Melania Trump's Linguistic Production

Abstract

In the past couple of years, the President of the United States, Donald Trump, has been one of the most talked about people in the world. Likewise, many people talk about his Slovenian–born wife Melania Trump, and frequently comment on her linguistic production. Consequently, this paper analyses Mrs Trump's linguistic production as well as people's comments on her linguistic production. The results of the first analysis show that Mrs Trump's mother tongue Slovene influences her production of English, which can be seen in examples of morphological and syntactic crosslinguistic transfer, and examples of her incomplete acquisition of English. The second analysis is a critical discourse analysis i.e. an analysis of ideologies underlying people's attitudes towards Mrs Trump's linguistic production. The results of the analysis show that the typical ideologies are the ideology of the standard language, ideology of the native speaker, ideology of territorialisation, ideology of fractional bilingualism, and the pluralist ideology