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

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. (wind blows)

What do you study?

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.

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?

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.