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Taylor Swift is one of the biggest pop singers in history, influencing millions of fans with her music. Thanks to years of recorded interviews, she is also influencing how we understand the ways that people adopt accents and regional dialects.

In JASA, a pair of researchers from the University of Minnesota analyzed years of Swift's recorded interviews to track how her dialect has evolved.

Authors Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn showed that studying high-profile dialect shifts like Swift's can help scientists better understand the scope of these dialects, not just in terms of geographic area but also in terms of social group, age, and leadership status.

"Taylor Swift is perfect for this type of longitudinal analysis because she has been interviewed and recorded many times over the years and had motivations for changing her accent at specific times," said Winn.

The duo studied Swift's dialect from recordings of interviews she gave when living in Nashville, when she moved back home to Pennsylvania, and when she relocated to New York City. From these interviews, the team selected over 1,400 vowel sounds and analyzed them using software to measure the vocal resonances.

"Those resonances indicate the exact way that a person articulates a vowel," said Winn. "The key thing about analyzing dialects is measuring the movement of the vowel through the mouth from the start to the end of the vowel—that's what makes it distinct across dialects. We made ten measurements per vowel to show this movement, which was key to showing how her articulation changed in the different cities."

With this analysis, the researchers could show how Swift adopted features of the Southern accent when she lived in Nashville, in particular the monophthongization of the /aɪ/ vowel—pronouncing words like "ride" more like "rod"—and the fronting of the /u/ vowel—shifting words like "two" to sound like "tee-you"—which disappeared after she moved back to Philadelphia.

They hypothesized that Swift's use of the Southern accent could have been a way to integrate into the country music community, as opposed to just connecting with Nashville as a city.

"The second major shift we saw was that Taylor lowered the pitch of her voice when she moved to New York City," said Winn.

"This was the time in her career when she became more well-known for speaking up on issues of social change and feminism, as well as musician's rights. Sometimes, people with a lower pitch are perceived as a voice of authority, and it is possible that she was making use of that tendency to ensure her message was received."