A sociophonetician explains presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s intonational patterns and the way that the properties of candidates’ speech influences how they are perceived.
I’m Rachel Feltman. Today I’m chatting with Nicole Holliday, an acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Nicole has recently gone viral for making TikToks about how Kamala Harris talks—and what that means for her campaign.
And so that is what drew me to linguistics. And, you know, what people think we do is really different than what we actually do. And that’s one of, one of the things, right? So they think, oh, we just speak a bunch of languages or that we’re, like, very prescriptive: we go around, you know, like, correcting people’s grammar or whatever that is.
What’s theoretically possible in, you know, the structures of language? I’m more interested in two parts. So, I’m a sociophonetician. So the phonetics part is “What are the physical properties of speech, and how does that work with our vocal tract?” and sort of “What is the variation there?” And then I’m a sociolinguist, which means I understand how language and society operate on one another.
On TikTok, I felt like I had to become an influencer. Like, oh, I got to get the lighting and the script and figure out how all these apps work so I can embed images. And it’s, like, actually very hard to do that, as well as to do real-time science communication. So you do this in the podcast, but explaining really, you know, complex concepts for a nonspecialist audience in a three-minute video is super, super challenging.
None of this, I think, is really conscious. It’s very hard to do the kind of linguistic phenomena that I’m talking about, you know, in real time, and I’ll give you an example. Her vowels are California vowels. I also look at how she uses different intonational patterns. So she does charismatic politician speech in a way that’s very legible—that sound, you know, like a mainstream kind of white guy politician when she talks about particular issues like the economy.: This economy is not working for working people. For too long, the rules have been written in the favor of the people who have the most and not in the favor of the people who work the most.
It’s also mine because I’m from central Ohio. It’s unmarked for place, usually. He doesn’t actually sound Minnesotan. If he sounded Minnesotan, that would actually be more of a problem, but he doesn’t. So he’s just, you know, imagined as a blank slate. When people talk about his language, they talk about it as, like, folksy dad.
And maybe, you know, there’s conversations to be had about appropriation, but at least they understand that it’s a thing that exists that’s marginalized because of racism in the United States, and that’s kind of a good thing. When we talk about the upper echelons of power, I think that’s a little bit harder.
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