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TEEN TALK: Eckert tracked a
vowel shift.
Linda Cicero |
what adolescent girls first
vocalize, their elders often imitate. So it’s
important to listen to linguistics professor Penelope
Eckert, who has been documenting a phenomenon called
the Northern California Vowel Shift for 10 years. Her
preteen and teenage subjects sometimes exaggerate and
alter their vowels; for example, “brook”
becomes “bruuck” and “food”
becomes “fewd.”
“The most innovative speakers are girls, which
suggests that girls are using language to construct
social differences,” Eckert notes. “There’s
this whole exclusionary thing, and they spend a lot
of time negotiating clothing style—and linguistic
style. Girls who are really into it develop a style
that involves a very flamboyant use of vowels.”
Take sixth-grader Christie, who didn’t want her
new friend, Chris Ann, hanging out with some of the
other girls on the playground. As Chris Ann explained
it to the ever-eavesdropping Eckert: “Christie’s
all, ‘What are you dewing, Chris Ann?’”
Academic study of social practice and vowels dates
from the 1960s, and much of the work on dialects in
the United States has been done on the East Coast and
in the Midwest. Eckert, a native of New Jersey, says
some intriguing new dialects are now emerging in Arizona,
as people move to that state from the South and from
California. There, again, adolescent girls are the bellwether.
The more they want to make a point, the more the girls
exaggerate their vowels. When one California preteen
talked with Eckert about everyday events, for example,
“her ‘ah’s were nice and separate,”
she says. “But when she was doing drama—boom!
Her vowels just spread out like crazy.”
Mostly, the vowel shift yields a NorCal version of
Valley Girl-speak: “friend” becomes “frand,”
“stand” becomes “stee-and” and
“mom” becomes—you guessed it—“mawm.”
But there is potential for semantic confusion. One of
Eckert’s subjects declared, “I have a hickey.”
“Who gave it to you?” her friend asked.
“José gave it to me.”
“Was he licking?”
“No,” the girl said emphatically. “He
had his eyes closed.”
Says Eckert: “I get some really funky stuff.”
Make that fenky stuff.
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