Taylor Swift, the highest-earning singer in the world, originally did country music but leaped into pop with her fifth studio album "1989," released in 2014. As the title of her signature song "Shake It Off (털어버려)" suggests, she shook off negative images of herself and became a singer loved around the world. At the same time, it turned out she also shed her accent.
A research team led by Matthew Winn, a professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Minnesota, said it analyzed years of Taylor Swift's recorded interviews and confirmed that her vowel pronunciation and intonation changed as she moved locations, in a study published on the 23rd (local time) in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
◇ Pronouncing the local accent while active in the South
Swift was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in the northeastern United States and left for Nashville, Tennessee, in the South at age 14 to pursue country music. While living near Nashville in 2008, she released her second studio album "Fearless," and in 2012 she released her fourth album "Red," which topped the Billboard chart. She succeeded in transitioning from a country singer to a pop singer. In 2019, while living in New York, she released her seventh album "Lover."
The researchers collected recorded interviews conducted when Swift lived in Nashville, when she returned to Pennsylvania, and when she moved to New York City. They used a computer to track changes in the pronunciation of more than 1,400 vowels she used. Winn said, "When an English speaker changes dialects, most of the changes appear in vowels," and added, "We measured each vowel 10 times, which played a key role in showing how her pronunciation changed in different cities."
In her early period working in Nashville in the South, Swift shortened the "i" in words like "ride" and pronounced it like "rod." This is monophthongization, the merging of two vowels into one. According to the researchers, it is a typical feature of Southern American English. She also backed front vowels, pronouncing "two" as "tee-you."
◇ Speaking out on social issues with a lower pitch in New York
The research team hypothesized that Swift's use of a Southern accent early in her career was a way to enter the country music community. In fact, when she released the pop album "Red" in 2012, her Southern accent disappeared, the team said. Alice Gaby, a linguist at Monash University in Australia, said, "This study confirms what people noticed," adding, "When Swift moved to Tennessee and then returned to Pennsylvania, there was a quite distinct change in her pronunciation."
Winn said, "The second major change we identified in this study is that Swift lowered her vocal pitch when she moved to New York." He said, "During this period, she became more known for speaking about not only musicians' rights but also social change and feminism issues in her career," and explained, "Lower-pitched voices are perceived as authoritative, and she may have leveraged this tendency to deliver her message."
People use dialects based on where they are from, but they can change later. However, studying that change is difficult. Winn said, "We can't follow someone around with a microphone, so opportunities to study an individual's dialect change are rare," adding, "Taylor Swift was like a research subject who was followed with a microphone for most of her adulthood."
◇ Triggering a "Swift quake" at concerts
This is not the first time scientists have focused on Taylor Swift. Seismologists also pay attention to her concerts. The British Geological Survey (BGS) announced on Jun. 13 last year that vibrations (quake) strong enough to activate seismometers every single day were recorded at Swift's concert venue. The press release title from the geological survey at the time riffed on Swift's hit "Shake It Off," calling it "Quake it off."
The geological survey said that at Swift's concert at Murrayfield Stadium in Edinburgh, Scotland, on Jun. 7, where about 73,000 people gathered, "the ground literally moved" because "fans stomped and danced to Swift's songs."
At the time, fans moved the ground by up to 23.4 nanometers (nm; 1 nm is one-billionth of a meter). When Swift performed "Ready For It?," fans generated force equivalent to 80 kW of power, comparable to the batteries of 10 to 16 cars, the geological survey said. The survey said it detected the vibrations at a lab 6 kilometers from the venue and that the level could be scientifically recognized as ground shaking.
Swift triggers quakes every time she performs. In July 2023, during her concert at Lumen Field in Seattle, seismometers at a nearby station detected vibrations equivalent to magnitude 2.3. The audience size per show at the time was about 72,000.
The vibrations, dubbed the "Swift quake," were stronger than the so-called "Beast Quake" observed during a National Football League (NFL) game at the same site in 2011. During that game, when Marshawn Lynch of the Seattle Seahawks scored a touchdown, a magnitude 2.0 vibration was recorded on seismometers. Lynch's nickname was "Beast," hence the name Beast Quake.
References
Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (2025), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0039052
British Geological Survey (2024), https://www.bgs.ac.uk/news/quake-it-off-taylor-swift-concerts-shake-edinburgh/