Young women: Linguistic pioneers? Totally.

SALT LAKE CITY — Totes. Ridic. Whatevs. The latest wave of slang to be introduced into the general American lexicon was, perhaps not surprisingly, introduced by young women. And being ahead of the pack linguistically is something they are used to, recent research has shown.

It is something young women are often teased about or even judged for, and Utah women are no exception: their often peculiar intonation and incessant use of slang can be seen as immature or unintelligent. Recent trends include uptalk (ending declarative statements as if they were questions?) and vocal fry — the art of ending one's sentences as if one were trying to imitate the linguistic stylings of Britney Spears or Ke$ha.

Now, though, linguists are saying young women deserve credit, not judgment, for pioneering linguistic trends, and for using those trends in purposeful ways.

"A lot of these really flamboyant things you hear are cute, and girls are supposed to be cute," Penny Eckert, a professor of linguistics at Stanford University, told The New York Times. "But they're not just using them because they're girls. They're using them to achieve some kind of interactional and stylistic end."

Researchers from Long Island University recently analyzed the speech patterns of 32 college-aged women and found that one trend — vocal fry — was prevalent among two-thirds of them. Most people utilize vocal fry occasionally, but the researchers found the young women studied were more likely to turn the end of a sentence into a croak, as Jill Abramson of The New York Times famously did in a 2011 interview with PBS.

"They use this as a tool to convey something," said Nassima Abdelli- Beruh, an author of the study. "You quickly realize that for them, it is as a cue."

It could be used as a tool for finding those of similar social standing, or to convey thoughts about social standing to others, as when researchers found that members of sororities utilized uptalk while speaking to potential pledges.

It may be obvious that they do it, but it is less clear why, exactly, women are so far ahead of the curve. Scientists have proposed a number of theories: perhaps women are simply more sensitive to, and thus more likely to adopt, social cues. Maybe it is a power play in a world that has scarcely given women power, or maybe it is just easier for women than for men to get away with picking up on new vocal trends.

Similarly and just as mysteriously, in Utah, linguistic trends are first picked up by and become more prevalent among young women.

Brigham Young University linguistics professor David Eddington found in 2011 that "the case of the missing ‘T'" — Utahns' tendency to drop the middle "T" in words ending in an "en" sound — was more common among young people, and especially women.

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The tendency to pronounce words such as "mountain" and "Layton" as "MOU- un" and "LAY-un" is not unique to Utah, but it is certainly more pervasive and noticeable in the Beehive State, Eddington said at the time.

And while Eddington's research was inspired by complaints among Utahns about the relatively recent linguistic development, it came as no surprise that young women were the mavericks.

"Linguists have found that young women are always, or generally, on the forefront of linguistic changes," he said.

Some of those changes are trends that are dropped nearly as quickly as they are picked up — "As if!" and "all that and a bag of chips" are hardly among today's power phrases — but others seem to be here to stay, picked up by men and older generations about half a generation after they come into popular usage among young women.

The use of the word "like" as a filler word with little meaning, for example, was originally reserved for teenage girls but is now ubiquitous among Americans, regardless of age or gender. And uptalk is already finding its way into popular usage.

It was, like, only a matter of time.

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