Valerie Fridland - Professor, Sociolinguist, and Author | Language and the Good in Bad English

What does this actually teach people? What are some examples of how drastic altering language could be on an individual? It's true. People generally have never heard of the socio-linguist. Today my guest is Valerie Friedland, an esteemed professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada and Reno. Her captivating language blog has been found on psychology today it's called Language in the Wild where she delves into slang, accents, and grammar myth. What is the psychological reasoning why people swear? I don't study profanity myself. There seems to be sort of an emotional response that it's helping us process when we use profanities. When we swear it seems to be something that helps us feel better it's helping us express an emotion an emotional reaction just in the same way like it's encoding an emotion in the same way that oh is encoding of surprise. I'm just super curious when you listen to me like what does that say about me and be ruthless like you can say whatever you want. One thing I didn't notice is you know men tend to think welcome to success story I'm your host Scott Clary. The success story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. Now the HubSpot podcast network has incredible podcasts like my first million hosted by Sam Parr and Sean Perry. They interview some of the most incredible business leaders Alex Ramozi, Sophia Amaruso, Hassan Minhaj who shared their journey to success and how they made their first million. On a recent episode they featured the acquired podcast host Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal to discuss how they scaled their multi-million dollar podcast. Don't sleep on my first million if you want to get inspired. If you want to learn from the best you got to tune into my first million wherever you listen to your podcast. Today my guest is Valerie Friedland, an esteemed professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno. She holds a PhD in linguistics from Michigan State University. She specializes in socio-linguistics American Dialectology and Regional Val variation. Her captivating language blog has been found on psychology today. It's called Language in the Wild where she delves into slaying accents and grammar myths. As a distinguished professor of the great courses series she shares her passion for language with students worldwide. She's taught at a multitude of prestigious institutions such as Georgetown, George Mason and others. She's recognized for her innovative teaching methods and dedication to mentoring graduate students. She's an active member of professional organizations like the linguistics Society of America, the American Dialect Society, and she also contributes as an editor or reviewer for renowned journals in her field. Well I had parents that are non-native speakers and I grew up in a small well it wasn't small town at the time either but it felt small town in the south and it really was very exotic to have parents that didn't speak with a southern accent and I remember when I'd have all these friends come over and my mom is French speaking and so she would say Valerie to call me and I every single friend it was like you know all of a sudden they call to attention and then they start imitating her you know with her accent and it really brought home to me how integral to our personalities voices how much having something that's different than somebody else from an accent perspective or whatever thing makes you different makes you stand out in some way and of course you know to a ten year old it wasn't a good thing I hated that I hated it when people you know I was like mom stop saying my name just don't talk but it really brought home to me the power of language in shaping social identity and the way that people perceive you so I really found languages fascinating just in general because I think you know partially it was my parents didn't just speak English and that wasn't the first language also from that experience of having people react to their accents and think things about us about us being kind of different or novel or not fitting in because of the way they talked so when I went to college at Georgetown University I went into the languages and linguistics program mainly just because I was curious about learning about more languages and more about how they worked I didn't really have any concept of linguistics at the time in fact I think if you told me at freshman year I would have been a linguist I probably would have cried because it sounds very boring to a 19 year old but I took a linguistics class that covered language and gender sort of all the different ways that our our speech reveals who we are from a sort of social and gender perspective and how that impacts how you perceive it impacts your opportunities in the office it impacts your relationships and it kind of blew my mind because it articulated all these things I had felt and noticed so we all have these feelings about language when someone says something in a certain tone or they sort of tell us dismiss us because of the way we talk we all have had that experience in some way a shape or form but we've never had the language to discuss it we always thought of it as a sort of a us problem and all of a sudden I thought oh my gosh this isn't just me people that remark on my slight southern accent it's not because I'm saying something wrong it's because of these larger sociolinguistic forces that make us notice the way people talk it makes us sort of predetermined who they are from a social perspective and it really impacts the opportunities that people have down the road because of the way people think you are because of the way you talk and it was that that was really the turning point for me where I decided oh you know screw chimis which was my major at the time I want to go study linguistics it was also that I was really bad at chimis that probably hits on him do with it too I'm you know this is so fascinating because like I think anybody listening understands how important language is and everybody who's listening has had these moments in their life when they've been judged or they've even judged someone else but it doesn't seem like be quite literally before I met you I've never heard of somebody studying this as a profession I mean I the only application that I can see this in day to day would be maybe actors and actresses and people that use this as part of their profession but this is so language is so powerful and it seems like the lack of understanding of language and how it impacts is something that could change people's careers change people's lives change their ability to negotiate the next job or present a certain way and there's all these other skills that are about are sort of adjacent to communication that people focus on but they never focus on language I've never heard somebody say like don't say this word or say this word as part don't you know they say don't say um or what not and try and cut out the filler words when you're doing a presentation maybe to be a bit more confident but I've never seen somebody and actually apparently according to your research that's not even the best way to present but the point is I've never seen somebody focus on this before so what does this impact what kind of impact does this study have what does this actually teach people what kind of influence could this have on somebody's life like what are some examples of how drastic altering language could be on an individual well you know it's interesting that you say that because it's true people generally have never heard of the socio-linguist or even a linguist that's a theoretical linguist like I am so we talk about linguists that study a lot of languages but the type of language that I am is someone who studies the underlying structure of language how we produce sounds why certain things happen a certain way how languages change over time what is the what are the social and linguistic forces that create the language we speak why did old English sounds so different than modern English all those kinds of things and we also try to trace back the evolution of where all languages come from did they were they from one language one proto-language or was it sort of multi multiple origin stories for language so those are all those big questions that we don't think about as speakers of a language we think about what's a noun what's a verb and you know where's my dangly modifier and those are really interesting because those are actually social preferences that we have learned when we study English language arts what we're studying is one person's version of what they like about language and what they have claimed language should be those are not the actual cognitive rules that create language and drive it forward so it's really kind of striking to me that we don't know this side of language because it's so pivotal in everything we do I mean do you have a voice assistant like a virtual assistant that you talked to Alexa or Siri linguist linguist linguist right if it wasn't for people like me wouldn't be able to talk to them so someone has to figure out how to program those computers to understand human speech what is the structure of a senate so that we make sure that when Siri spit something out she follows that structure right it's an analysis and she's using large data pool so she's doing analysis that is a syntactic analysis of those speech features so this predictive language model that is driving like chat GPT today what it does is it looks at huge quantities of language data and a lot of them have been pruned and approved by linguists like this is something the types of language data we want a lot of the language data comes from linguists in fact I have a friend that runs a large corpus that is a linguist and a lot of his lately a lot of his work is trying to field requests from these large language data runners to get his access to his corporate to help them build language models for these big chat GPT type things so that chat GPT is a predictive model meaning that based on its analysis it's sort of linguistic analysis of all these sets of data it predicts what comes next so if you have a sentence it's looking at massive quantities of data and saying what is the statistical probability that this type of word comes next and this is exactly what you do as a human language model right you are predicting when you hear someone talk you are predicting oh they said the nouns follow the that's probably going to be a noun and that's how I understand if you use a word that's not typically a noun and put it after a the all of a sudden it becomes a noun because my brain understands that the makes things a noun that that that slot in syntactic structure makes a noun so another great example is adulting right that we've made into her right people of course hate that but what they don't know is parent and parenting is actually the same relationship parent the noun came centuries before we started talking about parenting so you could be a parent in the 14th century but you didn't do parenting and really the first reference to parenting we find is in the 16th century and that it was hardly ever used until the 20th century but parent has been used for a long time well adult adulting has that exact same distribution or adult came first and it meant to be a grownup right a grownup person but adulting carries with it not just the idea of I'm being I'm grown up it carries all the things associated socio culturally with being an adult and it's by adding that ing that it signals to me okay I've shifted that noun to a verb so these are actually linguistic ways of looking at language that are super helpful in both you know data for language learning models in making sure Siri recognizes a southern accent versus a non-southern accent by giving it the understanding of the vowels for example that a southern uses versus a non-southerner it's also really important in educational context because a lot of times we have non-native or non-standard speakers I both of those go to schools along with native and standard speakers and we can have some problems in terms of how educational attainment is met for different pools of language learners or different pools of dialect speakers and it doesn't mean they're sending wrong with those dialects but we can use the models of standard English and the models of dialects are non-standard to try to compare them to help children achieve learning attainment by giving them really solid understandings of where their dialect differs from the one that is the socially preferred dialect now notice I said social prefer because there's nothing wrong with a standard dialect it's simply a different set of rules but how do you learn rules you learn it by having them articulated in English language arts we don't articulate here's the rule where English you know uses a noun after a the here we don't articulate those kinds of rules we give people ideas like nouns or person places or things which actually doesn't explain most nouns right especially abstract ones that's not really linguistics that's actually just sort of ideas about language that get floated around so there are lots of ways that linguists are relevant to our daily lives in professional circles linguists do a lot of things like studies on that as well as communication researcher studies on how different types of language use is perceived in different context so one place for example that I give talks on a lot is accent discrimination and how what kind of work research linguists do can show us where we're making some errors in the way that we approach accents in workplaces and sometimes it's really surprising so for example if you see if we do experiments where we see an Asian face a South Asian face and we play a standard English native speaker voice and then we compare that to a different control group that saw a white face with this the same exact voice what we find is ratings of intelligibility and ratings of non-native-ness go significantly up when you show them a picture of a non white person which means you're not actually listening to the actual signal because it's exactly the same voice but just your stereotypes about what that person should sound like influences strongly what you think they sound like and can affect intelligibility but what we find is people that are massive bias when it comes to hiring and right and then what's the solution that's the other thing so what we find in also doing the same studies is if we expose speakers to more talkers from diverse backgrounds they get better at not processing it in a negative way so it can decrease accent bias so there are a lot of different places where linguists are important and people just don't realize they are no I have no doubt they're very important I think that more people should be aware more people should be aware of their biases that they assume when they when they hear someone then when they receive a message but it's like without the education and the awareness like you said like just like a random study is going to show this is a very real thing in the workplace in a professional setting you're you're trying to get a job you're trying to raise money this is going to be is it going to be difficult if the person who's receiving it is not aware of these biases but the other question would be so outside of the person who's receiving the message being aware of these biases and being exposed to a different different individuals so these biases start to be reduced is that's sort of what I'm hearing that if the person speaks to a bunch of different types of individuals eventually over time these types of biases are reduced are there are there what was the word you used you said non like the preferred lane not the preferred language like the socially accepted language are the outside of that realm are there like language quirks or things that people say that they should not say it's not a bias it's just like a like a bad habit or a bad practice that that hurts you know I think that's a really loaded question because I'm a linguist so my aim is to study language descriptively so what do people actually do and then I can also look at the impact of what they do I particularly am interested in why they do it and where it came from so what what need in our speech did it develop to to serve and that's sort of a prescriptive question in the sense of is there anything we shouldn't do but again that all comes down to social preferences and I'm not saying that there shouldn't be things that we watch in our speech because we know how other other people perceive it and we obviously want to make a good impression for example a job interview you probably don't want to walk in there saying a lot of ums and us a lot of likes and use vocal fry if you want to be employed by someone who might have a bias against those kinds of features but in many ways I would say that actually says a lot more about that company and the kind of climate it has that you probably don't want to be a part of if they're going to have those kinds of biases against speakers that happen to typically be young and female because those are features that women young women tend to use at a higher rate so you know I think there's a difference between being aware of how you might be perceived based on using certain features versus the prohibition to not use them if you look at young speakers young speakers in general use those features so if you're aging up those features then any workplace would be you know sort of dumb to ignore them because that is the latest in the clients and the employees are going to have um so when we so when we look at language and like our language choices forget bias but just our personal language choices what does that say about our our identity and our personality and our social relationships I did enormous amount and I think that's the thing that people tend not to realize um you know we see language in two ways either good language or bad language and if you speak good language or a good person if you speak bad language or something wrong with you um but in reality language is about social identity just as much as it's about communication so think about you know things like hi how you doing that we say five million times a day uh they're they're really about making connection right it's there's nothing informational in that other than hey I like you I just want to check on you and let's have some connection here let's build a relationship so it's a relationship building so a lot of times language is about talking in such a way that it invites connection camaraderie solidarity and closeness or it tells someone the way that you're approaching them um so I you know we were talking before we went on about how you can change your speech over time that you become more informal more casual and that you've heard podcasters do that sort of over a couple of years well the idea with more casual informal speech is it's inviting when you when you go home and you used an overly formal way of approaching your family they're going look at you like what the hell is going on with you because who are you you know it because it's weird it's not it doesn't speak to your relationship so when you are in a conversation that was someone you just met for example and you sort of get that sense that you like them that you're making a connection do you stay stiff informal in your speech or do you switch and start using maybe more contractions like gonna want to have to do you start saying you know I always want to instead of will do you say things like walking instead of walking those are very subtle cues that we give each other about the relationship so if you've ever been in a conversation where someone does not shift it's very off-putting in fact you probably walk away with a bad impression about them and that's the same thing is using things like discourse markers well oh so like you know those are about connection and actually if you look at research on them we find that when people take personality tests more conscientious speakers tend to use more discourse markers so it's actually the linguistic version of kindness when you think about discourse markers so our dislike of them is really more about who has tended to use them historically more so women tend to use more discourse markers and it's probably a lot with women's speeches related to the position and the role that they've had compared to men for centuries and women's voices have always been sort of vilified and told to be silent for you know since Aristotle I think Aristotle had saying that said silence gives grace to women so you know it sort of tells you what he thought about women's voices in the public sphere and then you know we used to put them in scolds bridles in the middle ages if they talked too much and said things that we thought was blasphemy which was mainly saying you know he sucks we should get rid of this guy are you know talking around the gossip circles and the water well that you had these feelings about maybe those in governance or people that were doing things you didn't like well that was dangerous especially when women were saying it because women talked a lot of other women and they talked to their husbands and then it could spread like wildfire it was kind of the internet you know the gossip circles were the internet of the middle ages and so they actually would prosecute women for sins of the tongue and put them in things called scolds bridles which was like a metal handable lecture contraption that held their tongue down so that they couldn't speak so here's his history and so we have always been skeptical of women's voices so that leads us to believe a women talk more than men which they don't most research doesn't show that to be true women have less to say it's unimportant it's evacuous it's empty headed so that then gets assigned to the features they tend to use at a higher rate so things like like our vocal fry or using a lot of intensifiers like vary or so or pretty or really those tend to be used at a higher rate women's speech and the reason for that is that women actually lead in language change and have through time so almost everything that you say today as a man was something that was started with a woman centuries ago so it's very interesting that women are very powerful to generators of change can I ask something so if historically women's voices were suppressed how was it so that even though they were suppressed the the items in their speech were actually setting like the the precedent for how men speak in the future in the next you know couple years or the next the next the next the you know the next 10 years men will sort of adopt some of these speaking patterns how did that 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 I'm we are cool but the real answer is what 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 catch 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 guess who their moms their mother their mom so you know unless that changes drastically and of course it has changed somewhat it's still the case that that happened 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 there are this is when you ask that question about what is our language say about us it says a lot 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 notice 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 generation ahead they had children the kids inherited their generation they go to school are their speech they go to school with the same system but then girls forge ahead another generation if a change is going is going to continue the girls will push it 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 leapfrogging and that's only find that men catch up and that's when a new norm gets established over time and 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 dot 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 that 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 doth 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 so you know what we just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot now companies are under pressure right now pressure to get more leads closed deals faster get better insights to create the best experience for their customers see a CRM can help but not just any CRM one that is easy to set up intuitive to use and customizable to the way you do business now that's where HubSpot comes in HubSpot CRM is an easy for everyone to use on day one solution it helps teams be more productive you can drag and drop your way to attention grabbing emails and landing pages you can set up marketing automation to give every contact the white glove treatment plus AI power tools like content assistant mean less time spent on tedious manual tasks and more time for what matters your customers HubSpot CRM has all the tools you need to wow prospects lock in deals and improve customer service response times get started today for free at HubSpot.com and what would cause that what would cause the totally to to be a more gendered feature well a lot of times it's the different types of attract of sociocultural attractiveness that features carry so what makes a boy popular in school you know you you were a boy right traditionally sports yeah like links sports having friends you know being kind of tough in macho right yeah yeah basically yeah that kind of thing and does that is that the same kind of thing that happens for women when a girl I mean they can play sports but is sort of masculine bravado very traditionally no no it's really not femininity and more totally 180 yeah 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 have this expectation of rough tough kind of behavior and so 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 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 and he has to have that that's part of what bonds them is having a shared language and it's it's actually acts is an older feature than ask and that's what ask came from which is so another thing that's why else that you're saying like people know 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 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 that's really what's happening 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 gonna do it but what what they don't understand is the reason those features are attracted attractive to them is because they're completely misinterpreting why they're used in the first place they are used as sort of symbolic symbolic solidarity symbols for the groups that use them in the same way that we use certain features like like or vocal fry to like claim to other aspects of our identity and those tend to be very predominantly kind of white and middle class features and actually if you look at I'm an I use which we should talk about at one point because they will blow your mind if you look at the distribution of use of those features men use much more than women do and upper class speakers tend to use more field pauses than lower class speakers so they sort of it's funny how these different features take on these associations that are very subtle we don't realize it but they send messages to us about who those people are because of the very very detailed distribution of those features in speech that we can't articulate unless we're a linguist but influence us nonetheless so when we see higher rates of certain things like contractions or palitalization which is when you say things like watcha did ja that's called palitalization because it simply two sounds coming together because of how they're articulated in the mouth that get palitalized meaning the tongue moves more towards the palate we find higher rates of that speech feature everybody does them but we find higher rates in among non-standard English speakers probably because it is used as a language of of communication of intimacy of connection so when we shift to more informal features among our family members it's because we're showing them that were connected and we identify with them so in communities that tend to have that as a very very important facet of self-protection against a larger dominant culture that tends to despise them that's a way to show it is in your language is connection so but the problem is a lot of times young men misinterpret those sort of signs of solidarity as also representing what those people represent to them from cultural stereotype which is sort of dangerous and edgy and cool and then to get that in their own persona they adopt those features so that's sort of how that cycle works it's pretty fascinating and are there any other examples of because we've now we've sort of spoken how language impacts society and a little bit of how society impacts language but outside of North America what are some other interesting examples of how society impacts language because it seems to be this like Yin and Yang seesaw type relationship between language and society that goes back and forth and they almost impact each other constantly right and so that's a really good question and there are I mean language this is how language operates everywhere so there are linguists like me that study languages outside of English I'm an English linguist which means mainly what I study is in English but what's really fascinating is how these patterns that I've just discussed are not patterns that are somehow naturally driven so they're nothing biological they they have nothing to do with the fact that you're born female or you're born male they have everything to do with the way that society expects you to act because of those designation so and that access and to resources that you have as a member of that society so we find in American English that women tend overall to use more standard forms of speech and that's cuts across sort of ethnic and class lines if you look across those groups in every group and you study the same feature that's non-standard you typically find that man use non-standard features at a higher rate and so this is things like simple things like walking versus walking you know that alternation in the progressive participle we find in every group that studied that's an English speaker that man use a higher rate of in vending and women use typically a lower rate that doesn't mean that every single woman follows that pattern but the overall generalization that we find very very consistently and this is in world world English is not just American English is that men use more in and women use more in because in is considered the more correct version and in is the more casual sort of laid back version that we find that distribution but part of that is because women in this culture are valued for being standard speakers and a lot of times historically and ecologically they're given jobs in which language is very important so think about teachers historically teachers have been more women than men and that of course is a area where language is important so the way you speak to students is going to necessarily be more standard than the way you speak if you are say at a factory which have typically been male or into jobs and what kind of speech is valuable to factory well it doesn't matter what progressive participle you use it's that you have this sort of language that helps you kind of bond with the other people that are doing this boring job or a lot of cases that will help you communicate if there's any kind of danger so in in a lot of types of jobs that men historically have held there might be high rates of danger factory work it could be equipment in lumber it could be that a tree is falling right and firefighting it might be that there's a fire coming so there's all these different pressures on you but very few of them are speak standardly right it's like hey get out of the way that damn tree that kind of thing yeah so right these pressures are different it's just like because of how we treat men and women this culture in terms of jobs that we expect them to have another job that women have historically done more is being the front line of restaurants of banks of hotels of service industries and that again puts a pressure on women to have more standard speech versus being in a police force or something like that how many police men really worry about having standard speech not much because again it's a language of solidarity and brotherhood right but you go to a different country like perhaps in the Middle East where there's different norms for behavior for men and women were met or out in professions and women are not women have to rely on solidarity and friendship among other women primarily they don't need to have any kind of outward facing good speech we find the exact opposite pattern in those cultures men lead in the use of standard forums and women lead in the use of non-standard features so we find the same pattern but for the same reasons but sometimes it's reversed based on the social needs of that society now what so then what does this mean for an increasingly globalized world because now we're we're working remote working from home on zoom with people from every single country every single day and I would I would assume that most people don't understand the level of detail that one should understand to communicate with an individual in a different society or a different culture or a different part of the world right so what does this actually mean well you know I think and that's sort of what I'm trying to get my main message of the book in addition to being fun and learning about these fascinating facts because there's so many unbelievable facts about language we don't understand and we have these beliefs that they come from these weird places that they don't come from are they spontaneously come into existence and they're just bad almost everything we do has been around for centuries and there's a reason we do it and one thing that I think is my main message of the book is be compassionate right think about the fact that not everybody comes to language with the same perspective that you do and the reason they're doing the things they do is because that has been useful in their own background in their own language in their own existence and you are falling on the same exact pattern for the same exact reason so compassion is really key especially in this new connected world there are also a number of different things that if we understand the linguistics behind it it'll make it a little easier and things like the zoom I mean zoom is a weird context because first of all it has a delay there's a sort of an internet delay so that it kind of there's been a really fascinating study recently that looked at the way that we cognitive process we sort of process cognitively the interactions that we have when we talk to people and we do this in called like syncing so when we're having a conversation in real time with someone in a real place you know a one-on-one real real conversation in physical space there are brains sync up and they sort of are able to sort of attach to the pattern and the the stress pattern and the intonation pattern of that other person and kind of no one we're going to hop in and when we're not and our brain doesn't have to do that much work because it they're synced so it's not exhausting how many times have you had a zoom conversation and you're really tired at the end and you can't figure out why yeah because your brains can't sync to the same way because of that lag that slight lag throws off our automatic syncing and it makes us have to work harder to process what other people say and then to jump in and follow up with it so one thing to remember is that tiredness is actually real physical tiredness from doing heavy cognitive work and it's not only you it's everybody else on that phone call so one thing is to think about well what does that mean for me as a employer or as a manager as a participant in these things are there things we're doing on zoom that could be better done elsewhere through other forums either email something that's the asynchronous perhaps or through a phone call that we don't seem to have that same kind of exhaustion when we talk that maybe we should save the zoom for things that we can devote full energy to for a shorter period of time so one thing is to think about don't have these you know five hour zoom meetings or take breaks so that you let people's brains kind of have a chance to relax and get over it the other thing is who am I talking to in terms of what culture they're from and how do they deal with silence because different cultures have different norms for how long a lag to have between different conversational terms and American English speakers don't like having much time at all so we don't like to leave silence out there on the table but for example fins and Japanese speakers tend to have much longer silence that's acceptable and desirable so of course to them on a phone call on a zoom call or a phone call with an American English speaker the American English speaker is constantly talking jump interruptions jumping in all the time and basically hogging the conversational floor to an English speaker American English speaker a Japanese or Finn is never talking they're uninterested they're not holding up their end of the conversation so can you see how this one really simple difference in our cultural norms for talking can create some significant problems from a business perspective I love that that's fascinating okay I want to actually because we actually haven't spoken about like your book at all there's so much fun stuff to cover there's a lot this is made okay I will I will go into the book I'm just super curious um when you when you listen to me like what does that say about me which I want you to like I want you to give me like the rundown on on on how I speak and how I present it's it's so good and and be ruthless like you can say whatever you want well just to preface this by when a linguist study speech what we do is we actually record a bunch of speakers and then we analyze their speech usually using acoustic equipment and then so we can pull out statistical distribution so I don't usually just sort of take it on one person because speech it's usually a glomeration but that said um I actually now it's interesting because I had listened to you do a podcast before I came on I always like to listen and one thing I didn't notice is you know men tend to think they don't ever use like in their speech and one thing I didn't notice is you are a quoted of like per speaker you don't tend to use like in other contexts but I did hear you actually use quoted of like which is not surprising because it's the probably the fastest expanding use of like among Americans and Canadians the study actually that's showed at exponential use of quoted of like over 50% over 10 years of greater like use among young men and women in particular so I had noticed that you when you talk about what someone should say you'll say well so that if they were like this you know if they say if you don't you don't say if they said actually say if well if they were like this which tells me that you're under 40 most likely because it is a youthful marker especially quoted of like um a lot of people use discourse marker like especially older women you'll find middle-aged women that use it but for quoted of like for man to use it's usually a young male feature a younger male not not you know a teenager but teenagers do it too but I did notice that in your speech and then you have a really interesting uh valile raising in about that about yeah that's Canadian yes and so I was wondering if you were Canadian based on that I am I'm from yeah I'm born in Toronto okay so that's actually called Canadian raising um and that's sort of a stereotypical Canadian features Canadian raising now people usually have it wrong they think people say a boot which they don't right they say very subtly and you have a very subtle Canadian raising your speech um so that anyway that's my quick and dirty acoustic in our analysis now that's amazing um and it's it's quite funny because a lot of people when they find it on Canadian they don't they don't they don't hear any I guess uh Canadian air quotes in my in my accent but sometimes they have mentioned oh I hear it when you say about yes yes but it's only when I'm not thinking about it yeah just like right there and how do you say exactly yeah say this one word because this can also be Canadian but it's yeah yeah I think it's older Canadian feature so you may not have it how do you say the word S-O-R-R-Y sorry oh hey that's very Canadian you say sorry sorry yeah what how do you say how how would an American sorry sorry oh that sounds weird to me you say sorry it sounds so often it's a very Canadian feature it's it's some that if you're clout have a lot of contact with Americans we noticed that actually younger speakers can have it dissipating but it's a it's a very traditional Canadian feature to say sorry that's so funny um okay let's talk about your book so the book is like literally dude arguing for the good and bad English what what is the argument for the good and bad English what does that mean well so the idea here is sort of what we were talking about before that we have all these preconceived notions when we go into a speaking context about what good English is and if someone deviates from those norms that we expect them to use we think all sorts of things about them and so a lot of times that's things that are not in our own speech we judge other people or we feel very self-conscious about those things in our our speech because we know we do them and we know other people don't like them and we have these ideas based on this very prescriptivist view of language that we've been taught since we've been you know born basically our parents tell us oh don't say that it's not it's not him and I went to the store it's it's he and I right those kinds of things that are very prescriptivist notions that have developed over time what we don't realize is those are only moments right those are moments in our speech that we call attention to that over the long call of language have made no difference so these prescriptivist views first of all have only been around since about the 18th century before that we really didn't have a lot of prescription like you should do this you should do that you shouldn't do this talk like this don't talk like that that didn't mean we didn't notice differences in people's speech but we didn't tell them they were bad speakers because of it in the way that we do now but these are actually based on misunderstandings of where these features come from instead of realizing that they're actually part of the natural evolution of language and we have done the exact same thing throughout history with things that we think are totally right now but it's also that we don't recognize that speakers do that for very very good social reasons as well like people don't adopt our own our speech because they want something that they're getting from using those other speech features and it's that kind of social pressure that has moved language forward since the time of old English because if you've ever read Beowulf I think you'll probably agree with me that a Beowulf is unintelligible to anybody that speaks English today and be it wasn't really fun to read right so no one is brutal and I remember that too I was like why are we studying this like who's gonna ever need this in life and probably you don't tell you meet a linguist but reality is was that great English no but if we have if we follow this view that older features are better features than modern English speakers have a lot of explaining to do because clearly we have massively changed our language in the last thousand years and in fact the changes to English between the year 10,000 I'll be sorry the year 1000 and the year 1700 basically were much more major in terms of radically reshaping the way that English sounded and looked like than any changes that have happened in the years since prescription started so we're actually really slowing the rate of change now not speeding it up but people act like we're decaying language constantly so this book was just like one of these features just before you keep going no sorry before you keep going what was the reason for that expedited change uh well wars invasions the French the Vikings right uh massive differences all of that so yeah you know in that eighth and ninth century we had a lot of old Norse inscriptions which basically was Viking incursions well what we don't tend to think of is Vikings were actually not that different than what Anglo-Saxons were Anglo-Saxons were essentially Vikings of an earlier era they all were from the great northern Germanic plains and so they all spoke a kind of related they also spoke dialects of essentially the same Germanic based language Anglo-Saxons came over several centuries before and then the language started to evolve in certain ways because those speakers were isolated especially back then when you didn't you know just pick up the phone or jump on zoom you didn't have a lot of contact so languages naturally evolved due to underlying linguistic pressures in different directions whenever speakers are separated and this can be separated by geography or separated by social distance whatever um so then when the Viking started to come over they spoke old Norse which was a similar dialect basically of the language the Anglo-Saxons spoke and people think of the Vikings as sort of these vicious people that came over and killed everybody but actually and they were I mean I'm not saying the Vikings were not fabulous and did only fabulous things they were mean and they killed a lot of people and you know they pillaged and all that but they also settled a lot in the Anglo-Saxon territory especially in the northern area of Britain and so they had a lot of assimilation with the Anglo-Saxons and so old Norse because it's a dialect whenever you have two dialects that are close together come in contact they influence each other quite a bit because those speakers can communicate so what happens is sort of a leveling where they kind of get rid of distinctive features and they move towards each other they become more similar so a lot of old Norse features came into the language through Viking contact um and so like that S that S I told you that does that's actually through old Norse contact it was a northern feature that came to us from old Norse contact um and then a lot of things we noticed in American English so southern features like Mike could saying things like Mike could those are actually come from contact with Scott's Irish back in the early days of colonial settlement um so those are all again very similar dialects to other ones that were sort of like the Virginia colonies spoke right they were from mainly South-Eastern British um areas then you have the Scott's Irish that also were in contact and so those those dialects blood together the history of our language in American English is very similar it's just all through contact and that of course you have the Norman invasion they brought the French over and I do talk about this history in the book and of course French was the language of government for and of the royal court for hundreds of years and what happens when you elevate a language it becomes the powerful language it's the one everybody wants to know if they want to work in that area if they want to have social status of a certain type those that don't speak it by default become colloquial vernacular speakers that we kind of you know those are scuzzy people you don't want to talk to them well that was what English was English was the scuzzy language right you didn't get educated in English you didn't make laws in English you didn't have religious ceremonies in English because English was considered as sort of gross vulgar language it was the language of common people I mean that is what English is right so the French though we borrowed a ton of vocabulary we got new sounds so for example f and v didn't exist in English as separate sounds until contact with the French which is why we have that weird spelling in words words like knife and knives and wife and wives that's actually from this contact with French that gave us these two different sounds that we actually now treat differently which we didn't in old English so massive changes to the language over time and then in the early modern period the drastic change was that English rose up as the language of power and then that massively changed English because it started to be used in government it started to be used in education it started to be used in law it started to be used in the court which then elevated forms of English to be the standard over the things that had been associated with French so all of those were pretty massive changes in according to you know modern times we really haven't had that much excitement so not much has happened in English in the last 200 years compared to all those massive changes at that time let's speak about some of those filled pauses that you were speaking about previously the ums and the us so I even made a point at the beginning that that was the one thing that I I don't know anything about linguistics but I do know that I was not supposed to when presenting filled things with ums and us and I know that when you record a podcast and post production if you do the editing that's the parts that you're cutting out to make sure that it flows quicker so what are those where did they come from why do we do them what purpose did they have in our communication well and that what's so funny is so many people have told me I cut every uh and um out of my recordings because that is a widespread belief I mean no one has ever gone to a public speaking class and been told no stick your arms in they're awesome no one ever zero but that means no one has read the literature that suggests that um and uh are actually very very positive features in our speech now I'm not saying that they're positively perceived because that's clearly not true right we don't like them but this is a case a perfect example of where linguistic reality and social preferences do not meet so sometimes we have features that arise in our feet our speech to meet needs that we have as speakers of a language and those can be cognitive needs in terms of what's preferred in a structure linguistically it can be social needs in terms of how what how communication and connect connections can be made more effectively and then sometimes we have needs that arise because of social preferences that have developed in uh the world around us in businesses and schools that tell us to do something a certain way sometimes those are in tandem and we can get the same benefit from using the thing that's linguistically preferred and the thing that socially preferred sometimes they're in opposition and that's exactly what has happened with filled pauses filled pauses come up because we're doing heavy cognitive retrieval so it's basically a signal that our our brain is working over time and usually this happens when we're processing more difficult or new information so we have basically more neural firings that are needed when we have we're hearing something new for the first time then when we hear something many many times over and a great example of how integrating new information takes more cognitive effort and causes us to pause more a filled filler pauses more is a study that was done where they had people look at a picture and describe the picture and then they would have them describe the picture over and over again what you find is in their first description of the picture they use a much higher filled pause rate than in their third description of the picture because they're not doing as much cognitive processing because they've already explained it they've already gone through the stages in their head they know what they're going to say they've built the sentences they've come up with the vocabulary there's not much effort involved but when they're working harder they're coming up with new words they're using infrequent words they're constructing long sentences they're making in sort of embedded phrases in a different sentence all of those actually take additional cognitive effort and that is where we see ums and us come into play so the idea that ums and us are tied to anxiety is really not well established what it seems to be more tied to is hard cognitive effort um and that often comes up in cases where we might also be anxious which is why I think people conflate those two so when we're giving a presentation that usually involves bigger words than we usually use familiar less familiar words than we usually use because you don't talk at home like you do at the office and are in a business presentation and you're you're using bigger sentences right because you're probably not taking a lot of background information for granted like you would when you talk among friends and you're building out bigger syntactic structures well it also is a nerve-wracking experience to be giving a public presentation and therefore it seems like we're umming because we're nervous but actually we're umming and iying because we're doing really heavy cognitive work so now people do have rates of ums and us so some people do them a lot some people do them less and that does seem to be a kind of personal attribute I mean certainly this true that heavy ummers are generally less well received than light ummers but the reality is we um in us as speaker for a couple of reasons but one of them is basically we're doing heavy cognitive retrieval and so we're that's giving us a moment to get our thoughts together it's helping us retrieve the vocabulary out of a sea of other vocabulary words that would come to mind more quickly so if you're using a less familiar word what's going to come to mind more quickly are them more familiar words so you have to kind of wade through that cognitively to get to that word that's less familiar um and so that's like oftentimes have you ever been in a place where you're trying to come up with a word you're like uh uh uh it's because your brain is like marking marking marking i'm working i'm working i'm working but why we fill our pauses with a sound because we could just take a a silent pause seems to be because not only are we thinking harder but we want to signal to our listener that they need to give us a moment to come up with what we're going to say and don't take our turn from us so it's sort of a communicative aid that tells someone that's listening to you i have something more to say so you know don't go away and don't jump in my conversation you know don't don't still the floor for me which is why when you're talking either to Siri or Alexa or one of a computer or you're talking in a context where you're telling a story and you wouldn't expect to get interrupted we don't see filled pauses come up as often so the same speaker will decrease the rate of filled pauses in context where floor theft is not an option compared to when they're in a casual conversation hey everyone just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode masterclass now i wanted to share masterclass with everyone here i just discovered it it's an amazing streaming platform with over 180 classes taught by some of the world's best minds so i'm talking about learning how to cook from Gordon Ramsay or diving into writing with Neil gammon or even getting tips on tennis from serena Williams but what caught my attention was Alexis ohanian's class on 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day so go to that is masterclass.com slash success story to get up to 35 percent off from mother's day so really what are you waiting for they gave us a special code you gotta go to masterclass today take advantage of this special mother's day discount happy learning is that is that an exclusively north american or english feature and the reason why i ask because you mentioned that that other cultures were more comfortable with silent pauses so like like fins or or i think you mentioned a japanese before they're comfortable with silent pauses would they still have these arms and arms they do now that so what's interesting is what you're talking about are silent pauses between turns which we call turn transition cues and those are actually different so think about when you come to the end of a senate you don't usually go yeah so i had a great time at that party uh right that's not that's not what you say to tell someone it's their turn to talk right so what we're talking about actually when i say that is that that space that comes between conversational turns and it serves as a turn transition cue which tells someone else oh it's your turn to talk right um and that's what i was talking about in that context but yes that taking to your question we're directly every single language ever studied has filled pauses and not only do they have one filled pauses but every language studied so far has more than one filled pauses generally at least two like japanese for example has a and ono as well as several others and uh dutch has f and m right french has a and m so you have all these filled pauses now the reason the in though European languages sound very similar is that actually we hypothesize that they all or those those filled pauses probably all originated from a source language so for example all Germanic languages have essentially the same two pauses uh and um slightly different with the vowels based on whatever vowel context that language has but that's just to us that they're inherited from proto Germanic which probably got them from indo European which is like why french has very similar because it's a indo European language even though it's not a Germanic one so yes all languages do have them they seem to serve the same purpose and the reason they seem to have two is really fascinating because we don't tend to think there's a substantive difference between uh and um and if you think about it why would we need synonyms for a filled paus which is just sort of a thing that we insert in our speech it seems kind of odd but if you look at the length of the pause that people have after they are compared to the length of the pause that he people take after they um we find a statistical difference between them so that uh signals you just need a quick sec um signals you need to take longer so it actually seems to be listener directed so that listeners will know how long they have before you're going to finish your thought so a lot of times if I uh we find that people try to don't try to fill in what we're struggling with so have you ever been talking to someone that's I mean a lot and you're like wait do you mean this do you mean that well what's interesting is if you hear them uh because you know what means they're not having as much difficulty it's not going to take them as long you don't tend to do that to the same degree if you um someone is more likely to try to hop in and help you because that signals to them you're struggling more with whatever you're processing so there's a really interesting fascinating difference between the amount of times we uh the amount of time we need for an uh versus an um and that the final fascinating fact about your filled pauses because there are so many is that not only do they help you as a speaker when cognitive processing and communicating a lag or speech delay they really help you study show as a listener in both being quicker to process what someone says integrate new information faster and remember it better later so not only do your uh as an um help you signal to a listener like okay they're gonna take a minute but that listener upon hearing those seems to take it as a cognitive flag that whatever follows the filled pause is more is more difficult to process that seems to cue their in their interest and their cognitive effort towards it so they get kind of more neural firings directed towards that which makes them quicker to anticipate what you're gonna say and predict it quicker to integrate new information if it's something novel in that context and that it also seems to then cement it in their memory better so that if you give them for example pop quiz an hour later they'll remember words that had an hour or an um before them better than they remember words that didn't so if you think about that's pretty damn impressive for something we think of as bad habits right yeah no I mean it's exception I've never thought about it this much before this is amazing let's can we can we talk about profanity and and I want to understand its place in language and communication so what is the psychological impact or what is a psychological reasoning why people swear well you know there've been I know study profanity myself but I have read some of the literature on why people do it and there seems to be sort of an emotional response that it's helping us process when we use profanity so for the same reason that we express ourselves in different ways linguistically when we switch between saying something with a more formal context and saying something informal that's actually doing something for us from a sociocultural kind of perspective when we swear it seems to be something that helps us feel better it's helping us express an emotion an emotional reaction just in the same way like it's encoding an emotion in the same way that oh is encoding of surprise so if I say something like oh my god listen to this that oh is actually an exclamation that's encoding this is surprise here this is an emotion of surprise that I'm expressing I'm having and I want you to share it right and so we actually find that my understanding of what we find with swearing is it comes from a different side of the brain that processes emotion and response and so it is actually a way to help us process these emotions that we're feeling usually anger or frustration or something like that and what's really fascinating about swearing is of course you know it's really much more prevalent today than it was in you know something like the 1920s when it wasn't widely accepted we see an uptick in in bad words or bad language you know obscenities after a world war two and it seems like what happened is when soldiers went overseas and experienced probably the worst things they ever experienced in life profanity offered them a way to process those experiences to commiserate over those experiences to express exactly how deeply it affected them and they brought profanity home so they they had those experiences they brought it home and that's where we see actually women start to use it at a higher rate because their husbands came home they were using profanity they were describing experiences that were highly emotional and profanity helped emphasize the intensity of that emotion and so then it became more prevalent in people's speech every day when they also wanted to express an intensity of emotion so I know I know you don't study this so if you if you if you don't have the literature on it then that's fine but I'm I'm very curious if if swearing profanity you mentioned that it's mostly for the person who's actually speaking it's not for the recipient there's no correlation between profanity and level of trustworthiness or level of authenticity and delivery of message like I'm thinking of like the Gary V's of the world that swear casually right you know and he stands behind that I'd be interested I don't know the literature on that um sort of you're talking about sort perceptual response to swearing my my my suspicion would be it would depend on context right wouldn't be equivalently perceived well in or more trustworthy in different contexts um so you know if you swear in a professional place where more traditional norms are what are considered appropriate then I doubt that would make you feel more trustworthy because it would be a violation of corporate culture in that context right and the expectation would be you understand the corporate culture here and you understand that that's inappropriate versus maybe in Silicon Valley where it's much more laid back that would come across as a more authentic self um so I actually think that it would depend on the context you're studying it in but I just from what I know about other things about how informal speech tends to make you more sort of sociable and credible in many contexts because if you use overly stiff or more formal language it comes across as learned it in high status but also can be kind of arrogant pretentious and when we get into more informal speech it feels more trustworthy more like this is a person I know this is a friend that profanity could operate the same way but I don't know the literature on that um if I find any though I'd be happy to send you something I would do a whole show on that that's fascinating you know I just find it fascinating because even I I think to myself and you know when I swear and it's not always it's not always emotional so I'm trying to figure out what I would do it why I would why I would say it in a sentence that has you know consciously no emotion attached to that sentence maybe there is subconsciously I don't know well I think it seems like there's not so a lot of times what we do is we have something that is born in one circumstance so swearing came from an emotional core emotional response and it was in response that we did it first but a lot of times what we find with language is these these things that language has come to represent then get picked up and moved to a different context that is more metaphorical or figurative so uh oh for example is a metaphorical extension of surprise does that make sense that you've taken from an explanation to use it in a word in a as a sort of discourse marker that's telling your listener hey this is where we're going to shift to something that is new information that you didn't know and it should surprise you right you're giving them a heads up about it so it's already the figurative use of something that was once just an explanation of surprise when you know someone jumps out of a closet at you so that again is a good example of where swearing could have that same thing swearing mainly became something that was sort of an expression of intensity and surprise and chalk whatever and then now is sort of used for emphasis and intensity removed from its original use in more conversational speech so that would be something that would be very very normal and in fact intensification in general comes from that kind of space so when we say things like he's very good or terrifically awesome or totally great the reason we have those words is to express intensity or emphasis and in fact those words are called adverbial intensification that's what we call it but most words that serve as intensifiers started as something else that had a different meaning that got semantically bleached down to meaning just extremely so very for example is originally from a word that meant actual or true so in old English you would find people well actually it was be middle English because it came from French but in middle English early on around 1300 you would see references to Jesus as the very prophet which met the true prophet he was the true prophet but later on about a century later you start to see it as he was a very proper fool which is actually a quote from Chaucer and that means he was a true proper fool which means he had all the qualities of being a proper fool which is an intensification of being a proper fool so what over time happens is the meaning of true gets bleached out and all that's left a very is that it means a lot so I'm very happy means I'm extremely happy it doesn't mean I'm true it means I'm very happy but we can still see very retaining some aspects of that meaning when we say on this very spot he died which means on this true or exact spot so I do so what I'm sort of the example I'm using this for is that this one sense of very got extrapolated and became the prominent use of very today I feel like profanity could have worked the same way this emotional sense of what a word meant in one context this emphatic and sort of intensity that when you set a cuss word it brought into the context got extrapolated so now when I say damn I'm happy what I'm not saying like I'm having this emotional experience it's like I'm intensifying my happiness right so it's again extrapolated to the context from its original use but no longer carries that same original emotional intensity does that make sense it makes it makes a ton of sense and I have one more I have one more question and it's we're actually moving away from profanity and we're moving away from longer time periods I'm curious about accents I'm curious I don't know if this is your specialty at all I'm just throwing stuff on you now I'm just hoping you answer I'm so curious so when you look at someone and they're they came from one country to another country and say they move from anywhere anywhere in the world to the US and over their lifespan they've started to sound quote unquote American you know and but this another person will move to the US and their entire lifespan they'll have an accent from wherever they originally came from why is that and why is that even I'll give you a even better example even in you know so my girlfriend she has two sisters my girlfriend is a little bit of an accent or two sisters have no accent they're all very confused how the younger older than she is they're younger okay that's your trick so I actually this is my specialty I do a lot of work I'm a sociophonetician which means I do a lot of work on speech sounds and why they come to be in how they work cognitively and there are a number of things that enter into the question that you asked about why some people have stronger accents than others and what accents are we're basically an accent is related to speech sounds so when we talk about someone to accent the only thing that actually means is they have a sound to their speech that's uniquely identifying them as being from somewhere else or something different a fallacy is that we don't have an accent we do because if we go somewhere else they'll say oh you're an American it's because of your accent we just don't hear it because we're talking to other people that sound the same way so what happens is when you have a language that's not English mostly they have different systems of sounds typically in the vowels so English is an extremely vowel promiscuous language which means we just pot vowels out everywhere you know we have a ton of vowels in English it's not ideal which is why we have a lot of stuff going on with our vowels in American English they're changing a lot but if you look at the majority of other languages they have around five vowels so for example Spanish has five vowels so what happened when you go from a five vowel system to a 13 or 14 vowel system which is what English is and I say 13 or 14 because it depends on the dialect of English you're speaking well you have to come up with something for those vowels so you then say the vowel in your system of those five vowels that's closest to one of those 13 vowels which then makes you sound different because you're not using the same vowel as someone that speaks that language so a lot of times accents are deeply tied to vowel pronunciation because that tends to be something that really differs among different cultures among different languages so the trick is the reason we have certain sounds is because we've learned those as babies as infants we find that children are able to recognize the sounds of their language by a year old so at six months they don't seem to notice they notice human speech sounds opposed to other sounds but they they will equally devote attention to every speech sound no matter whether it's in their language or not but so if th is a good example of the sound of the sound the English is unusual and having that sound many many languages don't so for example my mother's a French speaker she still says one too Tweet because French doesn't have a thus sound so a baby at an English baby will understand both the and ta at six months and so would a French speaking baby but by a year old a French speaking baby will filter out the thus sound because it's not relevant to their language whereas a American baby will still pay attention to it and suck harder that's how we measure baby attention they'll suck harder on a sort of electronic pacifier that transmits their sucking rate to a computer when they hear that sound meaning they're recognizing that that's part of their speech sound that they start babbling you know if you've had a baby or been around babies they do weird things with their mouths and they're like yeah ba ba ba ba pa ta ta and they make a lot of noises that is them actually practicing to make those sounds so they're exercising there are sort of physiological ability to make certain sounds and anything with practice the more you do it the better you get but if you don't do something learning a new skill no matter what it is is hard it takes time and we're often very good at the things we learned from being a very at a young age and bad at the things we learn at a later age well that's exactly what happens speech sounds you have been practicing and setting your articulatory mechanism to make these particular speech sounds since you were born but also you come into a language as an adult or a older adolescent and you have a whole bunch of new sounds that you haven't processed before cognitively you haven't practiced physiologically and you kind of use your own system to understand that language and that prohibits you in some ways from adopting that language as a native speaker so that's sort of the background the question you ask is why are some people better than others well some of us are better at doing the analysis as an older adult on sort of the new distribution of sounds and we just find certain people do that better and that's partially tied to motivation it depends on your motivation for doing it often depends on how close or distant your own system was from the one you're learning but it also seems to depend on whether how well you perceive sounds how well you sort of analyze the statistical distributions and that just seems to be blind luck like some people are good at it some people are less good the same way that people are good at hearing music or not like tonality of music so it does seem to be there some innate predisposition that makes you better or worse at it but the key is age of acquisition the older you are when you're exposed to a new system the worse you tend to be at acquiring it so I would suggest that with your girlfriend because her sisters are younger they had earlier exposure and longer to adjust to it at an earlier age and that really seems to make a big impact on how languages learned and how accents are gotten rid of I love this okay um so let's let's let's wrap this up uh I want to give the floor over to you so I guess two I always ask a question at the end but I'll say that for a second um two things anything else that you wanted to go into or teach over to uh the audience that we haven't come into feel free and then also uh more importantly um what can people get out of your new book where can they go get it and all of your social and and whatnot okay well so I think uh you know the big thing is everything we've talked about though a lot of it wasn't directly from the book although some of it was like the ums and us and the intensifiers and things but it's all about these questions that we have as speakers of human language I don't think there's anybody alive in any language that has never questioned their own speech or the speech of other people um you know it's it's not just because we're judgmental it's because we are indoctrinated into a really firm belief about what's good language and what's bad language and um the problem is it's it's an issue of equity for one because we tend to judge certain people's speeches better and there's reason socio historically for that but it's also of accuracy because a lot of the what we believe about language and the why people do it and what's bad is based on erroneous facts so it will blow your mind where a lot of these speech features come from so for example like where does it come from well valley girls right if I asked you you'd probably say it's Southern California's valley girls wrong it is actually centuries old if we look back in set the 1700s to British trial transcripts which because obviously we didn't have recordings we have to rely on transcripts there is something called the old Bailey proceedings which were criminal trial proceedings that were rigorously transcribed verbatim for about 200 years so if we look back in the 1700s in Britain we find like used as a discourse marker um we also find it in literature at that time but if you look in New Zealand at some recordings New Zealand did this wonderful project called I think it was called the arms project done in the middle of the 20th century where they recorded really old New Zealanders before they died um who had come over from British backgrounds in the late 1800s so these were people born in the late 1800s guess what they used like just like we use it today at the beginning of sentences for cohesion we also find an octogenarian rural speakers in Britain they used like the same way so this is actually a British feature and it wasn't until it got noticed with Southern California Valley girl speakers in the eight in the 1980s that we also were like oh my god like it's everywhere it's all it's a bad thing but actually it is centuries old and it has fascinating reasons for why it emerged so it's really about accuracy if you really want to know why people do this it's easy to dismiss them but then you miss the reality of why people change language and have through centuries and my book is really about getting to understand why we do the things we do in language um it's also really funny i i have fun with it i want people to enjoy reading it it will help you understand your kids if you have teenagers it will help you understand your employees if you have young employees and it will help you understand yourself if you use any type of non-standard speech marker in your speech so if you say like if you use vocal fry if you um in uh if you've ever said dude in your life if you're struggling with singular they any of those things you can find that in the book i love it okay where do they go what's the socials that you want to send people to in the website okay well my website will have information on other things i've written um and as well as the book so that's just Valerie Friedland dot com and i'm sure you'll have the link in your um show notes so that i don't have to spell that out because it's of course a little tricky to spell but that has a lot of information i also write a monthly blog for psychology today so it's called language in the wild you can just either go to my website to find it or if you search Valerie Friedland psychology today it'll come right up and and i pick fun things like swearing there's actually a one on swearing so i'll have to send you that link uh so that's where they can find me i don't do a lot on social but you can find me it on twitter uh Friedland Valorys my handle there and also on LinkedIn okay perfect all right so last question i ask everyone before we end this out um you've had an incredible career writing books you're i mean you've taught at multiple universities um very very impressive after everything that you've achieved in your life what a success mean to you you know that's a really great question because it's something i have thought about a lot in the last few years as i sort of evolved in terms of what i'm doing in my career and i think if you'd asked me 20 years ago when i was first starting out i would have said financial success you know that's what of course every 25 year old is thinking when they're going on the job right do something that's cool and i want to have money i want to be successful that success i think for a lot of young people maybe some people are better than me and don't think that but that's probably what i thought of in my 20s but as i've gotten older and wiser and also done work what i realized is freedom to me is really the ultimate success the freedom to pursue the things you like and not have to do the things that really you don't like because half of what you do no matter whether it's a job you love or a job you hate is something you don't enjoy about that right so for me it was administration i'm a professor and i really do enjoy teaching i'm still close friends with students i had 20 years ago because i try to be meaningful in their life in some way and i really try to support them because i think mentorship is really key so it's to me that's a really valuable part of my job i love to write i love to share what i learn it's passion for me because i find it so fascinating i think everybody else has to be also fascinated by this so those are the things i like but i also had to do a lot of administration like i hate forms i hate them if i had to fill out another form a writer report or oversee somebody or you know give lessons and lectures to students behaving badly or professors behaving badly both of which i've had to do because i was a director of the department for a while i don't like that i really i did it because it was my civic responsibility and it was what it meant to be in a career like i was in but i felt really awful in that phase of my life i did six years as a director and while i had cherished moments and experiences in that i will say it's not what i like to do at all now that i'm a full professor and i'm kind of at the ending stage of my career and sort of seniority i get to do what i love which is right and teach and i don't have to do nearly as much administration and so to me i think the freedom to pursue my interests rather than my obligations has really been success in the last few years