I have noticed she speaks with a very deliberate and careful enunciation. I know she is from NYC and Puerto Rico but I cannot quite place her accent and diction. What is it?
She sounds like a lot of my Spanish speaking friends when they are in a professional setting. They tend to try and minimize their accent by talking this way. In my case even if I talked in Morse code you would still hear my accent, so I don’t event try, I have been told I sound a lot like Ricky Ricardo.
I’m just glad she’s a Supreme Court nominee rather than someone who’ll do a lot of public speaking. That slow, deliberate manner of speech drives me nuts! It sounds pompous and self-important, which is probably the opposite of Ms. Sotomayor’s personality, but it grates.
I saw the video of her speaking at Duke University in 2005, and her diction is much less affected than at the introduction by the President.
That’s gold, baby, gold!
She’s from New York and she sounds like she’s from New York. I don’t hear any Puerto Rican or other Spanish accent.
She just doesn’t sound like a New Yorker to me. It definitely sounds like a very stilted accent but I am not sure where it comes from. Academia maybe?
sailor, I have no idea what you’re hearing, but she’s so blatantly New Yooowk it’s hilarious. Yes, she enunciates a lot as well (which is really why it’s so funny), but it’s obvious.
She was born in the Bronx. She’s not from Puerto Rico. She sounds like someone form the Bronx to me. Not heavy Bronx, but it’s definitely there.
Does she take on a “Barbara Jordan” type diction lately? She was a great speaker, but a little over the top in her enunciation.
I liked the style of speech. You know that she thinks carefully about every word before she says it. Thats a very important quality for a judge to have. I respect people who speak deliberately although I speak very quickly myself.
That actualy does not follow. Speaking slowly and enunciatively does not help.
Bingo. Alternatively, if you slightly speed up Sotomayor’s speech and (magically) strip her diction of her Nuyorican-ness, you’d get the schoolmarm character from Blazing Saddles.
Link?
First of all, there are many “New York accents.” And I have known many people who were born and raised there with no discernible regional accent whatsoever.
New York has a huge ethnic Puerto Rican (New Yorican) population with their own particular dialect, with minor sub-dialects. The more educated ones, like Sotomayor, work on minimizing this dialect by slightly over-enunciating. Even without knowing anything about her, I’d guess she was an educated New York Latina.
It’s always seemed a little sad to me that often some educated people feel the need to alter their dialects beyond the basic rules of grammar. I enjoy the differences in pronunciation and usage from region to region. But some people do think of broadcast English as being “standard” English (which it really isn’t) – and consider those who don’t speak it as unintelligent. That’s why The Colbert Report is not brought to you in a Deep South drawl. (He’s from Charleston, South Carolina.) Edward R. Murrow, the standard for Broadcast journalism, was born in Polecat Creek, North Carolina. Changing those Southern intonations perpetuates a myth.