144: Sociophonetics Deep Dive (with Jennifer Nycz, Lauren Hall-Lew, and Kelly Wright)

Why don't we all sound the same? Are some accents easier to learn? And are there reasons for the differences in how people sound and sign, or is it just random?

We use sound and sign to encode information about our age, place, gender, sexuality, and so much more. Sometimes we're not even aware of how we do it. But we're fixing that on this episode with Jennifer Nycz and Lauren Hall-Lew, editors of Sociophonetics: Implications for Phonological and Phonetic Theory.

Timestamps

00:00 Start: Introducing Jennifer Nycz and Lauren-Hall Lew

01:57 What is sociophonetics?

03:01 What's in our own sociophonetic background?

10:10 Why is it always vowels, vowels, vowels?

13:03 Why don't we all just sound the same?

15:09 You can hallucinate accents by seeing a photo

16:00 Sound encodes gender and sexuality

20:57 Chronolects, Boomerlects, and GenX-lects

22:04 Tweens to teens: What to expect sociophonetically?