While Obama unleashes his "folks" phrasing to appeal to middle-America, it appears Hillary Clinton has a different approach in her effort to reach "everyday Americans" - speak in tongues. As The Hill reports, Clinton - who grew up in Chicago - spoke with a Southern accent during a swing through South Carolina yesterday. What is even more disturbing is the fact that it is not the first time she has faked her accent as Bloomberg [4]exposes [4] various versions of American English employed by Clinton, going back to her early years as first lady of Arkansas and first lady of the United States.
As The Hill reports [5], at several points in her talk yesterday with minority women small-business owners, Clinton slowed her speech and lowered the timbre of her voice for a Southern drawl.
But, as Bloomberg exposes, [4] during her tenure in politics, Hillary Clinton has shifted between several distinct versions of American English.
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.
Of course 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.
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As Bloomberg's Ali Elkin concludes, "Hillary Clinton gets ever so slightly falsier when she is running for office"
So will the real Hillary Clinton please stand up? Or has it been so long that not even she knows who that is?
