Why do sports announcers talk like that?
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What is sports announcer talk and why is it unique?
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How has sports announcer talk been studied over the years?
Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday.
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.
Left wing handoff to Wimpanyama with two. Takes a three 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.
What are the main conventions of sports announcer talk?
Enjoy it, Knicks fans. Signed, sealed, and delivered. Your 2026 New York Knicks.
The sentence structure, the elocution, the pitch, the patois, the announcers seem 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 Friedland from the University of Nevada, Reno. Valerie, welcome to Science Friday. Well, thank you. And such a fun topic.
How do omissions and simplifications shape sports commentary?
I'm so excited to talk about it.
I'm obsessed. I'm just obsessed by it. OK, so the way sports announcers talk has actually been studied.
It has. It has. Yes. You know, 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.
What role does pitch and rhythm play in sports announcing?
And it still holds up to this day. So break it down for me.
What are the conventions of sports announcer talk?
There are two different sort of 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. So and the example you played, you could hear it. They just sort of use, you know, don'ts. 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... Wait, so let's just spend one more second on omissions.
How do sports announcers build excitement during a game?
So like they don't have verbs and subjects. How does it play out? Give me a couple more examples.
Sure. A lot of times it's the subjects that are deleted because you either know 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 admits pretty much anything about what's happening except where the action was played, right? But if you're in basketball, you're assuming that meant the ball went from Smith to Johnson. So a lot of that relies on the background knowledge of listeners. Or another good example would be Banks, the free throw.
Can the style of sports announcing evolve over time?
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.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is sports announcer talk and why is it unique?
0:01–0:47
2
How has sports announcer talk been studied over the years?
0:47–1:25
3
What are the main conventions of sports announcer talk?
1:25–2:04
4
How do omissions and simplifications shape sports commentary?
2:04–2:33
5
What role does pitch and rhythm play in sports announcing?
2:33–3:26
6
How do sports announcers build excitement during a game?
3:26–4:00
7
Can the style of sports announcing evolve over time?
4:00–4:52
8
Why is understanding sports announcer talk important for linguists?
4:52–13:03
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Science Friday
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