If you caught some of Hillary Clinton’s speech to her supporters in New York this week, you may have paid as much attention to the way she spoke as you did to her actual words. During the endless primary season, Clinton was repeatedly bashed for allegedly using different accents, depending on where she spoke and to whom. Author and social critic Camille Paglia wrote: “For every new state or region, [Clinton] trots out a new tone or accent, from the crisp to the cornpone.”

But was Hillary purposely pandering? Or just engaging in normal human behavior? “We modify our speech all the time,” says Steven Weinberger, director of linguistics at George Mason University, home of a speech accent archive. “We do it unconsciously, every day. It’s very, very normal.”

The University of Pennsylvania’s William Labov, one of this country’s most distinguished linguists and co-author of the Atlas of North American English, agrees. I asked Labov to listen to a couple of excerpts of Hillary's supposed southern accent. He shared his thoughts via e-mail: “I hear her doing just what many effective political speakers do: making slight adjustments without changing her basic Chicago speech pattern, as a way of making contact with the audience.”

Labov also analyzed video clips of Clinton’s South Carolina debate and found “she is consistent in her use of her native Chicago dialect.” During her 2000 New York Senate campaign, people “wrongly thought she had adopted a NYC pattern. In fact, I found she had returned to her native Chicago pattern, abandoning some of the Southern features she had picked up in Little Rock.”

And it’s not surprising she would have picked up some Southern speech habits. She did, after all, spend nearly two decades of her adult life in Arkansas. Linguists say that’s long enough to adopt a way of speaking different than the one we grew up with (though not enough to sound like a native).

“People who have lived in two or more places for long periods may have two near-native accents and may be able to shift (consciously or not) between them,” David Harrison e-mailed me. He’s a linguist at Swarthmore College and co-director of National Geographic’s Enduring Voices project to preserve endangered languages around the world. “Lots of people shift their accent to some degree when they are in the environment of another accent,” Harrison says.

Robin Dodsworth, a linguist at North Carolina State University, points out that women tend to be more “stylistically flexible than men in language use. Men don’t style-shift as much.” (“Style-shifting” is linguist-speak for making adjustments, often unconsciously, for different audiences). Explanations for this behavior vary, but perhaps women use language more flexibly to get their point across because historically they’ve had less power.

So maybe style-shifting is just part of what it takes to make a historic run for the presidency. It's certainly part of being a royal. Linguists in the U.K. analyzed Queen Elizabeth II’s annual Christmas messages over 30 years and found “the Queen no longer speaks the Queen’s English of the 1950s.” In that decade, she pronounced the word “had” as if it were “hed.” By the ‘80s, it rhymed with “bad.” The linguists concluded that “there has been a drift in the Queen’s accent towards one that is characteristic of speakers who are younger and/or lower in the social hierarchy.” But when it comes to style-shifting, neither Hillary nor Elizabeth II can match the biggest style-shifting queen of all: Madonna.

-Hannah Bloch

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