Why Do Some People Lose Their Accents When They Sing?

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Person singing into a mic and playing guitar

A peculiar phenomenon often occurs in the music world: You hear someone sing, and then hear them speak, and the two accents clearly don’t align. The British Grammy-winning singer Adele, for example, speaks with a distinct North London accent, but when she sings, that inflection largely disappears, replaced instead by a more neutral, somewhat Americanized accent. The same happens with many other singers — Elton John, Bono, Amy Winehouse, and Ed Sheeran, just to name a few.

So why exactly does this happen? In most cases, the change is involuntary and can be chalked up to a combination of physiology (vocal mechanics) and technique (learned behavior). Let’s take a closer look — or listen.

How Singing Dismantles an Accent

To understand why accents can almost entirely dissolve in a song, we first need to look at what an accent actually is. Your way of speaking isn’t one single thing, but rather a bundle of features, including the pronunciation of vowels and consonants as well as your rhythm and intonation. Together, those elements form the overall sound of your speech, which begins developing before you’re even born.

Many people maintain the same accent throughout their entire lives, and it can form an important part of our identity. Singing, however, can systematically and instantly dismantle the factors that make up an accent.

Linguist David Crystal has highlighted two main reasons why this occurs, and the first is entirely phonetic. While singing, your normal intonation and speech rhythm tend to disappear, because the song’s melody replaces them. Vowel length also changes, because many syllables are elongated when we sing. Crystal notes on his blog that “vowel quality is also often affected, especially in classical singing, where vowels are articulated with greater openness than in everyday speech.”

So a song’s melody can cancel out your normal intonations of speech, while the beat of the music can cancel out your rhythm of speech. Singers are also forced to stress syllables as they’re written to be accented in the music, which causes them to elongate their vowels. Consonants can be affected, too: To achieve a smoother sound, some singers choose — sometimes consciously, but often not — to modify or soften certain consonants.

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An American Influence

In many cases, even if a British, Australian, or Scandinavian (think ABBA) pop or rock singer has no intention of sounding American, they still might. When specific elements natural to the singer’s native accent are stripped out, the result can be very similar to what’s called the General American accent, a neutral accent that can be defined by its absence of distinguishing features.

But it’s also worth noting that the phenomenon isn’t always involuntary or mechanical — sometimes it’s social. As far back as the 1950s and 1960s, many non-American singers made a conscious decision to sing with a more American-sounding accent, either because they grew up listening to American music and naturally mimicked it, or because it helped them get a foot in the door of the U.S. market. In many cases, it was a combination of both.

Today, many singers still deliberately choose to sound more American. In a 2013 interview, pop group One Direction tried to explain why their English accents often disappear on their albums, putting it down to a combination of the U.S. music they listened to as kids, the way their producers wanted their records to sound (for the U.S. market), and the nature of pop music. As One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson said, “I think in certain music genres you can really tell when people are British, but in pop it’s not as easy to get it across.”

In other words, if you notice that an artist seems to lose their accent when singing, don’t be too quick to judge or criticize. It may not be a conscious decision, but rather a learned adaptation and physiological consequence of singing the song itself.