My English friends say not only are they loud but all American girls talk in a higher pitch than necessary. At least in a much higher pitch than English girls. After they mentioned this I noticed it more and have to agree.
Interesting. As an American woman, I have just the opposite problem. My voice is kind of deep. So, if I get animated on a subject, my voice has a sort of booming quality that some people find disconcerting. It’s almost like I scare them or something. They’ll tell me, “Calm down! Easy! Calm down!” when I’m perfectly calm, just adamant about something. It really pisses me off too, because I feel like they’re telling me to shut-up.
No wonder I hate making small talk. As soon as I start to get into something worth talking about, people tell me to shut-up.
Sure, you make a good point. Also, there are LOTS of Americans, and of course some will be loud, thus confirmation bias will creep in, as you will notice the loud ones. In fact, someone who thought all Americans are LOUD would likely just considered the quite couple in the corner to be Canadian, as they couldn’t be Americans, as Americans are loud, eh?
Sage Rat makes a good point also.
They’re not even a real country anyway. (Blame Canada. Blame Canada …)
Canadians can be just as loud, but what’s irritating about Canadians (and I say this as a Canadian) is that they don’t explicitly tell you where they’re from when they’re ranting. Thus, if you consider Americans to be loud, it can be easy to mistake loud Canadians for loud Americans if you don’t pick up on the Canadians’ lack of localization. Examples:
American: Forty dollars? You’re kidding! Back in the USA, that would be twenty, tops! What kind of a place are you running here?
Canadian: Forty dollars? You’re kidding! That’s way too much for something worth twenty, tops! What kind of a place are you running here?
No, it’d be; “Four-tee dollars? What’s that aboot? Dat’d be only wort about twenty, eh? What kinda place you running here?”
True, but I also think that people from different cultures are louder in different circumstances. During the World Cup, everybody gets loud. During sex, during parties, during bus trips, in line at the movies, in line at the theater… different strokes for different locations.
A WAG of mine is that Americans are louder in some “at home” circumstances because they’re used to large houses with no wall-to-wall neighbors. The American image of “home” is a stand-alone house; those are common even in neighborhoods which appear to be quite poor based on other indices. There may be a beaten half-rusted car on the driveway and barely three square feet worth of [del]grass[/del] dusty dead soil, but by Og the house is standalone. In other cultures, you’re used to having neighbors above, below and to each side, which makes “not being loud at home” one of those “it’s nice when everybody showers” kind of things. The same Spanish woman who shushes her children if they yell at home may use her size=7 voice to call them in the playground, though, a circumstance where the Americans are likely to be a size=5 at most.
I was taking an overnight train from Munich to Italy, and a bunch of about twenty American EuroRailers were running up and down it, in and out of compartments, screaming drunk and increasingly loud. I sat in a compartment quietly reading a book opposite a German muscle-man (white vest, long, golden curly hair, big blonde moustache) and his girlfriend, who were clearly irritated at not being able to get any sleep.
A laughing American boy bolted in and sat down next to Herr Angry. A few minutes later he fell asleep, with his head resting on the Germans shoulder. The German was clearly going to take some action but before he could the clever American vomitted all over him. Well, I was studiously engrossed in my book but there was some noise, and when I glanced up a few minutes later, the American seemed to have fallen and hurt himself, repeatedly, and was lying bleeding, half in, half out of the compartment.
One by one, the other Americans came by to see what had happened, peaked inside to see the German, and then left, without even recovering their fallen comrade. They were utterly silent for the rest of the journey. So it seems Americans can be quiet after all, and that their volume switch is located somewhere on their face.
Are you referring to Americans talking to non-native English speakers?
A very common phenomenon is when a non-native speaker will say, “Excuse me,” or “I’m sorry, could you repeat what you said?” Americans tend to live in monolingual societies, so they have very little experience with non-native speakers. So, when they aren’t understood, the usual response is to repeat what they said exactly, but twice as loudly.
Drew Kit, that sounds like exactly the sort of confirmation bias DrDeth was talking about.
The loud, drunken Americans confirmed your stereotype, so you have happily embraced them as proof that Americans Are Loud. Of course, if there were quiet Americans on the train, you wouldn’t have noticed them, or perhaps even realized that they were Americans.
I encountered a loud, drunken group of German tourists in Prague once. But I didn’t think “All Germans are loud and obnoxious.” I thought, “Well, these are a bunch of young guys on holiday, and young guys on holiday get drunk and loud sometimes.” (Sort of like the ones on your train.)
My girlfriend and I were sitting quietly together and having dinner at the time. You know, like those Loud Americans never do. Maybe we should have worn stars and stripes attire to announce our nationality, the better to fight the stereotype.
The voices aren’t loud, the clothes are.
Sure, but I’ve posted a few ‘typical stories’ about loud americans on this forum now.
In the first, a loud Texan berated Germans for not speaking English to him, and so missed his train because nobody explained the station announcements to him. I never, Germans never, but more importantly there were other (quiet, bilingual) americans on that platform who didn’t.
In the second, I pointed out that an american lover I hugely respect, very intelligent and wise, was intensely loud without realising it througjout our relationship and her speaking volume seperated her more from my other friends than her accent ever would have.
In my experience, Americans are in general the loudest race on the planet. I don’t think this is subjective, if anything I have less respect for many other nationalities, I’m sure a decent sound meter would prove this.
So for people who already accept that Americans are loudest in general, maybe a more interesting debate would be why? Personally I assume it is national psyche. Most Americans associate loudness with dominance, or at least confidence, which are traits you associate with. I know this sounds a puerile argument but other US national traits cause you problems. For example, I’ve heard eight times as many US firefighters die in blazes than in other developed nations, and the reason given for this is that the US psyche elevates each individual to aspire to be a hero. So US firefighters rush into burning buildings where more sensible firefighters elsewhere work as a team to extinguish the blaze as safely as possible.
I was in Lisbon when some Scottish soccer team was playing some important game. I’ll never think Americans are loud again.
On the other hand, Americans do have more of a “personal bubble” than other people, like Italians for example. We tend to stand farther away from one another, so maybe we do speak louder. Of course, Italians are not known for their gentle soft-spoken natures.
Loud American woman, get away from me
Loud American woman, mamma let me be
Don’t come shoutin’ at my door
I don’t wanna see your uvula no more
Hi Johnny! Happy Birthday!!
I get it; this is a joke thread, right? Sort of a response to the “Why are black people so loud?” and “Why to Asian people all talk with a lisp?” threads?
Stranger
You don’t stand require more body space than most Europeans of the same latitude, but I appreciate the attempt at an explanation, it could well be a factor. Another factor someone suggested here was environmental noise, which may cause poorer hearing. I gebnuinely think the national psyche is a major factor, 'We’re loud, proud and in your face".
Scottish people are quite loud too I admit, (and imho we are getting louder each decade) but it is not the capacity for loudness but the prevelance of loudness. That US lover of mine would literally be shouting at me as all the world was a stage, and she wasn’t talking to me but the far end of the theatre. I’d ask her to whisper and she would speak in a stage whisper.
You do all realise that the title of the Graham Greene book “The Quiet American” is seen by most non-American readers as a deliberate oxymoron?
Because we kick ass! BOOYA!!
A lot of people here seem to take ‘loud’ to mean obnoxious and associate it with drunk tourists. Loud in this sense refers to behavior taken more broadly rather than the actual noise level per se. This type of behavior, I am fairly certain (and others have pointed this out too) can be found amongst people from a host of different countries, including the US.
Still, I do think that there’s different settings that do not involve drinking and tourism in which Americans can be loud just in the simple sense that I can overhear their conversations with much more ease and from further away than is usually the case. This is not limited to Americans, nor is it universally true for Americans, but in my experience it is true more often for Americans than it is for a number of other nations. As to why, I don’t know. Why are the others so quiet?
In Europe, educated, wise and intelligent people tend to be quieter than normal for the rest of their society. Stupid people talk louder, like shouting at someone who doesn’t understand your language to make yourself more easily understood. We have a general impression that softly spoken people are smarter, and we assume that someone who doesn’t talk much is deep.
You’ve heard expressions about people wanting to shout their love from the rooftops, it appears Americans love their country so much that everyone is shouting about it. Speaking quietly may then become associated with introversion, lack of individualism, lack of confidence, or lack of ideas, and therefore all of your society ratchets up the volume to make themselves heard in the din.