Investigating Variation in the Pronunciation of Spoken and Sung Text: A Kimbra and Lorde Case Study

Abstract

This study aimed to answer the question of whether there was variation between the pronunciation of speech and singing of New Zealand artists Kimbra and Lorde. By means of phonetic analysis of interviews and the artists’ music, it was found that when comparing singing and speech, there was a shift features from standard New Zealand English towards standard American English and Southern British English realizations. The cause for these differences is not immediately apparent. Instead, it is argued, it is a multi-faceted system of sociolinguistic motivations which may all be odds with each other. These include motivations for language variation such as genre appropriateness, acts of identity, audience and referee design, and discourse-based motivations based on topic and mode.