Scientists analyzed years of interviews with Taylor Swift to track how dialects evolve

By Amarachi Orie, CNN

Day-one fans of Taylor Swift know that the pop superstar has come a long way since launching her music career as a country singer — and that evolution is apparent in her dialect, according to speech scientists.

From Tennessee to Pennsylvania to New York, the career of the 14-time Grammy award winner has taken her “in and out of communities that have distinct regional or socio-cultural dialects,” two researchers from the University of Minnesota wrote in their study, published Tuesday in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

Study authors Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn noted that the singer’s numerous interviews and media appearances across the span of her career to date gave them a “rare opportunity” to observe dialect change over a prolonged period of time, in a way that “would be virtually impossible to observe in a controlled laboratory study.” This, they say, could have implications for our understanding of the influence of place, profession and leadership goals on how a person’s dialect adapts later in life.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1989, Swift moved to Tennessee at age 13 to gain the attention of country labels in Nashville.

There, she found success as a young country artist, releasing her hit country pop album “Fearless” in 2008.

A transition to more mainstream pop became evident in the release of her 2012 album “Red,” with lead single “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”

In 2014, Swift moved to New York and released her fifth studio album, titled “1989,” which she described as her first “official pop album.” It featured hit singles “Bad Blood,” “Blank Space” and “Shake It Off.”

The researchers analyzed changes in Swift’s accent between 2008 and 2019, extracting audio from interviews on YouTube and elsewhere online.

Each interview was linked with the promotion of a specific album, and the researchers chose the albums based on where Swift lived when recording and promoting them.

One set of interviews was related to her 2008 country album “Fearless” in Nashville; another was related to her transitional fourth studio album, “Red,” made in Philadelphia; and the final set was related to her seventh studio album, “Lover,” which was notably pop and made in New York in 2019, according to the study.

A total of 45 minutes, 24 minutes and 37 minutes of speech audio were analyzed for each of Swift’s Nashville, Philadelphia and New York City eras, respectively.

The researchers then made acoustic measurements for “hundreds and hundreds of vowels that Taylor spoke during these interviews,” study co-author and speech communication scientist Winn told CNN.

Vocal eras

After comparing the acoustic measurements across Swift’s different eras, the researchers saw signatures of changes in how she pronounced her vowels “that were consistent with markers of speaking a Southern dialect in Nashville and then losing those features when she went back to Philadelphia,” Winn said.

The trajectory of her tongue movement was shorter when Swift pronounced the /aɪ/ vowel during her time in Nashville, making a word like “ride” sound more like “rod.” This is a feature connected to a Southern dialect, according to the study.

Swift lengthened her pronunciation of the /aɪ/ vowel when she relocated to Philadelphia and it remained that way in New York City. The ending of the sound of the vowel when Swift was in New York was so high that “it is tempting to interpret it as a hyper-correction away from the Southern dialect,” the researchers said.

While Swift was in Nashville, her fronting — articulating a vowel with the tongue more forward — of the /u/ vowel was much more exaggerated than in her other eras, confirming that she was adopting a Southern accent, the study authors said.

This made her pronounce words like “two” in a way that sounded like “tee-you,” according to a press statement accompanying the study, but this disappeared when Swift moved back to Philadelphia.

“It’s good to continue finding evidence that that’s true — that a person, as they go through adulthood, they still find reasons to change how they sound to fit in with their community,” said Winn.

“A lot of people think of dialects as just belonging to geographic regions, at least in the United States, and that’s part of it. But, there are so many more factors that people have to change how they speak, including the social community that they’re in. And so, because Taylor Swift was moving into this country music community, that was another piece of the reason why her voice might have changed,” he added.

Accents and activism

Swift’s pitch was also “significantly lower” during her New York City era, according to the study, which noted that a lower voice pitch is often used by talkers to signal confidence and authority on important topics, and make the speaker more likely to be perceived as a leader.

“This era coincided with her increased visibility speaking out on issues of social change, sexism, double-standards, musicians’ rights, and her own autonomy in her musical career,” the researchers said.

Swift promoted LGBTQ equality at MTV’s Video Music Awards in 2019, and went on to sing about youth mobilization in her 2020 song “Only The Young” and endorse the Democrats.

Helen West, a senior lecturer in English Language at the University of Chester in the UK, who is part of the “The Swift Accent Shift Project” team at the university, said she was “excited” that the results in the Minnesota study were similar to those found by her team on Swift’s singing accent.

“What I found especially notable about this study of her interviews was not just that Taylor Swift adapted her accent to align with living near Nashville and performing country-style music, and then shifted to accent features associated with the northern US as her genre moved toward pop (a finding our own study corroborates in the analysis of her accent in her singing/music), but also that she potentially lowered the pitch of her voice to sound more authoritative when discussing social issues,” West, who was not involved in the latest study, added.

“This demonstrates how adaptable our accents can be, depending on our sense of identity, our social context, our perception of our audience/who we are speaking to, and the nature of the message we wish to convey at any given time.”

However, while it is possible that Swift lowered her pitch “to signal the seriousness of these themes, and to convey her competence to speak on them with authority,” her pitch change also coincides with her aging from 19 to 30 years old, the researchers noted.

A similar pattern of voice pitch lowering was observed in the speech of Queen Elizabeth II during the same period of life, as well as among women in their 30s, and so “could just be a simple pattern associated with aging through her 20s,” they added.

‘Wasn’t her “real” accent’

In May, Swift announced that she had taken ownership of her entire catalogue of music, years after her master recordings were sold by her former record label, and confirmed that she had completed the highly anticipated re-recording of her 2006 self-titled debut album, “Taylor Swift.”

Fans “have been discussing this for decades,” writer Elly McCausland, a professor of English Literature at Ghent University in Belgium who curated the course “Literature: Taylor’s Version,” told CNN.

“It’s speculated that this is why Taylor has waited so long to re-record her debut album, because she’d have to re-adopt the Southern country accent that wasn’t her ‘real’ accent in the first place,” continued McCausland, who was not involved in the study.

“I think it says more about the kind of accent that is expected from certain music genres than anything else, country music being predominantly associated with the US South,” she added.

However, the study authors noted that since they were listening to recordings of casual speech used in ordinary conversations and not in the controlled environment of a lab, and as they could not speak to Swift herself, their study alone cannot determine the array of reasons the artist might have consciously or unconsciously altered her speech as her career progressed.

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