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 itto 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.
