Democrat Senate candidate Lucas Coons (MO)
What is with the Democrats and their phony, distracting southern accents?
Lucas Kuhns, a Missouri Democrat running against Senator Josh Hawley in 2024, has developed a new accent.
Kamala Harris used a weird accent at Tyree Nichols’ funeral and once again addressed Virginia voters and Georgia voters.
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Dem Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had an intimidatingly fake Southern accent as she spoke to a predominantly black audience at the National Action Network’s annual convention.
Hillary Clinton is the queen of phony pandering accents. Hillary’s fake accent appears regularly and comes and goes depending on the audience she wants to manipulate. Raised in the Midwest, Clinton suddenly moved south to a black church in Selma, CUNY, and South Carolina.
Philip Letsou, The Deputy communications director for the NRSC, called out Kuhns on Twitter.
Experts agree: @Lukas Kunsmo Has a new southern accent for his promotion. Even a top linguistics professor—who literally wrote the book on US dialects—said Kuhns was 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:
Charles Boberg, professor of linguistics at McGill University, is a co-author Atlas of North American English, widely regarded as the leading text on accents and dialects in the United States, said he was able to “detect a difference” in how Kuhns spoke before and after the start of his campaign. Boberg speculates that Koons may have cycled through a “repertoire” of accents that he used to appeal to different audiences.
“I detect some differences between a high- and low-Southern-sounding accent,” Boberg said after reviewing audio clips of Koons. “A speaker is often likely to sound more southern with some audiences or in some situations than others. This is quite common for people whose ‘reservoir’ of accents and speech styles includes both their ‘standard’ version of English and the local or ethnic accent spoken in the community in which they grew up.
Boberg said it’s common for individuals to change their pronunciation “in response to the needs of a particular situation.”
“Many middle-class African Americans, for example, speak both ‘standard’-sounding and African-American-sounding English and can shift and shift between these accents in response to the needs of a particular situation,” Boberg said. “That’s what we call ‘sociolinguistic competence’.”
However, it is unlikely that Koons’ Southern drawl was adopted by the community in which he grew up. The Democratic hopeful was born outside of Columbia, Missouri, and grew up nearby in the state capital, Jefferson City. Experts say that central region of the state has more in common linguistically with parts of Iowa, Nebraska and Ohio, where linguists call “North Midland” and “South Midland” English.
