Allison Burkette
 

This paper addresses candidate Sarah Palin’s vice-presidential debate performance from a dialectologist’s perspective.  Palin, before and after the debate, had been accused of  “fakin’ it,” of exaggerating or manufacturing a “midwestern-sounding accent” to further a middle-America political personae.  This paper examines the marked features of Palin’s speech, such as Canadian raising, ash raising, the hill/heel merger, and, of course, so-called ‘g-dropping,’ and compares the ‘reality’ of her debate speech with the perceptions of her speech as espoused by various pundits and political commentators.  Specifically, token/type counts of g-dropping are discussed compared to Trudgill’s benchmark numbers for social class and [n] for [ing] substitution.  Finally, this paper looks closely at the contexts in which Palin’s marked features occur, finding that clusters of marked features tend to co-occur in relation to specific topics.