Because Language:The Evolution of Slang and Dialects

By Kathleen Laufenberg

Human languages have never been static entities. The grammar,

vocabulary, and dialects of every language on the planet evolve with

the society that uses it. However, while the evolution of language is

a linguistic fact, the processes and catalysts involved in it are more

difficult to define. For example, examine the changing use of the

word “dude.” In the 1870’s, a “dude” was a well-dressed (or overly-

dressed) man from a metropolitan area; in the 1980’s, the word morphed

in to a term for casual greetings between peers – “Hey, dude!”1 How

did this change of meaning occur, and why? Language use evolves over

time within society in three main stages: the creation of slang terms

and language dialects by subcultures due to geographic and social

boundaries, the early adoption (comparatively speaking) of linguistic

changes by younger age groups (especially young females,) and the

increasing adoption and usage by individuals within a society until

the change reaches its saturation point.

David M. Hummon defines slang as, “language that is not accepted

as ‘good, formal usage’ by the majority of the public and is largely

1 Robertson, Kelly. "The Evolution of Slang," The King's Page, August 3, 2013.

part of oral, rather than written, expression.”2 Slang terms often

originate from individual subcultures which use slang as a sort of

“in-speak” with other members of the “in-group.”3 However, there is a

difference between general slang and subcultural slang. General slang

terms are “widely recognized in the culture” while subcultural slang

terms are “only intelligible within a smaller social world.”4 In cases

where a subcultural slang term becomes useful to society on a larger

scale however, such words will expand in use beyond a specific group

and gain wide-spread acceptance within society.5 Race, gender, sexual

orientation, education, industry, income, and other differentiating

characteristics create subcultures within a society. These various

subcultures then increase demand for new slang terms deemed necessary

for clear communication by those specific groups.

One American subculture with a predisposition for the creation

and use of slang terms is the population of undergraduate college

students. College slang is expressive, on occasion seemingly

offensive, and has an informal style of expression and student-centric

orientation.6 College students are typically young, and they use both

2 Hummon, David M. "College Slang Revisited: Language, Culture, and Undergraduate Life." The Journal of Higher Education 65, no. 1 (January/February 1994): 75-98.

3 Zarella, Dan. "How and Why Slang Spreads." DanZarrella.com. 2008.4 Hummon, 77.5 Zarella.6 Hummon, 77.

general slang (which is already in widespread use within American

society) and subcultural college slang terms, used for “communicating

the values of undergraduates rather than the concerns of other adults

in and outside the academy.”7 There are four general categories which

all slang use by this subculture can be grouped within: general slang,

regional slang, national collegiate slang, and local college slang.

The relationships between these four types of slang can be represented

visually below:

SLANG USE BY AMERICAN COLLEGE STUDENTS

National Local

ALL ADULTS General

slang

Regional

slang

UNDERGRADUATES

ONLY

National collegiate

slang

Local college slang

Design for table inspired byHummon..

This table shows how the geographic and social boundaries of

slang terms can differ. The first category, general slang, is used 7 Hummon, 77.

widely among the American public. Many of these terms have dictionary

definitions despite their origins as slang. This includes words such

as babe, bitch, brown-noser, dick, jerk, womanizer, and yuppie.8 Other terms used by

students are collegiate slang, which is generally used geographically

but socially bounded: dork, dweeb, god, god squad, granola, monger, and party

animal.9

Slang can also be geographically bounded. In fact, when Hummon

analyzed the slang used among college students, he found that the

great majority of college slang is local rather than general. At Holy

Cross College, a Catholic Liberal Arts College in Notre Dame, Indiana,

72.3% of slang usage was classified as local slang, while only 27.7%

was placed in the general slang category.10 However, he also notes

that Holy Cross College might be an environment which encourages the

development of more localized slang terms “if one assumes that the

small, private, socially homogenous residential college provides a

more coherent and exclusive social context for the elaboration and

transmission of student culture.”11 When comparing the different rates

of use of different types of college slang at Holy Cross (a small

private liberal arts institute) to the University of California at

Davis (a large public university) the differences in slang usage based8 Hummon, 80.9 Hummon, 81.10 Hummon, 82.11 Hummon, 81.

on local differences become more pronounced. Slang terms about campus

life make up 33.7% of slang use at Holy Cross, but only 18.1% of slang

use at UC-Davis.12 On the other hand, terms pertaining to personal

attributes make up 40.1% of the slang terms at UC-Davis, but only

27.8% of the terms used at Holy Cross College.13

This assumption based on Hummon’s findings would lead one to the

conclusion that Warren Wilson College, being a small, private,

residential liberal arts college in an isolated environment, would

also possesses an ideal social scene for the development of localized

slang terminology just like Holy Cross. Without any hard data it is

difficult to say. However, international students at Warren Wilson

College admit more difficulty understanding their peers’ informal

conversations outside the classroom than the formal language used in a

classroom setting.14 Jian Zhang, a Chinese international student who

majors in Political Science, says that slang terms at Warren Wilson

College are one of the major language barriers she faces. For

example, when she heard her peers talking about the “Warren Wilson

Bubble,” she did not know the meaning of the term. 15 This is local

collegiate slang used by Warren Wilson students to describe the

relative social isolation experienced by students on campus due to 12 Hummon, 85.13 Hummon, 85.14 “Jian Zhang Interview.” Personal interview by author. November 8, 2013.15 “Jian Zhang Interview.”

Warren Wilson’s remote location and the students’ resulting lack of

outside knowledge and social interaction. Students often blame the

“Warren Wilson Bubble” for their ignorance of current events or

popular culture. There are many terms like this at Warren Wilson

College, and mastering their various standard definitions, social

meanings, and cultural connotations requires an understanding of the

English language that goes beyond mere academic fluency.

Slang use among undergraduate college students can provide

insights into the use of slang as a whole in English-speaking American

society. It ranges from the widespread use of general slang

throughout society (which is neither socially nor geographically

bounded), on to the regional or general subculture slangs that appeals

to the shared interests and experiences of a large subset of

Americans, and culminates in the “highly localized, socially

circumscribed idiographic terms of small-group culture.”16 The

boundaries imposed on different terms and expressions are a major

factor in their use within wider society and acceptance across

cultural, regional, and societal divides.

These different types of slang are far from categorically static

– terminology that is highly localized can rise to general use. The

more interaction a subculture has with the larger society, the more

16 Hummon, 82.

likely that subculture’s distinctive slang use is to reach societal

saturation and become a general slang term. This happens quite

regularly in many world languages. In English, one recent linguistic

phenomenon that recently underwent this social diffusing is the

“because + noun” grammatical structure.

In traditional grammatical use, the word “because” is a

subordinating conjunction, meaning it connects two parts of a sentence

together into one coherent thought.17 However, in this new slang usage

of the word “because,” it instead functions as a preposition. Here is

an example of the use of the “because + noun” form:

I was awake all night last night because finals.

This new use of “because” has only developed in the last three to four

years.18 It just received a name in July 2012, when two linguists both

independently decided to call it “because + noun” and “because NOUN”

structure.19

Linguist Mark Liberman, who first coined the “because NOUN”

terminology for this slang, states that the structure usually carries

the “implication that a referenced line of reasoning is weak.”20 For

example: “The stock market hit a new low this month because Obama.” 17 Garber, Megan. "English Has a New Preposition, Because Internet." The Atlantic. November 19, 2013.18 Whitman, Neal, and Mignon Fogarty. "Because as a Preposition." Grammar Girl (audio blog), October 18, 2013.19 Whitman and Fogarty, 1.20 Liberman, Mark. "Because NOUN." Language Log. July 12, 2012.

The implication in this sentence is that Obama really did not have

much to do with the stock market’s value dropping so low. Instead,

the structure is used to add dramatic effect to a cause-effect

statement.21 This slang grammatical structure originated in the memes

commonly found within the most popular online communities of internet

subculture.22 The internet has a great deal of interaction with

society at large due to social media websites and the sharing of

online information among individuals. This enabled the “because +

noun” structure to reach a wider audience and gain popularity outside

of the subculture which spawned it, becoming a general slang term used

by a wider audience. As writer Stan Carey puts it: “Because X is

fashionably slangy now, diffusing rapidly across communities.”23 Just

as Hummon predicted, it was the accessibility and practicality of the

“because + noun” form which allowed its use to become socially

acceptable among a wider population.24

Racial subcultures are also a source of slang terminology. For

example, the use of the word “yo” can be traced back to the 1940’s,

where it originated in African American communities in Philadelphia,

Pennsylvania.25 The word first broke into mainstream popular culture 21 Carey, Stan. "'Because' Has Become a Preposition, Because Grammar." Sentence First. November 13, 2013.22 Garber.23 Carey.24 Hummon, 82.25 Robertson.

when it was used in the 1950 film Rio Grande, starring John Wayne.26 A

decade later, the character Goober Pyle (of the popular sitcom The Andy

Griffith Show) used the term regularly, exposing even more of the

population to “yo.”27 However, it wasn’t until the 1970’s that the

term really gained popularity via the Rocky movies, and in the 1990’s

it was incorporated as a common word in urban music and rap songs.28

Since then, “yo” has been a commonly used term in colloquial American

English, with many different meanings depending on the situation.

A slang term refers to a single word or phrase that has different

meaning in a subculture of people speaking a language, but there are

even larger variations in local language use among subcultures. A

dialect is a variety of language shared by a group of speakers.

Instead of just one term, a dialect can differ in many ways, including

word use, phrases, grammar, and pronunciation. Dialects differ

between groups based on a number of characteristics, including one’s

geographic region, group memberships, or socioeconomic status.29 Like

slang terminology, variations in dialects are often geographically

and/or socially bounded. However, unlike slang terms, dialects will

not die out or spread among society based primarily on the social

connectivity of the groups which use them. Linguists are often asked 26 Robertson.27 Robertson.28 Robertson.29 Merriam Webster. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/dialect.

if regional dialects will die out because of technological advances

such as television, commercial aviation, or the internet. The answer

is a definite “no.”30 Technological advances may limit the power of

geographic boundaries to preserve dialects, but geographic distance or

isolation is only part of the larger reason dialects emerged and

continue to exist today – after all, there are many different accents

in immense cities like New York. 31 There is no geographic boundary

standing limiting the interaction of these dialects, so why do they

stay distinctive from one another? The reason for different and

unique dialects is actually quite simple. “Our language expresses who

we are: our complex and simultaneous identities as individuals and

members of society… We want to sound like the people we want

to be like, not like other people from other groups.”32 A study of the

Sui ethnic minority located primarily in rural areas of Guizhou in

Mainland China confirms this assertion. “Sui men, women, and children

maintain the dialect features of their home clans to a high degree

throughout their lives, regardless of any later migration or long-term

immersion in other clan dialects.”33 The maintenance of a home clan

dialect among the Sui serves as a linguistic act of clan identity that

30 Fought, Carmen. "Are Dialects Fading?" PBS. 2005.31 Fought.32 Fought.33 Stanford, James N. "Dialect Contact and Identity: A Case Study of ExogamousSui Clans." Diss., Michigan State University, 2007.

helps continually reinforce clan memberships.34 Dialects serve as a

way for individuals to demonstrate their belonging to a certain group.

We want to sound like the other people around us, and we want to

remember our roots.

This doesn’t mean that dialects do not evolve, change, shrink,

and spread across social groups. Even within a single dialect there

is significant variation. No two people use a language in exactly the

same way. In a sense, each individual speaks their own dialect, or

idiolect.35 Dialects evolve over generations by gaining or losing

speakers, or even being replaced by other dialects entirely.36 Within

a population, dialect continually forms through “chains of mutually

intelligible signal schemes” spanning a population.37 The “signal use

change” between dialects is usually different for each individual

chain, forming indistinct boundaries between dialects.38 This

eventually leads to the transitive linking of mutual unintelligible

dialects as well.39 Through this model of dialect change, one can

trace the origins of Spanish, Italian, and French as “dialects” of

34 Stanford, iii.35 Livingstone, Daniel. "The Evolution of Dialect DIversity." In Simulating the

Evolution of Language, by Angelo Cangelosi and Domenico Parisi, 99-118. London: Springer, 2002.

36 Livingstone, 100.37 Livingstone, 100.38 Livingstone, 100.39 Livingstone, 100.

Latin, or find the origins of Modern Greek language in its Ancient

Greek roots.

If one theoretically wanted to predict the future evolutions of

dialect within languages, the best place to look would probably be

among young urban women. Claire Nance, a linguistic lecturer at

Lancaster University, notes that, “Typically, women are trailblazers

in language change and take up innovative features first, then men

start using them later.”40 One can see evidence of this start and

spread of dialect up to the modern day: the modern English language’s

evolution can be seen real-time in the spread (and dislike,

disparagement, and disappointment from elders) of a linguistic trend

known as “vocal fry.”

Among young, upwardly-mobile women, “vocal fry” is becoming more

and more common. This term refers to the low, raspy voices that young

women have developed in recent years. Vocal fry has gotten a lot of

press lately, and a great deal of it is negative. The distinctive

sound is caused by compressing one’s vocal chords, which reduces the

airflow through the larynx and decreases the frequency of vibrations,

resulting in speech that sounds “rattled” or “creaky” compared to

normally-spoken English.41 Many influential young women in pop culture40 Hogenboom, Melissa. "More Men Speaking in Girls' 'Dialect', Study Shows." BBC News. December 5, 2013.41 Arana, Gabriel. "Creaky Voice: Yet Another Example of Young Women's Linguistic Ingenuity." The Atlantic. January 10, 2013.

have used or still use vocal fry, including Zooey Deschanel, Kim

Kardashian, and Britney Spears.42

Often, these new linguistic trends in dialects are viewed

negatively by older generations using previously established

linguistic dialects. NPR’s Bob Garfield called the phenomenon of

vocal fry “vulgar,” “repulsive,” “mindless,” “annoying,” and “really

annoying” over the course of a single 26-minute podcast on the topic.43

Despite this rather harsh reaction, the widespread annoyance of

certain demographics is doing little to stem the tide of vocal fry in

the voice patterns of young women. Amanda Hess writes, “Young women

could work to flatten their speech patterns to conform to Garfield’s

own NPRish affectation… So why do we instead insist on speaking in

ways that old men find so objectionable?”44 In the end, the answer

boils down to one simple fact: young women don’t care what old men

think of their speech patterns. The way it is perceived among their

peer circles is far more important.

The 21st century’s reluctance towards vocal fry has been likened

to the reception of another linguistic phenomenon which is only mere

decades old: “uptalk” or the “valley girl” dialect. This speech

42 Arana.43 Vuolo, Mike. "Lexicon Valley Discusses the Rise of Creaky Voice or Vocal Fry Among Young American Women." Slate.com. January 2013.

44 Hess, Amanda. "Why Old Men Find Young Women's Voices So Annoying." Slate.com. January 7, 2013.

pattern first rose to prominence in the 1980’s and also received

negative reactions from many language purists.45 “Uptalk” is

characterized by a rise in pitch at the end of sentences, similar to

the rise in tone denoting a question rather than a statement. It is

difficult to know exactly where and when the “valley girl” dialect

started, but Professor Amalia Arvanti of the University of Kent

hypothesizes that the origins may lay in a pitch pattern found in many

different varieties of English, used when the speaker is

simultaneously making a statement and indirectly asking the listener

to confirm if they are “with you” in the conversation.46 Non-speakers

of the dialect typically seem to assume a speaker who uses uptalk is

“insecure, shallow, or slightly dim.”47 Laurie Fendrich admits that

the “Valley-Girl Lift,” as she names it, is a speech pattern she

reviles: “In general, I find that turning declarative statements into

questions reveals an unexplainable lack of confidence in one’s

opinions and a radical uncertainty about one’s place in the world.”48

Despite the hand-wringing of language purists, uptalk spread far and

wide. Over the course of multiple decades, the fear, bewilderment,

and sometimes even hatred surrounding the presence of uptalk in a

person’s speech patterns seemed to abate. Mike Vuolo asserts that “we45 Vuolo.46 Arana.47 Arana.48 Fendrich, Laurie. "The Valley-Girl Lift." Brainstorm. March 12, 2010.

somehow managed to endure that frightful fad and beat back the

apocalypse,” referring to the spread and adoption of uptalk by more

English speakers in our society. But there is an issue with Mr.

Vuolo’s statement about uptalk – it is very, very wrong. In fact,

uptalk is still spreading throughout the English-speaking world today.

Recent evidence shows that even though the uptalk phenomenon

hasn’t been making news, this way of speaking is still winning over

new and varied speakers. In fact, a recent study by the Acoustical

Society of America found evidence that uptalk is still spreading

rapidly among younger generations in Southern California, where it

originated.49 At its inception, the “valley girl” dialect was

typically associated with young females from California or Australia.

Nowadays, uptalk is becoming increasingly frequent among men from

these areas as well.50 Amanda Ritchart, a linguist at the University

of California who led the research, stated that “We found use of

uptalk in all of our speakers, despite their diverse backgrounds in

socioeconomic status, ethnicity, bilingualism and gender.”51 Rather

than sounding dim or ditzy to younger generations, uptalk seems to

denote that a speaker is seeking agreement or empathy on a

conversational topic, and that use has resonated with young English

49 Arana.50 Arana.51 Arana.

speakers. Inklings of uptalk speech patterns and word use have

disbursed far and wide, away from the dialect’s roots in Southern

California. Even President George W. Bush and televangelist Pat

Robertson sometimes uses vocal patterns derived from uptalk. One

common instance of this is the near-constant use of the word “like”

throughout statements, even without a comparison or simile. For

example, Pat Robertson once said, “I really believe I'm hearing from

the Lord it's going to be, like, a blowout election in 2004.”52 Uptalk

has quietly seeped into American dialects and speech patterns across

all American social demographics. It likely won’t be leaving our

collective linguistic process any time soon, and by the time it does,

something even more offensive to the older generations will have taken

its place.

Evidence shows that younger generations – and women in particular

– are most likely to detect and begin using new linguistic dialect

patterns like uptalk or vocal fry. In the case of the latter, creaky

voices have already broken into the American pop culture scene where

young people make up the majority consumer demographic. Like the Sui

minority of Mainland China, young people may be using vocal fry as a

cue denoting their membership within a certain social or cultural

52 Hess.

group – in this case, membership of the millennial generation in the

United States.53

Nassima Abdelli-Beruh, a speech scientist and co-author of the

study on vocal fry done at Long Island University, notes that often

hears vocal fry in radio hosts on “Top 40” pop radio stations aimed at

younger listeners, but not on NPR, which tends to appeal to an older

audience.54 Abdelli-Beruh says that young people tend to use a creaky

voice more often when they are speaking with their peers, leading to

the conclusion that vocal fry is used by young women to indirectly

declare themselves as part of a specific social group using vocal fry

speech patterns.55 Statistics from the study she co-authored, which

quantify usage rates of vocal fry among young women, seem to endorse

her communication theory; more than two-thirds of the research

subjects in the study used vocal fry during their recorded readings.56

They are also more likely to recognize the positive social cues hidden

within those dialects, as one comparison of speech with and without

vocal fry showed:

One study recorded a college-aged woman’s voice while speaking inan even tone, and then again when employing the creak. When both

53 Fessenden, Marissa. "'Vocal Fry' Creeping into U.S. Speech." Science Magazine. December 9, 2011.54 Fessenden.55 Fessenden.56 Wolk, Lesley, Nassima B. Abdelli-Beruh, and Diane Slavin. "Habitual Use of Vocal Fry in Young Adult Female Speakers." Journal of Voice 26, no. 3 (May 2012): E111-116.

samples were played for students in Berkeley and Iowa, those peers viewed the affectation as “a prestigious characteristic of contemporary female speech,” characterizing the creaky woman as “professional,” “urban,” “looking for her career,” and most tellingly: “not yet a professional, but on her way there.”57

However, the conclusions that can be drawn from this study are

limited, as the researchers only looked at female college students who

spoke Standard American English.58 Nonetheless, Abdelli-Beruh still

believes the results of the study show that “Maybe this is a social

link between members of a group.”59 If this is the case, older nay-

sayers like Garfield may dislike newer speech patterns among the

younger generations “because it represents the downfall of his own

mode of communication, which is swiftly being replaced by the patterns

and preferences of 11-year-old girls.”60

The evolution of slang terms and language dialects is a never-

ending process, and by extension a never-ending battle between

language adapters and language purists. This linguistic battle is far

from new. An article titled “In Defense of Slang” appears in the

Literary Digest from May 18, 1901, over a century ago. It reads:

All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry. If we paused for a moment to examine the cheapest cant phrases that pass our lips every day, we should find that they are as rich and suggestive as so many sonnets. To take a single instance: we speak of a man in English social relations ‘breaking the ice.’ If

57 Vuolo.58 Wolk, Lesley, Nassima B. Abdelli-Beruh, and Diane Slavin.59 Fessenden.60 Hess.

this were expanded into a sonnet, we should have before us a darkand sublime picture of an ocean of everlasting ice, the somber and baffling mirror of the northern nature, over which men walkedand danced and skated easily, but under which the living waters roared and toiled fathoms below. The world of slang is a kind oftopsy-turvydom of poetry, full of blue moons and white elephants,of men losing their heads and having their tongues run away with them – a whole chaos of fairy tales.61

Evolving slang and changing dialects may be disconcerting to

those who are not a part of the in-group using a certain term or

pattern of speech, but those individuals need only remember that they

too, at some point, were part of the in-group using a newly-minted

word or phrase. Subcultures create new dialects and slang, young

people adopt them, and society embraces or balks at the terms and

patterns as it sees fit – until it doesn’t. This is how our language

evolves and grows and it will continue to do so long after we are

finished our short lives. The reality is that the “Valley-Girl Lift”

will most likely outlive us all, and that isn’t a bad thing. It’s

just one more step in the never-ending process that is linguistic

evolution.

61 "In Defense of Slang." The Literary Digest 22, no. 20 (May 18, 1901): 603.

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