There are a few strongly held beliefs in Southern California. We judge travel by time instead of distance, In-N-Out is a must, and some locals really lean into that Valley Girl accent.
The accent went from a simple place signifier to a stereotypical white girl phenomenon.
It’s a dictionary entry. A movie, twice over. A stereotyped demographic. All under the guise of the “Valley Girl.”
The roots of the ‘Valley Girl’
My interest in the "Valley Girl" origins started with a conversation with a stranger at a concert entrance. People around us were speaking with that familiar upward inflection and creaky voice.
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"You know, the accent came over from Hawai‘i," he asserted.
That statement got me thinking. What do I actually know about the accent and how it grew? I began to dig in.
(As for Hawai‘i, my later interviews with linguists showed there's little truth to that. But reader, if you know of evidence to the contrary, send it my way!)
Before the ‘80s, being called a “Valley Girl” usually meant you were just from a valley area. What valley? Basically any in California. If a Woodland Hills woman won an award, headlines would often read something like “Valley Girl wins big.” The same goes for Santa Clarita Valley women, and so on.
But things largely changed in 1982 when musician Frank Zappa released his best-selling single ever, the Grammy Award-nominated song “Valley Girl.” There, his 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit Zappa riffed lyrics inspired by the teenage girls she grew up around in the San Fernando Valley.
“Encino is, like, so bitchin’,” Moon said with a lot of rise in her voice. She sang of shoe stores in the Galleria, mini-skirts, and repeated teen lingo that would make today’s Gen Alpha say “barf me out.” Her improvised lyrics were an amalgamation of teenage things she heard and saw.
It’s not the sole reason for the term’s popularity, but Zappa’s song gets a lot of credit. (By the way, there was a response to that song called “Marina Men.”)
Sometimes called Val Girls and Valspeak, there were even books published before about how to eliminate that particular Valley Girl sound.
But Zappa’s buzz helped make it popular. Reseda even held a "Valley Girl" contest that year. Ironically, the winner was from La Verne in the San Gabriel Valley, and a judge went on record as saying, “Valley girls are from everywhere.”
He was probably onto something. While the accent is associated with Southern California, Teresa Pratt, an assistant professor of linguistics at San Francisco State University, said the term gets evoked in other places.
“They can’t even name the actual valley,” Pratt said, “but they know that it’s, like, somewhere around L.A.” (And yes. Pratt has a sort of valley girl accent, in case you were wondering).
“Nobody’s thinking about geography,” they added. “That’s how language works, right? You label something and then it takes on its own life.”
How did it start?
Pretty much all linguists can agree on one thing — no one knows for sure. (Or should that be ‘fer sure’?) New speech patterns arise unpredictably and how and why can be hard to track down. Where people first start noticing a way of talking may not even be when it started.
For example, when it comes to "uptalk" — the rising intonation at the end of a sentence that’s associated with “Valley Girl” — no one can even say which country it started in, although theories abound.
(It’s been associated with a speaker’s insecurity, or even our dwindling attention span. As in, "If I ask this as a question will you look away from your phone?" Meanwhile the UK blames a popular Australian soap opera that brought antipodean uptalk to British TV.)
The same goes for the overuse of “like.”
What is known is that growing up, we develop our accents by absorbing how people talk around us, so in a place as racially and culturally diverse as California, we sometimes get influenced by multiple speaking styles.
For example, some Californians’ accent can be traced to Chicano English. Linguists also know that "Valley Girl" is strongly associated with the California vowel shift, which is when the pronunciation of vowels happens in different parts of the mouth compared to other states.
Just watch Saturday Night Live’s famed skits about “the Californians.” The skit is exaggerated, but there’s some truth to it. Pratt says the accent is found across the state.
The ‘Valley Girl’ persona
Norma Mendoza-Denton, a linguistic anthropology professor at UCLA, says what linguists understand as the standard California accent, which is closely associated with “Valley Girl,” is often identified with whiteness. It makes sense given that the valley was initially populated by white families living in tacitly segregated suburban subdivisions.
Class and intelligence are also at play. While plenty of different people speak like “Valley Girls,” the imagined girl is a ditzy one with money to spend. Moon Zappa did, after all, use the teen slang she heard hanging out at the mall.
“Sometimes you will have a stereotype that’s so strong that it sort of carries along into the broader consciousness of the population with it,” said Mendoza-Denton.
Society dug its heels into the “Valley Girl” trope as an easy target for misogyny toward young women. Just watch the Valley Girl movie or Clueless, and you’ll see women characters deploy a roster of slang with a certain dress, but they’ll also be depicted as air-headed and shallow.
The accent’s influence
A girl in 1982 may have jinxed us when she suggested that no one would remember “Valley Girl” in six months.
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Norma Mendoza-Denton, quoted in this story, is researching linguistic variation and identity in Los Angeles. Interested in helping her work? Participate here.
More than 40 years have passed, and there are still big ways the trend impacts public perception.
Pratt says while things have been added to the idea of the “Valley Girl” character, the social analysis of her hasn’t changed much.
“Now she has a Starbucks cup or something, which wasn’t true 20, 30 years ago, but the core of her orientation to consumerism has not changed,” they said. “It’s still superficial. It’s still vapid. It’s still without any deep meaning.”
She’s modernized, so to speak. It’s less about Moon’s lavish mall trips and probably more today about smoothie excursions at Erewhon.
But with popularity, a reminder to not forget who actually makes up our home.
“It’s a bummer when L.A. gets stereotyped as like surfer dudes and white girls,” said Tyanna Slobe, a linguistic anthropologist at Dartmouth College. “That erases the linguistic variation in L.A.”
