Taylor Swift has made years of contributions to music. Now, researchers say, her unique life and career have advanced the study of speech patterns.
Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn of the University of Minnesota analyzed years of recorded interviews from Taylor Swift’s different eras to study how her speech patterns evolved through different phases of her life and career.
The purpose of their study was to look not only at geographical areas, but also explore how social groups, age, and leadership status can influence the way a person speaks. Thanks to nearly two decades of public recordings, the researchers had a unique opportunity to study Swift and the way her dialect evolved with her career.
Their work was published Tuesday in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
“Taylor Swift is perfect for this type of longitudinal analysis because she has been interviewed and recorded many times over the years and had motivations for changing her accent at specific times,” says Winn.
To conduct their research, Mohamed and Winn analyzed over 1,400 vowel sounds from Swift’s interviews, allowing them to track shifts in pronunciation and vocal resonance.
The pair chose to focus on three major areas of Swift’s life: different years, different cities and different albums.
Comparing the eras: ‘Fearless,’ ‘Red’ and ‘Lover’
Mohamed and Winn focused their research to align with these details:
- 2008: Living in Nashville, promoting “Fearless”
- 2012: Living in Philadelphia, promoting “Red”
- 2019: Living in New York City, promoting “Lover”
During the “Fearless” era, Swift was establishing her career in Nashville as a country artist. In interviews researchers noted a few distinct features of a southern accent.
Mohamed and Winn recognized an /ai/ vowel shift which led to her pronouncing words such as “ride” like “rod.” She also adopted the fronting of the /u/ vowel which the study explains shifts words like “two” to sounding like “tee-you.”
Winn and Mohamed were not surprised by this, saying the accent was likely a way for Swift to integrate herself into the Nashville county music scene and establish herself as an artist at the time.
The accent was short-lived because by the time she moved back to Pennsylvania and began promoting “Red,” Swift’s southern sound diminished. According to the study, this was also likely a strategic move. The star was attempting to transition to the pop world and separate herself from her country roots. Dropping southern dialect was a way for her to do that in public media.
Dialect as power
The second major shift in Swift’s dialect, according to the study, came during her “Lover” era in 2019. Swift had moved to New York City, was a prominent pop icon, and started exercising her voice more openly in social and political discourse.
The researchers observed that at this point in her career Swift’s speech was in a noticeably lower pitch. According to Winn, this was likely an intentional decision. “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,” he said.
Taylor Swift always knows how to keep her Swifties on their toes. The pop icon revealed on her website that she has a new album coming out called, “The Life Of A Showgirl.”
The researchers noted that Swift’s unique life and career could not be replicated in a lab.
“These results, which would be virtually impossible to observe in a controlled laboratory study, have broad implications for our understanding of the combined influences of place, profession, and leadership goals on an individual’s dialect adaptation later in life, suggesting that the ways people use language for conveying identity and community belonging are malleable within specific timeframes and goals,” they wrote.
