6 ms·

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.

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.