How We, Like, Innovated Language

You're totally welcome

"That's just, like, the rules of feminism!"

-Gretchen Wieners, Mean Girls, 2004.

My Valley Girl¹ accent was probably at its peak in middle school. If I go back and think about those classrooms I sat in, those cars I jumped into, the food courts, the long, long phone calls on my bed, I can hear a “like” staccato like running water. It was also around this time that my family insisted that they couldn’t understand me. They said that I sounded “dumb” and not like the “bright girl” that I was.

Linguists and scholars, however, disagree with my family and Valley Girl vocal stigma on all fronts. Turns out, my tween friends and I were innovating language, one “like” at a time.

Firstly, Valley Girl speak—the signature “like,” uptalk, vocal fry—is both instantly recognizable and traceable. In a paper by Patrick Ploschnitzki, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, he posits that the “valley girl dialect”² is exactly that: a specific form of language that carries consistent rules across speech and perhaps even grammar. In short, you can follow it.

What he and other thinkers in his field assert is that the “rising intonation” in valley girl dialect is a way to communicate “don’t interrupt me.” The vocal shift up in tone signals that more information is coming. This suggests that Valley Girls effectively engineered a linguistic defense against unwanted verbal interruption—a common female experience, particularly when engaging with cis men³.

Lucien Hilaire, a graduate student at Université Paris 8, determined another linguistic innovation when analyzing “like.” “Like” is both very expansive in valley girl dialect and very specific. He noted that the various uses of “like” expand a number of details within English sentences, including who is talking, who felt what emotions, what was implied and not directly said. He uses the following examples:

5a. My brother started throwing up and everybody went: "Eww..."
5b. He was talking about his trip to Cambodia and he was like "Blah blah blah, it was such an enriching experience."

…In addition, speakers can use like to evoke sound effects ("went" could be replaced by "was like" in example 5a) and therefore expand the range of feelings that can be expressed through reported speech.⁴

He cites other experts who break down a consistent pattern: most speakers define what logistically happened with “say” while “like” is reserved for “judgments or evaluations.” His examples include:

6a. The minister asked if someone wanted to object and this guy came in and screamed: “I object!” and it was like “What the hell?”
6b. She goes “Mom wants to talk to you.” It’s like “Hah, hah. You’re about to get in trouble.”

Generally though, Hilaire’s work stipulates that “like” is used as a way to emphasize hypothetical or genuine experiences, a way to express emotion or emphasis in otherwise logistical recounting. His examples thoughtfully pull from films with notable Valley Girl accents:

7a. "I had two bowls of Special K, 3 pieces of turkey bacon, a handful of popcorn, 5 peanut butter M&M's and like 3 pieces of licorice." (Clueless)

7b. "Dionne: 'Phat! Did you write that?'
Cher: 'Duh. It's, like, a famous quote.'
Dionne: 'From where?'
Cher: 'Cliff's Notes.'" (Clueless)

7c. "Irregardless, ex-boyfriends are just off limits to friends. I mean, that's like the rules of feminism." (Mean Girls)

And yet, despite the unifying emotion in these examples, each of these exchanges use a very distinct “like”—there is specificity in the expansiveness. According to Hilaire, 7a uses “like” as “approximately.” 7b uses “like” as filler. 7c shows the use of “like” as a marking for uncertainty “or exaggeration for lack of words.”

Young girls tweaking language to be more expansive, powerful, or expressive is not new. The author, and my friend, Amanda Montell, reported in her first book, Wordslut, that young, urban girls tend to be “linguistic innovators.”⁵ Linguists have observed this gendered trend for decades.

Valley Girl 101

And yet, Valley Girl speak is not exactly teeming with research. Ploschnitzki writes that “it seems odd that one of the most common influences on today’s speech all across the United States of America is widely neglected.” Like other linguists, he notes the widespread influence of valley girl dialect, in that people who do not live in the San Fernando Valley or even Los Angeles speak in these conventions. This can account for why the young female cast of Mean Girls, set at a high school in Evanston, Illinois in 2004, speak like Moon Unit Zappa circa 1982.

He asserts that valley girl dialect should be studied further as one would Standard American English or African-American Vernacular English. His reason? “This may be how Americans (and possibly speakers of other varieties of English) will be communicating in the future.”

In 2035, we might all speak like Valley Girls.

Next week: let’s go to the mall.

💗Thank you to Amanda Montell for sending me the sources for today’s Valley Girl.💗

1. Uppercase “Valley Girl” to indicate the manufactured caricature.

2. Ploschnitzki, Patrick. “ ‘Valley Girl’ - A Dialect, Its Stereotypes and the Reality.”

3. Chira, Susan. “The Universal Phenomenon of Men Interrupting Women.” The New York Times, 14 June 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/14/business/women-sexism-work-huffington-kamala-harris.html. Accessed 4 Aug. 2025.

4. Hilaire, Lucien. Mean Girls and the Likes: the Language of Girlhood in American Pop Culture.

5. Montell, Amanda. Wordslut: A Feminist Guide to Taking Back the English Language. Harper Wave, 2020. pg. 127.