INDEXING POLITICAL Persuasion: VARIATION IN THEIRAQVOWELS

Abstract

to determine whether phonological variables are a potential resource for the expression of political identity, this article examines the second vowel of Iraq. in addition to being part of a politically significant place-name, Iraq is particularly wellsuited to index political identity due in part to the ideological association between the "foreign (a)" variable with correctness and educatedness in u.S. english (boberg 1997). Specifically, Iraq's second vowel appears to index political conservatism when produced as /á/ and political liberalism when produced as /a:/. results from an analysis of the u.S. House of representatives show that republicans are significantly more likely than Democrats to use /á/, even controlling for regional accent.

Accommodation or political identity: Scottish members of the UK Parliament

“…Our work also differs from other variationist studies of political identity in focusing solely on elected politicians, a growing body of work in its own right (Kementchedjhieva 2016;Kirkham and Moore 2016;Lei and Liu 2016;Podesva, et al, 2015). In this regard we follow Hall-Lew et al (2010; who also rely on party membership as a measure of political identity in the analysis of phonetic variation among elected politicians.…”

“…Rather, we suggest that the variation indexes political party membership, with a subset of individuals drawing on that indexicality in speech production. This paper integrates the growing body of work on linguistic variation and political identity (e.g., Hall-Lew et al 2010) with studies of accommodation between Scottish and English interlocutors (e.g., Llamas et al 2009) and sociophonetic work in Scottish contexts more generally (e.g., Lawson 2014). Note that a devolved Scottish Parliament sits in Edinburgh, Scotland, with a different set of Members (MSPs; but see Boyd 2012), and so it is the linguistic situation of the Westminster parliament that is of interest.. Scots' use of the English language in the UK Parliament has been taken as a prime example of linguistic accommodation (Carr & Brulard 2006).…”

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on NLP and Computational Social Science

“…In addition, linguistic reflections of political identity are of interest to sociolinguists (Hall-Lew et al, 2010;Labov, 2011). However, the approaches of these two communities of researchers with respect to identifying political affiliation are somewhat different.…”

“…Much of the sociolinguistic work, on the other hand, has focused on sub-lexical features that encode political identity. Hall-Lew et al, for instance, found that American political party affiliation was strongly associated with whether a speaker produced the final syllable in "Iraq" to rhyme with "rock" or "rack" (Hall-Lew et al, 2010). Kirkham and Moore found that British politician Ed Miliband modulated his use of tglottalling depending on his audience (Kirkham and Moore, 2016).…”

Sociophonetic Variation in an Internet Place Name

“…Previous sociolinguistic studies involving onomastics have focused on the names of geographically bounded places (Read, 1933;Shapiro, 1997;Hall-Lew et al, 2010), but no work to date has investigated the negotiation of the pronunciation or the collective meaning of the name of an online place. Research in this area is needed if we are to understand how micro-level processes in symbolic interactions such as a naming practices relate to macro-level changes in language variation in cultures where mixed online/offline networks of cross-modal (text-and speech-based) communication are becoming the norm.…”