http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?pagewanted=all
Even more than the admittedly small-sampled research and associated musings by the author, I was intrigued by the comments. I'm still wading through them. Essentially, the article argues that certain speech patterns originate with young women--specifically uptalk, vocal fry, and the use of the word "like"--but quickly become adopted by American society at large. The author suggests that, far from being frivolous and flighty, the use of these vocal strategies can serve a social function, especially among young women who are highly sensitized to nuanced social cues.
In the comments, you find two schools of thought that seem to echo the two major arguments about language: prescriptive versus descriptive. Prescriptive is a black-or-white attitude that essentially allows people to justify judging people based on their mode of speech. The idea is that there is one proper way to utilize the language (in this case English), and all other usages are incorrect and reflect badly on the speaker, making them sound lazy, bored, uneducated or downright stupid. The other paradigm, the descriptive approach, is the one employed by academic linguistics, and much like its cousin, cultural anthropology, assigns no value to speech patterns, but instead observes and catalogs without judgement the ways in which people are using language.
What I noticed about the comments was a lot of discussion about how these linguistic "tics", as they were referred to over and over, make the speakers sound. There's so much vitriol about how these young women sound stupid, bored, disrespectful, insecure. To be fair, many commenters have brought up the fact that women are still not socially rewarded for sounding too smart, too sure, or too assertive, and that mitigating speech strategies might be useful for conveying information in a socially acceptable way. I agree with that assessment quite a bit--uptalk makes the speaker sound unsure of their statement, and thus less threatening, which is a vital skill for navigating social interactions where seeming to be in opposition can land you on the defensive.
But the two things that bothered me most were the following: 1) how many posters said that this was a ridiculous topic for the NYT or academia to be pursuing/young girls' speech patterns are totally inconsequential to real life, and 2) how few people stopped to think that maybe young girls could give a fuck less how they sound to outsiders.
To address the first topic--I find this sexist AND agist. Young women are a fairly large portion of our total population, and even before you consider that they're someone's daughter, and that one day they will become adults, what about them makes them less legitimate people than those of other demographics? What are the criteria for mattering in our society? Commenters dismiss this whole group as flighty, foolish, conformist, superficial, insecure and unimportant, condemning their speech patterns as evidence of these qualities--which they are ascribing to a group of people whom they have never met, and in fact, have not been clearly defined. Are they under twenty? Under thirty? White? Black? Straight, bi, lesbian, asexual? Do higher SES young women have more influence? Does the experience of a poor teenage girl matter less than her counterpart, be it a richer girl, or a poor male? These are mostly rhetorical questions that come to my mind immediately to complicate this homogenized group being criticized so harshly.
The second issue I take is that everyone assumes that these young girls (whoever they are), do and should care what people think of their language choices. Just as we often decry the male gaze in how women understand themselves, this situation goes one step further. The way these commenters talk about young girls seems to completely discount their own opinions of self. When these women speak among themselves, and even to people outside their peer groups, the choices they make may not be totally self-aware at every moment, but language use is a powerful way we define ourselves. And these young women absolutely have the agency to make choices about that and the intelligence and social acuity to do so in a very sophisticated way. Many posters point out that code-switching is a strategy used by almost everyone alive to relate to different people in the most appropriate ways. It's dehumanizing and condescending to imply that young girls, only by virtue of those two categorizations lack the skills or savvy to do this, when the article clearly mentions that these complicated social interactions are one of the things young women are socialized from an early age to understand and navigate.
I argue that the discussion of what these women are doing linguistically is interesting and potentially very significant to the rest of society, since their patterns DO seem to get adopted into the mainstream. And even if that weren't true, they are part of society and thus a valid subject for study and discourse based on that alone. Finally, if we're going to be eavesdropping on these young women while they converse in public places, we should take responsibility for that and realize that it is not THEIR responsibility to please us with their private decisions. If you think uptalk makes a young woman sound insecure, that's your ascription, not an objective fact. That young woman makes her decisions based on a thousand variables you don't have access to, and who the hell are you anyway, to think that she should be "on" all the time, and pleasing to an adult audience? Why is it always she who must adjust herself to social expectations, and why do we get so angry at the prospect of her being a participating agent in the shaping of our culture? Why is she so unqualified? Why, in short, should she care at all about what you think of how she speaks to her friends or parents or whomever...let alone adjust that speech to meet with your approval?
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