Hillary Clinton's Accent

I notice that Hillary Clinton has come in for some criticism for slipping into a Southern accent when talking at a black church. It sounds horribly fake, to be sure.

Still, I have a bit of sympathy. I've done the same sort of thing myself, as have friends of mine. One of my best friends from college ("M") is from a small town in rural Georgia. My wife always makes fun of me because whenever I talk to M on the phone, or hang out with him, I start talking in a deeper Southern accent. She says it sounds fake, but I don't even notice that I'm doing it -- it just slips right out.

And I've seen M do the same thing himself. Last year, when the family visited Georgia, I hung out with M one night. We looked up another old friend -- "T." T is black, and he grew up with M in that same rural Georgia town (they were later roommates in college, which is how I got to know T -- in fact, I wrote about T before, in this post).
Anyway, the phone rings; M answers; and soon as M says, "Hey, man!," with about three syllables in each word, I knew that it was T on the other end. Whenever M is around T, he starts talking black.

Black people do it too, all the time -- that is, switch between standard English and black vernacular English, depending on the audience. Linguists call it "code-switching," which seems to be a fancy term for, "talking like the people you're hanging out with."

It's a natural urge: When in Rome, talk as the Romans do. Some people expressly promote the use of verbal "mirroring", so as to build rapport. Indeed, the failure to talk like your audience can sometimes be dangerous.

All of which is to say that I can't blame Hillary Clinton -- she may well not have even intended to talk that way at all; it just might have come out that way under the circumstances.