Hillary Clinton's on-again, off-again southern accent cropped up again last week in South Carolina, but according to ThinkProgress, it's wrong to poke fun at her for it.
Clinton has a habit of changing accents depending on her location and their political utility, ranging from middle American to southern to New York.
ThinkProgress, the blog of left-wing think tank Center for American Progress, found this mockery of Clinton problematic and reached out to linguistics expert Robin Dodsworth, an Associate Professor at North Carolina State University. Dodsworth explained that Clinton is a "target," and that her attempt to "fit in" and "get people to like her" was perfectly natural:
What do you make of people who challenge candidates for "faking" accents, such as Hillary?
That’s such an interesting question. What counts as an authentic accent? That’s a matter of opinion, that’s a matter of ideology. The truth is everybody "code-switches" or switches the way they talk from one setting to another … Neither [accent] is "inauthentic."
Now Hillary Clinton is a target, first and foremost, for who she is. People aren’t making fun of her because she changed up the way she talks. People are making fun of her because of who she is.
Claims of linguistic authenticity and inauthenticity have as much to do with other social factors as … linguistic facts. I think most linguists would say, well, is she being inauthentic? Well, in the sense that there aren’t very many times when she used that accent… But is that a problem? Should we be making fun of that? No. What she is doing is trying to accommodate to her audience, and trying to get people to like her, and trying to fit in. And we all do that in one way or another.