Vice President Kamala Harris is being attacked for a lot of things these days, but one of them might make you scratch your head. Lately, Republican commentators have been criticizing her for changing her accent on the campaign trail.
‘Is it Southern?’ ‘Is it just pandering?’ they ask. Sonja Lanehart, a linguistics professor at the University of Arizona, says no.
"She's not using a Southern accent and she is doing something that we would call code switching, which I think most people do some form of when they have access to two or more ways of speaking," Laneheart said.
Lanehart joined The Show to talk about how her own story has taught her something about code-switching.
Full conversation
SONJA LANEHEART: So we can think about code switching as what people normally think about as switching between two different languages. So if you hear a Spanish speaker thinking something like Tex-Mex, right? You hear some Spanish and then you hear some English. But we can also talk about code switching when we're talking about switching between dialects or different ways of speaking in the same language. Lots of people have done this over the years, lots of people do this, especially politicians.
You will notice this happens. [Ronald] Reagan, for example, did this when he used multiple negation, I think in there he used ain't in some of his speeches, right? So you have to make particular types of points and to sort of index particular types of feelings or notions that people have about when you use those types of things in language.
GILGER: So what Harris is doing here is code switching, and she's switching into basically to Black English, right? Or I guess the official term would be African American language, right.
LANEHEART: Right. So African American language is the term I use. And I, I find it funny that some people were calling this Southern English when she has never lived in the South. I mean, she has no connection to the South really. Other than the fact that she's Black, right. And so I think people sometimes connect Black people with the South, even though Black people live all over the country and Black people all over the country do use African American language, even if they don't have any Southern roots.
And so that is something that she uses African American language because she is Black, she has a Black identity, she went to a Black school, she's invested in a, you know, one of the Blackest sororities, right? This one of the divine nine sororities. So she is very much a part of the Black community and Black culture. So one would expect her to use African American language.
GILGER: So talk about the history of that, right. Like this is Black English or African American language, like you're saying, goes back a long way and is used by a ton of people to sort of navigate culture, navigate language.
LANEHEART: Right. In the same way that people who are born in, say New York City and use New York City English and have particular ideas about what that index is about their identity or how people perceive that, who may try to then soften that and change it to something that doesn't sound like New York and sounds more like what they perceive to be sort of unaccented or you know, non-stigmatized varieties of English, right?
So Black language is stigmatized because Black people use it. So Black people are the ones that are stigmatized. That's just one of the many things that follow from that stigmatization. But also the reason why Black people continue to use Black language, despite it being stigmatized is what something that John Bach calls covert prestige. So we all belong to communities. We all grew up speaking a particular language that we consider a home language or a native language and that might not be what we continue to use on a daily basis in the places we may move to that aren't those spaces. But that doesn't mean that we don't, we stop interacting with people from those spaces or we stop having close connections, right? That always will feel like home to you regardless of where you are.
So for Black people, if that's what they grew up speaking, they're not gonna just stop using it completely because someone has this negative perception about it. What they may do is they learn this other variety that they find, find to be more accepting and they will use that in more context than they had previously used it, right? But when they go around other Black people, then they're going to use it because they're in a space where they're comfortable to do this.
I myself have experienced this especially early in my career when I would talk about these particular issues and how we need to understand that these are people's languages. And instead of trying to, you know, diminish the number of linguistic varieties we have, we should be accepting of all of these varieties and understand their context and how they can be used.
And I gave this paper and a white guy in the back of the room at this conference, and to remind you, I'm just a newly fresh minted PhD giving one of my first conference presentations. He says, “well, if you believe this, why are you speaking to us in Standard English?” And I said, well, you are under the misperception that you should have access to that part of me and you don't. But this is an argument that I often have to make that the stigmatization that we have to deal with comes from the fact that we as a people are stigmatized. But it doesn't mean that we don't have all of these rich attributes to ourselves and to our language. So why should we get rid of it?
GILGER: That's really interesting. So this is really crossed into your own journey as a linguist and in your own studies. Talk a little bit about what that felt like personally to realize that there was nothing to fix here. Like this was something that was good and acceptable on its own.
LANEHEART: Oh, wow, that's a wonderful question for me in particular is because when I started out as an undergraduate student, I absolutely bought into the belief that I needed to be fixed or Black people in general needed to be fixed. And I started off in undergrad as a speech pathologist and I was going to fix all Black people. I was going to fix their language, right? Because they just weren't using it right. And it was only through experience and reading and understanding.
Oh, wait a second. You know, there are lots of varieties, right? There's, you know, all of these American varieties that we can talk about, in like Boston, English or Ocracoke, right? Or Gullah or California English as a whole has become a whole thing. Utah, right. Like there are all of these spaces where there are these varieties that don't look like we've been told language should look like and they're all systematic, they're all rule governed. If they weren't, people wouldn't understand one another. It's not like they just throw something out and see what sticks. It's not like they make stuff up, you know right, people understand them, right? These are mutually intelligible communicative systems of ways of speaking of language and expression that people understand and they become, they’re a part of their communities and their identities.
GILGER: So that plays right into the last question I wanted to ask you here, which is what you make of the backlash that Kamala Harris has been facing for this kind of code switching and for using this kind of language. Why do you think that is?
LANEHEART: Well, clearly it's very polemical. It's, it's obviously politicized in a way that I mean, [Barack] Obama faced some of this, right? I still remember the conversations where, oh, he's code switching, he's over there. He's trying to sound more Southern. Well, white politicians do that, too. I don't think Kamala Harris is getting any special attention to some extent. I think what's different now just is the political atmosphere.
So like I said, every politician gets it. So, you're pandering to your audience, right? But I think what's made this really interesting with Kamala Harris is that the people that she's running against in particular are trying to pick at every little thing. It's almost as if in part because the people they're trying to identify with. It's one of those things that she can actually identify with, they can't. So I think she's just a target in this political climate.
GILGER: All right, we'll leave it there. Sonja Lanehart, University of Arizona professor of Linguistics. Joining us to talk more about this. Sonja, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you for telling us your story as well. I really appreciate it.
LANEHEART: Thank you. It's been my pleasure.
