The dog voice
A dog is coming the other way on the pavement, on a lead, tail going. It reaches you before its owner does and puts its nose against your knee, and you hear yourself say hello, you an octave higher than you have said anything all day. It is not the voice you use with babies, though it is related. It is not the voice you use with your own dog, which is lower and has instructions in it. It is a voice for a dog you have never met and will not meet again, and you have no other use for it.
Nobody taught you it, and it is remarkably uniform. People who study it call it pet-directed speech, and the measurements are consistent. The pitch goes up and swings more widely. The sentences get short. The same phrase comes twice, and questions arrive that nobody expects to have answered: who's this, then? Who's this? Most of that is shared with the way people speak to infants. One part is missing. When adults talk to babies they stretch their vowels, pulling them further apart than usual, which seems to help a child hear where one sound ends and the next begins. A 2002 study in Science compared the two registers and found the exaggerated vowels in speech to infants and not in speech to pets. The warmth came across unchanged. The teaching was left out. Without ever deciding it, the speakers had worked out that the dog was not going to learn English, and that it would get the tune and nothing else.
That is roughly what the dogs report, too, as far as they can. Puppies pay more attention to the high voice than to an ordinary one. Adult dogs are less easily impressed. In one study they preferred the high voice only when it came with dog words in it — good boy, walkies — which they had presumably learned at home from someone who was not a stranger.
So a good part of what you are saying is not for the dog. It is for the person holding the lead, who has now caught up and is standing there smiling. Aren't you gorgeous. Aren't you a good boy. Said directly to a stranger, either line would be an approach, and it would oblige them to answer, to judge your intentions, and possibly to cross the road. Said to the dog, it obliges nobody. The owner can reply, he's a menace, or say nothing at all, and both are correct. The dog is a go-between, and a very good one, because it cannot pass on anything except that you were kind. The high voice is part of the delivery. It announces that nothing in this sentence is a request, that you are harmless, and that you will be gone in four seconds.
One way to check is what happens when there is no owner in sight. A loose dog in a park gets a different voice, lower and more careful, with instructions in it again. Take away the human audience and the register goes too, because the audience was a large part of why it was there.
Then the lead goes taut, the owner says come on, and the two of them move off. You drop back to your own voice for whatever you say next, and nobody on the pavement hears the change except you.
It is the one compliment a stranger can pay you in public that you are not obliged to answer, and it is paid to your dog.
Thread: the carrier wave