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Vocal fry in the English language is historically associated with British men; it's curious to me that only when women adopted it did we start getting told to h

• globular-toast 3y ago
  Told to hate it? Please. I'm British and barely even know of the existence of Kardashian, much less how she speaks and what she's famous for. My first experience with vocal fry was a Finnish woman at my job who would use it constantly. This was several years ago and I had no idea what vocal fry was until recently. All I knew was I found the way she talked annoying. I liked her, but I did not like the way she talked. I think the most annoying thing is that it's clear it's being done on purpose for some reason. I know she can talk normally and I know I can talk like her, so why is she choosing to talk like that? Later there was a young guy at work who would drop into vocal fry a lot. I still didn't know what it was called but I still found it very annoying. I don't know why I don't find men like Bertrand Russell annoying. But all I know is nobody told me to hate anything. Even people that didn't like the woman I worked with never mentioned her voice.
  • tsimionescu 3y ago
    > I think the most annoying thing is that it's clear it's being done on purpose for some reason. I know she can talk normally and I know I can talk like her, so why is she choosing to talk like that? This is like complaining someone speaks with a certain accent. Sure, we can all change how we speak, but we speak and certain way and there is nothing wrong with it.
    • globular-toast 3y ago
      I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I merely said I find it annoying. Am I not allowed to reflect on what I find annoying? And yes, I do find certain accents annoying too, but my feeling is it's much harder to change one's accent than it is to not do vocal fry. I can't change my accent at will, but I can certainly do vocal fry.
      • tsimionescu 3y ago
        You can of course find anything annoying. But you said that it's annoying that people choose to do this, and you called speaking without vocal fry "speaking normally", implying that it's somehow wrong/abnormal and they should stop. Similarly, it's perfectly OK to find some accent annoying, but it's not OK to say that you wish people would stop using their accent and "speak normally". And while of course you can do vocal fry or not, once you've established a pattern of speech, it's very hard to change. You can try speaking a whole day only with vocal fry and see how often you'll slip back to your regular speech pattern, and just how weird it will sound to you. Or try saying "aboot" instead of "about" for a whole day, if vocal fry sounds too annoying to you to try out (which, again, you're perfectly entitled to). Either way, the discomfort you'll feel trying to change your speech is exactly the same discomfort someone like your colleague would feel.
      • djur 3y ago
        Vocal fry is very common in Finnish. I would consider it to be part of a person's accent just like their vowel shapes.