Taylor Swift: Academics study how the singer’s accent has changed

The way music megastar Taylor Swift changes her accent has become the focus of academic scrutiny.

A team from The University of Chester has examined how her drawl alters when she performs different musical genres.

Dr Helen West, Senior Lecturer in English language/linguistics, and English graduate, Esther Humphries compared earlier and later Swift styles.

Their findings were presented to an online symposium on the artiste.

Swift’s fanbase has previously discussed how Swift sang with a Southern or Tennessee accent on her earlier recordings, but has a more northern USA tone on her more recent work, the university said.
Swiftposium
Their online paper – the only one to look at this facet of the singer – was made to the Swiftposium academic conference, at the University of Melbourne and was among 130 selected from more than 400 submissions.

Dr West said: “Taylor’s accent changes between her country and pop music styles has generated quite a lot of public attention, but, until our research, it had not been analysed in any depth.

“The results reveal significant stylisation dependent on the musical genre Swift performs, with Southern American English accent forms more prevalent in her earlier country-style music.

“Her popular-style performances demonstrate a transition to Northern American accent forms.

“However, while there is clear evidence of accent shift between the two genres for all the accent sounds investigated, our results reveal that the shift between the genres is more subtle than we had hypothesised, with Swift using less perceptible Southern accent forms in her country area, rather than some of the features that index (are very recognisable in) a Southern American accent.”

Miss Humphries added: “These results suggest that Swift is not performing the accent simply for her music but indicate a form of bilingualism, with some linguistic awareness.

“The changes could be attributed to a range of factors including her emersion into the Nashville/South American English speech community, having moved to Nashville at the age of 14, and they could also carry some social meaning about ‘countryness’, youth culture and lack of pretention.”