Using a phone voice to impress

IF YOU’VE found yourself using a special “phone voice”, then you are not the only one. Two out of five people admitted they switched to a different voice because they thought it makes them sound smarter, a study found.

Two-thirds of them even used an affected voice when they were speaking to their spouses or family.

Women were more likely to adjust their voices in order to impress, with almost half of women doing so during phone calls, compared with just over a third of men.

However, a quarter of phone voice users said they did not realise when they were doing it, and more than a third failed to keep it up for a whole conversation, with the mask tending to slip after 90 seconds of talking.

The dictionary defines a phone voice as one “intended to be particularly clear, engaging or businesslike, or one which is regarded as affectedly cultivated or pretentious”.

Usually designed to disguise the speaker’s class background, phone voices were used by workers on clients, suppliers and their boss, the report by insurance company Privilege said. They were often adopted by people discussing loans and overdrafts with their bank, and nearly a third of phone voice users said they also used a different tone to try to impress restaurant staff when they called to reserve a table.

The survey also indicated that a high number of people who used a phone voice wanted to hide their accent. – Daily Mail