Why Does Everyone Say ‘Like’ and ‘Um’ All The Time? - Valerie Fridland

one thing that we do notice is when people are more Dynamic speakers when they say something that's more interesting and they're more engaging people actually don't tend to note their O's and um's as much as people that give sort of a monotonous boring delivery and maybe don't have content that's really interesting so a lot depends on what you're saying what do you study I am what's called a socio-linguist don't try to say that after a few drinks at cocktail parties it's a hard one but it basically means that I study how the underlying linguistic patterns that we take for granted and we don't even notice anymore vary not just by language or dialect but by social facts about us that are much smaller than these things that we tend to think of as language differences why do languages change at all then why isn't it just that we have a language and then people use it and people use it and it gets locked in for the rest of time well that's why I make the big bucks or actually not but that's why they pay me some salary that's a big question actually and you know that is what keeps linguist and psychologist and cognitive scientists employed because we don't understand all the forces but the short answer to that big question is we have underlying cognitive and articulatory pressures that constantly affect us as speakers so an example of that would be the fact that take a word with a lot of consonants on it that's a single syllable like whisks which is you know word we use every day when we're cooking and notice that when you say it in fast speech or just really any time you say it in speech you're going to naturally just delete some of the consonants off that so you'll say you'll whisk it fast um you're not going to say all the whisks because it's a hard thing to say or fifths that's another word sixths those are all tricky words well the reason you delete those consonants is there's a natural inherent pressure a cognitive preference we think for languages to have very minimal syllable structures and that means no consonants at the end if possible some languages actually prohibit all consonant clustering but English allows a lot I call it a promiscuous language for that reason and so it's natural to delete them that's sort of a cognitive trying to get back to this cognitive preference we have there's also some articulatory issues so for example words like the are words that begin with the that that consonant cluster that sort of a th but it's actually a single sound many many languages don't have that sound so for example my mother is a French speaker and I used to make endless loads of fun of her because she would say one two Twee because she couldn't make the th sound right and she loved it of course that was her favorite aspect of our relationship I'm not sure but she couldn't say that because it's not a sound in French that also tells us that it's either articulatorily a disreferred sound or cognitively a dispreferred sound so languages will naturally if they have that sound try to move towards not having it anymore which is why a lot of dialects of English say things like Brava ortif because they're trying to get back to that more natural consonant structure so those are natural tendencies we have that exist all the time pressure on us all speakers all languages all the time the part that I'm interested in is the other pressure which is social pressure so how is my social identity a factor in which of those pressures I succumb to so if I'm a female if I'm a young person if I'm an African American if I'm a second language speaker a non-native speaker what do those pressures coupled with those linguistic pressures create in terms of dialects and it's because these things swirl around us all the time we're are always having these natural pressures we're always something socially we're always changing who we are socially and that has a big impact on which of those pressures that we allow in our speech in which we don't and in the end it's the cosmic language change that results so language has always had these pressures on it it hasn't changed language might change but the pressures don't we've always been social right you know back in caveman days I'm sure they did some social fun stuff um so you know it's always been there and we just kind of interact and engage and then that creates language change over time obviously it's a lot more complex but that's sort of the short long answer is it right in saying that languages seem to change in a particular direction towards Simplicity uh toward being more straightforward easy to pronounce okay that's a really a trick question thinks the problem is a lot of times when people think Simplicity they think uh Simplicity in a cognitive sense and that's really not what we're moving towards and languages don't always get simpler certain types of languages tend to get less complex over time from a standpoint of how they're articulated and maybe how they're structured morphosyntactically and those tend to be large languages spoken by a lot of speakers so like English for example or Chinese or Russian they actually have a lot of speakers a lot of non-native speakers learn it a lot of adults that may have to acquire it not perfectly and that causes language to simplify over time because the very complex Morpho syntactic and phonological patterns that babies are born into and able to acquire because of their greater cognitive plasticity does not exist in that case as widely and therefore over time the rules that are less transparent to pick up atrophy and that is what causes sort of a less complex structure sure I wouldn't call it simpler but less complex so English for example was really complex in its early days it had a lot of endings on all words so nouns and verbs and pronouns so for example think about how we say I do he does right where you have that little s that comes on well imagine that we had to do that every time we used a noun an adjective or a verb to make sure it fit with all the other words in the Senate so like German today has first of all it has grammatical gender which means that if I have a noun like the moon or the sun I have to know whether it goes with other male or female things depending on which grammatical gender it belonged to so that was one ending and that had to stick on not just the nouns but the adjectives there were several verb classes in Old English so there were strong classes and weak classes so all the Ed verbs that we use today are weak class verbs so they were a few a very sort of minority class in Old English the majority were the things like the sing-sang song or drive driven kind of class where they had these extra endings that you put on and those weird irregular verbs that we have in English like um I drive he drove I have driven that's actually a holdout from the strong classes of Old English now they're the minority today and we just memorized them but back then they were a regular rule so another fun example is is the plural s we have just one ending to make plurals in English super simple you want to make something plural stick an s on it you want to make a new word plural stick an s on it but in Old English s was actually the minority way of forming plurals and it wasn't just an S it was an as typically and many many other forms of plurals existed and the reason we have words like oxen and children is because their holdouts from Old English plurals that were much more frequent and in fact shoes and eyes used to be shoeing and iron back in the day so so these are examples of complexity um that that we lost over time I think the trick is we think of simpler as being sort of stupider or primitive and that's actually false in the way of language and a perfect example is you know no one thinks English is a stupid language and in fact we've created all sorts of things we've made airplanes fly we've created incredible life-saving vaccines you know we've created the internet in English we do all of these things in English so if we're really getting simpler that probably wouldn't have happened we'd be back in the days of Beowulf which no one wants no one wants to go back to that okay so you have a pressure which is on language especially languages that are widely used and popular ones that need to be adopted by people perhaps later in life because they are the cognitive limitations that you have just being an older person trying to learn a language as opposed to a child right when it comes to language acquisition that's just there we are so because of that you inevitably um de-complexify you you reduce down the complexity uh and that causes some of the quirks some of the sticky Audi bits that maybe are less logical to be eroded away we end up therefore with a less complex uh end result but that can't be the same for every language and also why if that's the case that languages are on average especially when they're widely used trending toward the less complex why are they complex to begin with why not just make it simple from the start well okay so these are a couple different questions in there I think that you've packed in one thing just just to say is language over time A lot of times through language contact they get more complex so it's this constant battle between what's good for us as language speakers which is to make it easier to communicate in the most efficient way possible which tends to lead to slightly simpler less complex structures versus the need to sort of have all the aspects there to form the different things we want to do with language which is complex in in its own right so they're they're constant pressures a lot of times more complexity happens when languages come in contact so we actually acquire new things on top of the things we already had but I I think one thing to be careful of is when we're talking about complexity here we're talking about Morpho syntactic or phonological complexity which just means we have a lot of stuff put on words um there's different types of complexity you can gain so while English lost morphosyntactic complexity meaning all those endings fell off because who needs them right we gained uh sort of lexical or um you know uh what what would be good pragmatic complexity meaning for example our word order became more fixed so it used to be in Old English you could kind of be willy-nilly in what you stuck at where because there were little endings on all the words that told you oh yeah this adjective goes with that noun over there right they're friends so you know you don't have to put them together because they know they're friends but we lose those things over time and then we don't know they're friends anymore if we're sticking the adjective at the end of the sentence and the noun it modifies at the beginning so as you lose the endings that tell you you work you're together like the wedding rings are gone so we no longer they're no they're together then we have to do other things that make up for it so what English did instead is get a more fixed word order so now our adjectives go before our nouns right and our subjects go before our verbs and our objects go after that and so that allows anybody listening to an English sentence to know okay it's first so it has to be the subject oh it's last so it has to be the object we didn't have to do that back then so it's a different kind of complexity so I I do want to be careful and so we're not saying that everything's simplifying but what happens over time is generally that smaller languages that had very few speakers which was the origin of all language I mean back in the day if we go back you know 50 000 years when we think language first started it wasn't thousands and thousands and millions of people that spoke them it was very small groups and they could transmit that kind of complexity um and so what happens is when you move away from small groups and you get to millions of speakers the original purpose of language which was sort of to allow Communication in a small group has changed and then language changes with it so we're talking about evolutionary processes and that's really what has caused languages to change and when you look at indigenous languages for example um those you know austronesian languages or Native American languages that have very few speakers often in the hundreds those languages tend to be much more complex than languages like English Chinese or Russian and that's because their purpose is to communicate in a small group and therefore for they don't need to simplify over time because they're not having this transmission across large swaths of speakers and and when we transmit and when I'm saying things change over time I'm not saying all of a sudden someone wakes up and it's like okay who needs that Morpho syntax let's just get rid of those stupid endings I feel like saying eyes instead of I in today that's not what happens it's transmission to children so when you get larger groups of speakers then the rules become more opaque to the adults and they transp transmit those sort of inconsistencies to their children who then acquired this sort of simpler Morpho syntax oh so um mofo syntaxes die one generation at a time in that way all language change works that way that it been basically old people don't pick up new tricks we're kind of like old dogs we just don't do it now certain superficial things like a vocabulary word you know I can learn to twerk um but that doesn't mean I should that definitely doesn't mean I should but I it's a lot harder for me to learn something like um front vowel tense and laxness which we have in New York whether you hear like versus some words like glass wouldn't be La would be tense and some would be less so this is really kind of tricky and it's a very very very complex rule where you you tense the a vowel before so-called fricatives which are sounds like s or F so it'd be laugh but cat so you'd hear the slight difference that's something that's really hard to transmit to any speaker learning English or even an English speaker that moves to New York as a 15 year old is not going to get that very complex sort of types of pattern in there so I think what we need to think about is sort of when we're talking about language change what general people think about as language changes like a new word I've picked up but what linguists think about is language change is a new sound system I picked up new vowels I've picked up new new Morpho syntax so new endings on my words new pronouns which of course were all upset about picking up these days but that has happened through history we've had a bunch of different pronouns and in fact most of the pronouns we have today like she and they didn't even exist at the beginning of English so they have both come into English since the middle English period uh therefore we obviously have changed our pronouns a few times I've been around the block on that front as well what about um and uh because these seem like words that are not only very common in English depending on who you're speaking to but I speak to friends who are native speakers of a different language who make ums and Earth sounds in different it's a different sound even when they're trying to speak English to me so that seems like a human Universal it is actually I'm in our fascinating and you know you call them words but there's actually a huge debate in linguistic circles uh you know this is what we do late at night about whether they are in fact words or not uh they they sort of act like um utterances that things that sort of just come out that aren't necessarily governed by the same rules that words are but we also find them written in things where it's like um no and so that suggests a more word like employment so you know there's kind of a debate over the whether we'd call them words but regardless of what we call them filled pauses which is what those are are things that are Universal they've been found in every language study they do differ slightly so some languages will have a lot more than two some languages only have two but basically all languages have at least two and most proto-indo-european languages have something along the form of uh or um and usually they differ by the vowel why that sound what is it that's about the physiology of the mouth perhaps the way that the brain tries to make sounds come out what is it that's causing so many different languages to zero in on um or ER or something similar right well there are a lot of different answers to that depending on which aspect you're trying to answer but just for the sound itself actually it's a really interesting question because if we look at most languages most of them have sort of a vowel like filled pause like uh that we write with a uh but it's just a vowel you know like someone punches you in the gut you just go right and then we have one with a nasal sound and nasal sounds are things like ends or M's and so English has um but so for example in Japanese you have ano which also has a nasal sound so we find some syllables that's interesting yes well some languages like Chinese and Japanese actually use demonstrative pronouns as filled pauses so it can be a range of things and in in Spanish esta is a filled pause so there that also is something that functions as a word in other cases but is brought in as a filled pause so sometimes languages do that where they use another pre-existing word other languages mostly Germanic languages use uh and on because that seems to have inherited from a proto-language so we suspect that since English is very similar to German and other languages like Finnish and um yeah Danish and Swedish they all have these similar uh um types of sounds that they probably were inherited from proto-germanic which may even have been inherited from proto-indo-european so they're very old but the reason we probably do that sound is if you'd say the uh sound just say uh uh all right so your mouth is kind of just at rest right so if you didn't do much with your mouth and someone punch you in the gut that's the sound you would make so it's an easy kind of just simple sound and it's Central to the mouth so you're not moving to get to different targets like you are in speech sounds it's just what is emanated sort of as your brain is thinking um so that's probably why that sound in English was inherited the um is interesting because one of the reasons we think that sound might be used more than uh or have developed is partially because from a sound symbolism standpoint it's a more polite sound so if you go ah you know it's kind of ugly your mouth's hanging open a fly can just wander in there but if you say um it's it's much more pleasant isn't it it's the formal of uh exactly you gotta have synonyms for everything right but actually they're really interesting about uh and um is they do different work for us so both of them are basically speech planners so as we're thinking of more complex things to say of harder vocabulary less familiar terms or really long syntactic structures they tend to come out but uh signals to a listener that you're going to just take a really quick delay I'm I'm thinking about it's coming out in just a second but when you um it actually tends to precede longer delays which means that we're actually pretty intentional about which one we're using we don't have synonyms typically that don't develop different meanings so you know it's not there's really no point in doing the exact same thing so language just automatically tries to give different meanings to them so us seems to signal I need a short delay um seems to Signal it's going to take me a little longer to figure this out why would people choose to use this I understand that it's a sound but is this uh mental cognitive processing is this our buffering screen is this something else what's going on yeah you know how the internet has that little twirly thing that's basically what I mean uh are and have you noticed that you know when you're really in a hurry and you're trying to do something complex it tends to give you that little twirly signal more same thing with um and uh they tend to occur when we're doing more difficult cognitive processing so you know the idea that I'm an R sort of signals that we don't know what we're saying or we're uncertain or hesitant are not true in the sense that they signal that we don't know what we're talking about in fact what they signal is that we're doing a lot of work to say the right thing or to come up with the right word but it does signal that we're doing cognitive work and that our processing is is going so it's basically a sort of signal of brain churning but what we find is that it's not just brain turning if we're doing Simple tasks the more we uh and um the more likely it is that we're actually doing harder things like coming up with words we don't use very often coming up with more technical vocabulary or coming up with a more complex embedded sentence structure so morphosyntactically more complex so we tend to correlate our uh and um use with how difficult the thing we're doing is which is probably why we um and uh more when we're in context that require you know higher more pollutant sorts of speech like in the workplace or at school that kind of thing where we want to impress people so we're trying to come up with those big vocabulary words rather than you know twerk how does this how how is this interpreted by other people so from our side let's say that it is a byproduct of this cognitively demanding High Ram 64 gigabyte required processing speed that we're going through that should be the case if it's true that other people should always interpret ums and URS as signals of authenticity um somebody that is working incredibly hard to get their sentence across I really should pay more attention yet ums and does aren't exactly valorized as this fantastic introduction into somebody's speech pattern right so this is one of those really interesting places where things that offer us linguistic benefits which I'm really really do they're actually very beneficial to us as both speakers and listeners they don't match up with social benefits because they don't really offer social benefits on you know on the whole people don't really like uh and um and in fact they often think it signals someone doesn't know what they're talking about or they're hesitant or uncertain so if you go listen to someone give a presentation and their eye and numbing their way through it you're probably going to sort of shut down or stop listening or you'll say to your friends oh my God if that person says no another I'm just going to kill me and when people overdo it we really really notice them so they're not really considered great speech features but that's kind of funny because they're actually pretty great speech features if we look at them from a linguistic and cognitive standpoint part of the problem is in the context that we notice people's humming and eyeing which is usually presentations or speeches is those are contexts we expect people to have practice to have rehearsed to know what they're going to say and since we know that on Signal someone's sort of thinking through things I think part of the reason we dislike them in those contexts is because they signal to us that someone hasn't done their homework so if someone's giving a presentation then they're eyeing and numbing their way through it I'm thinking God did you not read this before you came up here and you know bored me one thing that we do notice is when people are more Dynamic speakers when they say something that's more interesting and they're more engaging people actually don't tend to note their O's and ums as much as people that give sort of a monotonous sort of boring delivery and maybe don't have content that's really interesting so a lot depends on what you're saying but also the practice issue I think in places where we expect someone to have rehearsed and know their content signals that we're working through it is not a great thing to have on the flip side though when we look at the research on what an um do for us they both help us as a speaker with speech planning they signal to the listener that my turn is not done and how long a delay to expect so those are both beneficial things but even more so for listeners if we look at studies that do either eye tracking or event related potential studies things that sort of are measures of cognitive processing on the listeners part they actually seem to help us have faster recognition of what someone's going to say be able to better predict what someone's going to say are better at new information processing and remember things better later so that's not bad for a little filled pause wow so we have a bunch of different Dynamics crashing up against each other here one is the buffering requirement or the advantage that using these filler words offer us another is that it is potentially useful at helping the people that we are speaking to both retain and understand what it is that we're saying but all of this gets filtered through these social expectation which disincentivizes both the speaker and The Listener from this happening so that's very it's very interesting the fact that this is good for you as a listener but might not be what you want to hear as a listener right but if you look at language over time anyway most of the things that we think of as bad speech are actually not bad at all it's just sort of social historical accident that we don't like them so a lot of things so think about like use you know the way that people say like all the time people hate that I I hear nothing but bad things about like if I go give a talk it can be on a completely different topic and then afterwards people will come up and say oh my God I love your talk tell people to stop saying like all the time if only I had that power right uh and I wouldn't want it because actually like is very beneficial so that's another example of we're doing something to help fill a void that we need in our language or to help us do a function or a purpose that we haven't found to be met by other things in our language and yet because they're not the right speakers that do them or because we take them to Signal something else we socially interpret them negatively so with an um I think it's because a lot of times we do associate them with hesitancy or uncertainty and it's true they do signal the fact that someone is working through things but is that a bad thing you know why do we think that's bad that someone is working through what they're going to tell us I don't want someone to just spout off you know incoherent stuff because they're not thinking it through if you step back to consider why we uh and um it's actually for pretty good reasons it's just that we don't like it because it signals to us someone isn't sure what the what they're saying and maybe they haven't practiced enough what about the difference between using um and uh versus just having silence you know that's an interesting question and certainly it's been studied so in some of the research that looked at the gay game that listeners Get By Hearing an uh and or an um before a word in in a series of sentences they would also do those same experiments where they had a silent pause instead of inserting an uh or on before the word to see if maybe it was simply that people have more time to think and that's why they do better at comprehension and what they found is a silent pause didn't have the same effect nor did something like a cough that also gave the same amount of time but was a different kind of distractor and in fact things like costs actually hindered comprehension so clearly we are treating uh and um differently than both other distractors and Silent pauses from a cognitive standpoint So Silent pauses don't give us the bum that uh seems to give us on the flip side silent pauses are sometimes better in a context like giving a presentation so I'm not telling people go stick uh and um into your presentation Because unless I've talked to that audience before you get there it probably will still not be taken as great speaking but especially at the beginning of a sentence because we do find that people either uh or um at the beginning of the sentence depending on how long they think it's going to take them to answer the question so it does seem to be taken as a marker of uncertainty particularly at the very beginning of the sentence so that might be one to stay away from but when we again do studies that look at how people take silent pauses versus fill pauses in some cases they can take silent pauses as greater signal signals of anxiety than when someone filled their paws with uh or um probably because they weren't sure when someone paused in that context whether they were just not sure what they were going to say or whether they forgot what they were going to say it doesn't give the listener the same clue that you know you're working on it instead it might lead to some misconception when you silently pause that either you haven't finished but you don't know what you're going to say or you suddenly abruptly did finish and it's someone else's turn so it can be a little more confusing whereas uh and um are signals to a listener specifically I'm working on it I'm going to keep talking so while silent pause is certainly in speeches are sometimes very effective especially when you want to add power to what you're saying so you give people a moment to think about it it's not always beneficial in casual conversation to do that I have a friend who does a lot of debates and he uses uh turn transition cues in a similar way to what you're talking about but he doesn't use Omar and he learned this from Christopher Hitchens so he's having a debate with somebody and one of the things that he's conscious of is that if he gets anywhere close to a pause Point within his sentence the other person is potentially going to jump in and then try and make a point so what he does is he'll start the beginning of a sentence like that take a sip of water give himself the breathing room to go through things and then keep going because you're no one's going to jump in after the are you kidding me that's so rude but right if he started it before the beginning of the sentence or halfway through at a point that seemed like a more natural break it allows somebody to come in so yeah I understand that ums and URS are a nice foam finger that you can wave in the air that says I I got a little bit more to talk about here just hang fire one second mate I know that I might not get the next word out immediately but just I require a bit more don't jump in here right it's sort of like hey dude I'm still talking kind of signal but that's exactly right in turn transition cues I'm impressed that's a big linguistic term and it basically to just is anytime we're indicating to someone that it's their turn and that can be something that we do spoken like uh saying you know stop talking and just have silence or we can select somebody so I can say Chris what do you think and that is definitely a term transition cue I can even just look at people but it's very because there's so many of them and they do different work in terms of how people interpret them it can be very confusing when someone just stops talking or doesn't use some sort of signal that they're either not done or they are done so on are a great solution for that and they do seem to work that way I know that you're coming at this from a linguistic perspective but I I would be stupid of me not to bring this up with you no one on the podcast that's ever listening to this is ever going to see the volume of nods that I put in while the guest is speaking so as I'm here I'm just going away like a little nodding dog sat on the back of a car that has to be kind of not quite like a turn transition cue but it's like an encouragement so what I'm doing while I'm here is yeah that's good keep on going keep on going that's good yeah enjoying it enjoying it and then if I need to take if I stop it's going oh maybe he's got something to say so this is a silent equivalent of a whatever the whatever the opposite of a turn transition keep my turn transition cue a lot of times we do it when we say things like aha yeah right which of course we try not to do on a podcast because you can talk over the other person first ever episode was filled with um [Music] it took a long time for me to deprogram it and the the person that I picked up the nodding thing from was Oprah oh that's a perfect person to take cues from and you know it's funny because actually it signals that you're more conscientious nicer listener turn transition I mean that back channels are actually a very lovely thing to do that's it's conversational support you're encouraging someone to keep going you're showing listenership it has all those sort of of aspects to it but when you do things like interview guests or I have learned not to back Channel too much because I do a lot of sociolinguistic interviewing and the last thing you can do is analyze someone's speech when you're talking over their speech with uh haha yeah great wow so you just sort of learned not to do it but in casual conversation it's weird if you don't and in fact there have been some really interesting studies about how people take uh people that don't back Channel very much or what how they misread their intentions um a famous study of course was done between men and women with the idea that men tend to not use back channeling as much as women which is why women think men are [ __ ] I mean I'm sure there's other reasons that there has been some in some there were there were some studies one uh I'm thinking about was done in the 80s by Pamela Fishman uh who did some research on conversational discourse and she found among couples that men tended to not back Channel um or did a delayed back channeling which is worse which is where you don't do it in time so you know there's very normal places to insert that uh-huh yeah uh-huh that shows excitement and like you're right there and you're keeping up with them you're listening and you know yes keep going and then there's the yeah uh-huh that really slow kind of three seconds too late that means I'm not I'm reading the newspaper I'm not even paying attention so what she found was men used more delayed back channels than women did I think you know it's changed I haven't read any recent studies of that um hopefully it has changed I think a lot of things have changed at that time and we don't find it quite as distributed by male and female anymore and it certainly can be personality type you know there are people that are really Avid engaged listeners more conscientious listeners and you can do psychological tests to test out those people and there was a really interesting study on discourse markers and those are things like you know well so um and we found that more conscientious people it wasn't my study but it was found that more conscientious people tend to use more of those as well so I think it also is by personality type and it's probably by socio-cultural background as well but yes there was there was a gender difference initially in back channeling okay what about the word like why does anybody use it oh I love like I mean what's not to love about like uh you know a lot of people hate that word uh they hate it in except for the verb you know where they like ice cream for example but the like that's used as a discourse marker are a quotative verb so those would be things such as I'm gonna have to watch my like use here uh like he goes to school like you know or and that sort of discourse marker like that's overdone but that's an example or a quotative like would be something where you use it instead of the verb to say so if you're talking about a party and you're talking about what John said you might say well John was like I don't think I'm going to go tomorrow and I was like I think you should right that's a quotative verb so those are very different likes and in fact there are at least three if not more different very legitimate uses of like that are not the traditional uses of like which would be like as a verb like as a noun or like as a preposition so in a simile construction for example the ones that are less accepted are like as a conjunction so if you say something like I feel like or it seems like or he pretends like those types of likes even though we all use those are actually frowned upon by the grammar events but the newest forms that we really dislike are those discourse marker likes that sort of dot to our linguistic Landscapes when we're saying things but if you think about where they show up and it's not random or chaotic despite what people might believe they actually tend to show up when a speaker is trying to do some sort of subjective approximation an estimation or apply the sort of imprecisis of meaning so that their listener gets that sense that this is their own evaluation of a situation so if I said like he was a lawyer or something that means I'm telling you this is my own opinion I don't really know for sure but I'm estimating or approximating what I think he was or she's like popular or something means it's not quite that that's not the exact fit that's not exactly how I describe it but that's the best I can do because there's not really words available to describe my meaning so those are actually very valuable because what they're communicating to you as a listener is I'm not making any strong claims about this is exactly how the world is I'm telling you this is my perception of how the world is in this case or it can intensify or emphasize something so if I said I ran like 20 miles today well you know I didn't run 20 miles I don't look that exhausted or that fit [Laughter] but what I'm saying is I ran a lot I'm emphasizing just for effect how much so in all those cases whether I'm using it as a quotative verb which then tells you I'm not verbatim quoting what someone says we're sort of estimating what they said or if I'm telling you an estimate of how much I ran for emphasis they're actually serving a really useful purpose it's simply that age-wise older speakers tend not to use them they use about instead or they use you know as a discourse marker instead or some sort of other discourse marker younger speakers people under 40 tend to use like a lot more and so that's where we really see a generational divide and how acceptable people find it when did it get introduced well for you know the popular belief you'd say the valley girls in the 1980s with I think was Moon Unit Zappa who sang that fabulous song valley girl you know where she liked and gagged me with a spoon all over the place but that was actually just picking up on an undercurrent of something that was already in Southern California's speech at the time and in fact and Chris you're gonna like this like is a British feature and we find it traces back centuries in British speech and if you look at old Criminal Court transcripts from the 1700s the old bailing proceedings which are great documents for linguists to look at how colloquial speech was back in the day when before we had cell phones and smartphones to record everything and we find that like actually occurred as a discourse marker as back as far back as the 1700s so it's been around a long time and I'm afraid we have to blame the Brits for this one okay I've got a I've got a little video that I wanted to show you and see if this can work can you see that I I think like the biggest like annoys me the whole dating world is like [ __ ] talking stages like that shit's so annoying like the whole like and just like the inconsistency in them like I literally like hate that like so much but I think that's like my biggest thing is just like what specifically just like the fact of just like you like I don't know how to word this like in like talking stages and it's just like you're like labeled that and it's like people like are considered like you can't like you're just like confused and like most of the time like the girl gets like gets like attached or something and they like see it like it's gonna lead to a relationship and it's always not and it's just like that's like my biggest thing is like I just hate the whole like how like talking stages are so like normalized like traditional dating does not exist in this generation so that was 27 likes in 48 seconds there all right and you know when you draw attention to it it really stands out right so the fact that we're talking about like it definitely stands out a couple of things I would say is that's obviously a young woman and that's tends to be who we we sort of dis in terms of like use more than young men although actually studies don't show that there's really a significant difference generally between young men and young women older men and women there is some difference but generally speaking it's a young feature and what we find with like is if we look at how it distributes over a lifespan younger speakers tend to like at a much higher degree than they will as the same speaker 10 years later so part of that is the stage of life she's in but notice when she was talking it's all estimation she's giving her own Impressions her own opinions her own sort of uh approximation of what she likes what she doesn't of her opinion and so for example um she was saying I hate when it's like I can't even remember what she was saying truthfully but uh you know she was talking about how how she feels when things happen and so this is a perfect example of why like was so prevalent in Her speech because almost every instance she's talking about something that is her own subjective sensibility now was it excessive certainly but a lot of times when we look at young speech we find a overuse of something and that's called age grading which atrophies as they get older because it's sort of cool and they're set to talk that way it's part of just sort of learning to use that feature and it's a novel feature coming in so it gets overused then as they go into the Working World and people frown upon them as the you know one million people probably wrote nasty comments under that you tend to lower your use especially in settings where you would be expected not to use them so for every parent out there who's freaking out about how their daughter or son uses like all the time in that context don't worry I promise they're still employable despite what you might think what is the social uh interpretation of the use of the word like well I think it depends on the age group among younger speakers so I think when that young woman was talking to other young women it's not noticed at all I have a teenage daughter and she uses like quite a bit and when she has her friends on the way to volleyball in the back of the car it is a like Fest I hear a lot I hear a lot there's a lot of low-key there's a lot of slay there's a lot of like but again that's in her own peer group and that's very normal and it's kind of I think part of the reason it's used a lot is it gives this sort of young hip kind of urban sort of sense and that's very much what young women and young men are trying to pull off when they're with their friends um so as she gets older I'm expecting she won't use it but the social benefit to her is it gives off that sort of um cool hip not too concerned with you know academics and scholasticness you know it's sort of imprecision in a way it's relaxed yeah you know kind of the chill Vibe uh the sort of Southern California chill Vibe and that's what I think young women are going for on young men it is also quite prevalent with young men but I do know that people all the time bring up just like that example people that use it excessively and I think the reason we notice and call those out is because they are excessive and unusual so I teach 20 somethings every year and they're delightful and I will tell you they're very concerned about their like use I at the very first day of class I said you know I'll say what do you notice about speech just tell me something I don't say tell me something bad about speech I just say tell me what you notice every single year every single class period like like like like I hate like and they'll even say I hate like how people use like all the time which is then of course the rest of the class we laugh every time that person uses like because once you've noticed it it's very very Salient but young people are aware of it and they are self-conscious about it my students are very self-conscious about it so I make them study it I make them analyze their speech I have them have a conversation and record where they use it and how they use it which gives them two tools it first lets them see that it's purposeful most of the time people don't use it as excessively as that example and you use it in cases for example where you're using it as a quotative where you're using as approximate an adverbial or you're using it as a sentential adverbial so if you can put a name to it it makes it seem a little more like it has a function but the other benefit is if they want to lower their use and they know how they use it you can take things to yourself okay wait I know I use it as a approximating adverbial I'm going to use about instead so instead of saying I ran like 10 miles you can just think to yourself I ran about 10 miles and so if you give someone the tools by understanding their speech then they have tools to help themselves whether they want to justify its use or change it to you so I think that's my approach to like right so rather than feeling as if like is a curse that gets thrown and Scattered across a sentence and it's essentially impossible for you to get rid of what you're doing here is saying it's there for a purpose here are three different distinct purposes if you want to reduce the usage of the word like one of the things that you need to do is look at where it gets brought in and then in advance perhaps at the start of that sentence just take an extra half beat and think I will use about I will use one of the other replace Alternatives exactly exactly as a sociolinguist I love like you know I think it's a fascinating thing to study and I love the fact that it's actually much more powerful and purposeful than people give it credit for but as a person and as a mother I do get the concern with women and men using like and especially women because we diss their speech so much that a man can use a young man can use the same amount of like and not be judged in the same way and it can have professional consequences at least we worry about that so I want to give people the tools to look at like either way and as long as you realize there's nothing bad about it there's nothing wrong with it but it may not be professionally and socially beneficial for you to do it and if that's the case understanding it will give you some tools as well what's happening with vocal fry as well speaking of dissing women's voices right now this is vocal fries are really interesting feature and for people that don't understand what vocal fry is it's that sort of crackly poppy sort of noise that sometimes comes into particularly women's voices as they get through the end of the Senate so that would be something like I don't know about that where you can hear that kind of fry that that crackliness come in we call it Creek in linguistics we actually don't refer to it as vocal fry we refer to it as creaky voice which I think is way more descriptive of what it sounds like and actually what happens with Creek or vocal fry is that you have the vocal folds and I'm going to give you for those of you that are looking you can see that these are sort of your vocal folds which are kind of these muscular flaps at the top of the larynx so usually we have them kind of pulled tight and long and so you can either open them a little to make a voiceless sound where the air flows through freely and that would be like a Tata sound or you can close them and um push air through and that makes them vibrate as you do your pitch too you push them through the vocal folds and the vibration of the vocal folds is what determines your average pitch so in normal cases just your everyday average pitch the thing we recognize when we talk to our our husbands or our wives or when someone we know calls us on the phone that's just normal phonation it's called that's just a certain vibration of the vocal folds but when we get into creaky voice what happens is we take those same vocal folds and we kind of bunch them up so they're thicker do you see how they can kind of get thicker and think of a rubber band if you have a rubber band and it's pulled really tight and you ping it it's going to well if it doesn't snap you and you go [ __ ] that really hurt if it stays together it's going to vibrate at a very regular rate but if you kind of let it fall and get soft and you kind of ping it it's just going to be like right it's not gonna really do much it's not going to be a regular vibration well when you Bunch your vocal folds up and you make them thicker and heavier they vibrate at a slower rate because they're heavier and they tend to vibrate irregularly now lower pitch in general is just a slower vibe vibration of vocal folds if you add on top of that in a regular vibration that's when you get creaky voice and so it happens at a low pitch what happens is we actually find that men do it too but because men operate at a lower pitch more generally that drop in Pitch to Make local fry is not as obvious so when we notice women doing it it's because they go from a higher pitch at the front end of their sentence to a much lower pitch to enact vocal fry what we find is women have been doing it in professional settings particularly so one of the biggest complaints you hear is in radio shows or broadcasting where people have women's voices so NPR is an area where people have complained in fact there was a show This American Life that was completely dedicated one of the episodes to vocal fry and how many haters wrote in because of the women on that show the broadcasters the journalists that actually had vocal frying their voices what we find is early studies in the 1990s and the early 2000s showed that women in broadcasting settings actually local fried more than men in those settings and more than women elsewhere which suggests that they're actually responding to that pressure for women in broadcasting to have lower pitch voices which is something that they've had a pressure on them since the 1950s I mean I think Barbara Walters spoke a lot about the fact that as a woman broadcasting she was expected to put a certain voice on there have been lots of complaints by women saying that their low voice their High voices were called shrill and unacceptable on the airwaves well what's the solution throw in a little low pitch vocal fry and why don't you do lower pitch just in general well because women get the double bind of being less attractive in terms of ratings that people give them when we hear them with a lower pitch voice so women with high-pitched voices are more attractive but not very professional or competent man with low pitch voice are both professional competent and attractive so women have this double bind in a workplace where they have to adopt a lower pitch voice to be taken seriously but then their judge is less attractive so what if you have a high voice with a little vocal fry that gives you a little bit of two birds with one stone right where you get this attractive rating with the higher pitch voice it's your more normal voice you have a little vocal fry on the end to kind of get that more professional Urban feel which is really how women hear that that feature and that kills the problem of being not attractive but professional or being not professional but attractive so it's kind of a really cool solution I think not well loved yeah what you're saying there is other women seem to interpret vocal fry more positively than men do is that right well I think Young is the Judgment of older speakers particularly ones that would listen to NPR you know not many of my 20 year old males listen to NPR in my class nor my females um not all of them I'm sure there are some but they tend to listen to a little different kind of more you know hip stuff so you know when you get to be older an older speaker you have these ideas and Norms in your head and you might be more judgmental but young women hear vocal fry as Urban as professional as sort of chill and relaxed as intimate so we find positive attributes with vocal fry among younger speakers and those don't seem to translate so much to older speakers and part of it's also just the fact that we diss women's voices in professional context so when women do it and we notice it it's a bad thing but if you look at longer term research on vocal fry in British speakers which is where it was first studied British Men actually use vocal fry at a rate of three to ten times more than British women so you know it it wasn't considered an epidemic or sort of a a vocal um pandemic until women in America started doing it at much higher rate but in Britain even today it's still men that fry more are you familiar with David putz do you know him evolutionary psychologist yes I do I know he has done a lot of research on voice and evolutionary series of voice correct yeah so he was on the show a little while ago and he was telling me I think his master's thesis perhaps or his his PhD was done on vocal pitch and he was looking at it uses This brilliant example from when he was at Uni doing his undergrad and apparently he was stood in a checkout queue and there was a couple of guys behind him and he heard how low both of their voices were and couldn't believe it he thought he's going to turn around and see these man mountains or a guy with a Siamese twin that's got a second neck like it's impossible to have such a low voice and he turned around and it was just two normal dudes but stood in between him and the normal dudes was a pretty hot girl I was gonna say I'm sure there was a hot woman somewhere in this in this right yeah right you know um interpretations of both Prestige and dominance like lower vocal pitch is associated with longer and bigger vocal folds which is associated with being a bigger animal over time that's the same reason that before animals tried to fight they're actually going to growl or make Roars at each other this is how big you don't want to fight me look at the amount of sound that I can make if you can hear the amount of sound you don't want to come near these hands bro so yeah I'm going to bang my chest while I make low guttural noises kind of precisely yeah I actually saw a gorilla do that a Silverback Gorilla did that five yards away from me in the windy impenetrable forest in Uganda and that was um not too much it was just a little reminder like that he wasn't happy that we were lurking around him um so one of the trying to tie together a bunch of the different trends that we're seeing at the moment it seems like we're leaning towards um less formal language it seems to be like going toward an informal style of languages is something that's happening at the moment how much has social media contributed to the changes that we've seen in language and given the fact that probably for the first time ever we have a higher proportion of people communicating with each other non-verbally probably ever ever in history ever have you considered how this and the introduction of social media and its propagation and mass use has changed the way that people relate to each other linguistically well you know that's a pretty new thing social media of course there have been studies on more uh sort of traditional forms of media so television for example and radio uh and sort of to look at how that affects speech and certainly I think the last few years the last several decades not only has social media opened up the world but transportation networks I mean you don't there really are no very few undiscovered parts and that you can't just go on vacation and hang out right so it's really changed massively our communication networks and how we we talk to each other so you know there have been some studies I know the ones on television use about how that spreads changes what we tend to find is um television is one of those things and social media is the same thing is it doesn't have natural social engagement in the way that everyday conversation does and so if you stick a baby in front of you know Tick Tock or if you stick a baby in front of Tom Brokaw you know or some sort of television show they're not going to learn language from that not because they're not hearing it but because they're not having engagement from it and what we find with language is it's social engagement in an authentic kind of space that really leads to both child language acquisition being optimal and adult transmission of changes so most of the things we see on social media or most of the things that we see in the world on you know on television are things that are already there at some low level so they're already in the community television social media doesn't invent anything but what it does is disseminates it so once it gets in a place where it's done by someone who has some sort of quality or some sort of emotional resonance with people and they do something cool with their language whether it's something they're aware of or not then if I see it on social media and I'm sort of young and influential and sort of influenced easily or even if I'm old and influenced easily or they have some quality that I want to embody it's a very natural thing to kind of move towards that speech style or move towards that word or move towards the way that they they physically move or the way they dress and of course language operates the same so I would say that the impact social media has is one on of dissemination not Innovation so no one is doing things on social media and starting a trend in terms of language change but what they're doing is they're disseminating changes that were in their communities so a good example and this is a really superficial one but a good example is the word Riz I don't know if you've heard that word so if you have maximum RIS it means you're kind of you're really sexy with the ladies um generally it was started by a young African-American male so it's usually used by men and it became the tick talk storm in fact I know it because my kids were both joking about who has maximum risk in their high school and that just means you know you can just like look at serious rizz is when you just look at someone you know with this sort of Zoolander gaze and they come running to you and in fact there were all sorts of tick tock memes where uh boys would go in front of the attack track team and be like giving them the eyeball and then of sort all these track women start running towards them because he's at the Finish Line not because he actually had Riz but that you know it's kind of became a joke well that went viral and not in the community where it started which was sort of the hip-hop African-American kind of genre but because that embodies something that a lot of young men and want to emulate a lot of young white men love to talk with a hip hop kind of vocabulary so they pick up words like that to take those qualities of sort of machismo and toughness which are actually stereotypes about the people that use it not really why they use those features but those are the stereotypes that young white men have about young African-American men that they're tough and they're physically they sort of have a lot of physicality and they're hot with the ladies and therefore we take those stereotypes we see those features that embody it and then we pick them up and that is the power of social media and it certainly has been very influential in that I think the question you asked about informal language use is not something that social media has inspired that's been a tendency in our language over time and if you think about the 18th and 19th century who wants that kind of formality I mean it was the height of formality where you know you had to wear like 50 layers and you had to use these very very extravagant politeness routines and it took you forever to just get a coffee at Starbucks I mean it was a real pain in the ass who needs that so what we've done is we've become more efficient I think in our communication and what has changed is not our language but our culture and our culture has become more informal and language follows culture not the other way around and just like our forms of trust have become less formal um you know so if you look at most workplaces people don't wear three-piece suits anymore I'm not happy workplaces at least but no one is saying okay my God the downfall of man has happened because we're not wearing really uncomfortable suits and ties and I think we have to look at language that way as well there's nothing wrong with being less formal in our language and really formality in language is a relative cultural belief if you look back to Old English the Anglo-Saxons were not the height of fashion or formality so you know more blood feuds and killing so I'm sure they weren't saying sir kind sir would you whine shall we do this I mean they didn't say that kind of stuff so they were very informal in their speech in fact you didn't ask someone to do something you told them to do it you shout do X was how you would say it not would you mind please kind sir do X so that kind of really fancy formality is really something that was an early modern and early early True Modern period so it's really not that the you know death of modern decorum it simply we've changed to be a more formal society and language is changing with us and still when we go to formal cases formal places and give speeches or go to workplaces we we know how to ramp it up and be dressed up in our speech so anybody who's worried about that I think you can rest easy tonight the black Twitter to white boy pipeline for language is one that is not lost on me massive words like bus in No Cap um it's just it's I find it's so funny and one of my friends is tapped in hard to Black Twitter and he will be able to tell me about trends that are going to happen six months before they do so there definitely is a trickle-down effect coming from black Twitter one thing that I read uh probably about six months or a year ago now a judge in New York had had to work out the interpretation of an emoji because a big chunk of a case rested on what this Emoji had meant in the form of the conversation I'm not surprised that probably did happen yes I haven't heard of that specific case but we actually find a lot of hip-hop lyrics being used in criminal trials to the detriment of of defendants usually because of the misinterpretation well a lot of times rappers for example will be put on trial and we're not talking about well big name rappers but just sort of everyday people that have rap as part of what they do and you know rap music is built on sort of the experience of being in a place where you know you're fearful for your life you're having to fight a lot of times it's sort of machismo as well it's rebuilding yourself up it's not truthful or necessarily reflective of anything that actually happened but lyrics can be very misogynistic and very violent and in cases where the hip-hop um sort of lyrics were done by the defendant they've been used in those trials to suggest that they were actually talking about what they had done uh this is not performance art this is an indication of what this person's true nature is like absolutely and not only that but actually if we look research on when defendants or Witnesses used English when giving their depositions or when being a witness at a trial or when speaking on their own behalf the outcomes for them tend to be much more negative than the outcomes for a speaker that would have used more mainstream English so there are a lot of problems with the way that we interpret African-American English even though we glorified in some contexts young white men love it but they what they don't do is recognize the negatives that are faced by people that use African-American English and can't just put it on the way that they do yeah part of the reason as well is with the the white guys on Tick Tock that are using the language trickled down from black Twitter is that it it feels a little bit like a lop right it's them playing with the language as opposed to being locked into it as opposed to it being almost native it's something else so one of the um one of my favorite stories that I came up with I'd learned from a few years ago was the um development of goodbye going from God be with you to God be with ye to just goodbye have you got a favorite or any other favorite word stories of where something developed from that we all use nowadays well one of my favorite is um hello right because actually hello was in competition when the phone was first created as a way to answer and it hello used to be used in British English for Sailors a lot of time I mean not sorry for Sailors but for people that wanted to call to someone who was not near them so if someone was walking across the street you wanted to get their attention it would sort of be a way to to yell out at them hello hello you know like look over here dude I'm here it wasn't a greeting in the way that we use it today and it certainly wasn't the way you answered the the telephone but um I think it was Alexander Bell and Thomas Edison were having a little war at the beginning of the phone creation about what should be the way that you get someone's attention on the other line because the old phone lines didn't have a ring or anything you'd have to say something like someone be walking through the house you'd be like hello hello pay attention so you'd say it because it was the same sort of attention-getting device as yelling to someone on the street but Alexander Bell who had created a similar technology as Edison but you know for a competing I think it was um model right for a competing group he thought Ahoy made more sense so people just say Ahoy when they answered the phone because this was a way you greed you know people on a ship so he would answer the phone Ahoy Ahoy that was his attention getting way but obviously what happened is uh Edison went out in the end and the reason is because in the first phone book when they were giving instructions about how to use the phone instead of Ahoy they suggested hello and so that was really the way that hello won out for our attention when we wanted to talk on the phone or just now when we greet each other so we think of hello as being this early long-term formal way to do it but it's actually instead of Ahoy which I think we should go back to Ahoy because I kind of like that what about high is high short for hello I think I don't know the history of high so much but I'm pretty sure it is uh short for hello um I'm not sure I remember I know I've read that but it's been a long time I'm trying to think about what Ahoy and hello have in common they're both similar sounds they both don't have any hard like plosives or any of those fricatives or there's not it's the sort of thing I imagine that you could shout at a pretty loud volume quite easily is that what's what's a Hawaiian hello what do they have in common well hello is is voiced right a lot of voiced sound which can be louder and vowels which are the loudest and high I think you know I'm I'll be curious I'll have to look up the history of high and figure out how it happens but a lot of times something might be optimal in its full form but we as speakers tend to like to shorten things and so it probably just came up in sort of a simple greeting of a shortening of hello a lot of times what we'd see is these things happen when people are very intimate and they know each other well they sort of do these little cute shortenings of things and so high probably evolved that way it's not that different than any other word that would have a vowel because all words have to have a vowel so high on its own doesn't stand out more than any other word because basically high is just a a vowel sound hello has two syllables so we give you two chances to get someone's attention and L's which starts the second syllable or tend to be louder than a voiceless consonant so that could be it but I don't know from a sound symbolism standpoint that they've studied hello there are a lot of interesting sound symbols some studies but I don't think hello has been among them your area of work is absolutely fascinating I think it's so interesting to look at the it's almost like linguistic archeology in a way it actually you know a lot of um anthropologists studied Linguistics so Linguistics in the special the field I do is kind of a cross between sociology and linguistic anthropology so we look back in time that's really cool some of the old socio-historical Linguistics where they go back and we try to recreate How Sound change happened by looking at written documents but in modern speech I get to go out and interview people and talk to them and figure out what they're doing differently so you know for example Chris I could record you stick you on a machine and then sort of do an analysis of your vowels and sort of show just by looking at your vowels I would be able to tell who's Chris versus you know who's a American male just from where your vowels are positioned you know and plus you're our lists right so you delete your r's post vocalically have you not noticed that you've probably noticed who he says I'm like the the instead of there or here you're right you don't have your r's you have that'll be the northeast of the UK I've managed to reintroduce I had a brutally bad glottal stop uh because yeah you don't have really gladdle stops that stand out not too bad but that's been I've worked with the vocal coach miles for two years now um to try and just give myself a little bit more of a middle England I already did quite a lot I didn't have a massive Northeast of the UK but when I was growing up I would miss the teas out of the word butter and I'd get slapped on the back of my wrist by my mum who would say there's two T's in butter Christopher and you're not pronouncing either of them um which is just half the course Northeast of the UK that's the way that you would speak right well now if you're American you don't have any teas in that butter well it's actually called a flap it's actually called a flap but that's a that's for a different episode so and you know that's an interesting right because you have the glottal stop which is a perfect example of a feature that has a really strong social stigma attached and what I study is why do we get these really strong social feelings about something that's a sound you know glottal stop is a sound and when if you say the word up every English speaker if they say the word up actually has a glottal stop at the beginning of that word so think about up you can feel that your glottis catches right it's because you're making a glottal stop so no one you know criticize criticizes you when you're saying uh but yet if you say but or what oh my God like you know linguistic argument our argument art no argument what's that Eve I can't even say that word it's it's linguistic hell so that's a perfect feature there that exemplifies why I study what I study okay but if you gave a great example of your R so you said yes instead of years yes that's two another one is yeah you I get the piss taken out if we buy a lot of friends for years and years but it's years right that's a perfect and you know that's a fascinating one for me from historical perspective because that is really sort of high-class British speech right to drop your r's so if you have your r's not so not so fabulous in Britain Now in America if you drop your RS you're you know kind of pretentious and uppity or you're a New Yorker right you're either a New Englander and you're like a brahmana you know kind of upper class or you're a New Yorker and you just sound cool but generally Americans don't do it but fascinating fact about those ours is British speakers until the 19th century did it because it was considered bad English to not have your r's but in the 19th century flipped around because it started to be the way that speakers women particularly in court in the you know Royal Court spoke and then it became cool to drop your r's but prior to that you actually will find write-ups from the 1700s that criticized that nasty vulgar are dropping that some British speakers in London I'm part of the new era of our dropping okay you're the cool Suave our dropper thank you I knew I knew that you would understand all of the people in America that take the piss out of me for the way that I say yours no longer need to because I have the seal of approval from someone who's professionally trained yeah well I mean Americans love British accents so I don't think you have to I was talking to a very very success who has a regional dialect he doesn't like and so on his voicemail he had a British speaker record it for him because you know British speech is so fancy well look if if my accent is a competitive advantage over here then I'll take it as a win given the fact that I had to survive uh Independence Day last year which was very difficult for me personally obviously as I was watching watching your country dance on the ashes of Mines lost ambition uh but look why should people go if they want to check out more of the work that you do because this is fascinating well first of all it's been really fun to talk to you about it and uh yes I think if you're looking for a second career sociolinguistics would be for you but if people want to learn more about me they can obviously pick up my book which is like literally dude but you can also go to my website which is just valeriefregland.com and you can read some of my other work and sort of learn about the types of research I do you can even participate in a research study if you click on that link there's all sorts of fun to be had there Valerie I appreciate you thank you sure thanks for having me what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press 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