Hillary! Clinton, Linguistic Chameleon

This humanoid is fake from her hair to her toenails. Not to mention her ludicrous attempts to blend in with normal people by aping the way they speak. Bloomberg has the scoop:

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During her tenure in politics, Hillary Clinton has shifted between several distinct versions of American English. This is not terribly unusual. President Barack Obama has been known to change his pronunciation according to region and audience. But the thing about Clinton is that she’s been in the game for so long, and has had so many different jobs and lived in so many different places, that her various accents wind up mapping her career.

There follows a series of ear-grating video clips as Hillary! tries to suppress her natural Chicago honk and fakes, variously, an Arkansas accent, a generic southern accent, Washington-speak, and, God help us, even a “black” accent.

Clinton called herself “multilingual,” because she’s spent so much time in the South, the East Coast, and the Midwest. But the different accents don’t seem to appear randomly—they seem to come out based on where Clinton is, what role she has, or what office she’s running for.

“We talk in different ways depending on where we are in the country and depending on what kind of situation we’re in,” [linguist Bill] Kretzschmar said.

It wouldn’t be fair to accuse Clinton of having made a conscious decision to mimic her audience.

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In her case, sure it would…

This is just a thing that people do. Researchers at the University of California Riverside found that humans unconsciously adopt other people’s accents in order to bond and empathize with them, similar to the way we unintentionally mirror each other’s body language.

Like when a rube goes to France and starts speaking English with a “French” accent, in order to blend in…

And Clinton is not, by any stretch, the only politician who’s been caught talking in a different accent or tailoring vocabulary to an audience. Slate reports that the linguistics term for this is “code-switching.” President Barack Obama is known for it.

He’s even worse at it than she is.

And don’t miss the Not Particularly Lifelike Robot’s deadly arsenal of nods!

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