Rachel Feltman: From coconut trees to “brat summer,” folks on the Internet have been spending loads of time trying to analyze Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign strategy over the past few weeks. But to understand how people perceive the Democratic nominee, you don’t just have to look at what Harris says—you also have to look at how she says it.
[Clip from speech by Kamala Harris]
Harris: You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.
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Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. Today I’m chatting with Nicole Holliday, an acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Nicole has recently gone viral for making TikToks about how Kamala Harris talks—and what that means for her campaign.
Thanks for being here, Nicole. I would love to start by hearing a little bit about what drew you to linguistics.
Nicole Holliday: Yeah, the joke is that linguistics has a PR problem because everybody just, like, stumbles into it. Nobody, very few students, you know, go to college being like, “I’m going to study linguistics”—nowadays more than they used to, but not when I was a student. So I went into college studying Spanish and Arabic.
I was good at languages, and then somebody suggested that I might like a linguistics class. So I took it and changed my major two weeks later. It’s, like, what I had been looking for my whole life. I had an epiphany because, like, yes, a lot of people want to be polyglots. They want to learn a lot of languages.
But there’s this other kind of person who’s very interested in the analysis piece of it. So I didn’t want to just collect languages like they’re Pokémon or something. I wanted to really be able to answer the questions that I had, particularly sociological questions about how the world works, using social science tools.
And so that is what drew me to linguistics. And, you know, what people think we do is really different than what we actually do. And that’s one of, one of the things, right? So they think, oh, we just speak a bunch of languages or that we’re, like, very prescriptive: we go around, you know, like, correcting people’s grammar or whatever that is.
But really, we’re kind of the most open-minded people you’ll find about language. We just go around describing. So it’s very liberating to be able to just be in the world and hear people say things different ways and then understand what that means about how they move through the world.
Feltman: Totally. I get a lot of e-mails about my use of the word “like” on my other podcast, The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week, ’cause it’s very casual, very conversational. And I actually just sent someone several articles by several, uh, very wise linguists about, you know, why filler words are not bad and why speech patterns used by young women are not bad. So yeah, I think it’s a huge misconception that linguistics is about writing the language in it. It’s such a fascinating field.
Holliday: I’m really glad you bring that up because for me, part of what I was saying about understanding how language helps me make sense of the world is about understanding power structures and inequality. And so you do this enough, and you just see that the pattern is always that. People that have lower social power have linguistic discrimination against them, too.
So whoever’s at the bottom of the social hierarchy will be the one who is sort of accused of speaking the bad version of the language. Um, and, and that goes in reverse, too. And it’s really hard for people to wrap their heads around because we’re all taught to be very prescriptive, right? Everyone has a story about their elementary school teacher policing their “ums” or their “likes” or ending sentences with prepositions or whatever grammatical hobbyhorse their teacher had. But really, all of that is a sociological construct that is a little bit independent from what’s happening with the language on the ground.
Feltman: Yeah. So what kinds of questions do you set out to answer in linguistics?
Holliday: Generally what we’re trying to do is explain how language works, which is a really big task. So you can take that from lots of different angles. So, how does it work in the mind? A lot of us work with cognitive scientists. How does it work, sort of from a philosophical perspective? What’s possible?
What’s theoretically possible in, you know, the structures of language? I’m more interested in two parts. So, I’m a sociophonetician. So the phonetics part is “What are the physical properties of speech, and how does that work with our vocal tract?” and sort of “What is the variation there?” And then I’m a sociolinguist, which means I understand how language and society operate on one another.
So for me, my biggest question, my elevator pitch, is: I want to understand what it means to sound Black, which sounds straightforward, right, but actually isn’t because you can take that from the perspective of the speakers, from the perspective of the listeners, from the perspective of wider society. So it’s actually a really big question.
And if I could answer it, I would be retired by now. But I think it’s going to keep me in business for a few more decades, hopefully.
Feltman: Yeah. I love all of the casual linguistic explainers that you have on your TikTok. How did you get started doing that kind of engagement?
Holliday: I used to teach undergraduate students at Pomona College and there were these things that would come up in class all the time, semester after semester, that I felt like were really important for regular people to know. And I was always on linguistic Twitter [now X] back in the day.
Once Twitter was purchased by Elon Musk, of course, it became a less good place to be an academic. So we all had to decamp. And then I was very intimidated by TikTok because you can’t, you know—on Twitter, you can just, like, write something pithy, and that’s it. And it takes you 15 seconds and whatever. And people can say what they want.
On TikTok, I felt like I had to become an influencer. Like, oh, I got to get the lighting and the script and figure out how all these apps work so I can embed images. And it’s, like, actually very hard to do that, as well as to do real-time science communication. So you do this in the podcast, but explaining really, you know, complex concepts for a nonspecialist audience in a three-minute video is super, super challenging. So for a while it was just, you know, something would happen in class, and then I’d hop on TikTok, just me talking to the camera, like, this is what happened, or a student asked this, or this is a concept that I think you should know about, and a few people would watch it, and it was cute.
And then, the day after Kamala Harris was sort of put forth as the Democratic nominee, I made a video that got a lot of attention because I had written a paper about her from data from when she was running for the Democratic nomination to be president. So I had all this data from her from years ago, and the paper had already come out, which never happens. So I made a TikTok, and I was like, actually, let me tell you guys about how Kamala Harris sounds, and people loved it.
Uh, it was very timely, and so since then I’ve started to make sort of more TikToks about her, uh, about political language and about things that sort of intersect with my other interests.
Feltman: Yeah, so as the linguistic expert on the topic, tell me what is interesting and cool about Kamala Harris linguistically—obviously we could, we could talk about what makes her interesting and cool as a person, but specifically linguistically.
Holliday: Yeah, I mean, these things overlap. So she’s got a really difficult task ahead of her, which is: she has to sound like herself, and that self has to appeal to voters. And this is true for all political candidates, but I’ve been really interested in listening to her next to Tim Walz and the commentary that people make about her versus the commentary that they make about him. So let me start with him and go backward to her because it’ll make more sense.
[Clip of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz]
Walz: No, they said to be careful and let her know this that black pepper is the top of the spice level in Minnesota.
Harris: [Laughing] I’m the first Vice President, I believe, who has ever grown chili peppers, we’ll figure that–
Walz: I’m trying to expand my food knowledge
Harris: You know, we’ve got some cantaloupes, you’ll be fine.
Walz: Yeah.
Holliday: He is originally from Nebraska. He’s the governor of Minnesota. He does not sound like a Minnesotan. He sounds like a Nebraskan. But people don’t tend to accuse him of being inauthentic or, you know, trying to hide aspects of his identity.
Indeed, she chose him because he has this sort of unimpeachable American stereotype that everyone can attach to him, right? He’s a Midwestern dad, veteran, football coach, whatever. We are so used to seeing people like him. He’s Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights, right? He’s straight out of central casting, as a, as a Midwestern dad.
So it’s legible. And the way he talks is part of that, too. She is unusual. There’s nobody like her. Like, what’s the closest analogue? Barack Obama? Well, that was a while ago now. And there’s a gender piece. And she’s from California. So what does she do in the construction of her persona, her political persona that tells us she’s from California, she’s a Black and Indian woman, she’s progressive, and this is sort of what her brand is?
None of this, I think, is really conscious. It’s very hard to do the kind of linguistic phenomena that I’m talking about, you know, in real time, and I’ll give you an example. Her vowels are California vowels.
So I did a side-by-side with her and Tim Walz. He’s from a different part of the country that has not had this thing we call /u/-fronting. So in a word like boot, your /u/ will move forward. So he’s going to say something more like boot, and she’s going to say something more like boot—super forward in the mouth.
And she has to because she’s Californian. So when she was running for office in California, if she said boot the way he says boot, everyone would go, “That’s not how we say that here. Are you really from here?” And she really is from here.
Feltman: Yeah.
Holliday: But I’m sure that if somebody went up to Kamala Harris and said, “Hmm, do you know that you have fronted boot?” she’s going to say, “What?”
People aren’t paying attention to their vowels like that—yeah. People aren’t paying attention to their vowels like that. So in the paper, I look at her vowels and see that she has a system that we can see is Californian, but we can also see that it’s African American based on previous research in other communities.
I also look at how she uses different intonational patterns. So she does charismatic politician speech in a way that’s very legible—that sound, you know, like a mainstream kind of white guy politician when she talks about particular issues like the economy.
[Clip of Kamala Harris from 2020 election debate]
Harris: This economy is not working for working people. For too long, the rules have been written in the favor of the people who have the most and not in the favor of the people who work the most.
Holliday: But when she talks about things that are a little more personal, like race, um, or her background, she sounds more like what we would expect from a Black politician. She sounds more like Obama, actually.
[Clip of Kamala Harris from 2020 election debate]
Harris: There is not a Black man I know, be he a relative, a friend or a coworker, who has not been the subject of some form of profiling or discrimination.
[Clip of an interview with Barack Obama]
Obama: There aren’t a lot of African American males who haven’t been subject to additional scrutiny or suspicion because of their race.
Holliday: So you see her sort of walking this line. And I don’t, I don’t think, like I said, I don’t think she’s doing it consciously. But I think everything about her is coming out in the way that she talks and particularly in these sort of debate contexts, which are super formal and, you know, require a particular kind of style.
They all still have to be themselves, but which part of themselves the listeners are listening for becomes sort of at issue.
Feltman: Yeah. That is so interesting. And how do you think these sort of linguistic choices, you know, conscious or otherwise can impact a campaign or an election?
Holliday: Yeah, so it cuts both ways. If you hear her as very Californian, then you attach whatever your stereotypes are or your ideologies are about California to her. So this could be good, right? Positive stereotypes in the society about California are, like, “it’s cool.” “It’s chill.” Like, “it’s happening.” “It’s, like, progressive.” Maybe that’s a good thing for some voters, a bad thing for other voters.
Negative stereotypes, right—oh, well, “it’s fake.” “It’s flaky.” “It’s not intelligent.” “It’s unserious.” And you’ll notice that those adjectives, those criticisms, are ones that get attached to her anyway.
Feltman: Yeah. Yeah.
Holliday: Her language is a way in which she can kind of try to steer the narrative toward the toward the more attractive parts of her biography, but it’s really, really challenging.
And like I said, I really don’t think this is conscious, you know. Like, they choose their words—that’s definitely something more conscious—and maybe some grammatical things, but when we’re talking about the intonation stuff in particular, nobody can coach her to be like, “So you need to raise your F0, your fundamental frequency, by exactly 25 hertz, um, 0.5 milliseconds into this vowel.” Like, that’s, you know, like, I can’t do that, and I know what it’s supposed to be.
Feltman: Yeah, well, and you mentioned Harris’s VP pick a bit, but I would love to hear more of your thoughts on, you know, what he brings to the campaign linguistically as, you know, in contrast to Kamala.
Holliday: Right, so I think what he brings linguistically is also what he brings politically, so we see a really nice alignment of that here. If her speech is Black and female and Californian, these are things that are not seen as quote, unquote, “standard,” right? Everybody’s imagined perfect American English is the accent from nowhere. So you’re not supposed to sound like you’re from a place, right? And if you sound like you’re Californian, that’s already a liability—less of a liability than if you sound like you’re from the South, for example, because it’s very stigmatized there. So, because Walz is from eastern Nebraska, he has a pattern that is more—it’s called Midlands, that variety.
It’s also mine because I’m from central Ohio. It’s unmarked for place, usually. He doesn’t actually sound Minnesotan. If he sounded Minnesotan, that would actually be more of a problem, but he doesn’t. So he’s just, you know, imagined as a blank slate. When people talk about his language, they talk about it as, like, folksy dad.
But it’s not actually, like, his accent. It’s not his pronunciation. It’s the stuff he says. It’s the jokes, right? It’s the sayings.
[Clip of Tim Walz]
Walz: I talk about it being halftime in America. We’re a touchdown down, and I kind of like the idea of being a little bit behind.
Holliday: But that can be projected onto him because nobody’s actually listening to his quote, unquote, “accent” because they see it as default—and that it’s also because he is an older white man; he’s supposed to sound quote, unquote, “default.” She doesn’t get to sound like him.
Feltman: Right.
Holliday: Because if she did. it would be weird, right? Like, she, they have totally different biographies. She’s not from the Midwest. She’s, they’re the same age somehow, even though they don’t look like it. But she’s had a totally different life experience.
And also in terms of race and gender, we really can’t expect people to sound, all to sound like this default politician, and that’s one of the points that I want to make. How do you convey something that is authentically yourself but also persuasive to voters if you’re Kamala Harris?
So what Walz does is allay the concerns that people might have about her being Black and a woman and from California by giving us like a nice, safe, um, ideological stereotype to land on…
Feltman: Mm-hmm.
Holliday: Something that’s, you know, very familiar; something that we’ve seen before. And his language reflects that as well.
Feltman: Yeah. Do you think that things are getting more expansive and inclusive in terms of, you know, how people are quote, unquote, “allowed” to sound to be taken seriously? Is that, have we had any movement on that at all?
Holliday: I think that people are more aware of the role of linguistic discrimination in society and that inequality. Like, when I was a student, I really did not see anybody online talking about African American Vernacular English. And now when I teach students coming in, you know, at Pomona or at Berkeley, they know that because they’ve learned it online.
And maybe, you know, there’s conversations to be had about appropriation, but at least they understand that it’s a thing that exists that’s marginalized because of racism in the United States, and that’s kind of a good thing. When we talk about the upper echelons of power, I think that’s a little bit harder.
Um, so there have been some cracks in that, right? We have more examples of what a powerful Black candidate sounds like or a powerful female candidate sounds like because we have more diversity in our candidates—not as much as we might want, but if you think about 50 years ago, the idea of there being a woman who ran for a major party recently, that—sort of somebody to look back at would be unheard of.
We had a female candidate eight years ago. So that history of Hillary Clinton does actually inform something about what Kamala Harris can do and what she’s seen like by the voters. There is still a very prescriptive ideology about what power sounds like, and that is a problem. So I see this when people say things that are kind of sexist about Kamala Harris.
They talk about her laughing. They talk about her being unserious. She giggles. She sounds like, I’ve heard she sounds like a Valley girl, which, totally not true to me.
Feltman: I have gotten so many e-mails about my other podcast to that effect. Really [Laughs] That’s literally not true.
Holliday: Yeah, but also like, so what? [Laughs]
Feltman: Yeah, and also, so what?
Holliday: Yeah, like, yeah, okay. So first of all, she doesn’t sound like a Valley girl. She’s from northern California. The Valley is southern California. Those are different. But even if she did, does having the features that we associate with younger women mean that she doesn’t have the experience as an attorney general? Like, it doesn’t actually take anything away from her.
And I get this too, right? I am a young Black woman who lives in California, and I have had people say to my face, “You don’t sound like a professor. You don’t look like a professor.” Well, damn, I got the same Ph.D. as the white guy in the office next to me. So part of it is that the listeners have to adjust their frame—not just the candidates.
Feltman: Yeah, absolutely.
Holliday: For me, hearing all the different ways that people use their language is just an object of fascination. It’s like if you’re a geologist, and you’re like, “Oh, cool, all the rocks.” And yes, some rocks have more value because society gives them more value, right? Diamonds are actually not uncommon, but we’ve created a world in which they are expensive and, you know, have this symbolism and whatever.
I think it’s actually a good analogy for language, right? There are some varieties and some languages that have a lot of power because we’ve imbued them with power and because they’re linked with a political, historical, you know, community or something like that. But they’re actually all pretty cool and interesting. So we, I don’t want to call you out necessarily, Rachel, but we were talking about this before we started recording. Like, you’re from Philly, and you say things like, “I’m done my homework.” For me, I’m like, amazing!
I hear that in the wild, and I go, Philly, yay! Or Canada, right? That’s the other place where they have that. Really interesting how it’s both Philly and Canada. That’s a better way to be in the world than “oh, my God, bad grammar,” right, because it opens you up to this world of possibility to learn something about being another way in the world that’s different than yours.
Feltman: That’s great. I think that is a perfect note to end on.
[Clip: Show theme music]
That’s all for today. We’ll be back on Monday with our usual science news roundup.
Science Quickly is produced by me, Rachel Feltman, along with Fonda Mwangi, Kelso Harper, Madison Goldberg and Jeff DelViscio. Shayna Posses and Aaron Shattuck fact-check our show. Our theme music was composed by Dominic Smith. Subscribe to Scientific American for more up-to-date and in-depth science news.
For Scientific American, this is Rachel Feltman. Have a great weekend!
