Linguistics Blog

 Max Barger

Mr. Roddy

IHSS

7 September 2021

Linguistics Blog

This article goes over the study that the way you pronounce different words, can be predicted by your political view. It is shown that Democrats, pronounce words that are from different nationalities, closer to the actual pronunciation than Republicans might. When people like Donald Trump, for example, pronounce words like Tanzania as tan-zay-nee-uh instead of its correct pronunciation as tan-zuh-nee-uh. On the other hand, there is Barack Obama, who has been given thanks for pronouncing the word Pakistan as pock-ee-stahn rather than pak-iss-stan

    In the study, the researcher takes a group of people, without knowing their political views and asks them to read out a few sentences out loud that contain foreign words. After the sentences were read, they were asked to share their political standpoint. It turned out that Democrats did in fact pronounce words closer to the original pronunciation. For example, these Democrats pronounced Iraq as ear-rock instead of how Republicans pronounce eye-rack. I found this very interesting because, in today’s politics, republicans strongly hold on to the belief that America is superior to all other countries and other nationalistic views. Someone who is more passionate about their “patriotic” views could believe that it is not a good idea to have other cultures and beliefs in their own country. Because of these views, words that originate in different languages or cultures, are pronounced differently between America’s biggest political parties. 


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cultural Anthropology blog

Prisoner of The Infidels

IHSS reading Prisoner of the Infidels Ira Williams