Creaky voice

[Jonathan Lighter]

Aren't we talking about a kind of creakiness (with nasality, perhaps) that
is widely perceived as a (usu. disdainful and seemingly novel) affectation?

John Wayne's apparently natural creakiness was not at all of this sort -
assuming that the phenomenon, as described above, is a real one?

JL

On Sat, Jan 1, 2011 at 1:43 PM, Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at wmich.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Paul Johnston <paul.johnston at WMICH.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: Creaky voice
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> I used to do some research at Edinburgh with a colleague of mine, a voice
> quality expert, on the dialectal component of voice qualities, both
> phonation type (which creak falls under) and articulatory setting, trying to
> find constraints on phonemic inventory and sound change driven by one or the
> other kind of voice quality.  One thing we found that most Americans have at
> least some degree of creak (as do upper-middle-class Edinburgh speakers).
>  The degree varies, though. and besides nasality, the label of "Long Island
> lockjaw" suggests a close jaw articulatory setting on top of everything
> else, which is definitely not a common American trait   That I do associate
> with upscale speakers from the East Coast of both sexes--if I try to do an
> accent typical of the (male) preppies I grew up with in New Jersey--kind of
> like a rhotic version of ex-governor Tom Kean or William F. Buckley--I
> automatically increase creak, close my jaw and retract my tongue to add a
> bit of pharyngealizati!
>  on.  I don't do anything with nasality (and I'm quite DEnasal, though that
> can be perceived as nasal), but offhand, as a hypothesis, this is where the
> gender divide in upscale New Jersey creakers comes in.  Female speakers have
> the nasality, males don't.  Both sexes, though, seem to have the
> pharyngealization as part of the whole VQ complex.   Midwesterners identify
> this setting as an "affected" voice, though I think there are native
> speakers with this setting, too.
>
> Paul Johnston
> On Jan 1, 2011, at 1:09 PM, David Bowie wrote:
>
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> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       David Bowie <db.list at PMPKN.NET>
> > Organization: Organized? Me?!?
> > Subject:      Re: Creaky voice
> >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > From:    Ronald Butters<ronbutters at AOL.COM>
> >
> >> If you listen closely, you will note that creaking is a common
> >> phenomenon among men, women, teenage boys, and even small parrots.
> >
> > As a professional who regularly does acoustic analysis i might shouldn't
> > admit this, but i've just been glossing past the term "creaky voice" for
> > years now without ever caring to learn what it actually means�hat is, i
> > could have given you a technical definition in terms of what the vocal
> > tract is doing, but i didn't have a connection in my head between that
> > and the sound of it.
> >
> > So this thread got me to finally make that connection, and so i googled
> > lots of stuff on creaky voice, only to find lots and lots of people who
> > absolutely hate it. Me, though? I find it utterly unremarkable (in the
> > social sense湾rofessionally, it'd be interesting to look into). I just
>  > thought that's the way people sound when they talk.
> >
> > (Now i have to figure out if i have creaky voice or not. Students
> > regularly say that i have a "soothing" voice, and given the way non-fans
> > of creaky voice characterize it, soothing may be the conceptual
> opposite.)
> >
> > One thing i noticed in my searching, by the way, is that a lot of people
> > who loathe creaky voice and were kind enough to provide YouTube clips to
> > show what they meant seemed to react most strongly not to creaky voice
> > alone, but rather to creaky voice plus a high degree of nasality.
> >
> > <snip>
> >
> > --
> > Very truly yours,
> > David Bowie
> >
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