Talking the Talk

Politicians’ speech patterns subtly reflect racism, sexism in America.

Think all politicians sound alike? Not so, say researchers who examined the speech patterns of black and female political figures. Comparing the language of male and female, and black and white politicians, sociolinguist Camelia Suleiman, PhD, and psychologist Daniel O’Connell, S.J. found that language subtly reflects a social hierarchy and stratification not openly acknowledged or discussed.

The researchers, whose study was published online in the journal Psycholinguistic Research, examined transcripts of interviews between Larry King on CNN TV and Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. Suleiman and O’Connell focused on each public figure’s use of interjections, number of interruptions, use of the self-referent “I,” number of syllables spoken, non-standard English such as “gonna,” and “y’know,” and instances of laughter.

Results indicated that the “subordinate” roles of black and females were revealed in speech patterns with “dominant” white males. Furthermore, black and female politicians, say the researchers, reproduce these conditions through their own speech.

What prompted Suleiman and O’Connell to pursue this area of research? Suleiman, an immigrant in the U.S., says that the vitality of American political life attracted her attention and admiration the moment she arrived in this country.

Beyond that, she adds, both she and O’Connell were drawn to the data that was available to the public for examination. “For instance, we wrote an article a few years ago comparing the communicative styles between Hillary and Bill Clinton,” she tells demo dirt. “Hillary Clinton gave several interviews to major media networks in 2003 in order to promote her memoir. A year later, Bill Clinton did the same thing, with the exact same interviewers in order to promote his own memoir. So we thought we had an excellent opportunity for drawing comparisons.”

Communication expert Leslie Ungar, of President of Electric Impulse Communications (www.electricimpulse.com), says that the way politicians speak sends a powerful message to voters. “Part of the reason is you need language is to move your agenda forward, whether it is financial, about the war, or homeland security, it cannot be done without language.”

If a public figure speaks in a way that invites ridicule or derision, voters will not trust him or her. An ineffective or irritating public speaking style, Ungar says, becomes more important than the issues. “It becomes the focal point rather than your agenda. That is what happened with Bush, and with Caroline Kennedy [criticized for her overuse of ‘y’know’]; people got caught up with the word usage.”

“It is not that if someone can speak well, you should vote for them, but someone that has a good grasp of the language can accomplish more,” she explains. “If he or she speaks with more clarity, and more confidence, things move faster. Basically, speaking well helps solve problems more quickly.” And that, she says, creates voter confidence in the speaker’s abilities.

Suleiman says she and her colleagues explore the power of language and its role in the social structure. “We focus on our studies on the subtleties of language use, what we called the banal racism and the banal sexism, [for instance] the ordinary linguistic usages that carry with them subtle sexism and subtle racism, and thus reflecting sites and conditions of inequality often over-looked,” she explains.

Examining speech within the public discourse rather than within a controlled environment, explains O’Connell, provides more accurate data with which to work. Co-author with Sabine Kowal of Communicating with One Another: Toward a Psychology of Spontaneous Spoken Discourse (2008, New York: Springer Publishers).

The genesis of this type of research emerged when O’Connell and Kowal were dissatisfied with the traditional method of research within field. “[We] began to suspect around 1980 that something was radically wrong with classical psycholinguistics. The examination of mostly artificial, written, monological language in laboratory experiments simply cannot get at what constitutes the vast majority of our language use: spontaneous spoken discourse,” O’Connell tells demo dirt.  “And in any event, the model of the well-formed sentence so popularized by [linguist Noam] Chomsky and his transformational friends is totally inadequate as a model of genuine language use. So that's where it all originated. We began to study mostly media discourse: political speeches, interviews, films. It's been lots of fun.”

After examining spontaneous spoken discourse for this study, what was the most unexpected result? “The biggest surprise was how social relations between the sexes and between the races in the U.S. are stratified, and how language can be an indicator of the stratification, but at the same time, how language reproduces these stratified social relations” Suleiman says. ”We found that black politicians and women are more careful about language use than a white male counterpart, and that is attributed, to put things simply, to the historic conditions of dominance/subordination among groups in the U.S.”

Now that we have a black President, as well as black men and women in other positions of power, what does the new style of communication sound like? “Obama and Rice set a new model of black political rhetoric, mainly by speaking to all Americans, on behalf of all Americans, rather than speaking on behalf of black Americans to white Americans as the case was with Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson,” Suleiman explains.

Suleiman explains that the new rhetoric reflects racial progress in the country, one in which it is not necessary to separate one’s listening audience by race. “This is not to belittle the contributions of Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson. Not at all. This is rather an acknowledgement that the black struggle in the U.S. has moved to a new phase, a phase of more meaningful equality, after the remarkable achievements of the civil rights movements,” she maintains.

“Obama does have a different style than Jesse Jackson, and different than King; he is not the preacher, but since he has been elected, he has more of a preacher ‘style,’ and has become a hybrid of Lincoln, Kennedy, and King,” Ungar says. “He now has more of a melodic rhetoric.”

Future research includes more work on gender and race in the U.S., Suleiman adds. “We just finished an article on nationalist and feminist discourse in American politics. We still wish to explore further how gender and racial identities plays themselves in political language in the U.S.”