The Brief

There are a few strongly held beliefs in Southern California. We judge travel by time instead of distance, In-N-Out is a must, and some locals really lean into that Valley Girl accent.

The accent went from a simple place signifier to a stereotypical white girl phenomenon.

It’s a dictionary entry. A movie, twice over. A stereotyped demographic. All under the guise of the “Valley Girl.”

The roots of the ‘Valley Girl’

My interest in the "Valley Girl" origins started with a conversation with a stranger at a concert entrance. People around us were speaking with that familiar upward inflection and creaky voice.

"You know, the accent came over from Hawai‘i," he asserted.

That statement got me thinking. What do I actually know about the accent and how it grew? I began to dig in.

(As for Hawai‘i, my later interviews with linguists showed there's little truth to that. But reader, if you know of evidence to the contrary, send it my way!)

Before the ‘80s, being called a “Valley Girl” usually meant you were just from a valley area. What valley? Basically any in California. If a Woodland Hills woman won an award, headlines would often read something like “Valley Girl wins big.” The same goes for Santa Clarita Valley women, and so on.

But things largely changed in 1982 when musician Frank Zappa released his best-selling single ever, the Grammy Award-nominated song “Valley Girl.” There, his 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit Zappa riffed lyrics inspired by the teenage girls she grew up around in the San Fernando Valley.

“Encino is, like, so bitchin’,” Moon said with a lot of rise in her voice. She sang of shoe stores in the Galleria, mini-skirts, and repeated teen lingo that would make today’s Gen Alpha say “barf me out.” Her improvised lyrics were an amalgamation of teenage things she heard and saw.

It’s not the sole reason for the term’s popularity, but Zappa’s song gets a lot of credit. (By the way, there was a response to that song called “Marina Men.”)

Sometimes called Val Girls and Valspeak, there were even books published before about how to eliminate that particular Valley Girl sound.

But Zappa’s buzz helped make it popular. Reseda even held a "Valley Girl" contest that year. Ironically, the winner was from La Verne in the San Gabriel Valley, and a judge went on record as saying, “Valley girls are from everywhere.”

A portrait of musician Frank Zappa on April 23, 1980.

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Rob Brown, Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

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An undated photo of Moon Unit Zappa, the daughter of musician Frank Zappa.

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Herald Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

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He was probably onto something. While the accent is associated with Southern California, Teresa Pratt, an assistant professor of linguistics at San Francisco State University, said the term gets evoked in other places.

“They can’t even name the actual valley,” Pratt said, “but they know that it’s, like, somewhere around L.A.” (And yes. Pratt has a sort of valley girl accent, in case you were wondering).

“Nobody’s thinking about geography,” they added. “That’s how language works, right? You label something and then it takes on its own life.”

How did it start?

Pretty much all linguists can agree on one thing — no one knows for sure. (Or should that be ‘fer sure’?) New speech patterns arise unpredictably and how and why can be hard to track down. Where people first start noticing a way of talking may not even be when it started.

For example, when it comes to "uptalk" — the rising intonation at the end of a sentence that’s associated with “Valley Girl” — no one can even say which country it started in, although theories abound.

(It’s been associated with a speaker’s insecurity, or even our dwindling attention span. As in, "If I ask this as a question will you look away from your phone?" Meanwhile the UK blames a popular Australian soap opera that brought antipodean uptalk to British TV.)

The same goes for the overuse of “like.”

What is known is that growing up, we develop our accents by absorbing how people talk around us, so in a place as racially and culturally diverse as California, we sometimes get influenced by multiple speaking styles.

For example, some Californians’ accent can be traced to Chicano English. Linguists also know that "Valley Girl" is strongly associated with the California vowel shift, which is when the pronunciation of vowels happens in different parts of the mouth compared to other states.

Just watch Saturday Night Live’s famed skits about “the Californians.” The skit is exaggerated, but there’s some truth to it. Pratt says the accent is found across the state.

The ‘Valley Girl’ persona

The 1983 "Valley Girl" movie poster art, featuing Deborah Foreman and Nicolas Cage.

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Courtesy Everett Collection

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Norma Mendoza-Denton, a linguistic anthropology professor at UCLA, says what linguists understand as the standard California accent, which is closely associated with “Valley Girl,” is often identified with whiteness. It makes sense given that the valley was initially populated by white families living in tacitly segregated suburban subdivisions.

Class and intelligence are also at play. While plenty of different people speak like “Valley Girls,” the imagined girl is a ditzy one with money to spend. Moon Zappa did, after all, use the teen slang she heard hanging out at the mall.

“Sometimes you will have a stereotype that’s so strong that it sort of carries along into the broader consciousness of the population with it,” said Mendoza-Denton.

Society dug its heels into the “Valley Girl” trope as an easy target for misogyny toward young women. Just watch the Valley Girl movie or Clueless, and you’ll see women characters deploy a roster of slang with a certain dress, but they’ll also be depicted as air-headed and shallow.

The accent’s influence

A girl in 1982 may have jinxed us when she suggested that no one would remember “Valley Girl” in six months.

More than 40 years have passed, and there are still big ways the trend impacts public perception.

Pratt says while things have been added to the idea of the “Valley Girl” character, the social analysis of her hasn’t changed much.

“Now she has a Starbucks cup or something, which wasn’t true 20, 30 years ago, but the core of her orientation to consumerism has not changed,” they said. “It’s still superficial. It’s still vapid. It’s still without any deep meaning.”

She’s modernized, so to speak. It’s less about Moon’s lavish mall trips and probably more today about smoothie excursions at Erewhon.

But with popularity, a reminder to not forget who actually makes up our home.

“It’s a bummer when L.A. gets stereotyped as like surfer dudes and white girls,” said Tyanna Slobe, a linguistic anthropologist at Dartmouth College. “That erases the linguistic variation in L.A.”

Big Bear’s famous bald eagle nest has taken a turn — both of Jackie and Shadow’s eggs have been attacked by ravens.

In the nest overlooking Big Bear Lake, a raven could be seen poking a large hole into, and potentially eating, one of the eagle eggs. The intrusion was noticed on a popular YouTube livestream run by the nonprofit Friends of Big Bear Valley.

Jenny Voisard, the organization’s media and website manager, confirmed the crack in Friends of Big Bear Valley’s official Facebook group, which has nearly 400,000 members, after Jackie and Shadow were away from the nest, and eggs, for several hours Friday.

Voisard told LAist one of the eggs may still be partly intact, but both eggs are believed to be breached. Jackie returned to their nest shortly after the raven left to lay on the remaining egg, according to organization records.

“Our hearts are with Jackie and Shadow always and we wrap our arms around them,” Voisard wrote. “Our hearts are also with you eagle fam, we know how you are feeling now."

“Step away from the screen when needed,” she continued in the post. “Try and rest tonight.”

How we got here

Jackie laid the first egg of the season around 4:30 p.m. last Friday and the second egg around 5:10 p.m. Monday as thousands of eager fans watched online.

It was almost exactly a year after the feathered duo welcomed the first egg of the 2025 season.

Bald eagles generally have one clutch per season, according to Friends of Big Bear Valley. A second clutch is possible if the eggs don’t make it through the early incubation process.

For example, Jackie laid a second clutch in February 2021 after the first round of eggs was broken or destroyed by ravens the month before.

Jackie and Shadow may have the left the nest unattended Friday because they knew on some level "that not everything was right," Voisard wrote.

"We are hopeful however, because bald eagles can lay replacement clutches if something happens early enough in the season," she continued. "The fact that the raven came to do its job so quickly may be just what Jackie and Shadow needed."

A raven is believed to have breached both eggs in Big Bear's famous nest.

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Friends of Big Bear Valley

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YouTube

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Watch the nest

This is a developing story and will be updated.

The Meta researcher’s tone was alarmed.

“oh my gosh yall IG is a drug,” the user experience specialist allegedly wrote to a colleague, referring to the social media platform Instagram. “We’re basically pushers... We are causing Reward Deficit Disorder bc people are binging on IG so much they can’t feel reward anymore.”

The researcher concluded that users’ addiction was “biological and psychological” and that company management was keen to exploit the dynamic. “The top down directives drive it all towards making sure people keep coming back for more,” the researcher added.

The conversation was included recently as part of a long-simmering lawsuit in a California-based federal court. Condensing complaints from hundreds of school districts and state attorneys general, including California’s, the suit alleges that social media companies knew about risks to children and teens but pushed ahead with marketing their products to them, putting profits above kids’ mental health. The suit seeks monetary damages and changes to companies’ business practices.

The suit, and a similar one filed in Los Angeles Superior Court, targets Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Snap. The cases are exposing embarrassing internal conversations and findings at the companies, particularly Facebook and Instagram owner Meta, further tarnishing their brands in the public eye. They are also testing a particular vector of attack against the platforms, one that targets not so much alarming content as design and marketing decisions that accelerated harms. The upshot, some believe, could be new forms of regulation, including at the federal level.

One document discussed during a hearing this week included a 2016 email from Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s live videos feature. In the email, the Meta chief wrote, “we’ll need to be very good about not notifying parents / teachers” about teens’ videos.

“If we tell teens’ parents about their live videos, that will probably ruin the product from the start,” he wrote, according to the email.

In slides summarizing internal tech company documents, released this week as part of the litigation, an internal YouTube discussion suggested that accounts from minors in violation of YouTube policies were actively on the platform for years, producing content an average of “938 days before detection – giving them plenty of time to create content and continue putting themselves and the platform at risk.”

A spokesperson for Meta didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

A YouTube spokesperson, José Castañeda, described the slide released this week as “a cherry-picked view of a much larger safety framework” and said the company uses more than one tool to detect underage accounts, while taking action every time it finds an underage account.

In court, the companies have argued that they are making editorial decisions permitted by the First Amendment,. That trial is set for June.

The state court litigation moved into jury selection this week, increasing the pressure on social media companies.

While the state and federal cases differ slightly, the core argument is the same: that social media companies deliberately designed their products to hook young people, leading to disastrous but foreseeable consequences.

“It's led to mental health issues, serious anxiety, depression, for many. For some, eating disorders, suicidality,” said Previn Warren, co-lead counsel on the case in federal court. “For the schools, it’s been lost control over the educational environment, inability of teachers to really control their classrooms and teach.”

A federal suit

Meta and other companies have faced backlash for years over their treatment of kids on their platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Parents, lawmakers and privacy advocates have argued that social media contributed to a mental health crisis among young people and that tech companies failed to act when that fact became clear.

Those allegations gained new scrutiny last month when a brief citing still-sealed documents in the federal suit became public.

While the suit also names TikTok, Snap, and Google as defendants, the filing includes allegations against Meta that are especially detailed.

In the more than 200-page filing, for example, the plaintiffs argue that Meta deliberately misled the public about how damaging their platforms were.

Warren pointed to claims in the brief that Meta researchers found that 55% of Facebook users had “mild” problematic use of the platform, while 3.1 percent had “severe” problems. Zuckerberg, according to the brief, pointed out that 3% of billions would still be millions of people.

But the brief claims the company published research noting only that "we estimate (as an upper bound) that 3.1% of Facebook users in the US experience problematic use.”

“That’s a lie,” Warren said.

In response to recent interest in the suits, Meta published a blog post this month arguing that the litigation “oversimplifies” the issue of youth mental health, and pointed to past instances where it has worked with parents and families with features to protect kids.

The federal case faced a key hearing this week, as the defendants argued that a judge should summarily dismiss the case. A decision on that motion is likely coming in the next few weeks, Warren said.

Social media companies, like other web-based services, receive protection from some legal claims under a part of federal law. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act gives legal immunity to website operators for potentially illegal content on their platforms.

Mary Anne Franks, a legal scholar in First Amendment issues at George Washington University who has long studied Section 230, said rather than online content in and of itself, the recent social media cases are focusing on the design of the platforms and their marketing.

“The litigation strategy is saying it's the way that you're providing that space and you're pushing this toward individuals that are vulnerable that is really an issue here,” she said. “It's your own conduct, not somebody else's.”

The companies are making key decisions behind the scenes, she said, and could be held responsible for them.

“You were manipulating things,” she said the plaintiffs are arguing. “You were deliberately making choices about what comes to the top or what is directly accessible or may be tempting to vulnerable users.”

A California state trial begins

Meanwhile, the related state lawsuit went to jury selection this week.

The case, which makes similar claims about personal injury caused by the social media companies, has also drawn nationwide attention, and major industry figures like Zuckerberg are expected to appear on the stand.

The personal injury case focuses on an unnamed plaintiff who claims to have had her mental health damaged by an addiction to social media.

In a last-minute development this week, TikTok and Snap reportedly reached undisclosed settlements in the case. Meta and Google are continuing as defendants.

Franks said these trials could be a tipping point in regulating how tech companies design and market their products. While the companies have faced scrutiny in the past, she said, the glare of examination at trial could be especially bright.

“There's always been talk of it and the members of Congress have kind of said, ‘maybe we'll regulate you,’” she said. “I think now the platforms are really getting nervous about what this is going to mean if they look really bad on the stand.”

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

On Saturday, Burbank is officially launching a new hiking trail accessibility program for people with disabilities. Two new all-terrain wheelchairs will be available to rent at Stough Canyon Nature Center for use on the fire trail.

The program is the first of its kind in Southern California. Several jurisdictions in the region have beach accessibility programs, but this is the first for mountain trails.

The background

In recent years, Burbank has become a leader in the movement to make sports and the outdoors more accessible to people with disabilities.

Since 2021, the city has launched several adaptive sports programs, including offering wheelchair rugby and fencing, Piper’s Pals youth baseball and basketball, powerchair soccer, boccia and the Burbank Adaptive Sports Expo, which is coming up for its third year running on Feb. 21.

The new equipment

The new all-terrain wheelchairs are the latest in that effort, said Diego Cevallos,  assistant director of the city’s parks and recreation department.

“We are building an ecosystem here in Burbank of robust programming and activities that cater to folks with disabilities,” he said. “Really what we want to do is inspire the community and also our other civic leaders to engage in this movement of making outdoor equity more accessible through programs just like this.”

Burbank is launching its accessibility program with two new all-terrain wheelchairs.

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Courtesy Burbank Parks and Recreation

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The city purchased the all-terrain Action Trackchair AXIS 40 wheelchairs — each about $20,000 — exclusively with funds raised by Leadership Burbank. The community-based organization raised about $90,000 for the trail accessibility program. The remaining funds went to the city’s parafencing program and all staff time associated with maintaining these programs comes out of the city’s general fund, Cevallos said.

How the program works

The program is open to anyone with mobility issues in the region, not only Burbank residents.

You can reserve one of the two wheelchairs by going to BurbankParks.com. The process is a bit clunky, but city staff are working to simplify it.

Once reserved, the user will have to bring a non-disabled companion to assist them and a staff member or volunteer with the Nature Center will accompany them on the trail. That docent will provide nature education during the hike and make sure everything is going smoothly and safely.

Right now, the chairs can only be reserved for up to two hours, said recreation services manager Noah Altman, but he said staff welcomes feedback from the public and will consider updating the requirements for the program as needed.

And an important note: Residents with all types of disabilities can use the chairs — it’s not necessary to have mobility in one’s hands. The family member or friend accompanying the user can remotely control the wheelchairs if needed.

Why all-terrain wheelchairs matter

Mobility challenges are the most common type of disability in L.A. County — around half a million Angelenos have some type of ambulatory disability, according to the county’s Aging and Disabilities Department.

But all-terrain wheelchairs cost around $20,000 and weigh around 400 pounds, making them out of reach and impractical for most individuals to own themselves, said Austin Nicassio, a San Dimas resident and founder of Accessible Off-Road, a nonprofit that advocates and is raising funds for more off-road mobility devices.

Nicassio provided consultation early on in the Burbank accessible trail project effort, and is currently working with L.A. County and California State Parks to bring all-terrain wheelchairs to more areas. The nonprofit is raising money to purchase all-terrain wheelchairs for use in those jurisdictions.

“ It's a huge milestone,” Nicassio said of the Burbank program. “It's going to be absolutely life changing for everyone in Southern California.”

For Nicassio, these efforts are deeply personal. Growing up in the eastern San Gabriel Valley, he used to be an avid hiker and mountain biker.

“Five years ago I was completely able-bodied working as an aerospace engineer, mountain biking, hiking, surfing,” Nicassio said. “My body did whatever I wanted it to do, and I always took it for granted.”

Austin Nicassio uses his all-terrain wheelchair at Frank G. Bonelli Regional Park near his home in San Dimas.

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Courtesy Austin Nicassio

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But in 2022, after a mild case of COVID-19, he started experiencing strange symptoms — muscle weakness, severe brain fog. He was later diagnosed with a condition that affects his blood flow and makes it difficult to stand for long periods of time and impossible to do anything too strenuous. He was also diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.

“I went from being very active to being a wheelchair user,” Nicassio said.

His mental health plummeted — he realized he used to cope with strong emotions by getting out on the trails or in the ocean. When he finally saved up enough to purchase his own off-road wheelchair, it was “life changing.”

“And not just for me, but for my father, for my wife, for my friends, my whole community,” Nicassio said.

He says he wants to see a world where access to such offroad wheelchairs is the norm.

“ No one has told me that their favorite hike or trail's been paved unless you're disabled, and it has to be,” said Nicassio. “Being out on these trails, a couple miles from the noise, from the trash, from the people, it's life changing.”