My argument for why Standard American English really is "no accent" -

[KellyCriterion]

I’m an Aussie.

As a young boy, I once acted in a school play. One comment from my teacher at the time was, “Why do you put on an American accent when reciting your lines?”.

I was not trying to do it consciously. I guess it’s just what I was used to hearing other actors do, due the dominance of American pop culture.

[Mangetout]

@Norse

No wonder. To minimize your second language accent you have to listen a lot to that language. People in Dutch- and Scandinavian-speaking regions of Europe generally have less of an accent than other non-native-English-speaking Europeans.

?? Less of an accent?

[Baffle]

Stoid, are you still arguing?

Regardless of your interpretation of whatever “no accent” might mean, your initial premise remains incorrect. Modern western pop singers use a non-rhotic accent; SAE is rhotic. They are not the same accent.

[Steophan]

@An_Gadai

As I said, American accents are/were the accent of rock. If you get people from any english speaking country to try to sing say an Irish folk song, many will, maybe even unconsciously, adopt an Irish accent, as this to them is the sound of folk singing.

Many, but not all, of the English folk singers I’ve heard have some Irish accent when singing an Irish song. I’ve heard it go the other way too - no less a singer than Luke Kelly adopted a Scottish accent when singing Scottish songs.

Anyway I would say the “rock accent” insofar as there is one is not the same as SAE anyway. It’s more rooted in Southern American accents and AAVE.

As rock music developed from a fusion of blues and country music, it’s clear why this would be the case.

Someone mentioned earlier about all rappers adopting AAVE. This isn’t the case in the UK, though, there’s a distinct Black British accent that is often used. I’ve also heard rap in both RP and Welsh accents, but they were parodies…

[Norse]

@Mangetout

?? Less of an accent?

Is “A less pronounced accent” an acceptable term? “a milder accent”? “sound a little more as they should”? “better English”?
And I apologize profoundly for not writing perfect English (which, by the way, is not my first language).

[Mangetout]

Sorry - it was more of a nitpick really. If ‘no accent’ is impossible, then ‘less of an accent’ is also impossible (or else ‘less’ should be able to reduce to ‘none’).

It’s all relative - what one person considers less of an accent, another person from somewhere else will consider more of an accent.

[Thudlow_Boink]

@Mangetout

Sorry - it was more of a nitpick really. If ‘no accent’ is impossible, then ‘less of an accent’ is also impossible (or else ‘less’ should be able to reduce to ‘none’).

It’s all relative - what one person considers less of an accent, another person from somewhere else will consider more of an accent.

Fair enough; but it is possible to have less of some particular accent, which in context is what 2square4u meant (“To minimize your second language accent…”)

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Mangetout

Sorry - it was more of a nitpick really. If ‘no accent’ is impossible, then ‘less of an accent’ is also impossible (or else ‘less’ should be able to reduce to ‘none’).

It’s all relative - what one person considers less of an accent, another person from somewhere else will consider more of an accent.

I think the suggestion is that the Dutch (for example) have less of a Dutch accent when speaking English than people from Italy (for example) have of their Italian accent when speaking English.

This whole issue first occurred to me in high school, when our school was visited by some French foreign exchange students. Their teacher came along, and he spoke English beautifully–but with a heavy British accent. It baffled me at first why a guy from France would have a British accent, and I had to think through the whole process of how he learned language in order to figure it out.

[Norse]

@Norse

Dutch- and Scandinavian-speaking regions of Europe

While we’re nitpicking, what I meant was of course “Dutch- or Scandinavian-speaking regions of Europe”. AFAIK, there’s no “Dutch- and Scandinavian-speaking regions of Europe”.

Mangetout: Peace. Your comment just looked a bit too snarky from my POV

Thudlow & LHoD: Quite. Thanks for clarifying.

[Mangetout]

I get it now. it genuinely wasn’t meant to be a snark, but I can see how it looked that way - sorry about that.

BTW, I don’t think you need apologise for your written English. It’s considerably better than the written English of many English people.

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Norse

While we’re nitpicking, what I meant was of course “Dutch- or Scandinavian-speaking regions of Europe”. AFAIK, there’s no “Dutch- and Scandinavian-speaking regions of Europe”.

No need for the correction; we understood that you were referring to both the Dutch-speaking regions and the Scandinavian-speaking regions, just as if I said that the animal shelter keeps the feline and canine populations in cages for adoption.

[JKellyMap]

@Stoid

And I’m not saying that Standard American is “special” - it’s just very bland and flat compared with most varieties of accents among English-speaking people. It doesn’t bend and twist the sounds in the language in interesting ways, and it doesn’t have any kind of lilt in it. It’s pretty close to neutral.

(Forgive me if this is repeating something already well covered.) This is simply not true. SA “bends” – that is, dipthongizes – almost all its vowels more than your average dialect of your average language. Say (or sing) “yeah, man!” Then, say (or sing), “yah, mon!” like a Jamaican. Which pair of vowels is more “twisted”?

I was actually curious about the question posed in the OP as well. It seems hard to believe that it’s just conforming to expectations for singing among non-SA English speakers pretty much all over the world, since at least the Beatles if not before, rather than something inherently “flat” in the accent (because it is true that singing tends to make some aspects of speech less apparent, mainly extra-segmental stuff like tone and stress)…but I am now almost convinced that this really is the case.

[Galileo]

A few interesting video links:

Hugh Laurie singing with an English accent
Hugh Laurie singing with an American accent
Also, from the same link:

His honesty helps verify his musical project but perhaps more interestingly is the fact Laurie sings with an American accent, something that may seem a little pretentious but an act that the Brit stands by.

“There is a musicality to words. They are instruments, in a way. They are notes, and there is a particular way of sounding a note where sometimes, like it or not, in this particular idiom, to sing a sort of defiantly English version is as jagged and musically wrong as playing a wrong note. You’d just be hitting the wrong note by saying ‘chance’ instead of ‘chair-nce’.” Laurie commented for Culture Magazine.

James Lipton and Hugh Laurie discussing accents
Adriano Celantano singing “American gibberish”

BTW, Stoid, you keep referring to Standard American English (SAE) as the accent that is heard in songs that are sung in English. Do you think that Hugh Laurie’s American singing is SAE? How about Celantano’s?

[Galileo]

Sorry, missed edit window, the second time.

I should have said: “BTW, Stoid, you keep referring to Standard American English (SAE) as what is heard in songs …”

Still can’t around the idea that anyone thinks that there’s such as thing as no accent.

[BigT]

Actually, what is happening is that the things you usually hear to help you identify an accent are being removed due to what singing (particularly bel canto singing) requires. Because you think of American English as neutral, it’s your default. But there still are differences, and quite a few people can hear them.

I don’t think Americanization has much to do with it. Most people who claim that an accent is lost in singing also apply it to the Beatles, and there is no way they are using any derivation of SAE.

[Acsenray]

@Galileo

Hugh Laurie singing with an American accent

And in that video clip, you can hear Laurie’s voice stretching to reach American vowels.

[JKellyMap]

@BigT

I don’t think Americanization has much to do with it. Most people who claim that an accent is lost in singing also apply it to the Beatles, and there is no way they are using any derivation of SAE.

Very, very wrong. I don’t have time to give you cites right now, but I might get to it later – or you can just trust me that the Beatles, circa 1960-63, were huge devotees of Carl Perkins, the Everly Brothers, the Shirelles, Roy Orbison, Chuck Berry… You get the picture. They could have sung like The Jam/XTC/The Clash, but they chose not to.

ETA: To hear the Beatles singing with British accents, try “You Know My Name, Look Up the Number”, where their model was not American rock/rhythm-and-blues/country/soul artists, but rather British comedian Spike Milligan.

[Heart_of_Dorkness]

I think everyone else has addressed this pretty thoroughly (especially matt_mcl; what up, Linguistics B.A.'s!), but I thought of another great example last night and can’t resist throwing it out there.

Stoid’s argument seems to be (and please correct me if I’m wrong) that:

1. Many people note that British singers “lose” their accent when singing, and this cannot be intentional.
2. Many people also describe these British singers as “sounding American”.
3. Therefore, if you “lose” your accent, you “sound American”, meaning American English has no accent.

In response, we’ve noted that:

1) Many people note that British singers “lose” their accent when singing, and this cannot be intentional.
2) Many people also describe these British singers as “sounding American”.

• This is hardly universal. We’ve posted tons of cites of singers who don’t “lose” their accent, and don’t sound American at all.

• In many cases, it absolutely is intentional. Here’s my awesome example: in the movie “The Commitments” - which you should see, if you haven’t - an Irish guy gets a bunch of friends together to form a soul band. There’s a funny scene where they’re practicing “Mustang Sally”, and he chastises the girls because they’re singing the line “Ride, Sally, ride” with an Irish accent rather than an American accent. Unfortunately, he can’t get it right himself. He says something like, “It’s not ‘roy-eed, Sally, roy-eed’, it’s ‘roid, Sally, roid’!” The point is, they’re explicitly trying to sound like American soul singers, and having a hell of a time with it.

• It can also happen unintentionally, but not because singing naturally “Americanizes” pronunciation. If someone grows up listening to primarily American singers, they will sometimes learn to sing with a similar accent. As **KellyCriterion **said, he picked up an American “acting” accent.

• Additionally, singing can minimize certain differences between the listener’s and singer’s accents. This does not mean that the listener does not have an accent. It means that the listener’s accent and the singer’s accent have many sounds in common, and a few that are different. If the listener hears only the common sounds, and none of the differences that indicate there’s an accent, the result is that the listener interprets the singer as sounding like the listener.

As Princhester says:

@Princhester

None of us hear our own accents. We sound neutral to ourselves. So when we hear something that sounds neutral to us (no regionalisms) we perceive it as sounding like us.

Leaving aside singers who manage to inject their regional vowels into their singing, singers to me sound like me ie neutral. So clearly an Australian accent is “no accent”.

• And lastly, lots of singing that “sounds American” does not, in fact, sound like Standard American speech. As Baffle and I noted above, American rock and pop singers tend to de-rhotacize (“fi-uh” vs. “fi-er”). They also change many vowel sounds in a way that, as An Gadaí said, mimics certain southern American accents and AAVE (“I” becomes “ah”, “get” becomes “git”). Blues, rap, hip-hop, and many other genres each have their own typical pronunciation styles, and none of them would sound like SAE if spoken. I grew up pretty sheltered, singing mostly church hymns, and when I finally started listening to pop and rock, I had to consciously work at pronouncing words the “cool” way the singers did, and often didn’t understand what they were saying*, because it was so different from the way I spoke and the way I sang.

And as matt_mcl noted:

@matt_mcl

For example, as I pointed out above, if singing really is characterized by monophthongization, this causes pronunciation to become less like SAE, not more.

In addition, if pop singers converge on a particular pronunciation, and the most famous and influential pop singers come from America, we’ll start to think of that pronunciation as “American” regardless of how many phonetic features it actually shares with SAE.

3) Therefore, if you “lose” your accent, you “sound American”, meaning American English has no accent.

• Given everything stated above, let’s amend this to: Therefore, if you “lose” your accent, you might “sound American” to Americans.

*It took me years to understand a line of one of my favorite songs, “My Girl”: “I’ve got so much honey, the bees envy me.” Great line!

[Acsenray]

Stoid, this exchange is very important:

@Stoid

Singing is phrased such that vowels are held longer (to the note), which more or less erases regional accents. In singing, vowels tend to sound more like their true sounds (monophthongs), rather than diphthongs.

@matt_mcl

Or, as I mentioned, classical singers are trained to assume a special kind of pronunciation (characterized in particular by monophthongal vowels, among other things) that sounds nothing like American English. Because that’s the accent that’s favoured in that context.

In sum, (certain) singers don’t lose their accent and start speaking American English; they start speaking American English because that’s considered to be losing your accent because it’s sociolinguistically favoured.

@Stoid

Alright. But it does seem that these people are referring to the existence of a phonetically neutral English sound:

A: Because singing forces the singer to pronounce “true” vowel sounds.
English vowels are the same, no matter where you’re from. Speaking employs gliding vowels…transitions from one to the next. Singing is phrased such that vowels are held longer (to the note), which more or less erases regional accents. In singing, vowels tend to sound more like their true sounds (monophthongs), rather than diphthongs.

@matt_mcl

Aha! This is the first time you’ve actually proposed what this neutral accent might sound like. Unfortunately, it’s an own goal. Standard American English, like most varieties of English, is not characterized by an abundance of monophthongal vowel sounds. For example, if a SAE speaker says the words bate, boat, boot, *none *of those will be monophthongs, although boot will come closest. If you really were to pronounce all those vowels strictly as monophthongs, you would definitely not sound like you were speaking SAE. (To my ears, it sounds like an Irish accent, if anything.)

You see, you’re confusing this quote’s (somewhat odd) use of “pure” to mean “monophthongal” with an imagined “neutral” language variety that is “pure” because it isn’t a dialect and has no accent – even though there is no such variety.

@matt_mcl

For example, as I pointed out above, if singing really is characterized by monophthongization, this causes pronunciation to become less like SAE, not more.

The point needs to be repeated: Standard American English is not monophthongal as a general characteristic.

And I think one of the big issues here is a problem of perception. To a large extent, you perceive “singing” accents to be the same as some (hypothesized) SAE accent. But to the extent that there is an SAE accent, the “singing accent” isn’t actually the same. You perceive them as being the same because of certain assumptions you are making. To a large extent, as Matt said it takes extensive training and education to understand and perceive phonological differences. Your lay ear just isn’t sufficiently trained.

[bordelond]

@JKellyMap

ETA: To hear the Beatles singing with British accents, try “You Know My Name, Look Up the Number”, where their model was not American rock/rhythm-and-blues/country/soul artists, but rather British comedian Spike Milligan.

Also “Paperback Writer”, “Strawberry Fields”, and “A Little Help From My Friends”.