When Taylor Swift released her first hit nearly 20 years ago she was a teenage country singer with a headful of blonde ringlets. A shift into pop saw her trade her cowboy boots for a sleek bob and Manhattan couture. Most recently, in photos of her engagement to the American football player Travis Kelce, she opted for a demure halterneck dress from Ralph Lauren.
But according to a new study, it is not just her look that has evolved: so has her accent.
After analysing hundreds of hours of Swift’s interviews, linguists have concluded that the world’s most bankable singer-songwriter offers a rare opportunity for understanding how people adapt the way they speak.
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The results, published in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, highlight how voices are not fixed by birthplace. Instead, they shift according to our ambitions, the judgments of others and the desire to belong.
As a teenager Swift, who is now 35, moved from her native Pennsylvania to Nashville, the capital of country music. The study shows how she came to lean into the cadences of the south.
She flattened the i in “ride” so it edged toward “rod”, and pushed the oo of “two” until the word sounded a little like “tee-you.”
Both sounds are hallmarks of southern American English and a faint drawl, even one acquired rather than inherited, may have helped Swift sound, and feel, at home.
Swift singing the US national anthem before an American football game in 2006
AL MESSERSCHMIDT/GETTY IMAGES
It may also have demonstrated a certain solidarity, suggests Matthew Winn of the University of Minnesota, a co-author of the study. “In general, many people in the US do not prefer to speak with a southern accent because it is met with unfair judgment and criticism,” he said. “So the fact that Taylor expressed some southern features despite this stigma shows how committed she was to fitting in with her country music community.”
When Swift left Tennessee and returned north to Pennsylvania, the Nashville twang faded. By the time she moved to New York City in 2014, which was around the time she began working on her album 1989, she sounded closer to the “general American” accent familiar from television news presenters. This lacked prominent signals of region, ethnicity or class. But there was a new twist: her pitch dropped.
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This was a period when Swift became more outspoken on feminism, artists’ rights and politics. Deeper voices, other studies have shown, are more likely to be perceived as authoritative. She may not have calculated the shift consciously, but on some level she may have grasped that pitch can matter when you speak.
“Even though she has the ability to speak about these issues without needing to change her voice, this is a typical thing that people do when they’re talking about something that is important to them,” Winn said. A deeper voice is consistent with a goal of pursuing leadership, he added.
Swift in Sao Paulo, Brazil, during her Eras tour in 2023
BUDA MENDES/TAS23/GETTY IMAGES
It is not the first time that the speech of a prominent figure has been scrutinised. Recordings of Queen Elizabeth II from the 1950s revealed a clipped, aristocratic pronunciation. Over the following decades her vowels softened, tracking a decline in the deference paid to the upper classes in Britain. Linguists came to see the shift as mirroring national societal changes.
According to Winn, the changes to Swift’s dialect probably reflect a more personal journey. “The results help to expand the scope of how we think dialects work,” he said.
“Many people think that dialects just reflect where a person grew up. And that is mostly true, but it also includes the social community that you want to be a part of.”