Fanspeak

This was originally posted in rec.arts.sf.fandom in 1999 by Cally Soukup. If anyone knows of an actual transcript of this talk please let me know.

Minicon Panel Report

The best piece of programming I attended at Minicon was a panel, or rather a lecture, by Karyn Ashburn, Elise Mattheson's sister. She is a speech therapist, with lots of initials after her name, who works with adult populations, many of whom are nonverbal or barely verbal, and she isn't a member of fandom. As the sister of a member of fandom, however, she's had an opportunity to observe us in one of our native habitats when meeting Elise at conventions. And as a non-fan and a person passionately interested in speech production, she's noticed some common features in the way fans verbally communicate.

We were lucky in that she hadn't shown up for her panel at 5:00 on Saturday, which would have been in a smallish function room and restricted to only an hour. Instead she was rescheduled for after closing ceremonies in the ballroom, so a large fraction of the convention members had a chance to hear her. Because we wouldn't let her leave, her talk ended up being about 2 1/2 hours long, but she still left us with a lot of questions. I recommend her as a speaker to any convention. The bare gist of what she said follows.

On those occasions when she showed up at a con to meet Elise, she saw lots of fans in groups talking. To her they seemed angry and rude. To Elise they seemed nothing of the sort. Observing them more closely, she realized that they were using different social cues, different body language, different eye contact, and even different ways of forming vowels than what she jokingly called "my people", or what for convenience sake I'll call mundanes. She hastened to say she doesn't have a theory, or even yet much of a hypothesis for why this may be (or a large enough sample size across populations to prove that this is so), but she does have a lot of questions.

She also seemed quite concerned that we would feel offended by what she had to say, but what she told us was so interesting, and often so recognizably true, that I don't think anyone was. Of course everything that I'm about to say is an overgeneralization; different fans possess these traits to greater or lesser degrees.

First, the mechanics of actual vocal production, especially vowels. The phonemes in the words "him" and "meet" are produced with the tounge in various positions, and the lips stretched back. The phonemes "uh" and "oh" are produced with rounded lips. This, at any rate, is the case in mundania. Fans, she has noticed, push the vowels forward; rounding the lips somewhat even for "ee" and "ih". We use our lips a lot, but at the same time, we use our cheeks and our chins not as often as would be expected. We stabilize the cheeks and the chin, and we "prolabialize". (When, while sitting at a table, I leaned my chin on my hands while talking to her, she became uncomfortable. She can't do that easily; her chin moves more when she speaks.)

Second, fans articulate more than mundanes. She had various of us stand up and say things, and then repeated them in "mundane". When I said the phrase "talk to", she pointed out that I had pronounced the "k" on the end of "talk". Mundanes, she said, wouldn't. We pronounce more of the terminal consonents in a phrase than a typical mundane does. We are more likely than mundanes to pronounce the "h" in "where", and the "l" in "folk". (She seemed to think it was rather charming; that we were preserving old pronounciations, or reinventing them from the way words are spelled.)

We also speak in larger word groupings between breaths. This does not necessarily mean that we speak faster; we just pause for a shorter time between words -- except where there is punctuation. She pointed out that when Teresa Nielsen Hayden said she came from Mesa, Arizona, Teresa actually pronounced the comma by putting a slightly longer pause there, while most mundanes would simply run the words together. Mundanes slur a lot of consonents that we pronounce individually. We use punctuation in our spoken utterances. Sometimes we even footnote.

What we say in those large word groupings is also different. We tend to use complete sentences, and complex sentence structure. When we pause, or say "uh", it tends to be towards the beginning of a statement, as we formulate the complete thought. The "idea" or "information" portion of a statement is paramount; emotional reassurance, the little social noises (mm-hmm) are reduced or omitted. We get to the heart of what we want to say -- if someone asks us how to do something we tell them, not leading up to it gently with "have you tried doing it this way?"

This leads us to body language. Our body language is also different from mundanes. We tend to not use eye contact nearly as often; when we do, it often signifies that it's the other person's turn to speak now. This is opposite of everyone else. In mundania, it's *breaking* eye contact that signals turn-taking, not *making* eye contact. She demonstrated this on DDB; breaking eye contact and turning slightly away, and he felt insulted. On the other hand, his sudden staring at her eyes made her feel like a professor had just said "justify yourself NOW". Mutual "rudeness"; mixed signals.

We use our hands when we talk, but don't seem to know what to do with our arms. When thinking how to put something we close our eyes or look to the side and up, while making little "hang on just a second" gestures to show that we're not finished talking. We interrupt each other to finish sentences, and if the interrupter got it right, we know we've communicated and let them speak; if they get it wrong we talk right over them. This is not perceived as rude, or not very rude.

We accept corrections on matters of fact and of pronunciation; when I asked her about whether fanspeak might be related to Asperger's Syndrome, and mispronounced "Asperger's", I was corrected in mid-sentence by the man sitting next to me, corrected myself, thanked him, and finished the sentence. One Doesn't Do That in Mundania. Fans understand that mispronouncing words one has only read is very common in fandom, and not mortally embarrassing.

When we make a joke, we don't do a little laugh in the middle of a word to signal that it's funny; we inhale and exhale a very fast, short breath at the end of the sentence, rather like a suppressed beginning of a laugh, or a kind of a gasp.

She didn't get much into why this is all the case (I think she was surprised at the laughter when she suggested diffidently that we might be a bit under socialized. No, really?? <grin>), and turned away questions about possible pathology. While more comfortable with us now, I suspect she was probably still worried about offending us. She did suggest that many of the common features of fanspeak seem to be related to thinking in "written English".

The day before, while waiting for her sister to show up, Elise had suggested that perhaps the overuse of the lips and underuse of cheeks and chin had come from very small children wanting to communicate complex ideas to grownups; the facial muscles still being underdeveloped, the easiest way to articulate would be to concentrate on the lips, holding the cheeks and chin still as a way to reduce the complexity of word formation.

I hope others who were at the panel can expand upon what I've reported, especially the parts I may have ommited. It truly was the most interesting lecture or panel I've ever attended, and I can't recommend her too highly if you can convince her to speak at a convention you're involved with. It would both give her more test subjects and us more cool information <grin>.

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