Why do politicians talk like that?

A linguist weighs in on how "politician speak" has changed over the past century, and what it says about what we want from our leaders.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Flora, and you're listening to Science Friday. With the midterms approaching in less than a month, politicians are out in full force trying to convince voters to elect them. And that means that we are hearing a lot of this.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  All right. I know this crowd loves freedom.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  Everywhere I went, people told me the same thing. It just shouldn't be this hard. Shouldn't be this hard to afford a second bag of groceries.

• 0:45Speaker 04

  You see, Georgia is where I built my business. It's where I raised my family. It's where I learned the hard lessons that helped me to deliver every day in Washington.

• 0:54Speaker 05

  I'll go into the lines then, because I, I know what I believe.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Politicians speak. I know you know it when you hear it. It's those folksy turns of phrase, the vague promises. But what do linguists have to say about this vocal register? Has politician speak changed over time? Does how someone pronounce their A's signal something about their values? Here to help us decode politician speak is Dr. Valerie Friedland, a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada Reno. Welcome back, Valerie.

• 1:30Speaker 06

  Oh, thank you. So excited to be here because there's just so much to talk about. It's where to start, not what to say.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  Absolutely, and so glad to have you back. I mean, last time we had you on, we asked you about sports announcer register. Is there a political register?

• 1:48Speaker 06

  I think everybody knows the answer to that, and we're hearing a lot of it these days. Absolutely. And in fact, I think there's not just a political register that defines more general political speak. There's actually a partisan register that even defines the way Democrats versus Republicans speak.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Well, let's get into the details. So first of all, just the broad political register. What characterizes it in terms of cadence, or sentence structure, or word choice?

• 2:20Speaker 06

  Well, word choice is obviously very, very important because messaging is so important. And so there's a lot of repetition, right? Especially as you get closer to elections, we find that actually the register shifts slightly, where you might get into more complex explanations of issues earlier in a campaign or when there's really no election looming. As you get closer to elections, the messaging gets shorter, it gets simpler, it's more direct. It gets more emotional in tone, so it's sort of trying to drive up and galvanize the people that need to get out there and vote. And certainly, I think what we're hearing a lot of in this election cycle, particularly with the Republican Party this cycle, is things about radical beliefs, and extremism, and socialism, and communism.

• 3:03Speaker 06

  And then on the flip side, it's really the Democrats homing in on the affordability issues. So we're hearing a lot about that. Food, gas prices, housing. So the words change, but the, the sort of repetition and driving home of whatever the talking points for that election cycle doesn't.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  But I mean, even on things like affordability, sometimes the words change, but often they don't. I feel like there are these stock phrases, like money in your pocket. Like, why is it always money in your pocket? Or bag of groceries? You know, there are these, they just feel like cliches, like verbal tics almost.

• 3:43Speaker 06

  Well, they're, they're cliches, but they're also highly relatable. And one thing that we've seen that has really been driven home to both Republican and Democratic candidates is that they have to be relatable, authentic, and believable. And that's actually changed over time. So since the 90s, we really see this bigger attention paid to making sure that they come across as honest, relatable sort of storytellers instead of elitist, you know, sage-on-the-stage kinds of people. And what's been fascinating is the trends in the last century in terms of what's happening with that kind of language. We have a lot of both written and orally recorded evidence

• 4:28Speaker 06

  from presidential State of the Union addresses and inaugural speeches, but also we have hundreds of thousands of data points from congressional speeches over the last 140 years. So I think it's starting in maybe 1873, we have congressional speeches, so we can analyze that. And a lot of data scientists have done exactly that. One key finding is it's becoming simpler. It's becoming less complex. But the basic thing we're finding is that we are becoming more about relatable politicians and less about politicians that debate the issues themselves and come up with a lot of empirical evidence to support their arguments.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Like more I think, I feel, I believe, and less the data show?

• 5:17Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So one of the studies actually looked for words like analysis, investigate, evidenced, data. And then they also compared it to things like my viewpoint, my opinion, I believe, I feel, those kinds of words.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  So funny, because the, the list that you mentioned that's falling out of favor is like 98% of the words that we use on this show.

• 5:44Speaker 06

  You're right. Well, Science Friday says it all, I think, right? I mean, I think one of the things that all these studies stress is we're not saying that people are becoming dumber or less complex, but it means that what has shifted is what we want from a politician.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  It's interesting to me that this really started happening in the 90s. Like, why then?

• 6:05Speaker 06

  You know, there are a number of different studies that all point to the 90s as being pivotal, but actually, they sort of show that a lot of the trends started in the 70s. What you see is really prior to the 70s, political ideology and partisanship was something that was more in the political elite realm. So politicians argued with other politicians. But everyday people probably didn't have the same sort of partisanship in their language at the time. The strata of middle class has increased since World War II greatly. So as people became more educated and had more time to worry about issue, social issues, the political divides that the elites had became the political divides that the population had.

• 6:48Speaker 06

  And they were more interested in some of the issues that were coming up in the 1960s, late 60s and 70s, which were things like civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, all these social issues that became more prominent and more important in people's daily lives that people actually could relate to. They really galvanized sort of ideological divides between the right and the left. And then also, kind of the wherewithal of political strategists recognizing this power. And so in the 1990s, particularly the Republicans, really jumped on this political buzzword bandwagon that really sort of sold their platform to the people.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Was there a concerted effort? You know, was there someone behind this, actually?

• 7:35Speaker 06

  Yes, there was. And that's sort of, I think, what would surprise most people because we think of these words just sort of catching on. But the reality is, in the 1990s, there were two things that were important. One was Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, which really tried to make politics about what people want. So if we get elected within 100, 100 days, we're going to do X number of things, right? And then there was a strategist and pollster named Frank Luntz at the time, who had realized that the power of talking points was immense. So he wrote a playbook, essentially a guidebook, to the language that Republican politicians should be using. At this time, that Newt Gingrich's Contract with America was using some of that language.

• 8:20Speaker 06

  So he had informed that. And then he informed political candidates on the Republican side to use words like, instead of undocumented worker, illegal immigrant, right? Or illegal alien at that time. Instead of tax breaks, which is what a lot of times the Democrats were talking about, he wanted to give tax reform and tax relief. He also wanted to characterize Washington as being an inside group that didn't have your interests in their heart. And so instead of saying government spending or something like that, he advised Republican candidates to say things like the Washington takeover of whatever, and Washington spending. So blame it on Washington, especially if there was a Democrat in the White House.

• 9:05Speaker 06

  And that way, you could make yourself seem sort of anti-establishment and fighting for the little people. And that really was powerful and influential on speech that was to come. The Democrats were slower at picking it up. But there's a lot of research that has suggested that Democrats are seen as sort of lecturers rather than communicators. And in part, that's because they hadn't really started to use this language of the people as readily and as quickly as Republicans had.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  We have to take a break, but when we come back, we're going to get into accents and all of the secret information your vowel pronunciation is conveying.

• 9:51Speaker 01

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• 10:32Speaker 01

  Hey, everybody. If you like Science Friday, I want to recommend another podcast I know you'll love, Science Versus. From peptides to protein maxing, Science Versus takes on fads and trends and the opinionated mob—I know you know what I mean—to find out what is fact, what is not, and what's something in between. And they're the only podcast with better pun game than us. So check them out, Science Versus, wherever you get your podcasts. Let's talk about Iraq versus Iraq. You've written about this. Break it down for me.

• 11:14Speaker 06

  Yes, there have been a number of different studies done in the last couple of decades on pronunciation and politics. And one of the really interesting studies that was done was in 2007. It looked at pronunciation of Iraq or Iraq during the 2007 congressional debates. What we find was that Republicans tended towards the more Americanized pronunciation, Iraq or Irak, depending on the front vowel, and that Democrats tended towards Irak. And this seemed to be the biggest predictor of that pronunciation is their political partisanship. And war stance as well was part of that. But when we look at how everyday people say these words, studies that were done subsequent

• 11:59Speaker 06

  to this did not find that correlation. And actually, those studies also looked at Iran and Iran pronunciation. And if you said, so do you think there is some political messaging from the way people pronounce the word Iran? Then they found that people did say, oh, yes, you're more liberal if you say Iran, and you're more conservative if you say Iran. So people seem to have that sensitivity when it was made explicit that it was a politically charged question, but in their own everyday talk, they didn't do this, which seems to suggest that politicians are aware of, at some level, how this sort of more pro-nationalist

• 12:40Speaker 06

  pronunciation or pro-international pronunciation plays a role in how they are perceived by the groups that they want to support them.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  I mean, is there something about the A vowel that's like—I was just thinking, as I was prepping for this, like, there are other As that feel like a tell, like tomato tomatoes, aunt, aunt, right? Like, there's something about the A that can come off as snooty, maybe, or perceived as snooty. What is going on there?

• 13:16Speaker 06

  Well, as one might say, the As have it. Because A is a very interesting vowel. So the snootiness you're talking about seems to be a fairly new thing because the at to ah snootiness transition didn't really happen until the late 18th century, early 19th century. And it was particularly prominent in American English that ah, you know, saying aunt instead of aunt was the sort of New England posh style to speak in until World War II. And then that sort of stuck around as being the fancy way of pronouncing that word. And that seems to have pushed us into using ah instead of at for a lot of words borrowed

• 13:58Speaker 06

  into English since that time, which is why Americans say pasta, not pasta, right? And we also don't say nacho or taco. We say nacho and taco. And those are because they're fairly—

• 14:12Speaker 01

  Most of us.

• 14:13Speaker 06

  Right, most of us, right? We have this alternation between these two vowels because it depends on how many languages you speak. Languages without the at tend to favor ah pronunciation. And then we also find political identity influences that pronunciation. So it's probably not just happenstance that it's the ah vowel that's playing a role in the pronunciation of both Iran and Iraq. It's because it's a vowel that has been variable and has sort of ideological meaning in terms of both poshness and snootiness, but also in terms of foreignness and internationalism because it's so prevalent in foreign languages. And so people that are more open to diversity and more multilingual will tend to actually

• 14:58Speaker 06

  pronounce ah over ah.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  What a lot of information that one vowel is packing. It's amazing.

• 15:07Speaker 06

  Yes, it is. Absolutely.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Let me ask you a couple more questions, and we'll let you go. Accents, how do they play a role in political speak?

• 15:16Speaker 06

  Now, this is really some interesting research that's been done recently because one of the things that we've found with accent research, and this is my own research that I do, is on particularly the southern accent, but also all major regional accents are fading away in the generations, starting with Generation X. So Boomers are much more regionally accented than Gen Z. So by the time you get to Gen Z, a lot of times, people are like, I don't even have an accent, right? So you can be in a large city in the South, like Atlanta or Raleigh, North Carolina, and really not be able to hear that much of a southern accent among young speakers. And so a separate body of research has found that when you play for just everyday listeners,

• 15:59Speaker 06

  a accented speaker talking political issues, no matter whether those political issues are partisan or not, if you play them a speaker with a southern accent, they seem to automatically hear them as being more right-leaning and conservative. And not only that, you actually find a correlation that those with heavier southern accents tend to be more Republican and more right-leaning, and those with less tend to be more liberal and having had voted Democratic. So that tells us that actually in urban areas of the South, that maybe the southern accent is receding in part because of its strong ties to political ideology, that young Gen Z people in these urban areas in the South don't want to necessarily be heard as being

• 16:44Speaker 06

  conservative. And since it's become so strongly associated with conservative issues and stances, that they're actually moving away from that accent, not just because of social media, but also because of the political ideology it stands for.

• 16:58Speaker 01

  I says—I'm listening to you talk. I'm thinking about how much is happening subsurface. How conscious do you think we are of these trends or this sort of—the meaning that is imbued in the way that we talk?

• 17:14Speaker 06

  Well, it is amazing to me how much we know without knowing, right? We don't think about how we pronounce our vowels, right? We're not saying, okay, I'm going to use ah here, not ad. That's completely just arbitrary. So part of this unconsciousness of it is the models we have when we're young are the things that really influence us. And we also tend to have a bias towards speaking people we want to be like. There is an attention paid to speech at some level when we say things like we're a politician and we're pronouncing the name of a country that we're at war with, and we have a choice between variants that are widespread. And if you notice with this last sort of six-month period, who was saying Iran versus

• 17:59Speaker 06

  Iran? Well, Trump and Vance both said Iran as we began our attack. And so I think that's a pro-nationalist ideology that you're expressing with that. And we found that with Vietnam, too, right? So most people say Vietnam now, but during the Vietnam War, it was very frequent to say Vietnam, to Americanize it. And I think—well, I'm not sure people think about it before they do it. It's at a subconscious level, there's some reflection about what messaging the pronunciation is giving. And Vietnam distances us from this country we're at war with. Iran distances us from this country that we're at war with. And so I think in that level, it is, you know, a little more conscious than maybe having

• 18:44Speaker 06

  a southern accent being politically charged.

• 18:46Speaker 01

  Valerie Friedland is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada Reno and author of Why We Talk Funny: The Real Story Behind Our Accents. Thanks for coming on, Valerie. It's always such a pleasure.

• 19:00Speaker 06

  So much fun. Thanks for having me again.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  This episode was produced by D. Peter Schmidt. One more thing, Science Friday is a finalist for Best Science Podcast in the Signal Awards, and we need your vote. If you love the show, please vote for us. sciencefriday.com/signal. We'll take you right there. Thanks for listening. I'm Flora Lipton.