Posted on 05/04/2007 8:18:33 AM PDT by presidio9
Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., declared herself "multilingual" on Friday, saying that her on-again, off-again Southern twang will be a plus for her candidacy. Clinton's Democratic adversaries Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., and John Edwards have also faced allegations of linguistic pandering to potential voters. (Click to hear Clinton's accent and Obama's.) Does anyone naturally speak with more than one accent?
Yes, lots of people do. We're all guilty of changing the way we speak in subtle ways, depending on whom we're talking to. Linguists call this "code shifting"—you don't want to talk to your boss the same way you talk to your old college roommates. We often code shift subconsciously, by picking up other people's speech patterns (as anyone who has ever studied abroad probably knows). Politicians and actors, on the other hand, sometimes hire vocal coaches to help them with their speech. But it isn't too difficult to adopt a bit of a twang. It's easier to match an accent if you've heard quite a bit of it—as Clinton has from the mouth of her Arkansas-born husband. (American politicians aren't the only leaders who try to sound more down-home: Last year, England's Queen Elizabeth was accused of folksying up her speech.)
Our accents develop as we acquire language and speech skills in early childhood—before the age of 6, for most people. By the early teen years, our accents are pretty firmly entrenched, matching the cues provided by those around us.* A conscious attempt to change your natural accent can take some time. It depends on how good a mimic you are, whether you want to be able to stay "in accent" all the time or just once in a while, and other factors. Those who succeed won't have made a permanent shift.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
President Bush is fluent in English and Spanish but Hillary! got cheered for demanding a bilingual president as if we didn’t already have one. The Drooling Lapdog Press did not call her on it.
I find her fake accent really grating.
Please don’t bring this up. It still pains me that this country passed-up on the opportunity to elect a First Lady who speaks seven languages like Theresa Heinz-Kerry.
I remember when Perot was running in 92, he got skewered for saying “You all” to a predominately Black audience.
I suppose it depends on who it is and what they say.
Here's a logical explanation:
She's a pandering socialist twit; afraid to reveal her true self, who thinks her audience is dumb enough to accept it.
I find her real accent really grating.
Iceman, you are pushing the envelope a wee bit. W ain't "fluent" in nothin'. As for his Spanish, cowboy Tex-Mex at its colorful and quaint worst. Face it compadre, if Bush could talk, this would be a better country!
As far as Hillary goes, she is just doing the Merill Streep accent thing, but nowhere as well as Streep does. It is laughable and insulting. It could seriously hurt the African-American vote. The Democrat share of this important segment might actually slump to ... O say .... 97%.
Ha! Ha! That is funny!
Leno did a bit on this last night that was hillarious. They dubbed parts of speeches. When she was in California it was an “Arnold” accent.
I find her ideas even more grating.
That's very true. I didn't go home and talk to my kids or my wife like I did to my sailors on the ship. But what differed was my vocabulary, not my accent.
Hillary's southern accent is so obviously fake it's laughable. Her accent is as fake as Nicholas Cage's in "Con Air" or Keanu Reeves' in "The Devil's Advocate" (my personal vote for worst movie southern accent).
And her personality.
As an original GRITS (Girl Raised in the South) member I demand that Hillary apologize for mocking my heritage with her fake southern drawl.
Slate undertakes to "normalize" Hillary's cheap verbal pandering in the same way the MSM defended Bill's incessant lying by claiming "everybody does it".
Personality? She interacts with people like a robot.
“President Bush is fluent in English and Spanish but Hillary!”
I haven’t heard his Spanish, but he sure isn’t fluent in English! ;)
His father speaks Gibberish.
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