I say “like” a lot. Far too much than normal speech allows. I also seem to overuse the passing trends like “legit” and “lit”. But when starting to immerse myself into the dreaded summer homework, I have been noticing how many different words I’ve incorporated into my vocabulary over the summer. While exploring the interwebs I found this video talking about the science behind the word "like". I thought it would be bashing the overuse of it and have tips on how to get rid of the habit. However, I was quite wrong.
Vera Reagan is a sociolinguist who spoke for TEDxDublin in 2014. Vera has a unique way of defining what a sociolinguist does, calling the job “professional eavesdropping”. She doesn’t work at the NSA though, so she listens to how language is spoken instead of what is being said. As a scientist, she is constantly questioning the evolving language around us and is quite fascinated with the anomalies in all the studies she conducts. Her interest with the word “like” started when she saw an older woman seated by 2 younger women on a bus. The older woman would cringe or roll her eyes at all the “likes” in the conversation. That demonstration of a generation gap sparked the studies that Vera would later conduct with her team on the role the simple word “like” plays in the evolving language.
She found out that despite the thought that “like” is a thoughtless filler word, it actually has constraints as to where it can be placed in a sentence. She also found that there are 2 different regions have different constraints. The first is everywhere in Ireland except for Dublin, the constraint is that it must be at the beginning of the end of a sentence. The other is the rest of the world, where you place it in the middle of a sentence or at the beginning. But Vera and her team found next was far more interesting. 62.5% of the native Irish speakers incorporated the Irish “like” into their daily language. The rest used the global “like”. Polish migrants whose native tongue doesn’t have an equivalent to “like” showed to use the Irish “like” 87% and used the global “like” less than the Irish people themselves . The team looked into that small 13% and found that those Polish people are over there short term and don’t want to settle there.
She explored the concept further with her team and found instances in other languages where there would be a quirk that would differ in usage depending on different variables. The team worked to narrow the variables down to 3 different social structural categories. The place, identity, and plans of a person are reflected just through those small bits of speech.
Coming back to the 2 girls on the bus; Vera kindly suggested that instead of the older woman assuming they're sloppy and lazy, she recognizes that they are like the movers and the shakers of language like. And I am too.
