A new study analyzes how Taylor Swift’s accent has shifted depending on where she lived.
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She’s inspired endless fan devotion, speculation and rumors. Now, Taylor Swift has inspired a scientific study.
Two University of Minnesota researchers analyzed hundreds of hours of recorded interviews with the pop star to track how her dialect evolved and shifted as she lived in different parts of the country during different eras of her career. They analyzed the 14-time Grammy winner’s speech patterns in a bid to better understand how, and why, people adopt accents and regional dialects.
Swift proved the perfect study target, as her many media interviews provide a continuous record of variation in her speech and she “had motivations for changing her accent at specific times,” said Matthew Winn, co-author of a new study published Tuesday in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America that reinforces how dialects reflect not only where people grow up, but the social communities they aspire to belong to.
“When we perceive speech, we don’t just perceive the words, we perceive the person and the character traits that they want to convey,” Winn said in an interview. “Not everybody changes their speech after moving to a new city, so it’s interesting to think about what motivates the people who do change.”
It’s All About The Vowels
Winn and audiology graduate student Miski Mohamed, a huge Taylor Swift fan, analyzed interviews with the artist conducted between 2008 and 2019. They focused on the articulation of vowels, which form the basis of most accent differences across English dialects.
When Swift moved from her home state of Pennsylvania to Nashville as a teenager, for example, she adopted features of a Southern accent — pronouncing words like “ride” more like “rod,” for example, and “two” more like “tee-you.” The researchers hypothesize that the shift to a more Southern twinge may have reflected the musician’s desire to fit into the country-music community. The southern sounds faded after she moved back to Philadelphia, they found.
They observed another shift when the newly engaged musician relocated to New York City in 2014 and released her first official pop album, the wildly popular 1989, which produced hits like “Shake It Off” and “Blank Space.”
“This was the time in her career when she became more well-known for speaking up on issues of social change and feminism, as well as musician’s rights,” said Winn, who studies speech communication and the factors that make it difficult for people with hearing loss. “Sometimes people with a lower pitch are perceived as a voice of authority, and it is possible that she was making use of that tendency to ensure her message was received.”
They note that this change also coincided with Swift’s progressing in age from 19 to 30. That similar voice lowering has been observed in Queen Elizabeth II and other women during the same stage of life, suggesting it could simply be a pattern associated with aging through her 20s, the study indicates.
Why Do We Adjust How We Talk?
Swift’s representative did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the research. But Cynthia Clopper, a professor of linguistics at Ohio State University who was not involved with the study, stressed how common it is for people — even record-busting artists — to shift their speech in response to geography, social identity and professional context.
“We can all probably think of people we know who moved from where they grew up to somewhere else as adults and ‘lost’ their original accent,” Clopper said in an interview. “Shifts related to social identity and context are even more prevalent. Think about having a ‘phone voice’ for talking to customer service agents or a ‘teacher voice’ that teachers and professors have for the classroom. We constantly adjust the way we talk, not only to project our own identity, but also for the context in which we are talking.”
It’s valuable, she added, to understand how much we can change our speech and how successful those changes can be in shaping how we’re perceived.
The University of Minnesota researchers picked more than 1,400 vowel sounds from recorded Swift interviews and used software to measure the vocal resonances. Winn stresses that the school’s Listen Lab doesn’t typically focus on dialects — or pop stars — but on how hearing loss affects speech communication.
“I didn’t know much about Taylor before this project began,” Winn said. He may not know the lyrics to “All Too Well” or “Antihero,” but now he knows the rhythms of her speech patterns better than most fans ever will.