Democrat Senate candidate Lucas Kunce (MO)
What is up with Democrats and their phony, pandering southern accents?
Democrat Senate candidate Lucas Kunce of Missouri, who is running against Senator Josh Hawley in 2024, has developed a new accent.
Kamala Harris used a weird accent at Tyre Nichols funeral and again addressing Virginia voters and voters in Georgia.
Dem Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a cringe-worthy fake southern accent while she was speaking to a predominantly black audience at National Action Network’s annual convention.
The queen of phony pandering accents is Hillary Clinton. Hillary’s fake accent makes regular appearances and comes and goes depending on the audience she wants to manipulate. The midwestern raised Clinton suddenly goes southern at a Black church in Selma, at CUNY, and again in South Carolina.
Philip Letsou, the Deputy Communications Director for NRSC, called Kunce out on Twitter.
Experts agree: @LucasKunceMO has a new Southern accent for his campaign. Even a top linguistics professor—who literally wrote the book on US dialects—said Kunce is trying out a new accent.
Take a look for yourself: pic.twitter.com/sFK84S0Cr8
— Philip Letsou (@philipletsou) February 2, 2023
The Washington Free Beacon spoke with linguistics professor Charles Boberg:
McGill University linguistics professor Charles Boberg, who co-authored the Atlas of North American English, widely considered the pivotal text on accents and dialects in the United States, said he was able to “detect variation” in how Kunce spoke before and after his campaign launch. Boberg speculated that Kunce could be cycling through a “repertoire” of accents that he uses to appeal to different audiences.
“I do detect some variation between more- and less-Southern-sounding pronunciation,” Boberg said after reviewing audio clips of Kunce. “It’s possible that the speaker sounds more Southern in general with certain audiences or in certain contexts than others. That’s fairly normal for people whose ‘repertoire’ of accents and speech styles includes both their version of ‘standard’ English and a local or ethnic accent that is spoken in the community they grew up in.”
Boberg said it is common for individuals to change their accents “in response to the needs of a particular situation.”
“Lots of middle-class African Americans, for instance, speak both ‘standard’-sounding and African-American-sounding English and can switch and shift between these accents in response to the needs of a particular situation,” Boberg said. “That’s what we would call ‘sociolinguistic competence.’”
It is unlikely, however, that Kunce’s Southern drawl was adopted from the community he grew up in. The Democratic hopeful was born just outside of Columbia, Missouri, and raised nearby in the state’s capital, Jefferson City. That central region of the state, experts say, shares more in common linguistically with parts of Iowa, Nebraska, and Ohio, where they speak what is referred to by linguists as “North Midland” and “South Midland” English.
