4 ms·

Especially with the vocal comment, many people get annoyed with female voices when they're in a supposedly serious context. But the thing is that it's not actua

• mgkimsal 12y ago
  Voices going up - as in, asking a question(?) - is annoying whether it's a female voice or male voice.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
    It's a feature heavily associated with female voices. So it is discrimination against female voices. It's also not something people do consciously, it is a feature of dialect. And studies show that why people dislike a dialect has nothing to do with its actual aural qualities, and everything to do with its social status.
    • rjbwork 12y ago
      You can say what you want, and studies can say what they do, but but vocal fry is annoying. It literally makes me cringe and it grates my ears to hear it.
      • skj 12y ago
        The telling thing from the "This American Life" episode is that despite both men and women having noticeable vocal fry, 100% of the complaints mentioning it were about the women. This may be an unconscious bias at play.
        • rjbwork 12y ago
          Nah, I've noticed it in men. The stereotype is this like, laid back hipster douche. It's even more noticeable and annoying when coming from men!
    • JDiculous 12y ago
      Are you serious? Just because it's more common with females doesn't make it discrimination. Just because poor black people are more likely to commit crimes doesn't mean that criticizing criminals makes you racist and classist. Come on now, this is basic logic.
      • foldr 12y ago
        I think the point is that it's something which tends to be more common with females for various non-accidental reasons. E.g. because they need to lower their voices to be perceived as less feminine and more masculine and authoritative. So it would be a bit like criticizing black guys for keeping their hair very short, when the reason for this might be that longer hair styles on black guys are usually perceived negatively. (That may not be a particularly realistic example; it's only intended hypothetically.)
    • Mithaldu 12y ago
      > its social status. Link? I've found dislike for dialects spoken by poorer people (chavs for example), richer people (valley talk) and completely normal average people of a wide range (bavarian) in myself. In my experience how much i dislike a dialect has always been about how difficult it makes it for me to understand it, in both english and german, and there's literally no pattern to the social status in it.
      • foldr 12y ago
        This kind of proves the point. There isn't any single dialect of English spoken by "chavs", so it must be that you dislike the various dialects that those people speak because they're spoken by those people. Of course the claim is not that people's dislike will always be targeted at groups with a low socio-economic status. E.g. as a British person, I quite dislike "posh" dialects. And that is entirely my problem -- not the problem of people who happen to speak that way.
        • Mithaldu 12y ago
          There's a certain specific londonish dialect i'm thinking of, but don't know the name for, so i abbreviated it to chavs, but feel free to extrapolate my thoughts. My problem also isn't the people, my problem is that i cannot fucking make out the words they are trying to form, but i guess you can ignore that too despite me literally saying that in my previous post.
          • foldr 12y ago
            I'm not ignoring it, but the whole point is that the reasons that people give for liking/disliking a particular dialect are often not the real reasons. I think it's pretty telling that you chose to identify one of your example dialects using "chav", which is basically a term of abuse directed at a certain social group which isn't dialectically all that homogenous.
            • Mithaldu 12y ago
              So i didn't want to leave you hanging, and i figured out thanks to the help of gaius below that i wasn't talking about chavs, but cockney, as exampled in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQJrBSXSs6o It's an accent i hate not because it sounds different, but because i literally cannot understand what they are saying for over 2/3 of the words (using the term words loosely here, i have trouble distinguishing their words in the first place).
  • partisan 12y ago
    Completely agreed. A hundred years ago, this would have been some sort of local affect, but thanks to the internet, nationwide TV, radio, etc, today it's a plague.
  • rjbwork 12y ago
    That's when you're SUPPOSED to end your sentence by going up. That is the natural pattern. Doing it at the end of everything else is the annoying part.
    • mgkimsal 12y ago
      I didn't write that comment very well. I mean, when the voice goes up at the end of a sentence making it sound like a question when the sentence is not a question.
• Mithaldu 12y ago
  High Rising Terminal is a thing and it has nothing to do with gender: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal Edit: Heck, in the segment you link they even comment on the fact that the guy does it too, and it was one of the first things i noticed. Those are just valley people, that's it.
  • skj 12y ago
    It's not gender-based, but the complaints about it are gender-based.
    • Mithaldu 12y ago
      I can assure you i'll hate the fuck out of you for triggering my question recognition flag without asking a thing, regardless of what's hanging between your legs or what clothes you're wearing, and i know quite a few people who share my sentiments.
    • brandonmenc 12y ago
      It's just as annoying when a guy does it. If anything, it's an ageist thing, since only young people seem to do it. It makes people sound young, inexperienced, and unsure.
  • aupajo 12y ago
    It's worth reading this piece for context. Reactions to uptalk can belie underlying prejudices. http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/16/uptalk_is_okay_young_women_shouldn_t_have_to_talk_like_men_to_be_taken_seriously.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/12/16/uptalk_...
    • Mithaldu 12y ago
      I read it and got this far: > But even if women did uptalk more than men, we've all > heard enough uptalk to know that its rising intonation > doesn't indicate a question. No one's actually confused. And as well-meaning as Marybeth Seitz-Brown might be, i do not appreciate the insinuation that i am lying when i, as a foreigner, state that i hate HRT* in men, women, americans, australians, anyone because it fucks with my parsing of spoken english, which is already one of hardest-to-parse languages on this planet. Should i read further? Does she at any point acknowledge that i might be saying the truth? * It's the only thing too, i don't mind excessive "like" usage, high-pitched voices, gravely voices, rednecks.
• kelukelugames 12y ago
  I think vocal fry is pretty annoying period, but let's assume it is gender specific. That doesn't mean having poor inflection is a female only problem. Read any public speaking guide or speak to a speech coach, fixing rising inflection is one of the first recommended fixes. If anyone is interested, I found this book very useful: http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947436/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1425745988&sr=8-1&keywords=carol+speech http://www.amazon.com/Its-Way-You-Say-Well-spoken/dp/1609947...
  • skj 12y ago
    That's the whole point: it's not gender specific. But when people complain about it, the targets are almost always women.
• partisan 12y ago
  I remember hearing this episode on the radio some time back. I am blessed to have worked in places where I haven't been exposed to many people who speak this way. I am surrounded by women, to be sure, but they are worried more about doing a good job than by trying to sound like it by deepening their voices. It's funny, my mom is a non-native english speaker, having been in the US for 30 years. She heard a few women talking the other day using a well practiced combination of up-talk and vocal fry. She later turned to my wife and asked "Why are they talking like that?". I do think that you will find that different demographics are more likely to speak this way. It's not the blanket category of "WOMEN". It's likely, from my experience, to be white, younger, professional women, and then, as knock-on effect, women from other backgrounds who work with them. They are probably plugged into the monoculture, have a common vocabulary, and use their vocal affects and vocabulary to filter out people who are not of a similar mind. It's like when the newscasters all started speaking the same way, emphasizing certain words, movements of the head, a unique cadence that would, in conversation, be considered bizarre. Nowadays, you are likely to dismiss any newscaster who doesn't speak that way as an amateur or charlatan who is not to be trusted. Just my two cents. Feel free to give back change.
• belorn 12y ago
  The claim that female voices has an effect on speaker quality should seem to be extremely silly for anyone who regularly goes to international conferences. I personally just happy if I can understand the words the speaker is trying to pronounce, and if the concept they are translating from their own native language matches the English words.