In singing, syllables are lengthened, air flow is increased, articulation is less precise. Thus we get a more generic, neutralised accent that happens to share features with American varieties of English.
One of the more likely reasons that singers mimic American accents when they perform is that many are taught to do so by their vocal teachers to encourage good vowel techniques. These long, neutral vowel techniques can often sound more like an American accent, and British vocal hints will be lost in the song.
An article in Mental Floss cites linguist David Crystal's explanation, which is that, “a song's melody cancels out the intonations of speech, followed by the beat of the music canceling out the rhythm of speech.” Thus, many of the features that give away your speaking accent are not possible to reproduce when you're ...
They're probably just trying to sing “correctly”, producing sound from the back, which makes them sound American. I'm noticing some “r” sounds, too; I guess it's because while singing correctly one's tongue should be as relaxed as possible, which causes the “r” sounds to happen quite naturally.
Why do British vocalists often sound American when they sing? Because that's the way everyone expects pop and rock musicians to sound. British pop singers have been imitating American pronunciations since Cliff Richard, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones began recording in the 1960s.
So, why is this the case? Most likely it's a combination of two main factors, one linguistic, one social. Linguistically, the very process of singing has an accent-neutralising effect. Accent differences are largely created through intonation, vowel quality and vowel length – all of which are affected when we sing.
It's partly that many of the distinctive characteristics of an accent aren't reproduced well when you sing. Vowel sounds get stretched, and the precise articulation of the consonants is lost. The result is a neutral baseline accent that sounds vaguely American.
Early European settlers to Australia — many of whom were convicts — were from all over Great Britain and Ireland, and their speech patterns blended to form the new Australian accent.
Australians have an accent that is often confused with New Zealand's dulcet tones. However, for those in the know, they are as distinct as Canadian and American accents. Kiwis have a tendency to flatten their vowels, and Aussies have more of a nasally twang.
The Aussie accent, as we know it today, started more than 200 years ago with the children of the convicts, soldiers and other European arrivals. The parents spoke with all different kinds of English accents because they came from many places in England.
For most people it is possible, but as we get older it becomes more difficult. If you're an adult, and speaking English as a non-native speaker, accent free English can be very difficult to achieve. We need to teach our ears to hear the different speech patterns and then training our mouths to make the new sounds.
She grew up in Tottenham, Northern London so beside having a British accent, peculiarly she has a Cockney accent. Cockney accent is a sub group in British accents. It is hard to imitate, belongs to lower groups in society, mainly to workers' class.
Apparently, it is harder to fully pronounce certain words in a non-native accent, for instance, while singing. In singing, some syllables and vowels naturally get stressed to go with the cadence, rhythm, and melody of the music. As a result, some singers tend to naturally drop the accent without even realizing it.
'Innit? ' is a contraction of the tag question 'Isn't it? ' and people use it to prompt a response from the listener. So if someone says 'Nice weather, innit?
This may be out of a need or desire to be more clearly understood and to be accepted in a new community. They might also want to avoid ridicule for the way that they speak. Over a quarter of senior professionals from working-class backgrounds in the UK have been singled out for their accents at work.
Australian English arose from a dialectal melting pot created by the intermingling of early settlers who were from a variety of dialectal regions of Great Britain and Ireland, though its most significant influences were the dialects of Southeast England.
Australian English often contains higher levels of nasal resonance to oral resonance. Resonance refers to voice acoustics and is determined by where the bulk of sound vibration from the voice is reinforced in the your face.
The English accent is the one that is victorious, with the latest survey showing that 17 per cent of people have it at the top of their list. French came in next at 13 per cent, which is unsurprising considering that this is the language spoken in the city of love.
New Zealand. The New Zealand accent is most similar to Australian accents (particularly those of Victoria, Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia) but is distinguished from these accents by the presence of three "clipped" vowels, slightly resembling South African English.
The terms pommy, pommie, and pom used in Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand usually denote a British person.
English is derived from a number of Germanic dialects brought to these shores roughly 1,500 years ago by settlers we now call Anglo-Saxons. The Saxons came from present-day northern Germany, and settled mainly in the south and West Country.
Accents develop and change over time as people tend to live and communicate in specific and delineated communities. Accent is the social marker that signals either affiliation with a group or distance from a group.