As the vocabulary and manner of speech give low self-esteem Bashny.Net

At school we are taught not to mumble the words and get rid of parasites. Linguists from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania have found less obvious but no less important signs of uncertainty in the speech. The Aeon magazine published a useful article on how to recognize other people's systems under the guise of self-confidence and improve their own self-presentation skills. "Theory and Practice" published the main points.


Uncertainty about how the smell of blood, sooner or later becomes noticeable to others. It makes us feel so open and vulnerable, with the result that we really reveal their weaknesses and become vulnerable. As red sock accidentally turned into a typewriter with white sheets, leaving signs of hesitation in our speech and texts, spoiling the image of the perfectly balanced man, we tried to broadcast around.

But if you know, for what linguistic markers is to monitor, you can recognize the uncertainty of speech (and possibly corrected before anyone nibudzametit). The following are useful tips.

First of all, beware of overcompensation. Nothing gives an inferiority complex as self-promotion. Researchers from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania reported that people who are on the periphery of a group, are more likely to use the words, emphasizing their belonging to this group. But key figures do not seek to demonstrate their involvement.

One study compared the sites of top universities and top graduate school and universities, providing an opportunity to get a master's degree. And those and others have programs for people with higher education, as opposed to the college, but the researchers speculated that higher education institutions specializing in the master will be less confident about their status because they do not confer PhD. Volunteers needed to track how often a schools name used at each site (such as "Harvard") and how often referred to their status (eg, "Harvard University"). It turned out that the "master" universities do often called themselves universities than colleges with graduate school.

Similarly sites examined international airports: it turned out that the small airports are much more likely to emphasize its international status than Heathrow level. Finally, the researchers conducted an experiment with students of two universities of the Ivy League, asking them to describe their education. Students less prestigious University of Pennsylvania often emphasized exclusivity of his high school than their peers from Harvard.

Sociologists have a term for how people change their voice to sound more solid: linguistic insecurity

You could argue that such a blatant labeling can resort only to avoid confusion and ambiguity. Default We assume that the major airports have international flights - possibly smaller airports simply useful to remind customers about all the possibilities, because they are not so obvious? And if someone does not remember that part of the University of Pennsylvania in the Ivy League, there are quite pragmatic reasons cause companion "correct" association.

And yet it seems to me that the interpretation of the researchers at least partly true. I remember as a child screaming at full throat in support of its team of swimmers. Why? I was disgusting swimmer and wanted to prove that they belong to the "dolphin».

Despite the fact that insecure people insist on their involvement in the group, they prefer to speak only for myself. Now we know that low self-esteem is reflected in pronouns. Until recently, many experts believed that the frequent use of the first person singular and peculiar domineering and narcissistic "I-I-I-people" eager attention. But Pennibeyker wrote James, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, the pronoun "I" often signals the humiliation and subservience. A more confident person often represents their territory (and may decide that you should do and not worry about what is worth doing it). "A person with high status focused on the outside world, and people with low status are interested in himself" - says Pennibeyker

. Uncertainty is expressed not only in what you say, but how you do it. Colleagues told me that lowered his voice to sound more authoritative in difficult moments, or use high-sounding words. Sociologists even have a term for how people change their voice to sound more impressive: the linguistic uncertainty. It occurs when people feel that their language indicates their inferiority. They try - consciously or not - to "borrow prestige" by choosing a different style of conversation. The linguist William Labov first investigated this phenomenon in the 1960s. He found that in New York, members of the upper class, making noises «r», and the citizens of the lower classes often lowered it to the end of words and before vowels, and asked workers from the prestigious shopping center Saks Fifth Avenue and discount-store S. Klein utter the phrase «forth floor». It turned out that the staff Saks more often try to imitate "elite" pronunciation.

In linguistic uncertainty there is a more extreme form - overcorrection when real or imaginary grammatical rule is used in the wrong context. In such cases, an attempt to say "right" paradoxically leads to an incorrect result.

There are also features of speech, which we mistake for signs of uncertainty, even though they are not. For example, a cracked voice, manner of pronouncing affirmative sentence with a question mark - more evidence of vigor and propensity to innovate, and the habit often say "um" or "you know" - a sign of the narrator's honesty.