Beware the Millennial Aussie Expert Voice

The word “millennial” has come to mean very little at this point. To many, it just stands for “young people”. To some, it’s become a synonym for “woke”. Considering that the oldest millennials are actually 40 years old now and run the gamut from performative wokesters to apolitical normies to Pepe trolls , I feel like “millennial” has now become a catchall receptacle for “any change in the culture which I don’t like”.

One of the most common complaints about millennials is the way that we speak. Particularly two features of speech: vocal fry and uptalk. There’s a certain gendered component to the criticism, as linguistics Youtube rock star Erik Singer explains, especially when it comes to vocal fry. Since that creak is actually a natural linguistic feature of some languages and doesn’t actually damage the vocal tract, I’m not very interested in vocal fry. Uptalk, on the other hand, is—as millennials might say—problematic.

I recently recorded an interview with an academic for a story I’m working on. Both of us are millennials and, listening back to the recording, it was easy to tell. We were both peppering our questions and answers with regular High Rising Terminals, going up in pitch at the end of declarative sentences when we should have been going down.

(Though I wasn’t born there, I also have the added problem of being Australian. This means that even though I don’t really sound very Australian—my diphthongs and vowel sounds are quite boring-sounding and not at all the vocal tours de force that you hear in a typical Aussie accent—I did pick up the knack for the rising inflection.)

I’d like to just brush away the objections to uptalk the way I could with vocal fry. Unfortunately, it’s not so easy. I noticed that it does cause problems in audio production. When editing tape for a podcast, especially from an “expert voice”, you want statements to sound complete. Ending a fragment of tape with a rising tone builds anticipation for something else to follow. It’s like ending a sentence on a comma—you expect something to follow but it never does, so it feels unfinished.

Maybe we’ll all have to treat tape like Radiolab does, as a percussive audio layer interspersed with voiceover and bleeps and bloops, rather than a concrete chunk of sound.

Or maybe we can just take the easy way out and only use British experts.