Voice quality

Speakers can control not just the rate of vibration of the vocal folds, but also the way in which they vibrate. This is known as voice quality. Aside from modal voice quality, we will look at four voice qualities which are regularly used in certain situations, to convey e.g. a particular stance towards the thing being talked about. There is also some evidence that varieties of English have habitual settings for voice quality: that is, speakers belonging to certain sociolinguistic groups share a common voice quality. None the less, there remains much work to be done on the function and use of voice quality in English.