Acts of Conflicting Identity

1
Acts of Conflicting Identity

• The Sociolinguistics of British pop-song
  pronunciation
• by
• Peter Trudgill

2
The Accent of pop singing

• At least since the 20s and the advent of Jazz,
  singers have adopted speech patterns while
  singing that are different from their regular
  speech patterns.
• In British pop music, starting in the late 50s,
  this accent most notable for its inclusion of non
  pre-vocalic /r/ in otherwise r-less
  English-English dialect

3
Non pre-vocalic /r/

• In the late 50s and 60s, /r/ incidence highest
  (47 percent)
• By the 70s, /r/ incidence (4 percent)
• Why did British singers add /r/ in the early
  parts of the decade, only to lose it later?

4
Three Possible Explanations

• Accommodation Theory
• (Giles and Smith 1979)
• Argues pop vocalists adopted, or attempted to
  adopt features of the prestige dialect into their
  singing patterns, in this case, American r-full
  English pronunciations
• This theory does not explain why the singers
  would want to sound like their audience
  oftentimes, audiences adopt the speech patterns
  of their favorite singers, not vice versa

5
Three Possible Explanations

• appropriateness
• In the context of pop/rock song, it would be
  appropriate to sing like an American

6
Three Possible Explanations

• Le Page 3-part explanation
• First, British pop singers have attempted to
  model their singing on American English speech
  patterns. However, in doing so, they are actually
  trying to accommodate into a single singing
  dialect many different American dialects, such as
  AAVE, New York Dialect, and Upper Mid-West
  English
• Second, This leads to a confused idea about many
  aspects of American English, and leads to the
  odd /r/ inclusion, yielding
• Americer, idears, taughrt etc.
• Thus, Ability to modify our behavior degrades as
  we age. Thus /r/ inclusion is always variable,
  and would be even if the British singers had
  accurately identified the patterns of American
  English
• Third, There are varying motivations towards
  adoption of a new dialect, and the accompanying
  identity
• In the 50s singing rock standards from America,
  it was natural to want to sound as an American.
  However, as Britpop emerged as a viable and
  influential, less rock oriented musical genre,
  there was a diminishing incentive to adopt that
  speech pattern

7
Problems

• This theory does not explain why certain patterns
  of American English were retained in Britpop
  singing
• Also, this theory cannot account for the
  hyper-British, Estuary English common to many
  British punk bands, even though punk music is an
  American Genre (most music theorists point to The
  Stooges debut album (1968), as the birth of punk
  or proto-punk, and to the Ramones first
  performance (1976) as the official birth of punk
  rock)