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 20’s 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 50’s, 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 50’s and 60’s, /r/ incidence highest (47 percent) • By the 70’s, /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 50’s 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”)