Does anyone know what the capital of Transnistria is?

Wikipedia always amazes me. Today, I discovered the "Random article" link on the home page, which essentially gives you what it says: a random article. To illustrate just how random the articles are, the first one I was presented with was on Galina Antyufeeva. What is that, you ask? Galina Antyufeeva is a Transnistrian politician and wife of the country's National Security Minister. This, of course, naturally leads to even more questions: what kind of name is Galina, where in the world is "Transnistria" (if it's even in this world), and who the hell knew enough about this topic to write an entire article about it?

Transnistria, it turns out, is not a fictitious place, as I had originally thought. It is a small, poor and fiercely independent province of Moldova. Interesting. One more obscure factoid to add to the pile, I guess. I wonder when I'll be able to slip it into a conversation:

"So, you're from Quebec, right?"
"Yes, or as I like to call it, Transnistria West."

Next, I was served up an article on a book series by Harry Turtledove (another great name) called "Settling Accounts." It is part of a series of books which tell an alternate and fictitious account of World War II, presupposing that the Confederates won the Civil War. One funny and interesting plot detail that is mentioned in the article is that Canada, in this scenario, is under U.S. occupation. All, that is, save for the independent Republic of Québec, which, allied with the U.S., is the ruling force in the other assimilated Canadian provinces, while U.S. forces redeploy to the South to confront Confederate armies. Now, I'm no separatist, but there's something oddly satisfying about imagining Jean-Pierre Tremblay manhandling those Ontario dandies and forcing them to listen to Céline Dion all day. (Come to think of it, don't we pretty much already do all of that?)

Also, now that I think of it, there's also an interesting parrallel between the article on separatist Transnistria and my sudden pleasure at imagining an independent Quebec ruling over the rest of Canada, but I'm not going to go too far down that rabbit hole—I might not like where it leads.

But the main reason that I was moved to write about all of this is that I stumbled upon an academic explanation of something that I've always found fascinating, and which I've observed with alarming frequency since I've been in the States: the tendency for teenagers—mostly female—to speak in such a way that it makes their every utterance sound like a question. You know what I mean? Like? Every sentence? Sounds like? A question? Yeah, like that. Drives me crazy too.

This mode of speech even has a name: High Rising Terminal, or HRT. To quote the Wikipedia entry on the matter:

The High Rising Terminal (HRT), sometimes known as Australian Questioning Intonation or more colloquially as up-talk or up-speak, is a feature of some accents of English where statements have a rising intonation pattern in the final syllable or syllables of the utterance.

Everybody with me so far? It gets more interesting:

It has been suggested that the HRT has a facilitative function in conversation (i.e., it encourages the addressee to participate in the conversation), and such functions are more often used by women. It also subtly indicates that the speaker is "not finished yet", thus perhaps discouraging interruption (Allen, 1990; Guy et al, 1986; Warren, 2005).

It has also been noted in speech patterns heard in areas of Canada and in Cape Town, the Falkland Islands, and the United States, where it is often associated with a particular sociolect that originated among affluent teenage girls in Southern California (see Valspeak and Valley girl).

Now that's just plain cool. And here's where the learning happens. Although this way of speaking, to me, has always sounded like a question, when you actually think about it, a question hardly ever ends in a rising intonation. In regular, every day speech, it's more of an up-then-down intonation on the last two syllables. So the theories about the mode of speech being more intended to sustain listener attention or to mitigate interruptions are pretty enlightening. To me, at least.

Yes, Dillon, that was a whole entry on linguistics. Bite me. It's my blog.

Nic