A community's sound change always outruns the individual, and innovation mostly happens in adolescence
Your accent barely changes over a lifetime, yet an entire city's speech keeps moving: new changes are mostly added once in adolescence, then each person freezes with them, and the next generation adds a little more.
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The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
Perfectly identical accents would actually be harder to understand
Daniel asks: if the goal is to be understood, the easiest route is for everyone to talk the same way, so why isn't that how it works? Lauren says it's anatomically impossible — every person's vocal tract is different, so variation is built into speech. And once variation exists, it gets recruited for other jobs: little boys and little girls have the same vocal tract anatomy, yet they deliberately amplify gender differences, because that matters to their social world. She offers a counterintuitive corollary: if someone whose body differs a lot produced exactly the same sound, that would actually hinder understanding, because we're used to normalizing what we hear against the body we see. The other face of the same mechanism is what they call the "Social McGurk Effect": show a listener only a photo and tell them this is the speaker, and they will "hear" an accent that isn't there.
— Lauren Hall-LewThe more intuitive the story, the more you should doubt it
Daniel floats a hypothesis: Australian Indigenous languages generally lack fricatives, which might be tied to a high rate of hearing loss in the population — in 2018-2019, more than two-fifths of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people aged seven and over were assessed as having some degree of hearing loss. Jennifer doesn't accept the explanation: she says she wasn't aware of that feature in Indigenous populations, questions the premise, and presses that such an account could explain losing certain subtle contrasts but not why an entire fricative series would disappear. She offers a methodology: the more intuitive and plausible a story is, the more she wants to doubt it, especially when the generalization is about a group underrepresented in academia. Daniel himself concedes up front that it sounds like a Just-So Story.
— Jennifer NyczThe individual freezes, the community keeps moving
The book poses a paradox: sound change in a community is faster than in any individual in it. Lauren says this is almost logically necessary — if an individual changed more than the community, he would no longer belong to it, and the community already contains individuals' changes. The actual mechanism is called the adolescent peak: innovations are usually introduced into the grammar by adolescents, who then keep using them for the rest of their lives but never more than that. Take /u/-fronting: one generation pushes it to a certain point and stops, the next pushes a little further from there, and the community thus travels a road no individual could walk in a lifetime. Hedvig follows up by asking "why people always think the music they loved at 13 to 17 was the best," and Lauren says that's exactly the period when you're shaping "who I am" — speech is just one of many markers that set along with you.
— Lauren Hall-LewMedia changes listening, not pronunciation
The baseline judgment in sociolinguistics is: put a kid in front of Peppa Pig or Bluey and he won't permanently change his accent — what people want to learn is the person next door. Jennifer says media is more likely to have an indirect effect: if a show presents an accent, or people from a certain community, positively and as cool, the social payoff of adopting that feature in real life goes up, and change may be accelerated. She notes that past research mostly looked at asymmetric broadcast systems like radio and television, whereas podcasts and social media are more invested and interactive — listeners feel the host is like a friend in their ear, and that might affect vowels and consonants at a finer grain. Lauren adds: media's influence is probably more in perception than production — what it changes is your ability to understand various accents.
— Jennifer NyczYou're unaware of 95% of what you say
Daniel asks how much of our own accent we're conscious of — fifty-fifty? Lauren's answer is "95% not aware," and for linguists about 85%. She stresses this doesn't mean we only take in 5% of the information: we're taking in 100% all the time, but only 5% of it enters awareness. Her example: the moment you open your mouth you have to pick a language, which immediately tells others something about you, and you weren't thinking about it at all. Jennifer gives the reason from the other end: in one second we produce roughly ten to twelve phonemes, on top of stress, neighboring segments and morphological categories, so it's impossible to "choose" how to pronounce each one. So accusations like "someone is deliberately using an accent to be annoying or insincere" don't survive the arithmetic.
— Lauren Hall-LewA rare male-led sound change
Lauren says what she's focused on now is East Asia and West Africa. East Asia has a large body of research on various feminine voice qualities: the "cute" voice popular in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and parts of China, and what happens when male bodies start using it. She gives Seoul Korean as an example — vowels after nasals used to be nasalized and are now denasalizing, an ongoing sound change. What's special is that it's rarely male-led: nasalization and hyper-articulated speech are already bound up with a hyper-feminine "cute" style, so men are leading the shift in the opposite direction. She then responds to a listener's claim that American women are more nasal, arguing that, like creaky voice, it's embedded in a higher fundamental frequency and so is more noticeable, and probably doesn't hold up when you actually measure it.
— Lauren Hall-LewTeach people the game, and also point out the game
Hedvig asks: since the ideal that all accents should be treated equally won't be realized any time soon, should schools teach the prestigious variant so people suffer less discrimination? Jennifer uses an analogy: it's like "capitalism is terrible, but I also have a 401k" — an individual has to survive inside the system, and that doesn't mean giving up your judgment of the system. She separates two things: knowing that high rising terminals and creaky voice are linguistically no worse than anything else is one thing; telling a woman who feels she has to change her voice "don't change, you're fine" is another, because in her own situation she probably isn't fine. Lauren aims at the stigma around style shifting: every few months a politician gets slammed in the media for switching registers and being insincere, yet all of us switch all the time.
— Jennifer NyczDeaf schools create dialects in sign language
Sign languages have no sound, but they have phonology and social variation just the same. Lauren says the most distinctive thing about sign-language sociophonetics is this: most deaf people are born to hearing families, so there's no intergenerational transmission the way there is in spoken language, which makes deaf schools play a far bigger role than spoken-language schools in "what counts as input," and people will say certain signs belong to this school or that school. Hedvig mentions a Catholic deaf school that separated students by gender and ended up with gender dialects — Lauren corrects the location to Ireland; in the US, racial segregation produced Black ASL, distinct from white American Sign Language. At the articulatory level, sign languages have two hands, non-manual features like the face and body, and a range of arm movement far larger than the mouth, so signing height, the size of the signing space and the speed of movement can all become individual variation.
— Lauren Hall-LewIn their own words · checked verbatim
So, the second that you have variation, which is introduced just by differences in the meat of the human body, then that variation becomes available to be used for all sorts of interesting things. So, variation is just inherent to speech.
Lauren Hall-Lew17:46
So, an individual is not going to go through all those stages. They're going to go through the first stage and then just hang out there for the rest of their life.
Lauren Hall-Lew38:12
there can be this sort of indirect effect where if you are watching a show that portrays speakers of a particular accent or from a particular community in a positive way, like makes them seem cool or something then that can sort of accelerate the acquisition of a change IRL because that kind of enhances the social benefit of taking on that feature.
Jennifer Nycz41:42
Oh, I'm saying we're picking up on 100% of it all the time. It's just we're not aware or consciously aware that we're doing it, five percent is conscious.
Lauren Hall-Lew45:12
It relates to this cuteness thing because unlike most sound changes, it's male led. … So, you see men leading in the change away from vowel nasalization.
Lauren Hall-Lew50:59
It's one thing to know that there is nothing like linguistically lazy or wrong about high rising intonation or creaky voice or something. It's another to tell a particular woman who feels like she has to alter her voice … because she's probably not fine in her context.
Jennifer Nycz56:23
Ben's not here, but when we talk to him about this, we usually come up with some version of: Teach people the game, but call out the game.
Daniel Midgley1:01:57
We need more sociophonetics of sign language, particularly those from Deaf backgrounds. So, this is my call to arms.
Lauren Hall-Lew1:06:12
Figures
| Share of linguistic social-signal processing we do unconsciously | 95% (about 85% for linguists) | 44:10 |
| Phonemes produced per second | about 10 to 12 | 53:46 |
| Hearing loss rate among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians | in 2018-2019, more than two-fifths of those aged seven and over had some degree of hearing loss | 33:26 |
Glossary
- sociophonetics
- The study of how phonetic variation is bound up with speakers' social identities, contexts and listeners' expectations.
- actuation problem
- Why a given phonetic variant gets assigned social meaning at a particular moment, thereby setting off a sound change.
- adolescent peak
- Sound-change innovations mostly enter an individual's grammar in adolescence, after which they are only used, not deepened.
- chronolect
- A coinage Hedvig wants to popularize, meaning the shared way of speaking of the people of a given era.
- style shifting
- The same person adjusting how they talk between classroom, family and friends; everyone does it, yet it's often taken as insincerity.
- denasalization
- Vowels after nasals losing their nasalization — an ongoing, male-led sound change in Seoul Korean.
How to listen
Readers interested in sociolinguistics and phonetic variation; engineers working on speech synthesis, accent recognition or dubbing, who can take concrete judgments from the production-versus-perception distinction.
0:00-27:00 of personal pronunciation self-description can be fast-forwarded; the mechanistic discussion is essentially all after 27:33.