Is Linguistic Neutrality Possible?

On accent, smell, and getting yelled at on the internet

The internet is an astoundingly complex and delicate technology that allows us to misinterpret one another in thrilling new ways. Occasionally these misunderstandings can be revealing. The unabashed hostility of social media sheds stark light on battle lines that, in real life, are obscured by the mandate to be polite and act normal.

This is all to say that I recently posted a TikTok video in which I described—or, really, asked for help describing—a new-ish accent feature. Indulge me while I describe the accent, because, for some reason, God has seen fit to make me care about language change rather than something more lucrative/employable, and if I knew how to change this, I would.

This particular accent is distinguished, from what I can tell, by an unusual level of aspiration. Some consonants are accompanied by an extra release of air. In English, we usually aspirate consonants when they come before a stressed syllable. Thus, the “P” in “Pet” or “Particle” or “Computer” or “Reportedly” is aspirated, but the “P” in “Apple” or “Reputation” is not. Say these words and you’ll see what I mean. There’s more force behind the aspirated P’s. In the new accent, I think, people are aspirating consonants beyond what’s otherwise typical in American English (so that, for instance, the final G of an -ing verb can sound almost like a K).

I haven’t personally heard this accent in offline life — only on social media. It’s particularly visible among lifestyle influencers. And, anecdotally, the people who speak with this accent (or who have this accent feature) tend to be young, white American women. None of this is surprising. Accents aren’t only geographical phenomena. They are linked to age, gender, race, class, and culture. The internet is a place (actually, an agglomeration of places) and is full of its own subcultures. And so, like any other place, it has accents of its own.

Moreover, while America and the world in general once displayed more place-based linguistic diversity, meaning that accents and dialects used to differ significantly between cities and states, and even block to block, mass media now means that this diversity tends to be temporal rather than spatial. That is to say, people in Texas and Canada now speak more similarly to one another than they once did, since they use the same social media platforms, watch the same movies, etc. But the internet accelerates the spread of new language features, so that, even if people speak more homogeneously across distances, they speak more heterogeneously over time periods. Thus, new accents and features crop up in corners of the internet very frequently, and then spread quickly to the wider population.

I wanted to know if other people had noticed this aspiration-based influencer accent, and I hoped that someone (maybe a linguist with an interest in phonology) could tell me more about where the accent comes from, and whether I was right in ascribing it to aspiration. So I described the accent on TikTok and explained who, in my experience, displays this accent feature.

A few people offered fascinating insights, pointing out that this feature is similar to some Slavic accents or speculating that it might have developed as a way to navigate certain tech issues. But, overwhelmingly, comments on the video were hostile and mocking. Mostly, people told me, in so many words, that I was being a hypocrite. How funny for me to make fun of this influencer accent, when I myself “talk like an influencer”! There was a lot of “Like you’re doing?” or “I’m gonna hold your hand when I say this.” My first reaction was to get annoyed and offended. Even if you study linguistics, even if you spend a lot of time cultivating an understanding that accents are morally and intellectually neutral, even if you spend all of your time thinking about how people develop emotional associations with given linguistic shifts, even if you have a very thick skin from years of being a young woman talking online, it is hard not to feel frustrated by hundreds of strangers telling you that they hate how you speak.

But I quickly got over myself and became interested in the content of the comments, which, I realized, revealed quite a lot about how people think about language and language change.

In general, people assumed that I was being denigrating. This is why I was coming off as hypocritical: how could I call other people’s accents annoying when some people find my accent annoying?¹ But the fact is, I wasn’t complaining about the accent. I never said it was annoying. It’s fine if I have the accent—in fact, it’s very likely that many more of us are going to start developing it, because this is just how language change works. If I don’t have it yet, I will in five years. Changes start on a small scale and then ripple out, which is why a slang term can originate in LA or Mexico City and find its way into the vocabulary of a speaker in Sydney.

I wasn’t mocking the accent. I was trying to neutrally describe it. It is fine with me if I have this accent.

So why was my description taken by so many to be a complaint? And why, I found myself wondering, is it so hard to describe language change in a neutral manner?

It feels nearly impossible to speak about language change without others thinking you’re complaining, or without others using it as a chance to complain themselves. This neutrality is more or less doable only in one context—that is, the context of academic linguistics, where calling someone a prescriptivist is the greatest possible insult. After all, it is hard to be angry about sound change when you have learned to describe and notate it with phrases like “unvoiced alveolar fricative.” I am not insulted when men on the internet point out that I have vocal fry, because there is something about the mere act of sitting down in a classroom and taking notes on vocal fry (or “creak,” or “laryngealization” as it’s technically known), learning about what it means and how it manifests in different languages, understanding that in English it was until recently associated primarily with male British upper-class speakers, that eradicates embarrassment. Learning linguistics is an antidote to language-based shame, not only because one comes to understand that variety is inevitable, but also because, for better or worse, academia feels legitimizing. It’s fine that I talk like a dumb girl because I have the ability to contextualize my own speech in unimpeachably bloodless, technical, decidedly non-young and non-girlish academic jargon. If I call you an asshole for making fun of my vocal fry, then I am proving your point. If I point out that laryngealization is phonemic in Danish, then I’m disproving your point—I’m not as much of an airhead as you think, clearly! It’s ok to talk like a girl if you can also talk like a professor.

Mere description of language change is automatically assumed to have a negative valence. This reminds me of something that people often say about smell. Scholars of smell, or critics interested in perfumery, frequently point out that we lack a neutral language for describing smell in English. If I say “it smells,” then the “bad” is implied. I have to go out of my way, and say “it smells good,” or else you will assume that I am speaking denigratingly. Similarly, one must go well out of one’s way to assert that a description of language change is not denigrating. “You have an accent,” implies bad accent, much as “You have a smell” implies you have a bad smell. Accent and smell are both emotionally and politically charged arenas, and judgments of each are moral as well as aesthetic. To smell bad, or to sound bad, means that you, as a whole, are bad.

In high school, my best friend told me that I had a smell. Initially I was insulted: it is not good to smell. The bad is implied. She set me straight, and told me that everyone has a smell (much like everyone has an accent), and that she liked my smell. It was, she said, like salt and baby powder. Evidently, she had a stronger nose than me, or a more observant personality, or both. The initial insult faded away, and instead, I felt deeply loved. How moving, to have a friend who pays such close attention to you that they can describe you back to yourself in terms you would never have expected! How lovely, that all along my friend was moving through the world noticing the people around her in this particular way—and how sad that I’d never thought to pay attention to how others smelled, except, maybe, to complain about it!

One of my favorite novels ever written is Patrick Süskind’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer. This is a book about a man with a supernatural sense of smell. But because of this, or in spite of it, he lacks a scent of his own: he smells like nothing at all. Another of my favorite novels ever written is Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. This is about a man who listens to others speak day in and day out, hearing their worries and problems and hopes, but who never speaks himself: he is a mute. In Perfume, to smell someone is an act of love. In The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, to hear someone’s speech is an act of love. But to have no smell and to have no speech, to be odorless and accentless, is both a superpower and a tragedy.

It saddens me that the mere description of an accent is taken, by most people, to be an insult or a jab. I would like to live in a world where a description of someone’s speech is assumed to be an act of love, in much the same way that my friend’s description of my scent felt like an act of love. This is, to me, the real joy of linguistics, and the reason that—despite the bloodless jargon of the linguistics classroom—it cannot be truly neutral. Attention is not neutral. On the contrary, to pay close attention to the speech of another person is an act of devotion.

A Note on Smell:

If you’re intrigued by the mentions of smell and scent in this video, I highly recommend following two newsletters focused on perfumery: “Adapted From” by

Tracy Wan

and

FUMES

. I’ve learned a lot from each of these writers. Enjoy!!

1. Interestingly, some people also said things like “but you do this, even the hand gestures/vocal fry/uptalk!” But I never mentioned any of those things, only aspiration, which I don’t actually think is a feature of my own accent right now. In other words, people assumed that I was primarily saying something like “I’ve noticed that young women talk in a way that is distinct and irritating,” and that the actual accent I was describing was secondary—a vehicle for expressing misogynist irritation.