Dr. Christopher Strelluf

Abstract

This presentation examines changes in the qualities of Donald Trump’s vowels from 1980 to 2023. Donald Trump’s lifelong navigation of national celebrity presents an opportunity to bring together research strands exploring (a) lifespan language change among public personalities and (b) politicians’ selection of variants to present public identities. Trump’s home dialect of New York City English (NYCE) provides indexicalities for Trump to draw upon—for instance to highlight “New Yorker” identity or project qualities of toughness. At the same time, Trump’s curated personal qualities of inflexibility might align with resistance to language change, and NYCE may be sociolinguistically marked as incongruous with attainment of high social status. In this presentation, a corpus of 70 speech events reveals that Trump has generally resisted ongoing NYCE vocalic changes, but has lowered /ɔ/ across his adult lifespan and, to an extent, reduced his NYCE short-a split. Competing explanations for these patterns are considered, including that Trump may resist ongoing language change as a characteristic or performance of inflexibility, while nevertheless being subject to sociolinguistically marked vocalic changes. Trump’s limited participation in lifespan language change sheds light on relationships among linguistic plasticity, indexicalities of place, and sociolinguistic evaluations of features.

Biography

Dr Strelluf is sociolinguist who works primarily from variationist approaches. Most of his research has focused on describing varieties of English, and identifying changes in dialects resulting from a range of social and linguistic factors. Dr Strelluf's recent work has included a series of "historical sociophonetic" projects to use old speech recordings to test hypotheses about sound change which were constructed to explain present-day data, as well as editing the Routledge Handbook of Sociophonetics. Dr Stelluf is a Fellow in the Warwick Institute of Engagement, and frequently shares knowledge about language and linguistics in media appearances, webinars, presentations, and other events. His engagement work also includes collaborations with Cockney Cultures to celebrate non-standard Englishes traditionally associated with East London and reduce language prejudice faced by speakers of these varieties, as well as collaborations across the EUTOPIA Alliance of universities to foster public engagement and impact.