The Sociolinguistic Tools We, Like, Deploy … You know?

The Bold Acting Newsletter for June 25th, 2023

It’s only old people that complain about subsequent generations. When I was young I complained about their complaining: “They don’t get us. They don’t know what it’s like.” What I didn’t realize was how annoying young people can be to old people that are really just jealous of the high collagen levels present in the former. It’s part resentment but it’s also because young people do annoying shit all the time. When I was young I didn’t know this. Now I know.

John McWhorter, the Columbia professor of linguistics said on his podcast the English language evolves and it always has. Vocal fry (the gravelly sound that comes out of your mouth when your larynx is compressed) is a result. As is up-speak (the penchant to speak in the interrogative — or like an Australian — when no question is apparent).

It wasn’t easy for my parents to understand why I painted my nails and had a Euro-mullet or was obsessed with acting. I thought they just didn’t get me. And I was right. Difference out of context is jarring. Like a Goth in summer. Difference within context is authentic: A surly server in a Salzburg cafe bearing tiny coffees, a newspaper on a bamboo spine and a bad attitude is exciting.   

Some young people speak differently than I do. I join the judgey ranks of a certain age and dismiss. But it’s just English. And English, like people, will betray you six ways to Sunday. In the 1920s and 30s old people complained about how young people said, “You know” too much. I remember my mum in the early ‘80s in conversation with an older British woman at the bank used the word “weird”. The older lady laughed incredulously. She was of a generation that didn’t use that word as commonly. The vernacular changes just as the linguistic does.

Is there something lost when we annoy great swaths of people that may include the decision makers? Do we plow on no matter what? If you can’t be understood or taken seriously I would suggest a code switch is in order.

Here are two Australians, Kath and her daughter Kim.

Read the Room

Know your audience. You speak differently with your friend group than you do with your parents than you do with your boss than you do with your neighbour. We do this all the time. As performers we can choose which sociolinguistic tools we want to deploy to signal to the audience what kind of character we’re playing. Vocal fry and up-speak become tools for further understanding. Where it falls down is when we aren’t aware of what we’re doing.

A modicum of self-awareness takes practice but oh, the enlightenment obtained when we do.

I would argue that the glottal collapse that is vocal fry is used not only for emphasis but at its worst to apologize or to take care of. Like up-speak changes a statement to a question we’re checking in with the person to whom we speak. We’re taking the subordinate position because we’re not sure or because we defer to the other person. If we’re paying attention we can go in and out of these linguistic choices automatically.

It All Starts with the Breath

If you’ve taken vocal training it is unlikely you will ever subconsciously run out of breath at the end of your sentences. Which is what vocal fry is essentially. If you’re unaware of it happening you’re making the other person pay more attention to the end of your sentence by deploying or falling into fry. Someone who has vocal training won’t likely think to use it. Just like someone that has trained in performance technique won’t defer to others with up-speak. Our voice supports our ideas all the way to the end of the sentence.

If there isn’t enough breath supporting your voice your sentences will lose power at the end. They’ll trail off. Chances are people won’t get your whole idea. And you’ll get less of what you want. You have to send your ideas all the way through to the end of the sentence. The voice has to go past the last word. You hear theatre actors do this naturally. Opera singers never suffer vocal fry. Nor do politicians, drunks, the homeless or anyone else whose day-to-day survival requires they be heard.

My 11-year-old still speaks like he’s five. He finds it advantageous. He’s done informal polling and one currency he trucks in is a cute-speak because he knows he’s cute. His brother is 13 and has braces. He trades in intellect. He has facts and knows computers. I speak loudly in order to be heard. I have yet to try ‘quietly’. Perhaps I’m nervous. I am not confident that the young will still want to listen to me.

Am I really listening to them? Or am I lost, once more, in their shiny newness, their lives stretching on endlessly before them.

I’m less annoyed by difference nowadays because I’ve become more self-aware. Because I need it to survive. Because the Angry-Old-Guy is a crowded field.

Like, weird, right?

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