Hilaria Baldwin has addressed the controversy surrounding her accent, claiming ‘the whole world was mean to me’.

The mom-of-seven, who is 41 years old and is known by her real name Hillary Hayward-Thomas, hails from an affluent area in Boston. Over the years, she has caught the attention of many with her unconventional way of speaking.

Although her parents live in Majorca, Spain, she grew up in the states and is American – but she often uses a Spanish accent in interviews.

Speaking in the latest episode of her TLC reality show, The Baldwins, Hilaria talked to her oldest daughter’s friend about being forced to learn about code-switching.

‘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,’ she first said in her confessional. ‘You can try.

‘You can chameleon. You know, people who code-switch we’re very good at chameleoning… and you’re not even thinking about it.’

Addressing the teen, Hilaria continued: ‘They say that it’s like communication, if you ever talk to a really old person who cannot hear, and I’m gonna emphasize, I’m gonna speak slower.

‘And you’re not even really thinking about it. You just start to do it.’

She continued: ‘You know what it’s called? Code-switching… 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.’

Returning to her confessional, Hilaria opened up about the pressures that come with being in the spotlight.

She said: ‘People say, “Oh, don’t you get used to it?” No, you don’t get used to it.

‘You never get used to people being mean. But you take a deep breath, and I think you learn to distance yourself from it, and so, you know, you just try turning down the volume in my head a bit… and I’m not gonna take it personally.’

Back in 2015, the entrepreneur went viral for seemingly forgetting a simple word in her native tongue while cooking.

At the time, Hilaria had appeared in a now infamous six-minute segment on the Today Show and made an ‘authentic’ gazpacho.

The Living Clearly Method author listed the ingredients, and at one point, seemed to forget the English word for ‘cucumber.’

‘We have tomatoes, we have, um, how do you say in English? Cucumber,’ Hilaria said at the time.

Hilaria was exposed four years ago by DailyMail.com for listing her birthplace as Majorca, Spain, on her agency’s website.

In The Baldwin’s first episode, Hilaria said she is ‘normal’ for mixing English and Spanish while also expressing upset over being criticized for her accent.

‘My nuclear family now lives over in Spain,’ she said. ‘I want to teach my kids pride in speaking more than one language.

‘I think just growing up speaking two languages is extremely special. I love English and I also love Spanish, and when I mix the two, it doesn’t make me inauthentic.

‘When I mix the two, it makes me normal!’

Hilaria, who shares seven kids with her husband Alec Baldwin, hinted that although the controversy over her accent has made her feel low, she has been able to lean on her loved ones for support.

She continued: ‘I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me sad and it didn’t hurt and it didn’t put me in dark places.

‘But it was my family, my friends, my community who speak multiple languages, who have belonged in multiple places, and realize that we are a mix of all these different things and that is going to have an impact on how we sound and how we articulate things and the words that we choose and our mannerisms.

‘That normal. That’s what’s called being human.’