Why don’t we all sound the same? Are some accents easier to learn? And are there reasons for the differences in how people sound and sign, or is it just random?
We use sound and sign to encode information about our age, place, gender, sexuality, and so much more. Sometimes we’re not even aware of how we do it. But we’re fixing that on this episode with Jennifer Nycz and Lauren Hall-Lew, editors of Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory.
Timestamps
00:00 Start: Introducing Jennifer Nycz and Lauren-Hall Lew
01:57 What is sociophonetics?
03:01 What’s in our own sociophonetic background?
10:10 Why is it always vowels, vowels, vowels?
13:03 Why don’t we all just sound the same?
15:09 You can hallucinate accents by seeing a photo
16:00 Sound encodes gender and sexuality
20:57 Chronolects, Boomerlects, and GenX-lects
22:04 Tweens to teens: What to expect sociophonetically?
27:33 Are there reasons for sound variation and change?
34:16 Why does a community change faster than an individual?
38:37 Does media have an influence on accent?
42:17 How much are we consciously aware of?
44:52 Are some accents easier?
48:39 What are the sociophonetic hot spots?
50:54 Are American women more nasal?
52:09 Persistent misconceptions
54:49 Fight linguistic discrimination, or teach marginalised people to “pass”?
01:03:03 The sociophonetics of signed languages
Listen to this episode
Video
@becauselangpod We use sounds to send signals about our identity. But what percent are we aware of? Lauren Hall-Lew @lhlew and Jennifer Nycz join us for this episode. https://becauselanguage.com/144-sociophonetics-deep-dive/
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Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory
https://academic.oup.com/book/61815
Alan C.L. Yu. 2023. The Actuation Problem. Annual Review of Linguistics 9:215–231. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031120-101336
It’s apparently possible to hallucinate people’s accents
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/its-apparently-possible-to-hallucinate-peoples-accents/zmge7dux2
[PDF] Donald Rubin: Prejudice in Accent Perception: Reverse Linguistic Stereotyping
https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/psllt/article/15173/galley/13751/view/
Rubin, D. (2012). The power of prejudice in accent perception: Reverse linguistic stereotyping and its impact on listener judgments and decisions. In. J. Levis & K. LeVelle (Eds.). Proceedings of the 3rd Pronunciation in Second Language Learning and Teaching Conference, Sept. 2011. (pp. 11–17). Ames, IA: Iowa State University.
Identifying sounds in spectrograms
https://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~krussll/phonetics/acoustic/spectrogram-sounds.html
The special nature of Australian phonologies: Why auditory constraints on human language sound systems are not universal
https://pubs.aip.org/asa/poma/article/35/1/060004/997317/The-special-nature-of-Australian-phonologies-Why
Ear and hearing health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people 2024
https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/indigenous-australians/ear-hearing-health-indigenous-2024/contents/ear-hearing-health-in-australia/ear-and-hearing-conditions
Australian Aboriginal languages: Consonant salient phonologies and the ‘place-of-articulation imperative; Andy Butcher, Flinders University
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251509897_Australian_Aboriginal_languages_Consonant_salient_phonologies_and_the_’place-of-articulation_imperative
[$$] Peaks and arrowheads of vernacular reorganization
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/language-variation-and-change/article/abs/peaks-and-arrowheads-of-vernacular-reorganization/CFDCA4DFCE6B177040CC1A86C96C6F76
Dick Van Dyke: ‘Someone should have told me to work on my Cockney accent’
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/17/dick-van-dyke-someone-should-have-told-me-to-work-on-my-cockney-accent
[$$] Jang, J., Lee, J., Lee, J., Kim, S., & Cho, T. (2025). Unveiling Denasalization as an Ongoing Sound Change: The Role of Prosody and Gender in Seoul Korean. Language and Speech, 68(4), December 2025.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830925139043
[$$] Sociophonetics and signed languages
By Amelia A. Becker, Julie A. Hochgesang, Meredith Tamminga, Jami N. Fisher
The Routledge Handbook of Sociophonetics
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003034636-25/sociophonetics-signed-languages-amelia-becker-julie-hochgesang-meredith-tamminga-jami-fisher
Here’s a good demo of the Scottish NORCE-FORCE contrast
Transcript
Coming soon.