Northern California dialect? Linguists at Stanford have identified a “Northern California Vowel Shift” and it began with teen-aged girls. Californians used to speak like the state’s mainly New York transplants, with a mix of foreign influences. Now native births are the main source of population growth instead of immigration. That shift contributes to a unique dialect, constructed by the younger female generation and sometimes picked up by young males and older females. It has some characteristics of that ol’ 80s Valley Girl speak, but is unique to itself. The emphasis on the young girls’ contribution to dialect change makes me wonder whether the evolution of spoken human language has had times of predominantly female influence. Nowadays it seems as if people pick up their “speak” from favorite television shows, which flattens out dialects into TV demographic target groups.