Pop Song English as a supralocal norm

Andy Gibson

doi:10.1017/S0047404523000131

Pop Song English as a supralocal norm

Andy Gibson^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Linguistics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

7 Citations (Scopus)

100 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

An American-influenced singing accent, referred to here as Pop Song English (PSE), is common in popular music throughout (and beyond) the Anglophone world. This article presents an analysis of the sung pronunciation of two variables (BATH and nonprevocalic =r=) that distinguish New Zealand English (NZE) from American Englishes (AmE). The Phonetics of Popular Song (PoPS) corpus includes 154 performers, structured according to country of origin (NZ and the US) and musical genre (pop and hip hop). An auditory analysis was conducted for each variable, distinguishing between the NZE and PSE=AmE variants. Almost all New Zealand performers adopt the PSE variants at least some of the time, with greater adherence to the American model in pop than in hip hop. In the US, region determines hip hop, but not pop, artists’ degree of rhoticity. PSE represents a supralocal norm for pop music, while hip hop artists tend to use their ‘own accent’.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	471-498
Number of pages	28
Journal	Language in Society
Volume	53
Issue number	3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1017/S0047404523000131
Publication status	Published - Jun 2024

Bibliographical note

Copyright the Author(s) 2023. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.

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10.1017/S0047404523000131Licence: CC BY

Publisher version (open access)Final published version, 400 KBLicence: CC BY

Cite this

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Pop Song English as a supralocal norm

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