Do you use HRT? More and more people do these days. All over the world, in fact - in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand - and it's on the increase over here, too. Naturally, it's mainly young people that use HRT: teenagers, of course, but more and more pre-teens are doing it as well. There are even some adults who have either grown up using it or who are getting HRT off their kids.
Excuse me? HRT stands for high-rise terminals. What did you think I meant? It's the technical term for "uptalk" - the way kids speak so that every sentence ends with an interrogative tone so that it sounds like a question even when it's a statement? Like that, in fact.
Strictly speaking, uptalk is not brand new. But it is travelling fast and may be reaching critical mass. Even Danny DeVito's son does it, as he told a conference on teenagers hosted by Bill'n'Hill at the White House last year: "He uptalks, my son. You know what uptalk is? You know, like, where they don't end a sentence and they keep talking like this... and if you take the arteries and capillaries and veins in your body and you stretch them all around you can go four times around the world." Then he went on to say: "But uptalk is really interesting. You've probably experienced it, like all the doctors and people who have studied it. I think it comes from kids who want to be heard, and they're afraid that if they stop, adults are going to cut them off."
It's a cute theory, but one "doctor" who has studied the phenomenon is Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. "Linguistic trends always begin decades before they are noticed by the media," he says, citing a 48-year-old college professor friend from southern California who, he says, has always been an "uptalker".
"But I wouldn't be surprised if it went global," says Pinker. "The coolest kids decide to talk that way and it spreads like wildfire."
But where did uptalk actually begin?
According to a 1995 piece in the Houston Chronicle, "It began as a feature of valley speak, the adolescent argot native to the San Fernando Valley and immortalised by the valley girl. But now uptalk has taken on a life of its own." Other commentators have likewise associated uptalk with other features of west coast "mallspeak", such as the slacker habit of self-interrupting sentences with "like", using the intensifier "totally", and responding to any actual question (as opposed to an uptalk interrogative) with "whatever".
I encountered my first real-life uptalker three years ago, when I interviewed the Vancouver-based writer Douglas Coupland. Transcribing the tape, I was struck by the way he seemed to be asking more questions than I did. Coupland's uptalk, shy and unassertive yet self-consciously postmodern, seemed to embody the grunge aesthetic that had filtered down North America's Pacific seaboard from Seattle to San Francisco in the early 90s.
But if, like the idea of Gen X, uptalk originated with Coupland and his circle, does that mean it came from British Columbia? Pinker quashes this notion: "As a Canadian, I can assure you that it did not originate in Canada. Canadians do tend to terminate sentences with 'eh?', which works in a similar way, but it's not the same as uptalk."
The term uptalk was invented in 1993 by James Gorman, a teacher at the NYU school of journalism, who wrote a humorous piece for the New York Times after he'd noticed his students were using the characteristic high-rise terminals. The story was taken up by others - CBS News even sent veteran reporter Connie Chung on to the campuses in search of uptalkers - and the quest briefly turned a young linguistics researcher into a minor celebrity.
In 1991, Cynthia McLemore had been a postgraduate student in Austin at the University of Texas, working on a PhD thesis about intonation in the speech of a university sorority. Two years later she was a world authority on uptalk (albeit Gorman's coinage). What she noted, she says, was that her seminar class used a rising intonation "to signal identity and group affiliation" - in other words, to establish what might be called a linguistic micro-community.
"In the Texas sorority I studied, I suspect this way of talking came from California, since California members had particularly high status in the group. But I have no evidence on this point," says McLemore, with academic circumspection.
Where Gorman devised the lay shorthand "uptalk", McLemore prefers the tools of her trade and alludes instead to "recurrent intonational rises". The jargon here is reminiscent of the phrase "high-rise terminals", but that terminology comes not from California, nor even Texas, but from the other side of the world entirely.
Casual observers of uptalk here in the UK have long maintained that the characteristic interrogative "lift" is typically antipodean. Guardian columnist and broadcaster Mark Lawson, for instance, remarked on the phenomenon in this newspaper in 1998, but claims to have spotted the trend nearly a decade earlier. "My guess was that it was spreading here because of Neighbours and Home and Away, which were what the young watched at the time," he says. "I have no doubt at all that Australian soap is the culprit as the change in the speech of the English young became noticeable within a year or two of those shows topping our ratings." Although he might add that shows like Friends and Clueless are just as likely to be influences now.
But if Californian uptalk comes from down under, what's the evidence? According to Penny Lee, a linguist at the University of Western Australia, "What's called 'high-rising intonation in statements', an increasingly common feature of Australian English, was first noticed as an aberration in an interview situation in 1965." And if you go looking, you can find numerous references to uptalk, or rather HRT, in learned journals of linguistics published in both Australia and New Zealand from the 80s onwards.
But Mark Newbrook, a linguist from Monash University in Australia, differs on the Lawsonian "soap-effect" theory. "Unlike vocabulary changes, phonological changes are not at all well disseminated by TV, movies etc," he says. "Apparently this is because conversation is needed for such changes to occur, and people do not converse with TVs or movie actors. American vocabulary, for example, has spread around much more than have even the most obvious features of American pronunciation."
No one, then, can definitively pin down uptalk's geographical origins, and it may well have started in several different places more or less synchronously. In which case the best guess might be that the intonation owes something to Irish dialects - and so may potentially pop up anywhere in the world where the indigenous accent has (via two centuries of migration) some debt to Irish ancestry. Newbrook's point, though, is that the only reliable mechanism for the transfer of such "phonological changes" as uptalk from one linguistic community to another is by people actually talking to one other. As TV and movie executives might say, you can't beat good old word of mouth.
It definitely works on my six-year-old daughter. While we were on holiday in the US this summer, my kids spent two weeks at that great American childhood institution: camp.
"So what did you do today?" I'd ask my daughter at collection time.
"Well, we went canoeing on the lake? Which was, like, really really fun? And then we had storytelling in the barn? And we all had to tell a story about, like, where we're from or our family or something?"
Yep, she was uptalking: in a matter of days, she had evolved from Estuarial English-speaking Londoner into Californian Valley Girl. Or Aussie Soap Wannabe. Whatever.
But what was interesting was that my son didn't pick it up at all. His standard conversation (about Pokemon) remained in standard English. Many of the commentators, from McLemore and her sorority onwards, have noted that uptalk is a predominantly female tic. But why?
Kate Lock, an actor and voiceover artist who lives in London, is succinct on the boy/girl thing: "I think you get it more with girls than boys because girls talk more - they're capable of conversation," she says. "Girls congregate and talk, whereas boys kick a ball around."
In fact, Lock has firsthand experience via her 12-year-old son, whom she has noticed picking up the intonation, but she also has a professional interest in uptalk. Part of her work involves dubbing voices for English language teaching tapes, and she finds that some producers specifically ask her to uptalk in order to imitate how English is spoken by young people - "We have to represent the way kids talk now." In short, if you're a non-English speaker using the new generation of tapes, the way you will learn to speak is uptalk: it's a seismic shift from the clipped 1950s vowels of yesteryear.
As one might guess from Coupland's espousal of HRT, uptalk is close to the spirit of postmodernism, concerned with advancing relativistic, provisional statements - in contrast with the classic discourse of modernism, pronouncing absolute truths. But not everyone is a fan of the new.
If women always sound like they're asking for approval or agreement, they seem less sure of themselves," says Mary-Ellen Drummond, a communications consultant from Santa Fe in California. Someone in the same line of business, Diane DiResta (author of Knockout Presentations: How to Deliver Your Message with Power, Punch and Pizzazz), is still more categorical.
"I believe it is also an outgrowth of our politically correct society where people tiptoe around their beliefs by monitoring their language," she says. "Uptalk is a form of this politically correct language. It's as if a person's tentative tone allows them to retract the statement if it is met with criticism or disapproval. People are afraid to take a stand."
And she agrees that it's a menace to women trying to clamber the corporate ladder: "Uptalk robs them of credibility and authority. It is especially disempowering for women."
If this sounds rather alarmist, let Deborah Tannen have the last word: "I think teenagers tend to pick this up simply because other teens talk like that and it's catchy and makes them feel good that they're talking like their friends. Most give it up when they get older and don't want to sound like teenagers any more.
"At bottom, ways of speaking are first and foremost ways of sounding the way we think we should sound, given who we are."
I don't think that needs a question mark, do you?