The development of American accent in songs of Arctic Monkeys

Abstract

Arctic Monkeys, a British renowned band, and their lead singer Alex Turner has been the subject of phonetic analysis on two occasions – Beal (2009) analysed his choice of accent and dialectal words based on one song and Flanagan (2019) analysed his accent and lexis in order to find whether he has begun to sound less regional (the band is from Sheffield) over his career from 2006 to 2018. However, no research has been conducted to see whether Turner’s accent has become more American, which has been the assumption by media (Petridis 2018; Wilkinson 2016). Therefore, this thesis contributes to this knowledge gap by answering two research questions: a) Is it phonetically evident that Alex Turner’s singing accent in the songs of Arctic Monkeys has changed to sound more American from 2006 to 2018? b) If this change is evident, what could the possible reasons for such a shift in accent be?