the valley girls

I have heard so much about this girls and their supposed pronunciation that I'd like to know all on this subject.

Does anyone have an idea where I can read about the show? any link?....

It's not a show. It refers (usually teenage female) speech patterns from certain parts of southern California. It less refers to the accent than it does to the tendency to have like every third or fourth word be "like", "really", "totally", or something similar, and in particular to really, really overuse the word "like", and to the overuse of various expressions, such as the phrasal verb "to be like" (which has been already talked about on here). In addition, it tends to have certain rather marked intonation patterns that I can't really adequately describe in here, except that I'll say that usually the words listed above tend to be rather stretched out and strongly intonated... Well, I can't fully describe it myself here in text at the moment, even though I can usually immediately recognize its usage.

That's not a show. Valley girls are girls living in the San Fernando Valley in California ;-)

Here is information courtesy of Wikipedia about the San Fernando Valley:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley

Here is a sample of the accent courtesy of the IDEA archive (click on the one that says "valley girl"):

http://www.ku.edu/~idea/northamerica/usa/california/california.htm

Like, oh ma gawd, you guys are all, like, dissing the, like, coolest accent in, like, the universe. Like, gawd...

[/sarcasm]

/me laughs at american nic's wonderful textual impression of Valley Girl-speak

One of the most noticeable features of the intonation is the rising at the end of a non-interrogatory sentence? (The question mark indicates Valley Girl intonation.)

>> One of the most noticeable features of the intonation is the rising at the end of a non-interrogatory sentence? (The question mark indicates Valley Girl intonation.) <<

Uptalk

Bree, what do you mean by "uptalk" above, anyways?

Sorry --

uptalk - noun: A manner of speaking in which declarative sentences are uttered with a rising intonation as though they were questions.

article: "Does Uptalk Make you Upchuck?"
http://www.appearfirst.com/language/w_and_s_99.html

Well, at least around here in Wisconsin, I really haven't heard the use of a high rising terminal intonation pattern much at all, if ever, to say the least, so I'm not sure where whoever wrote that article got the idea that it's very prevalent at the present. Well, it may be in other areas, such as Australia, where I've read it's quite prevalent, but it certainly isn't here.

There's another use of uptalk that wasn't mentioned in the article "does Uptalk Make you Upchuck." It's a way of implying "You know?" or "Do you know what I mean?" without saying it.

Travis - it certainly is present down here in Australia, amongst younger girls...and it drives me nuts!

The Irish tend to intonate like that as well but it sounds good when they do it.

Of course, the problem with using high rising terminal intonation here is that it seems like in the dialect here that going and changing around word order when forming questions is no longer mandatory, even though it's still usually done, whether it's moving a modal to sentence-initial position, or it's putting a "do" or "did" in sentence-initial position, or it's moving "wh"-words to sentence-initial position, with the consequence that the only real difference in marking between a declarative sentence and an interrogative sentence is really just the question tone. As a result, were high rising terminal intonation to be adopted, some other method for marking interrogative sentences would be necessary, as the syntactic method for doing so has already been made non-mandatory, and thus can no longer be relied on. Hence it would be unlikely that a high rising terminal would be adopted, consequently.

>>The Irish tend to intonate like that as well but it sounds good when they do it.<<

It's a bit different -- they rise up toward the end of the sentence, but then it levels off or even comes down slightly right at the end. The irritating, Valley Girl-inspired rising intonation just keeps on going up?