Hilaria Baldwin is defending herself in the wake of the scandal surrounding her accent. The celebrity and entrepreneur addressed the controversy during Sunday’s episode of her family’s TLC reality show “The Baldwins.”
If you need a refresher, in 2020, a Twitter post accused Baldwin of faking her Spanish accent. This led to a flurry of posts and articles dissecting, criticizing and mocking said accent. The Daily Beast even accused her of “posing as a Spanish person,” and The Atlantic listed Baldwin as an “identity hoaxer” alongside Rachel Dolezal. At the time, Baldwin defended her accent, saying that she identifies as white but that her ethnic background is varied and that she was raised in a Spanish-speaking household. Now, five years on, she has opened up about this particular online controversy.
“You know what it’s called? Code-switching,” Baldwin said on Sunday’s episode of “The Baldwins.” “I had to learn about it because the whole world was mean to me, and so I had to learn it. It’s code-switching.”
Previously, Baldwin has said that she’s of English, French-Canadian, German, Irish and Slovak descent. “Growing up in a way where you have multiple cultural influences on you means that you’re never going to be able to fit in. You can try,” she said. “You can chameleon. You know, people who code-switch we’re very good at chameleon-ing … and you don’t even think, you’re not even thinking about it. It’s just normal. It’s just natural.”
Code-switching occurs when a speaker jumps between multiple languages or varieties of language within a given timeframe. It can be as drastic as a person switching from English to Korean mid-sentence or as subtle as someone who’s talking to their friends becoming a bit more formal when their boss enters the conversation.
New episodes of “The Baldwins” premiere Sundays on TLC.
The post Hilaria Baldwin Defends Accent Controversy as ‘Code-Switching’: ‘The Whole World Was Mean to Me’ appeared first on TheWrap.