Question: what kind of people do you interview?

Damien Hall answered on 18 Jun 2011:

Anyone who wants to be interviewed! Sometimes it can be hard to get people to interview, as I usually don’t know them beforehand, and imagine if some stranger came with a mike and wanted to record you speaking! But, mostly, people find it is interesting and fun when they actually start to do it.

If I have a choice, it’s better to interview young people, because there’s evidence that people’s language and accent are formed up to the time they are a teenager, and stay more-or-less the same after that. So, if you interview someone who is 75 years old, you are listening to the language as it was 60 years ago. If you interview someone who is a teenager or in their 20s now, you are listening to the language as it is being formed now.

I also try to have an equal number of men and women to interview. This is because there is evidence that men and women do different things with language – if there is a new language fashion, like a new word for something or a new way of pronouncing something, then young women will often take up the fashion before young men will.

That doesn’t mean that old people are not interesting! Far from it – I love interviewing old people as well, as they often have really good stories to tell.

Do you think that’s right about men and women? Do you notice them speaking differently from one another? I mean, not just because the young men’s voices have broken and the women’s haven’t, but in other ways too? Another thing that’s often said is that young men speak in a less prestigious way than young women sometimes – that young men may be less bothered about making a good impression when they speak. Does that ring true for you?