Peter Trudgill first thought to analyse the accents used in pop and rock music in 1980 when he published his article "Acts of conflicting identity: a sociolinguistic look at British pop songs". This is where we will begin our journey into the study of accents in music: with Trudgill, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. A lot has been sung since and new musical genres have sprung up. And still we notice when artists sing with different accents from the ones they use in real life and we are compelled to ask 'why'. In his articles Trudgill observes which specific forms that a thought to be American are adopted by British bands and gives possible reasons why singers modify their speech. More recently, other linguists have filled in the intervening twenty years to the 2000s and have taken up the question of how the image projected by the usage of certain accents might be linked to musical genres and what they represent. We will close with student contributions analysing accents in contemporary music and trying to answer the 'why' by themselves.
Warning: You are required to understand and apply notions of phonology, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with sounds.
A reader will be available from the copy shop Schug & Real, Reckhammerweg 4, from the first week of the semester, which you are expected to bring to the first session.
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