How YouTubers' voices evolve, with Andrew Cheng
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Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. And just a heads up that today's show was originally released a couple of months ago as a bonus segment for people who support the show, the Grammarpalusians. If you like what we do every week and want to support the show, you get ad-free podcasts and bonus episodes like this one right away. You can become a Grammarpalusian just by visiting the Apple podcast page, the landing page for the show, or visit quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus to learn more about other ways to do it.

And now, on to the episode.

Greetings, Grammarpalusians. I am here with Andrew Chung, a professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. We just finished our conversation about language in movies, which was just fascinating. If you haven't heard the main show yet, head over there and listen to that first. It was great. But Andrew has done also a study. He's looked at some YouTubers and how their dialects have changed over time and when they moved. And so we're going to talk about that today.

Andrew Jung. Welcome to the Grammarpalusia segment of the Grammar Girl podcast.

Thank you. It's so exciting and exclusive. Yes, very exclusive. There's a velvet rope at the digital velvet rope somehow. So this this paper that you did is about second dialect acquisition, which sounds very academic. So but it's actually really interesting. So can you can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah, it just means that you maybe speak one dialect of a language and then at some point in your life,

You acquire a second one, a different one. Dialects here refers to anything you might consider as a very main or well-known dialect of a language. There's Australian English,

And there's British English and there's American English and Singaporean English. Right. So if you grew up speaking one of those dialects and then you move to another country where they speak another dialect, you could either keep your own dialect or you could sort of shift the way you pronounce things and start speaking in that second dialect as an adult. So it's really very interesting dialogue.

To what extent people shift their dialects, if they do it consciously or unconsciously, and whether we can really track the changes in pronunciation over time. This is sort of a backing up higher level question, but how would you define the difference between a dialect and a language? That's the million dollar question for linguists.

As a sociolinguist, there's actually a third term that I like to use, and that's just language variety. And that is a very neutral term that just refers to anything that's different. You can have variety A, variety B, variety C. Whether it's a dialect or language is actually a political question. There's a saying that everyone uses in linguistics, which is that a language is just a dialect that has an army and a navy. Right.

What that means is that the difference between what you call a language and a dialect is dependent on who's labeling it and how much political power that they have.

So we've got, you know, various languages that will say I'm a language because, you know, I'm associated with this country. But then we have the linguists who look at those languages spoken in those two countries and notice that they're actually really, really similar to one another, mutually intelligible. If someone speaking language X can completely understand almost everything that someone speaking language Y is saying,

We could consider them dialects actually of the same language, but don't tell that to the politicians. Don't say that to the people who are a little bit more nationalist and have that pride. My country, my language. I love that you brought up that quote because it's the epigraph in my book. I can't quite reach it, but Grammar Daily is one of my books and it's the opening quotation. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's a classic. It's really good.

So YouTubers, you know, I imagine this is a relatively new academic endeavor to study YouTubers. So can you tell me sort of how you came upon the idea of looking at these people and how they and the way they talk and why? Why YouTube?

Well, you know, I am going to age myself here or date myself. I grew up in an era when, you know, YouTubers were like a really massively influential source of entertainment, like the early days of YouTube vlogging, where you had early celebrities like Kev Jumbo or Niga Higa. And especially, I guess, speaking from the Asian American perspective, this was a time in the mid 2000s,

when you wouldn't see a lot of Asian Americans in mainstream media. But with this new advent of this new, this new social media website, YouTube, like suddenly anyone could become viral and anyone could become really, really popular just by posting whatever they wanted for the whole world to see. And so I got very interested in that. Then I went to college and I went to grad school and like my life got in the way. Suddenly, like 10, 15 years later, I'm revisiting some of these videos and wondering like, huh,

I wonder how these people have changed. I sort of grew up with some of these YouTube vloggers. Do they still do the same thing? Are they still making the same content? The answer is no, not at all. But some of them are still making videos all the time and still talking, and I just was very curious about their voices.

I then took a seminar in graduate school that was about language change across the lifetime. And this is really interesting because it connects to all sorts of ongoing linguistic questions, like theoretical questions such as, is there a critical period after which it's impossible to learn a second language? Does someone's accent fossilize in place at a certain age and then you can't change it for the rest of your life? Or once people are in their older adulthood, like 70s, 80s, 90 years old,

you know, what kind of changes happen there. So thinking about these questions and then combining it with my just personal interest in YouTube vloggers, I was like, Hey, you know, it's really hard to do a longitudinal study of real people because you need to ask one person to come back to your laboratory and record them every year for 10 years. That's hard to do, but YouTubers,

have been recording themselves, you know, daily, weekly, whatever, for a really, really long time sometimes. And if we just analyze their voices from their videos going back however many years, you instantly have a longitudinal data set that can be used to analyze any changes in their voice over time. Oh, that's fascinating. You could do the same thing with podcasters, actually. I absolutely could. How long have you been doing Grammar Girl? 18 years. 18 years. All right. So you can send me a video from 2011.

2006. Right. And I can compare it to your voice now and we'll see what's changed. Not much, I don't think. I haven't really moved. So it seemed like in your study, one of the key elements was that the people had physically moved. Yeah. So one of the YouTubers that I followed moved from Hawaii to Nevada. So Hawaii has a very particular dialect of English that we call Hawaiian English or Hawaii English.

Um, it sounds quite different from other varieties of English. And then this person moved to Nevada, which has more of like a general West coast, Western type of English. Then the other YouTuber, uh, is originally from upstate New York, grew up in Boston, has a very, very particular, maybe familiar accent to those who've, I don't know, watched, uh, I don't know what movies I'm trying to think of, like Goodwill hunting or whatever, like an athlete, Boston, Boston type, uh, speech. Um,

So think of that Bastin, Pakhtaka, and Havinyad type dialect. You get a little bit of that, but then she moved to Los Angeles, as many viral YouTube stars do. So I'm thinking about two vloggers whose accents started on opposite sides of the United States, and then they moved to the West Coast area.

To what extent did the hallmarks of their accents or their dialects from their respective places change to fit the mold of what's more common in California or the West Coast? And what did you find? Well, I found a pretty interesting... Okay, so first of all, the answer was not 100%. It's not the case that anyone would just completely wholesale leave their old dialect behind and then start speaking like a valley girl Californian. But...

Every person's accent is what defines an accent is composed of lots of lots of different parts. So you can talk about the vowels, you can talk about the consonants, you can talk about pitch. And so if I just broke down each dialect into its component parts, you could see that there were some shifts, like a few vowels here and there that would move and others that would not.

The example from the Bostonian was her vowel, like the one in Boston, right? When we think of typical Boston, stereotypical accent, say Boston, have it yet that sound.

Which in California, I'm a Californian, so mine would be more like ah, Boston. And we do see that movement from ah to ah over time for that speaker. Why is it the vowels? Linguists often talk about the vowels. Why not the consonants?

Well, I think it's because vowels are a little bit easier to analyze for me. And vowels tend to be sort of like the locus of where dialectal variation occurs in English. Like when you talk about all the different, if you just list out all the phonetic sound differences between every dialect of English, mostly it has to do with their vowels. That's not to say that there aren't continental differences. Yeah.

But those are just... I'm wondering why that is. Is it because of the way we make vowels in our body? That could be it. Vowels are really slippery creatures. The difference between an E and an IH and an OO and an UH...

It just has to do with where your tongue is. And there's not, it's not like a, it's kind of like the difference between like when you play piano keys and you've got, you know, you press this key and it makes that sound versus playing on a violin where you can sort of slide your finger up and down and go in between notes all the time. So vowels can be slippery like those on a violin. It's really easy for them to change. It's really easy for them to like shift slightly subtly in any direction, but changes in consonants have to be a little bit more concrete. Fascinating.

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And so I'm not familiar with the Hawaiian accent. What was changing there from Hawaii to the West Coast? One hallmark of the Hawaiian accent is a lot of what we call monophthongized vowels. And so that's a vowel that maybe sounds more, a vowel that undergoes a little bit of change, like saying ooh, and you've got that little off glide at the end, ooh.

And in Hawaiian English, that becomes monothungaizer, becomes more stable. So just ooh, ooh. So actually maybe a better example would be oh. In the word boat, we're going to go on a boat. My Californian English and a very standard American English pronunciation is oh. And you've got a little off glide. You can look at my lips, oh, boat. But for Hawaii English, we're more likely to hear boat, boat. Especially, yeah, especially for those who are very local and grew up in Hawaii.

So we've got that vowel monoplingization that happens. We also have another example that I write about in the paper is the vowel "a". So for my particular dialect, Californian English, if I say the word "can", C-A-N, can, the presence of the "n" sound will change the nature or the quality of the "a" before it, of the vowel. So it becomes more like "can", "can".

Versus can can and can a very subtle difference. Hopefully you can hear it. Yeah, I can For Hawaii English, we don't really have that. So it's more like can all the way actually sometimes more like Ken so what I found for our Hawaii YouTube vlogger was after moving to Nevada and just sort of being surrounded by more standard or West Coast American English rather than Hawaii English and

there were some aspects of his vowels that became less monophthong guys, less Hawaiian over time, and more like the standard American English. And I'm always using scare quotes when I talk about standards because just like who is to determine what is a language versus a dialect, who gets to say what is standard and what is not standard? It's just whoever has power, right? So for both of these YouTube vloggers, I'm noticing that it was just like little parts of their vowel systems really subtly changed.

Maybe it's to the extent that a person who's really paying attention could notice. In other areas, like some of these other changes were so subtle that I would be surprised if anyone really noticed the change. And it really speaks to this idea that a lot of linguistic change and linguistic convergence, like when we change the way we speak, sometimes it's so subtle that we don't even notice anything.

Until years down the road and then you listen to your past self and think whoa That's literally what happened with one of these vloggers the one from Boston where she one of her videos in the late 2010s was like I Listen to my early YouTube vloggers and cringe at my accent and she like makes commentary on how like wow I sounded so Boston back then and now she doesn't so she is aware of that change But there's many times like during while the change is happening. It's very very hard to notice and

And why do you, I mean, I know that we tend to talk like our friends and the people that we're around. Is it as simple as that? Why people change the way they speak or is there more to it than that when someone moves like that? A sociolinguist would probably say that a lot of it has to do with

like prestige and how positively you evaluate people who speak a certain way. This could be people that you talk to all the time or it could be like what you hear on the radio. You don't have to necessarily be in conversation with somebody to pick up verbal tics in the way that they speak. And you also...

don't have to necessarily like somebody to also maybe subtly pick up on ways that they speak too. A lot of what we call convergence, linguistic convergence happens subconsciously, but it can be affected by your evaluation of that particular accent or dialect that you hear.

And so, you know, I can see the pros of studying people who have been making YouTube videos for years and years because you've got all that data. I imagine, though, that there must be some disadvantages. Yeah. As an experimental linguist, one thing I like to have is a lot of

Control, not control in like a, you know, you must do what I say, but control as in like ideal situation for recording vowels or consonants is just to have someone say the same word in the same tone, in the same place, like the same recording with the same equipment, you know, once a year for 10 years. If we could really control, tightly control all the other contexts of sound, that would be the best way to really verify if the sound, if the change that we're observing has to do with change in the voice rather than change in other contexts.

surrounding contexts. But you can't do that when you're using found data. The same thing happens for anyone, any social scientist who wants to look at a Twitter corpus or anyone who's just studying like, I don't know, comments on a Reddit thread of some kind. You can't really control who is giving you the information, why they're giving you the information or who people really are. So there's a lot of unknowns in the data that's

That could be one disadvantage. And then there's the audience effect, which it has to do with people speaking differently depending on who they're talking to. Right. So the way that I'm speaking now to you or to this imagined future audience podcast is definitely different from the way I talk to my students when I give a lecture. And that is definitely different from the way I talk to my partner, to my friends. And that's definitely different from the way I talk to my family.

Even disregarding different languages that I would use with each of these people, even if I was using English, the tone, the intonation, the stress patterns, my pitch, all that's going to be quite different. And so when we're thinking about the audience of the people that I studied for this project, perhaps the way that they were speaking early on in their careers is quite different before they became famous versus after they became famous and their audience grew by a thousand times.

Or maybe in the different genres of videos that they made, some videos being straight up monologue, me talking to my camera versus others being a conversation or others being some kind of recorded skit. That was very, very popular in the 2000s and 2010s. All those things need to be taken into consideration and can't be really controlled for as well when you're doing this kind of found data analysis.

Yeah. Yeah. I imagine people hear a big difference in my voice when, you know, cause I do two shows a week and one is scripted and one is an interview conversation like this. And I know I speak very differently in those two situations. Yeah. I would love to take a look at the phonetics of that. It's all public. So yeah. I mean, would you do a study on YouTubers again like that? I mean, do the pros outweigh the cons?

Hmm. I think that I would. I would love to continue on in this vein of linguistic studies of popular media. And I think it's mostly like...

Obviously, from my standpoint as an academic, the theoretical question of what drives second dialect acquisition is quite interesting. But I'm also always on the hunt for ways to get more students and more just lay people engaged in linguistics. And if I can do that by analyzing the voices of celebrities or YouTubers or movies, anything that gets people drawn into like, wow, what is linguistics? I consider that a win, which is why I do what I do. Wow.

Wonderful. That is so interesting. Well, we're going to wrap up. We always ask for book recommendations. So it's time for the book recommendation segment. Pretend we are your best friends. And what books would you tell us to read? Oh my gosh, Mignon, have you read Babel? Yes. Oh my gosh, I have. By R.F. Kuang. It is so good. Now people were recommending that book to me before it was even published. And I put off reading it for two years for who knows what reason.

But the minute I picked it up and opened it, I was like, oh, okay. This book, which is about linguists, it's an epic fantasy about linguists in an alternate universe where linguistics is magic. Magical linguists. I just thought this book was written for me and it totally was. It's so good. Highly recommend anyone who likes fantasy or is interested in languages or just wants to fall into this rabbit hole of a really well-constructed fantasy world. Yeah.

Read Babel. From a more academic perspective, if you've got those in the audience,

A lot of the trajectory of my academic career was changed after I read a history book called The Making of Asian America. It's by Erica Lee, published in 2015. It's very, it's like a textbook, I guess, but it's written extremely in a very engaging way, but it just covers like every, every community in the United States that could be defined as Asian American. Who are they? When did they get here? Where did they come from? And what are some really important pieces of their history and how they contributed to American history that,

you know, maybe you've never heard of or, you know, maybe they don't teach in schools very often. So that was one that after I read that, I just thought like,

oh, you know, there's so much more to like my identity as an Asian American and like the fabric of American culture than I ever thought or I ever imagined. Amazing. That sounds like one of the books. It sounds like a book you might have been assigned for school, but then you would keep forever because it was so interesting and useful. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, I sadly never took an Asian American studies course, so I wasn't assigned it. But I'm so glad that my friend recommended it to me. So I'm recommending it to you and your audience. Wonderful. Thank you.

And is there a third? The last one? Yeah, the last one is Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler. So this is a sci-fi classic. And I'm just recommending it now because it seems so weirdly prescient. It is about a dystopia, and I'm not going to comment too much on the current state of the world. But I do think that if you read the Parable of the Sower, you might wonder like...

well, is this really written 22 years ago? No, 32 years ago or, well, or was it written last year? Yeah. I've been seeing a lot of people recommend that book. I actually checked it out from the library and then it expired before I got to reading it. So I recommend it also has, um, uh,

a sequel called the parable of the talents. Um, and both of them are, they're very short, um, very, very readable and a fascinating look into the genius mind of a fantastic sci-fi author, Octavia Butler. Those are wonderful. Thank you so much, Andrew Chung from the university of Hawaii in Honolulu. Thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you? I had so much fun. Thank you. Uh, you can find me on blue sky linguist, Andrew also on, um, Twitter slash X.

And I do have an academic website. If you just want to Google my name and University of Hawaii and linguistics, you'll probably find me. And that's Andrew Chung, C-H-E-N-G. C-H-E-N-G. Yeah. Awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today. You're very welcome. Thank you so much for having me.

I hope you enjoyed that. And if you want to hear Andrew talk about the language in movies like Parasite and Enora, you can find that episode on your feed. It's episode 1060. Finally, thank you to all the Grammarpalusians. You make these bonus shows possible. And if you want to support the show and become a Grammarpalusian, you can sign up right in Apple Podcasts on the Grammar Girl show page or to learn more about other ways, including getting fun text

from me with little tidbits, visit quickanddirtytips.com slash bonus. That's all. Thanks for listening.