A linguist explains the "YouTube voice"

YouTube stars employ a watered-down, carnival-barker style of annunciation to keep viewers interested, says Julie Beck of The Atlantic, who asked to Naomi Baron, a professor of linguistics at American University, to explain what's going on. Baron identified the following distinguishing components of the YouTube voice:

• Overstressed vowels - "eh-xactly" instead of "exactly."
• Sneaky extra vowels between consonants - "terraping" instead of "trapping."
• Long vowels - "fiiive" instead of "five" for emphasis and bounce.
• Long consonants - "fffascinatingly" instead of "fascinatingly"
• Aspiration - puffing more air to make a word stand out.

So it turns out the "YouTube voice" is just a variety of ways of emphasizing words, none of which are actually exclusive to YouTube-people employ these devices in speech all the time. But they generally do it to grab the listener's attention, and when you're just talking to a camera without much action, it takes a little more to get, and keep, that attention. All the videos I used as examples in this article come from popular YouTube accounts, with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers-in other words, from people who know how to engage an audience.