Partway down your throat are two flaps of muscle. When you breathe normally, you pull the flaps away to the sides, and air comes out silently. But if you stretch the flaps across the opening of your throat while pushing air up through, you can make them vibrate in the breeze and produce all sorts of sounds -- sort of like the mucousy reed of a giant meat clarinet. (You’re welcome.)
In this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about the vocal folds! They’re often called vocal cords, but as they’re attached along the long side rather than just the two ends like a guitar string, we’re using the more precise “folds” (just be thankful they’re not called “vocal flaps”!) We talk about the many cool types of vibrations you can make with your vocal folds: pushing out an extra puff of air (aspiration), turning off your vocal folds while still talking (whisper), making them high and tight (falsetto), low and airy (breathy voice), and low and crackly (creaky voice, aka vocal fry). We also talk about the ways that various languages draw on different configurations of these vibrations to distinguish between words (such as “sip” and “zip”; Thai, Tai, and Dai; and more) or for stylistic effect (such as newscaster voice).
Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.
Announcements:
We’ve teamed up with linguist/artist Lucy Maddox to create a fun, minimalist version of the classic International Phonetic Alphabet chart, which you can see here (plus more info about how we put together the design). It looks really cool, and it’s also a practical reference tool that you can carry around with you in a convenient multi-purpose format: lens cloths!
We're going to place ONE (1) massive order for aesthetic IPA chart lens cloths on October 6, 2022. If you want one, be a patron at the Lingthusiast tier or higher on October 5th, 2022, timezone: anywhere in the world. If you’re already a patron at that tier, then you’re set! (That's the tier where you also get bonus episodes and the Discord access, we've never run a special offer at this tier before but we think this time it'll be worth it!).
In this month’s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about a forgotten gem of a linguistics paper about a rabbit! We talk about how Linguistics Twitter got excited about tracking down this paper based on a vague rumour, Labov's history of coming up with unique ways to record language in more natural environments, and useful takeaways about how to talk with children.
Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 60+ other bonus episodes, including an upcoming episode where we interview the artist and linguist Lucy Maddox about the process of designing our new IPA chart. You’ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds, as well your exclusive IPA chart lense cloth!
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
Laryngeoscope examples (warning: kinda gross videos of what the vocal folds look like from the inside!) - Glottal opera and more straightforward video
Language Log post on Nationality, Gender and Pitch
Lingthusiasm Episode ‘A Fun-Filled Fricative Field Trip’
The Two Ronnies - Four Candles skit
Stops in Western Armenian
Lingthusiasm Episode ‘When nothing means something’
Wikipedia entry for Thai
Examples of languages with multiple voicing contrasts
All Things Linguistic post on stops in Korean
Wikipedia entry for Sanskrit Consonants
Wikipedia entry for Hindustani Phonology
Wikipedia entry for Breathy Voice
Wikipedia entry for Creaky Voice
Omniglot entry for Jalapa Mazatec
Wikipedia entry for Jalapa Mazatec Vowels
You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening. To receive an email whenever a new episode drops, sign up for the Lingthusiasm mailing list.
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Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com
Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.
Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our production manager is Liz McCullough. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).
So apparently this is a misconception that a lot of people have. For those of you who don’t know, creaky voice/vocal fry is the noise that’s created (usually) at the end of sentences that has a creaky affect to it. It’s something that nearly everyone does in their speech, but there’s a misconception out there that it actually damages your voice over time.
Creaky voice is created when your vocal folds are adducted, which basically just means that they’re pressed together. The adduction of the vocal folds creates the noise because it causes the vocal folds to vibrate irregularly. Speaking at a lower pitch can create this environment (or heighten the affect), which is why lowering your pitch at the end of sentences tends to cause it.
The misconception states that because you’re holding your vocal folds tense that it’s somehow bad for your voice. In reality, vocal folds are made to change their states of tenseness. Simply changing the pitch of your voice changes how lax or tense your vocal folds are. It’s something that they’re supposed to do. While keeping a string on a violin very taught will probably stretch it out over time, tuning the string so it’s tight only when you’re playing isn’t going to do anything to the string. Nobody speaks in creaky voice 24/7 and even if they did, there’s no substantial evidence that it actually does anything bad. Not to mention that if it was actually bad, it would probably hurt to do. Your body tends to tell you when it doesn’t like something that you’re doing to it.
The thing that really bothers me about this misconception is that it’s something that is only targeted at women. Men do this all the time too, but for some reason, women are the only ones who are called out for it. The reason why I think this is the case is because (mostly) men like to police the way that women speak. For instance, before creaky voice was a thing, men used to criticize women for using “uptalk” which just consists of raising your pitch at the end of sentences (think “valley girl”), basically saying that it was annoying. Women took that advice and instead now lower their pitch at the end of sentences which is something that leads to creaky voice. This was then also criticized for being annoying and the misconception was created that it was bad for your voice.
So anyway, use creaky voice as much as you want. While it’s your own prerogative whether or not you think it’s annoying, it’s not going to do anything to harm your voice.
It’s easy to find words that distinguish between other voiced/voiceless pairs in English - bus and buzz, fine and vine - but the two sounds represented by the “th” sequence in English are rarer and harder to learn, especially since English uses the same spelling for both of them.
A lot of people give up and just use near-minimal pairs like “think” and “this”, or “theta” and “they”, but there are actually a few true minimal pairs that you can use:
thigh - thy
ether - either
thistle - this’ll
It’s worth noting that function words in English, like pronouns, prepositions, and determiners, tend to have ð, while content words, especially nouns, tend to have θ.
Theta θ and eth ð are also found in the following noun/verb minimal pairs, at least for many dialects:
wreath - wreathe
(I put a wreath on the door / I wreathe the door)
teeth - teethe
(my teeth / the baby is teething)
loath - loathe
(I’m loath to do it / I loathe doing it)
sheath - sheathe
(in a sheath / to sheathe one’s sword)
sooth - soothe
(for sooth! / to soothe someone)
Here the vowels differ, but the theta θ to eth ð, noun to verb relationship is preserved:
cloth - clothe
(wear cloth / clothe oneself)
bath - bathe
(take a bath / bathe the baby)
breath - breathe
(take a breath / breathe deeply)
Make sure to try them at full volume, not whispering, because whispering involves turning off your vocal cords (which is why you can whisper when they’re inflamed with laryngitis).
These sounds are called dental fricatives or interdental fricatives, because the sound is produced by a thin stream of air friction where the tongue is at (dental) or between (interdental) the teeth. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, the voiceless interdental fricative, theta, is written θ, and the voiced interdental fricative, eth, is written ð.
As a bonus, here’s a minimal pair for ʒ and ð, thanks to recent developments in clothing technology: pleasure and pleather.
The vocal folds, also commonly known as vocal cords, are flexible, flappy pieces of tissue situated safely within the sturdy framework structure of the thyroid cartilage in the larynx.
The vocal folds are super handy! Their function is two-fold. First, they serve as a safety valve, gate keepers if you will, at the mouth of the windpipe. When swallowing food, the vocal folds shut close, preventing any foreign objects or food going into your airways or lungs. This thwarts any risk of choking or worse, aspiration caused conditions like pneumonia! Secondly, working in tandem with the breath flowing through them, speech or singing is produced when the vocal folds vibrate and “slap” against each other. Yup, it’s because of these little babies that you can sing :)
The vocal folds are amazing! They’re famously known as cords, but truly they look more like curtains or flaps than strings. These flappy tissues are not uniform in their compositional structure. Below the top most skin surface which we call the EPITHELIUM, our vocal folds are actually made up of 3 different layers of tissue. And let’s geek out here for a second: these layers are called the (drumroll please, because I promise you, they’re very fancy sounding) LAMINA PROPRIA. Firstly, there is the grey colored strip in the picture above and this is the SUPERFICIAL LAMINA PROPRIA. The superficial lamina propria is the most “flappy”, most flexible, most whippy (excuse the vocabulary, I’m just trying my best to make science easy to understand!) layer. Secondly, we have the INTERMEDIATE LAMINA PROPRIA. No clues for guessing, but it’s intermediate because this pink colored strip in the picture is still flappy, flexible and whippy but slightly more dense than our superficial lamina propria. And last but not least, we have the DEEP LAMINA PROPRIA right at the bottom and this part is almost like firm jelly, gelatinous. Therefore, it is the least flappy and whippy, and most dense of all the 3 layers.
Attached to this deep lamina propria, is a muscle. This little hercules is known as the THYROARYTENOID. This is a small but mighty muscle. With control learned from singing and the appropriate exercises, the singer can manipulate the tension and bulk of this muscle. This tension and bulk will in turn affect the whippiness quotient of the lamina propria. When someone is said to sing in what is commonly known as chest voice, this refers to a thyroarytenoid-dominant vocal production.
When we sing, our exhalation breath flow and the air pressure that is created below the vocal folds causes them to vibrate. The speed of vibration and how fast they “slap” against each other is affected by the volume of airflow going through and how fast the airflow is. Another variant of such a production during singing also has to do with this amazing compositional structure of our vocal folds that I’ve just told you about. Because the different layers of the lamina propria are of different densities of “whippiness”, a singer’s control and manipulation of using varying degrees of whippiness, and control over the thyroarytenoid that forms the muscular base of these layers can result in infinite qualities within vocal production!
For example, if more of the whippier, flappier layers (those closer to the epithelium) are employed in vibration, this would produce lighter, headier singing. If a greater proportion of the denser layers are vibrating, this would produce chestier, more solid sounds. I may have oversimplified the science of singing in these statements, but what I’m trying to say is, there is a wide spectrum of variance to be found in lamina propria vibration due to its 3-jellies-in-1 composition! And this is why we can make so many different kinds of sounds.
As we go along, I will talk about other components of vocal production like resonance and compression that add to the equation too. But for now, to me it is just mind-blowing to know that our vocal folds can do so much! There is truly more than meets the eye when one considers this seemingly unassuming pair of flaps :)
This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Various vocal fold vibes’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.
[Music]
Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne.
Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about the vocal folds. But first, Lauren, I just have something to say. I’m really jealous of the chemistry people.
Lauren: Okay. Why is that?
Gretchen: They have all these cool versions of the Periodic Table of the Elements. You can get it in different colours and aesthetics and designs. We have a table that gets used a lot in linguistics, the International Phonetic Alphabet chart, but it just looks very boring. I want more versions of it.
Lauren: Yeah, there are a lot of details on the International Phonetic Alphabet charts, which is great if you need to know what’s in each of the columns and the rows. But there’s a lot happening. Once you know how it’s all set out, I don’t really read those anymore. I’m there to just find the specific symbol that I need.
Gretchen: Right. I was thinking we could make a version that’s abstract and stylised. If you don’t know about the IPA, it would just look like some cool symbols in a grid.
Lauren: The IPA symbols are indeed very cool.
Gretchen: But if you do recognise them, then you get to be an insider. In the meantime, it would be useful for refreshing your memory of some of those rarer symbols you don’t use as much.
Lauren: Oh, like, maybe some kind of Scandi minimalist aesthetic.
Gretchen: To go with your nice Ikea furniture.
Lauren: Okay, but seriously, I want this.
Gretchen: I also want this. I have another important question. What should we put our cool stylised IPA design on?
Lauren: Hmm, I mean, in the long run, it could go on lots of things. Before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to run a special offer to offset the investment in getting this thing made. It’s a little bit beyond our usual in-house design skills.
Gretchen: That is very true. Also, it would be cool to use a special offer to make something available that we don’t normally sell.
Lauren: This is finally our chance to make lens cloths.
Gretchen: Okay, why lens cloths specifically?
Lauren: They’re portable, and they’re useful. They’re practical. But you can also just lay your love of linguistics on something that you’d use anyway.
Gretchen: Okay, so, this sounds really useful to you and me because we both wear glasses, but what about people who don’t?
Lauren: Phone screens get grubby. Computer screens get fingerprints all over them. People have sunglasses.
Gretchen: I mean, this is fair. I got a lens cloth from a conference once. I actually use it all the time. Best conference swag ever. What if I could have a linguistics themed lens cloth and put it in all of my bags?
Lauren: Exactly. Very much on the same principle as our linguistics-themed scarves. It’s some stealth nerdery you can carry around with you and use.
Gretchen: Here’s the deal. Everybody who wants a stylised IPA chart themed lens cloth, we’re gonna place one bulk order for them. This is your chance. Go to patreon/com/lingthusiasm. Join the Lingthusiast tier or higher by October 5th. Then we’ll place the order on the 6th, so we know how many to get.
Lauren: If you want several lens cloths, either to keep them in different places or to give as gifts or split with some friends, we have some options for those. We have pictures of the design.
Gretchen: It’s extremely snazzy looking I have to say.
Lauren: That’s all at patreon.com/lingthusiasm if you get in by the 5th of October 2022.
Gretchen: Plus, patrons get all the usual perks like bonus episodes. Our most recent bonus was an introduction to a long-forgotten linguistics study about a rabbit.
Lauren: If you need people to talk about your linguistic enthusiasm with or perhaps to admire your Lingthusiasm merch, patrons also get access to the Lingthusiasm discord.
Gretchen: Thanks so much to everyone who’s currently a patron. If you’re already at that level, you will get a cloth in the mail. Look out for a survey from us for your address.
[Music]
Gretchen: Okay, vocal fold demonstration. Let’s start by putting our hands on our throats and saying some sounds.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: /hhh/ /aaa/ /haa/.
Lauren: /haa/
Gretchen: /hah/ /hʌh/ /haa/ /hah/.
Lauren: /hʌh/ /haa/. Sounds like the most underwhelming laugh track ever.
Gretchen: The worst podcast. We’re so funny.
Lauren: Very fake laugh there. I am just gently touching my throat low down on the front of my neck – emphasis on the “gently” there. I can still feel the vibrations even with just a tiny fingertip.
Gretchen: When I’ve done this in intro linguistics class or intro phonetics class, which is a very classic classroom activity, some people seem to be really comfortable jabbing right at their voice box, and I’m like, “Ooo, no, that’s, ugh.”
Lauren: I can report the same. I don’t know if it’s something to do with differences in anatomy or just twitchy reflexes but definitely a light touch for me.
Gretchen: For the purposes of the demo, it doesn’t matter. You can put your whole hand lightly at the base of your throat, which is what I do, or put a finger or two towards the middle. You can do it while you’re talking normally as well, which I’m doing right now, but it’s confusing if you’re not making a very controlled sequence of sounds because you’re also thinking about what you’re saying, and that’s kind of distracting.
Lauren: /haa/ /hhh/. Yeah, great, here we are. If you’re listening around people in public, then you’re continuing the grand tradition of being slightly silly in public in the name of linguistics.
Gretchen: If you really can’t bear to do it now, do try out this demo sometime later when you’ve got a minute in a secluded location. Just put your hand to your throat. Make some repetitive sounds and feel what your throat’s doing.
Lauren: When I’m making a /hhh/ sound, my throat is doing nothing. But when I make an /aaa/ sound, there’s a buzzing that’s happening.
Gretchen: You can feel the vibration in a very cool ‘70s fashion. That buzzing is coming from your voice box – also called your “larynx” – and specifically from the “vocal folds” or “vocal cords” that are inside that.
Lauren: You might be able to feel a lump there if you’ve had a testosterone-based puberty. I can’t. I don’t imagine you can feel too much there unless you push down hard, which we’ve established is not necessary.
Gretchen: Sometimes they’re called “vocal cords.” I think that’s more common terminology because you can think of the cords as the strings on a guitar. Technically speaking, they’re more flaps of muscle. Rather than being cords that are attached at either end, they’re flaps that are attached all along one side.
Lauren: I’m so glad we don’t call them “vocal flaps.” “Vocal folds” is fine by me.
Gretchen: [Laughs] Gross. You can see videos of them. You can go on YouTube. We will link to a video of this. You can take a laryngoscope, which goes down your nose and has a little light, and you can see them flapping about and moving when someone’s talking.
Lauren: Look, your vocal folds are mucus membranes. You have a lot of saliva. Your vocal tract is quite lubricated. It’s not a particularly appealing video if you find the inside of a mouth to be a lot. It’s just that but more.
Gretchen: They’re really kind of gross. I think you get a full-body cringe rippling through the intro linguistics classroom when you put the video up. That’s your warning. If you would like that or not like that, you can click on the link or not.
Lauren: If the vocal tract is like a meat clarinet, then the vocal folds are that bit that’s the reed that’s making that vibration and making that noise happen.
Gretchen: The clarinet is also not at all a disturbing metaphor. You say it very casually, which is because we came up with it a year or so ago for the Crash Course Linguistics phonetics video. You have the other stuff you do to change the shape of your mouth and your vocal tract to produce different sounds, which are like pressing the buttons on the clarinet. The vocal folds are the reed. Or you could think of this as like if you’re playing a trumpet, and you need to make a buzzing with your lips into the trumpet, and that’s sort of like what your vocal folds are doing. Again, you press the buttons and that affects what the sound is that comes out.
Lauren: When you have laryngitis, that affects and enflames the vocal folds inside your larynx. That’s why having laryngitis affects your ability to speak.
Gretchen: I had laryngitis once when I was an undergrad, and it was the most exciting thing.
Lauren: Why was it exciting, Gretchen?
Gretchen: Because I was midway through a linguistics degree, and I’d heard the thing about, “Oh, you know, your vocal folds, your larynx, laryngitis, that’s what it is.” And then I was like, “It’s true! I can’t produce voicing. That’s why I can only whisper because whispering is talking without voicing.” This also means that if you’re in a public place, and you’re trying to demonstrate this to yourself, and you’re not getting the effect, maybe because you’re whispering or doing it under your breath, which is you’re not producing the exact thing that we’re trying to study. This was something that happened to me when I was first reading books about linguistics, and they would say, oh, the difference between /θ/ and /ð/, as in “thing” and “then,” and I’d be sitting there trying to feel the difference, but of course, I was quietly in the library trying not to make any sounds, and so I couldn’t feel the difference. I thought this was something wrong with me, but it turned out I was just not doing the thing.
Lauren: Because voicing turns on and off throughout speech, it’s why you feel a somewhat constant buzzing if you just hold your fingers to your throat while you’re speaking. If you are only whispering, you’re losing a whole dimension of information on sound. That’s why if you play a game like broken telephone or pass it on where a group of people whisper a message in a chain, the reason that you’re likely to get something very different at the end from the beginning is that the whisper is removing a whole bunch of cues that you’re using to make sense of what’s being said.
Gretchen: Oh, that makes sense. You’re really just trying to figure out what something means by context, like most of the time words are distinguishable in context. But if you start with a weird phrase, then it can degrade in the whisper because you’re doing it – I always thought it was just that, like, people have bad memory or something. Or whispering is quiet.
Lauren: It is! Because whispering is quiet, and it removes voicing.
Gretchen: Amazing. When we do vibrate our vocal folds, they’re like an instrument and how like an oboe has a bigger reed than a clarinet, and it makes a deeper sound. Or a thicker string on a guitar is deeper than the thinner string on the guitar. Depending on the person, depending on how long and how thick your vocal cords are, you can have what shows up as a deeper or higher-pitched voice.
Lauren: A lot of what influences how large your larynx grows is whether or not you had a lot of testosterone in your puberty. That’s one of the things that causes this growth to be more so in some people than other people.
Gretchen: Right. If you didn’t have a testosterone-based puberty initially, but you take testosterone later, your vocal folds will do that growth. It’s effectively a second puberty.
Lauren: We should say in general though that just like you don’t arrange the parts in a choir by lining people up by height, there’s not a direct correlation with how big you are and how big your vocal folds are and the pitch of your voice. There’s lots of other factors that go into it as well.
Gretchen: Some of that variation is also, individually, people choosing how low and how high to pitch their voices and also people making those sorts of decisions constrained by a culture. I remember I was in a phonetics class and learned that pre-pubescent kids in North America, who statistically all have the same vocal tract, still show gender differences in terms of their pitch because, socially speaking, the boys are more likely to choose to make their voices a bit deeper pitched than the girls for social reasons even though physiologically they don’t have any reason to.
Lauren: Fascinating. That’s where it becomes as social thing not just an anatomical thing. There’s been some studies with Japanese speakers as well in Japan where Japanese women have a higher pitch than American women, and Japanese men on average have a lower pitch than American men, so they sit even further apart in the range. That’s a social thing around pitch that people learn as they learn to speak the language and live there.
Gretchen: There’s also a lot of overlap in pitch range in the middle where just like there’s hormonal factors that can influence how tall someone is and genetic factors that can influence how tall someone is but there’s also a lot of overlap in terms of gender differences and height. It’s not that all men are taller than all women or something like that.
Lauren: That pitch has to do with how many times a second your vocal folds are vibrating. This can get measured by electroglottograph, which I like because it’s an EGG or an “egg.” It’s a tiny little device that goes on your throat where your larynx is, and it creates a little electric circuit that gets closed every time your vocal folds pulse together.
Gretchen: This is like a little electrode that gets stuck on with a sticky bandage patch on your throat, and you can measure that.
Lauren: Yeah.
Gretchen: If there’s a part of me that’s moving 100 to 200 times a second – because that’s what “hertz” means – why am I not more tired when I’m talking?
Lauren: It’s because of the magic of the air pressure in your lungs that pushes up through your vocal folds. It takes a little bit of effort to get started but a bit like blowing a raspberry with your lips – but even more so because your vocal folds are perfected for this kind of work.
Gretchen: Also, my vocal folds are really jacked. Is that what we’re saying?
Lauren: They are incredibly well specified for this work. Once they get started, that air pressure coming up from below lets them oscillate in a way that means you’re not physically controlling each opening and closing. That's why you’re not getting too tired but why it can be fatiguing to talk for a long stretch of time.
Gretchen: I guess this is also similar to our musical instrument metaphor, right, because if I’m playing the clarinet, which I used to do in high school, I wasn’t going there and actually physically vibrating the reed hundreds of times a second. I was directing a flow of air through it which would make the reed vibrate, which is similar to the vocal cords and similar to what happens when you’re blowing air through your lips as well.
Lauren: And a reminder of just how much of this kind of acoustic phonetics and figuring out how the parts of the vocal tract work and produce sounds is very much a type of physics that’s being studied.
Gretchen: Something that there’s been a lot more work on the very fine-grained details of since recording technology has gotten a lot better.
Lauren: You can manipulate the vocal folds to create different effects, and one of those effects is what we think of as falsetto.
Gretchen: Falsetto, I think of it as like those clip things that you put on a guitar, like a capo, where if you clip it on the guitar, now every note on the guitar, you could play it the same way, they’re all higher pitched. If you only use part of the vocal folds, then you’re gonna produce this thing that’s higher pitched.
Lauren: Because you’re only vibrating something that’s smaller, and you can do that quicker.
Gretchen: You know, Lauren, I’ve always wondered – can I do falsetto? Am I doing falsetto? Why don’t I get falsetto? You know, just because I didn’t have a testosterone-based puberty, does this mean I don’t get to do falsetto?
Lauren: You might not notice it as much because if someone who has a really deep voice does falsetto, it’s much more noticeable but can take a bit of training. Most people should be able to do falsetto. It’s just if you already have a relatively high pitch to start with, it’s not as noticeable when you’re doing a falsetto.
Gretchen: Oh, okay. So, it’s just that, if I did it, it would sound relatively similar to my regular voice, I guess. We’ve talked about the vocal folds as the thing that produces sound in general, but they’re also very specifically involved with certain types of sounds. Demo time again?
Lauren: I think so.
Gretchen: All right. Hands on your throats.
Lauren: Fingers gently to your throat.
Gretchen: We can do /sss/ /zzz/ /sszz/.
Lauren: /zzz/. This reminds me of our fricatives episode.
Gretchen: Indeed, it does. And /fff/ /vvv/ /ffvv/ – also from the fricatives episode.
Lauren: Like, “voiced.” That’s convenient.
Gretchen: V is voiced, yes. There’re some pairs of sounds – many of them are in English, some are also found in other languages – where the difference between them is your mouth is in exactly the same shape, but your vocal folds are doing something different. In one case, they’re vibrating. In the other case, they’re just letting the air pass through.
Lauren: I can feel that – which is very convenient.
Gretchen: It’s very neat. And you don’t need a weird, gross laryngoscopy to do it. You could just feel the vibration on your throat.
Lauren: But this distinction isn’t just in fricatives.
Gretchen: No, there’s also voicing stuff going on with various other sounds. We already looked at /aaa/ – all the vowels are voiced. /aaa/ /iii/ /ooo/. You can try some vowels. They’ll all be voiced.
Lauren: So, we have voicing distinction in those fricatives, but we also have a voicing distinction in some other pairs of words like “pat” and “bat,” “ten” and “den,” “cave” and “gave.”
Gretchen: Yeah. If you’re saying, “pat” and “bat,” again, your mouth part is doing the same thing. It’s just there’s something different going on in your vocal cords that’s affecting what the meaning is. Same thing with “ten” and “den,” T and D – the names of the letters – “cave” and “gave.” Try saying this out loud and attracting some strange looks. With /sss/ and /zzz/, it’s pretty easy to put your hand to your throat and feel a difference there because you can hold those sounds for a relatively long period of time. This is a problem when it comes to /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/ /k/ /g/. It’s really hard to produce those sounds without a vowel after them. That vowel is gonna be voiced. And so, it’s hard to feel what’s going on before that because these sounds involve a complete closure of air and then releasing it. You stop up the air – they get called “stops” – and you release it, and that makes it hard to feel contiguously what’s going on in your throat because you have to release them into a vowel or into something.
Lauren: What’s happening is a difference in how the vocal folds are vibrating. There’s also another little thing that happens in English at the same time.
Gretchen: English also has this fun curve ball. I think we need a classic British comedy sketch to illustrate this curve ball.
Lauren: Oh, if there is one, it’s always very welcome.
Gretchen: This is a comedy sketch by an old school British comedy duo called The Two Ronnies. I think they were two men, both named Ronnie – hence the name. Basically, there’s this laconic guy who comes into a shop, and he asks for “four candles.”
Lauren: And the shopkeeper gets down behind the counter and pulls out one, two, three, four white candles. He’s got him four candles.
Gretchen: Ah, yes, you might think this is a reasonable response. But in fact, what the shop guy wanted was “fork handles” – as in handles for forks.
Lauren: Handles for his forks, which sounds pretty much the same.
Gretchen: Right. What’s actually going on is that words in English that begin with /p/ /t/ or /k/ get pronounced as if there’s actually kind of an H there.
Lauren: Like in “handles.”
Gretchen: Like in “handles.” So, “fork handles” – fork [pause] handles, I’m deliberately putting a break there – and “four candles,” there is that ghost of an H or a very short H in the regular English pronunciation of “candles.”
Lauren: It’s like you wanna be very careful if your surname is “Hook” to not call your son “Michael.”
Gretchen: Ah, because then you could say, “Yes, this is my cook.”
Lauren: Ah, you have a private chef, Gretchen. That’s very fancy.
Gretchen: No, I just know this guy named “Mike Hook.” This is an interesting type of distinction because it’s not all of the time when you have a /p/ /t/ or /k/ sound that it has this ghost of an H attached to it. There’s some contexts where you don’t pronounce that H. One of those is after S. So, in a word like, “sky,” you’re probably not saying /skhaɪ/. It’s just /skaɪ/. But this means that that K that’s written as a K can be pronounced like a G would be in some contexts.
Lauren: Because my brain doesn’t hear that puff of air and so is just as likely to think it’s a G.
Gretchen: Right. Have you ever heard the famous song that goes, “Excuse me while I kiss this guy”?
Lauren: Yes, it’s about making out with a man. No, wait, it’s about making out with the thing in the heavens.
Gretchen: So, the lyric is supposed to be, “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.”
Lauren: S-K-Y.
Gretchen: But many people mishear it as, “Excuse me while I kiss this guy.”
Lauren: G-U-Y.
Gretchen: Because in that context after an S, the K and the G really sound like they’re doing the same thing. I think this is something that’s really tricky for English speakers to wrap our heads around because our writing system is telling us to do this one thing, and yet it turns out that we’re actually doing a different thing perceptually. And you’ve had however many years of your life minus a few at the beginning when you didn’t know how to read yet telling you this is what this sound is. And then it’s like, “Ah, yeah, actually, no, it’s something else going on.”
Lauren: The good thing is you can observe this puff of air that comes out with a /p/ or a /t/ or a /k/. It doesn’t come out with a /b/ or a /d/ or a /g/.
Gretchen: This is, at least apocryphally – I never had a phonetics class that did this – but I’ve heard that some phonetics profs use fire to demonstrate this.
Lauren: Because if you hold a candle or something up, you can see the air move.
Gretchen: Yeah, if you hold a lit match or a candle up in front of your mouth while you’re making /k/ /p/ /t/, you could blow out the candle.
Lauren: I’m a little bit more risk-averse, and so I hold up a tissue. You see the same air moving with less of a risk of setting off the fire alarms.
Gretchen: Look, I mean, I don’t wanna make any promises. Don’t try this at home in a dangerous location. Please have adult supervision, etc., etc. Exercise appropriate caution. But I just feel like it’d be fun to play with fire.
Lauren: If you don’t have live fire or a Kleenex to hand, you can just hold your hand in front of your face and feel that little puff of air that comes out when you say, “pat” but not “bat.” I think it’s easy to see that this English split is not the only way to do things by looking at some other languages.
Gretchen: Yeah, this was something that came up for me when I was learning French because French also has a two-way distinction on stops like /p/ and /t/ and /k/, but it doesn’t have this extra puff of air which is called “aspiration.” It just does the thing in your vocal cords the same way that /s/ and /z/ do.
Lauren: Okay.
Gretchen: My favourite demonstration of this is there was a movie that came out in Canada probably a decade or so ago which is half in English, half in French, and the bilingualism is very much a feature of the movie. You know, strong linguist recommend. Watch it with subtitles in both languages and get a whole experience. The movie is called Bon Cop, Bad Cop.
Lauren: Good cop, bad cop.
Gretchen: Good cop, bad cop, but in French. But when I say this – so “cop” has been borrowed into French as a word there. When I say, “cop,” in English, I’m producing it with that puff of air – /kʰɑp/. But when I say it in French – because I learned French young enough, I have a fairly decent French accent – I’m not saying it with that extra puff of air. I’m saying, /bɑ̃ kɑp/, /bæd kʰɑp/. There’s the same word, effectively, but because I’m pronouncing it according to each language’s sound system because of the word in front of it, I’m giving it a different aspiration – and also a different vowel sound but, you know, there’s a lot that differentiates between accents.
Lauren: In most languages that have this two-way distinction, you have one that’s voiced and one that’s not. But there’s one sound in all of the set of stops that we have where you can’t get a voiced version of it.
Gretchen: Oh, is this a very special sound?
Lauren: It is a very special sound. It’s the glottal stop.
Gretchen: Wait, your glottis is your voice box. That’s your larynx.
Lauren: Yes. So, to make a glottal stop, you have to close off your vocal folds, bring them together, which means that if you close them off, you can’t also vibrate them to create the voiced version.
Gretchen: You can’t also push a stream of air through and have them vibrate through it. Yeah, I don’t think that works.
Lauren: That’s why you only ever get an unvoiced glottal stop.
Gretchen: The glottal stop is the sound in “uh-oh,” which is between the “uh, oh.” You also often make it if you’re lifting a heavy box or something, and you’re just closing off your throat to make that tension. I think of it as sort of a grunt-y sound sometimes.
Lauren: It is a sound in a whole bunch of different languages, including Hawaiian.
Gretchen: And in a few very specific contexts in English. The reason it’s special?
Lauren: Because we have a stylised version of it as the Lingthusiasm logo! We’ve discussed two-way distinctions between voiced and unvoiced in French and voiced and unvoiced aspirated in English, but it’s possible to have more than two different distinctions because aspiration gives us that extra dimension to play with.
Gretchen: Right. There are languages – so English has a two-way distinction that has some fogginess around what’s going on with whether aspiration is important depending on the position in the word. But some languages treat the – so let me try to say this with my French brain – /tʰ/ /t/ and /d/, each as three sounds. If you heard that as two T sounds plus a D or two D sounds plus a T, you might have English brain. But I was at least trying to produce them in three different ways. One of these languages that makes a three-way distinct is Thai. You can see in the name “Thai” itself. That H there – T-H-I – is because it’s pronounced with that extra puff of air, which is sort of a mini-H.
Lauren: “Thai” is in the Tai language family, which is a T without the H – unaspirated.
Gretchen: Ah, very nice.
Lauren: Which is a set of distinctions we don’t make in English. You might have an English speaker talk about Thai being in the /tʰɑɪ/ language family.
Gretchen: Right. If you’re not making that distinction. Another language that used to make this distinction was Ancient Greek. In Modern Greek, this has shifted. But if you’ve ever wondered why “theta” and “phi” and “chi” – or /kɑɪ/ – are written with an H, it’s because they used to be pronounced /tʰɛɪta/ and /kʰi/ and /pʰi/ contrasted with /tau/ and /pɑɪ/ and /kapa/. Then those sounds shifted in a later version of Greek. And so, these letter combinations – the T-H and the P-H and the C-H – became conventionalised in languages that were being influenced by the Latin alphabet as ways of writing the /θ/ /f/ and /k/ sounds.
Lauren: It’s definitely worth emphasising that these things aren’t set in stone. As languages are spoken by newer generations, they can change. Apparently Korean has historically had a three-way distinction like we’ve seen Thai had a three-way distinction. But for younger speakers, it’s moving towards a two-way distinction. It is possible to change.
Gretchen: Yeah, change various things around.
Lauren: If you’ve been struggling to hear distinctions that aren’t in your native phonologies, that’s totally understandable because the point at which voicing starts and how that differs across languages is measured in milliseconds. The fact that we perceive these differences at all in the languages we do speak is actually quite amazing.
Gretchen: I think for me one of the things that helped make it click was – and maybe this is a bi/multilingual experience – but thinking it’s not so much that I’m hearing aspiration, it’s that this sounds to me like someone who’s got a really English-y accent in French. If someone says – uh, I dunno. What’s a French phrase that a lot of English speakers kind of know?
Lauren: “Qu'est-ce c'est.”
Gretchen: Oh, boy, okay, yeah. That sounds like you have a really Anglo accent on that because you’re saying, “/kʰɛs/-ce c’est” instead of “/kɛs/-ce c’est.”
Lauren: Yeah. I think it’s immediately apparent when I open my mouth that my French doesn’t get much beyond café French.
Gretchen: Right. That’s a very good demonstration of Lauren doesn’t speak French, isn’t it?
Lauren: Yeah. I don’t entirely know what it means, which is probably a good indicator.
Gretchen: Oh, it’s just, “What is this,” or “What is that?”
Lauren: Ah.
Gretchen: Or conversely, if you’re someone who grew up speaking French or a language that doesn’t do this extra puff of air that English does, that’s one of the things that contributes to sounding like you have that particular accent when you’re speaking English. It’s comprehensible. I knew what you were trying to say. But it’s something that contributes to that impression of having an accent that comes from a phonology that’s arranged a little bit differently.
Lauren: We’ve covered two-way voicing distinctions. We’ve covered three-way voicing distinctions. We’ve got an example of four-way voicing distinction if you want, Gretchen.
Gretchen: Amazing.
Lauren: This is a voicing range that is pretty common across languages in the Indo-Aryan family. A lot of those are spoken in India – Nepali as well, in Nepal – a lot of languages that are from Sanskrit.
Gretchen: So, this is things like Hindi, Assamese, Marathi. Lots of languages in that particular area have this four-way distinction. Let me think about the parameters here, right. You have your vocal folds are either on or off, buzzing or not buzzing, and you can multiply that by you produce this extra puff of air or you don’t produce this extra puff of air.
Lauren: Pretty much. I’ll walk you through a minimal set in Hindi. Since I speak Nepali, I can sometimes approximate all of these. We’ll see how we go. We have /tɑl/ [“beat”], /dɑl/ [“lentil”], /tʰɑl/ [“platter”], and /dʱɑɾ/ [“knife edge”].
Gretchen: Okay. So, definitely my English brain thinks that several of those sound very similar, but I believe you that you’re producing them differently.
Lauren: And definitely not as well as someone who spent more of their life speaking a language with a four-way distinction, but we have our two voiced and our two unvoiced. One of our unvoiced is aspirated, and the other one uses what we call “breathy voice.” It’s voiced but the voicing has a little bit of a gap in it that creates this breathiness. Something like /dʱɑɾ/ or /bʱɑl/.
Gretchen: Breathiness is something that I think you can also use in English for stylistic effect. Like, if I wanted to say, [breathily] “Ah, how beautiful. How lovely,” I’m making the whole thing kind of breath-like or with that relaxedness of the vocal cords. But if I’m just doing it in this narrow context of on this particular sound /dʱ/, then that’s making it for a particular contrast between one word and the next, whereas saying, [breathily] “How beautiful,” it has a different emotional meaning or connotational meaning to saying, [without breathiness] “How beautiful.”
Lauren: There’s none of that connotation when you’re using breathy voice to create those consonants in Hindi or Nepali.
Gretchen: Yeah. Not something like the difference between, in this particular set, “beat” versus “lentil” versus “platter” versus “knife edge,” which is just this very lexical meaning of here’s a word that means something.
Lauren: This breathy voice is contrasted with what we’ve just been calling “voicing.” In phonetics, it gets called “modal voice” because it’s just your normal one, but they needed a technical term for it.
Gretchen: Is this kind of like when you’re doing statistics, and you have the mean and the median and the mode, and the mode is the one that occurs the most, so the modal voice is like, “This is the one that most of the languages have somewhere, so we thought we’d call it, like, ‘the common one.’ It’s just there.”
Lauren: The default.
Gretchen: Are there any languages that make a five-way distinction?
Lauren: Hmm, I don’t know off the top of my head. There is a different kind of distinction that we can make where we have both breathy voice and modal voice, and we introduce a different voicing quality called “creaky.”
Gretchen: There’s a language called Jalapa Mazatec, which has creaky voice as one of its options. “Creak” sort of sounds like /a̰/ /a̰/. It’s this very relaxed vocal cords that means that the sound becomes lower because they’re looser. It has this sound – I think of it as kind of a Halloween-type sound, like if you’re opening a door [imitates a creaky door sound] you might do it.
Lauren: Just like with breathy voice, we associate it with more vibe related things.
Gretchen: Not to be confused with “vibration.”
Lauren: Whereas Jalapa Mazatec uses it as a way to distinguish vowels. It has five different vowels that all have either breathy, modal, or creaky in their pronunciation.
Gretchen: That’s like 15 vowels if you multiply it out by the breathiness or the creakiness. That’s great.
Lauren: In total, yeah.
Gretchen: “Creaky voice” is the technical linguistic term, but sometimes it shows up under the name “vocal fry” when people are talking about it in English – specifically for that stylistic effect. Some English speakers – and I know I do this, if someone wants to go back and do an acoustic analysis of all the Lingthusiasm episodes – do this at the end of a sentence, often, to lower your pitch of your voice towards the end of a sentence which finishes it.
Lauren: It’s a really good way to drop the pitch because, as you say, it’s vibrating less because of that difference in the tension, and that allows you to really emphasise that you’re either at the end of your turn or you’re speaking with some amount of gravity or authority.
Gretchen: I also tend to do it when I’m tired. If I’m just very relaxed and lying down after a long day, [creakily] “Ah, I dunno. Just pass me a glass of water, okay.” I think that’s got some creak or some fry.
Lauren: I think the important thing with vocal fry is once you start actually noticing it and the acoustic features of it, you notice that it’s done by a really wide range of people. It can be done by male radio hosts. It can be done by female podcasters. I can be done by Gretchen when she’s tired. Pops up in all kinds of places.
Gretchen: Vocal fry sometimes comes up in the media as here’s this thing that they’re criticising people, but it’s just one of the many things you can do with your vocal folds, and all of them are fine.
Lauren: I also find it very reassuring that in a study from five years ago, people under 40 find it a way of sounding authoritative.
Gretchen: Oh, great! So, that’s under 45 now. Eventually, all of the authoritative people will just be vocal frying.
Lauren: Doing interesting things with voicing.
Gretchen: I don’t know about any languages with six distinctions. Maybe there are some that make even more. What’s the minimum number of distinctions? We’ve got a lot of languages that do a two-way distinction in voicing.
Lauren: But there are also a lot of languages that have no distinction in voicing in terms of their fricatives and their stops that we’ve looked at so far.
Gretchen: This is a lot of the Indigenous languages in the North American continent, Algonquian languages, most of the Iroquoian languages, except for apparently Wyandot, but Iroquois, Mohawk, Cree, Ojibwe, a bunch of these languages, sometimes sounds get produced with a little bit more vocal fold vibration. Sometimes they get produced without it. But that’s a thing that you do depending on where it is in its position in the word or what your mood is at the moment as a speaker the same way that you could use breathiness or creak in English to convey a stylistic effect, but it doesn’t change the meaning of the word. Voicing isn’t important for changing the meaning of a word in those languages.
Lauren: You also find it in South America a lot, across the languages of the Pacific and Southeast Asia and South China. Australian languages are phonetically famous for having this feature. In fact, on the World Atlas of Linguistic Structures map that we’ll link to where you can see all these “no voicing distinction” dots, only Murrinhpatha in Australia is a language that has a voicing distinction. The rest are all without.
Gretchen: Literally all of the other ones. I think Hawaiian and some languages like Maori also don’t have a voicing distinction if you’re talking about South Pacific languages.
Lauren: But it’s something that’s very common in Europe and Africa. I think that’s why voicing is really baked into the design of the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Gretchen: The International Phonetic Alphabet is ultimately based on the Latin alphabet and the Greek alphabet because that’s the languages that the people who were making the first International Phonetic Alphabet were working from. They wanted to make it easy to type, for them, on existing typewriters which, you know, fair enough. So, we’ve got these pairs of symbols like P and B, S and Z, that represent this voicing distinction that sometimes get instantiated a little bit differently depending on the language, but you have this pair, whereas other things like breathiness or creak get represented by adding an extra little diacritic onto those sounds, which it’s kind of interesting to think about an alt IPA where it got invented in Australia, and they were like, “Yeah, voicing, I dunno. A few languages do that, but we don’t know very many of them. Let’s just use a diacritic for that as well.”
Lauren: Instead, where you have this voicing distinction, say, T and a D character, spatially, it’s very meaningful on the IPA where the voiceless one is put on the left, and the voiced one is put on the right of the pair.
Gretchen: And because ideally, I guess, if you were doing this chart with a voicing distinction as you have where in the mouth the sound is produced and what bits of the mouth are in contact with each other to produce it, then you’d wanna have a three-dimensional IPA chart to have the voiced one on top of the unvoiced one, like it pops out of the page, which I think we’re not gonna make lens cloths of.
Lauren: No.
Gretchen: The lens cloths will be in three dimensions, but the chart will be printed on them in the usual two dimensions of printing things.
Lauren: Ah, yes. We are working with the same standard physical plane. And we kept that left side unvoiced/right side voiced pairing in our redesign of the IPA chart.
Gretchen: But also, we put some circles to indicate the voiceless ones so that you can have that as a quick reference. I think the circles look cool.
Lauren: I think they look very neat as well.
Gretchen: Because the usual IPA chart has a lot of text on it. It has labels for all the rows and columns. It has things like, “When symbols occur in pairs, the left-most one represents a voiceless one.” This is, of course, very useful if you’re new to the chart, but if you’re looking for something that’s more of an art object, that’s a little bit useful as a reference thing. Maybe we could just use a fun circle, and if you know what a few of them mean, you can use the circle to remember the rest of them.
Lauren: You can see a picture of our redesigned IPA chart in the shownotes for this episode. The lens cloth offer is running until the 5th of October 2022.
Gretchen: Please do, at some point, when you get a chance, put your hand to your throat and try out some voicing. It’s really fun.
Lauren: /aaa/.
[Music]
Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, including how to get a cool redesigned IPA lens cloth, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not Judging Your Grammar” stickers, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet.
Lauren: I tweet and blog as Superlinguo. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes, and you wish there were more? You can get access to an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month plus our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Have you gotten really into linguistics, and you wish you had more people to talk with about it? Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to chat with other linguistics fans. Plus, all patrons help keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include a behind-the-scenes on running an MRI study and the history of “like” in English, as well as a historical bunny study. Until October 5, 2022, you can get an aesthetic IPA lens cloth for being a patron. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language.
Gretchen: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Production Manager is Liz McCullough. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.
Lauren: Stay lingthusiastic!
[Music]
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Honestly, even though its really gross sometimes, I am enjoying watching these laryngoscopy pictures and videos a lot.
An laryngoscopy is when we go down into your mouth and throat with a camera via your nose (you can do it via the mouth but it is rare these days as the nose yield better results).
This means that the Pictures and videos we see are of the vocalfolds. It is sooo fascinating and I am posetively in love. This is the most fun I've had since we got to learn about children's language accusition.
