Can someone explain to me what that infernal baby voice is all about?
Years back American actresses spoke with ‘normal’ voices.
Now when I see movies half of them talk in a weird husky back of the throat baby voice:confused:
That Paris Hilton fake voice thing going on.
Sometimes they forget it and talk normally, but as soon as they realise they revert back to it and it’s even more pronounced when they are being interviewed about a movie.
We get MTV here and just about every time you surf to find something and hit on MTV as you are looking they ALL have this voice.
Even young girls in the streets and shops were doing it in LA, New York, San Francisco when I was there last?
Why do they do it? It’s clearly not their ‘real’ voice.
It’s an accent, as well as an effect to sound more feminine. I agree that it is annoying. It does seem similar to the accent taught to child actors back in the 40s or so.
If you want me to be even more specific, Ms. Hilton is speaking with a closed throat and only using the air from her upper lungs (i.e “not using her diaphragm”. Ellen, on the other hand, speaks from her diaphragm and with a more open throat. She lacks any reason to put on a pretense of femininity.
If you want a to hear an actress switch between these two, try Allison Brie. Her character very much has the higher accent in Community, but her real voice is much lower. It’s not quite to the level of Ms. Hilton (as that would be too annoying), but it can help you hear what portion of the heiress’s accent is fake.
So the examples so far are that Paris Hilton, Allison Brie in her voice in the show Community, and the girls in the program My Sweet Sixteen. (My Sweet Sixteen is a reality show, so it’s not actresses speaking but non-actresses.) The example of women not speaking this way is Ellen De Generes and Allison Brie in her non-acting voice. This isn’t very many examples. I don’t think of Paris Hilton as being a typical example of anything. Her whole persona is of a heiress who never grew up. Far from being a role model, all her public actions are designed to show her as a figure of hate. As I understand it, the accents of the girls on My Sweet Sixteen are their least irritating aspect. They were deliberately chosen because they acting like bratty four-year-olds. I’m not convinced that there is any trend here.
I will check out Allison Brie tomorrow when I have time. Thanks for that.
Ellen Pompeo that’s another one.
We get a a load of these reality shows here and they all do it.
We also get movie trailers where they interview the stars and a whole load of those females do it when they are being interviewed, but talk normally in the movie:confused:
It seems to be something that’s started over the last say 5-6 years.
I babysat a couple of little boys some years ago, when kids actually played and used their imaginations. They were playing with trucks in a sandbox and used these deep “adult voices”, and called each other ‘Joe’ and ‘Tony’. Playing at being manly construction workers! If women are deliberately putting on a cute-widdle-girl voice to appear more ‘feminine’, they are pathetically stuck at age 7, when they were daddy’s little pink princesses.
From what little I’ve seen of the “follow the celebrity around all the time” reality shows, they are not typical of anybody’s life. I’ve never seen or heard any real people acting like that. I haven’t seen roles played by actresses in ordinary movies that resemble that either. It appears to me that they generally pick celebrities who are in a low point in their career (or never made it at all), but who have enough money to get by on at the moment. So the Kardashians were stars in celebrity reality shows because they had never had much of a career at all, but they had enough money to get by. Paris Hilton was a reality star because she wanted fame but didn’t have enough talent to get it, but she could live on her inherited money. The Girls Next Door is about pretty but untalented girls who get by because they are Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends. I think you’re going to be deceived if you take so-called reality shows as typical of anything.
I can’t answer why these women are doing this stupid, affected voice, but I can confirm that it is happening and you haven’t imagined it. It isn’t anything to do with accents, Valley Girl or otherwise; you get stupid women of all nationalities doing it. It seems to be regarded as cute or possibly appealing to masculine urges to take care of the helpless little creature. Personally it makes me want to shake the female until she admits that, despite speaking like a simple six year old, she is actually a grown woman.
It always reminds me of “Hogfather”: "Susan shut her book firmly and held up a warning finger. ‘What have I told you about trying to sound ingratiatingly cute, Twyla?’ she said. The little girl said, ‘You said I mustn’t. You said that exaggerated lisping is a hanging offence and I only do it to get attention.’ "
