Donald Trump has lowered THOUGHT for five decades : lifespan language change and stability in New York City English vowels

This paper examines changes in the qualities of Donald Trump’s vowels from 1980 to 2023. Donald Trump’s lifelong navigation of national celebrity presents an opportunity to bring together research strands exploring (a) lifespan language change among public personalities and (b) politicians’ selection of variants to present public identities. Trump’s home dialect of New York City English (NYCE) provides indexicalities for Trump to draw upon—for instance to highlight “New Yorker” identity or project qualities of toughness. At the same time, Trump’s curated personal qualities of toughness and inflexibility might align with resistance to language change, and NYCE may be sociolinguistically marked as incongruous with attainment of high social status. Using a corpus of 70 speech events, we find that Trump has generally resisted ongoing NYCE vocalic changes. However, Trump has lowered /ɔ/ across his adult lifespan and, to an extent, reduced his NYCE short-a split. We interpret this pattern as suggesting that, despite Trump drawing actively on his links to New York City and curating a public personality that can be enhanced by NYCE, he is nevertheless influenced by vocalic changes and sociolinguistic ideologies that were present during childhood language acquisition.