When you were a kid did you ever pick up the phone, say hello, and have the person on the other end ask if they could speak to your parents? In just one word, they were able to tell that you weren’t an adult.
If you were a teenager rather than a child, they would likely also draw conclusions about your gender as well. So much can be revealed about us just by a few sounds that come out of our mouths, with no other information available.
Every time we speak, we send out social signals about our age, gender, and other social characteristics, and others pick them up like clockwork.
I got my first mobile phone in the early-2000s, a Nokia 1100, with the standard SMS and call functions and also Snake II - a stark contrast from the smart phones most of us have these days. I remember making my first pre-recorded voice message on my Nokia 1100 when I first got it and I haven't changed the message since.
Two decades later and I no longer sound like what I used to. When I do get the odd voicemail, people still ask me if I got my daughter to record voice mail. Fortunately, I don't rely on my personal mobile phone in my work, but my voice message does get the odd chuckle when people realise that was me.
All voices lower in pitch as children transition to adulthood, but some stay higher than others. Most of the time, these changes are linked to physiological changes in the human body as we age. Sometimes the changes we observe are not physiological, but linked to different social roles. This is why sometimes we might struggle to estimate the age of people who grew up speaking another language, even if they're speaking English.
We see the presence of gender-exclusive or -preferential features associated with different gender roles throughout the world's cultures. In some instances, our ideas about the association between gender and voice might clash with the voices of some transgender people, whose adult voices do not align with the gender they know themselves to be.
As usual, variation is the norm when it comes to sociolinguistics. And whether we are right or not about someone’s age or gender, based solely on the sound of their voice, perhaps the more interesting point, sociolinguistically, is the fact that we make these assumptions at all.
Much like geographic variation, sociolinguists analyse this relationship constituitively where we view that a correlation between linguistic behaviour and a nonlinguistic factor actually helps to bring about and define (i.e., constitute) the meaning of a social category. Often contrasted with an interpretation of variation as reflecting a social category.
While we are interested on age-related and gender-related influences on how people speak, we must also keep in mind that our ideas about what makes up an authentic voice for someone’s gender or age is laden with the social norms that we attach to age and gender themselves.
I wrote this a wee while back when I was teaching the relationship between language and age. This is something I’ve been thinking a lot about now that the way I use language (English specifically) is socially marked as ‘millenial speech’.