How Taylor Swift's voice has changed over her career

Researchers have analysed Taylor Swift's voice in interviews and found that the pop superstar's accent has changed throughout her career.

Taylor Swift was born in Pennsylvania, before moving to Nashville when she was a teenager then later New York.

Her fanbase has previously discussed how she sang with a Southern or Tennessee accent on her earlier recordings, but has a more northern USA tone on her more recent work.

Now researchers from University of Minnesota Twin Cities in Minneapolis confirm this in what appears to be the second study on this topic.

Accent describes the sounds of a person's speech.

Dialect is a word which describes how different people might use different words and grammar as well as the manner of speaking.

These things might change throughout a person's life, depending on where they live and the experiences they have.

But it's rare for experts to be able to study these changes in depth.

Study authors Miski Mohamed and Matthew Winn noted that the singer's many interviews gave them a "rare opportunity" to look at how her dialect changed over a long period of time, in a way that "would be virtually impossible to observe in a controlled laboratory study."

They analysed more than 100 minutes of Swift's interviews across three different eras of her career.

Taylor, pictured here in Nashville in 2007 moved to the iconic city when she was a teenager

Taylor Swift was born in Pennsylvania in 1989, before moving to Nashville Tennessee when she was 13.

In 2014, Swift moved to New York and released her fifth studio album, titled 1989.

The researchers used computer software to track how the pronunciation of Swift's vowels changed.

Early in her career they found Swift's pronunciation of 'i' in words such as 'ride' became shorter, pronouncing the word more like 'rod', which the researchers say is a classic southern US feature.

The "oo" sound in words like 'two'" also changed to sound like 'tee-you', womething also common in the Southern states of the US.

A previous academic paper released in 2024 by a team from The University of Chester came to similar conclusions but focussed more on the singer's recordings.