The phrase “I’m all,” a staple Californian dialect over the last two decades, may be on its way out. And some Californians are all, “That’s too bad.”
A recent study in the journal American Speech, by Stanford University linguist John Rickford and three co-authors, looks at what linguists call the “quotative” use of “all” — when the word “all” introduces a quotation, as in, “I’m all, ‘No way.'” This usage showed up in American English in the early 1990s, Rickford says, but it’s now giving way to an equally informal quote signal: the word “like,” as in, “He was like, ‘No.'”
Rickford points to a 1994 study of the conversations of high school students in California. That study showed that students used “all” more than 45 percent of the times they introduced quotes, compared with “like” 18 percent of the time and “say” 11 percent.
Today, teens and twentysomethings still occasionally use “all” for quotes, as with one male speaker in Rickford’s survey who said, “I was all, ‘Keep at it.'” Here, “I was all” replaces “I said.”
What the American Speech study doesn’t say is that “all” and “like” usually go with approximate quotations, rather than exact ones. “He said” is an act of reporting. “He was all” or “He was like” just gives the gist of what someone said, often with an emphasis on that person’s emotion or attitude. If you say, “My mom was all, ‘Why are you late?'” your main intention is to say that your mom was mad, rather than to re-enact that conversation.
But now, “I’m all” is starting to disappear, the American Speech study says. In a 2005 survey of California high school and college students, Rickford and a team of researchers at Stanford University found that the quotative use of “all” had plummeted since the early 1990s. In their study, speakers used “all” less than 5 percent of the time they introduced quotations, down from 45 percent in 1994. “All” had even fallen behind the word “said,” which was used 12 percent of the time.
“Like” was the king of quotative words in Rickford’s study, showing up nearly 70 percent of the time speakers began quotations. The researchers found a similar trend in archived online message boards.
In fact, “all” has lost so much ground to “like” that it now appears as a modifier of “like,” as in, “She’s all like, ‘Well you have to.'”
“‘All like’ has become the primary sequence in which ‘all’ is used as a quotative, and the only one used by the younger speakers,” Rickford writes, adding that “all” may be “shifting from its new quotative [function] to its older intensifier function, reinforcing ‘like.'”
Carmen Fought, linguist at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., conducted the 1994 survey discussed in the American Speech study. She says the Stanford researchers are probably right about “I’m all.”
“Sadly, I believe it may be true that quotative ‘all’ is declining,” Fought writes by e-mail. “I think this is a great loss to the English language. Quotative ‘all’ has been a part of my life, as a Californian at heart, and I’m sorry to see it go.”
———-
Note to readers: On Language moves to alternate Tuesdays during the summer months. To contact Nathan Bierma, please e-mail [email protected].