1007. Why do Adele and Susan Boyle sound American when they sing? We have answers. Plus, with all the talk about "weird" lately, we think it's time to examine the old "I before E except after C" rule that has so many exceptions it's hardly a rule at all — until you add W for "weird."
1007. Why do Adele and Susan Boyle sound American when they sing? We have answers. Plus, with all the talk about "weird" lately, we think it's time to examine the old "I before E except after C" rule that has so many exceptions it's hardly a rule at all — until you add W for "weird."
The singing segment is written by Susan K. Herman, a former multidisciplined linguist, editor, and instructor for the U.S. government.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today, we're going to talk about singers who have accents and the weird "I before E except after C" rule.
by Susan K. Herman
This first segment is about accents and singing. Now, I know we have a lot of listeners outside the United States, so I want to acknowledge that we're taking an American English approach to this topic to keep the wording simpler. It's not that we don't appreciate you or know you're there!
Have you ever wondered where a singer comes from, or why they seem to "lose" their accent when they sing? How is it that a foreign singer, for example, can have a noticeable accent while speaking but then sound American when they sing? And why do country singers seem to keep their Southern "twang" when they sing? It's a question that's intrigued both singers and music lovers alike, so let's dive into the linguistic and socio-cultural reasons behind this phenomenon.
One of the most current examples is Adele, who speaks with a strong Cockney accent but sounds "American" when she sings. Other examples include Ed Sheeran; Sam Smith; and even Susan Boyle, runner-up on the 2009 season of "Britain's Got Talent." It's fair to say that many of us were shocked when she sang in what sounded like American English on the show, after hearing her heavy Scottish speaking accent.
First, let's look at what an accent is. Simply speaking, it's how we pronounce a language, and it can be associated with a particular nation, geographic area, ethnic group, or social class. Everybody has an accent because an accent is just how people sound when they speak. For example, according to a 2022 article in "Babbel" magazine, "no matter who you are and what you sound like, you’re using an accent, or you wouldn’t be able to form sounds at all." Of course, because we're so are used to our own dialect and accent, we notice other variations more. So we almost expect a foreign singer to have an accent when they sing. This is particularly – but not exclusively – true with British artists.
When we say someone is "losing" their accent, what it really means is that they're
speaking in a neutralized accent, meaning we don't notice the differences from our own accent. "Babbel" suggests rephrasing our original question from "'Why do people lose their accents when singing?' to 'Why do people tend to sound like they’re using a General American accent when singing?'"
And why is that? Well, there are several factors. British linguist, professor, and expert in English dialects David Crystal places these factors into two main categories in his 2009 "DCblog" post: phonetic and social. The phonetic factors he describes include intonation – the rise and fall of the voice – and rhythm – the alternating of stressed and unstressed elements in words, and both of these factors are different when speaking. In singing, intonation is replaced by the melody of the music, and the rhythm of speech is replaced by the rhythm of the music.
Crystal also points out that vowel sounds "… are elongated," and "'vowel quality' [the things that make vowels sound different from one another when we pronounce them] is also affected.” According to Crystal, this happens "especially in classical singing, where vowels are articulated with greater openness [meaning the tongue is positioned as far from the roof of the mouth as possible] than in everyday speech." For example, instructors encourage what they call "vowel modification" to help singers hit higher notes and produce more generally pleasing tones. To get a sense of what I mean, a site called "Sing Without Limits" suggests singing the word "go" more like "gahhh" and the word "is" more like "ehz" to help hit high notes. When you start reading about vowels in singing, you quickly realize that it's really different from talking!
Regarding the London accent, Crystal remembers British songwriter and singer Billy Bragg saying, "You can’t sing something like [Smokey Robinson's] 'Tracks of My Tears' in a London accent. The cadences are all wrong. It’s also difficult to sing harmonies in a London accent. And you can’t sustain syllables for long."
Another interesting vowel phenomenon in singing is monopthongization, or turning a diphthong – which is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds in one syllable – into a single vowel sound, like pronouncing "night time" as "not Tom" in Southern American English. "Night time" contains two vowel sounds (/ay/) in each syllable, while "not Tom" has just one (/a/). Finally, vowel rounding – the British English trait of pronouncing the vowels a, o, and u with the lips rounded – seems to disappear in many British singers' accents. So in song, you might hear the American English [ɡɑːt] and /wɑːtʃ/ instead of the British English /ɡɒt/ and /wɒtʃ/. (Forgive my bad British accent.)
Some social factors that lead to "losing" accents while singing, according to Crystal, include "some singers want[ing] to drop their regional accent, because they want to sing like the fashionable mainstream … especially … in popular music since the early days of rock 'n' roll." Given the popularity of international music in the U.S., it makes sense that artists would want to sound more like their listeners to connect with them.
According to Franz Andres Morrissey, a Swiss modern English linguistics
professor at the University of Bern, jazz singers have been trying to sound more American since before the 1950s. This is also true, Morrissey notes, of rock, pop, and R&B singers, among others. According to an article in "Connect Savannah" discussing Morrissey's and other's research, John Lennon reportedly has been quoted as saying, "Any major star in England had to change his voice. They do it too in America to get on TV and radio."
Some linguists, like Andy Gibson, a New Zealand researcher at AUT’s University Institute of Culture, Discourse, & Communication, believe that singers don't deliberately switch between speaking and singing accents and may not even be aware of it. According to a 2013 article in "Today I Found Out," Gibson's 2010 study of singing and speaking accents showed that most performers "were not aware that they sounded any different; they felt they were singing naturally." And "Babbel" agrees, noting that "… some of it is entirely out of our control."
Some professional singers add that physiology and anatomy also play a part in accent changes. According to Audrey Stottler at the McPhail Music Center in Minneapolis in a 2010 interview with WCCO TV, "when we speak, we don’t use the same air pressure as when we sing." That's because when you sing, your pharynx rises and your throat opens. So "when you sing your vowels, [they] have a tendency to be more pure," she added. So they are mostly single vowel sounds and do not change into diphthongs, like in the “night time” example.
As I mentioned at the beginning, some genres of music don't lend themselves to accent neutralization as much. One example Crystal cites is rap music, stating that "… in rapping we regularly get a distinctive accent, because of the syllable-timed rhythm" – meaning that each syllable is roughly the same duration. Crystal believes that "… rapping aside, in hardly any case do singers use a consistent regional accent throughout the whole song. Mixed accents seem to be the norm.”
We could probably add the country genre, where cultural and regional themes permeate the music, as another exception. Many – or maybe even most – country singers maintain their country twang when they sing.
"Babbel" sums it up this way: "The way we sing, like the way we talk, is shaped by countless forces around us. … The way we sing can convey our individuality or it can align us with a group we’re longing to be part of. Accents are another way that music has allowed us to express ourselves since the earliest days of human society."
That segment was written by Susan K. Herman, a former multi disciplined linguist, editor, and instructor for the U.S. government.
by Mignon Fogarty
All the talk about weirdness in the news the last couple of weeks has made me think about the "I before E" spelling rule many of us learned as kids. But many of you probably also know that this [quote-unquote] "rule" has a bunch of exceptions. In fact, it's so well known that comedian Brian Regan has a bit about it:
"I remember my teacher asked me, 'Brian, what's the I before E rule?'"
"I before E … always."
"What are you, an idiot, Brian?"
"Apparently."
"So she explains it: 'No, Brian. It's I before E except after C and when sounding like A as in "neighbor" and "weigh" and on weekends and holidays and all throughout May, and you'll always be wrong no matter what you say.'"
"That's a hard rule. That's a rough rule."
So it turns out there actually are a couple of versions of the rule with different exceptions (that don't involve weekends and holidays). The rule Brian Regan said, "I before E except after C and when sounding like A as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh,'" is more common in the United States. But the exception students in the U.K. are taught is more likely to be "except after C when the sound is E," which would account for words such as "receive" and "deceive" (which have the E sound and are spelled with an "ei" after C) and "ancient" and "science" (which don't have the E sound and are spelled with an "I before E" after C).
So how bad is the supposed rule, really? Well, fortunately for us, a data scientist named Nathan Cunningham looked at 350,000 English words and found that about 75% of words have I before E — whether they follow C or not. In other words, it was almost pointless to add the "except after C" line to the rule without the caveats that follow related to pronunciation. There are more words that break the "except after C" rule than there are that fit the rule. For example, besides "ancient" and "science," we also have "glacier" and "society."
And there just aren't that many words that fall under the "except after C" exception. We have that whole set I mentioned before — "receive," "deceive," "conceive," "perceive," and so on, and their variants, like "received," and "receipt." And "ceiling." But it's just not a lot.
On the other hand, Cunningham looked at all the other letters to see if he could find one that did better than C, and the winner was W! As in "weird"! And its variants "weirdly," "weirdo," "weirdness," and "weirding." Unlike C, where 75% of the words have "I before E" — with W, only about 32% of the words have "I before E." Most of them are "E before I." Another contributor to this set is the many forms of "weigh," (W-E-I-G-H), forms such as "weightless" and "weighty," so the American ending "except after C and when sounding like A as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'" looks like a potential winner.
To back up for a second, you might be wondering why this is such a tricky rule with so many exceptions. Well, it has to do with the history of English, which you might remember brings in words from many different languages. We have so many different spellings for the same sounds because we have words from Old English, Old French, Latin, Old Norse, Greek, and a bunch of other languages. So many, in fact, that in 1990, Usenet personality James D. Nichols wrote, "We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
Many of the words that follow the "I before E" rule come from a French lineage, including "ancient" and "science," "receive" and "deceive," and "chief and lieutenant."
Many of the words with the "ei" spelling that's an exception to the rule come from Old English, including "weird," our old friends "neighbor" and "weigh," and words such as "eight," "sleigh" (like Santa's sleigh) "height," and "heifer."
But none of these trends are universal. For example, exception words such as "protein" and "forfeit" that have the E before the I come from Greek and Old French respectively. At the end of the day, "I before E" is just a rule trying to weirdly weigh in on the spelling of a messy language.
Finally, I have a familect story.
Hi, Mignon.
This is Holly Hutchings, part of your Quick and Dirty Tips network team, and I have a familect story for you.
Back when my oldest son was about three years old, my dad, his grandpa, was in the hospital quite a bit. And so we spent a lot of time there visiting.
And I don't know if it was just the cuteness of being a three-year-old kid or the fact that my dad always gave him rides on his hospital bed, pushing the buttons up and down, but my son equated the hospital with a pretty fun time. And he started calling it the "hop-sickle."
And so every time we said we had to go visit grandpa, he would get excited and say, "We're going to the hop-sickle." So ever since then — it's been 20 years probably since then — and I have to stop myself and think about how to pronounce the word "hospital" when I say it because it always just comes out "hop-sickle."
Thanks.
Thanks, Holly! As you all can tell, I'm still testing different ways for sending in messages, and Holly used WhatsApp, which seems to work really well because it has a generous time limit, so you aren't going to get cut off telling your story or feel like you have to rush. Right now, I'm planning on sticking with this one, so if you want to share your familect, please use WhatsApp. The link is in the show notes, and I'll be posting it on my social media every once in a while too, so you can look for it there. It will be in the email newsletter every week too, and there's also a link to sign up for that in the show notes. I don't advertise that nearly as much as I should, but every week I send out a grammar tip and a little summary of the most interesting article I read that week, and something fun I found that's completely unrelated to anything, and which is almost always the most popular link in the newsletter. Hey, we all want some fun, right? Anyway, you can find a link to the newsletter and to my WhatsApp in the show notes.
Finally, if you're an educator, have you checked out my free LinkedIn Learning courses at your university library? Or if you're not an educator, have you told a friend who is?
I have short videos — with transcripts — about every major topic you'd want to teach your students: commas, hyphens, dashes, commonly confused words, subject-verb agreement, it goes on and on.
And did I mention they are often free through your library?
So as you're thinking about your fall lesson plans, check out my courses and slot in some videos to make your teaching job easier. I'll put a link in the show notes or you can go to my profile on LinkedIn.
Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. Thanks to ad operations specialist, Morgan Christianson; director of podcasts, Brannan Goetschius; marketing associate, Davina Tomlin; audio engineer, Nathan Semes; and digital operations specialist, Holly Hutchings, who loves summer thunderstorms.
And I'm Mignon Fogarty. That's all. Thanks for listening.