Singing in a dialect and "Authentic pronunciation"

[ronbutters at AOL.COM]

As JL knows, there is a serious (if small) literature on the singing accents of popular music. Musicians are not "most speakers" in this respect (and probably many others). THE accent is not so much "fake" but stylized, and not so much out of "respect" as necessity to conform to the audience expectations.

And as long as we are trading anecdotes about accents, I once heard a  monolingual Mexican youth sing popular songs, in English, that were indistinguishable in accent from the recordings that he was mimicking.

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JL wrote:

My experience is that, beyond two or three stereotypical pronunciations in
each case, most people don't know what another dialect should sound like.

A fellow graduate student (from Georgia, I believe) once told me that I
didn't sound like a New Yorker because I didn't say "boid."   Another was
dismayed by my unfamiliar pronunciation of the O's in "Florida" and
"Oregon." She thought it was just a personal idiosyncracy.

[blah-blah-blah]

Finally, singers who adopt fake accents may do it out of respect for the
song and the source rather than simply to show off.  The accent, even if
poorly reproduced, is part of the sound.

JL
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org