One of the polarizing aspects about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t codeswitch much, the way Obama spoke to black preachers in his black preacher accent while he spoke to whites in his flat Kansas accent (a state he barely has visited, but whom he claims to be from due to his mother having been born there and Kansas seeming particularly non-foreign) rather than in his prep school accent. Hillary has used many accents as well.
Trump talks like a guy from Queens, which he is. Many people, often ones not normally fond of New Yorkers, find Trump’s accent reassuringly authentic. Other people find it alarming. Does his failure to upgrade the class associations of his accent demonstrate that he is defective? Or does it imply that he rejects much of America’s class system? If he doesn’t have the decency to modulate his accent properly, what other social conventions might he not value? Clearly, many people with classier accents find Trump’s accent highly unsettling.
Comments:
* I think that fully half of the horror which the liberal middle classes feel toward Donald Trump is not just from his political views but is engendered by his working class diction. They hated Jesse Ventura for the same reason and Arnold Schwarzenegger too. Conversely those three guy’s manner of speaking was seen as a sign of authenticity by less elite voters.
* I think the anti-Trumpers are more offended by Jeff Session’s accent. He speaks like a nice southern gentleman, which is probably the worst thing you could be in Obama’s America.
* RP sounds evil because it’s exclusive, neo-colonialist and über-white in the minds of liberal and mostly Jewish Hollywood writers. It reeks of privilege and old pre-WWI Europe.
* RP is a young accent in linguistic terms. It was not around, for example, when Dr Johnson wrote A Dictionary of the English Language in 1757. He chose not to include pronunciation suggestions as he felt there was little agreement even within educated society regarding ‘recommended’ forms. The phrase Received Pronunciation was coined in 1869 by the linguist, A J Ellis, but it only became a widely used term used to describe the accent of the social elite after the phonetician, Daniel Jones, adopted it for the second edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1924). The definition of ‘received’ conveys its original meaning of ‘accepted’ or ‘approved’ — as in ‘received wisdom’. We can trace the origins of RP back to the public schools and universities of nineteenth-century Britain — indeed Daniel Jones initially used the term Public School Pronunciation to describe this emerging, socially exclusive accent. Over the course of that century, members of the ruling and privileged classes increasingly attended boarding schools such as Winchester, Eton, Harrow and Rugby and graduated from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Their speech patterns – based loosely on the local accent of the south-east Midlands (roughly London, Oxford and Cambridge) — soon came to be associated with ‘The Establishment’ and therefore gained a unique status, particularly within the middle classes in London.
* Many of the famous TV anchormen of the past were from west of the Mississippi river but east of California: Cronkite from western Missouri, Brokaw from South Dakota, Rather from Texas.
Brinkley was from North Carolina, however, as was Murrow (but he grew up in Washington state).
My vague impression is that a slightly country accent was helpful in the TV business a couple of generations ago. It seemed to me as if the famous national newscasters generally had less neutral accents than were then common in Los Angeles.
* Tom Wolfe has a great bit in The Right Stuff where he talks about the Chuck Yeager Voice:
Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘uh, folks, it might get a little choppy’… Who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it, – even after he is proved right and the emergency is over. That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in daylight.’ In the late 1940s and early 1950s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the [Pilot] Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.
