Tuesday 12 August 2014

Aha, there's a name for this stupid way of talking...

From a BBC article about Australian Question Intonation:

The potential spread of vocal fry could be an interesting case study. The phenomenon sees the speaker use their larynx in such way that a lower creaking or rattling quality enters their voice. There has been a great deal of discussion about it in the last few years in the US, with Kim Kardashian and Lena Dunham - when acting in TV comedy Girls - cited as examples.

I'm glad that others have noticed this.

Particularly vain women on the telly talk like this (e.g. all the women in Made In Chelsea, if you ever happen to have the misfortune of being in the room while somebody is watching it) and my wife and a lot of her friends have adopted it.

Vocal fry is more or less the opposite of AQI where at least you can understand the words and you just have to guess whether it was a question or a statement. With vocal fry, the last couple of words in each sentence are usually nigh inaudible, which makes it really, really annoying as you have to keep asking them to repeat the last bit, or you just decide that anybody who talks like that doesn't have anything interesting to say anyway.

3 comments:

Pablo said...

Ah, that explains why I have tyo have the subtitles on when I watch this! :-)

Mark Wadsworth said...

P, yes.

benj said...

Regarding AQI, I've got a theory about that.

When the first European settlers got to Aus, and found it full of spiders, snakes, jellyfish, desert etc, they had to metally convice themselves, through NLP techniques, that "everything is really great", and not the hellhole it was.

AQI, is re-inforcement for an optimistic mindset. A survival technique.

Whinging Poms, needless to say, hadn't developed a AQI way of speaking.