Why Does Everyone Say ‘Like’ and ‘Um’ All The Time? - Valerie Fridland

1. 0:00 – 0:20

   Intro

   1. VFValerie Fridland0:00

      One thing that we do notice is when people are more dynamic speakers, when they say something that's more interesting and they're more engaging, people actually don't tend to note their uhs and ums as much as people that give sort of a monotonous, boring delivery and maybe don't have content that's really interesting. So a lot depends on what you're saying.

2. 0:20 – 4:27

   The Work of a Sociolinguist

   1. VFValerie Fridland0:21

      (wind blows)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:21

      What do you study?

   3. VFValerie Fridland0:23

      I am what's called a sociolinguist. Don't try to say that after a few drinks at cocktail parties. It's a hard one. Um, but it basically means that I study how the underlying linguistic patterns that we take for granted and we don't even notice anymore vary not just by language or dialect, but by social facts about us that are much smaller than these things that we tend to think of as language differences.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:49

      Why do languages change at all, then? Why isn't it just that we have a language and then people use it, and people use it, and it gets locked in for the rest of time?

   5. VFValerie Fridland0:57

      Well, that's why I make the big bucks. Or actually not, but that's why they pay me some salary. (laughs) That's a big question, actually, and, you know, that is what keeps ling- linguists and psychologists and, uh, cognitive scientists employed because we don't understand all the forces, but the short answer to that big question is we have underlying cognitive and articulatory pressures that constantly affect us as speakers. So an example of that would be the fact that, um, take a word with a lot of consonants on it that's a single syllable, like whisks, which is, you know, a word we use every day when we're cooking, and notice that when you say it in fast speech, or just really any time you say it in speech, you're going to naturally just delete some of the consonants off that. So you'll say, you'll whisk it fast. Um, you're not going to say all the whisks, because it's a hard thing to say. Or fifths, that's another word. Sixths. Those are all tricky words. Well, the reason you delete those consonants is there's a natural inherent pressure, a cognitive preference we think for languages to have very minimal syllable structures, and that means no consonants at the end if possible. Some languages actually prohibit all consonant clustering, but English allows a lot. I call it a promiscuous language for that reason. And, uh, so it's natural to delete them. That's sort of a cognitive, trying to get back to this cognitive preference we have. There's also some articulatory issues. So for example, words like the, or, or words that begin with the, that, that consonant cluster that's r- it's a T-H, but it's actually a single sound. Many, many languages don't have that sound. So for example, my mother's a French speaker and I used to make endless loads of fun of her because she would say, "One, two, three," 'cause she couldn't make the T-H sound, right? And she loved it, of course. Um, that was her favorite aspect of our relationship I'm, (laughs) I'm sure. But she couldn't say that because it's not a sound in French. That also tells us that it's either articulatorily a dispreferred sound or cognitively a dispreferred sound. So languages will naturally, if they have that sound, try to move towards not having it anymore, which is why a lot of dialects of English say things like, um, bruvva or teef, because they're trying to get back to that more natural consonant structure. So those are natural tendencies we have that exist all the time, pressure on us, all speakers, all languages, all the time. The part that I'm interested in is the other pressure, which is social pressure. So how is my social identity a factor in which of those pressures I succumb to? So if I'm a female, if I'm a young person, if I'm an African-Ame- American, if I'm a second language speaker, a non-native speaker, what do those pressures coupled with those linguistic pressures create in terms of dialects? And it's because these things swirl around us all the time. We're are, always having these natural pressures. We're always something socially. We're always changing who we are socially, and that has a big impact on which of those pressures that we allow in our speech and which we don't. And in the end, it's the cosmic language change that results. So language has always had these pressures on it. It hasn't changed. The language might change, but the pressures don't. We've always been social, right? You know, back in caveman days I'm sure they did some social fun stuff. Um, so you know, it's always been there, and we just kind of interact and engage and then that creates language change over time. Obviously it's a lot more complex, but that's sort of the short long answer.

3. 4:27 – 14:51

   Has English Become Simpler?

   1. VFValerie Fridland4:27

   2. CWChris Williamson4:28

      Is it right then saying that languages seem to change in a particular direction towards simplicity, uh, toward being more straightforward, easy to pronounce?

   3. VFValerie Fridland4:36

      Well, okay, that's a really, a trick question because I think the problem is a lot of times when people think simplicity, they think, uh, simplicity in the cognitive sense, and that's really not what we're moving towards. And languages don't always get simpler. Certain types of languages tend to get less complex over time from a, a standpoint of how they're articulated and maybe how they're structured morpho-syntactically. And those tend to be large languages spoken by a lot of speakers. So like English, for example, or Chinese, or Russian. They're, they actually have a lot of speakers, a lot of non-native speakers learn it, um, a lot of adults that, um, may have to acquire it not perfectly, and that causes language to simplify over time because the very complex morpho-syntactic and phonological patterns that babies are born into and able to acquire because of their greater cognitive plasticity does not exist in that case as widely. And therefore, over time, the rules that are less transparent to pick up atrophy, and that is what causes sort of a less complex structure. I wouldn't call it simpler, but less complex. So English, for example, was really complex in its early days. It had, um, a lot of endings on all words, so nouns and verbs and pronouns.

   4. CWChris Williamson5:51

      Oh, like ...

   5. VFValerie Fridland5:51

      Um, so for example, think about how we say I do, he does.... right? Where you have that little S that comes on? Well, imagine that we had to do that every time we used a noun, an adjective, or a verb to make sure it fit with all the other words in the sentence. So like German today has. Um, first of all, it has grammatical gender, which means that if I have a noun like the moon or the sun, I have to know whether it goes with other male or female things, depending on which grammatical gender it belonged to. So, that was one ending, and that had to stick on not just the nouns but the adjectives. There were several verb classes in old English, so there were strong classes and weak classes. So, all the -ed verbs that we use today are weak class verbs. So they were a few, a very sort of minority class in old English. The majority were the things like the sing, sang, sung, or drive, driven kind of class, where they had these extra endings that you put on. And those weird irregular verbs that we have in English, like, um, I drive, he drove, I have driven, that's actually a holdout from the strong classes of old English. Now, they're the minority today, and we just memorize them. But back then, they were a regular rule. So, another fun example is sh- is the plural S. We have just one ending to make plurals in English. Super simple. You want to make something plural, stick an S on it. You want to make a new word plural, stick an S on it. But in old English, S was actually the minority way of forming plurals. And it wasn't just an S, it was an AS typically. Uh, many, many other forms of plurals existed, and the reason we have words like oxen and children is because they're holdouts from old English plurals that were much more frequent. And in fact, shoes and eyes used to be shuen and eyen back in the day.

   6. CWChris Williamson7:36

      No way.

   7. VFValerie Fridland7:36

      So, so these are examples of complexity, um, that, that we lost over time. I think the trick is, we think of simpler as being sort of stupider or primitive, and that's actually false in the way of language. And a perfect example is, you know, no one thinks English is a stupid language. And in fact, we've created all sorts of things. We've made airplanes fly. We've created incredible life-saving vaccines. You know, we've created the internet in English. We do all these things in English. So, if we are really getting simpler, that probably wouldn't have happened. We'd be back in the days of Beowulf, which no one wants. No one wants to go back to that.

   8. CWChris Williamson8:12

      Okay, so you have a pressure which is on language, especially languages that are, uh, widely used and popular. Ones that need to be adopted by people perhaps later in life, because they are the cognitive limitations that you have, just being an older person trying to-

   9. VFValerie Fridland8:27

      Right.

   10. CWChris Williamson8:27

       ... learn a language as opposed to a child-

   11. VFValerie Fridland8:28

       Right.

   12. CWChris Williamson8:28

       ... picking it up naturally.

   13. VFValerie Fridland8:29

       Old farts suck, right? When it comes to language acquisition. That's just a fact.

   14. CWChris Williamson8:32

       There we are. So because of that, you inevitably, um, decomplexify. You, you reduce down the complexity, uh, and that causes some of the quirks, some of the sticky-outy bits that may be less logical to be eroded away. We end up, therefore, with, uh, a less complex, uh, end result. But that can't be the same for every language. And also, why ... If that's the case, that languages are, on average, especially when they're widely used, trending toward the less complex, why are they complex to begin with? Why not just make it simple from the start?

   15. VFValerie Fridland9:09

       Well, okay, so these are a couple different questions in there, I think, that you've packed in. One thing just to say is languages don't always simplify over time. A lot of times, through language contact, they get more complex. So, it's this constant battle between what's good for us as language speakers, which is to make it easier to communicate in the most efficient way possible, which tends to lead to slightly simpler co- less complex structures, versus the need to, um, sort of have all the aspects there to form the different things we want to do with language, which is complex in, in its own right. So, there, there are constant pressures. A lot of times, more complexity happens when languages come in contact, so we actually acquire new things on top of the things we already had. But I, I think one thing to be careful of is, when we're talking about complexity here, we're talking about morphosyntactic or phonological complexity, which just means we have a lot of stuff put on words. Um, there's different types of complexity you can gain. So while English lost morphosyntactic complexity, meaning all those endings fell off, 'cause who needs them, right? Um, we gained, uh, sort of lexical or, um, you know, uh, what, what would be good? Pragmatic complexity, meaning, for example, our word order became more fixed. So, it used to be in old English you could kind of be willy-nilly in what you stuck where, because there were little endings on all the words that told you, oh yeah, this adjective goes with that noun over there, right? They're friends, so, you know, you don't have to put them together 'cause they know they're friends. But we lose those things over time, and then we don't know they're friends anymore if we're sticking the adjective at the end of the sentence and the noun it modifies at the beginning. So as you lose the endings that tell you you're work to- you're together, like the wedding rings are gone, so we no longer they're f- know they're together, then we have to do other things that make up for it. So what English did instead is get a more fixed word order. So now our adjectives go before our nouns, right? And our subjects go before our verbs. And our objects go after that, and so that allows anybody listening to an English sentence to know, okay, it's first, so it has to be the subject. Oh, it's last, so it has to be the object. We didn't have to do that back then. So it's a different kind of complexity, so I di- I do want to be careful and so we're not saying that everything's simplifying. But what happens over time is generally y- that, um, smaller languages that had very few speakers, which was the origin of all language ... I mean, back in the day, if we go back-... you know, 50,000 years when we think in language first started, it wasn't thousands and thousands and millions of people that spoke them. It, it was very small groups. And they could transmit that kind of complexity. Um, and so what happens is when you move away from small groups and you get to millions of speakers, the original purpose of language, which was sort of to allow communication in a small group, has changed, and then language changes with it. So we're talking about evolutionary processes, and that's really what has caused languages to change. And when you look at indigenous languages, for example, um, those, you know, Austronesian languages or Native American languages that have very few speakers, often in the hundreds, those languages tend to be much more complex than languages like English, Chinese or Russian. And that's because their purpose is to communicate in a small group, and therefore they don't need to simplify over time because they're not having this transmission across large swaths of speakers. And, and when we transmit, and when I'm saying things change over time, I'm not saying all of a sudden someone wakes up and is like, "Okay, who needs that morpho- syntax? Let's just get rid of those stupid endings." I feel like saying eyes instead of ion today. That's not what happens. It's transmission to children. So when you get larger groups of speakers, then the rules become more opaque to the adults and they transmit, transmit those sort of inconsistencies to their children who then acquire the sort of simpler morphosyntax. If that makes sense.

   16. CWChris Williamson12:57

       Oh. So, um, morphosyntaxes die one generation at a time in that way?

   17. VFValerie Fridland13:03

       All language change works that way. Um, that it... And basically old people don't pick up new tricks. We're kind of like old dogs. We just don't do it. Now, certain superficial things like vocabulary words. You know, I can learn to twerk. Um, but-

   18. CWChris Williamson13:17

       (laughs)

   19. VFValerie Fridland13:17

       ... that, that doesn't mean I should. That definitely doesn't mean I should. (laughs) But I... It's a lot harder for me to learn something like, um, front vowel lax, uh, tense and laxness, which we have in New York where you hear like, "Ca, ca, ket," um, versus some words like glass wouldn't be la- would be tense and some would be lax. So this is really kinda tricky and it's a very, very, very complex rule where you, you tense the ah vowel before so-called fricatives, which are sounds like S or F. So it'd be laugh, but cat. So you'd hear the slight difference. That's something that's really hard to transmit to any speaker learning English, or even an English speaker that moves to New York as a 15-year-old is not going to get that very complex sort of types of pattern in there. So I think what we need to think about is sort of when we're talking about language change, what general people think about as language change is like a new word I've picked up. Um, but what linguists think about as language change is a new sound system I've picked up, new vowels I've picked up, new s- um, new morphosyntax, so new endings on my words, new pronouns, which of course we're all upset about picking up these days. But that has happened through history. We've had a bunch of different pronouns and in fact most of the pronouns we have today, like she and they, didn't even exist at the beginning of English. So they have both come into English since the middle English period. Uh, therefore we obviously have changed our pronouns a few times, been around the block on that front as well.

   20. CWChris Williamson14:50

       What about

4. 14:51 – 26:27

   Why We Say ‘Um’ and ‘Uh’

   1. CWChris Williamson14:51

      um and uh? Because these seem like words that are not only very common in English depending on who you're speaking to, but I speak to friends who are native speakers of a different language who make ums and uh sounds in different... It, it's a different sound even when they're trying to speak English to me.

   2. VFValerie Fridland15:08

      Right.

   3. CWChris Williamson15:08

      So that seems like a human universal.

   4. VFValerie Fridland15:11

      It is actually. Um and uh are fascinating and, you know, you call them words but there's actually a huge debate in linguistic circles. Uh, you know, this is what we do late at night, (laughs) about whether they are in fact words or not. Uh, they, they sort of act like, um, utterances that things that sort of just come out that aren't necessarily governed by the same rules that words are, but we also find them written in, in things where it's like, "Um, no," and so that suggests a more word-like employment. So you know, there's kind of a debate over whether we call them words. But regardless of what we call them, filled pauses, which is what those are, are things that are universal. They've been found in every language study. They do differ slightly. So some languages will have a lot more than two. Um, some languages only have two, but basically all languages have at least two. And most proto-Indo-European languages have something along the form of uh or um, and usually they differ by the vowel.

   5. CWChris Williamson16:05

      Why that sound? What is it that's about the ph- physiology of the mouth perhaps?

   6. VFValerie Fridland16:12

      Mm-hmm.

   7. CWChris Williamson16:12

      The way that the brain tries to make sounds come out? What is it that's causing so many different languages to zero in on um or uh or something similar?

   8. VFValerie Fridland16:22

      Right. Well, you know, a lot of different answers to that depending on which aspect you're trying to answer. But just for the sound itself actually it's a really interesting question because if we look at most languages, most of them have sort of a vowel-like filled pause, like uh, that we write with a U-H but it's just a vowel. You know, like someone punches you in the gut, you just go "Uh." Right? And then we have one with a nasal sound, and nasal sounds are things like Ns or Ms. And so English has um, but so for example i- in Japanese you have ano which also has a na- nasal sound. So we find that a lot-

   9. CWChris Williamson16:55

      Oh, that's two syllables. That's interesting.

   10. VFValerie Fridland16:56

       Yes. Well, some languages like Chinese and Japanese actually use demonstrative pronouns as filled pauses. So it, it can be a range of things. And in eng- in Spanish esta is a filled pause. So there, that also is something that functions as a word in other cases but is brought in as a filled pause. So sometimes languages do that where they use another preexisting word. Other languages, mostly Germanic languages use uh and um because that seems to have inherited from a proto-language. So we suspect that since English is very similar to German and other languages like Finnish and, um, yeah, uh, Danish and Swedish, they all have these similar uh, um types of sounds that they probably were inherited from Proto-Germanic, which may even have been inherited from Proto-Indo-European. So they're very old. But the reason we probably do that sound is if you'd say the uh sound, just say uh-

   11. CWChris Williamson17:47

       Uh.

   12. VFValerie Fridland17:48

       All right, so your mouth is kind of just at rest, right? So if you didn't do much with your mouth and you, someone punched you in the gut, that's the sound you would make. So it's an easy kind of just simple sound, and it's central to the mouth so you're not moving to get to different targets like you are in speech sounds. It's just what is emanated sort of as your brain is thinking. Um, so that's probably why that sound in English was inherited. The um is interesting because one of the reasons we think that sound might be used more than uh or have developed is partially because from a sound symbolism standpoint it's a more polite sound. So if you go, uh, you know, it's kind of ugly. Your mouth's hanging open. A fly can just wander in there. But if you say um, it's, it's much more pleasant, isn't it? So sort of polite.

   13. CWChris Williamson18:31

       Oh, um is the formal of uh.

   14. VFValerie Fridland18:33

       (laughs) Exactly. You gotta have synonyms for everything, right? But actually, the really interesting about uh and um is they do different work for us. So both of them are basically speech planners. So as we're thinking of more complex things to say, of harder vocabulary, less familiar terms, or really long syntactic structures, they tend to come out. But uh signals to a listener that you're going to just take a really quick delay, li- I'm, I'm thinking about it, it's coming out in just a second. But when you um, it actually tends to precede longer delays, which means that we are actually pretty intentional about which one we're using. We don't have synonyms typically that don't develop different meanings, so you know, it's not, there's really no point in doing the exact same thing, so language just automatically tries to give different meanings to them. So uh seems to signal, "I need a short delay." Um seems to signal, "It's gonna take me a little longer to figure this out."

   15. CWChris Williamson19:27

       Why would people choose to use this? I understand that it's a sound, but is this, uh, mental cognitive processing? Is this a buffering screen? Is this ...

   16. VFValerie Fridland19:39

       (laughs)

   17. CWChris Williamson19:39

       ... something else? What's going on?

   18. VFValerie Fridland19:41

       Yeah, you know how the internet has that little twirly thing? That's basically ...

   19. CWChris Williamson19:44

       Right.

   20. VFValerie Fridland19:44

       ... what um and uh are. And, uh, have you noticed that, you know, when it, you're really in a hurry and you're trying to do something complex, it tends to give you that little twirly signal more? Same thing with um and uh. They tend to occur when we're doing more difficult cognitive processing. So, you know, the idea that um and uh are sort of signals that we don't know what we're saying or we're uncertain or hesitant are not true in the sense that they signal that we don't know what we're talking about. In fact, what they signal is that we're doing a lot of work to say the right thing or to come up with the right word. But it does signal that we're doing cognitive work and that our processing is w- is going. So it's basically a ch- a sort of signal of brain churning. But what we find is it's not just brain churning if we're doing simple task. The more we uh and um, the more likely it is that we're actually doing harder things like coming up with words we don't use very often, coming up with more technical vocabulary, or coming up with a more complex embedded sentence structure, so morpho-syntactically more complex. So we tend to correlate our uh and um use with how difficult the thing we're doing is, which is probably why we um and uh more when we're in contexts that require, you know, higher for- morpholutant s- sorts of speech like in the workplace or at school, that kind of thing, where we wanna impress people so we're trying to come up with those big vocabulary words rather than, you know, twerk.

   21. CWChris Williamson21:09

       How does this ... Uh, h- uh, how, how is this interpreted by other people? So from our side, let's say that it is a byproduct of this cognitively demanding, high RAM, 64 gigabyte required processing p- speed that we're going through. That should be the case, if it's true, that other people should always interpret ums and uhs as signals of authenticity, um, somebody that is working incredibly hard to get their sentence across, I really should pay more attention. Yet ums and uhs aren't exactly valorized as this fantastic introduction into somebody's speech pattern.

   22. VFValerie Fridland21:49

       Right. So this is one of those really interesting places where things that offer us linguistic benefits, which uh and um really, really do, they're actually very beneficial to us as both speakers and listeners, they don't match up with social benefits because they don't really offer social benefits. On, you know, on the whole, people don't really like uh and um, and in fact they often think it signals someone doesn't know what they're talking about or they're hesitant or uncertain. So if you go listen to someone give a presentation and they're uh-ing and um-ing their way through it, you're probably going to sort of shut down or stop listening or you'll say to your friends, "Oh my God, if that person says an- another uh, I'm just gonna kill me." And when people overdo it, we really, really notice them. So they're not really considered great speech features, but that's kind of funny because they're actually pretty great speech features if we look at them from a linguistic and cognitive standpoint. Part of the problem is in the context that we notice people's um-ing and uh-ing, which is usually presentations or speeches, those are contexts we expect people to have practiced, to have rehearsed, to know what they're going to say. And since we know that uh and um signal someone sort of thinking through things, I think part of the reason we dislike them in those contexts is because they signal to us that someone hasn't done their homework. So if someone's giving a presentation and they're uh-ing and um-ing their way through it, I'm thinking, "God, did you not read this before you came up here and, you know, bored me?" One thing that we do notice is when people are more dynamic speakers, when they say something that's more interesting and they're more engaging, people actually don't tend to note their uhs and ums as much as people that give sort of a mono- monotonous sort of boring delivery and maybe don't have content that's really interesting. So a lot depends on what you're saying.... but also the practice issue, I think, in places where we expect someone to have rehearsed and know their content, signals that we're working through it is not a great thing to have. On the flip side though, when we look at the research on what uh and um do for us, they both help us as a speaker with speech planning. They signal to the listener that my turn's not done and how long a delay to expect. So those are both beneficial things. But even more so, for listeners, if we look at studies that s- do either eye tracking or event-related potential studies, things that sort of are measures of cognitive processing on the listener's part, they actually seem to help us have faster recognition of what someone's gonna say, be able to better predict what someone's gonna say, are better at new information processing, and remember things better later. So that's not bad for a little filled pause.

   23. CWChris Williamson24:20

       Wow. So we have, uh, a bunch of different dynamics crashing up against each other here. One is the buffering requirement or the advantage that using these filler words offer us. Another is that it is potentially useful at helping the people that we are speaking to both retain and understand what it is that we're saying. But all of this gets filtered through the social expectation, which disincentivizes both the speaker and the listener from this happening. So that's very, it's very interesting, the fact that this is good for you as a listener, but might not be what you want to hear as a listener.

   24. VFValerie Fridland25:00

       Right. But if you look at language over time anyway, most of the things that we think of as bad speech are actually not bad at all, it's just sort of social historical accident that we don't like them. So a lot of things. Um, so think about like use, you know, the way that people say like all the time. People hate that. I, I hear nothing but bad things about like. If, if I go give a talk, it can be on a completely different topic, and then afterwards people will come up and say, "Oh my god, I loved your talk. Tell people to stop saying like all the time." If only I had that power, right? Uh, a- and I wouldn't want it, because actually, like is very beneficial. So that's another example of we're doing something to help fill a void that we need in our language or to help us do a function or a purpose that we haven't found to be met by other things in our language, and yet because they're not the right speakers that do them or because we take them to signal something else, we socially interpret them negatively. So with uh and um, I think it's because a lot of times we do associate them with hesitancy or uncertainty. And it's true, they do signal the fact that someone is working through things, but is that a bad thing? You know, why do we think that's bad, that someone is working through what they're going to tell us? I don't want someone to just spout off, you know, incoherent stuff because they're not thinking it through. If you step back to consider why we uh and um, it's actually for pretty good reasons. It's just that we don't like it because it signals to us someone isn't sure about the words they're saying and maybe they haven't practiced enough.

   25. CWChris Williamson26:26

       What about

5. 26:27 – 30:39

   Is it Better to Be Silent Than Use Fillers?

   1. CWChris Williamson26:27

      the difference between using um and uh versus just having silence?

   2. VFValerie Fridland26:33

      You know, that's an interesting question. Certainly it's been studied. So in some of the research that looked at the gain that listeners get by hearing an uh and- or an um before a word in, in a series of sentences, they would also do those same experiments where they had a silent pause instead of inserting an uh or um before the word to see if maybe it was simply that people have more time to think and that's why they do better at, at comprehension. And what they found is a silent pause didn't have the same effect, nor did something like a cough that also gave the same amount of time, but was a different kind of distractor. And in fact, things like coughs actually hindered comprehension. So clearly, we are treating uh and um differently than both other distractors and silent pauses from a cognitive standpoint. So silent pauses don't give us the bump that uh seems to give us. On the flip side, silent pauses are sometimes better in a context like giving a presentation. So I'm not telling people go stick uh and ums into your presentation, because unless I've talked to that audience before you get there, it probably will still not be taken as great speaking. But especially at the beginning of a sentence, because we do find that people either uh or um at the beginning of the sentence, depending on how long they think it's gonna take them to answer the question. So it does seem to be taken as a marker of uncertainty, particularly at the very beginning of a sentence. So that might be one to stay away from. But when we again do studies that look at how people take silent pauses versus filled pauses, in some cases they can take silent pauses as greater signal- signals of anxiety than when someone filled their pause with uh or um, probably because they weren't sure when someone paused in that context whether they were just not sure what they were going to say or whether they forgot what they were going to say. It doesn't give the listener the same clue that you know you're working on it. Instead, it might lead to some misconception when you silently pause that either you haven't finished but you don't know what you're s- you're gonna say or you suddenly abruptly did finish and it's someone else's turn. So it can be a little more confusing, whereas uh and um are signals to a listener specifically, "I'm working on it. I'm gonna keep talking." So while silent pauses certainly in speeches are sometimes very effective, especially when you wanna add power to what you're saying so you give people a moment to think about it, it's not always beneficial in casual conversation to do that.

   3. CWChris Williamson28:53

      I have a friend who does a lot of debates and he uses, uh, turn transition cues in a similar way to what you're talking about, but he doesn't use um or uh, and he learned this from Christopher Hitchens. So he's having a debate with somebody and one of the things that he's conscious of is that if he gets anywhere close to a pause point within his sentence, the other person is potentially going to jump in and then try and make a point. So what he does is he'll start the beginning of a sentence like that, take a sip of water, give himself the breathing room to go through things, and then keep going, because you're, no one's going to jump in. Uh, th- after a the? Are you kidding me? That's so rude. But-

   4. VFValerie Fridland29:32

      Right.

   5. CWChris Williamson29:32

      ... if he started it before...... the beginning of the sentence or halfway through at a point that seemed like a more natural break. It allows somebody to come in. So yeah, I understand that ums and uhs are a nice foam finger that you can wave in the air that says, "I- I got a little bit more to talk about here. Just hang fire one second, mate. I know that I might not get the next word out immediately, but just, uh, I require a bit more-"

   6. VFValerie Fridland29:53

      Right. Don't jump in here, right? It's sort of like-

   7. CWChris Williamson29:55

      "... attention."

   8. VFValerie Fridland29:55

      ... the, "Hey, dude, I'm still talking," kind of signal. But that's exactly right. And turn transition cues, I'm impressed. That's a big linguistic term, and it basically t- just is any time we're indicating to someone that it's their turn, and that can be something that we do spoken, like, uh, saying, you know, "Stop talking," and just have silence, or we can se- uh, select somebody. So I can say, "Chris, what do you think?" And that is definitely a turn transition cue. I can even just look at people. But it's very ... Because there's so many of them and they do different work in terms of how people interpret them, it can be very confusing when someone just ta- stops talking or doesn't use some sort of signal that they're either not done or they are done. So uh and um are a great solution for that. And they do seem to work that way.

   9. CWChris Williamson30:38

      I know that you're

6. 30:39 – 34:26

   How to Be a More Conscientious Listener

   1. CWChris Williamson30:39

      coming at this from a linguistic perspective. But, uh, it would be stupid of me not to bring this up with you. No one on the podcast that's ever listening to this is ever going to see the volume of nods that I put in while the guest is speaking. So as I'm here, I'm just going away, like a little nodding dog sat on the back of a car, that has to be kind of not quite like a turn transition cue, but it's like an encouragement. So what I'm doing while I'm here is, "Yep, that's good. Keep on going, keep on going. That's good. Yep, enjoying it, enjoying it." And then if I need to take ... If I stop, it's go, "Oh, maybe he's got something to say." So this is a silent equivalent of a, whatever the, whatever the opposite of a turn transition cue. My turn transition cue.

   2. VFValerie Fridland31:19

      (laughs) Of a keep going cue.

   3. CWChris Williamson31:21

      Yes. Yes.

   4. VFValerie Fridland31:22

      I, you know, that ... It's called back channeling, what you're talking about. You're doing a silent back channel. Um, but a lot of times we do it when we say things like, "Uh-huh. Yeah. Right. Uh-huh." Which of course we try not to do on a podcast, because it ... you can talk over the other person.

   5. CWChris Williamson31:34

      My first ever episode was filled with, "Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm-hmm."

   6. VFValerie Fridland31:40

      (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson31:40

      "Yeah. Mm-hmm." I had-

   8. VFValerie Fridland31:43

      That just means-

   9. CWChris Williamson31:43

      It took, it took a long time for me to deprogram it. And the y- the person that I picked up the nodding thing from was Oprah. <|agent|><|en|>

   10. VFValerie Fridland31:49

       Oh, that's a perfect person to take cues from. And you know, it's funny, because actually it signals that you're a more conscientious, nicer listener. Turn transition-

   11. CWChris Williamson31:58

       I am. Thank you.

   12. VFValerie Fridland31:58

       Cue ... I mean, uh, back channels are actually a very lovely thing to do that's c- It's conversational support. You're encouraging someone to keep going, you're showing listenership. It has all those sort of, of aspects to it. But when you do things like interview guests, or I have learned not to back channel too much because I do a lot of sociolinguistic interviewing. And the last thing you can do is analyze someone's speech when you're talking over their speech with, "Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Yeah. Great. Wow." So it's ... You just sort of learn not to do it. But in casual conversation, it's weird if you don't. And in fact, there have been some really interesting studies about how people take, uh, people that don't back channel very much or what, how they misread their intentions. Um, a famous study, of course, was done between men and women, with the idea that men tend to not use back channeling as much as women, which is why women think men are assholes. I mean, I'm sure there's other reasons that we think they're assholes.

   13. CWChris Williamson32:49

       Is that true?

   14. VFValerie Fridland32:50

       But ... (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson32:50

       Is there a, is there a sex split? Is there a gender split between men and women?

   16. VFValerie Fridland32:52

       You know, there, there has been some in some ... There were, there were some studies. One, uh, I'm thinking about was done in the '80s by Pamela Fishman, uh, who did some research on con- conversational discourse. And she found among couples that men tended to not back channel, um, or did a delayed back channeling, which is worse, which is where you don't do it in time. So you know, there's very normal places to insert that, "Uh-huh. Yeah. Uh-huh. Uh-huh," that shows excitement and like, you're right there and you're keeping up with them, you're listening. And you know, "Yes, keep going." And then there's the, "Yeah. Uh-huh," that really slow kind of three seconds too late, that means, "I'm not e- I'm reading the newspaper. I'm not even paying attention." So what she found was men used more delayed back channels than women did.

   17. CWChris Williamson33:40

       That's funny.

   18. VFValerie Fridland33:40

       I think, you know, uh, it's changed. I haven't read any recent studies of that. Um, hopefully it has changed. I think a lot of things have changed since that time and we don't find it quite as distributed by male and female anymore. Uh, and it certainly can be personality type. You know, there are people that are really avid, engaged listeners, more conscientious listeners. And you can do psychological tests to test out those people. And, um, there was a really interesting study on discourse markers, and those are things like, "You know, well, so." Um, and we found that more conscientious people ... It wasn't my study, but it was found that more conscientious people tend to use more of those as well. So I think it also is by personality type, and it's probably by sociocultural background as well. But yes, there was, there was a gender difference initially in back channeling.

   19. CWChris Williamson34:25

       Okay. What about

7. 34:26 – 44:46

   Why We Say ‘Like’ So Often

   1. CWChris Williamson34:26

      the word like? Why does anybody use it?

   2. VFValerie Fridland34:30

      Oh, I love like. I mean, what's not to love about like? Uh, you know, a lot of people hate that word. Uh, they hate it and except for, for the verb, you know, where they like ...... ice cream, for example. But the like that's used as a discourse marker or a quotative verb, so those would be things such as ... I'm gonna have to watch my like use here. Uh, "Like, he goes to school, like, you know?" Or ... and that's sort of discourse marker like. That's overdone, but that's a- an example. Or a quotative like would be something where you use it instead of the verb "to say." So if you're talking about a party and you're talking about what John said, you might say, "Well, John was like, 'I don't think I'm gonna go tomorrow.'" And I was like, 'I think you should.'" Right? That's a quotative verb. So those are very different likes. And in fact, there are at least three, if not more, different very legitimate uses of like that are not the traditional uses of like, which would be like as a verb, like as a noun, or like as a preposition, so in a simile construction, for example. The ones that are less accepted are like as a conjunction, so if you say something like, "I feel like ..." or, "It seems like ..." or, "He pretends like ..." Those types of likes, even though we all use those, are actually frowned upon by the grammar mavens. But the newest forms that we really dislike are those discourse marker likes that sort of dot our linguistic landscapes when we're saying things. But if you think about where they show up, and it's not random or chaotic, despite what people might believe, they actually tend to show up when a speaker is trying to do some sort of subjective approximation, a- estimation, or apply this sort of impreciseness of meaning so that their listener gets that sense that this is their own evaluation of s- of a situation. So if I said, "Like, he was a lawyer or something," that means, "I'm telling you, this is my own opinion, I don't really know for sure, but I'm estimating or approximating what I think he was." Or, "She's, like, popular or something," means, "It's not quite that, that's not the exact fit, that's not exactly how I describe it, but that's the best I can do because there's not really words available to describe my meaning." So those are actually very valuable, because what they're communicating to you as a listener is, "I'm not making any strong claims about this is exactly how the world is. I'm telling you this is my perception of how the world is in this case." Or it can intensify or emphasize something. So if I said, "I ran, like, 20 miles today," well, you know I didn't run 20 miles. I don't look that exhausted or that fit. (laughs) But what I'm saying is, "I ran a lot." I'm emphasizing, just for effect, how much. So in all those cases, whether I'm using it as a quotative verb, which then tells you I'm not verbatim quoting what someone says but sort of estimating what they said, or if I'm telling you an estimate of how much I ran for emphasis, they're actually serving a really useful purpose. It's simply that age-wise, older speakers tend not to use them. They use about instead, or they use you know as a discourse marker instead, or some sort of other discourse marker. Younger speakers, people under 40, tend to use like a lot more. And so that's where we really see a generational divide in how acceptable people find it.

   3. CWChris Williamson37:33

      When did it get introduced?

   4. VFValerie Fridland37:35

      Well, for, you know, the popular belief, you'd say the Valley Girls in the 1980s with, I think it was Moon Unit Zappa who sang that fabulous song, Valley Girl, you know, where she liked and gagged me with a spoon all over the place. But that was actually just picking up on an undercurrent of something that was already in Southern California speech at the time. And in fact, and Chris you're gonna like this, like is a British feature, and we find it traces back centuries in British speech. And if you look at old criminal court transcripts from the 1700s, the old bailing proceedings, which are great documents for linguists to look at how colloquial speech was back in the day when ... before we had cell phones and smartphones to record everything. Um, and we find that like actually occurred as a discourse marker as back a- as far back as the 1700s. So it's been around a long time, and I'm afraid we have to blame the Brits for this one.

   5. CWChris Williamson38:28

      Okay. I've got-

   6. VFValerie Fridland38:29

      (laughs)

   7. CWChris Williamson38:29

      ... a ... I've got a little video that I wanted to show you. Let's see if this can work. Can you see that?

   8. VFValerie Fridland38:33

      I see that, yeah. Okay.

   9. CWChris Williamson38:35

      Okay.

   10. NANarrator38:35

       I think, like, the biggest thing that, like, annoys me in, like, the whole dating world is, like, fucking talking stages. Like, that shit's so annoying, like, the whole, like ... and just, like, the inconsistency in them, like, I literally, like, hate that, like, so much, but I think that's, like, my biggest thing is just, like-

   11. CWChris Williamson38:50

       What- what specifically?

   12. NANarrator38:51

       Just, like, the fact of just, like, you, like ... I don't know how to word this. Like, in, like, talking stages, and it's just, like, you're, like, labeled that, and it's, like, people, like, are considered, like, you can't, like ... You're just, like, confused, and, like, most of the time, like, the girl get, li- gets, like, attached or something, and they, like, see it, like, it's gonna lead to a relationship, and it's always not. And it's just, like, that's, like, my biggest thing is, like, I just hate the whole, like, how, like, talking stages are so, like, normalized. Like, n- traditional dating does not exist in this generation.

   13. CWChris Williamson39:23

       So that was 27 likes in 48 seconds-

   14. VFValerie Fridland39:28

       (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson39:28

       ... there.

   16. VFValerie Fridland39:29

       All right. And, you know, when you draw attention to it, it really stands out, right? So the fact that we're talking about like, it definitely stands out. A couple of things I would say is that's obviously a young woman, and that s- tends to be who we, we sort of diss in terms of like use more than young men, although actually, studies don't show that there's really significant difference generally between young men and young women. Older men and women, there is some difference, but generally speaking, it's a young feature. And what we find with like is, if we look at how it distributes over a lifespan, younger speakers tend to like at a much higher degree than they will as the same speaker 10 years later. So part of that is the stage of life she's in, but notice when she was talking, it's all estimation. She's giving her own impressions, her own opinions, h- her own sort of, uh, approximation of what she likes, what she doesn't, of her opinion. And so for example, um, uh, she was saying, "I hate when it's like ..." I can't even remember what she was saying, truthfully. But, uh, you know, she was talking about how she feels when things happen. And so this is a perfect example of why like was so prevalent in her speech, 'cause almost every instance, she's talking about something that is ...... her own subjective sensibility. Now, was it excessive? Certainly. But a lot of times when we look at young speech, we find a overuse of something, and that's called age grading, which atrophies as they get older, because it's sort of cool and they're set to talk that way. It's part of just sort of learning to use that feature, and it's a novel feature coming in, so it gets overused. Then as they go into the working world and people frown upon them, as the, you know, one million people probably wrote nasty comments under that (laughs) -

   17. CWChris Williamson41:10

       (laughs)

   18. VFValerie Fridland41:10

       ... you tend to lower your use, especially in settings where you would be expected not to use them. So for every parent out there who's freaking out about how their daughter or son uses like all the time in that context, don't worry. I promise they're still employable, despite what you might think. (laughs)

   19. CWChris Williamson41:25

       What is the social, uh, interpretation of the use of the word like?

   20. VFValerie Fridland41:32

       Well, I think it depends on the age group, uh, among younger speakers, so I think when that young woman's talking to other young women, it's not noticed at all. I have a teenage daughter, and she uses like quite a bit. And when she has her friends on the way to volleyball in the back of the car, it is a like fest. Uh, I hear a lot, I hear a lot. There's a lot of low-key, there's a lot of slay, there's a lot of like. But again, that's in her own peer group, and that's very normal, and it's kind of... I think part of the reason that you use it a lot is it gives this very young, hip kind of urban sort of sense, and that's very much what young women and young men are trying to pull off when they're with their friends. Um, so as she gets older, I'm expecting she won't use it. But the social benefit to her is it gives off that sort of, um, cool, hip, not-too-concerned-with, you know, a- academics and scholasticness. You know, it's sort of this-

   21. CWChris Williamson42:25

       Yeah, it's imprecision, in- in a way.

   22. VFValerie Fridland42:27

       ... I'm, I'm chill.

   23. CWChris Williamson42:27

       It's relaxed, it's approximate.

   24. VFValerie Fridland42:29

       Yes. You know, kind of the chill vibe, uh, the s- sort of Southern California chill vibe, and that's what I think young women are going for, and young men. It is also quite prevalent with young men. But I do know that people c- uh, uh, all the time bring up, just like that example, people that use it excessively, and I think the reason we notice and call those out is because they are excessive and unusual. So I teach 20-somethings every year. Um, and they're delightful, and I will tell you, they're very concerned about their like use. I, at the very first day of class, I said, you know, I'll say, "What do you notice about speech? Just tell me something." I don't say, "Tell me something bad about speech." I just say, "Tell me what you notice." Every single year, every single class period, "Like, like, like, like, I hate like." And they'll even say, "I hate like how people use like all the time." Which is then, of course, the rest of the class, we laugh every time that person uses like because once you've noticed it, it's very, very salient. But young people are aware of it, and they are self-conscious about it. My students are very self-conscious about it. So I make them study it. I make them analyze their speech. I have them have a conversation and record where they use it and how they use it, which gives them two tools. It first lets them see that it's purposeful. Um, most of the time, people don't use it as excessively as that example, and you use it in cases, for example, where you're using it as a quotative or you're using it as approximating adverbial or you're using it as a sentential adverbial. So if you can put a name to it, it makes it seem a little more like it has a function. But the other benefit is if they want to lower their use and they know how they use it, you can ta- think to yourself, okay, wait, I know I used it as a approximating adverbial. I'm going to use about instead. So instead of saying, "I ran, like, 10 miles," you can just think to yourself, "I ran about 10 miles." And so if you give someone the tools by understanding their speech, then they have tools to help themselves, whether they want to justify its use or change its use. So I think that's my approach to like.

   25. CWChris Williamson44:22

       Right. So rather than feeling as if like is a curse that gets thrown and scattered across a, a sentence, and it's essentially impossible for you to get rid of, what you're doing here is saying, "It's there for a purpose. Here are three different distinct purposes. If you want to reduce the usage of the word like, one of the things that you need to do is look at where it gets brought in, and then in advance, perhaps at the start of that sentence, just take an extra

8. 44:46 – 52:12

   The Cause of Vocal Fry

   1. CWChris Williamson44:46

      half beat and think, 'I will use about,' " I will use one of the other replace alternatives."

   2. VFValerie Fridland44:53

      Right. Exactly, exactly. As sociolinguist, I love like. You know, I think it's a fascinating thing to study, and I love the fact that it's actually much more powerful and purposeful than people give it credit for. But as a person and as a mother, I do get the concern with y- women and men using like. And especially women, because we diss their speech so much, that a man can use, a young man can use the same amount of like and not be judged in the same way, and it can have professional consequences. At least we worry about that. So I want to give people the tools to look at like either way, and as long as they realize there's nothing bad about it, there's nothing wrong with it, but it may not be professionally and socially beneficial for you to do it. And if that's the case, understanding it will give you some tools as well.

   3. CWChris Williamson45:38

      What's happening with vocal fry as well?

   4. VFValerie Fridland45:41

      (laughs) Speaking of dissing women's voices, right? Now, this is, vocal fry's a really interesting feature, and for people that don't understand what vocal fry is, it's that sort of crackly, um, poppy sort of noise that sometimes comes into particularly women's voices as they get through the end of a sentence. So that would be something like, "I don't know about that," where you can hear that kind of fry, that, that crackliness come in. We call it creak in linguistics. We actually don't refer to it as vocal fry. We refer to it as creaky voice, which I think is way more descriptive of what it sounds like. And actually, what happens with creak or vocal fry is that you have the vocal folds, and I'm gonna give you... For those of you that are looking, you can see that these are sort of your vocal flo- folds, which are kind of these muscular flaps at the top of the larynx. So usually, we have them kind of pulled tight and long, and so you can either open them a little to make a voiceless sound, where the air flows through freely, and that would be like a tuh tuh sound, or you can close them and, um, push air through, and that makes them vibrate.As you do your pitch too, you push them through the vocal folds, and the vibration of the vocal folds is what determines your average pitch. So in normal cases, just your everyday average pitch, the thing we recognize when we talk to our, our husbands or our wives, or when someone we know calls us on the phone, that's just normal phonation, it's called. That's just a certain vibration of the vocal folds. But when we get into creaky voice, what happens is we take those same vocal folds and we kinda bunch them up so they are thicker. Do you see how they get, kind of get thicker? And think of a rubber band. If you have a rubber band and it's pulled really tight and you ping it, it's going to, well, if it doesn't snap you and you go, "Shit, that really hurt," if it stays together, it's going to vibrate at a very regular rate. But if you kind of let it fall and get soft and you kind of ping it, it's just going to be like, neeh, right? It's not going to really do much. It's not going to be a regular vibration. Well, when you bunch your vocal folds up and you make them thicker and heavier, they vibrate at a slower rate 'cause they're heavier, and they tend to vibrate irregularly. Now, lower pitch in general is just a slower vibration of vocal folds. If you add on top of that an irregular vibration, that's when you get creaky voice. And so it happens at a low pitch. What happens is we actually find that men do it too, but because men operate at a lower pitch more generally, that drop in pitch to make vocal fry is not as obvious. So when we notice women doing it, it's because they go from a higher pitch at the front end of their sentence to a much lower pitch to enact vocal fry. What we find is women have been doing it in professional settings particularly. So one of the biggest complaints you hear is in radio shows or broadcasting where people have women's voices. So NPR is an area where people have complained. In fact, there was a show, uh, This American Life, that was completely dedicated, one of the episodes, to vocal fry, and how many haters wrote in because of the women on that show, the broadcasters, the journalists that actually had vocal fry in their voices. What we find is early studies in the 1990s and the early 2000s showed that women in broadcasting settings actually vocal fried more than men in those settings, and more than women elsewhere, which suggests that they're actually responding to that pressure for women in broadcasting to have lower pitched voices, which is something that they've had a pressure on them since the 1950s. I mean, I think Bar- Barbara Walters spoke a lot about the fact that as a woman broadcasting, she was expected to put a certain voice on. There have been lots of complaints by women saying that their low voices, their high voices were called shrill and unacceptable on the airwaves. Well, what's the solution? Throw in a little low pitch, vocal fry. And why don't you do v- lower pitches in general? Well, because women get the double bind of being less attractive in terms of ratings that people give them when we hear them with a lower pitched voice. So women with high pitched voices are more attractive, but not very professional or competent. Men with low pitched voice are both professional, competent, and attractive. So women have this double bind in the workplace where they have to adopt a lower pitched voice to be taken seriously, but then they're judged as less attractive. So what if you have a high voice with a little vocal fry? That gives you a little bit of two birds with one stone, right? Where you get this attractive rating with the higher pitched voice since you're more normal voice, you have a little vocal fry on the end to kind of get that more professional, urban feel, which is really how women hear that, that feature. And that kills the, um, problem of being not attractive but professional or being not professional but attractive. So it's kind of a really cool solution, I think. Uh, not well loved. (laughs)

   5. CWChris Williamson50:04

      So w- yeah, what you're saying there is other women seem to interpret vocal fry more positively than men do. Is that right?

   6. VFValerie Fridland50:11

      Well, I think young men actually don't dislike it either. You know, a lot of times what we see is the judgment of older speakers, particularly the ones that would listen to NPR. You know, not many of my 20-year-old males listen to NPR in my class, nor my females. Um, not all of them. I'm sure there are some, but they tend to listen to a little different kind of more, you know, hip stuff. So you know, when you get to be older, an older speaker, you have these ideas and norms in your head, and you might be more judgmental. But young women hear vocal fry as urban, as professional, as sort of chill and relaxed, as, um, intimate. So we find positive attributes with vocal fry among younger speakers, and those don't seem to translate so much to older speakers. And part of it's also just the fact that we dis women's voices in professional contexts. So when women do it and we notice it, it's a bad thing. But if you look at longer term research on vocal fry in British speakers, which is where it was first studied, British men actually use vocal fry at a rate of three to 10 times more than British women. So you know, it, it wasn't considered a p- an epidemic or sort of a, a vocal, um, pandemic until women in America started doing it at a much higher rate. But in Britain-

   7. CWChris Williamson51:22

      Are-

   8. VFValerie Fridland51:22

      ... even today, it's still men that fry more.

   9. CWChris Williamson51:25

      Are you familiar with David Putz? Do you know him? Evolutionary psychologist.

   10. VFValerie Fridland51:28

       Yes, I do, I know. He d- has done a lot of research on voice and-

   11. CWChris Williamson51:31

       Correct.

   12. VFValerie Fridland51:31

       ... evolutionary theories of voice.

   13. CWChris Williamson51:33

       Correct, yeah, so he was on the show a little while ago, and he was telling me, I think his, um, master's thesis perhaps or his, his PhD, uh, was done on vocal pitch. And he was looking at, uh, uh, he uses this brilliant example from when he was at uni doing his undergrad, and apparently he was stood in a checkout queue and there was a couple of guys behind him, and he heard how low both of their voices were and couldn't believe it. He thought, uh, he's going to turn around and see these man mountains or, or y-

   14. VFValerie Fridland51:59

       (laughs)

   15. CWChris Williamson51:59

       ... I don't know, a, a guy with a Siamese twin that's got a second neck. Like, it's im- impossible to have such a low voice. And he turned round and it was just two normal dudes, but stood in between him and the normal dudes was a pretty hot girl.

9. 52:12 – 1:01:43

   Has Social Media Caused a More Informal Language?

   1. VFValerie Fridland52:12

      I was gonna say-

   2. CWChris Williamson52:12

      So-

   3. VFValerie Fridland52:12

      ... I'm sure there was a hot woman somewhere in this-

   4. CWChris Williamson52:15

      Correct.

   5. VFValerie Fridland52:15

      ... in this story. (laughs)

   6. CWChris Williamson52:16

      Correct, yeah, so-

   7. VFValerie Fridland52:17

      Right.

   8. CWChris Williamson52:18

      ... you know, um, interpretations of both prestige and dominance, uh, like lower vocal pitch is associated with longer and bigger vocal folds, which is associated with being a bigger animal over time. That's the same reason that before animals tried to fight, they're actually going to growl or make roars at each other. "This is how big I... You don't want to fight me. Look at the amount of sound that I can make. If you can hear the amount of sound, you don't want to come near these hands, bro." So-

   9. VFValerie Fridland52:43

      Right, yeah, "I'm gonna bang my chest while I make low guttural noises," kind of thing.

   10. CWChris Williamson52:46

       Precisely, yeah.

   11. VFValerie Fridland52:47

       Yes.

   12. CWChris Williamson52:47

       I actually saw a gorilla do that. A silverback gorilla did that five yards away from me in the Bwindi impenetrable forest in Uganda, and that was, um, not too much. It was just a little reminder, like, that he wasn't happy that we were lurking around him. Um, so one of the, uh, uh, trying to tie together...... a bunch of the different trends that we're seeing at the moment. It seems like we're leaning toward, um, less formal language. It, it seems to be, like, going toward an informal style of language is, is something that's happening at the moment. How much has social media contributed to the changes that we've seen in language? And given the fact that probably for the first time ever, we have a higher proportion of people communicating with each other non-verbally, probably ever, ever in history, ever. Have you considered how this and the introduction of social media and its propagation and mass use has changed the way that people relate to each other linguistically?

   13. VFValerie Fridland53:47

       Well, you know, that's a pretty new thing, social media. Of course, there have been studies on more, uh, uh, sort of traditional forms of media, so television, for example, and radio, uh, and started to look at how that affects speech. And certainly, I think the last few years, the last several decades, not only has social media opened up the world, but transportation networks. I mean, you d- there really are no, very few undiscovered parts, and that you can't just go on vacation and hang out, right? So it's really changed massively our communication networks and how we, we talk to each other. So, you know, there have been some studies, uh, I know the ones on television use, about how that spreads changes. What we tend to find is, um, television is one of those things, and social media's the same thing, is it doesn't have natural social engagement in the way that everyday conversation does. And so if you stick a baby in front of, you know, TikTok, or if you stick a baby in front of Tom Brokaw, you know, or some sort of television show, they're not going to learn language from that. Not because they're not hearing it, but because they're not having engagement from it. And what we find with language is it's social engagement in an authentic kind of space that really leads to both child language acquisition being optimal, and, um, adults' transmission of changes. So most of the things we see on social media or most of the things that we see in the world on, you know, on television, are things that are already there at some low level, so they're already in the community. Television and social media doesn't invent anything, but what it does is disseminates it. So once it gets in a c- a place where it's, um, done by someone who has some sort of quality or some sort of emotional resonance with people, and they do something cool with their language, whether it's something they're aware of or not, then if I see it on social media and I'm sort of young and influent- and, and sort of influenced easily, or even if I'm old and influenced easily (laughs) , or they have some quality that I want to embody, it's a very natural thing to kind of move towards that speech style, or move towards that word, or move towards the way that they, they physically move, or the way they dress. And of course, language operates the same. So I would say that the impact social media has is one o- of dissemination, not innovation. So no one is doing things on social media and starting a trend, in terms of language change. But what they're doing is they're disseminating changes that were in their communities. Um, so a good example, and this is a really superficial one, but a good example is the word rizz. I don't know if you've heard that word. So if you have maximum rizz, it means you're kind of, you're really sexy with the ladies, um, generally. It, it was started by a young African American male, so it's usually used by men, and it became this TikTok storm. Um, in fact, I know it because my kids were both joking about who has maximum rizz in their high school. And that just means, you know, you can just, like, look ... Serious rizz is when you just look at someone, you know, with the sort of Zoolander gaze, and they come running to you. Uh, and in fact there were all sorts of TikTok memes where, uh, boys would go in front of the tack- track team and be like giving them the eyeball, and then all of sort- all these track women start running towards them because he's at the finish line. Not because he actually had rizz. But that, you know, it was kind of became a joke. Well, that went viral, and not in the community where it started, which was sort of the hip-hop, African American kind of genre, but because that embodies something that a lot of young men want to emulate. A lot of young white men love to talk with a hip-hop kind of, um, vocabulary, so they pick up words like that to take those qualities of sort of machismo and toughness, which are actually stereotypes about the people that use it, not really why they use those features, but those are the stereotypes that young white men have about young African American men, that they're tough and they're physical, they sort of have a lot of physicality and they're hot with the ladies. And therefore, we take those stereotypes, we see those features that embody it, and then we pick them up. And that is the power of social media, and it certainly has been very influential in that. I think the question you asked about informal language use is not something that social media has inspired. That's been a, a tendency in our language over time. And if you think about the 18th and 19th century, who wants that kind of formality? I mean, it was the height of formality, where, you know, you had to wear like 50 layers and you had to use these very, very extravagant politeness routines, and it took you forever to just get a coffee at Starbucks. I mean, it was a real pain in the ass. Who needs that? So what we've done is we've become more efficient, I think, in our communication, and what has changed is not our language, but our culture. And our culture has become more informal, and language follows culture, not the other way around. And just like our forms of dress have become less formal, um, you know, so if you look at most workplaces, people don't wear three-piece suits anymore. Um, not happy workplaces, at least. But no one is saying, "Oh my God, the downfall of man has happened because we're not wearing really uncomfortable suits and ties." And I think we have to look at language that way as well. There's nothing wrong with being less formal in our language, and really formality in language is a relative cultural belief. If you look back to old English, the Anglo-Saxons were not the height of f- of fashion or formality. So, you know, more blood feuds and killing. So I'm sure they weren't saying, "Sir, kind sir, would you mind? Shall we do this?" I mean, they didn't say that kind of stuff. So they were very informal (laughs) in their speech. In fact, you didn't ask someone to do something, you told them to do it.... "You shall do X" was how you would say it. Not, "Would you mind, please, kind sir, do X." So that kind of really fancy formality is really something that was an early modern and early, early true modern period. Um, so it's really not the, the, you know, uh, death of modern decorum. It's simply we've changed to be a more inform- formal society, and language is changing with us. And still, when we go to formal cases, formal places, and give speeches or go to workplaces, we, we know how to ramp it up and be dressed up in our speech. So, anybody who's worried about that, I think you can rest easy tonight.

   14. CWChris Williamson59:53

       The Black Twitter to white boy pipeline for language is one that is not lost on me. Like...

   15. VFValerie Fridland1:00:00

       Massive.

   16. CWChris Williamson1:00:01

       Words like bussin', no cap. Um, it's just, it's, I find it so funny. And one of my friends is tapped in hard to Black Twitter, and he will be able to tell me about trends that are going to happen six months before they do. So there definitely is a trickle-down effect coming from Black Twitter. One thing that I read, uh, probably about six months or a year ago now, a judge in New York had had to work out the interpretation of an emoji because a big chunk of a case rested on what this emoji had meant in the form of the conversation.

   17. VFValerie Fridland1:00:36

       I'm not surprised. That probably did happen, yes. I haven't heard of that specific case. But we actually find a lot of hip hop lyrics being used in criminal trials to the detriment of, of defendants usually-

   18. CWChris Williamson1:00:48

       How, how so?

   19. VFValerie Fridland1:00:48

       ... because of the misinterpretation. Well, a lot of times, um, rappers, for example, will be put on trial, and we're not talking about, well, big name rappers, but just sort of everyday people that have rap as part of what they do. And, you know, rap music is, uh, built on sort of the experience of being in a place where, you know, you're fearful for your life, you're having to fight. A lot of times it's sort of, um, machismo as well. It's sort of building yourself up. It's not truthful or, or necessarily reflective of anything that actually happened. But lyrics can be very misogynistic and very violent, and in cases where the hip hop, um, sort of lyrics were done by the defendant, they've been used in those trials to suggest that they were actually talking about what they had done.

   20. CWChris Williamson1:01:32

       "Uh, this is not performance art. This is a, an indication of what this person's true nature is like."

   21. VFValerie Fridland1:01:39

       Absolutely. And not only that, but actually, if we look at research on

10. 1:01:43 – 1:10:24

    Strange Word Developments

    1. VFValerie Fridland1:01:43

       when defendants or witnesses use African American English when giving their depositions or when, uh, being a witness at a trial or when speaking on their own behalf, the outcomes for them tend to be much more negative than the outcomes for a speaker that would have used more mainstream English. So there are a lot of problems with the way that we interpret African American English, even though we glorify it in some contexts. Young white men love it. Um, but they, what they don't do is recognize the negatives that are faced by people that use African American English and can't just put it on the way that they do.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:02:17

       Yeah. Part of the reason as well is with the, the white guys on TikTok that using the language trickled down from Black Twitter is that it, it feels a little bit like a LARP, right? It's them playing with the language as opposed to being locked into it. As opposed to it-

    3. VFValerie Fridland1:02:33

       Right.

    4. CWChris Williamson1:02:33

       ... being almost native, it's something else. So one of the, um, uh, one of my favorite stories that I came up with I'd, I'd learned from a few years ago was the, um, development of goodbye, going from God be with you, to God be with ye, to just-

    5. VFValerie Fridland1:02:50

       Right.

    6. CWChris Williamson1:02:50

       ... goodbye. Have you got a favorite or any other favorite word stories of where something developed from that we all use nowadays?

    7. VFValerie Fridland1:03:00

       Well, one of my favorite is, um, hello. Right? Because actually hello was in competition when the phone was first created as a way to answer. And it, hello used to be used in British English for sailors a lot of time. I mean, not sorry for sailors, but for people that wanted to call to someone who was not near them. So, if someone was walking across the street, you wanted to get their attention, it would sort of be a way to, to yell out at them, "Hello. Hello." You know, like, "Look over here, dude, I'm here." It wasn't a greeting in the way that we use it today, and it certainly wasn't the way you answered the, the telephone. But, um, I think it was Alexander Bell and Thomas Edison were having a little war at the beginning of the phone creation about what should be the way that you get someone's attention on the other line, because the old phone lines didn't have a ring or anything. You'd have to say something. Like, someone would be walking through the house and you'd be like, "Hello. Hello. Pay attention." So you'd say it because it was the same sort of attention getting device as yelling to someone on the street. But Alexander Bell, who had created a similar technology as Edison, but, you know, for a competing... I think it was, um, Ma Bell, right? For a competing group. He thought ahoy made more sense. So people should say ahoy when they answered the phone because this was the way you greet, you know, people on a ship. So he would answer the phone, "Ahoy. Ahoy." That was his attention getting way. But obviously what happened is, uh, Edison won out in the end. And the reason is because in the first phone book, when they were giving instructions about how to use the phone, instead of ahoy, they suggested hello. And so that was really the way that hello won out for our attention when we wanted to talk on the phone, or just now when we greet each other. So, we think of hello as being this really long-term, formal way to do it, but it's actually, instead of ahoy, which I think we should go back to ahoy, 'cause I kind of like that.

    8. CWChris Williamson1:04:53

       What about hi? Is hi short for hello?

    9. VFValerie Fridland1:04:56

       I think... I don't know the history of hi so much, but I'm pretty sure it is, uh, short for hello. Um, I'm not sure. I r- I know I've read that, but it's been a long time.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:05:05

        I'm trying to think about what ahoy and hello have in common.... they're both similar sounds. They both don't have any hard, like, plosives or any of those fricatives or ... There's not, it's the sort of thing I imagine that you could shout at a pretty loud volume quite easily. Is that ... What, what's a hi and hello? What do they have in common?

    11. VFValerie Fridland1:05:24

        Well, hello is, is voiced, right? A lot of voiced sound, which can be louder, um, and vowels, which are the loudest. And hi, I think, you know, I'm, I'd be curious. I'll have to look up the history of hi and figure out how it happens. But a lot of times, something might be optimal in its full form, but we as speakers tend to like to shorten things. And so it probably just came up in sort of a simple greeting of the shortening of hello. Uh, a lot of times what we'd see is these things happen when people are very intimate and they know each other well. They sort of do sh- these, you know, cute shortenings of things. And so hi probably evolved that way. Uh, it's not that different than, uh, any other word that would have a vowel, 'cause all words have to have a vowel. So hi on its own doesn't stand out more than, uh, any other word because basically hi is just a, a vowel sound. Hello has two syllables, so it can be two chances to get someone's attention. And Ls, which start the second syllable, are, tend to be louder than a voiceless consonant, so that could be it. But I don't know from a sound symbolism standpoint ha- that they've studied hello. There are a lot of interesting sound symbolism studies, but, um, I don't think hello has been among them.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:06:32

        Your area of work is absolutely fascinating. I think it's so interesting to look at the ... It's almost like linguistic archeology, in a way.

    13. VFValerie Fridland1:06:40

        It actually, you know, a lot of, um, anthropologists studied linguistics. So linguistics in the, especially the field I do is kind of a cross between sociology and linguistic anthropology. So we look back in time. Um, that's really cool, some of the old sociohistorical linguistics, where they go back and we try to recreate how sound change happened by looking at written documents. But in modern speech, I get to go out and interview people and talk to them and figure out what they're doing differently. So, you know, for example, Chris, I could record you, stick you on a machine, and then sort of do an analysis of your vowels and sort of show just by looking at your vowels, I would be able to tell who's Chris versus, you know, who's a American male just from where your vowels are positioned. You know, and plus you're R-less, uh, right? So you dr- delete your Rs post-vocalically. Have you not noticed that?

    14. CWChris Williamson1:07:26

        What's that?

    15. VFValerie Fridland1:07:26

        You've probably noticed when we s- says something like tha, tha instead of there or hia.

    16. CWChris Williamson1:07:31

        Ah, yeah.

    17. VFValerie Fridland1:07:32

        You're right, you don't have your Rs. You have no glottal stops.

    18. CWChris Williamson1:07:33

        That'll be the northeast of the UK. I managed to reintroduce ... I had a brutally bad glottal stop, uh, because, because the northeast-

    19. VFValerie Fridland1:07:41

        Ah. Yeah, you don't have really glottal stops that stand out.

    20. CWChris Williamson1:07:44

        Not too bad. But that's been... I've worked with a vocal coach, Myles, for two years now, um, to try and just give myself a little bit more of a Middle England. I already did quite a lot. I didn't have a massive northeast of the UK, but, uh, when I was growing up, I would miss the Ts out of the word butter, and I'd get slapped on the back of my wrist by my mom, who would say, "There's two Ts in butter, Christopher, and you're not pronouncing either of them." Um, so butuh-

    21. VFValerie Fridland1:08:07

        (laughs)

    22. CWChris Williamson1:08:08

        ... um, which is just par for the course northeast of the UK. That's the way that you would speak.

    23. VFValerie Fridland1:08:12

        Right. Well, and now if you're American, you don't have any Ts in that, buttuh.

    24. CWChris Williamson1:08:16

        Oh, it's Ds.

    25. VFValerie Fridland1:08:17

        Right? We-

    26. CWChris Williamson1:08:18

        Replaced with Ds.

    27. VFValerie Fridland1:08:18

        Well, well it's actually called a flap. It's actually called a flap, but that's a wh- that's for a different episode. So, and you know, that's an interesting right, because you have the glottal stop, which is a perfect example of a feature that has a really strong social stigma attached. And, and what I study is why do we get these really strong social feelings about something that's a sound? You know, glottal stop is a sound. And when, if you say the word up, every English speaker, if they say the word up, actually has a glottal stop at the beginning of that word. So think about up. You can feel that your glottis catches, right? It's because you're making a glottal stop. So no one, you know, criticizes, criticizes you when you're saying up, but yet if you say buh or wuh, oh my God. Like, you know, linguistic argumentum ... Ar- argumentum? Ar- no, argu- What's that even ... I can't even say that word. It's, it's linguistic hell ...

    28. CWChris Williamson1:09:05

        (laughs)

    29. VFValerie Fridland1:09:06

        ... if, if you do it.

    30. CWChris Williamson1:09:07

        Well-
11. 1:10:24 – 1:12:04

    Where to Find Valerie

    1. VFValerie Fridland1:10:24

       in London were doing.

    2. CWChris Williamson1:10:24

       I'm, I'm part of the new era of R-dropping, okay? I'm, I'm-

    3. VFValerie Fridland1:10:28

       (laughs) You are, you're the cool, suave R-dropper (laughs) .

    4. CWChris Williamson1:10:30

       Thank you. I, I knew, I knew that you would understand. All of the people in America that take the piss out of me for the way that I say yours no longer need to because I have the seal of approval from someone who's professionally trained.

    5. VFValerie Fridland1:10:41

       You do, you do. Well, I mean, Americans love British accents, so I don't think you have to argue with that. I, in fact, was talking to, uh, somebody very, very successful who has a regional dialect he doesn't like. And so on his voicemail, he had a British speaker record it for him because, you know, British speech is so fancy (laughs) .

    6. CWChris Williamson1:10:58

       Well, look, if, if my accent is a competitive advantage over here, then I'll take it as a win, given the fact that I had to survive, uh, Independence Day last year, which was very difficult for me personally. Obviously as I was-

    7. VFValerie Fridland1:11:10

       (laughs)

    8. CWChris Williamson1:11:10

       ... watching, watching your country dance on the ashes of mine's lost ambition. Uh, but look, where should people go if they want to check out more of the work that you do? 'Cause this is fascinating.

    9. VFValerie Fridland1:11:21

       Well, first of all, it's been really fun to talk to you about it. And, uh, yes, I think if you're looking for a second career, sociolinguistics would be for you. But if people want to learn more about me, they can obviously pick up my book, which is Like, Literally, Dude, but you can also go to my website, uh, which is just valerie fridland.com, and you can read some of my other work and sort of learn about the types of research I do. You can even participate in a research study if you click on that link. There's all sorts of fun to be had there.

    10. CWChris Williamson1:11:47

        Valerie, I appreciate you. Thank you.

    11. VFValerie Fridland1:11:49

        Sure. Thanks for having me.

    12. CWChris Williamson1:11:50

        What's happening, people? Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode, then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks. And don't forget to subscribe. Peace.

Episode duration: 1:12:05