Parents: Please teach your daughters to go down at the end of sentence.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

There are some folks that suggest that this irritating vocal style (almost as irritating as those chuckleheads who pronounce “greasy” as “greazy”…but I digress :wink: ) is a sign of indescision or a lack of confidence.

However, Cynthia McLemore did a study about uptalking in sororities.

  1. The Pragmatic Interpretation of English Intonation: Sorority Speech. Austin, TX: University of Texas PhD dissertation.

She found that upspeak was most commonly used by group leaders, suggesting that the tentative sound can serve as a way of getting attention, involving listeners, and enforcing consensus.

42

She may have a point beagledave- I’ve noticed that trend in speaking from attendants while on rides at amusement parks and on planes.

43

Interesting. Or it could just be that they were in their first leadership positions and were therefore nervous. I wonder if more research has been done on the question. In my first retail job I found that I was subject to significantly less hassle if I made a point to state things with (somewhat) exaggerated confidence. If, for example, someone was wondering about the price of something–it was a kite shop where a lot of stuff was negoitable–and I appeared to think about it at all or have any hesitation the customer would be on me right away. I find it hard to imagine what it would be like if every statement I made ended with a question mark.

Maybe the upspeak needs more specific targeting depending on the circumstances and the audience.

44

There is a nice comprehensive article on “high rise terminals” (gotta have a fancy sounding descriptor) at The Guardian.

It includes some attempts to date the origins. Some trace it to valley girl speak…others trace earlier by a couple of decades…

45

Originally posted by cjhoworth
…I’m pretty sure it is a sign of insecurity.

I’m with DanielWithrow and beagledave - half of the teenage, and early 20s, females I know who do this are being conniving, the other half seem merely to have picked up the the habit.

The insecure keep their mouths shut. I see absolutely no evidence that youthful American females, in general, are insecure. They seem to feel very confident that they can slack off, be late, question authority (I mean, like shift managers). This was also true of the youthful American females I knew back when I was one.

I take that all back for the Irish and people from various islands where a musical cadence is a common and lovely part of speech.

46

Thanks for the link. So maybe I could have Pitted those kids after all. Regardless, I did find this notable:

BTW, who the heck is Deborah Tannen?

47

Hmmm… Don’t know anybody who does that in my corner of the world.

48

On the other hand… embarrassing story time.

I had this class (in grad school, no less) in which the prof would ask us to explain the answers to the homework questions in class. Just shout out a problem number, choose a student at random person, and ask him or her to answer the question. Pretty standard.

Well. So for problem 2, he asked something which has escaped me, called out for this friend of mine to answer the question. So she did, completely correctly, and ended it with the not atypical “is that right?” bit.

The professor threw a hissy fit. “I don’t mean to pick on you, Shannon, but women do that all the time and it’s awful. Answer the bloody question with a statement, not a question!” And so on.

Three minutes later, he got to the next problem, and yelled for me. And the first words out of my mouth were… “Isn’t it because.” Needless to say, I was hideously embarrassed. :o

But I have a reason for doing that, honestly! If I don’t know what the answer is, I don’t want to claim that I do know what the answer is. And if I do know what the answer is, and I suspect that most other people don’t get it, I have this instinctual urge not to show them up, as it were, by making it seem as if the answer was utterly obvious to me, even if it was.

Make of it what you will.

Oh, and just for the record, if it needed to be clarified: I don’t do upspeak, I just occasionally phrase my answers less assertively then I could. Which may make this all completely irrelevant, but since I’ve typed it all anyway…

49

Well, here’s a dissenting note - I don’t think anyone’s died of uptalking yet, and “I’m like” can be downright useful. A peer of mine presented a study in which she demonstrated that whereas nearly 100% of teenage girls (at least in this part of the world) say “I’m like,” they do so in a precise context - specifically, when they are not representing the quoted material as a direct quotation. (In fact, she played a tape in which a girl is telling a story where the precise wording of a quotation is germane, and the girl says “He’s like” and corrects herself to “He said”.)

For that matter, although this woman only studied girls, I am pretty sure that a substantial proportion of guys do it too. And it’s well known in sociolinguistics that women are on the forefront of most sociolinguistic changes. Far from being a sign of female insecurity or the like, it may just be that uptalking and I’m like are just oncoming changes in the languages, that women have gotten to first.

50

I don’t believe it’s always about security. I think sometimes “upspeak” is another way to say, “you know?” As in, are you following me here? Just keeping the listening involved…

There was a documentary on tv a few years back. I didn’t catch the whole thing, just a portion. It was about girls attending all-girl schools. Almost every single girl that spoke used upspeak after every freakin’ sentence that came out of their mouths. It grated on my nerves, and I don’t normally notice or care about that.

Whenever I speak to someone who talks like that I just figure it’s their way of saying “you know what I mean?” I figure that’s my cue to say “uh-huh” or “yeah”.

51

I’m sorry?

Really, I think the OP makes a point about upspeak. Whenever I have a conversation with a woman who talks that way, I immediately make the assumption that she’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I have to listen to what she actually has to say to realize that she is, in fact, an intelligent, capable woman. I also can’t help but think others make the same judgement I do, but don’t take the time to actually listen.

52

Parents, don’t teach your daughters to go down. That would be so, like, eeeewww! Let them have the fun of learning it the hard way, like their mothers did.

53

So true.

My $.02 on the “upspeak” or “Teenage Mutant Question Marks:” Maybe they sound tentative because they are tentative, and maybe this has nothing to do with absolute low-self esteem/insecurity. Maybe (at least for some) the intonation has its purpose in specific settings where the user feels that s/he needs some feedback from the other participants in the conversation, in order to know whether s/he should continue on the same line, rephrase something, or correct something erroneous.

Or maybe it is just a generational thing that popular kids do to bond and piss off their elders.

54

Slightly related, I guess…since moving from the US to Germany it has really struck me that a great deal of young American women tend to speak in a gratingly high “little girl” pitch. Even before distinguishing the language or individual words being spoken, I can usually identify an American girl vs. German or British simply by pitch.

When I went back to the states for a visit, it really got on my nerves. Yes, it is hard to take grown women seriously when they sound like Minnie Mouse. I have yet to meet a German woman who sounds like that.

I know this doesn’t apply to everyone–I always made a conscious effort to speak at a natural level, probably because I already look quite young. But it’s still a disturbing phenomenon.

55

I noticed that a lot of English people who go off backpacking come back using this intonation.

My theories are that 1. it comes from talking to non-English speakers so much that statement-as-interrogative becomes a normal way of speaking. “I say this statement - have you understood?”. 2. Lots of Aussies and Kiwis go backpacking (less female American teenagers, I think) and the antipodean intonation rubs off on the English people.

56

Bullshit detectors going off here. If this were true, Jennifer Tilly’s voice wouldn’t be notable. She’d sound just like all other women. But she doesn’t.

57

Dave Barry noted this phenomenon in one of his “Mr. Language Person” columns. He didn’t attribute it to lack of confidence, or even exclusively to teenage girls. His take on it was that teenagers felt compelled to throw question marks in at frequent intervals to be sure their listener was still paying attention.

58

From the same site: Copyright © 2002 - Taylor Mali - All Rights Reserved

Don’t post entire poems, songs, books, encyclopedias, you get the idea. Read our rules, and familiarise yourself with the concept “fair use”. Thanks.

59

She writes books about communication between men and women such as You Just Don’t Understand. Fascinating stuff.

60

Thanks!