A new study published in the Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), analyzes the evolution of singer-songwriter Taylor Swift’s dialect over the course of her career, using recordings from her interviews.
Published Tuesday, the study, titled “Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift’s dialect changes across different eras of her career” reveals how people adopt accents and regional dialects, according to University of Minnesota researchers Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn.
In an interview with CTVNews.ca, Winn said studying dialects can be challenging because it requires following around someone as they move from city to city. Swift was an ideal candidate to research in order to observe the changes in a longitudinal way.
“Taylor Swift not only moved to different cities and had reason to change her dialect, but she was also recorded over and over again doing interviews, doing conversations with media, things like that,” he said. “So that just gave us that opportunity that we wanted to make the most of.”
Using recordings of interviews Swift gave when she lived in Nashville, in her hometown of Pennsylvania and New York City, Mohamed and Winn analyzed over 1,400 vowel sounds to measure the vocal resonances.
They observed that Swift adopted features of the Southern accent while living in Nashville—features that were not present when she lived in Pennsylvania.
Specifically, the monophthongization of the /aɪ/ vowel — pronouncing words like ‘ride’ like “rod” — and the fronting of the /u/ vowel — shifting words like “two” to sound like “tee-you” — were present in recorded interviews during her time in Nashville, according to the study.
“It’s not just based on what you hear, but you can measure very subtle changes in the person’s tongue position as they’re producing a vowel and plot that out and how it changed when she was in Nashville and those things went away when she moved back to Philadelphia,” Winn explained.
Swift’s use of the Southern accent could have been a way to integrate into the country music scene, the researchers hypothesize.
The second change researchers noted in Swift’s dialect was a lower pitch in her voice when she lived in New York City. During this time in her career, she became well-known for speaking up on issues of social change, feminism and musicians’ rights.
“This was a time where she might have been trying to be more of a leader on some of these things, and sometimes when people assume positions of leadership, they drop their voice,” Winn said.
Researchers Mohamed and Winn say that studying high-profile dialect shifts like Swift’s can help scientists better understand the scope of these dialects, with geographic area, social group, age, and leadership status in mind.
For inspiration, the researchers referred to a 2000 study published in Nature Magazine, which examined Queen Elizabeth’s Christmas address over the years to track the changes in her dialect.
Winn is trained as an audiologist, which is the study of hearing and hearing loss. Part of his training and research is trying to understand the acoustics of speech, since that’s what people are hearing. He admits the study isn’t representative of his normal work.
“This work would fall under the category of sociolinguistics, how people are changing their language as part of the social expression of who they are,” he said.
