Linguistic Anthropology and TV’s ‘Friends’

My students will be amused by a study in the journal American Speech where a linguistic anthropology student at the University of Toronto watched all episodes of the first eight seasons of Friends to try and understand the speech patterns of the characters on the show. Then, conclusions were drawn about the impact of the spoken language on the show and English spoken in the United States.

The research and its results are described in this article in the Chicago Tribune.

From the article:

The study for American Speech focuses on intensifiers that accompany adjectives, as in “really hot” and “so happy.” Roberts [the student] documented every adjective uttered on “Friends” through 2002. He found that about one out of every five adjectives appeared with an intensifier …

The “Friends” data turned out to be different [from British English] — so different. On “Friends,” the word “so” made up 45 percent of all intensifiers, followed by “really” at 25 percent, “very” at 15 percent, “pretty” at 6 percent and “totally” at 2 percent.

This suggests that “so” is on the rise in American English, Tagliamonte [Roberts's supervisor] says.

“I think the movement is towards a new intensifier,” Tagliamonte says. “Either the `Friends’ actors pushed it, or maybe they just picked up on it in vernacular culture and used it. This is just speculation. If they can influence how everybody wore their hair, why not intensifiers?”

Tagliamonte cautions against the simplistic conclusion that “Friends” or any television show leads to copycat language use. Linguists have consistently found that although people may watch the same television shows, they still retain their regional ways of speaking, especially their pronunciation. But Tagliamonte says linguists need to take a new look at whether the media affect our grammar — in this case, our intensifiers.

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