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Ask-A-Linguist - Message details
Subject: Individual speech and its qualities
Question:
I'm interested in how to go about answering the following. I just need the pointers to start with, as my query is about how to start.

I'm curious as to how any individual's speech becomes unique. One can recognize a particular person's voice sometimes quite easily from very small parts, and during a long association, one can become intimately familiar with it.

So starting from, say, me, I can see an expanding circle of "linguistic consideration"':

My individual voice (the actual tonality)
cadence
mannerisms
nuances
meanings and implications (semantics?)
accent
dialect
the language I am speaking

I am completely naive about the entire field and do intend to read a freshman text on linguistics. However, I would like to know the process (ie as many of the things - jargon/formal terms etc) that might be involved in going from say English as the language spoken and understood by many, to my own individual speech.

I used the term ''linguistic considerations'' because I can guess that at some point it becomes ''speech'' and a different department at the university! and because I am new to the field and would like to know the boundaries.

One way of answering my question might be to list, as I have done above, an expanding set of notions that move from an individual's speech & voice to the language at large. And of course it need not be a simple linear progression.

Appreciate any help,
Anil
College Park, MD

Reply:
First you say:
"I'm curious as to how any individual's speech becomes unique."

but then a paragraph or so later you say:

:So starting from, say, me, I can see an expanding circle of "linguistic consideration"':

So which is it? Do you want to know how individuals come to talk differently from others in their community, i.e. have their own idiolect, or do you want to start with the individual idiolectal differences as a given and know how we come to understand each other.?

Talking envloves motor operations in the mouth, throat, nose,. An obvious difference is the relative length of vocal chords and that is why some people can become Colorado Sorpranos (now, there's a folk etymology for you) and others, like me become bassi profundi. Indeed, I started out with a for a child very low voice and it just got lower.

But we all have, baring physical impedimenta, pretty much the same teeth and tongue. Not though the same size oral cavity. But no two humans move them exactly alike. Since we're all individuals, it follows then that no two people talk exactly alike. Indeed, we don't even talk exactly like ourselves. If you go to the speech lab and utter a given sentence ten times and they make a sound spectrogram of each utterance, you'll find they are not identical. So not only do you not talk like anybody else, you dont even talk like yourself.

But the locus of language is in a society or a speech community. We talk a lot more like the people we talk with all the time than we do like people we rarely or never talk with. And that of course is what gives rise to dialect differentiation in a language -- and ultimately over time, to dialects becoming so different that they are no longer mutually intelligible nor recognizeable as the same language.

U of Cincinnati
Dept of Anthropology

Reply From: Joseph F Foster    click here to access email
Date: Oct-15-2009
Other Replies:
  1. Re: Individual speech and its qualities John M. Lawler    (Oct-15-2009)
  2. Re: Individual speech and its qualities Nancy J. Frishberg    (Oct-15-2009)
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