{"id":15099,"date":"2015-07-28T11:08:00","date_gmt":"2015-07-28T18:08:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2015\/07\/28\/vocal-fry.html"},"modified":"2018-01-16T15:07:40","modified_gmt":"2018-01-16T23:07:40","slug":"vocal-fry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2015\/07\/28\/vocal-fry\/","title":{"rendered":"Vocal fry and dismissing young women’s voices"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n\r\n

I was completely oblivious to the vocal fry\/“creaky voice” phenomenon until today. A friend posted about it, and I did a quick search, and found several interesting articles on the subject.<\/p>\r\n

\r\n
“Creaky Voice: Yet Another Example of Young Women's Linguistic Ingenuity<\/a>”<\/dt>\r\n
“If you want to see where the language is going, you find a young, urban woman.”<\/dd>\r\n
“Creaky Voice: A New Feminine Voice Quality for Young Urban-Oriented Upwardly Mobile American Women?<\/a>”<\/dt>\r\n
“Previously, creaky voice was interpreted as a voice quality of masculinity or authority. Moreover, a [...] survey indicates that college-age Americans [...] perceive female creaky voice as hesitant, nonaggressive, and informal but also educated, urban-oriented, and upwardly mobile.”<\/dd>\r\n
“Vocal fry: ‘creeping in’ or ‘still here’?<\/a>”<\/dt>\r\n
“these ‘low creaky vibrations’ have been common since forever.” (Also suggests that Mae West used this register.)<\/dd>\r\n
This American Life, episode 545<\/a>, act 2<\/dt>\r\n
“Listeners have always complained about young women reporting on our show. They used to complain about reporters using the word like and about upspeak[...]. But we don't get many emails like that anymore. People who don't like listening to young women on the radio have moved on to vocal fry.”<\/dd>\r\n
Stanford linguist Penny Eckert did a preliminary study, and found that people under 40 found vocal fry authoritative, while people over 40 didn't. Ira Glass says “So if people are having a problem with these reporters on the radio, what it means is they're old.” Eckert replies: “[the media] want to talk about the crazy ways that young women are speaking [...], even though young men are doing it too. So it's a policing of young people, but I think most particularly young women.”<\/dd>\r\n
“Naomi Wolf misses the point about ‘vocal fry’. It's just an excuse not to listen to women<\/a>”<\/dt>\r\n
“Vocal fry is not a problem. It is merely another excuse to dismiss, ignore and marginalise women's voices, both literally and figuratively. And it's just the latest in a long history of finding excuses not to listen to what women, especially young women, say.”<\/dd>\r\n<\/dl>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

dd { margin-bottom: 20px; } I was completely oblivious to the vocal fry\/“creaky voice” phenomenon until today. A friend posted about it, and I did a quick search, and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42,84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender","category-speech-spoken"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15099"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16786,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15099\/revisions\/16786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}