When people listen to their favorite Influencers talk, they notice that something new has happened. People have been hearing their favorite TikTokers talk in a certain way, and it turns out that this is something that a lot of people see on different social media sites as well.
Professor of Linguistics at the University of Warwick, Dr. Christopher Strelluf, talked about this change in accent and said it could affect the way many other people speak English and the way we speak English in general. This unique speech has been called “Tiktok Voice,” “TikTalk,” and “Influencer speak,” among other names.
A sociolinguist at the University of Edinburgh named Christian Ilbury said, “People are noticing a style becoming associated with influencers or micro-celebrities” that can sound “too informative or colloquial.”
The accent is made up of “linguistic quirks” that were mostly seen on YouTube in the past, but now we’re also seeing it in short videos on TikTok and other social media sites.
The accent that Strelluf talked about was “Uptalk,” which means using a rising tone at the end of a sentence. When you end a statement in American English, you usually drop the accent and when you end a question, you usually raise it. Uptalk does change the sound of a sentence into a question.
He went so far as to say that this wasn’t a new accent or language, but rather the way that the English language and accents are shown on social media changing over time.
Experts also said that the fact that so many young people use TikTok could change the way they speak as adults and could change the English language for years to come. While they did say that this wasn’t a new thing, they did say that this “uptalk” was first seen in “Valley Girls” and that this is how they talked, so it’s not new at all.
Strelluf ended by saying, “Language changes all the time, and women usually lead those changes.” For more than 50 years, sociolinguists have looked at changes in English in areas all over the United States. The one thing that all of these studies agree on is that women are in charge of change in English, no matter what way it is changing.
