Tracking the evolution of Taylor Swift’s dialect

The pop star and her years of recorded interviews offer a glimpse into the shifting nature of speech patterns.

2025-09-23

(Press-News.org) WASHINGTON, Sept. 23, 2025 -- Taylor Swift is one of the biggest pop singers in history, influencing millions of fans with her music. Thanks to years of recorded interviews, she is also influencing how we understand the ways that people adopt accents and regional dialects.

In JASA, published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America by AIP Publishing, a pair of researchers from the University of Minnesota analyzed years of Swift’s recorded interviews to track how her dialect has evolved.

Authors Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn showed that studying high-profile dialect shifts like Swift’s can help scientists better understand the scope of these dialects, not just in terms of geographic area but also in terms of social group, age, and leadership status.

“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,” said Winn.

The duo studied Swift’s dialect from recordings of interviews she gave when living in Nashville, when she moved back home to Pennsylvania, and when she relocated to New York City. From these interviews, the team selected over 1,400 vowel sounds and analyzed them using software to measure the vocal resonances.

“Those resonances indicate the exact way that a person articulates a vowel,” said Winn. “The key thing about analyzing dialects is measuring the movement of the vowel through the mouth from the start to the end of the vowel — that’s what makes it distinct across dialects. We made ten measurements per vowel to show this movement, which was key to showing how her articulation changed in the different cities.”

With this analysis, the researchers could show how Swift adopted features of the Southern accent when she lived in Nashville, in particular the monophthongization of the /aɪ/ vowel — pronouncing words like ‘ride’ more like "rod" — and the fronting of the /u/ vowel — shifting words like "two" to sound like "tee-you" — which disappeared after she moved back to Philadelphia. They hypothesized that Swift’s use of the Southern accent could have been a way to integrate into the country music community, as opposed to just connecting with Nashville as a city.

“The second major shift we saw was that Taylor lowered the pitch of her voice when she moved to New York City,” said Winn. “This was the time in her career when she became more well-known for speaking up on issues of social change and feminism, as well as musician’s rights. 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.”

###

The article, “Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift’s dialect changes across different eras of her career,” is authored by Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn. It will appear in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America on Sept. 23, 2025 (DOI: 10.1121/10.0039052). After that date, it can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039052.

ABOUT THE JOURNAL

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (JASA) is published on behalf of the Acoustical Society of America. Since 1929, the journal has been the leading source of theoretical and experimental research results in the broad interdisciplinary subject of sound. JASA serves physical scientists, life scientists, engineers, psychologists, physiologists, architects, musicians, and speech communication specialists. See https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa.

ABOUT THE ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA

The Acoustical Society of America (ASA) is the premier international scientific society in acoustics devoted to the science and technology of sound. Its 7,000 members worldwide represent a broad spectrum of the study of acoustics. ASA publications include The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (the world's leading journal on acoustics), JASA Express Letters, Proceedings of Meetings on Acoustics, Acoustics Today magazine, books, and standards on acoustics. The society also holds two major scientific meetings each year. See https://acousticalsociety.org/.

###

END

ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

International team publishes framework for study of ‘Earth engineers’

2025-09-23

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Nebraska–Lincoln’s S. Kathleen Lyons, is providing a new framework — Earth system engineering — for examining how organisms, including humans, have fundamentally altered ecosystems on a global scale across hundreds, thousands or millions of years. The framework was published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution and builds on ecosystem engineering, which describes how organisms change their physical environment to thrive. Earth system engineering is a novel approach that distinguishes ...

Applied Microbiology International joins forces with microbiology leaders to launch Global Climate Change Strategy

2025-09-23

In a bold step toward climate action, leading microbiology societies and organizations have unveiled their first joint global strategy to harness the power of microbial science in addressing the climate crisis. This landmark strategy has been published across 6 scientific journals, including FEMS Microbiology Ecology, mBio, Microbiology Australia, Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Research, Sustainable Microbiology and The ISME Journal. On May 23, 2025, leaders from microbiology organizations from around the world gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Global Strategy Meeting on Microbes and Climate Change. The goal was to unite ...

Running dry – a new study warns of extreme water scarcity in the coming decades

2025-09-23

A new study published in the journal Nature Communications by researchers from the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in the Republic of Korea reveals that Global Warming is accelerating the risk of multi-year droughts that can lead to extreme water scarcity, threatening water demands in cities, agriculture, and livelihoods worldwide, already within the coming decades. The study uses the latest generation of climate model simulations to determine the time when local water demands will exceed the regional water supply from precipitation, rivers, and reservoirs. This time is commonly referred to as the Day Zero Drought ...

How cell cycle status affects aging cell response to senolytic drugs

2025-09-23

“This data provides the first evidence of selective cell response to senolytic treatment among senescent cell subpopulations.” BUFFALO, NY — September 23, 2025 — A new research paper was published in Volume 17, Issue 8 of Aging-US on August 7, 2025, titled “Senescent cell heterogeneity and responses to senolytic treatment are related to cell cycle status during senescence induction.” This study, led by first authors Francesco Neri and Shuyuan Zheng, together with corresponding authors Denis Wirtz, Pei-Hsun Wu, and Birgit Schilling from the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, the USC Leonard Davis School ...

JMIR Publications and Iowa State University partner for unlimited OA publishing

2025-09-23

(TORONTO, September 23, 2025) JMIR Publications, a leading open-access digital health research publisher, and Iowa State University are pleased to announce that they have modified their long-standing partnership from a multi-payor model to JMIR’s Flat-Fee Unlimited Open Access Publishing model. Iowa State is the first research university in the United States to take advantage of JMIR’s flat-fee unlimited publishing partnership, which removes researchers’ financial burden. They join dozens of research institutions around the world whose researchers are benefiting from zero-charge publishing. As an independent open-access publisher, JMIR Publications is dedicated to removing ...

Molecular breast imaging may benefit women with dense breasts

2025-09-23

OAK BROOK, Ill. – Screening women with dense breasts with both molecular breast imaging (MBI) and digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) increased overall invasive cancer detection while modestly increasing the recall rate compared with screening only with DBT, according to a new study published today in Radiology, a journal of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). “To our knowledge, this is the first multicenter, prospective evaluation of MBI as a supplement to DBT in women with dense breasts,” said lead author Carrie B. Hruska, Ph.D., professor of medical physics ...

Singapore and Denmark pioneer sustainable cooling for megacities, supported by US$9.4 million from Grundfos Foundation

2025-09-23

As climate change accelerates, the world is experiencing more frequent extreme weather events and rising temperatures. This is driving up the demand for cooling to make cities liveable, especially in fast-growing megacities with populations exceeding 10 million. While cooling is essential, it also creates a challenge, as conventional cooling systems consume vast amounts of energy and contribute to carbon emissions, creating a vicious cycle that worsens global warming. To break this cycle, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore), Aalborg University and Aarhus University in Denmark have embarked on a new five-year research initiative, supported by US$9.4 ...

Air pollution is harming children’s eyesight - study

2025-09-23

Air pollution may be harming children’s eyesight with cleaner air helping to protect and even improve their vision - especially in younger children, a new study reveals. Researchers have discovered that exposure to lower levels of air pollutants - specifically nitrogen dioxide (NO₂) and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) - is associated with how well children can see without glasses. Their findings suggest that reducing exposure to these pollutants could help slow the progression of myopia or short-sightedness - when distant objects appear blurry. The condition is becoming more common in children, especially in East Asia. Publishing their findings ...

Study of glaciers in the Andes sheds light on future climate impact

2025-09-23

Andean glaciers advanced during an acute period of climate change at the end of the last Ice Age, new research has found. An international team of glaciologists, led by Aberystwyth University, made the discovery as part of a new project into tropical glaciers in Peru. The finding challenges long-held assumptions about glacier behaviour during this period. The findings, published in Scientific Reports, shed new light on how glaciers respond to shifting climate patterns and may help improve predictions of future climate impacts. The study focused on the Younger Dryas period, a time of sudden and dramatic climate change that occurred approximately 12,900 ...

Climate change could erase 80% of whitebark pine’s current habitat across the Rockies and Northwest 

2025-09-23

A new study, led by federal agencies in collaboration with the University of Colorado Denver, shows that the whitebark pine tree—an iconic, high-elevation tree that stretches from California’s Sierra Nevada through the Cascades and Rockies and into Canada—could lose as much as 80 percent of its habitat to climate change in the next 25 years.  The loss could have a cascade of effects, impacting wildlife and people. The threatened whitebark pine tree is a crucial food source for squirrels and grizzly bears. It also acts as a natural snow ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

SRL welcomes first Deputy Editor-in-Chief

Time to act and not react: how can the European Union turn the tide of antimicrobial resistance?

Apriori Bio and A*STAR Infectious Diseases Labs Announce strategic partnership to advance next generation influenza vaccines

HKUMed finds depression doubles mortality rates and increases suicide risk 10-fold; timely treatment can reduce risk by up to 30%

ECMWF and European Partners win prestigious HPCwire Award for "Best Use Of AI Methods for Augmenting HPC Applications” – for AI innovation in weather and climate