The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu (31 page)

By contrast, the vowel α (as in
large
,
pod
, or
on
) is a low back vowel;
this sound is made by holding the tongue lower in the back part of the mouth; other back vowels are ο (as in
bol
d
) and
(as in the word
coarse
or my mother’s New York pronunciation of
caught
). The figure at right on the preceding page shows a very schematic tongue position for these vowels; lower in general, and more toward the back of the throat.

A number of studies over the last 100 years or so have shown that front vowels in many languages tend to be used in words that refer to small, thin, light things, and back vowels in words that refer to big, fat, heavy things. It’s not always true—there are certainly exceptions—but it’s a tendency that you can see in any of the stressed vowels in words like
little
,
teeny
, or
itsy-bitsy
(all front vowels) versus
humongous
or
enormous
(back vowels). Or the i vowel in Spanish
chico
(front vowel, meaning “small”) versus the
in
gordo
(back vowel, meaning “fat”). Or French
petit
(front vowel) versus
grand
(back vowel).

In one marketing study, for example,
Richard Klink created pairs
of made-up product brand names that were identical except for having front vowels (
deta
l
) or back vowels (
dutal
) and asked participants to answer:

Which brand of laptop seems bigger, Detal or Dutal?

Which brand of vacuum cleaner seems heavier, Keffi or Kuffi?

Which brand of ketchup seems thicker, Nellen or Nullen?

Which brand of beer seems darker, Esab or Usab?

In each case, the product named with back vowels (Dutal, Nullen) was chosen as the larger, heavier, thicker product.

Since ice cream is a product whose whole purpose is to be rich, creamy, and heavy, it is not surprising that people seem to prefer ice creams that are named with back vowels.
Eric Yorkston and Geeta Menon at New York University
asked participants to read a press release describing a new ice cream about to be released. For half, the ice cream
was called “Frish” (front vowel) while for the other half it was called “Frosh” (back vowel). Asked their opinions, the “Frosh” people rated this hypothetical ice cream as smoother, creamier, and richer than other participants rated “Frish,” and were more likely to say they would buy it.

In a final twist, Yorkston and Menon distracted some participants by having them perform another task simultaneously, so they couldn’t fully concentrate on reading about the ice cream. The distracted participants were even more influenced by the vowels, suggesting that the response to the vowels was automatic, at a subconscious level.

I wondered whether commercial ice creams make use of this subconscious association of ice cream names with back vowels as richer and creamier. To find out, I ran what University of Pennsylvania linguist Mark Liberman calls a Breakfast Experiment. Liberman—a tenacious advocate for bringing linguistics to bear on public affairs—often runs a quick experiment on a linguistic tip in the news before breakfast, posting the results on
Language Log
, the “blog of record” in linguistics. He is legendary for his ability to run complex linguistic statistical analyses in minutes, which he says comes from his days as a piano tuner.

My hypothesis was that we would see more back vowels in names of
ice cream brands or flavors, and conversely that thin, light foods like crackers would have more front vowels.

Front versus back vowels in cracker names and ice cream flavors (normalized by dividing by the expected count of front and back vowels computed from a large dictionary of English)

I tested the hypothesis on two lists of food names from the web, the 81 ice cream flavors sold by either Haagen Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s, and a list of 592
cracker brands from a dieting website
. For each list, I counted the total number of front vowels (i,
I,
, e, æ) and the total number of back vowels.

The result? As shown in the chart on the preceding page,
I found more back vowels
in ice cream names like R
o
cky R
oa
d, Jam
o
ca
A
lmond F
u
dge, Ch
o
colate, C
a
ramel, C
oo
kie D
ou
gh, C
o
conut and front vowels in cracker names (note the extraordinary number of
I
vowels) like Ch
ee
se N
i
ps, Ch
ee
z
I
t, Wh
ea
t Th
i
ns, Pr
e
tzel Th
i
ns, R
i
tz, Kr
i
spy, Tr
i
scuit, Th
i
n Cr
i
sps, Ch
ee
se Cr
i
sps, Ch
i
cken in a B
i
skit, Snack St
i
cks, R
i
tz b
i
ts.

Of course there are exceptions: van
i
lla (the orange blossom of our day), has an
I
. But most of the front vowels in ice cream flavors tend to be the names of small, thin ingredients in the ice cream (th
i
n m
i
nt, ch
i
p, p
ea
nut br
i
ttle).

Sound symbolism is thus an important device in the toolbox of modern advertisers and designers of brand names, and in fact branding companies often get their
insights from linguists
.

While our ice cream and cracker connections might be subconscious, they are systematic, and linguists have theories about the underlying cause: about why front vowels are associated with small, thin, light things, and back vowels with big, solid, heavy things.

The most widely accepted theory,
the
frequency code
, suggests that low frequencies (sounds with low pitch) and high frequencies (sounds with high pitch) are associated with particular meanings. The frequency code was developed by linguist John Ohala (my phonetics professor as an undergraduate at Berkeley) by extending work by
Eugene Morton
of the Smithsonian.

Morton noticed that mammals and birds tend to use low-frequency (deeper) sounds when they are aggressive or hostile, but use higher-frequency
(higher-pitched) sounds when frightened, appeasing, or friendly. Because larger animals naturally make deeper sounds (the roar of lions) and smaller animals naturally make high-pitched sounds (the tweet of birds), Morton’s idea is that animals try to appear larger when they are competing or aggressive, but smaller and less threatening otherwise.

Morton and Ohala thus suggest that humans instinctively associate the pitch of sounds with size. All vowels are composed of different frequency resonances. When the tongue is high and in the front of the mouth, it creates a small cavity in front. Small cavities cause higher-pitched resonances (the smaller the space for vibration, the shorter the wavelength, hence the higher the frequency). One particular resonance (called the second formant) is much higher for front vowels and lower for back vowels.

Thus the frequency code suggests that front vowels like
I
and i are associated with small, thin, things, and back vowels like a and ο with big heavy things because front vowels have higher-pitched resonances, and we instinctively associate higher pitch with smaller animals, and by extension smaller things in general.

Researchers have extended this idea to show that raising pitch or “fronting” vowels (moving the tongue a bit toward the front of mouth to make all vowels have a slightly higher second formant pitch) are both especially
associated with babies or children
. In an early paper I examined more than 60 languages around the world and proposed that the word endings used in many languages to indicate smallness or lightness come historically from a word originally meaning “child” or associated with names of children, like the
y
in pet names Barbie and Robby. My linguistics colleague Penny Eckert shows that front vowels are associated with positive affect, and that preadolescent girls sometimes use vowel fronting to subtly imbue their speech with sweetness or childhood innocence. Linguist Katherine Rose Geenberg found that speakers of American English move their vowels toward the front when using baby talk, and psychologist Anne Fernald shows that, across languages, talk to babies tends to have high pitch.

The frequency code isn’t the only kind of sound symbolism in food. To see why, we’ll need a brief digression. Consider these two pictures: