Vocal fry: Women changing voices to sound 'creaky' like Kim Kardashian

A study has found women are starting to change their voices to sound 'creaky' like Kim Kardashian. Photo: Getty

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Kim Kardashian is known for influencing everything from reality TV, sex tapes, fashion, social media, apps, selfies, our view of the female body – and now women's voices.

A Louisiana State University study has found that women have started to mimic the Keeping Up with the Kardashians star's delivery, in particular elongating certain syllables, making their voices sound "creaky" and more masculine. For example, stressing "rs" so a word like "whatever" sounds more like "whateverrr".

While the Kardashians and company are blamed, another voice expert believes it all started with Meredith Grey on Grey's Anatomy. Photo: Grey's Anatomy.

Known as "vocal fry", it is defined by Urban Dictionary as an "artificial, gravelly, voice-lowering way to speak," while US speech pathologist Dr Nicole Maronian once described it in a Fox News segment in 2013 as sounding like "bacon sizzling on a pan".

The study shows it is becoming a vocal phenomenon that "persists among young adult women". Fifty female undergraduate students were recorded for the study saying multi-syllable "non-words" and it found that 86 per cent of those showed "at least one episode of vocal fry".

Todd Gibson, an assistant professor in communication science who conducted the study, wrote in the Journal of Voice: "Vocal fry is a voice register most frequently heard in young female speakers of American English – a low 'creaky' effect typically heard on episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

"Research has several theories as to why women use vocal fry: for example, reflecting sociolinguistic cues such as the need to sound more masculine.

"Our [study suggests] that even when words have no meaning, young female speakers will seek to mark the end of an utterance or add emphasis with vocal fry."

While the Kardashians and company are blamed in Gibson's report, Dr Maronian believes it started with Meredith Grey on the TV show Grey's Anatomy.

"She had this very tired-sounding voice dealing with lots of troubles and dramas," she explained. Well, Seattle Grace Hospital is a busy place.

Dr Maronian added that the continuous use of the purring or rasp can be damaging to the voice.

"For one, it's fatiguing to use. Two, it can cause swelling. And three, it can cause lesions that can cause more aggressive intervention, even surgery," Dr Maronian said.

Naomi Wolf wrote a colum for The Guardian last year urging young women to abandon vocal fry and uptalk (rising intonations at the end of sentences like they were questions) as it made twenty-somethings "sound less competent, less trustworthy, less educated and less hireable" and labelling them as "destructive speech patterns". 

However, her comments started an uproar, with some writing a rebuttal: "Continually policing the ways women talk will further reduce them to silence."

It was also asked why men were not targeted: "[Kardashian's] male peers use it extensively, and it's also a well-documented feature of the speech of upper-class Englishmen, the kind who get firsts at Oxford and then go on to run the country."