Girls Sound "More Aggressive" On Social Media

OK, so we already know that American women are on the forefront of linguistic innovation: we vocal-fry just like Ke$ha! And the whole world fries with us. Or something.

But the ubiquity of Facebook and Twitter have continued to advance the way young women communicate. Specifically, it makes even the politest and chatty of them sound like David Mamet characters, according to a linguistics professor at Oxford who spoke to Newser. She posits that this generation of teen girls, having grown up with texting, Gchattng and Twitter, have less time to deliberate their words.

If you’re sending text messages all the time, you’re having conversations that are like shorthand,’ she added. ‘To any outsider, there aren’t those pleasantries that there were when you wrote a letter to someone. It’s not intentional… curtness tends to be short, sharp and to the point. But it’s a fine line between being curt or aggressive and being straightforward.”

(This only applies to social media, mind; it’s not like we’re running around being fast-talking old-timey newsreporters out loud, because that would sound silly.)

As a result, girls of this generation—who are in contact with each other via text/Gchat more than males—communicate in a different, faster way than their parents and job supervisors. But given their influence on vocal patterns in the past 10 years: vocal fry, high rising tonal intonation (that thing where everything you say sounds like a question), perhaps our brusqueness on chat will rub off and next time your mom Gchats you to remind you to bring your dirty laundry home she signs off with a “kthxbye.”