Changing language use of political parties and individuals over time

Recent years have seen a variety of studies on political speech and style. In this talk, I will review some of this work in the context of the ongoing ERC project Explaining Individual Lifespan Change. First, I will consider what style is and discuss the phenomenon of style shift and the different theories that have been employed in the literature to capture this phenomenon, ranging from Labov’s Attention-Paid-to-Speech model to approaches that focus more on identity and its construction. I will also discuss long term effects of social status on language such as the notion of the Linguistic Market. I will then look at some of the findings on how political position correlates with the use of language, including the work of Lauren Hall-Lew and her colleagues. This includes how vowel pronunciation in the word Iraq differs in American politics depending on whether the speaker is a Republican or a Democrat. I will then go over how the current ERC project differs from previous studies and goes beyond what has been done before. Further specific findings of the present project will then be discussed in the other talks of the session.

Political speech is an active area of investigation and the ongoing ERC project Explaining Individual Lifespan Change (EILisCh) expands on some of the previous findings in this area. Previous work has found that political speech can differ based on party membership in a time-wise static environment and it has also been uncovered that individual politicians can change their linguistic behavior over time. In this talk, we pursue a novel topic in this area, the evolution of language use of entire political parties over time. We focus on Icelandic political parties and their use of Stylistic Fronting, with a particular emphasis on the years around the financial crisis of 2008, the years leading up to it, the crisis itself, and the subsequent years. We find that parties in a position of power typically speak more formally, using more Stylistic Fronting, but at the same time it is not as simple as that, as there are some exceptions to this pattern. We discuss the reasons for why this might be the case.

In this talk, we will build on the previous two talks in the session and turn the focus to individual politicians. As we have established that political speech is interconnected with style shift and entire political parties change their use of language over time, we relate these findings with the usage patterns of individuals within these parties. Importantly, we find that there is indeed a pattern, such that several politicians follow their party trend in how the party becomes more formal or informal over time. However, there are also some individuals who go their own way and do something different from what their party members are doing. We show some examples of such cases and discuss the reasons for why this might be the case. We also visit the idea that some individuals change more than others. While some politicians change with the times, others remain remarkably stable, regardless of their changing position in politics.