The Way You Say It: Variation in Politicians' Use of Regional Dialects

It has long been recognized that political communication extends far beyond the direct message conveyed. Elements such as who communicates, where, and how often matter as much as what is said. While research has explored how factors like cadence, emotionality, and speech style influence political messaging, one aspect remains chronically under-researched: the role of linguistic variation—specifically regional dialects and accents. A politician’s speech is a powerful marker of identity, class, and education, yet we have little empirical data on how politicians vary their speech for different audiences or how citizens perceive these shifts. While this linguistic adaptation has been thoroughly researched in linguistics, it remains underexplored in political science, where the audience, goals, and expectations differ significantly from everyday speech. This research employs a large-scale evaluation design to investigate these dynamics. A panel of over 3,000 citizens evaluated 100 audio fragments from 50 Flemish politicians, capturing speech from both the floor of the Flemish Parliament and local municipal meetings. This design allows for a direct evaluation of perceived dialect and register, rather than relying solely on linguistic indicators. Furthermore, it enables a comparison across all regions of Flanders, including rural vs. urban and core vs. peripheral dialects. We investigate whether the use of regional dialects and intermediate language (Tussentaal) increases perceived "warmth" and "dynamism" (modernity and assertiveness) at the cost of traditional markers of "professionalism" and "competence." Furthermore, the study accounts for in-group/out-group dynamics by matching the regional background of the evaluators with the dialectal variety of the speaker. By controlling for preference indicators such as education and age, the study provides a comprehensive view of how distinct groups of citizens evaluate linguistic variation in political speech. Preliminary analysis focuses on the geographic divide between "core" and "peripheral" dialects, testing whether politicians from the periphery are more heavily "penalized" or "rewarded" for their linguistic choices than those from the center, and whether they exhibit higher levels of linguistic variation across institutional contexts. In doing so, the paper offers new insights into how the "how" of political speech shapes the representative bond in a linguistically diverse society.