Linguists believe conversations have been losing individuality in recent years. — ZACHARIE SCHEURER/dpa
“YES we’re all individuals! ... We’ve got to work it out for ourselves!” 45 years ago, a scene in Monty Python film Life of Brian famously mocked conformism and group-think.
And while the gag was so self-explanatory as to become iconic, its obvious message may have been lost, going by new linguistic research.
Conversation and speech patterns are increasingly lacking individuality, as people grow more likely to echo bromides and jargon made fashionable by business, academia and activism, according to linguists at Lancaster University and the University of Liverpool.
People are “increasingly adopting each other’s speech patterns to be more socially inclusive,” the team found, suggesting that the “dramatic change” could be due in part to an “institutional turn towards corporate social responsibility (CSR), and ideologies such as Equality, Diversity and Inclusion,” also known as DEI.
The mockingbird-esque tendency was more noticeable among those with higher levels of formal education and among people who do not do manual labour, according to the researchers, whose findings were published in the journal Applied Linguistics.
“This increase is not found in workplaces where these ideologies are not institutionalised and routinely encouraged,” said Vittorio Tantucci, senior linguistics lecturer at Lancaster University.
The researchers studied over 1,600 British conversations over a 20-year-period, while controlling for creativity, age, class, gender, context, dialect and intra-generational speech.
“Over time, this form of engagement, known as resonance, has increased mostly among people in higher social grades, including people in leading managerial positions in the corporate world, doctors, university lecturers and politicians,” the team said.
“We may not always notice it, but we frequently imitate each other in conversation, using similar gestures, accents and facial expressions,” the team found, describing people as often echoing the words they hear from people they talk to. – dpa
