Trump Speaks Like Regular Folk

[TheRealJoeFish]

I couldn't help but laugh. The irony here is that it's well known that Hillary's accent and language use magically changes depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line she's giving a speech.

So does mine. I don't do it consciously, but get me around my black relatives and I'm a little more...let's say... ebonically tilted. Even just me and my dad and brother get a little funky around each other.

They say this happens to just about everyone. Now, of course, some people may play it up, but it's a common anecdote among news and TV people who have overcome their natural accent and affected a more "generic" accent that when they return home it takes a matter of hours before the old pronunciations come flooding back. Hell, when I went to London for a week a few years ago it was a day or two before the H disappeared in my "hello" and the I got a lot softer in "right".

A related term is Register Switching, effectively the name for subconsciously using a different vocabulary/set of grammar rules in different social settings. This is, again, almost impossible not to do: we talk to our boss, our dad, a stranger in a suit, and a stranger in tattered clothes differently.

And then there's code switching, which is using different languages/dialects within the same conversation, alternating between languages in different sentences or for different words. Sometimes, people even alternate *within a word*, adding a descriptive prefix or suffix in one language to a base word in another!

Ok that's the end of my tangent. Linguistics is really cool.