Not sure about the claimant's voice actually "going up an octave at the end of statements", but such speech patterns are common. I noticed this everywhere in Au

Not sure about the claimant's voice actually "going up an octave at the end of statements", but such speech patterns are common. I noticed this everywhere in Australia, especially among younger people, and regardless of sex/gender. There's plenty of material written about it, such as Speech Patterns: Uptalking [1] (which has a section about its prevalence in Australia), and there's an interesting if navel-gazing BBC article [2] from 2014, The unstoppable march of the upward inflection? - note the question mark in the headline there. (The article mentions how bosses/older people tend to frown on this tic; quite a good read, IMO.) And re the written word, I've increasingly noticed question marks in non-interrogative text (including on HN), which to me is the same thing as the uplift terminator in speech. Matt Levine [3], the Bloomberg finance writer, tends to do this a lot in his Money Stuff column/newsletter, in fact his writing is littered with this device. I really don't understand why some people react so negatively to what I'd describe as quite a nuanced form of expression, unless it's along the lines of grammar pedants who don't appreciate that language always evolves; who imagine that the evolution ended when they learnt to speak and write. I'd appreciate feedback on my thoughts/observations here, from other HN folk? [1] https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-1692574 https://www.thoughtco.com/uptalk-high-rising-terminal-169257... [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526 https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-28708526 [3] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...