And now the moment you've all been waiting for...

What do I think of Sarah Palin's g-dropping and reductions?

All political views aside, I hate the way she speaks. I don't think it's natural even one bit (maybe it was when she was a teenager, but she's been around the public eye long enough to have mastered Standard American English). To me, she sounds friendly and believable, but very unintelligent. I feel like she's talking down to America and putting us all in a class with hicks and rednecks. Which I am not. *Note: I'm solely talking about Palin's speech, not her personally or her politics.

However, I understand her purpose of trying to create solidarity among Americans. While my little poll was definitely less than scientifically accurate (i.e. it's really hard to separate what you think about the way Palin speaks from your opinion of her and her political views), I was not at all surprised by the results: 55% of you thought Palin's speech made her sound friendly (no one found her to be unfriendly) and 40% thought she sounded trustworthy. On the other hand, 35% thought she sounded unintelligent (I actually thought it would be higher) and 30% thought she sounded unpresidential. The point is, Palin is clearly altering her speech so the she can come across as a friendly, down to earth type of person...and it's working. The only down side is that people don't always take the local "hockey mom" very seriously.

Along those same lines, one of my professors, Wendy Baker, did an extremely fascinating study a few years ago (yes, I'm too lazy to go find a source for this right now) on dialect perception. She played speech clips of people from various areas across the country: South, East, West (Colorado), Northwest, and Utah. Her results found that people assumed different things about people based on the way they speak. Southerners sounded dumb, but friendly; Easterners sounded stuck up and smart; Coloradans had an equal mix of sounding smart, friendly, relaxed- theirs was the preferred dialect; and Utahans sounded dumb, but not unfriendly (interestingly enough, it was the Utahns that rated their dialect the lowest- come on Utah, get some self-esteem!). We constantly make judgements about people based on their accents and word choices.

The real trick is finding a balance in your speech. In Palin's case, she's identifying very well with lower-middle class America, but perhaps not so much with the academics. Do you think it's worth the risk of alienating 1 group to identify with another?

*Just for the record, if I ever say anything about your speech, I for one am not judging you. I'm just observing and sometimes I get excited and want you to know what I've just noticed about your speech. I'm a linguist; it's what I do.