Why do sports announcers talk like that?
6/19/202613 min
If you watch sports, whether the recent NBA finals or the ongoing World Cup matches, you may have noticed that the athletes aren’t the only ones putting on a show. The announcers seem to be playing a beautiful game of their own, capturing the excitement and play-by-play of the game in a unique blend of sentence structure, elocution, and pitch. Linguists have even given this speech pattern a name: sports announcer talk.
Sociolinguist and dialectologist Valerie Fridland joins Host Flora Lichtman to break down the patterns and rules of this register.
Guest:
Dr. Valerie Fridland is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno, and author of “Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents.”
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
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Speaker 20:15
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Flora Lichtman· Host0:33
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Speaker 4· Soundbite1:23
Three dribbles. One shot for the championship. He got it. Four-point