A sociophonetic study of creaky voice across language, gender and age in Canadian English-French bilinguals

This study investigates how creaky voice (aka “vocal fry”) varies across language, gender, and age in Canadian English–French bilingual speakers (Brown & Sonderegger, 2025). Popular discourse and sociolinguistic studies often portrays creaky voice as a hallmark of young women’s speech, yet earlier acoustic research has frequently linked it to male voices. To clarify these patterns, I analyzed spontaneous speech from 49 bilingual public figures using a wide range of acoustic measures of creaky voice.

The results show that bilingual speakers maintain broadly similar voice qualities across English and French, with no strong evidence for systematic cross-linguistic differences in creakiness. In contrast, clear social patterns emerge: by multiple acoustic indicators, men’s voices are substantially creakier than women’s. Age effects also run counter to common assumptions—older speakers tend to exhibit more creaky voice than younger speakers.

Taken together, the findings suggest that variation in creaky voice is better explained by physiological factors such as vocal aging than by an ongoing sound change led by young women. The study also highlights a broader mismatch between acoustic reality and public perception, contributing to debates about gender, voice quality, and how linguistic stereotypes arise and persist.