Accommodation or political identity: Scottish members of the UK Parliament

Indexing political identity in the Catalonianprocés: A sociophonetic approach

“…However, what makes this specific case different from others in other political contexts (e.g. Krivoruchko 2008; Hall-Lew et al 2010; Schrimpf 2013; Knoblock 2014; Podesva et al 2015; Kirkham & Moore 2016; Hall-Lew et al 2017, among others) is that this process of appropriation gives rise to a preference for apparently opposite variants from a prescriptive angle. That is, in some cases, nationalist politicians are far ahead of the rest in the use of more vernacular forms, such as [ɫ] or [t], while in others, it is the most prestigious variants in the pan-Hispanic context that are used the most (the case of [ð] both in inter-vowel contexts and in the final word position).…”

“…Likewise, ideology on the right/left axis has not behaved as expected or, in fact, how it has been noted in studies conducted in other countries (e.g. Hall-Lew et al 2010; Schrimpf 2013; Knoblock 2014; Hall-Lew et al 2017, among others). Among the Catalan politicians, this constraint does not explain any of the variation phenomena considered in the study.…”

“…However, this seeming contradiction is only illusory and shows how the same social meanings may be indexed by different linguistic variants, as long as they meet one condition: that, in all cases, they are the closest to the pronunciation of Catalan and, therefore, represent an authenticity and proximity to a (nationalist) ideal of Catalanhood. It should be stressed that, like other examples of agentivity studied in recent years—jocks and burnouts (Eckert 2008), Beijing yuppies and state managers (Zhang 2008), Scottish Labour and National Party MPs (Hall-Lew et al 2017), and so on—nationalist and non-nationalist politicians are not born with these associated speech styles. Instead, they construct them in the course of social interactions within this particular political context.…”

“…For example, in a study on the extent to which the foreign (a) vowel was integrated within foreign words such as Iraq among US politicians, Hall-Lew, Coppock, & Starr (2010) found that the uses that most faithfully follow the original pronunciation [aː] occur among the Democrat representatives, while among Republicans adaptation to the phonetics of English [æ] was more frequent, even with some examples of idiolectal variation inside both groups. Hall-Lew, Friskney, & Scobbie (2017) also showed how convergence towards the standard norm of British English among Scottish politicians is closely correlated with their ideological identity, so that Labour politicians converge significantly more than members of the Scottish Nationalist party with respect to some phonetic variants. Likewise, in post-Soviet Ukraine, the choice of the prepositions na and v in the sequence ‘in Ukraine’ also appears to be marked by the political affiliation of the speakers, the first variant being preferred by the Ukraine nationalists and the second by pro-Russian followers (Krivoruchko 2008).…”

Constructing social meaning in political discourse: Phonetic variation and verb processes in Ed Miliband's speeches

“…Our work also contributes to the growing body of literature on phonetic variation in the speech of British politicians (e.g. Hall-Lew, Friskney, & Scobbie 2013).…”