Episode 80 - Matthew Hunt on voice pitch

Welcome to episode 80 of Lexis in which Dan and guest interviewer Ben talk to Dr Matthew Hunt, Lecturer of Sociolinguistics, University of Southampton about voice pitch, including:

• What it is and how we measure it

• What it ‘means’, including its ‘social meaning potential’

• The judgements that we make about pitch and why these matter

• Gendered perceptions of pitch

• His work on domestic violence cases and the role of pitch in perceptions of ‘victimhood’

• Gender and football commentaries

• Advice to A Level students on exploring pitch and its role

⚠️Content warning⚠️

We discuss domestic violence and abuse in broad terms in part of this episode. 

Journal of Sociolinguistics paper on the effect of pitch variation on perceptions of domestic abuse victims: https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12723

The second paper, ‘Gender Penalty? Linguistic Discrimination and Perceptions of Female Football Commentators’ is with Gender & Language and currently in press. We will update the link once it is published. 

Matthew’s website: https://matthewhuntlinguistics.home.blog/ 

Matthew’s University of Southampton page: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/people/626sz2/doctor-matthew-hunt 

Lexis is on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/lexispodcast.bsky.social 

Contributors

Lisa Casey 

blog: https://livingthroughlanguage.wordpress.com/ & Twitter: Language Debates (@LanguageDebates)

Dan Clayton 

blog: EngLangBlog & Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/englangblog.bsky.social 

Jacky Glancey 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/JackyGlancey

Raj Rana

Matthew Butler 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MatthewbutlerCA 

Music: Serge Quadrado - Cool Guys 
Cool Guys by Serge Quadrado is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. From the Free Music Archive: https://freemusicarchive.org/music/serge-quadrado/urban/cool-guys