The linguistic divide - The Globe and Mail

This was in the Globe and Mail this morning

MARINA JIMÉNEZ

From Friday's Globe and Mail

April 17, 2009 at 9:04 AM EDT

A Botox treatment can mask your age - but the way you speak gives you away.

A University of Toronto sociolinguistics professor has discovered that those under 40 are much more likely to use the word "like" when narrating a story, than those over 40. As in "I'm like, 'What are you talking about?' " instead of "I said, 'What are you talking about?' "

This linguistic difference is a key demographic marker, says Sali Tagliamonte, who has published a paper exploring the use of "be like" in the scholarly journal Language Variation and Change.

"The use of 'like' is a watershed. It captures a change in how people narrate their stories," she says. "We think it came from California in the 1980s and it gained prestige as a trendy and socially desirable way to voice a speaker's inner experience."

She and her research team painstakingly analyzed more than 300 hours of recorded conversation with 200 volunteers and identified subtle differences in speech pattern and storytelling.

"The new trends reflect the evolution of Canadian society," Prof. Tagliamonte said.

The volunteers all grew up and live in Toronto, one of the world's most multicultural cities, and varied in age from under 17 to 80.

The study found that the rate of use of "be like" was, for example, 65 per cent for 17- to 19-year-olds, 29 per cent for 30- to 34-year-olds, 18 per cent for 35- to 49-year-olds, and 0 per cent for 80-year-olds. "People are really identifiable by the way they speak," she concluded.

Older people often criticize the use of "like," which peaks at about the age of 30. But it doesn't reflect stupidity or poor grammar - it is merely a recent linguistic trend. In fact, Prof. Tagliamonte says, it's not really so new any more, and has reached a saturation point in common conversation. In formal linguistic parlance, the use of "like" is called a "quotative" - a storytelling device used to indicate who said what.

There are several other conversational markers that divide the generations. For example, the under-40 set also tends to use the word "stuff," as in "I have the stuff in my bag," and "right" as a sentence ender, for example, "It's a girl, right."

Also popular is the use of "so" as an intensifier ("it's so cold outside"), and the use of have as a "deontic modal," as in "I have to go." Prof. Tagliamonte has identified these trends as she records the particular characteristics of "Canadian" English. Canadians are known to follow both American- and British-style English, she says, and are best known for lexicon such as eh, tuque, two-four (beer), washroom and mickey (small bottle of liquor).

But the professor has found other, more subtle trends, including the development of the tense system and the use of qualifiers. The under-40 set in Toronto is more likely to say "I'm going to the store" instead of "I'll go to the store," she notes. As well, Canadians say "I have to go to the doctor," whereas those born in Britain say "I've got to go to the doctor." There is not a lot of social class differentiation in Canada by speech, she adds, unlike in Britain.

"This research matters because we can look at who the agents of change in language are, and what direction the language is going in," she says. As Canada's demographics shift, so too does its language. Some words or expressions will be lost forever. "No one says doth, shall, shan't or sayeth any more," she says. "Some people mourned this loss."

Prof. Tagliamonte's childhood inspired her to study sociolinguistics. She is Italian on her father's side, but it was the speech patterns of her maternal relatives in rural Southern Ontario that intrigued her. "The accents my aunts and uncles had were mind-boggling to me," she recalls. "They sounded alien. They would say things like 'I come up from the garden and I seen a skunk.' They used very old features."

These days, she eavesdrops on her four children, aged 5 to 17, hoping to discover the latest teen bon mot. Her current research project - to be published this fall - involves studying how gays and lesbians act as agents of linguistic change.

It's so, like, interesting.