High rising terminal

HRT has been claimed to be especially common among younger speakers and women, though its exact sociolinguistic implications are an ongoing subject of research.

[2] In the United States, the phenomenon of HRT may be fairly recent but is an increasingly common characteristic of speech especially among younger speakers.

[7] Media in Australia, Britain, and the United States have negatively portrayed the usage of HRT, claiming that its use exhibits a speaker's insecurities about the statement and undermines effective speaking.

[13] However, other research has suggested HRT can be an effective way for speakers to establish common ground, that this often involves breathy voice, and that its meaning is highly situational, derived from a "complex interaction of time, presupposition, and inference.

[2][16][17] According to University of Pennsylvania phonologist Mark Liberman, George W. Bush began to use HRT extensively in his speeches as his presidency continued.

Rising intonation on declarative sentences was one of the features Lakoff included in her description of "women's language", a gendered speech style she believed reflected and reproduced its users' subordinate social status.

"[22] Negative associations with the speech pattern, in combination with gendered expectations, have contributed to an implication that for female speakers to be viewed as authoritative, they ought to sound more like men than women.

Anecdotal evidence places the conception of the American English variety on the West Coast—anywhere from Southern California to the Pacific Northwest.

[25] This in turn comes into prominence due to development of "Valleyspeak" popularized by the Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl" in the early 1980s.