There’s a spectre haunting social media. It’s hard to see but easy to hear — a singular synthetic voice known for narrating GRWM vlogs and Sephora hauls, which has now become the official accent of the endless scroll. Coined “TikTalk” or “Influencer Speak”, experts believe it might soon take over the IRL world, too.
Defined as a mix of uptalk, whereby a sentence ends when an upward lilt — like if the speaker was asking a question — and vocal fry, which is an ultra-low pitched, gravely tone favoured by podcasters, the artificial sounding voice has fast gone viral.
Late last year creators began picking up on this strange phenomenon, realising that they too were mimicking the uncanny accent. “I agree that [TikTalk] is unnatural, and it doesn’t make sense,” said vlogger Kara Knight in a TikTok video. “But trying to force yourself [to speak] in a normal cadence while filming a video for the internet, it’s like you’re almost conditioned to talk the way that you’ve been hearing things,” she continued on the impossible-to-escape draw of TikTalk.
@kara.world It leans Kardashian too honestly
♬ original sound - Kara.world
Currently #TikTalk has over 3 million views, and as more and more creators unknowingly code-switch into this filtered voice, the trend appears to be in a new self-perpetuating virtual cycle. One that seems to be driven by one group in particular: girls and young women.
“The most consistent finding in the study of language is that girls notice the patterns of language change that are taking place in the community around them and they accelerate those patterns forward,” says Christopher Strelluf, a linguistics professor at the University of Warwick, who adds that research shows boys are a generation behind girls when it comes to language innovation. “Because there’s all this attention on TikTok when somebody names it we start noticing it and we fall into this confirmation bias process,” he continues on how quickly this influencer accent has proliferated through the web.
Of course, vocal fry and uptalk — the main features of TikTalk — are hardly anything new. Although they are now synonymous with ring lights, #sponcon and the iPhone front camera, celebrity perpetrators like the Kardashian-Jenner clan and Paris Hilton have been speaking like this for well over a decade. “There was a lot of media attention to vocal fry and uptalk around 2010. They're the same kinds of features that people were mocking in valley girl speech. Or when they were saying these teenage girls are listening to Britney Spears and Kim Kardashian and trying to talk like them,” continues Strelluf.
“They’ve both been features of English for some time now,” agrees Louise Mullany, associate professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham, “but now they are being promoted on a new platform. It is something traditionally associated with the speech of young women in particular, and there’s a lot of women on TikTok.”
Critics have been quick to slam the accent as annoying — vapid, even. Belonging to smooth-brained bimbos and dead-behind-the-eyes celebs like Kylie Jenner. With the most popular words uttered in the TikTalk accent being “like”, “umm” and “literally can’t even”. But both Strelluf and Mullany warn against these harmful charges. “Our judgments of language are always judgments about people. It's not OK to be overtly racist, it's not OK to be overtly sexist, overtly classist. But we can still use language,” explains Strelluf. He adds that the perception of people who use uptalk is that they are unsure of themselves, which is just a rehashing of the belief that girls lack confidence.
“We notice the way that people who fit into certain categories talk and then we're critical of those features and come up with a label for it. And ‘TikTalk’ is actually a repackaging of the same critiques young women and girls have been facing for the way they talk for years.”
“There’s quite a few conservative attitudes that language is pure, and there’s only one version of English, which is, of course, absolute nonsense,” says Mullany, who adds that received pronunciation is usually granted this “pure” status, but only because it is “associated with the most powerful people in society”.
Yet, she argues these “purist” attitudes are not born out of any research or historical studies, but is a form of deeply ingrained social elitism and prejudices — and actually “prejudice and misogyny lies at the heart of what's going on here”. Especially since TikTalk is actually a clever strategy if you want to keep an audience engaged.
We tell girls they need to speak up more, but criticise them as being annoying when they do
“People making TikTok videos don't want people to turn off. The most important thing is to keep that audience engagement there. So whether it's conscious or subconscious, people are designing what they're saying for an audience,” explains Mullany. In the case of uptalk she argues that it signals to the audience that the speaker isn’t done speaking and fosters a more intimate vibe even though they're broadcasting potentially to hundreds of thousands or millions of people around the world.
“In conversation analysis that's called a floor holding move,” adds Strelluf. “Uptalk gives speakers a strategy to say, ‘I'm not done. I'm gonna say a little bit more’, and we both understand that strategy, which is giving us another tool for navigating our relationship through communication. Any innovation in the language that gives us that is positive.”
So for Strelluf the backlash towards TikTalk presents a strange paradox: we tell girls that they need to speak up more, but then we criticise them as being annoying when they do. Whereas if we told them to be more assertive, we’d probably berate them for being ‘bossy’.
Or as Mullany says: “We’re damned if we do, we’re damned if we don’t.”
