{"id":1415,"date":"2012-02-28T23:18:48","date_gmt":"2012-02-28T23:18:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/?p=1415"},"modified":"2012-02-28T23:18:48","modified_gmt":"2012-02-28T23:18:48","slug":"the-linguistic-power-of-young-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/28\/the-linguistic-power-of-young-women\/","title":{"rendered":"The linguistic power of young women"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/images.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/02\/images.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"images\" width=\"299\" height=\"168\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-1416\" \/><\/a>A great article in the <em>New York Times<\/em> reveals that young women are linguistic trendsetters.<\/p>\n<p>The use of \u201clike\u201d and uptalk (\u201cpronouncing statements as if they are questions?\u201d) is often seen as a sign of stupidity or immaturity, with women being compared to \u201cValley Girls\u201d, like Alicia Silverstone\u2019s character in <em>Clueless<\/em>. Linguists have refuted this however, saying that girls and young women popularise vocal trends and slang, and use embellishments in more sophisticated ways than previously thought.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cIf women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it\u2019s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid,\u201d said Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif. \u201cThe truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The idea that young women serve as incubators of vocal trends for the culture at large has longstanding roots in linguistics. As Paris is to fashion, the thinking goes, so are young women to linguistic innovation.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s generally pretty well known that if you identify a sound change in progress, then young people will be leading old people,\u201d said Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, \u201cand women tend to be maybe half a generation ahead of males on average.\u201d (Source: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/02\/28\/science\/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?_r=1&#038;scp=1&#038;sq=vocal%20fry&#038;st=cse \">New York Times<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Take a look at the rest of the article \u2013 it\u2019s fascinating. And women, never again feel ashamed of using these social cues!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A great article in the New York Times reveals that young women are linguistic trendsetters. The use of \u201clike\u201d and uptalk (\u201cpronouncing statements as if they are questions?\u201d) is often seen as a sign of stupidity or immaturity, with women being compared to \u201cValley Girls\u201d, like Alicia Silverstone\u2019s character in Clueless. Linguists have refuted this [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100,1046,44],"tags":[25,1106,257,1105],"class_list":["post-1415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-speech-2","category-words","tag-languages","tag-social-speech","tag-speech","tag-uptalk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1415"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1419,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions\/1419"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.language-museum.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}