If you listen to young female celebrities such as Lena Dunham, Kim Kardashian and Zoe
Deschanel talk, you'll notice they share a similar speech pattern in that they all tend
to frrryyyy. What's up with thaaaatttt?
Vocal fry or glottalization if you want to be fancy about it is a creaking sound that
some people and apparently a lot of young women including myself make. It's the lowest
of the three vocal registers which go falsetto, modal and then frrrryyy. And that creaking
sound like an old door opening happens when we flutter our vocal cords while talking which
sounds like kind of a cool talent if you ask me. Word of this creakification of girls'
voices started to spread in two thousand ten with the publication of a study in the journal
'American Speech' which found that female college students in California tended to speak
with much creakier voices than male students and Japanese students. That jumped out to
researchers because that lower creaky voice is more of a masculine vocal pattern. Soon
enough everybody was talking about vocal fry and how awful it was that girls were speaking
in this manner, kind of ironic considering how in nineteen sixty-four vocal fry was first
identified among British men. Mmmmm yes. I don't know why but anytime I say British I
can't help but not go, 'Mmmm yes,' so I'm sorry UK listeners. One big thing we do know
about young women and vocal fry is that people hate hearing it. Actress Lake Bell has a term
for this hyper vocal-fried voice that some women tend to do which she calls the 'sexy
baby voice' which is essentially a combination of fry, uptalk and valley girl that makes
you sound really unintelligent and it's true it doesn't sound very smart at alllllll. What
is still unclear is why vocal fry has become so uncommon among young women. Some linguists
think that women tend to be the vocal trailblazers because we're a little more sensitive to social
interactions and might be likelier to pick up subtle vocal cues such as a fry. There's
also a theory that vocal fry is also our in-group communication. If I'm doing a podcast I will
talk like this or this is an exaggerated way or if I'm talking to my girlfriends I get
a little more relaxed. So true. Oh my god, right? Right. Right. Right. Right? Right?
Rightttt. Oh my godddddddddddddddddddddd. Right. Believe or not there might also be
a power dynamic in this as well. When researchers have studied women's patterns of uptalk or
ending sentences in questions kind of like Canadians tend to do, they've noticed that
women in positions of power a little bit more perhaps as a way to vocally balance out the
negative biases a lot of people have towards female leaders. Uptalking is a way to assert
your authority a little bit less confrontationallly. Flipping that on its head a little bit there's
an idea that vocal fry, speaking in a more masculine register, might be another way that
younger women are making their voices heard, asserting their power through frrrrryyyying.
Apparently in the process, we're making everyone really upset. There is a very real world implication
for this which was highlighted in a new study which found that women who were interviewing
for a job who had vocal fry were deemed less trustworthy than women who didn't fry. The
women who fried were judged even more negatively than men who fried which means that women
we can fry all day long with our girlfriends but perhaps in professional settings its not
such a good idea to let our vocal cords flutter. Which leads me to my question for you oh viewers.
With all of this constant backlash against vocal fry will people ever just give in and
learn to love the fry or will the fry just finally one day diieeee? Let me know in comments
below. Right? Right. Right. Rigggght. Uhhhhh. [Laughter].