ABSTRACT
As I write this chapter, a language story is circulating concerning “vocal fry.” Tied to a paper to be published in the Journal of Voice, one of the central claims of the paper is that the use of vocal fry (or creak) has become more prevalent among younger (college-aged) women in the United States. In the discussion section of the paper, the authors surmise that young women are using vocal fry to mimic popular figures. This story was picked up by many different news and entertainment media organizations, and the tangential link to popular figures was elevated to a central point, as evidenced by titles such as “More college women speak in creaks, thanks to pop stars” (Dahl, 2011, p. 12). While there are many interesting components to this story and the media’s reaction to it, in this chapter I draw attention to the idea that it is pop stars who are the drivers of this supposed innovation. In particular, this story encapsulates a fundamental question for working with performed language concerning the relationships between “real-world” linguistic variation and similar variation as it occurs in various media channels. In the remainder of the chapter, I discuss what performed media are, the ways in which performed media can be a good source of data about language, and some of the places where performed media represent special challenges. In considering these questions, two main areas that require consideration remain in central focus. Working with performed media differs from working with other kinds of sociolinguistic data, first in terms of how the researcher theorizes the data, and second, how the researcher selects and organizes the data, including managing matters linked to copyright and “fair use.”
