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I Wanna Be Like You-hoo-hoo

In 1983, Trudgil explored the shift from Americanisms to their own Liverpudlian dialect, in the Beatles music; in 2009, Beal looked at the reasons as to why the Arctic Monkey’s had such a prevalent Northern-English accent in their songs, despite playing to a multi-cultural base. They both held that possible causes for this was the musicians desire to have their identity expressed through their dialects, or to fit in with their targeted audience.
But is it just professional singers who do this? Could a person modify their accent if they greatly identify with the song’s originator? Would people change their accent when singling along to music more if they like the band, than if they weren’t really bothered by them?
In order to begin to answer these questions, I have designed an experiment to see whether the lay-person also varies their accent in music, and whether this has a relation to their attitude towards the music in question. To do this, I invited participants to come and read through lyrics to a variety of different songs from a variety of different genres/place of origin, and then to sing along. I then asked that they answer some questions about which songs they already knew, any that they were particularly fond of etc. This was to see the differences they presented when singing the song, as opposed to when they were speaking it, and see if any of their own feelings towards the music/artist(s) in question impacted their speech production.