As part of a series of speeches at the Democratic National Convention (DNC), U.S. House of Representatives member Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) was heavily criticized for adjusting her accent while addressing the audience and nation. The headlines were highly critical, blasting the performance with statements like “AOC mocked debuting bizarre new accent Democrat National-Convention” by the UK dailymail and others. AOC quickly responded by stating “‘Folks talking about my voice can step right off,’ she wrote on Twitter. “Any kid who grew up in a distinct linguistic culture & had to learn to navigate class enviros at school/work knows what’s up. My Spanish is the same way.” Not the first time to have endured such criticism, AOC’s response was brief and to the point. Criticism of her prior work as a bartender seemed to backfire as well – only serving to showcase the fact she had a job before entering politics.
Shifting accents is not a new or unique phenomenon. A quick online search reveals that it’s quite common in the United States, especially for people who move frequently — modifying one’s accent can be another way of “fitting in.” Termed “style shifting” it is a well-known linguistics phenomenon described by Sociolinguists Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling as “variation within the speech of a single speaker whereby speakers may shift in their use of grammatical, phonological, and lexical variants in response to social conditions.1” Style shifting has been well-documented as has a related linguistics term called code switching. Code switching refers to changing one’s speech pattern or accent as a way to better connect with diverse cultural groups and individuals. In an effort to connect or seem more relatable, the speaker will invoke a tone, accent of rhythm of speech familiar to the intended audience. The subject was been so well-researched, it even has it’s own Wikipedia entry “Code-switching”.2 To be more specific, changing between American accents would be better described as “dialect-switching.” Linguistics can be a highly complex subject with numerous examples and variations of code-switching :
The term “code-switching” is also used outside the field of linguistics. Informally, code-switching is sometimes used to refer to relatively stable informal mixtures of two languages, such as Spanglish, Taglish, or Hinglish.[12] Some scholars of literature use the term to describe literary styles that include elements from more than one language, as in novels by Chinese-American, Anglo-Indian, or Latino writers.[13]
As switching between languages is exceedingly common and takes many forms, we can recognize code-switching more often as sentence alternation. A sentence may begin in one language, and finish in another. Or phrases from both languages may succeed each other in apparently random order. Such behavior can be explained only by postulating a range of linguistic or social factors such as the following:[14]
Speakers cannot express themselves adequately in one language, so they switch to another to work around the deficiency. This may trigger a speaker to continue in the other language for a while.
Switching to a minority language is very common as a means of expressing solidarity with a social group. The language change signals to the listener that the speaker is from a certain background; if the listener responds with a similar switch, a degree of rapport is established.
The switch between languages can signal the speaker’s attitude towards the listener – friendly, irritated, distant, ironic, jocular and so on. Monolinguals can communicate these effects to some extent by varying the level of formality of their speech; bilinguals can do it by language switching.”
Source: Wikipedia
Code-switching : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching
As an aside worth mentioning, there’s a considerable amount of online debate over differences in regional accents and language behavior patterns in general. The website reddit.com features a section specifically discussing this topic “Can you do “code-switching” with accents?” According to one redditor, changing accents and dialects is “very common in Korea” due to differences in Seoul and regional accents.3