviously they're from blah, blah. And I'm like, good on you. But I have a sneaking suspicion. It's the kind of people like, like, like some of you that have like moved around and been a different place. So this is just me excusing my own bad ability of like telling these things apart. But like, I feel like Daniel's kids and maybe Lauren's kids or Lauren herself, it would be, it would be a harder challenge. And especially if you meet

25:23people from like international English speaking schools, like army kids or diplomat kids or business kids, they're very hard to tell where they're from. And it's, it's cool and interesting. But it's, it's like a different thing because it's not tied. Yeah. It's not really tied to a specific place in a way. It's something else. It's not one of the world Englishes. It's like a, it's not, I don't know what

25:53it is. Is it a koine? Is that what we're using those words for? Like a dialect creole? Is that a bad way of describing what a koine is? You're getting at the social forces that lead to the same thing. So contact leads to a koine and contact leads to a creole. They're not the same, but they're motivated by contact between different varieties for sure. International school accent is absolutely fascinating, but I don't know that anyone's done the research to compare different

26:25international schools enough to know if there's like an international school accent, you know what I mean? But yeah, there's definitely work to be done there. Right. Get on it, people. I love this idea of like, yeah, like social group mattering so much more than the bed of material that you experience. Even, yeah, like the poverty of the stimulus or whatever is this, it's like what you care about, what you are attempting to express matters so much more for how you sound and, and, and how you want

26:56other people to hear you. Then whatever it is you're combining to make the sound in the first place, which is, it's so cool. It's like, yeah, you all have said so much that I really resonates with me because the actuation problem is like, yeah, we have a hard time observing it because it happens like in your heart. How do we get, how do we see that? How do we see sincerity? It's a difficult thing to measure, but it's so cool that we are attentive to it and it has this wonderful effect outside

27:30in the language over time. I mean, it could just be a bit random, right? It could be similar to genetic mutations that like every time someone is born, there's a slight variation, the genetic mutation, and some of them are more advantageous to living longer, but some of them are also like, I don't know, birds, like slightly different colors. So like something, they're, they're not really functional, but they're, they're doing some other work, some sexual identification or something. And then it spreads throughout a population, but there's not, it's not like because these birds live on these islands, they have blue feathers, just like blue happened to win out on

28:04this island for whatever reason. Um, and sometimes I, I feel like I really want to find like the cause, the, like the, the, the function of every change. And sometimes it seems like it might just be a bit random.

Causes of sound change

28:22Well, can we find causes? The thing is that, um, there's a lot of really good reasons why certain changes go from one to another type. Like it's not really random. Um, there's certain things that our articulators seem to want to do more than other things. It's more surprising that language doesn't change more often. So there's so much variation that some people say the question should be, why doesn't language change more, but for the actual changes themselves, like ease of articulation, for example, is one of the

28:58things that we can point to the, the more often we say something, we, you know, we cut some of the articulatory edges off how we, how we go about saying it. And so, um, a lot of changes happen for that reason. Um, and then there's the perceptual side of things like changes happen so that people can understand us better. So, so there's those kinds of universal forces at play. And a lot of it's also just path dependency. Like if you have certain things in the ancestral language, you're more likely to have it in the daughter languages, but for no other reason.

29:31I was thinking of a potential cause for many Australian Aboriginal languages. There's just no fricatives. There's the, the, the line of fricatives is just completely absent. Why would that happen? And one hypothesis is that there's a lot of, uh, ear trouble. People just have trouble hearing stuff. It's, there's a genetic component to it. And over time, there was just pressure to just omit fricatives. Have you heard of that one? Am I off base or is there anything else like that

30:01that you can think of? I've heard of that one, but also we, we used to live in Australia. So, but maybe it hasn't spread outside of Australia. This one is sort of a bit similar to, there's some papers about genetic ability to perceive colors and the propensity of having certain color words or the classic tone and humidity we've seen before. But the fricatives and ear, there's a certain kind of ear trouble that seemed to be a bit more common. And if you just have that little bit more of a common, then maybe

30:33it can have like a larger effect over time. If languages are evolving over thousands of years and that effect can sort of accumulate to just cause less fricatives over time, even if it's not like everyone having. What do you think, Jen? I'm mulling it. Um, I mean, what is the incidence of, I guess, higher frequency hearing loss or deficits in the population? Like, I guess I, well, I was not aware that this was a, a feature of Aboriginal populations. And I'm just wondering like, to what extent, yeah, I'm questioning all kinds of

31:06assumptions and premises here, first of all. Let's see. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare says that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have elevated rates of ear and hearing problems. Uh, in 2018 to 19, more than two in five First Nations people, age seven and over, were assessed as having some degree of hearing loss. I was not aware of that. For what it's worth. Yeah, interesting. Now, could that have an impact on like the communication system as a whole? I don't know that maybe somebody has done some modeling to show like what percentage

31:43of the population needs to not be able to distinguish or hear a particular cue before it has some sort of knock-on effect in the language. I, I don't know. Or just like a few people not be able to do it reliably in all contexts. Like you could maybe do in a laboratory setting, but like language is spoken in noisy environments where a lot of things are happening and you could just be like that little bit slower at getting the distinctions. Like typologically, it's really weird to have a ff, ff distinction. I don't know if that came

32:16across in the recording. It's very weird that English has that because it's not, it's very hard to perceive, um, around, especially with any noise in the background. I didn't hear the difference between what you did. Can you do it again? Which ff and f as an f beta. Yeah. No, but Jen, what I, what I'm hearing is I'm not hearing you say, oh yeah, we know about that thing. It happens all the time. What I'm hearing is you going, oh, this is, that's kind of weird. Is that kind of weird? Yeah. I mean, well, so also I'm thinking about like, okay, there's the one thing like making a

32:48really fine grain fricative distinction between like an intradental and a labial dental. That's one thing. But, but just like excluding all the fricatives for this reason, like why not just have one? Why not have like S or something? Um, again, I'm not, I'm not kind of sure what like the nature of the, um, the hearing problems are. So I would guess it's mostly like high frequency, but not like all the high frequencies, but maybe some of these fine grain distinctions. Um, so, and I think

33:20I am also, there's a part of me that like is always a little wary when an explanation comes up that's like, oh, it has to do with like how this group of people is built, um, or like some like weird thing about their culture or something like that always just gives me. Sounds like a, like a just so story. Yeah. It could be, it could, there could be something to it, but, um, but I think the more almost like the more intuitive or sense making the story makes the more skeptical I want to be

33:50because like, I want to see, especially when it's a generalization about like, um, a group that is not represented in academia as well as it could be. Cause I'm like, okay, before I like tell the tale about these people, I want to investigate a lot further and see like, what is the nature of the physical difference that we're, um, we're saying is present? Um, and what impact would that really have on the language? That is very fair. And that is something that we need to watch out for. Definitely. There was another question I had at the book presents a paradox. It's pointed out

Community versus individual change

34:23that the sound change within a community happens faster than any individual person in that community. And I was just wondering what's going on there. Like I, I, as a person won't change that much over my lifespan, but language will change a lot, even though it's made up of individuals. That was a strange and counterintuitive thing that really got me thinking. It was counterintuitive to me first when I read it, but I think it makes logical sense in that an individual is part of a community.

34:57And so if any individual changes more than a community, they can't be part of that community anymore because the community encompasses their change, right? So it just logically has to be the case that you're always going to have community change outpacing individual change. But what happens of course is that, um, most of the change is incremented in adolescence. We have this thing that we know about this quantitative pattern called the adolescent peak, where when, um, more, when, when innovation

35:28enters into the grammar, it's usually introduced by people in adolescence. And then they continue to use that as they get older, but they don't use it more. So with phonetic variation, you've got frequency of use using more of a new thing or, um, a phonetic, um, what do you call it? How do I describe this? Um, something that I should definitely know how to do, uh, a phonetic, uh, like how strong the phonetic

35:58change is. So for example, if you have, um, ooh fronting to ooh, if you have it really fronted all the way logically to e, then like there's a, between ooh, there's all of that variation. So you might have one generation who goes from ooh to ooh, and one generation who goes from ooh to ooh, and just a little bit more and more and more. So an individual is not going to go through all those stages, right? They're going to go through the first stage and then just hang out there for the rest of their life. And then next adolescents come along and they increment it just a little bit more. And that's why the

36:29community ends up going so fast. And that, uh, teenage peak, does that also sort of partially inform why people seem to sort of sometimes freeze their cultural perception of a lot of things, like when they're like between 13 and 17 and they're like, SNL was the best, comics were the best, music were the best, language was the best, and like everything from then is downhill. Also, I don't know, I don't think they remember anything before then because I don't think they think that when they were seven, that was necessarily the best, but it's some sort of like 13, 17, you know what I mean? Like TV was the best,

37:03everything was the best, and everyone else is dumb for not keeping up. Yeah, because that's, I guess that's when you were last taking in new things. Is that cruel to say? Well, it's when you have this developmental imperative to distinguish yourself, to figure out who you are as distinct from your parents, as distinct from the kids that you had to play with just because they were around, you know, now you get to choose your friends. So it's the fashioning of a sense of who you are, and then that's what stays with you. And your language

37:33use is just, it's just part and parcel of that. Like we focus on the phonetic stuff because we like the phonetic stuff, but it's not like it's special. It actually just fits in with all the things you just mentioned. And it's just one of the many things that we carry with us that is defining who we are for the rest of our lives. Listeners to this show know that I am really terrified of this freezing thing. I really don't want to listen to only music that I liked when I was 16, and I'm desperately trying to get Gen Z to like, see me as part of them and like me. I don't know if it's

38:05going very well so far. But I just, I, the idea of stagnating terrifies me a little bit. But I guess it's just how you take it. You can just stagnate yourself and not be mad at kids. You can also enjoy new stuff in the sense of like, what music comes on and you just feel like you. I think that's different from like enjoying music. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a very good point. I try at least minimally to not be judgmental about what younger kids are doing.

Media influence on accents

38:37I guess since we're talking about music, it's time to branch into media here. I want to ask you about the influence of media on language change, sociophonetic change. It's been said, the thing that I always learned was TV doesn't influence accents that much. People don't want to sound like the people on TV. People want to sound like the people next door. Is that still true? Or is media having an impact that we don't realize? Well, there's been some discussion about this. And I think as far as like what sort of the baseline

39:15thinking in sociolinguistics is, that's basically true in the sense that if you like, you know, sit your kid down in front of Peppa Pig or Bluey or whatever, they're not going to necessarily take on an accent in any permanent way from watching that show. But I think there is some, and a lot of people believe that there can be this sort of indirect effect where if you are watching a show that portrays speakers of a particular accent or from a particular community in a positive way, like makes them seem cool or something, then that can sort of accelerate

39:48the acquisition of a change IRL, right? Because that kind of enhances the social benefit of taking on that feature. I think there's a lot of really interesting work to be done here, though, in sort of new media and social media and computer mediated communication. So a lot of the work that has looked on this has looked at like broadcast television, radio, right? These sort of very asymmetrical delivery systems for dialect and content where you're like, you're watching a TV

40:19kind of passively, maybe really enjoying it, but it's still, there's still a move between you and the person on the TV. But of course, we have like, you know, podcasts, maybe people are listening to Because Language and they've got their like internet friend Dan Midgley in their ears and they're like, oh, this is like my buddy. Maybe they're writing in the comment section, right? So that's a much more engaged sort of interaction. And I do wonder if that sort of engagement might have some sort of influence on like a very fine brain level on the phonetics of how we produce vowels and consonants and

40:53other features. So I think there's some really cool questions to be asked about this. But yeah, if you're like watching TV, it doesn't seem like that has a huge effect on people's accents or dialects, other than this sort of like, I guess, social lubricating effect of, oh, this is like a cool group that I might want to sound like them so that when I encounter that linguistic input in the real world, I'm more likely to take it up. I can attest to the podcast carrying over variation.

41:26I listen to some British podcasts sometimes and I sound more British, which is really kind of not insulting, but like I am married to a British man and talking to him does nothing.

41:37Oh, I see. Distancing. Which I feel like says something. I don't know. Um, I think it just says you don't notice his accent anymore because it's always around. My partner says the same thing. Maybe. I don't accommodate to my kids at all. But if I'm talking to like a random Scottish adult, I will accommodate. Right. Yeah. So you're, you're, you're the same bad kind of bad person as me. Yes. Please do an impression of you doing that, please. Could you please? Me?

42:08Yes. No, I can't do it without the person, honestly, because it's so not conscious. It just happens. And so yeah, I can't conjure it, I'm afraid. Sorry. Darn. Is, is most of this unconscious? I mean, we're very aware of accent, but there's a lot going on outside of the level of awareness as well. If you had to give a split of how much we're aware of and what percentage we're not, what would you give it? 50-50? 95, not aware. Whoa. Really? Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, if you're a linguist, okay, 85. But like the average person,

42:43no, you know, you open your mouth and you immediately have to choose a language to speak. And that tells everyone something about you. I mean, it's social. And like, we don't even think about it. We're just talking, but it conveys all sorts of information. And we don't think about it. We can't possibly be thinking about that most of the time. But regular people, even non-linguists are so aware of accent, like really, really aware. Sure. That's the 5%? Yeah. Yeah. That meta-linguistic, like noticing when somebody has an accent. Yeah. That's really

43:17just 5% of the amount with which we use language on a day-to-day basis. Absolutely. We're not, we're not hyper-fixated on that so much. Are you saying that like 5% of noticing is enough to pick up so much information that you actually might not even need to pick up more than that, that paying attention to 5% of all the nuances is enough to capture where someone's from? Oh, I'm saying we're picking up on 100% of it all the time. It's just, we're not aware or consciously aware that we're doing it. 5% is conscious. The rest of the time, we're just

43:49doing it. We're just moving about the world as a, like the part of, you know, being competent in a language means knowing all of this social signaling that happens in the phonetic level. But we don't really think about it that often. I watched a movie once, a Swedish movie that had a German production company and it was stipulated in their company that they had to have at least one German actor in the movie. So this one German actor was dubbed into Swedish, but I was not consciously picking up on the fact that they

44:20were dubbed. And I, the entire movie, it was about murder mystery. I was like, something's off about that guy. I don't know what it is, but I don't trust him. Like that has, he has, he's up to something shady and I don't like it, but I couldn't figure, I, I, I didn't figure out that he was dubbed. So this is like, um, like detecting AI now. Yeah. Yeah. Something's just off, but I couldn't for the life of you, like tell them, tell you like what it was in the performance that, you know, gave this idea.

Actors and accent adoption

44:51Well, now we're to a question from James who asks, when actors do accents, are there qualities that tend to be easier for them to adopt or imitate? Or does it depend on the performer? Are some things easier or are some people just good at accents? Well, first of all, it probably depends on the performer's own accent or language. So it's like that question of like, what's the hardest language to learn? It's like asking like, what's the farthest town? It kind of depends where you start from. Um, so you could imagine that there are things like if someone wants to learn an Australian accent, there's going to be things

45:25that are differently difficult for a, um, a Northern British English speaker than an American English speaker. So that's a thing we want to consider. I mean, I have not studied this specifically, but I think it's clear that there is, um, inter person differences in just like ability to do this. I am not good at accents. Um, just not, not good at all. But there are people like, yeah, I mean, there are obviously like actors who are very good at actors who are not so good at it. Um, so that is certainly the case. And I do think there are certain features that are, uh, a little

46:02more salient. So probably things like, um, certain vowel sounds in their broad strokes. Maybe it's different in other languages, maybe for speakers of Spanish varieties, it's really consonants that are more salient. Oh, that would be kind of interesting to look across linguistically and see like, what are the sort of easiest features for people either to imitate or to, to adopt long term, um, in this sort of context where they're trying to, to try to pass with respect to some accent. Um, and there's like the additional issue of like how you even evaluate how good someone

46:36is because, um, is there some like objective gold standard? Like, yes, they have mimicked some, some model or some idealized speaker, or are they just doing enough such that listeners from that place are like, yeah, I can't tell, or they pass. Right. Um, so there's so many moving parts in terms of how we judge this, how we like evaluate how good people are. But I think it's all these things. I think it's speaker, their language background, their natural ability, and things about the specific features.

47:06I would suspect that imitating like a sort of like bog standard East North American English would be easy for a lot of English speaking actors, just because everyone watches so many movies where you hear that variety. So like, I think most British actors have an easier time passing as some kind of American than any American actor does for passing as British, just because people in the UK consume more American media than people in the US consume British media. I was going to say that when we were talking about the influence of media, that it's probably less

47:39in production and more in perception. And not only just in the example that Jen gave about what's valued and prestigious, but just in the ability to understand certain accents. That's an effect that media consumption is going to have on individuals. I just wanted to say I learned something interesting about Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. So he's famous for being like the worst, one of the worst Americans trying to do a British accent. And I just heard something a bit heartbreaking, which was that he thought he sounded a bit off. And he was asking people

48:12on stage while they were filming if he sounded good. And all the British people were super polite and were like, yes, it's great. And at that point, I feel like it's not entirely on him anymore. Because you can't, I just feel bad for the man because he's known as like one of the worst. And I don't think it's all his fault. People should have like, sets should hire proper coaches and stuff.

Global hotspots in research

48:37Tell us about some of the interesting hotspots in sociophonetics, not just English, but other places. In the work that you're seeing that people are doing, where are they going? Where geographically? Where methodologically? Yeah, where in the world? What languages are being covered? There must be a lot of interesting work. What are you seeing over and over again? What are the cool places? I think every place is probably pretty cool. And we all have our own personal biases. So I am personally oriented towards right now work in East Asia and work in West Africa. So

49:13in East Asia, there's a lot of really interesting work around the various different vocal styles that are related with kinds of femininity. So cuteness is one that you see popping up for a long time now in Korea and Japan and Taiwan and parts of China, et cetera. And then the features, the phonetic features that go into building different kinds of cuteness and how that varies depending on who's producing it, you know, what happens when male bodies start producing these

49:46varieties. There's really interesting work going on there. There's a study from a few years ago that I like Lee, I think is the author. And it's showing that Seoul Korean is showing a denasalization change in progress where vowels after nasals used to be nasalized, but they're becoming denasalized. So like, me, ma is more like that now instead of like with a nasalized variant, which I'm not going to

50:17attempt. Yeah, thank you. It's funny because that sounds like the opposite of ease of production. It's easy to just keep nasalizing through the vowel, but stopping nasalization. That's like, that's not lazy. It relates to this cuteness thing because unlike most sound changes, it's male led. So one of the features of this cute vocal style that you see in East Asian languages often is nasality and like really hyper articulated nasality that's associated with a particular kind of hyper feminine

50:48femininity. So you see men leading in the change away from vowel nasalization. Wow. Interesting. That's very interesting. Okay. Well, now this leads me to another question because I was on the Australian ABC this morning. I do a weekly gig called The Speakeasy and it's a call-in show. So people are firing in questions. So I got one and I said, I'm going to ask you. Andrew of Henleybrook asks on accents. I can never understand why so many American women have such nasally accents from most states, but the men don't.

51:22Now that's got to be wrong, right? That's not plausible. Yeah, that's sort of like creaky voice as well that we just notice it more because there's, it's embedded in a high F zero, high pitch. I don't think that that's actually like, if you were to measure it, I don't think you would find it to be right. I hadn't heard that before. I know that people say that like associating creaky voice with valley girl and women is like not entirely right because a lot of men do it a lot. But you just said, cause women tend to have like, what is it? Like 200 Hertz higher-ish pitch on average,

51:56something like that. So, so it's like creaky voice more noticeable at higher pitches. Absolutely. Ah, so it's okay. I didn't know that. That's cool. I learned something good today. That's very useful. Very cool. Since we just dispelled something, what is a notion that you keep having to dispel or correct among non-linguists? What's a particular misconception that people just keep having? I mean, there's the oldies, but goodies that we, it's like the bread and butter of an intro

52:29linguist course. You know, the fact that everybody has an accent. So there aren't people who are accentedless, um, accentless, uh, that there are correct ways of speaking. Um, and these things, you know, it, it goes deeper than just having like a wrong fact in your mind. Like they're really deeply embedded ideologies. So even like when you tell people an intro to linguistics and they're very motivated to like have this right so they can get it right on the test, right? They know, um, explicitly that like, of course all languages are equally good and stuff, but like throughout the

53:03semester and throughout, you know, one's education, you have to kind of like catch the way that people talk about accent and dialect as like, Oh, being like sloppy or incorrect, right? These things are so deeply embedded because we're just steeped in these ideologies of standard language. Um, and there being a correct way of speaking from very early on. Uh, so I think those kind of like deeply embedded things, it's not just like a one-off actually, you know, correction, but, um, but things you really have to kind of keep poking at. Um, so I think, uh, you know, those are perennial good ones. Um,

53:40I think the question of like awareness that Lauren was talking about before and this idea that people are sort of deliberately making choices to use language in particular ways, maybe to annoy other people or to be inauthentic or to do all kinds of nefarious things. Uh, like the math just doesn't math. Like if you think about how many different linguistic features we're uttering, like over the course of a second, it's like, you know, 10 or 12 phonemes, right? Like you couldn't possibly, you could never just like choose how each of those is going

54:13to sound. Um, stepping aside from all the complexities of like contextual effects and the fact that things like stress and the surrounding phonological segment, uh, or the morphological class of the sound that you're producing can also influence how it comes out. Like we just, we are so not aware of all of these details. Um, so I think like how, just how implicit our awareness or the, our knowledge of languages, um, and how much we're not making these very explicit online decisions is something that is striking to people and surprises them, I think.

54:49Can I ask Jen a follow-up, um, about what you said in the beginning about, uh, which is a part and parcel of every like individual linguistics class that like everyone has accents, all languages are valid expressions of meaning, et cetera. And those things are all true and I deeply believe them. And I think they're also just scientifically true because everyone runs around and has communities and raises babies and do all the things, you know, it's, it's clear that it's, it's, it's, it's all good. It's all fine. At the same time, we live in, we live in a society where there is accent and language discrimination. Um, and a perennial question that we've come back to a

55:23couple of times on this show is sort of like, at what point do you stop fighting the good fight for like all accents and languages should be treated the same? And start also saying, well, in the meantime, there are some people who don't, who didn't get brought up in a house with the prestigious variety. Should we teach the prestigious variety in school so that those people are screwed over less in their adult life? They can pass. How do you say? Um, not like giving it to the devil, but like sort of being like, yeah,

55:54this isn't great. But in the meantime, if these people don't learn certain ways of expressing themselves in writing or speech, they're going to be discriminated against and they're going to bear the brunt of it. The truth is that I'm probably not. I think I come across as like American whites, educated, whatever. Um, but that's something that I've learned. And some, some people don't have access to those varieties. What do you guys think about that? Should we keep fighting for employers being more fair or should we at the same time teach everyone how to,

56:27how to please the employers? In lack of a better word.

56:34I mean, this is a problem that's larger than language and linguistics. It's like every societal ill, it's like, well, um, capitalism sucks, but on the other hand, people like individual people have to live within that system. So I don't think there's a contradiction in saying like, like I think capitalism sucks, but I also have a 401k or a 403b or whatever you have in the university. Like I still have to participate in the system, but at the same time, I don't like put away the sort of larger, um, ideal or the way that I think about that system. Uh, and I think like

57:09in linguistics, we're sort of in a similar situation. Like, of course you want, like you have to treat things at a systemic level. Um, but on the other hand, like I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna tell any individual how they should or shouldn't act given the particular, uh, situation that they're in. Right. Um, it's one thing to, to know that there is nothing like linguistically lazy or wrong about high rising intonation or creaky voice or something. It's another to, um, you know, to tell a

57:44particular woman who feels like she has to alter her voice, like, oh no, don't do that. That's fine. You're, you're fine. Um, cause she's probably not fine in her context. So I think it's really tricky, but you can kind of try to do both at the same time. I can answer both your question and Daniel's earlier question, actually, which is, um, so Daniel was asking about what do people often get, get wrong or what, or, or, um, what do I often have to, misconceptions, right? Thank you. And, uh, one of the big ones, I mean, the big one, of course, is what Jen already said, this idea, the things that can be wrong. But another one is there's so much stigma against style shifting,

58:20which is something that all of us do. Code switching, of course, but if you just sticking within a monolingual context, I mean, um, you see every few months, there's some politician who's being berated by the press because they style shifted and they're being seen as inauthentic. And if we could just get our heads around the fact that all of us always style shift, then it makes the problem of whether or not to teach standard language in schools much easier, because if you're teaching standard language as the only way to survive in this world,

58:50then that's really problematic. But if you're saying, Hey, here's an alternative, this is the one that you want to use when you're in this particular context, but you know, you want to be using these other varieties in these other contexts and they're all fine. And some of them are stigmatized and we have to fight against that. And some of them receive too much prestige and that's kind of ridiculous, but we have to play the game. I mean, there's ways to teach it that are actually more like empirically accurate and validating to speakers, um, without having to say, no,

59:21we're not going to teach it at all. Oh man, this is, this is everything that I think about all the time is like, how, yeah, what do we, it's, it's exactly this. It's like, there is no correctness. Language is always changing. The things that people get upset about are so normal, but we can't fix all of society. So what do we do? Like, how do we use our combined expertise? I feel like I used to get very frustrated about having to reiterate just those handful of points all the time, but there are

59:53billions of billions of language users who have not been afforded the education that I have and the, the, the, the ability to be slow enough and sit down with language in these wonderful settings where we get to examine it. So it is like, I feel like my duty to continue with these, these mantras. Um, but also, yes, it's exactly this of part of our training puts us in this place where we have to examine language where we find it. And often where we find it is in these places where people are struggling to negotiate whatever, whatever market or social situation they find themselves

1:00:27in. Even if that's just being able to walk down the street and whatever clothes you wish, you know, sometimes it is, it is linguistic, even if it feels non-linguistic, it is this thing where, yeah, you have to do language with your whole body. And so sometimes these things get really complicated. Um, I like, yeah, just being in the room with other people who sit in the mess. I think a lot of what I'd like as scientists, we want it to be just, just so orderly. Um, and language is very, very rarely behaves in, in, in a spreadsheetable way. So I appreciate

1:01:00sitting with the mess. Thank you. I was just pleased that we returned to, I think was, it was just a good sort of framing, which is, um, there are lots of different ways of expressing yourself that are perhaps more or less successful in different settings. Uh, when you talk to your grandma at home versus when you talk to your friends, you're going to be speaking differently. Um, and here's a variety that is like widely considered to be like used in a lot of settings and in settings where, uh,

1:01:30power matters that people maybe should learn. It's hard to, how to do that without also saying that it's the correct or right language. I feel like people might do a search and replace for right with prestigious and then be like, she actually means correct, but I don't know how to do anything better than that. What I do love is that in the UK, received pronunciation is not necessarily prestigious in the sense that it's like, it's kind of stigmatized, right? But because it's, people make fun of it. People make fun of posh in a way that you don't find in the U.S. So I think

1:02:05there's some nuance. Ben's not here, but when we talk to him about this, we usually come up with some version of teach people the game, but call out the game. Yeah. The book is Sociophonetics Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory. It's available now from Oxford University Press. We've been talking to the editors, Dr. Jennifer Anise, Dr. Lauren Hall-Liu. Jen and Lauren, thank you so much for coming and hanging out with us today.

1:02:35Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks also to Kelly. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Let me crash. And have a great fun to have a chat with you as always. I'm always thrilled to come along. Thanks also to our patrons for supporting the show. We'll have a proper outro next time, but for now, thanks for listening. We'll catch you next time. Because language.

Sociophonetics of sign languages

1:03:01Oh, right. How did that feel? Yeah, fine. I had this whole thing about sign language ready to go, but it was going to take so long that, like, I'm glad you didn't ask because it's like a whole other thing. Lauren, we've been talking about spoken languages, but what about signed languages? What kind of phonology, sociophonology can we talk about in a language that is gestural? You really want to do this?

1:03:30I do. Sound is not a feature of signed languages, but there are things that we could describe as phonology. Absolutely. And the difference between phonetics and phonology in sign languages is it's murky in any language, but it's particularly murky in sign languages. So I'm not going to really make a distinction. There's a lot of really great work on sociolinguistic variation in sign languages. Most of it is lexical, at least as far as I know. So I'm not a specialist in this area. And there is like a really nice overview by Amelia Becker and her colleagues on the

1:04:03sociophonetics of sign languages. But from what I know, what makes sign languages really interesting is two things. One is that most people who are deaf are born to hearing parents. And so you don't have intergenerational transmission the way that you do for spoken languages, which means that the role of the schools that deaf children attend takes on so much of a bigger role in terms of what counts as the input and what structures social variation so that people talk about

1:04:37signs that belong to this school or that school. Regardless of the sign language itself, this is just true across different communities. But whatever national policy there is towards sign languages, the sign language education has this really strong effect on the languages in ways that it doesn't quite as much for the spoken languages. I heard that there was a sign language school in Belgium, I think, that was Catholic. So they separated boys and girls. So they ended up having sort of different dialects, if you will.

1:05:10Ireland. That happened to be gender split as well. Absolutely. Yeah. You get this huge gender effect because the schools were segregated by gender. Exactly. And in the U.S., famously, African-Americans were segregated from white Americans. And so you have Black American sign language, which is a distinct variety from white American sign language as well. So then getting into the phonetic stuff, I mean, what makes sign language so interesting is that you not only have one articulator, you have two articulators, you have two hands that can do the

1:05:40same thing or different things. And then you also have the non-manual features that are expressed by the face and by other aspects of how the body presents. Yeah. So eyebrows, position of like the muscles around the nose and the cheeks and then mouth and jaw. And then in addition to all of these things that can do things, they can move more than oral articulators can move for spoken languages. So they can have a much greater distance. They can move forward and backwards. Yeah, exactly. Up and

1:06:12down. How, yeah, distance from forward in the front. And then hand shape can just has so many other different configurations than what tongue shape can do, for example. So all of these things make sign languages potentially so much more rich phonetically in terms of, so a phonetic difference, you know, could be in how high a sign is made or how large the signing space is for an individual, for example,

1:06:45or how fast a movement sign is performed, all of these things. So it just makes it much more interesting. I think much more complex. We need more socio phoneticians of sign language, particularly those from deaf backgrounds. So this is my call to arms. I also have a suspicion that, like you said, because most deaf people are born to hearing parents and also because there are so much variation and like you have so much scope. I have a suspicion that deaf people are more flexible, more forgiving with

1:07:17variation than hearing people because half of, like a lot of the time they might be communicating with people who don't really know their sign language at all. So they're like, okay, yeah, I know, thank you isn't like that, but like we're at a bus stop and I helped you get off. I can figure out, like you might need to do a lot of interpretation because you deal with people who are not very proficient signers all the time. So I have a feeling like they're more, yeah, more forgiving for variation and quote unquote like errors or like uncommon things, which should make for a very different kind of language, I think,

1:07:54which I think is really cool. Yeah. And these kids who go to different schools, of course, they're interacting all the time. And so they're exposed to more variation that way. Yeah, absolutely. So cool. All right. Thank you. We managed to get that in.