Read the following out loud:
“The fortieth annual Father’s Day Festival will take place in Grass Valley next summer. A lot of people will be going. It will be extremely fun and I think you should consider going.”
Now try reading it like this:
“The fortieth annual Father’s Day Festival will take place in Grass Valley next summer? A lot of people will be going? It will be extremely fun and I think you should consider going?”
The second version is an example of uptalk. If you listen carefully to how people speak these days, you will hear this kind of speech very frequently. I heard a formal presentation recently by a company that was trying to sell us some software and virtually the entire presentation was uptalk.
When a declarative statement is read aloud, the tone is supposed to go down at the end, right? And I’ll bet your mind just imagined an upward voice inflection as you read that last question mark that I typed.
How did this phenomenon of uptalk happen to our beautiful English language? Nobody really knows. It may have started in Southern California with the valley girls. It may have started in Australia. The BBC ran an article about uptalk about a month ago, so it seems the trend has spread even to the very well of the language that we call English.
After the software presentation, I mentioned the uptalk to my colleague and told him how inappropriate I thought it was for such a formal presentation. He sympathized with me but in the process, as I pointed out to him, some of his sympathy was delivered in uptalk!
I guess there’s no escape now. Uptalk is here to stay and the rest of us just have to get used to it. I sure hope it doesn’t spread its cancer into those wonderful Bluegrass lyrics I’m so used to. Edge bands are fine (in moderation, of course). But I don’t want to think about Bluegrass sung as uptalk (although if it’s good, I’d probably like it).
