Different registers in everyday speech and on the phone/in Skype/etc?

[Travis B.]

I have noticed that I personally speak in very different registers when speaking in person as opposed to when speaking on the phone, in Skype, or like, even when speaking to the very same people in both cases. Specifically, I speak in a much more informal, much more progressive, and much more dialectal register in person whereas when speaking on the phone or in Skype I speak far closer to General American. Anyone else do this?

[Pabappa]

Ive worked in retail for such a long time that Ive developed a pretty good salesman's voice, and even have had people tell me Im in the wrong career and should be out making commercials somewhere. I dont really have much of a dialect, since the local nonrhotic accent here has been receding for several generations, but Ive caught myself adopting other people's speech habits, both coworkers and customers, such as having /ə/ for the BET vowel.

[linguistcat]

My personal experience is that I change registers more based on age, and then perceived knowledge of internet culture, if I'm not accounting for anything else. I honestly spend far more time on various internet communities than interacting irl. So if I am speaking to someone offline who is younger than myself, I won't change much from how I'd type online, what slang or references I'd use, etc until/unless they showed signs they don't understand. If it's someone about the same age, I'll assume they probably have less interaction with internet culture but might still have some knowledge and keep any slang or references to things that are well known. People too much older than me, I try to avoid using internet slang with unless they do so first or I know they have contact with internet culture, and then I try to keep it to the same sort they use.

Of course other things like shared interests and the like would also affect this. But that's getting into specific jargon.

[Arzena]

I have noticed that I personally speak in very different registers when speaking in person as opposed to when speaking on the phone, in Skype, or like, even when speaking to the very same people in both cases. Specifically, I speak in a much more informal, much more progressive, and much more dialectal register in person whereas when speaking on the phone or in Skype I speak far closer to General American. Anyone else do this?

Discussion of when I turn on my "gay" voice vs my "straight" voice aside...

On the phone I try for slower, more deliberate speech in General American. Depending on the person I'm talking to, I turn on my Texas drawl. The drawl helps when I do phone canvassing, makes me more approachable and marks me as a Texan calling other Texans.

[Travis B.]

I also notice that I speak in a more informal, dialectal register when I know the person I am speaking to and I can hear them clearly, whereas I speak in a much more GA-like fashion if I do not know who I am speaking to or I am speaking to them over a bad connection.

[Vijay]

I don't necessarily talk differently everyday vs. on the phone or whatever, but I do tend to use an Indian accent with other South Asians. I used to have an Indian accent until my brother trained me to adopt an American one.

[Ares Land]

Same here; I speak in a more formal fashion over the phone, or on Zoom. Depending of course on whom I'm speaking to, though even my wife I think I speak in a more standard way.

I used to have a bit of a Northern accent, which I'll revert to when speaking with other Northerners. I've also picked up turns of phrases from the Franco-Provençal area, bits like using 'y' instead of 'le' over the years, and I'll use these more if say, I'm talking to someone from Lyon.

In English, I never followed the wise advice of my college English teacher, which was to pick either American or British English and stick to it. So generally, I'll use something closer to General American when speaking to Americans and an approximation of RP when speaking to anyone else.

I gather we learned from experience that talking over the phone can be less than optimal, so we'll adopt various strategies to make ourselves understood -- I wonder if there've been any studies on that subject.

[Pabappa]

My first instinct was to agree that the audience matters more than the medium, for me. But outside of extreme comparisons like talking in person with toddlers vs addressing a panel of interviewers for an important new job, I dont think that's true.

There are a lot of speech traits that I exhibit regardless of who's listening. Im a visual thinker, and I think maybe that's why I've always been repelled by obscene language, and even by euphemisms for obscene words such as "crap". Yet other words like "f--ck" which are normally considered much more taboo don't bother me because there is no repulsive visual image (for me at least). I didnt make the connection between visual thinking and avoidance of obscene vocabulary until recently, and its just a hunch. But either way, I've always avoided obscene words, even in private writing like diary entries, except for a brief phase when I was about 15 and I experimented for a few months before going back to my previous speech patterns. Perhaps even then I realized it was odd to avoid saying words like "crap" but to be okay with obscene terms for sex, so I just avoided obscene words altogether. But I think i just figured "that isnt who i am" because i associated obscene words with aggressive speech patterns in general, which Ive never been good at.

Just between my post upthread and today I've discovered Discord and gotten somewhat involved again in YouTube, ... and I've gotten more compliments on my voice. I think its not so much that my voice is deep or has a particular sound .... in fact, I've been told that Im not good at imitating other people's voices in narratives .... but that I carry the prosody well, and can make myself the center of attention whether or not i'm supposed to be. I've become proud of my voice over the years, and I use the same speech style everywhere, and i admit that i know it sometimes further aggravates people who are already angry at me, such as my father, who will go on a long rant only to be met with a short reply from me in the same voice i would use to address a small child.

[Ryusenshi]

I tend to enunciate more clearly on the phone, e.g. using fewer contractions, which can overlap with a higher register. Otherwise I don't think my speech varies much.

As is expected, I use a lower register when speaking to friends or family, and a higher register if I'm speaking in a professional setting, like giving a lecture or whatever. Though I tend to conceptualize it as "speaking well", rather than as a change in "dialect" — my native variety of French is very close to the "standard" anyway.

When speaking in English I normally emulate SSBE/Estuary, at least when speaking with native Anglophones. When I'm with other non-native speakers, I make less of an effort. I also use a completely different accent when singing.

[Raphael]

I'm in the position that almost all my online communication is in English and almost all my offline communication is in German - does that count as a register difference?

[Vijay]

That's just using different languages in different contexts. Still interesting and relevant IMO, though.

Technically, I suppose something similar is true of me. Since I'm at home all the time, my offline communication is generally in Malayalam; however, if I'm talking to other people in my generation (even within the family) or one of our Indian neighbors who doesn't speak Malayalam, then it's in English. That being said, I don't really have much offline communication to begin with. My online communication is overwhelmingly in English, I watch TV in English, and I watch YouTube mostly in English (but I often try to watch something in Malayalam or some Sinitic variety/variety of Chinese).

[Travis B.]

I tend to enunciate more clearly on the phone, e.g. using fewer contractions, which can overlap with a higher register. Otherwise I don't think my speech varies much.

As is expected, I use a lower register when speaking to friends or family, and a higher register if I'm speaking in a professional setting, like giving a lecture or whatever. Though I tend to conceptualize it as "speaking well", rather than as a change in "dialect" — my native variety of French is very close to the "standard" anyway.

I tend to think of it as a change in register, not in that I am "speaking well" but rather that I'm speaking carefully in that I do not perceive my careful register as "better" than my everyday register, and it just happens that "speaking carefully" is closer to GA than my everyday register is, even though there are features which are constant in both (such as how I pronounce /r/ and /l/ and how I pronounce my vowels), so I don't adopt GA wholesale.

[Vijay]

I just remembered a little while ago, my brother once pointed out to me that I have a "professor voice" and a "fun voice," and it's very obvious when I'm switching between them (I myself am oblivious to the distinction while I'm making the switch since it's a subconscious action on my part AFAICT). I think it might come out even in writing sometimes.

People on the (landline) phone often tell me that I sound just like my dad. I think that's in part because they initially mistake my voice for my dad's, especially because I'm trying to end the call quickly (though politely) since it's pretty much always my mom who they're really calling to talk to so I talk in short utterances, plus they don't have visual cues over the phone. I also happen to look basically like my dad except with black hair instead of white hair.

[Ryusenshi]

Comments on this article about Irish accents point to an interesting phenomenon: some Irish children, who normally speak with an Irish accent, switch to an American accent (or an in-between "mid-Atlantic" accent) when playing a character.

I was visiting friends in rural Co. Cork and went with them to a gathering at the local big house. While there I excused myself from the ladies at tea and sought refuge with the smokers outside the kitchen. The grand-daughter of the house, 11 and all of it lived there in rural Cork, was playing outside. You could clearly hear her speaking cultured Southern Irish with other children. Then she came up for a little performance before the guests, ***and immediately switched into a mid-Atlantic dialect almost like General American***. It seems she watched television religiously, and had come to perceive GenAm as the preferred dialect.

As a child, there was a tendency among my peers which used to bug me no end. When assuming a character in a pretend game (be it manipulating a Barbie doll or playing “mammies and daddies” (as we called “playing house”) ) other girls my age would invariably speak in as American an accent as they could when speaking in character. I found it jarring and thought it ruined the verisimilitude of the game, but I was an odd child. I don’t know if they even knew they were doing it, and they all sounded recognisably Irish when not playing pretend, or when playing and not speaking in character.

So, definitely a form of code-switching, reserved for one very specific circumstance only. A performance or dramatic dialect, maybe?

[Vijay]

Actors in Bollywood movies occasionally affect an American accent while speaking Hindi. For example, in this clip, the woman affects (or at least tries to affect) an American accent while speaking Hindi starting at 0:44, though occasionally slipping back into a normal Indian accent. At 1:58, she suddenly completely drops the fake accent, and instead, the guy talking to her mocks her accent. (Then from 3:14 to 5:02, she does one of those stereotypical imitations of Punjabis in Bollywood movies by speaking Hindi but bandying around the few Punjabi words everybody knows. At 5:26, she again affects a more generic foreign accent, probably trying to sound Japanese, but still speaking Hindi. At 7:26, she tries to act Punjabi again). At 9:15, she affects a lighter version of an American accent (while speaking Hindi again).

At least in all of those cases, she was trying to pretend to be a non-native speaker of Hindi. This much more recent song starts with (instrumental music followed by) two lines in American-accented English, two lines in American-accented Hindi, and one line in Punjabi (I think) before finally using regular Indian-accented Hindi in the next line. But then the next two words are "God promise" (though at least in a normal Indian accent this time), which is probably an attempt at a calque on the expression khuda ki qasam ('I swear to God' but literally 'God's oath').

In case anyone was wondering, both movies are absolutely godawful, though the occasional interaction between the actors and random Japanese people in the first one is kind of interesting.