Style-Shifting in Vlogging: An Acoustic Analysis of “YouTube Voice”
Keywords:
style shifting, intraspeaker variation, sociophonetics, regional dialects, UK English
Abstract
This article demonstrates evidence of context-related style-shifting on YouTube. This was achieved by comparing the vowels of vlogger Phil Lester in multiple contexts (a solo vlog, collaborative vlog, gaming video, and live video). A mixed-model regression found significant differences between the more scripted solo vlog context and the less scripted gaming and live videos: in the former, Lester’s FOOT/STRUT merger was reduced, and in the latter he showed considerable variability in his employment of the TRAP/BATH split. It is argued that this results from greater attention paid to level aspects of his Northern accent for an international audience.
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Wells, John C. 2010. English Places [Blog]. Accessed 6 February 2017, http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/englishplaces.html
AmazingPhil. 2015a. Phil reacts to his old videos [YouTube video]. Accessed 16 June 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPa2HqBvtjc
AmazingPhil. 2015b. Phil is not on fire 7 [YouTube video]. Accessed 16 June 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIPSjTmPmo
Ault, Susanne. 2014. Survey: YouTube stars more popular than mainstream celebs among U.S. teens [Online article]. Accessed 16 June 2016, http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/survey-youtube-stars-more-popular-than-mainstreamcelebs-among-u-s-teens-1201275245/
Barbu, Stéphanie, Aurélie Nardy, Jean-Pierre Chevrot, and Jacques Juhel. 2013. Language evaluation and use during early childhood: Adhesion to social norms or integration of environmental regularities? Linguistics 51(2):381–411. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling-2013-0015
Bates, Douglas, Martin Maechler, Ben Bolker, and Steve Walker. 2015. Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01
Bauer, Laurie. 1994. Watching English Change. London: Longman.
Beck, Julie. 2015. The linguistics of “YouTube voice” [Online article]. Accessed 16 June 2016, http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/12/the-linguistics-of-youtube-voice/418962/
Bell, Allan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13(2):145–204. https://doi.org/10.1017/s004740450001037x
Bell, Allan. 1992. Hit and miss: Referee design in the dialects of New Zealand television advertisements. Language and Communication 12(3–4):327–340. https://doi.org/10.1016/0271-5309(92)90020-a
community channel. 2011. (We Broke Up) [YouTube video]. Accessed 28 September 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq91hmSGUcE
Coupland, Nikolas. 1984. Accommodation at work: Some phonological data and their implications. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 46:49–70. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl.1984.46.49
Coupland, Nikolas. 2001. Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in Society 30(3):345–375.
Crystal, David. 2001. Language and the Internet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DanAndPhilGAMES. 2015. Forest fire!!!—Phil plays Shelter final episode [YouTube video]. Accessed 16 June 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ph54okW5Tok
Dan and Phil Survey. 2015. [Tumblr]. Accessed 16 June 2016. http://danandphilsurvey.tumblr.com/results
Disner, Sandra Ferrari. 1980. Evaluation of vowel normalization procedures. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 67(1):253–261. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.383734
Fabricius, Anne. 2002. Weak vowels in modern RP: An acoustic study of happY-tensing and KIT/schwa shift. Language Variation and Change 14(2):211–237. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0954394502142037
Ferragne, Emmanuel, and François Pellegrino. 2010. Formant frequencies of vowels in 13 accents of the British Isles. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 40(1):1–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025100309990247
Frobenius, Maximiliane. 2011. Beginning a monologue: The opening sequence of video blogs. Journal of Pragmatics 43(3):814–827. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2010.09.018
Frobenius, Maximiliane. 2014. Audience design in monologues: How vloggers involve their viewers. Journal of Pragmatics 72:59–72. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.02.008
Garrett, Peter. 2010. Attitudes to Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Garrett, Peter, Nikolas Coupland, and Angie Williams (Eds.). 2003. Investigating Language Attitudes: Social Meanings of Dialect, Ethnicity and Performance. University of Wales Press.
Hawkins, Sarah, and Jonathan Midgley. 2005. Formant frequencies of RP monophthongs in four age groups of speakers. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 35(2):183–199. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0025100305002124
Hughes, Arthur, Peter Trudgill, and Dominic Watt. 1979. English Accents and Dialects. London: Edward Arnold.
Hutchby, Ian. 2014. Communicative affordances and participation frameworks in mediated interaction. Journal of Pragmatics 72:86–89. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.08.012
Irvine, Judith T. 2001. “Style” as distinctiveness: The culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation. In Style and Sociolinguistic Variation, ed. P. Eckert and J. Rickford, 21–44. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Kamata, Miho. 2006. A socio-phonetic study of the DRESS, TRAP and STRUT vowels in London English. Leeds Working Papers in Linguistics and Phonetics 11. Accessed 6 February 2017, http://www.leeds.ac.uk/arts/download/1360/kamata2006
Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Labov, William. 1984. Field methods of the project on linguistic change and variation. In Language in Use, ed. J. Baugh and J. Sherzer, 28–53. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Ladefoged, Peter, and Keith Johnson. 2014. A Course In Phonetics. Boston: Cengage Learning.
Lange, Patricia G. 2007. The vulnerable video blogger: Promoting social change through intimacy. The Scholar and Feminist Online 5(2). Accessed 28 September 2016, http://sfonline.barnard.edu/blogs/lange_01.htm
LessAmazingPhil. 2017. Trying gummy candy sushi! (Live) [YouTube Video]. Accessed 6 February 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrcDNb9Xmdc
Montgomery, Martin. 1988. D-J talk. Media, Culture and Society 8(4):421–440.
Moor, Peter, Ard Heuvelman, and Ria Verleur. 2010. Flaming on YouTube. Computers in Human Behavior 26(6):1536–1546. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2010.05.023
PhanShows. 2015. Phil’s younow—December 6th, 2015 [YouTube video]. Accessed 16 June 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2qB-7uvlrg
Philip DeFranco. 2015, February 5. Man cuts off nose to look like red skull... [YouTube video]. Accessed 10 November 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KMqyJTqsmk
R Core Team. 2016. R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Accessed 6 February 2017, http://www.Rproject.org
Rheingold, Howard. 2000. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.
Rosenfelder, Ingrid, Josef Fruehwald, Keelan Evanini, and Jiahong Yuan. 2011. FAVE (Forced Alignment & Vowel Extraction) [Programme suite]. Accessed 28 September 2016, http://fave.ling.upenn.edu/
Schilling-Estes, Natalie. 1998. Investigating “self-conscious” speech: The performance register in Ocracoke English. Language in Society 27(1):53–83. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0047404598001031
Shields, Mike. 2013. PewDiePie has 12 million YouTube bros and no advertisers [Online Article]. Accessed 16 June 2016, http://www.adweek.com/videowatch/pewdiepie-has-12-million-youtube-bros-and-no-advertisers-151955
Sloetjes, Han, and Peter Wittenburg. 2008. Elan [Annotation tool, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Language Archive]. Accessed 28 September 2016, http://tla.mpi.nl/tools/tla-tools/elan/
Socialblade. 2016a. Zoella [User analytics website]. Accessed 10 November 2016, http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/zoella280390
Socialblade. 2016b. Danisnotonfire [User analytics website]. Accessed 10 November 2016, http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/danisnotonfire
Socialblade. 2016c. Crabstickz [User analytics website]. Accessed 10 November 2016, http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/crabstickz
Socialblade. 2016d. Charlieissocoollike [User analytics website]. Accessed 10 November 2016, http://socialblade.com/youtube/user/charlieissocoollike
VidstatsX. 2016. VidStatsX—Phil Lester stats [Website]. Accessed 10 November 2016, http://vidstatsx.com/AmazingPhil/youtube-channel
VlogBrothers. 2008. Nerdfighting in 2008, Pakistan, and Hillary Clinton [YouTube video]. Accessed 28 September 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOHqknrPQZgCite
Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English, Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wells, John C. 2010. English Places [Blog]. Accessed 6 February 2017, http://phonetic-blog.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/englishplaces.html
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26-Mar-2017
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