Lessons - The Influence of Women's Speech on Language Evolution | Valerie Fridland, Sociolinguist, and Author

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upscale your personal and professional life. Historically, women's voices were suppressed. How was it so that even though they were suppressed, the items in their speech were actually setting like the precedent for how men speak in the future. In the next couple of years, or the next ten years, men will sort of adopt. Some of these speaking patterns. How did that happen? Well, I mean, of course the big answers women are just cooler, so of course everybody goes after what they say. But the real answer, and we are cool, but the real answer is, what is a role of a woman historically? So they are often the home makers. They raise the children. They are talking to their husbands when they get home. So we have this really interesting thing called intimate diversification, which is a big fancy word to say that unlike other subcultures, that tend to be segregated. So if you look in a lot of cities, you'll find segregated ethnic enclaves so that you have these different sort of backgrounds and different language choices, perhaps. But they tend to be relegated to very distinct enclaves, a lot of times because of historical power differences and socioeconomic differences, but whatever the reasons, there's separate. So there's not as much borrowing across ethnic groups for features, except of course now there's a huge amount of borrowing of African-American features from like black Twitter and hip-hop into white male speech. So that's a totally different thing, but women raise the children. So children tend to adopt initially at least until they go undergo vernacular reorganization in school. They adopt the features of guest who, their mom, their mom. So you know, unless that changes drastically and of course it has changed somewhat, it's still the case that that happens. So what we find is women are usually a generation ahead of men in picking up a speech feature. Now this is not all features, this is when you ask that question about what is our language say about us. It says a lot so much, it's hard to get to it all. We could talk for hours, but essentially in the majority of speech features that have become standard over time gone from being sort of less standard or just not noticed to being standard, it is women that have led in those changes. They lead by usually at least one generation, because when they have children, those children inherit their speech. So boys and girls inherit the system of the mother first and foremost. And then they go to school and they start reorganizing their speech. We call it vernacular reorganization to be more like their peers. And then they pick up new forms and fashions in speech. And that is what we dislike as adults, right? This difference in our speech and the children's speech because it says something like this is youth culture and this is adult culture, it makes us feel old. And we tend to label what they do as sort of novel and undesirable. But in fact, a lot of it does end up staying around and becoming the norms of the next generation. But it's women more than men that in the teen years push language forward. So then we have this relief frog where, okay, women were a generation ahead. They had children, the kids inherited their generation. They go to school or their speech. They go to school with the same system, but then girls forge ahead another generation. If a change is going to continue, the girls will push it forward and then they give it to their children. So you have this kind of leap frog pattern that men stay a generation behind until that change has moved to completion, meaning that it's sort of what everybody says. And it's so, so widespread that there's no more leap frogging and that's only find that men catch up. And that's when a new norm gets established over time. So a great example historically would be, because sometimes it's easier if you have an example, when you say, you know, he does instead of he doff, that was actually a change led by women. So we find in letters, of course, we don't have recordings back from back then, but in the early modern period, which was about 1500 to 1700, we find letters written by women. And we also tend to find letters written by less educated people as well, but sort of also gives us the sense that these weren't really standard features. In fact, it was a northern feature, a northern British feature, and it was finally adopted into London speech, which is when it became the standard, but we find does, starting to appear instead of doff, first in women's and less educated speakers letters. And then about, you know, another generation skips forward and we start to see it in men's speech. So that's sort of what incrementally pushes change forward. Now sometimes, of course, a feature gets very gendered, so little boys go to school and then they hear girls say it and it takes on this very feminine tone. They get a very gendered association with that, sort of like totally as an intensifier. And so they retreat and that's where you find that changes tend not to progress or they become very gendered, changes over time where only women do them to a high degree and men don't. And we find the opposite is true as well. Sometimes, features become gendered towards men and women don't do it as much. What would cause that? What would cause the totally to be a more gendered feature? Well, a lot of times it's the different types of sociocultural attractiveness that features carry. So what makes a boy popular in school, you know, you were a boy, right? Traditionally sports. Okay. Yeah. Like, like, sports having friends, you know, being kind of tough in macho, right, sort of having fun on that kind of thing. And is that the same kind of thing that happens for women when a girl, I mean, they can play sports, but it's sort of masculine, bravado, very good for her. No, traditionally no. No, it's really not feminine, nudity, and more so totally 180 from that. Right. So think about the types of features that boys tend to use, you know, like man and bro and dude are good example of that, that it sort of is a masculine solidarity, tough kind of guy or just the appropriation of hip hop language, you know, that type of thing, saying things like ain't generally women as young girls get vilified for their speech much more than boys do. So if a girl comes home and says, I ain't doing that, that have parents that have an expectation about what that girl should sound like, she's going to get ridiculed for it much more than a boy would because for a boy, we kind of had this expectation of rough, tough kind of behavior. And the features that embody that kind of roughness, that toughness, that masculine kind of quality, those are the types that boys tend to pick up, which is why they tend to be very attracted to non-standard features because we have these stereotypes about what those speakers are like, even though they're completely cultural artifacts, like the idea that young black men are dangerous and rebellious and non-conformist, well, that's our interpretation of a speech feature that has nothing to do with the reality of why a young black man uses it, right? Because what young black man might use a speech feature like thing or ain't, or ain't or acts because he's trying for solidarity with a group of other speakers who have faced the same sort of social cultural prejudice as he has and he has to have that, that's part of what bonds them is having a shared language and it's actually acts is an older feature than ask and that's what ask came from. Which is another thing, right? That's wild, so you're saying like people, no, I just wanted to understand, so that means that one group of individuals have completely adopted a language, I'm going to just very, very simplify this so I understand it. One group of individuals have adopted certain things in their language because of a certain social cultural norm and then another group has misinterpreted that social cultural norm and then adopted things because of that misinterpretation and then that's been brought up. That's exactly what's happening. That's exactly what happens. That's exactly what happens and the reason that ethnic features tend to be so popular among young men, so if you go to high school, I have a teenage son and so I'm and he plays a lot of sports, so I'm around a lot of boys a lot of times and sometimes it makes me laugh the way they talk because I want to say do you realize what you're doing, you know, but they would totally ignore me and my son would never invite me to another game, so not going to do it. What they don't understand is the reason those features are attractive to them is because they're completely misinterpreting why they're used in the first place.