Dialectician and voice coach Jane Guyer Fujita.
Published by Elle, June 11, 2015.
Adele Cabot is in her studio singing, but not to record an album, and not even for her own enjoyment. Instead, the Long-time Los Angeles voice coach is using a common technique she uses to teach actors to identify—and erase—"uptalk." I'm not an actor, but Cabot sees a fair share of non-Hollywood women like me, and it's only increasing lately as more women turn to her business, LAVoiceJoy, with concerns that their speech patterns are actually curbing their career advancement. (You know, as if women didn't have enough holding them back in the workplace already.)
Namely, it's uptalk and vocal fry that send women to Cabot. Uptalk is that ascendant "Valley Girl" vocal tone, which makes every sentence sound like a question, the language infamously espoused by celebutants Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton. Then there's uptalk's linguistic sister—which is also one of my common speech patterns—called vocal fry, a creak in the voice that involves elongating words. (Think the growl of an "r" when Kim Kardashian says "really.")
While linguists struggle to pinpoint uptalk's exact beginnings—some date it to the 1950s, others to the 1980s-era Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Frank Zappa's "Valley Girl," or even the Scandinavian roots of English language—they agree that it's become a ubiquitous speech pattern today for women ranging from Gen Xers to millennials. According to a recent BBC article, the trend has washed up on British shores too, although the English blame Australia for the cultural import. A quick Google search for uptalk reveals the YouTube video "Does uptalk make you upchuck?", while another YouTube video "The vocal fry epidemic" has almost 900,000 views. In 2015, both vocal trends are reviled.
Actress Lake Bell, who plays a voice-over artist in the film In a World (which she also wrote and directed), is an advocate for teaching women the power that their voice carries, particularly in the workplace. "I could be in a restaurant and I'll have to change tables if there are people next to me that are speaking like that," Bell says on the phone from New York. As a director, she points out that when she's casting for a film she never wants to cast someone who speaks with uptalk or vocal fry, because it often categorizes them as millennials when she aims for all her characters to be timeless. "It's not to say that because you have a vocal fry or because you uptalk it makes you less intelligent, or some sort of submissive-trying-to-be-a-little-girl—it's just a vocal trend," Bell says.
Unfortunately, "it's really hard to change the way you talk," Cabot tells me. "But in my experience you can teach yourself to be more connected to language and to have greater articulation." To do so, Cabot uses a piano to help people become aware of their vocal rhythms, and works with voice work tools such as practicing bringing your voice forward with breath. She notes that both men and women use uptalk and vocal fry—but women tend to be more self-critical.
The workplace is also critical of women with vocal fry and uptalk, and disproportionately so. Take, for example, a 2014 study in the online journal PLOS. In the study, researchers at the University of Miami and Duke University asked seven male and seven female individuals to say the phrase "Thank you for considering me for this opportunity" in both vocal fry and an even voice. Then, 800 people of various ages and both genders were invited to listen to the samples and select which speaker—an even voice or fry—they thought to be more competent, educated, attractive, trustworthy, and appealing as a job candidate. For every trait, the study's participants preferred an even voice to the fry for both the male and female speakers. However, women using vocal fry were viewed more negatively than male "fryers."
This isn't a surprise to linguist and independent researcher Chi Liuu. According to Liuu, we are conditioned to speak cooperatively and encourage other listeners to share their point of view. "The question is very cooperative," she says, because it's "trying to convey information as unambiguously as possible." Liuu adds: "To me uptalk is fascinating because of the sexism angle, because everyone uses it. Everyone. It's not just young women." Radio host Ira Glass is a notable vocal fryer, and George W. Bush has been recorded using uptalk during his presidency, according to University of Pennsylvania phonologist Mark Liberman.
Despite both uptalk and vocal fry's commonality, they remain a concern in the workplace for some. Alexandra Von Tiergarten is a managing partner in Beverly Hills for the headhunting firm Lucas Group, which has 15 offices nationwide. There, she regularly coaches individuals to avoid using vocal fry or uptalk during job interviews. "When I'm looking to hire people for my team, because we do executive recruitment at a higher level— and we are placing people that make $100,000 to $400,000 a year—if I hire somebody that talks like a Valley Girl those type of companies are not going to trust candidates like that," Von Tiergarten says.
Likewise, Cabot says that once she was hired by a law firm to erase a young woman's "Valley Girl accent" so the woman could make partner. It wasn't the woman's choice to see her, though, and "she wasn't happy about it," Cabot remembers.
But before women visit voice coaches in droves to change their voices and improve their job prospects, dialectician and voice coach Jane Guyer Fujita, an associate professor at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, has something to consider. "I have a hesitancy to criticize these vocal trends because I feel like it is more prevalent among young women," Guyer Fujita says. "And that the attack on it can turn into just another way for women, and the greater population, to put more pressure on women to shape up and improve their habits."
Even some of uptalk and vocal fry's greatest critics can agree with this sentiment. Bob Garfield is the co-host of NPR's On the Media show as well as Slate's language-centered Lexicon Valley podcast. He's an outspoken critic of the vocal trends, but when he was told about a female reporter that uses both uptalk and vocal fry who is considering doing voice work to change her speech—and that said reporter is the same one writing this story—he softens. "What strikes me about what you're trying to do on an ongoing basis is to describe a sort of inner circle of hell," Garfield says. "It's hard enough to conduct ourselves in this world without trying to be conscious of what our voices sound like."