The Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the Menu by Dan Jurafsky

two lists of food names from the web, the 81 ice cream flavors sold by either Haagen Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s, and a list of 592 cracker brands from a dieting website . For each list, I counted the total number of front vowels (i, I, , e, æ) and the total number of back vowels.
    The result? As shown in the chart on the preceding page, I found more back vowels in ice cream names like R o cky R oa d, Jam o ca A lmond F u dge, Ch o colate, C a ramel, C oo kie D ou gh, C o conut and front vowels in cracker names (note the extraordinary number of I vowels) like Ch ee se N i ps, Ch ee z I t, Wh ea t Th i ns, Pr e tzel Th i ns, R i tz, Kr i spy, Tr i scuit, Th i n Cr i sps, Ch ee se Cr i sps, Ch i cken in a B i skit, Snack St i cks, R i tz b i ts.
    Of course there are exceptions: van i lla (the orange blossom of our day), has an I . But most of the front vowels in ice cream flavors tend to be the names of small, thin ingredients in the ice cream (th i n m i nt, ch i p, p ea nut br i ttle).
    Sound symbolism is thus an important device in the toolbox of modern advertisers and designers of brand names, and in fact branding companies often get their insights from linguists .
    While our ice cream and cracker connections might be subconscious, they are systematic, and linguists have theories about the underlying cause: about why front vowels are associated with small, thin, light things, and back vowels with big, solid, heavy things.
    The most widely accepted theory, the frequency code , suggests that low frequencies (sounds with low pitch) and high frequencies (sounds with high pitch) are associated with particular meanings. The frequency code was developed by linguist John Ohala (my phonetics professor as an undergraduate at Berkeley) by extending work by Eugene Morton of the Smithsonian.
    Morton noticed that mammals and birds tend to use low-frequency (deeper) sounds when they are aggressive or hostile, but use higher-frequency(higher-pitched) sounds when frightened, appeasing, or friendly. Because larger animals naturally make deeper sounds (the roar of lions) and smaller animals naturally make high-pitched sounds (the tweet of birds), Morton’s idea is that animals try to appear larger when they are competing or aggressive, but smaller and less threatening otherwise.
    Morton and Ohala thus suggest that humans instinctively associate the pitch of sounds with size. All vowels are composed of different frequency resonances. When the tongue is high and in the front of the mouth, it creates a small cavity in front. Small cavities cause higher-pitched resonances (the smaller the space for vibration, the shorter the wavelength, hence the higher the frequency). One particular resonance (called the second formant) is much higher for front vowels and lower for back vowels.
    Thus the frequency code suggests that front vowels like I and i are associated with small, thin, things, and back vowels like a and ο with big heavy things because front vowels have higher-pitched resonances, and we instinctively associate higher pitch with smaller animals, and by extension smaller things in general.
    Researchers have extended this idea to show that raising pitch or “fronting” vowels (moving the tongue a bit toward the front of mouth to make all vowels have a slightly higher second formant pitch) are both especially associated with babies or children . In an early paper I examined more than 60 languages around the world and proposed that the word endings used in many languages to indicate smallness or lightness come historically from a word originally meaning “child” or associated with names of children, like the y in pet names Barbie and Robby. My linguistics colleague Penny Eckert shows that front vowels are associated with positive affect, and that preadolescent girls sometimes use vowel fronting to subtly imbue their speech with sweetness or childhood innocence. Linguist Katherine Rose Geenberg found that speakers of American English move their