In Defense of the Valley Girl
Think she’s dumb, self-involved, hopelessly vain? As if.
We all know her. She’s the obnoxious girl who says “like” every four seconds while ordering a grande retro iced sugar-free vanilla latte with soy milk. Her voice draws attention to itself: Its pitch is abnormally high, and her statements sound like questions. She is the Valley Girl.
Over the past few decades, the speech pattern of young, upper-middle-class white girls from the San Fernando Valley has evolved into a full-blown accent, or even a dialect. You can hear it all over the English-speaking world: Valleyspeak. People love to hate on it. But have you ever asked yourself why you can’t stand it?
An accent is more than how a person talks. It’s also a marker of social identity. The way you speak can say a lot about where you come from, where you grew up, and, perhaps most important, how much traditional academic education you’ve received. But many of the assumptions we make about people based on their accents are wrong.
Consider the British accent. Most of us are familiar with the “BBC accent,” also known as Received Pronunciation or Queen’s English. Many people consider this to be the most elegant speech pattern in the world.
