Overstressed vowels: A lot of the time, people are lazy about pronouncing certain vowels—they’re un-emphasized and neutral, and just sort of hang loosely in the middle of the mouth, making an “euh” sound, regardless of which vowel it actually is. This “euh” is called the schwa. (Hear it pronounced here.) When you make the effort to actually pronounce a vowel that is usually a schwa, that’s a way of emphasizing the word. For example: “If I say the word ‘exactly,’ you don’t really know what that first vowel is. ‘Euh,’” Baron says. “If I say ‘eh-xactly,’ you have the sound ‘eh,’ like in the word ‘bet.’”

Sneaky extra vowels between consonants: Listen to the way Rugnetta says “trapping” at 35 seconds here. “Terraping.” “I’ve added a little vowel between the t and the r,” Baron says. “It elongates the word, it adds an extra syllable to the word, it emphasizes the word. There’s a name for this: epenthetic vowel.”

Long vowels: Stretching out vowels is a common way of emphasizing words—sometimes it’s obvious, and clearly done on purpose (listen to the word “five” in this Franchesca Ramsey video). But sometimes in these videos the vowels are just sliiightly longer than normal (see what I did there?), resulting in the kind of emphasis and “bounce” I wasn’t able to put my finger on until Baron pointed it out to me. (See: every time Rugnetta says “magic,” or when Ryan Higa says “channel.”)

For that matter, long consonants as well: Especially those at the beginning of words. Take the word “fascinatingly” from this Vlogbrothers video as an example.

Aspiration: This was the part of our phone call where things got interactive.

“If you put your finger in front of your mouth, I'll teach you a very quick phonology lesson,” Baron said. I did. “Are you ready? Say ‘keep.’”

“Keep.”

“Now say ‘geep.’”

“Geep.”

“When you said keep, did you feel a breath of air on your finger?” She asked. (Indeed I did.) “That’s called an aspiration.” There’s normally an aspiration on the K, even if you say it normally, but if you huff and puff a little more, that makes the word stand out.

For an extreme example, see how Hank Green says “couldn’t care less.” A more subtle example is how Australian vlogger Natalie Tran says “fake” and “sick.” You hear this sometimes with “p” and “t” sounds, too. Like when Charlie McDonnell says “salt.”

* * *

So it turns out the “YouTube voice” is just a variety of ways of emphasizing words, none of which are actually exclusive to YouTube—people employ these devices in speech all the time. But they generally do it to grab the listener’s attention, and when you’re just talking to a camera without much action, it takes a little more to get, and keep, that attention. All the videos I used as examples in this article come from popular YouTube accounts, with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers—in other words, from people who know how to engage an audience.