Once you’ve heard ‘luxury voice,’ you can’t unhear it

To better understand social stratification in New York City in 1966, sociolinguist William Labov started with a simple question: “How do you get to the fourth floor?”

He’d visited several department stores in Manhattan, each catering to different clientele across a broad spectrum of affluence, and asked relevant staff members that same leading question. Labov wasn’t particularly concerned with the answer. Instead of listening to the instructions, he was gauging the quality of each employee’s hard “r” pronunciation when saying “fourth floor,” unlike the British, who let “floor” sound like “floh.”

The results were stark: Sales associates at the highest-end department store categorically pronounced that firm “r,” while employees at the more accessibly priced shops didn’t. That’s a surprising linguistic quirk, considering American cultural biases ascribe poshness to British accents, notes Nicole Holliday, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. This didn’t surprise Labov, however. The newer, consistent hard “r” sound he identified was a growing indicator of prestige, one that came from American English becoming cemented through TV and radio.

Labov demonstrated in a study he published that luxury spaces were imbued with more tacit signs of eliteness beyond fancy finishes and expensive wares. Fast-forward to the present, and despite the ever-changing tastes and flexes of money — new and old — this remains truer than ever.

Today in the US, achieving this elite-speak is to walk a “high-wire act,” as Holliday calls it: One wrong step, or mispronunciation, and you break the confidence of the listener. But accents aren’t necessarily the tell for prestige when zooming out to examine contemporary international hospitality culture. A newer flavour of luxury voice has evolved that’s markedly different from everyday vocal patterns: softer volumes, slower syllabic speaking rates (in spite of our penchant for ultrafast talking on TikTok) and a whole new lexicon of buzzwords.

As someone who vets hundreds of hotels each year, I’ve started to clock how the dulcet tones and lofty words we usually find in spas have crept from the world of wellness into the realm of high-end accommodations. Perhaps you’ve noticed yourself, if you’ve been guided to a couch for a quiet check-in conversation instead of standing at a desk.

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“In a luxury setting, how something is said matters as much as what is said,” says Tom Rowntree, vice president for global luxury brands at IHG Hotels & Resorts. “Tone, pacing and delivery signal confidence and discretion.”

According to research conducted in 2025 by the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, staff in customer-facing roles at luxury hotels, retail and dining reduce their rate of speaking by more than 10% from everyday talking speeds. This is meant to signal an increase in empathy, author Jonah Berger notes in the study.

A reduction in decibel levels also promotes privacy and individualised care — after all, luxury doesn’t exist in crowded spaces. It’s no surprise that Hilton used the portmanteau “hushpitality” in its 2026 trend report, with more than half of its surveyed participants citing quietness as a primary form of indulgence in their overstimulated lives.

“When coaching [our employees], we focus on tone, pace and intent so interactions feel calm, considered and genuinely attentive,” says Roland Hamburger, general manager of the Rosewood Vienna, a luxury hotel in Austria’s capital.

Word choice is another vital component. “A ‘room’ becomes a ‘sanctuary,’ or a ‘stay’ becomes a ‘journey.’ Language creates emotion,” Rowntree says. The goal? To remove any whiff of transaction, says Kimberley Cohen, co-founder of Maison Pariente, a family-owned collection of five-star hotels in France. “Guests are looking less for possessions and more for emotions.” She highlights the special intentionality of using experiential verbs — “instead of ‘offer,’ we might say we ‘create’ or ‘share’ to imply a relationship rather than a transaction.”

Sometimes even basic words such as “yes” or “masseuse” are syllabically enhanced to “certainly” and “therapist.” Those examples were pulled from Forbes Travel Guide’s five-star rating program, which publishes a standards of service catalogue and makes it readily available to all the hotels it might rate.

“Communication style matters more now, because luxury hospitality has entered a more crowded, more visible and more easily copied era,” Hamburger says. It’s no longer enough for distinction to be derived from visual cues or from a formalised code of care. Now luxury service must telegraph emotional connection.

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Beyond the confines of high-end spaces, luxury-speak is morphing our ordinary vocabulary as well. According to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the word “curate” has seen a 700% increase in usage frequency in the past 20 or so years. Once a rather obscure museum term in early 2000s, it’s now a “high-frequency” adjective. Similarly, “conscious,” “grounded in place” and other terms have ballooned in popularity.

“The vocabulary that once belonged primarily to luxury hotels, fashion houses and fine-dining restaurants has become part of everyday culture,” says Sergio Pereira, a regional managing director for One&Only, a global portfolio of luxury resorts and homes.

This speaks to our fixation with purchasing high-end products as a way to bolster and flex our status. It’s become so prevalent that luxury-speak has fully infiltrated our everyday conversation, much in the way baseball idioms including “touch base” and “ballpark figure” entered common parlance in America at the height of the sport’s popularity after World War II — the same time a standardised version of elite-speak was coalescing in the US under Labov’s watch.

Terms like “cheat codes” and “level up” tracked the prevalence of video gaming as our pastimes transitioned from the analogue to the digital, and today the infiltration of this marketing-speak on our social media feeds suggests consumerism — and our pursuit of luxury goods — is the world’s great unifying cultural experience of the moment.

“Luxury never tries to fit consumer preferences too much,” says Mattias Fuchs, an assistant professor of the psychology of luxury at EHL Hospitality Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland. “It guides consumers toward becoming more desirable versions of themselves.”

© 2026 Bloomberg

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