Why do sports announcers talk like that?

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Hey, it’s Flora. And you’re listening to Science Friday.

ANNOUNCER: Three dribbles, one shot for the championship. He got it! 4 point lead, 7.5 to go! De’Aaron Fox–

FLORA LICHTMAN: If you watched the NBA Finals last weekend– go, Knicks– it was easy to marvel at the skill of the players. But they weren’t the only performers putting on the show.

ANNOUNCER: Left wing hand off to Wembanyama with two, takes a 3 that he misses– too strong! It’s happening, Knicks fans. It’s happening! It’s been 53 years! But for this moment, it was well worth the wait.

MONICA MCNUTT: Enjoy it, Knicks fan. Signed, sealed and delivered, your 2026 New York Knicks.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The sentence structure, the elocution, the pitch, the patois– the announcers seemed to be playing a beautiful game of their own. And it turns out, there are rules to this register. Linguists have studied it and even given the speech pattern its own name, sports announcer talk.

Here to break it down is sociolinguist and dialectologist, Dr. Valerie FRIDLAND from the University of Nevada, Reno. Valerie, welcome to Science Friday.

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: Well, thank you– and such a fun topic. I’m so excited to talk about it.

FLORA LICHTMAN: I’m obsessed. I’m just obsessed by it. OK, so the way sports announcers talk has actually been studied.

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: It has. It has. Yes, it’s actually been studied for about 35 years.

The first real study of sports announcer register was done by a linguist named Charles Ferguson and his students, which was published in 1983. And I remember reading it in grad school and finding it really entertaining then. And it still holds up to this day.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So break it down for me. What are the conventions of sports announcer talk?

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: There are two different areas that we look at when we look at sports announcer talk. And it turns out to be really, really unique and very different than our everyday, casual talk. He found that there were a lot of omissions and simplifications and reductions.

And the example you played, you could hear it. They just use baskets and shots and counts. They don’t really use full sentences a lot of the time, especially when they’re doing play-by-play action. There’s a little more of the fullness when you have the color commentary and explaining things about players and their backstories.

But generally, when you’re reporting and narrating the action, it has to be short, because it has to be quick. They also do things like–

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wait. Let’s just spend one more second on omission.

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: Sure.

FLORA LICHTMAN: So they don’t have verbs and subjects. How does it play out? Give me a couple more examples.

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: Sure. A lot of times, it’s the subjects that are deleted. Because you either who they’re talking about, or they’ll characterize it later. But it’s really the focus on the action.

So it would be something like, Smith to Johnson, which omits pretty much anything about what’s happening, except where the action was played. But if you’re in basketball, you’re assuming that meant the ball went from Smith to Johnson. So a lot of it relies on the background knowledge of listeners.

Or another good example would be Banks, the free throw, which would be, again, a subject omission but also a verb omission in some cases. So a lot of times, the is verb is what we find deleted. So they just don’t even bother with is, because you don’t really need it. And you’re talking fast, and you need to get the information out there.

Another thing you find a lot of that’s really not found in normal speech, because we would sound like Yoda, is inverted speech, where you invert the word order. And that’s where you basically say the action before the person doing the action. So that would be something like, a foul on Wemby, when you would say, Wemby was fouled, normally.

Or it would be something like, a rebound by Towns. Again, you don’t talk that way when you’re in everyday speech. You would say, Towns had a rebound. But we do this a lot in sports announcer talk.

And we see this in all sorts of different sports. That seems to be one of the really unique characteristics of that genre and makes it very recognizable because it’s so different than the way we talk every day. We don’t invert our speech like that, unless we are Yoda.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And, OK, is this basically like the action is first?

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: There are probably two reasons. One is the action is the important part. You need to describe. If you’re a sports announcer, one of your big jobs is describing what’s happening. And so the action takes center stage.

But the other thing is, sometimes in our brains, it takes a while to process how to put everything together. And when you’re following the ball and you’re reporting on where the ball is going, you’re going to be thinking about the action. That will be the first thing your brain is processing. And then it takes a minute to figure out, well, who’s doing that action?

So we actually think it’s because they need a little bit of a lag to figure out, well, OK, I followed the ball. I know what’s happening with it. But who was doing it? But it also kind of builds suspense and makes it more exciting. So it seems to be a two-way street, in terms of what it’s doing there.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What about the pitch or the musicality? I feel like there is a tempo and a sort of singsongy-ness to sports announcer talk.

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: Absolutely. So that’s the second area that studies have focused on. And in Ferguson’s day, they couldn’t really study that, because they didn’t have the kind of acoustic computational measurements we have today. But now a lot of the more recent work on sports announcer talk really focuses on what’s called the prosody or the rhythm of that speech.

And so it’s really based on pretty much three things, which is the pitch patterns, the pacing and the loudness a lot of times. So what we find is this build up in a play-by-play accounting of something. So if you’re following the action, the ball’s going down the court, and they’re about to get into the zone.

What you’re going to hear is they start at a slower tone and a low pitch. And then every phrase unit where they’re describing some play gets slightly higher in pitch, slightly faster in articulation, fewer pauses as you get to it, until, finally, you score!

FLORA LICHTMAN: [LAUGHING]

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: Right? So that’s exactly what you hear. And in fact, a study that was done– and this one was on soccer. A lot of the studies have been done on soccer. But they find the same kinds of things elsewhere– found that, when an announcer announces what they called the climax moment, which is the goal being scored or the basket making it, that the commentators– and this was men that they studied– actually went to a 400 hertz pitch range, which is astronomically high and something we don’t talk in normally.

So the average pitch of a male voice is about 100 to 150 hertz. So you’re talking about a 250 hertz climb to make sure you’re bringing that action to the full. There are a lot of studies that suggest that low pitch, particularly in males, is more attractive and heard as more socially dominant and more physical. So it’s actually a very unusual thing to find men speaking at such a high pitch.

And so one other study looked at their body movements and their mouth when they were doing it and how they offset the sort of femininity associated with such a high pitch. And they found that, instead of just doing the high pitch, they often do the high pitch with a bigger body movement. So they’re, like, flinging their arms out. And they’re making their shoulders really broad. And they’re opening their mouth really wide, probably to offset the more feminine associations with that high pitch.

And the other thing they do is, once they get to that goal, not only do they go to a higher pitch, but they slow down that very fast articulation rate. And they’ll often elongate the vowels. And it’s in! So that’s the very recognizable tempo and buildup that we get with sports announcing.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, we have a clip of this, actually, from the World Cup, which is where, of course, hundreds of millions of people are also hearing sports announcers right now. Let’s hear it.

ANNOUNCER: [SPEAKING SPANISH]

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: [LAUGHING] I love it.

Yeah, so you can hear it. And that’s actually called the goal roar. In the studies that have been done, when a goal is scored, it’s called the goal roar, that high, high pitch–

FLORA LICHTMAN: There’s a name for this?

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: There is a name for it, yes. We linguists like to come up with fancy names for everything. So that’s the goal roar.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We played a clip earlier from Monica McNutt. She’s one of the Knicks announcers.

MONICA MCNUTT: Soak it up, New York. This team continues to be and demonstrate that they are a team of destiny. It’s been two years of the phrase, we will find a way. And man, add more history to the books!

FLORA LICHTMAN: So she’s playing more of the sports analyst role there. But I also feel like she brings a different style. And I wonder how these registers evolve? And can they evolve?

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: They absolutely can. And one thing that we have seen is that certain announcers can be very influential on the future of announcing in that sport. A German linguist by the name of Mueller did a study in the early 2000s of German commentating. And they tend to use a faster speech rate than the English commentators, who tend to use simpler sentences than the German commentators and be more variable and excitable in the way they report sports.

And he found that was actually probably because of a single commentator that was very, very popular in Germany who had a very subdued style that was really influential, because people adored him. And that caused the style to become more subdued over time. So I think it’s absolutely the case that, when we have an iconic sports announcer that becomes very influential, people model themselves off of that commentator. And they can end up shifting the form itself.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wow. OK, well, zoom out with me, Valerie. Why do linguists care about documenting registers like sports announcer talk? What’s the big picture?

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: I think the thing that people forget is registers are part of everyday life and everything we do. And when we hear someone talk, we often know a lot about them by the register they use. And so we’re not studying sports announcer talk just because it’s cool.

But it is. It’s a fun thing. But it’s really just a form of understanding the way that language works to fit the needs of speakers based on, not just who we are– so where we’re born, that determines the way we talk. But how we live actually alters the fundamental ways that we interact. And that alters the way we talk.

So we recognize the way that doctors sound. We recognize the way that lawyers sound. We also recognize the way that young people sound.

These are all forms of registers. And you can learn a lot about how language changes over time and what makes it change by specific deep dives into types of registers. So it gives us more information, more generally, about the way that language works and how it interacts with social life.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Valerie, you have to come back and talk to us about scientist register.

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: Oh, I’d love to do that, yes. There are all sort– we could just have a whole day on register.

FLORA LICHTMAN: And I would be here for it. Thank you so much for joining us today.

DR. VALERIE FRIDLAND: Absolutely. It was a blast.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Dr. Valerie FRIDLAND, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno and author of Why We Talk Funny, The Real Story Behind Our Accents. This episode was produced by Dee Peterschmidt. In the podcasting world, a 3-pointer is considered a five-star review. So if you’re feeling it, maybe give us some net, five-star review. It’s happening. Science Friday! I’m Flora Lichtman. Thank you for listening.

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