The Vocal Fry Epidemic

[East_coast]

How do you stop your kids from catching the vocal fry?

If you're not sure what it is you should watch more youth TV

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvf1Co6fpNU

[East_coast]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY_6fFdRnik

[R.O.]

I think I've been hearing this affectation for at least ten years, and I'm glad to learn it has a name.

To me, the sound suggests a kind of ironic laughter, as if the speaker is gently mocking herself or what she is saying, and is inviting the listener's complicity in that laughter.

I think it could be, and is meant to be, sexy - because the only people who do it are young women, and so the speaker is reminding you that she is young, and a woman.

Other people will know more about this, but in England in the last twenty or thirty years there have been the rise in the use of Australian questioning intonation, and the rise in the use of glottal stops. Both trends were unopposable.

How do you stop your kids from catching the vocal fry? The question may be rhetorical, but if not we know the answer very well: You can't.