It’s kind of wild when you think about it, but Taylor Swift has been in the public eye for the majority of her life, and that’s been recorded through interviews, her album releases, and of course her record-breaking Eras Tour. Over the years, fans have noticed that the music sensation’s accent has changed from the time she was trying to make it as a country star in Tennessee to now. I just didn’t have actual speech scientists studying the trends of her dialect over the years on my bingo card, but here we are.
Fans Have Clocked That Taylor Swift’s Accent Has Changed Over The Years
Before we get into the findings of the study, let’s talk about how fans have been talking about Taylor Swift’s accent. When the singer first rose into prominence with her early albums in the early 2000s, she was marketed as this country star from Tennessee. The truth is, she was born in Pennsylvania, and moved to the South at the age of 13 to pursue her dreams in Nashville. This TikTok does a good job of showcasing how her speaking voice has changed over the years:
Among fans, there are generally two schools of thoughts about why Taylor Swift had a Southern accent that she gradually lost as she got older. Some believe she picked up on the accent shortly after landing in Tennessee, perhaps to fit in and embody the country community she had aspirations to join. Others think she straight up faked it. No matter what you believe, it’s clear the way she speaks has changed across the past twenty years.
I’m Flabbergasted Speech Scientists Have Now Taken The Time To Study It
Cut to this new study from the Acoustical Society of America (via a CNN article). Researchers Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn decided to study Swift’s accent in interviews from the years of 2008 and 2019, with about an hour and a half in total. They found it to be a “rare opportunity” to observe dialect changes across the span of two decades that “would be virtually impossible to observe in a controlled laboratory study.”
What they found is that Swift very much was exhibiting signatures true to the Southern accent during her time in Nashville, through the specific ways she said certain vowels in her speech. The study concluded that she “temporarily adopted distinct measurable features of Southern American dialect during her time in Nashville” which “disappeared upon her relocation to Philadelphia and New York City”. The study suggests she lowered her voice pitch during her time in New York City. In the CNN report, Winn said this about their findings:
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.
I definitely recommend reading the study in its entirety, and it's an interesting read following years of discussion among fans about her changing accent. It discusses how certain factors might have triggered these changes, like perhaps changing her pitch when she started getting involved in activism, but obviously cannot speak to Swift's reasonings.
Taylor Swift’s latest project is her new album, The Life Of A Showgirl after teasing an orange era over the years. It will actually be part of 2025 movie releases thanks to the singer putting out a theatrical experience for fans the weekend of the album’s release from October 3 to 5.
