Methodological questions regarding phonological accommodation in popular music

Abstract

More than a means of transmitting messages from a speaker to a listener, the language is also a means through which a speaker’s age, gender, social class and geographical origin – in other words, their identity – manifest. Speakers are aware of this and, occasionally, manipulate linguistic markers with stylistic and rhetorical ends. In popular music, the change in performers’ pronunciation and the tension between identity manifestation and accommodation to social and stylistic expectations has been a subject for some decades, the work of Peter Trudgill (1983) being one of the best-known examples. In this paper, we posit that any study aiming to explore such phenomenon must be especially careful regarding the description of the linguistic dialects in question, to avoid the risk of distorting the results deeply. We also show how analysing the performer’s speech, in addition to the pronunciation in song, may help us reach less obvious interpretations of the data collected. In order to do that, we analysed a corpus composed of songs by artist who have little in common – the Brazilian singer Rita Lee and the British vocal group Spice Girls – as well as spontaneous speech samples of the performers.