What’s the viral ‘influencer accent’ and why is it so popular online?

If you ever thought TikTok influencers sounded the same, you’re not alone. Creators on the platform are acknowledging that they speak with an “influencer accent,” and now they and experts are weighing in as to why.

What is the ‘influencer accent’?

The “influencer accent” is perceived as the distinct, recognizable way that influencers speak in their videos. It’s generally characterized by a “deep, creaky, breathy sound” known as vocal fry, punctuated with several pauses. Some linguistic experts even assert that rising pitch and bouncy pacing play a role as well, all for the sake of being better at influencing their audience.

Adam Aleksic, who is known as Etymology Nerd on TikTok and has a linguistics degree from Harvard University, revealed that this “accent” is merely a form of manipulation. Video-based platform algorithms, he explained in a Nov. 30 post, reward retention.

Aleksic told Yahoo News that there are three verbal attributes of the “influencer accent”: vocal fry, staccato uptick and pacing.

“One common feature of the influencer accent is vocal fry, which involves an unusual compression of the vocal folds,” he said. “The staccato uptick, often called ‘upspeak’ or ‘high rising terminal’ by linguists, is an increasingly common feature of Gen Z dialogue characterized by a rising pitch at the end of sentences almost like we’re asking a question. This seems especially common among influencers. Pacing is often different than in normal conversation, with midsentence upticks making each sentence sound like it’s bouncing up and down.”

However, Julia Huynh (@jigglyjulia), a California-based TikTok creator with more than 800,000 followers, asserts that the “influencer accent” is about something different. She recently shared why she believes influencers, including herself, choose to speak this way in their videos but not in real life.

“The reason why I think we do this is because we’re trying to not say ‘like’ or ‘um’ or ‘so’ as much,” she says in a video she shared on Nov. 24. “It’s not because they’re bland. It’s not because they have nothing going on up in here. There’s way too much going on up here, so we need to stop and pause, and figure out what we need to say before we say it.”

Is it actually an accent?

The “accent,” according to Eliza Jane Schneider, a dialectologist and CEO of Vox Pop Entertainment and Competitive Edge Voice Training, is a matter of musicality, that is the “musical element” related to cadence, which can be mistaken for an accent.

“Technically, an accent is defined as a distinction in pronunciation, while a dialect is defined as a distinction in pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary,” Schneider told Yahoo News. “What we're hearing defined as an accent is actually a matter of musicality. … I find musicality to be inseparable from what is considered by most to be an accent.”

Schneider added that the “accents” and upward cadence or inflection of the voice may be used by influencers as a tactic to come off as more familiar.

“Were she to listen to a recording of her own personal conversations more carefully, she might find that the more familiar the audience, the more prevalent the upward cadence,” she said of Huynh’s explanation. “She is correct about the pauses to think replacing the normal abundance of filler words such as ‘like’ and ‘you know’ which do tend to diminish the appeal and power of the speaking voice. I believe that the musical element of the upward cadence is one of the secrets behind an influencer disarming their listener and creating the illusion of familiarity.”

TikTok creator Layten Kaid (@gotpilk3), however, deliberately talks fast in his videos because he’s “terrified” of the “influencer accent.”

“When somebody talks like that, it makes me feel like I’m being slowly suffocated. It fills me with such anxiety,” he revealed in a Nov. 28 video. “That’s why I talk fast. It’s because I know what I want to say before I press the record button, and I don’t want to end up having an influencer cadence.”

‘A model of success’

As a linguist and influencer, Aleksic believes that creators are looking for ways to increase audience engagement and intrigue. This “accent,” he said, is either something that they passively learned via trial and error or deliberately trained themselves to know.

“All the features I listed are emergent aspects of the Gen Z accent as a whole, but this is exacerbated online. Much of it comes from the ‘Valley Girl accent’ that people like Kim Kardashian use, and then impressionable young creators try to imitate that because they see it as a model of success,” he noted. “Because of this association with social mobility and online success, the ‘influencer accent’ serves a metalinguistic function as a ‘sociolect’: It signals that the speaker belongs to an in-group of ‘influencers,’ and primes you as a viewer to expect a certain kind of content.”

Is the future of language female?

While the use of these attributes — vocal fry, staccato uptick and pacing — aren’t necessarily new, Christopher Strelluf, a linguistics professor at the University of Warwick, posited that this particular combination could be the future of language. Historically, according to Strelluf, young women have been the innovators of language. Any changes that we hear by young women are “probably the future of English,” he told National World.

Strelluf’s claim is further supported by a 2009 study by Sali A. Tagliamonte and Alexandra D’Arcy via JSTOR Daily, which found that men “lag a generation behind” women in the adoption of language innovation. Women, according to influencing marketing company Fohr, also make up 76% of influencers on TikTok.

“The influencer ‘accent’ is adapted to compete for your attention in an era of a billion online distractions, but we don’t have a need for that in person. Because of this, we switch between our normal Gen Z dialect in the real world to the influencer accent when it’s necessary,” Aleksic added. “That’s not to say we aren’t going to see a trend toward people actually starting to use the ‘influencer accent’ in real life. People copy the speech patterns of people they look up to as a form of social mimicry, so it’s quite possible we’ll see more upspeak in our near future.”