Voices and Politics

I think of myself as having standard English, given my bias that coastal California English is the “right” English. My family in Mississippi has always made fun of my shifting vowels compared to their twang. With people I care about in a place whose accent is associated with the stereotype of being uneducated or quaint, I can be defensive when faced with people who stereotype a southern accent. That being said, it’s scary to realize that our social mapping from an accent is so deeply ingrained and essentially automatic, according to Sumner’s article.

The article about Condoleezza Rice struck me deeply for various reasons. I acknowledge that Rice was chosen precisely because of her belonging to so many social categories, but I admit that my initial reaction was, “Seriously? We have to pick apart the linguistic components of a female politician’s voice part by part? Don’t they get enough scrutiny? Why is society so obsessed with the voices of high level women?” But in order to understand the article, I had to put this reaction aside (momentarily). I particularly appreciated the fact it was mentioned that discussing Rice’s categories is not meant to show a deterministic view of how her accent is, but instead acknowledged how such an “assumption would misguidedly essentialize linguistic practice based on social factors and deny Rice’s agency in the construction of her own identity.” I also had not considered the fact that the pronunciation of certain terms could have political significance. Did Rice intentionally choose her pronunciation of Iraq to further align with conservative customs? If this doesn’t explain the political divide in the pronunciation of the “a” in Iraq, what does?

As we enter into a high stakes election, I’m reminded of the criticisms of Hillary Clinton’s speech patterns through the years. Highlight reels of her voice through the years are mashed up to show how her speech has changed since her First Lady of Arkansas days to her days as the Senator of New York. Most of these videos take an accusatory angle, saying the change is a sign she has pandered to voters. As someone who has studied the ways in which the communication styles of women are policed and vilified, this frequently angers me, as I consider it clear that Clinton has had no choice but to groom herself in every way possible in order to get this far as a woman in politics.

As we saw in the Podesva article, accents themselves have semantic meaning. Every accent is a particular accent, the same way every swan you see is a particular instance of the swan animal as opposed to the model of the concept “swan.” Women are in a bind because of additional social expectations placed on their methods of communication, but people in general are also in a bind. There is meaning behind actively deaccenting your speech to conform to a certain “unaccented” standard.