Professor Amalia Arvaniti from the Department of English Language & Linguistics will be a guest on today’s edition of Inside Science on Radio 4, a BBC series exploring the science and research that is changing our world. The programme is presented by Dr Adam Rutherford, one of editors of the scientific journal Nature.
Amalia will be discussing the phenomenon of Southern Californian ‘uptalk’, which is the use of rising pitch at the end of statements. This way of speaking seems to be spreading to young speakers of all socioeconomic classes and linguistic backgrounds (which are very varied in California) but does show gender-related differentiation. Young women use uptalk more frequently than young men and for different purposes: young women use uptalk mostly to ‘hold the floor’ (ie. indicate to their interlocutor that they have not finished talking), while young men use it more for simple statements with no apparent communicative intent attached to the uptalk feature. In addition, both female and male Southern Californian speakers show a systematic difference between uptalk used for statements and pitch rise used in questions: in statements the rise is smaller and starts later than in questions. In other words, the uptalkers do not make statements that sound like questions, they keep the two distinct but the differences can be too subtle for non-native speakers to reliably distinguish.
The programme will be broadcast at 4.30pm, and repeated at 9pm, and will be available on the BBC’s iPlayer here: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03jfc49