Social Saturdays’ posts look at the social side of language. After all, language isn’t just a way to communicate, it is communication.
It was once said that language change cannot be studied in progress. That it was the job of the sociolinguists to come along after the fact and study what happened.
The be like quotative proved that statement wrong.
Be like is this new, annoying quotative which appeared in the English language a few decades ago, and has since become the most widely used quotative for certain demographics.
Instead of saying “I thought, ‘shut up!'”, people say “I was like, ‘shut up!'”. Instead of saying “She said to me, ‘you can’t do that'”, people say “And she’s like, ‘you can’t do that'”.
You’ve all heard it used. You’ve all probably been frustrated by its use – even if you’re a user of the form yourself.
Here’s what we know:
- It’s used in narrative. That mean people use it to tell people a story. If you look at the contexts it’s used in, that makes sense.
- It can be used in present or past historical tense. “I was like” and “I’m like” are both options for something that happened in the past. Past historical is often used to make things seem more dramatic, and this seems to be the rule here too.
- It can be used in first or third person, and for any number of people. “I was like”, “he was like”, and “they were like” all make sense. However, this wasn’t always the case. I’ll go into this a bit more in a bit.
- It can’t be used in second person, but people don’t generally tell stories about someone who was there, so this might just be because of the contexts it’s used in.
- It can only be used for direct quotes. Things like, “and she was like that I need to stop doing that” can’t be used.
- It can be used for bot lexical and non-lexical sounds. That means, “he was like ‘brrr'” makes sense.
If any new form is introduced into the language, it goes through a set of steps. These steps are not uniform, and are very generalised, but the case of the be like quotative has helped sociolinguists learn how changes happen.
Be like started in California, for what linguists can tell. “Valley girls” (a term I was previously unaware of) introduced the form.
Women are generally the innovators of new forms – perhaps because they are expected by society to be “ladylike” and therefore to speak “properly”, perhaps because, throughout history, they have been denied simple things like education, the vote, and so have had to speak properly to become a lady – usually through marriage.
Men are now using the term as much as women – at least in America. We would expect for the next step in the change to be women dropping the form. Once men use it a lot, it becomes stigmatised in a way women don’t want. Initially indicative of middle-class, female American youth, the form will start to be indicative of men in some way. This means that women will try and drop it some something less stigmatised – say go (“and I went…”), which is used in the same way, so is easily adapted to, but is also less stigmatised.
The form then spread to other parts of the English-speaking world; Canada, the UK, New Zealand. It did this in the way you would expect – to the geographically closest first. What’s interesting is that it has maintained all the rules I detailed above, despite only travelling to places like the UK through the television and radio. We’re still not sure how this happened.
One thing we can take from the geographical spread of the form is that changes don’t always occur in the was way. In Canada, be like is used less than in the UK. When they first found this out, linguists thought this mean that the form had traveled to the UK first, and minds, ladies and gentlemen, were boggled. However, it appears that the number of quotatives (words/phrases used to introduce a direct quote) be like had to compete with was higher in Canada than in the UK. In the UK, it initially only had to compete with think, whereas in Canada it had to compete with say and think. This means it had an easier job working its way into British English.
The term started off its life being used for inner dialogue. When someone said “I was like…”, it meant they thought this utterance, they didn’t say it aloud. Then the term spread to non-lexical utterances (“oooh”, “mmm”, “woo!”), which led to it being used for external dialogue – things actually said out loud. Along with this movement came the inevitable movement into third person – when it can be used for things you say out loud, it can be used for things other people say out loud.
What sociolinguists do to study the change in progress is interview people across a range of ages. Assuming the community’s language stays constant, an 80 year old’s speech will be a window into how the community spoke 60 years ago.
They find graphs which show, for an innovative form, more use in younger people, and for a form which is less favoured, more use in the older speakers.
As well as these expected findings, there’s also a peak at the 20-25 range. This is taken to be the age at which an individual’s language is stabilised. This makes sense: they’ve left home, so no longer influenced by the language of their parents, left school, so no longer trying to use “cool” school-aged language.
The rate at which the form is moving into the language is obvious from the graph. This data is from New York; the 57-62 year-olds don’t use a single instance of it, whereas is makes up 20% of the quotatives for 20-25 year olds.
It may be annoying, it may seem impossible to remove it from your speech, but it provides an opportunity for linguists to do something previously impossible: study a language change from start to finish.
Anglophonism 
“and the 57-62 year-olds don’t use a single instance of it”
Of course not! Presumably no-one older than that needed to be studied. Sue
Considering most changes take hundreds of years, this is pretty impressive!
But do these changes last? What about “sort of” and “actually” and other words and phrases which are over-used and than repaced by something else? I’m only an amateur linguist, but it seems to me from observation that slang words/colloquial expressions go out of fashion in decades.
I think the difference is that these are discourse markers. There are some terms which are easily eradicated from vocabulary, and discourse markers are in this category. They’re easily employed to show how cool someone is during a fad, but also easy to get rid of. Quotatives, on the other hand, are not so easy to rid from speech. If you speak to someone in their early twenties, and ask them to tell you about something that happened to them without using be like, they would struggle – it’s not easy to get rid of, but it’s very easy for younger generations to pick up.
I see. :-)
interesting. Rising inflexions at the end of statements are another phenomenon. Popular legend has it that this stemmed from popularity with the young of “Neighbours” in its Kylie Minogue heyday.
Yes, High Rising Intonation. It’s something that’s done a lot in Australia, America and, annoyingly, Glasgow. I notice myself doing it all the time!
ah, I’ve just learnt a difference between inflection and intonation – cheers.
Remember when you were like, “It can’t be used in second person,” and I was like, “is that so?”
Haha, see that’s why I put in the bit about it not being used enough.
Also in the context of “you were in my dream last night, and you were like, “your dreams are crazy”.
All the literature on the form says it can’t be used in second person, but I think it can be – just not in the contexts covered by the recordings.
Reblogged this on Demented Musings.
Great post. The whole “like” business drives me crazy, although I do it myself. The rising inflexions or up-speak is another weird bug. As for young people in my life if I hear them using like in that way I pinch them and it gets the whole issue at least noticed.
Thanks!
I think it’s also the effect of media – as soon as a “cute” local form goes global, it’s deemed very uncute and very horrible. Which is, unfortunately, what happens with a lot of forms – mostly North American – due to media today.
Ohmagawd! I totally can’t believe you’ve, like, never heard of Valley Girls. They were, like, totally rad in the 80s and, like, basically invented how, like, teenagers totally talk today in the US. Plus, their fashion sense was, like, totally tubular. Like, for real. You should check out the movie “Valley Girl” ’cause it is totally about that whole world and stars a super hot Nic Cage as the modern Romeo. And for real, Moon Unit Zappa (Frank’s daughter) has an awesome song called “Valley Girl” that’s, like, a reference book-thing for how to be a rockin’ Valley chick.
[Ed. Nic Cage was never hot in my opinion which is part of the charm of the movie. It also has a great soundtrack if you’re into 80s music. On a related cultural note, it’s interesting that Valley-speak took off as much as it did since, among Californians, it’s generally agreed upon that living in the Valley is the worst.]
I looked it up when I was writing about be like, so I basically know what they are, but had never heard the term before.
I don’t believe it started as inner dialogue, so much as an attempt to mimick. See my entry about “go, be like, be all” here:
but it’s been proven in studies that there was a movement from first to third person, and a parallel movement from inner dialogue to external. I think the movement between these two was mimicry, but it definitely started off as internal dialogue. If you asked someone, a decade ago, which it was used for, they would say internal dialogue; it’s just now the form has spread so much it’s used pretty much all the time, in every sense, so there’s no distinction in people’s brains between internal and external. This can lead to confusion (did she say that, or just think it?) in today’s conversations.
A mere decade ago? Surely you jest. As a southern Californian, let me testify that I remember hearing it used in mimicry in the mid-1970s.
I meant that people now can’t differentiate, because in ten or twenty years, the use has expanded to include every tense. However, before this expansion, the majority of people would say it is mostly used in first person internal dialogue.
You seem to be talking about people who were exposed to it more recently. In its origins, a good forty or fifty years ago or more, “I/she/you was/were like…” introduced a mimicry. It could be self-mimicry, mimicry of the person addressed, or anyone. There was a distinction between “be like” and “say”, in that it introduced something more than words: an acting performance.
I’m sorry if I’m coming across as stubborn; I’m normally someone who, if persuaded on a point, will say “hey, you’re right, I change my stance on this. However, having spent the last few weeks writing a paper due in on Wednesday, involving synchronising a dozen different studies of be, be like and go quotatives, I’m not voicing an opinion, it’s proven fact; be like started off as internal dialect in first person.
If you accept the hypothesis that it started among “Valley girls” (with whom, trust me, I’m pretty familiar), it would make sense for the studies you’re looking at to have interviewed people who lived in southern California in the 1970s. Is that the case? To my recollection, the very broad overuse of “be like” got media attention as part of a “Valley girl” stereotype in the early 1980s, but a more specific use of “be like” was common long before then, for mimicry.
It was first noted by Butters in an editors note on the go quotative, and since then there has been a number of studies in in. I studied where it is thought to have began in California, and also its diffusion to the UK, Canada and New Zealand. It’s true that it hasn’t maintained all of it’s traits as it has spread around the world, but this is one that all the linguists who have studied it seem to be unanimous in; unlike, for instance, the gender-based usage of the form.
Ok, I’m only one guy, and would love to hear from other old southern Californians, but here’s my hypothesis.
I spent four years at UCLA in the 70s. Big film school there, that feeds into the film and tv industry.
If you’ve ever sat around with film freaks describing the progress of a film, the most common construction is: “It’s like…, and then it’s like…., and then he’s like…., and then she’s like….” Scenes are described, but also, parts are acted. (…or that’s how it was when I was around these people). The same construction was also used for mimicry when recounting an ordinary conversation.
The “Valley girls” (living in what was then a suburban part of the LA area) would have been the younger relatives of these people in school or the industry, hearing such descriptions all the time. It’s likely that the children, with less understanding of how the construction demands some description or acting, would have taken it to very broad, indiscriminate usage, which then included the first person “internal” use.
Ah, well that’s discourse marker like, and it’s easy to see that be like came from discourse marker like, but it has definitely been proven that quotative be like was initially used in internal dialogue.
Please point me to such proof, if it’s on the web.
It’s mostly on JSTOR (Ferrara and Bell, Tagliamonte and Hudson, Tagliamonte and D’Arcy, Butchstaller, Cukor-Avilla, Durham et al), but I get free access to that through my university and I believe you’d have to pay.
Thanks. I might want to dive into this when I have leisure time. I’m particularly interested in how a linguist could ever “prove” that something is the “initial” use of something, and from when they date this “initial” use of quotative “be like”.
If they’re not on JSTOR, they’ll be on MUSE (I temporarily forgot the name of the journal site last night). Good luck!
I grew up as a Valley girl, so this was a really entertaining post for me. For me, “like” and “be like” are part of my dialect–trying to drop them is like a Southerner trying never to say “y’all.”
I had no idea that a Valley girl was a thing! Although I find it near impossible to drop be like and like from my speech as well, so it wasted no time in travelling to Scotland!
Do Southeners say “y’all” that much? I’ve noticed Ellen DeGeneres says it a lot but I’m not exposed to American English that much…
Valley Girl just means a girl from the San Gabriel Valley, a part of Southern California. I think people started paying attention to them in the ’80s because they showed up in a lot of movies, but they’ve been around a lot longer than that. I think I read once that the Valley Girl dialect has its roots in surf culture, which dates back to the early-to-mid 1900s. And, yes, Southerners say “y’all” all. the. time. It’s so pervasive that it’s commonly used by transplants who otherwise have no Southern linguistic markers. A fun variant is “all y’all,” which is used as a sort of emphatic “y’all.” BTW, “y’all” is sometimes used to refer to just one person (though that’s REALLY Southern).
Sorry–you’re right. “Valley Girl” officially means someone from the SFV. For those of us who grew up in the area, however, Valley Girls were to be found all over inland SoCal. At least to my ear, surfers just sound like Valley Girls on sedatives; and both accents are blown-out versions of the general SoCal accent. You’re certainly right that beach-dwellers aren’t always that welcoming to “Vals,” but of course most of the people you find on the beach in SoCal actually live inland. So Valley Girls had plenty of exposure to surfer-speak and adopted quite a few phrases from it. To be very simplistic about it, Valley culture is associated more with materialism, a fast pace of life, and trend/celebrity-worship; beach/surfer culture is more about individualism, enjoying nature, and being more relaxed and living more slowly overall.
Correction: San Fernando Valley. This came out in 1982: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ufYYOXiEtxM, and the stereotype portrayed was indeed a thing for a while.
Up to the early 80’s, it was largely suburban, but it’s pretty urban now. I could be jumping to conclusions here, having never surfed, but people who live near the beach have often been unweloming to “Vals”. The Valley is inland, of course. Not sure whether there’s a difference in accent between inland and beach, or what the major cultural markers might be.
Though I lived in the South for only a few years, I use “y’all” whenever I want to specify a plural “you”. It’s useful, that’s all.