Mail Online - Do women really talk like 12-year-old girls? - Analysis

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2382134/Actress-Lake-Bell-insists-vocal-pandemic-adults-talking-baby-voices.html

Not just analysing the text - analysing the ideology behind it- Women can't speak. If this wasn't the ideology, they would have started with the expert.

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      -Header – white woman, blue eyes, blonde – stereotypical and generalised

·        - Pink text/display – stereotypical, clear target audience

·        - ‘By Daily Mail Reporter’ – writer is not important

·         -Semantic field of disease - use of the view that language change/ misuse is a plague – descriptivist view

o   ‘pandemic’ – in the headline

o   ‘chronic’

o   ‘vocal virus’

·        - ‘pandemic’ and ‘baby’ are in quotation marks – suggests it is a view held only by Lake Bell

·         -‘Actress’ – adds weight to argument – gives reader impressions before they’ve even read what she said

·        - Actor vs. actress – do not want to be accused of political correctness

·       -  ‘Valley girls’ and ‘Kardashians’ – puts an age label on the article – this is about young people

·        - 'It's like a speech pattern that includes uptalking and fry, so it's this amalgamation of really unsavory sounds that many young women have adopted. It's a pandemic, in my opinion,' the 34-year-old told NPR. – made an article out of one quote, possibly taken out of context – want an excuse to bash women and young people

o   Uptalking – sounding like everything you say is a question – teenagers used to be accused of this, now women are

o   Fry – voice cracking , making your voice seem more vulnerable, ‘um’

·         -‘The actress, who wrote, directed and stars in the upcoming film’ – adds further weight to her point – earns her more respect

·         ‘she is worried that women are hurting their careers’ – doesn’t specify what women or what careers

·         'little girls' – belittling and demeaning to the women who do this – derogatory – implies it is weakness

·        - 'I grew up thinking a female voice and sound should sound sophisticated and sexy’ – do men have to sound sophisticated and sexy? – completely overrides everything else women can do

·        - ‘Lauren Bacall or Anne Bancroft or Faye Dunaway’ – old actresses – appealing to target audience

·         'Not a 12-year-old little girl that is submissive to the male species.’ – dressed up as empowerment  – but is there anything actually wrong with a 12-year-old girl’s voice?

·         -‘uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions), or the incessant use of 'like' as a conversation filler’ – anecdotes constantly associated with language misuse – follows the common trend/narrative that the way minorities use language is automatically wrong – it’s not men who have to adapt their language

·        - ‘But some believe women also change their voices, often subconsciously, to sound less threatening or domineering’ – Links to double voice discourse and how women have to adapt to being outnumbered in board rooms

·       -  'I hear women do it on the street when they are talking to a man they want to quickly placate' – some would say this is an example of power – using language to get what you want

·        - ‘Carmen Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College in Claremont, California’ – now we have an expert – the first one to speak who has evidence and studies to prove her words – if the article had started with this, it would be very different
         -  'If women do something like uptalk or vocal fry, it’s immediately interpreted as insecure, emotional or even stupid. - 'The truth is this: Young women take linguistic features and use them as power tools for building relationships.'
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