James Finn
1 min readSep 5, 2024

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I change what linguists call my "speech register" all the time. "Register" refers to choices in language use that reflect socioeconomic and other status, not rising to the level of separate "dialect" and more significant than "accent," which is often at least mostly involuntary.

Gonna, woulda, shoulda, betta, etc, are all part of a working-class register I grew up with as a White man, a register I mostly default to when talking to my neighbors in my working-class Michigan region. Nobody blinks.

Sometimes, I even write a bit in that register, though I usually use a different register in more formal situations.

White politicians use different registers all the time. Depending on their audiences. Hell, we expect it.

It's only when Black people are involved, when racism comes into play, that switching between ordinary speech registers gets derided. By White people.

We need to stop doing that.

Kamala Harris didn't even deliver her Detroit speech (I listened to it live) in a distinct accent or dialect. She just changed registers, slightly, and not as much as other famous politicians like Joe Biden and Bill Clinton, who are known to use distinctive working-class registers at times, depending on their audiences.

But I guess since they're not Black, we White people don't call them out for that.

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James Finn
James Finn

Written by James Finn

James Finn is an LGBTQ columnist, a former Air Force intelligence analyst, an alumnus of Act Up NY, and an agented but unpublished novelist.

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