Sounding vs. Being an Expert: Disentangling Authority, Register and Cultural Impact in Sycophantic LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been shown to exhibit sycophancy, a tendency to align with user assertions even when they conflict with facts.We frame sycophancy as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, disentangling two distinct drivers of credibility: explicit authority (credentials) and implicit authority (linguistic register).We introduce the Sycophancy Matrix, an adversarial evaluation framework that isolates these variables.Using a controlled subset of TruthfulQA, we evaluate openweight models across English, Spanish, and Portuguese variants.Our findings reveal that models often conflate high register with truthfulness: for some architectures, sophisticated tone triggers deference more effectively than explicit expertise.Furthermore, we observe statistically significant variability across cultural variants of Spanish and Portuguese, supporting the hypothesis that LLMs internalise languagespecific sociolinguistic norms and that sycophancy is not a purely technical deficit but an emergent property of multilingual training and alignment.Finally, we identify stable sycophancy fingerprints-domain-specific vulnerability profiles that persist across languagessuggesting that alignment artefacts are intrinsic to model families rather than linguistic context.