Is Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s political career being harmed by her white adolescent dialect? The New York Observer calls in a sociolinguistics expert to examine Gillibrand’s teeny bopper upspeak:
“Kirsten Gillibrand has what I would call a non-regional American young female’s accent,” wrote Dr. Bert Vaux, a sociolinguistics scholar at the University of Cambridge, who was asked by The Observer to analyze Ms. Gillibrand’s public speaking. “Though I lack the phonetic expertise to put my finger on what exactly is involved in this, her voice quality is of the sort that is typically associated with pre-workforce-age white American females. Judging by the case of this woman, this speech pattern has now extended into higher age ranges.”
Funny, I can’t even recall what Gillibrand sounds like. Just me?
