A linguistic dissection of 7 annoying teenage sounds

Voiced alveolar stop and breathy-voiced low back unrounded vowel — better known as duhhh

"Auuggghhh get out of my room!"
(Image credit: Thinkstock/Goodshoot)

The next time you find yourself wondering about the highest use of linguistics, or enduring the insulting grunts and groans of petulant adolescents and wondering how such noises could even be described, bring the two worlds together. Clearly, linguistics exists just so we can give a technical description of those hard-to-spell sounds that erupt from callow youths. Here are seven examples (with three bonus variations).

(And to hear what these sound like, check out the video below.)

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James Harbeck

James Harbeck is a professional word taster and sentence sommelier (an editor trained in linguistics). He is the author of the blog Sesquiotica and the book Songs of Love and Grammar.