Now, now, **matt_mcl **- you’re actually making sense and providing a thoughtful, linquistics-derived response. We can’t have that.
**Stoid **- enjoy your debate, since that is all you are looking for (“resolved: all people who want to sound like the dominant accent…do!”)
:rolleyes:
And, thread complete.
There’s plenty of artists who don’t adopt an SAE accent when singing. I’ll provide links to a few of them. Loituma from Finland, and Bjork from Iceland have more distinct singing accents. Bjork’s singing accent seems to sound like her speaking accent.
Catatonia were a band from Wales, and the lead singer has a Welsh singing voice.
Jez Lowe is a folk singer-songwriter from the north east of England, with an accent to match. In the clip he sings with Kate Bramley, who has an english singing accent, although I’m unclear where she is from.
Dick Gaughan is a Scottish folk singer, in the clip singing with Emmylou Harris, both with distinctive accents.
As it happens, both Irish band The Dubliners, and Cerys Matthews of Catatonia (mentioned above) have done a version of the Irish folk song ‘The Galway Shawl’. Her version seems to have at least some of her Welsh accent, and she may be adopting a partial Irish accent, I’m not sure. No SAE accent, in any case.
Perhaps it would help if you define “accent.”
I would have thought speaking English without an accent sounds like a stereotypical speech-synthesized sci-fi robot.
As has already been explained to you, that’s because “neutralizing” an accent in this case means “making it sound like a socially derived norm.” There is nothing inherent about American English that makes it somehow phonetically neutral. It is simply considered to be the norm, so when people make an effort to “neutralize,” that’s what they move towards. And there’s nothing about the physical process of phonating when we sing that makes us sound American.
Crystal points out that singing levels certain suprasegmental features that distinguish dialects, but that happens as much to Americans as to everyone else, and that’s not what makes American-sounding. (It’s not even quite right to say that it levels the suprasegmental features; what it does is replace them with a special class of “suprasegmental features” – the melody, rhythm, and syllable length of whatever song you’re singing.)
Look at it another way. If it were the case that there’s something special about the phonetic inventory of American English such that sung language somehow automatically shifts into that phonetic inventory, this would obtain cross-linguistically – the phonemes of all languages would be realized with the phone inventory of American English. But this is not observed. When you sing in French, your phonemes don’t come out sounding like American English; you don’t suddenly sound like an American speaking French. But this is what would happen if your hypothesis that singing makes you sound American were the case. (As has been repeatedly pointed out to you, this doesn’t even happen for most people in English, including numerous pop stars.)
And after all that, don’t you find it suspicious that we should somehow automatically assume the standard accent of a rich and powerful nation that produces widely consumed culture? If something about the physical phonation process of singing caused us to change accents, wouldn’t it be just as likely that we would end up sounding like Orkney Islanders or something?
Don’t you think it’s more plausible that the (postulated) predominance of the accent of such a nation should come from social factors?
I highly doubt Brits in the 1600s sounded like modern Americans when they sang a little ditty.
Out of curiosity, when’s the last time you heard someone pronounce a rhotic R while singing?
Speaking English without an accent sounds like American Sign Language.
Maybe the singers you hear sound like they’re speaking “your” accent because it’s an accent that you are accustomed to & find intelligible.
I find that US “newscaster” English, North American Standard, & Received Pronunciation are all quite clear standardized forms of English. I find all of these easily intelligible & “unaccented,” but they are all different from each other & from my own dialect. Actually, considering the references to Oysterband, check this out: OYSTERBAND Everywhere I Go - YouTube
That sounds a lot like singing I grew up with–but it’s not really a US accent. Just because something sounds normal to you doesn’t mean it’s your accent.
If I’m singing, & not in my own Plains twang-mumble, I will probably affect an accent–not SAE–possibly an exaggerated twang, or something like that guy in the B-52’s, or something with north English notes. But that’s because as a rocker, my models for singing are from the US South & from Britain. If I sang like Diana Krall, with all those enunciated rhotic* r*'s, I’d sound wrong to myself.
How absolutely ridiculous that everyone everywhere in the world, for all of history, spoke with an accent until those 20th century Americans came along and finally invented accent-free speech.
Is anyone else thinking about The Crying of Lot 49 right about now?
Exactly. I was about to bring this up myself. When I was a kid, I actually thought the opposite of Stoid’s premise: a lot of American singers - particularly rock and pop - sounded British to me, because they didn’t pronounce the "r"s. “Fire” is “fi-uh”, “heart” is “hah-t” and so on. My dad used to joke about the “gross” song where the guy says his girl “wants to potty all the time”. So we could say Americans tend to “lose” their rhotic accent when they sing.
Maybe America became rich and powerful because it was the first country to achieve speaking with no accent.
Or something.
Well, everybody had naturally been singing American for years, so… no?
I know this was a joke, but I am compelled to point out that ASL isn’t English; it is its own language.
I give up… why?
ETA: Nevermind.
I was going to say the same thing, but I let it slide, because even though it’s a totally different language, it does indeed sound exactly like speaking English without an accent.
And both sound like one hand clapping.
What about reggae?
Everyone who sings Bob Marley’s Stir it Up. Pronounces “stir” like an American would say “steer.” There are plenty of other examples like that too. Even the most whitebread people lose there American accent and sound more Jamaican when singing reggae standards.
This is nonsense.
A lot of non-American singers sound like Americans when they sing because they’re emulating old American standards music and American rhythm & blues. And that became the standard in the music industry.