Acoustic analysis of Taylor Swift's dialect changes across different eras of her careera)

Across different stages of her career, Taylor Swift has moved in and out of communities that have distinct regional or socio-cultural dialects. Her extensive history of media interactions offers a rare opportunity to observe longitudinal dialect change. Here, we show that Swift's conversational speech exhibited notable signatures of Southern accent during her time in Nashville, including a shortened trajectory for /aɪ/ vowels (“ride” becomes similar to “rod”) and exaggerated fronting of the /u/ vowel, even outside of coronal phonetic contexts. These features were lost after her return to Philadelphia, and hypercorrected upon her relocation to New York City, where she expanded the distinction between low-back vowels (in words like “cot” and “caught”). She also lowered her voice pitch (F0) during her time in New York City, coincident with her increased visibility speaking on issues of social change. These results, which would be virtually impossible to observe in a controlled laboratory study, have broad implications for our understanding of the combined influences of place, profession, and leadership goals on an individual's dialect adaptation later in life, suggesting that the ways people use language for conveying identity and community belonging are malleable within specific timeframes and goals.