Creaky voice? That's sooooo 2012. It's all about the creaky-voiced long alveolar glide with mid front unrounded vowel and glottal stop.<p><i>"A linguistic dissection of 7 annoying teenage sounds"</i><p><a href="http://theweek.com/article/index/244460/a-linguistic-dissection-of-7-annoying-teenage-sounds" rel="nofollow">http://theweek.com/article/index/244460/a-linguistic-dissect...</a>
'"I ne saugh nawiht" in Middle English; "I don't see anything" in Modern English. Today, one can find it in French, which negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to either side of the verb, as well as in Afrikaans, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages. The point: There is nothing inherently "ignorant" or "stupid" about double negation; judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves.'<p>There is nothing inherently English about Greek and a number of Slavic languages. There ain't nothing much that Afrikaans tells us about the practice of Modern English (is there, baas?) and only so much light that Middle English sheds.
I might be deaf to this. I watched the interview with some girl I never heard of and, although I found her very annoying for several reasons, I couldn't hear the "creaky voice" thing.
Also fun to try: justifying ones use of "innit" as a general purpose tag with reference to the french <i>"n'est-ce pas."</i> This drives people up the wall, as there's no comeback to it, and it invokes the shallow europhilism which the kind of person who tells me off for saying "innit" typically indulges in constantly.
The author never makes a case for why vocal fry might be warranted.<p>I personally find vocal fry to be annoying because it's the linguistic version of slouching. Support your voice properly and clearly speak so the other person can hear you. Vocal fry is just another manifestation of "I'm cool because I don't care."
> Had [old white dudes] been the ones to pioneer these tics, we'd be praising them as enriching expansions of the language. We'd be reading The, Like, New Yorker<p>I wasn't aware (and still don't care) which social group started adding "like" to everything; the reason it bothers me is that it adds noise without adding signal...<p>(Though I'm not a linguist; maybe there is some signal there that I'm just not consciously aware of?)
If you can't hear it in Zooey Deschanel's voice, a desk clerk with extravagant vocal fry was a gag in the movie Young Adult. Here's just a part of the scene (2nd clip on the page)<p><a href="http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/young-adult-clips/" rel="nofollow">http://www.nextmovie.com/blog/young-adult-clips/</a>
I sure hope next generation's NORMs won't speak in creaky voices. This looks a lot more like another cycle of fashion than true "ingenious" "innovation". What society-wide improvements in communication does it effect?
There was a good discussion about this on Language Hat a few months ago:<p><a href="http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004914.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.languagehat.com/archives/004914.php</a>
> judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves.<p>And so is "old white dudes".<p>> When it comes to language, the rules of natural selection apply: Evolve or perish.<p>I demand strong affirmative action for the less privileged languages.