At year’s end, this blog discussed an extremely bothersome if not perhaps stomach-turning conversational technique known as uptalk or upspeak which has spread like an epidemic. It’s like chalk on a blackboard (assuming blackboards still exist). You’ve heard it all over television and radio even from broadcast professionals and the speech pattern has unfortunately seeped into day-to-day life. This is the tendency for a speaker to end a simple declarative clause or sentence as if it is a question.
In other words, uptalk is a habit of finishing statement with an interrogative tone, if not an invisible question mark. Somehow this has become cool way for both men and women to communicate. Uptalk sadly has also proliferated like a virus to other countries.
It is more formally described as high rising terminal.
A statement is a statement; a question is a question. There is no overlap needed and no ambiguity required. Uptalk also makes the speaker appear uncertain, indecisive, or equivocating about even about the most trivial of matters. It also seems to make the speaker sound like he or she is desperate for affirmation from the listener.
With a tweet on Friday, author and SJW foe Christina Sommers prompted a social media discussion of uptalk (plus another technique called vocal fry).
Uptalk even made it to Family Guy several years ago:
In a blog post called “The Most Annoying Speech Patterns You Hear All the Time Now,” voice-over pro Debbie Grattan explains that uptalk, vocal fry, and other speech patterns do more than just annoy listeners. They make the person doing the talking “sound less intelligent” and “appear less professional” among other tings.
Added Grattan: “Despite all the detriments of allowing those patterns to unconsciously creep into your own conversational lexicon, people are falling prey at rapid rates. Some are even doing it on purpose.”
[Featured image credit: StockSnap/Pixabay]
