What Is: The Relationship Between Jeopardy and Uptalk?

At the Smithsonian Magazine, Jessica Gross writes about sociologist Thomas Linneman’s analysis of uptalk through the delightful-sounding study of “100 episodes of Jeopardy!, which he watched mostly in the evenings, on his couch with his dog at his feet.” You will likely find Linneman’s conclusion unsurprising: uptalk “might serve to reinforce existing gender norms.”

Women uptalked more than one and a half times as often as men. Perhaps signaling a lack of confidence, uptalk was also much more common for incorrect answers as correct ones. Women answering incorrectly uptalked a whopping 76 percent of the time.

But then the analysis gets interesting: While men who were $10,000 ahead of their nearest competitors uptalked less than men who were $10,000 behind, women in the lead uptalked more frequently than their losing female counterparts. And while men correcting other men uptalked less often, their uptalk frequency more than doubled if they were correcting a woman’s answer.

Women’s uptalk doesn’t just indicate uncertainty, Linneman concludes; it’s also meant to compensate for success. Men, on the other hand, don’t want to seem uncertain around other men, but use uptalk when correcting women as “a weird form of chivalry,” he says. “They’re in a public arena, they’re telling a woman [she’s] wrong, and they know they have to be careful about how they do it.”

There is a theory about how uptalk became popular in Australia and New Zealand in the ’50s, and then spread westward in the States in the ’80s. But one linguist at Penn says that “uptalk has probably been the default pattern of speech for a thousand years or so in some varieties of English in the British Isles,” and that people often also use uptalk to order multiple food items. “For example: I want two poppy seed bagels? One sesame? And a pound of lox?” That’s probably better than I sound normally? Which is like, I’ll take everything, bye? [Smithsonian]