Kim Petras: L2 English, California Dreamin'

Kim Petras is a German pop singer who has found cult success among fans of lighthearted bubblegum pop. I find her sociolinguistic awareness and flexibility, especially on her newer work, interesting. Her earlier work is in standard General American English. This is undoubtedly the result of influence from American popular media, as German students of English are usually taught a British-based variety of English. She shows that she's aware of differing versions of English, their association with genre, and their aesthetic use.

This is old news if you've followed past Dialect Dissections, but Kim speaks English as a second language. All of the other subjects we've covered speak English as a native language. It's therefore interesting to see how someone who does not speak English as an L1 can also play with language.

Non-native English Accent

As mentioned, Kim does not speak English as a native language. This is most evident in her earliest interviews, where she has some interference from German. Her more modern interviews and music has fewer of these features, but they still appear every now and then.

• TRAP has the [e] vowel.
  • "When I was twelve...um [e]nd yes." Source
• STRUT is fronted and centralized.
  • "I think it's kind of in my bl[ɐ]d." Source
• Voiced consonants at the end of words are devoiced.
  • "My parents tol[t] me to go to school." Source
  • "When I was twelve... an[t]." Source
  • "My silhouette is in the frame of your sha[ts] (shades) again" - Hillside Boys (2017)
• In English, consonants like 'k' and 'p' are aspirated at the beginning of a stressed syllable, but unaspirated if they are the beginning of an unstressed syllable. Kim sometimes aspirates them in an unstressed syllable. This tick dates back to her earliest interviews.
  • "I feel like I'm brea[kʰ]ing" - All I Do Is Cry, Clarity, Clarity (2019)
  • "That she leave you bro[kʰ]en" - Broken, Clarity, Clarity (2019)
  • "Voice would be dee[pʰ]er" Source
• Non-native syntax.
  • "I loved fashion always." Source

Her accent is noticeably more native-like and more decidedly American in her newer interviews. One reviewer went so far as to say "there is little evidence of a Kölsch accent in her expletive laden stage banter, instead her voice bears a noticeable LA inflection." We're going to take a closer look at that next.

Aspirational California

Kim uses some aspects of the California Vowel Shift. Why use a Californian accent instead of standard General American? Part of it may be an attempt to craft a musical persona, much like how Lana Del Rey made use of New York accents and Southern accents in her music to create streetwise and rural narrators. Californian accents in particular are associated with youth and leisurely subcultures like surfer girls and valley girls:

Eckert (this volume), for instance, discusses the importance of shifted vowels to California youth in locating themselves in the gender order and entering the heterosexual market. Finally, Eckert (2008b) identifies correlations between the CVS and less enduring identities, such as emotional states and an adolescent girl’s performance of a drama queen identity. In sum, even though the CVS is named and can be conceptualized in geographic terms, it participates in the construction of a wide array of identities. [...] California speech varieties, like those just discussed, are also closely tied to stereotypical character types represented in the media. Among the most notable are valley girls, surfers, stoners, and slackers, the first two of which are sometimes referred to in descriptions of California dialects (Bucholtz et al. 2007).

One of Kim Petras's inspirations is Paris Hilton, who grew up in Beverly Hills and is representative of a particular type of young, blonde, luxury-obsessed socialite. Kim Petras also idolizes Britney Spears, who, while not from California, has also used some aspects of the California Vowel Shift in her music.

Were there any pop stars that you idolized as a kid?

Britney and Christina, obviously! I love them so much. I love Fergie, I love Madonna—I really loved every single pop star there is. I always loved Boy George. My mom’s obsessed with Culture Club.

Did you have any favorite music videos?

You Drive Me Crazy by Britney Spears. I watched that a million times. And Stronger by Britney Spears. And when Christina [Aguilera] put out Lady Marmalade—oh my god, I’m so obsessed with Lady Marmalade. (Source)

California has served as a fantastical location in Kim's music. Kim moved from Cologne, Germany to Los Angeles in California at the age of 19 to chase her pop ambitions, so California also holds a personal significance to her - and she may have been exposed to Californian accents herself from living there. (If she is influenced by Californian accents, she doesn't seem to express it in her speech, which aims for General American.)

Also, I’m very inspired by being from Germany and imagining what L.A. and Hollywood would be like and then living here and living on studio couches and shitty apartments—the realness of it versus the fantasy of it. So I’m trying to have as much of that as possible in my visuals. (Source)

• "I been out West in LA" - The Hills (2017)
• "So while I'm away in LA getting paid" - Homework (2019)
• "I could take you to LA, yeah, we could take it to the bay, yeah" - Meet the Parents, Clarity (2019)
• "And all your kisses taste like Malibu" - Malibu (2020)

California therefore holds multiple different meanings for Kim, like a laidback chick or a bratty partyer. Here are some of the Californian features in her inventory:

• KIT-lowering. The vowel in KIT is lowered towards "kett."
  • "What's up b[e̞]tch" - Got My Number, Clarity (2019)
  • "Gave a few of y'all dr[e̞]p thats charity" - Clarity, Clarity (2019)
  • "No surprise that i’m l[e̞]t, other hand on the wh[e̞]p"- Clarity, Clarity (2019)
  • "If I'm l[e̞]t, I'ma catch a f[e̞]t" - Another One, Clarity (2019)
• DRESS-lowering. The vowel in DRESS /ɛ/ is lowered so it sounds like DRASS [æ].
  • "On the b[æ]d on the floor" - Got My Number, Clarity (2019)
  • "Won't get to the b[æ]d, to the b[æ]d" - Do Me, Clarity (2019)
  • "When she leave you for your b[æ]st friend" - Broken, Clarity (2019)
• GOAT-fronting. This is if GOAT /oʊ/ were pronounced "gewt" [əʊ].
  • “I’m a rolling st[əʊ]n” - Everybody Dies, Turn Off The Light (2019)
• Variable COT-CAUGHT merger. Sometimes she merges them to [a], but sometimes she keeps CAUGHT distinct with [o].
  • "From d[ɑ]llar to b[ɑ]ller, you know you're a star." - Shining, Clarity (2019)
  • "Tell me what happen to everything I w[ɑ]nted, what happen to my dreams now they are all h[ɑ]nted" - Fade Away, When Dreams Come True (2008)
  • "S[o] it in the rear-view mirror" - If U Think About Me (2019)

Curiously, Kim does not use one of the most characteristic features of the Californian accent, which is the fronted GOOSE /u/ vowel that ends up sounding like 'ew' [ʉ]. She always uses back [u] vowel instead. All of the other aspects of the Californian accents that she has shown involve shuffling vowels in American English around: moving the vowel in KIT down to the vowel that used to be DRESS, moving DRESS down to the TRAP vowel, moving CAUGHT to the COT vowel. Even the GOAT-fronting involves the [ə] sound, which is found elsewhere in English. General American English, on the other hand, does not have the [ʉ] sound, so there is no reference for her to pull it from.

Some varieties of English English have a fronted [ʉ] vowel in GOOSE, but it seems to me that L2 speakers of English are not taught to use that sound - they are taught to use instead a relative back [u], which is more conservative. Kim's native language, German, has a back [u] sound as well as a sound made by rounding the lips and bringing the tongue very near the teeth: [y]. [y] is acoustically similar to [ʉ], but Kim doesn't use this sound in her English music at all. Perhaps she doesn't think of the Californian [ʉ] as sounding similar to [y], or [y] feels too foreign to use in English language music, or it may risk turning the Californian influence into parody. In any case, her confidence stays b[u]ming.

Other

Kim also has some other curiosities. Some are repeated and some only appear once.

• Kim normally uses an American [ɑ] in words like "lot" and "not." However, she sometimes pronounces /ɑ/ words with a rounded [ɒ] sound instead. This is most common when /ɑ/ is preceeded by /p/, sincce the bilabial /p/ has a rounding effect on the vowel and turns it into [ɒ]. Although labialization can occur with /p/ in English, it does not usually affect the quality of the next vowel.
  • "Baby don't st[ɑ]p, don't st[ɑ]p, we're getting to the sweet sp[ɒ]t, sweet sp[ɒ]t
  • "If you wanna p[ɒ]p one in the hills
• Dramatic consonant deletion, similar to Ariana Grande. This is also typical of "mumble rap," which influenced her Clarity-era work.
  • "Ain't no wonder why they all so scea' me (scared of me)" - Clarity, Clarity (2019)
  • "That she lea' you (leave you) broken" - Broken, Clarity (2019)
  • "But you’ll never meet my p[æ̃]ts (parents) I could fly you out to P[æ]s (Paris)" - Meet the Parents, Clarity (2019)
• Monopthongization of FACE and GOAT. Also typical of "mumble rap" and trap, likely due to Caribbean influence.
  • "Almost tatted your n[e]me" - Broken, Clarity (2019)
  • "Not for you or n[o]body" - Another One, Clarity (2019)
  • "And my mind going psych[o]" - Broken, Clarity (2019)
  • "Rollie said it's our time and that's n[o] lie" - Shining, Clarity (2019)
• ME-breaking, when the vowel 'ee' /i/ is pronounced like 'ay' [eɪ]. This pronunciation was popular in the 90s and early 2000s pop, which was an influential period for Kim Petras. One of her icons, Britney Spears, has had her share of ME-breaking.
  • "Only want me back when you can’t have m[eɪ]" - Broken, Clarity (2019)
• MARRY words are distinct from MARY/MERRY. Inconsistent - she uses both [æ] and [e] in "Paris" in different songs.
  • "One look at you , I'm p[a]ralyzed" - Heart to Break
  • "Boy you used to have the baddest dipped in c[æ]rats" - Broken, Clarity (2019)
  • "I'm in P[e]ris with Mark Jacobs" - Broken,Clarity (2019)
• STRUT vowel fronted to [ɑ].
  • “Got one hand on the bl[ɑ]nt" - Clarity, Clarity (2019)
• GOAT has the vowel of [ɑ].
  • "Just wanna be your [ɑ]nly one"- Got My Number, Clarity (2019)

Discussion

This short little article on Kim shows that dialect play is not just for native speakers of English, but also something that L2 speakers can engage in to build an identity in their artistic worlds. It would be interesting to find more examples of L2 speakers of English attempting accents other than national standards (General American, RP, Cultivated Australian, etc.) and seeing which features they incorporate and which they do not. It will also be interesting to see if Kim changes her use of accent as her career develops - her earliest work sticks to General American, and it's newer music that branches into establishing an aspirationally Californian persona.

I did not elaborate on this part, but it's also interesting to see the repetition of some linguistic aspects of trap-influenced music. The use of monophthongs as a signifier of trap music goes back to my first article on Taylor Swift. The extremely lenited articulation recalls Ariana Grande, who has now thoroughly embraced it. Ariana's lenition was originally probably because it was easier for her to sing in a more simplified syllable structure, but it dovetailed neatly with the mumble rap trend, which coincidentally also had massive lenition. Kim dips her toes into imitating these aspects of trap and mumble rap - both highly Black-coded genres - while combining them with a White blonde Californian identity.

Crossover of different aspects of accents in a single work isn't something I've written about before, but it certainly needs more attention. This sort of crossover is pretty rare in normal spoken speech, because making up your own accent is considered weird. Film and the stage also seem to avoid accent-mixing as a device, since it's very easy for it to sound like a bad attempt at a particular accent and audiences are very sensitive to inaccurate protrayals of their own accents. But music doesn't have any allegiance to verisimilitude (as shown by the very niche feature of HAPPY-breaking spreading dramatically in 90s teen pop), so we should expect to see more of it. Much of modern pop music is cross-dialectal, with White American singers imitating Black American English, and White British singers imitating White American singers imitating Black American English.

As a final note, I was unable to tell if Kim has a Cologne accent when speaking in German. If you'd like to hear her speak in German, check out the following interview:

Sources

• California Shift in Santa Barbara
• Californian Accents and Gay Identity
• Labialization in English

What makes "Old Town Road" sound Country?

On April 13, 2019, Lil Nas X scored his first number one hit with "Old Town Road." This would otherwise be unremarkable except for the fact that it's a trap/country crossover made by a rapper who got it to blow up on TikTok. It's a short song, less than two minutes long. Although it was released under the 'country' genre on iTunes and other services, Billboard removed it from its country charts, citing that it did not incorporate enough aspects of modern country music. This has proved to be controversial, prompting debates about what country is and how Billboard can measure a genre. The question of whether race played a role has also hung over the song's removal from the charts.

In the midst of the controversy about the song and its memetic rise to success, the song itself has been forgotten. But I found one aspect of it particularly interesting and country-ish: Lis Nas X puts on a Southern accent in the song. Specifically, he imitates the variety of Southern American English spoken by white Americans. He himself is from Atlanta, Georgia, and speaks a Southern variety of African American Vernacular English. Lis Nas X imitating a mostly-white Southern accent would not be notable under most circumstances. After all, Taylor Swift, from the mid-Atlantic northern state of Pennsylvania, put on a Southern accent when she did country music. But it's especially interesting because African American Vernacular English and Southern American English are very similar in many ways! Some of the features they have in common are:

• Pin-pen merger: pronouncing "pin" and "pen" as "pin," instead of pronouncing both distinctly.
• /aɪ/ monophthongization: words like "ride" with an /aɪ/ sound get pronounced with the monophthong /a/. This means "ride" sounds like something between "rad" and "rod." There is no 'ee' or 'ih' sound at the end of the vowel, unlike in General American English.
• Use of negative concord. This means that if one part of a sentence is negated, the whole sentence must be negated to 'agree' with it. So "nobody can tell me anything" becomes "nobody can't tell me nothing."
• Feel-fill merger: both "feel" and "fill" are pronounced "fill." In General American English, "feel" has the long vowel of "feet" and "fill" has the short vowel of "fit" - they do not rhyme.

And this is far from exhaustive. The similarities between these two dialects should not come as a shock, since African American Vernacular English and Southern American English developed side by side due to the concentration of slavery in the American South. African American Vernacular English developed among slaves in the South and was influenced by Southern American English. Southern American English might have had influence from African American Vernacular English (see Richard Bailey's "Speaking American: a History of English in the United States"). It is hard to disentangle who influenced whom in the past.

But despite that, the two dialects are distinct, and Lil Nas X makes use of those distinctions to put on a more "country" sounding voice.

• Exaggerated rhoticity. Lil Nas X leans in hard on the "r"s, making them longer and more notable. Modern Southern American English is rhotic, while African American Vernacular English is non-rhotic - "r"s after vowels are not pronounced.
• "Riding on a tractorrr, lean all in my bladderrr ... you can whip your porrrsche." - Old Town Road
Compare this to how Lil Nas X pronounces "r"s:


• "Droppin' shit way before Decemba. Be afraid, hope you do rememba." - Thanos
• /eɪ/ lowered to [ɛɪ]. The way he says "baby" almost sounds like "bu-ee-by." Although the "ey" /eɪ/ sound can be lowered in African American Vernacular English, it is not as dramatic as in Southern American English. Moreover, Lil Nas X does not use the low "ey" sound in his own music, so it is definitely something he is using to imitate Southern American English.
• "Cheated on my beh-y-by" - Old Town Road
Compare this to how Lil Nas X pronounces "ey"s:


• "Cake the beat, I'm just the right ice ... workin' late night." - Rookie
• /æ/ is turning into a diphthong /ɛə/. This is part of the Southern Vowel Shift. He says "tractor" as "tre-a-ctor." Once again, although this sound can be found in African American English, Lil Nas X does not use it in his own music. He says "smack" with the monophthong [æ].
• "I got the horses in the beack... hat is matte bleack... riding on my treactor, lean all in my bladder" - Old Town Road
Compare this to how Lil Nas X pronounces "aa"s:


• "Smokin' on crack, I am on fire like Jack." - Thanos

What is curious about this is that Lil Nas X is not the only one who uses these tactics to imitate Southern American English. R. Kelly, a singer who has more recently been in the news for sexual abuse, used similar tactics in the 8th part of his musical series "Trapped in the Closet," as well as another additional feature.

• Exaggerated rhoticity.
• "Darrrlin', where have you been? I've been wurr'd about you ... sweethearrrt." - Trapped in the Closet
• Parts of the Southern shift that he himself does not use.
/ɛ/ 'eh' becomes 'eya' [ɛjɪ].
• "Then he screams, 'Bridgette!' 'Yeyis?'" - Trapped in the Closet


/i/ 'ee' becomes 'ey' [ɪi].


• "Take your time, I still got some claynin' ... You know what I mayn." - Trapped in the Closet
• /eɪ/ is lowered. R. Kelly also centers it so it sounds like "uh-ee" [əɪ].
• "Your fuyvrite, cherry ... tuyk your time, I still got some cleanin' ... 'muybe? muybe that time of the month?'" - Trapped in the Closet
• /u/ fronting. Southern American English pushes the /u/ sound to the front of the mouth so "you" /ju/ sounds like "yew" [jʉ]. This is a feature that is not present in African American Vernacular English.
• "Darlin', where have you been? I've been worried about yew." - Trapped in the Closet

Although Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" may not have been country enough for Billboard, it follows a tradition of country singers adopting another accent to sound more country. It is also an interesting example of the ways that a speaker of one dialect tries to imitate another, similar dialect, by leaning in on the most distinctive aspects (and keeping the similar ones, like /aɪ/-monophthongization). Are you aware of any other examples of African American singers using these features to imitate Southern American English, in or outside of the country music genre? I've noticed that although rhoticity is exaggerated, another distinctive Southern American feature, fronting "oh" /oʊ/ to "uh-uu" [əʊ], is missing from these imitations.

Dialect Dissection: Lana Del Rey's Chameleon Voice

“My mother told me I had a chameleon soul, no moral compass pointing due north, no fixed personality; just an inner indecisiveness that was as wide and as wavering as the ocean.” - Ride

If the previous Dialect Dissection on Taylor Swift was a case study in how accent can be used to match genre and connect with an audience’s expectations, Lana Del Rey’s dialect dissection is going to be a case study on how accent can be used as something more personal, a palette one can draw from. Since Lana began singing in 2005, she’s explored different musical identities, trying them on and moving on as quickly as she started. Critics’ rejection of her in 2012 led to her pulling back from the mainstream, and she's stayed content hovering in the periphery of popularity. Her chameleon soul has also expressed itself via her chameleon tongue, fully inhabiting whatever aesthetic she’s trying to channel.

For the uninitiated: Lana Del Rey is the stage name of Elizabeth Grant, an alternative pop singer who was born in New York City, grew up in upstate New York, moved to New York City to start her music career, and currently resides in Los Angeles. She’s been making music since 2005, most of it never made available to the public (with a few exceptions, like an early studio album “Lana Del Ray” (sic) ). She started out with acoustic singer-songwriter material and then worked with producers and songwriters on genres from bubblegum pop to blues to urban material. A lot of this material leaked and is available through YouTube. Her major label debut, “Born To Die,” was a unique album combining hip-hop beats with cinematic strings and melancholy mood. It launched her into the public eye but also won her backlash from critics who viewed her carefully manicured aesthetic as a studio concoction. She's continued making music since, to increasing critical acclaim.

Lana’s accent shenanigans are not limited to just using distinctive features. She’s often conscious about using these features herself, someone else using them, or combining them with certain imagery. This ties together the accent with the lyrical imagery and the music. Lana is known to have a love of recurring phrasing and imagery (little red party dresses, pale moonlight, daddies), and she also likes to talk about location. Accent seems to be one of the tools she uses to craft each song universe. Instead of looking at this by period, like I did for Taylor, I’m going to look at the different uses each accent serves in the Lanaverse.

It’s the Voodoo, Mississippi South

The very first material we have from Lana is a folk album credited to "May Jailer," made in 2005. The first shock is the difference between her maximalist "Born To Die" sound and this bare bones guitar accompaniment. The second one is that she in and out of a Southern accent on these songs, something she never does on her released work. Many folk and folk-revivalist singers put on a Southern accent, with a famous example being Minnesotan folk singer Robert Zimmerman, better known as Bob Dylan. Lana's motivation here seems to be genre-motivated, but unlike Taylor Swift, she's not committed to the accent. She uses a smaller range of features. It's noticeable that she uses the ai-monophthongization pretty rarely, as this is actually one of the defining features of what is called Southern American English.

After the professionally-recorded 2005-2006 era songs, we get a change in style. Some of the following songs were recorded as laptop demos and made with an extremely simple finger-picking pattern on the guitar. Others were professionally made with producers in the studio. She uses a variety of stage names, but she often goes by Lizzy Grant. What's interesting is that as her sound moves away from "singer with a guitar," her accent still lingers on Southern features.

By 2008, Lana had come up with the name "Lana" and wanted to use it. She released an EP in 2008 called "Kill Kill," but still under the name Lizzy Grant. She spent the next two years recording what would become her full-length debut album, "Lana Del Ray". This artistic period is noticeable for featuring an interest in Americana and white working class aesthetic. She talks about trailer parks and American states. Her use of a Southern accent no longer has anything to do with genre expectations and instead deals in associations with the people who actually speak it. This continues from her early themes in the "May Jailer" songs, that of problems encountered by normal people.

• /ɪ/ 🔊 → [iə]) 🔊 : In General American, the short "i" sound like in "bit" (/bɪt/) is one vowel made with the tongue held loosely. In Southern English, it's a diphthong with the tongue held tensely. This means "bit" can sound more like "beeyit" ([biət]) (Source). This is one of Lana's most commonly used Southern features.
  • "Another night I'm waitin'." - Next To Me, Sirens (2005)
  • "The record spins." - Methamphetamines, Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2006).
  • "And I will." - Oh Say Can You See, Lana Del Ray (2010).
• /æ/ 🔊 → [ɛ(j)ə]) 🔊 : In General American, the "aa" sound like in "bad" (/bæd/) is one vowel made with the tongue flat on the bottom of the mouth. In Southern English, it's a diphthong with the tongue raised a little, so it sounds like "beh-add" ([bɛəd]) (Source).
  • "My mean daddy." - Pretty Baby, Sirens (2005)
  • "I'm in the back doin' crack." - Boarding School (live), Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2008)
• /ɔ/ 🔊 → /ɑɒ/ 🔊 : Words like "bought" /bɔt/ that have a low, back vowel instead have a diphthong that sounds like "baut." (If like me, you rhyme bot and bought, then ‘bought’ will probably not have the [ɔ] vowel but the [ɑ] vowel so it sounds like [bɑt] 🔊. Instead, think about the vowel used in ‘bore’, without the ‘r’.)
  • "I don't know why it is that I wanna stay." - Fordham Road, Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2005)
• /aɪ/ 🔊 → [aː] 🔊 : In General American, the "ai" sound (/aɪ/) is a diphthong, meaning it's made of two vowels. In Southern English, it's one long vowel ([a:]). This means "ride" (/raɪd/) sounds a little like "rad" ([ra:d])
  • "High Christmas lights [...] I said yes Bill, I will." - Trash Magic, Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2007)
  • "You look like a Florida Native." - Elvis, Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2008)
• Lana uses a lot of zero-morpheme forms (that is to say, they do not have the -s they would have in Standard American English).
  • "There's a place on Valentine that still charge ninety cent." - Fordham Road, Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2005)
  • "Hear the way that he moan." - Money Hunny, Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2005)
  • "Fifty baby doll dress for my I do. It only take two hours to Nevada." - Yayo, Lana Del Ray (2010)
• She also uses other non-standard grammatical forms, like "done" as a past-tense marker and "was" as the past-tense conjugation of "to be" for "you."
  • "I done known a hoodlum and you don't pass the test." - My Momma, May Jailer (2005)
  • "My momma wouldn't say you was a good boy." - My Momma, May Jailer (2005)
• She does not limit herself to just using a Southern accent, but also talks about other people who have Southern accents, and invokes Southern imagery liberally:
  • "You look like a Florida Native. 'Are you,' I said, at the rate of slow molasses, 'from the State of Vermont, with a Southern drawl?'" - Elvis, Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2008)
  • "Dance at night back in Alabama." - Pin-Up Galore, Unreleased - Lizzy Grant (2008)
  • "It's the voodoo Mississippi south." - Raise Me Up (Mississippi South), Lana Del Ray (2010)

"Lana Del Ray" has a subtitle - AKA Lizzy Grant. She was beginning to transition professionally to her new stage name. After the album's short release in 2010, she was being shopped around to various producers and produced a diverse and often poppy body of work. After she committed to Lana Del Rey as a stage name, her use of Southern accents drops precipitously. She was moving from simple songs about a sweet trailer love to larger than life topics like honoring the love of your dead mafioso sugar daddy. Her Southern accent period coincided with "real" topics about "real" people trying to get by, make their relationships work, and also find meaning in a lonely universe. As her work became less grounded in a reality most people could relate to, it rejected the Southern accent.

Tawkin’ Bout My Generation

Lana also likes to use a New York City accent in her music. Now let’s clear something up - Lana Del Rey does not natively speak with a New York accent. Listen to any one of her interviews and you’ll be hard pressed to hear any of the distinguishing features associated with the region. This is unsurprising because she grew up in Lake Placid in upstate New York, not New York City. Lana certainly identified with New York City though, being that she was born there and she started her music career singing in Williamsburg and other hip locales. She didn't use this accent in the beginning of her music - she starts using it around 2010-11, which is the time when she's transitioned to going by "Lana Del Rey" as opposed to "Lizzy Grant."

One of the key elements in when Lana starts dropping "oall" into her songs is another recurring theme she talks about - gangsters. New York accents are associated with mobsters, due to the proliferation of the Italian mafia in the city. While one of her earliest songs ("For K" or "Drive-By") deals with the topic of a loved one going to prison, she starts romanticizing the idea of being in love with a gangster in 2010, around the same time she starts using these New York pronunciations and commits to calling herself "Lana Del Rey." A Southern accent would have been out of place here since there isn't any connection between the mafia and the American South, and Southern accents bring to mind images of a rural, friendly area - quite the opposite of city-smart wise-guys. For the most part, Lana still sticks to her General American accent, but she doesn't hold herself back from slipping in some features that show her character's allegiance to mobsters and big city life.

Curiously enough, she really ramps up her usage of the New York accent in Ultraviolence, which was based around the idea of a West Coast sound. "Shades of Cool," "Brooklyn Baby," and "Fucked My Way Up To The Top" all make use of it. Honeymoon uses it to a lesser extent in "High by the Beach" and "Terrence Loves You." Lust For Life, a mostly accent-free album, abandons the "doag" and "oall" in exchange for the subtler "paa-radise" in "Get Free."

• /ɔ/ 🔊 → [ɔa] 🔊 : The sound in words like 'bought' sounds more like 'bo-at.' New Yorkers also expand this sound to appear in words that it wouldn't in other accents, like dog and boss. (If like me, you rhyme cot and caught, then ‘caught’ will probably not have the [ɔ] vowel but the [a] vowel, like 'spa'. Instead think about the vowel used in ‘bore’, without the ‘r’.)
  • “Use your one phone call on your ex-girl, boo.” - TV In Black & White, Unreleased - Lana Del Rey (2011)
  • "You can be the boss, daddy, you can be the boss [...] sick as a dog [...]I tried to be strong but I lost it [...] a fire in his eyes, no I saw it." - You Can Be The Boss (live), Unreleased, Lana Del Rey. (2012)
  • "White bikini off with my red nail polish." - Off to the Races (live), Born To Die (2012).
  • "Caught up in the game." - Blue Jeans, Born To Die (2012).
  • "And when he calls, he calls for me [...] he calls for me" - Shades of Cool, Ultraviolence (2014)
  • "Talking 'bout that newer nation." - Brooklyn Baby, Ultraviolence (2014)
  • "Life is awesome, I confess." - Fucked my way up to the Top, Ultraviolence (2014)
  • "The truth is I never bought into your bullshit." - High by the Beach, Honeymoon (2015)
• In British English, the sounds /ɛ/ and /æ/ remain distinct before the 'r' sound. This means words like merry, Kerry, and America [ɛr] have the same vowel as in 'met' 🔊, while marry, carry, and pharaoh [ær] have the same vowel as in 'mat' 🔊. Most Americans use /ɛ/ for all of these words. The Northeast, and especially New York, preserves this distinction wholly. Observe how she says paradise, which is the word she most uses /ær/ in.
  • “Take me down to paradise.” - Paradise, Unreleased - Lana Del Rey (2011)
  • “It’s like a dark paradise.” - Dark Paradise, Born To Die (2012)
  • “And all my birds of paradise.” - Get Free, Lust For Life (2017)
• Lana identifies with New York City. There is no shortage of references to New York City in her songs.
  • “Everybody knows - they call me Brooklyn baby” - True Love on the Side, Unreleased - Lana Del Rey (2010)
  • “I’m a Brooklyn Baby” - Brooklyn Baby, Ultraviolence (2014)
  • “I'm your little harlot, scarlet, queen of Coney Island.” - Off to the Races, Born to Die (2012)

Crazy y Cubano Como Yo

Lana has not been content to stick to English - she’s also dabbled in foreign languages. Spanish is the foreign language she uses most, probably because she seems to speak it pretty well and she claims to have done volunteering work in Spanish. She says she came up with the name "Lana Del Rey" because she was in Miami a lot and hanging out with Cubans, and the name "reminded her of the glamour of the seaside." This Cuban relation could explain why, on "West Coast," she says "he's crazy y Cubano como yo [and Cuban like me]" - although she's not Cuban, so the line is still unusual. This is another case where she may want to bring a certain city image to life - there are plenty of Spanish speakers in New York City, Los Angeles, and Miami. She even portrays some sort of Hispanic gang in her film Tropico.

She uses Italian in one song, "Salvatore." It appears to be about her then-boyfriend Francesco, an Italian photographer. She has French on some of her songs (though she doesn't actually say the French herself in most of them) like "Moi Je Joue" and "Carmen," and uses a French pronunciation of "Jean-Paul Gaultier, Versace" in "Breaking My Heart." A common thread in her foreign language use is that it's limited to words that are easy to decipher for English speakers, especially Americans who may have taken Spanish as a second language at some point in school. Like with her New York accent, she chooses the most recognizable features or words and peppers her songs with them.

Translations for the below will be given in brackets.

• "Lights, camera, acción [action]." - Put Me In A Movie, Lana Del Ray (2010)
• "I can speak Spanish, you can sing for the neighbors." - Back to the Basics, Unreleased - Lana Del Rey (2011)
• She's done the monologue from Carmen in Spanish in live shows.
• “Yo soy la princesa [I am the princess], comprende mis [understand my] white lines.” - Ultraviolence, Ultraviolence (2014)
• “He’s crazy y Cubano como yo [and Cuban like me].” - West Coast, Ultraviolence (2014)
• “Cacciatore [hunter] [...] ciao amore [bye, love]” - Salvatore, Honeymoon (2015)
• "Lights, camera, acción [action]." - High By The Beach, Honeymoon (2015)

Lana-isms

Lana has many features that go into her unique sound, but don't tie back neatly to a single dialect. These little ticks are affectionately referred to here as Lana-isms. Some of these are related to making sure a word fits into the song's meter. Others are trying to evoke a certain image, like hip-hop or Hollywood. Some do double duty and perform both those functions. There are also some lexical items she uses frequently, which she's become famous for (party dress, diamonds, the pale moonlight, etc.). These are interesting because they don't seem to be cribbed from one singer or style in particular, but rather have been accumulated over the years as she became exposed to new influences. They are consistent with her use of foreign languages and New York City English in that she avoids using them throughout an entire song and instead uses them at key moments. This makes them more noticeable and stand-out.

• Inserting vowels in the middle of words, a process called Epenthesis. Lana likes to insert a neutral 'uh' sound /ə/ in the middle of words so that they can fit the meter of the song, or use a spelling pronunciation ("different") to add an extra syllable. One interesting example below is the "Hit & Run" one, where the demo is missing the 'uh' sound but the final version has it. There's a variation where she instead stresses part of a diphthong (Saigon) or adds a sound that appears in the spelling but not the pronunciation (ovation). She has more dedication to fitting the meter than she does to the standard syllable structure of a word, which shows the extent to which she is willing to "color outside the lines" to achieve a certain aesthetic effect.
  • "You got a diff-e-rent story." - Wait, May Jailer (2005)
  • "Give me a standing ov-a-ti-on." - National Anthem, Born To Die (2012)
  • "You have to live life deadly / Together we'd be dead-a-ly." - Hit & Run (Demo & Final), Unreleased - Lana Del Rey (2010)
  • "Mary swaying soft-a-ly." - Body Electric, Paradise (2012)
• Lana has a preoccupation with old-school Hollywood glamour. A lot of this is expressed in terms of reference to icons like Marilyn or California, but some of it appears in how she speaks as well. She uses a three-syllable pronunciation for 'diamonds' instead of a two-syllable pronunciation; this pronunciation is an older one and can be heard in classic Hollywood films. Her use of 'daddy' is likely influenced by old films as well - see here for further details. She even briefly fakes a Transatlantic accent in one of her songs, dropping her 'r's and using a high [ɐ] sound in words like 'love' and 'above' - all wrapped in an old-timey microphone filter. She's name-dropped Hollywood icons before 2010, but these pronunciations all appear after 2010.
  • "Do you think you'll buy me lots of diamonds?" - National Anthem (Demo & Final), Unreleased & Born to Die (2010 & 2012)
  • "If you should go before me then know that I've always loved you - there's no one above you, baby." - Hollywood's Dead, Unreleased - Lana Del Rey (2011)
  • "Diamonds, brilliant [...] like diamonds." - Young & Beautiful, The Great Gatsby Soundtrack (2013)
• Lana uses a lot of hip hop slang, but she does not affect an African American Vernacular dialect. Her rapped lines are instead done in her General American accent. The number of hip-hop references she makes increases after 2010, once she retired the whole Lizzy Grant aesthetic.
  • "Salvatore, you can def' be my baby boo." - Backfire, Unreleased - Lana Del Rey (2010)
  • "Dope... that's sick." - Unreleased - Lana Del Rey (2011)
  • "You're so fresh to death and sick as cancer. You were sorta punk rock, I grew up on hip-hop." - Blue Jeans, Born To Die (2012)

Out of the Black, Into the Blue

There's an interesting shift in Lana's use of accent. Her early career as a folk singer featured a more or less constant use of a type of Southern accent. She kept this accent at the start of her jazzy/surf-rock period when she went by some variation of Lizzy Grant, but it started to decline in frequency. We know "Lana" as a name was on her mind by 2008 because it comes up in a song of hers, but she starts going by Lana more in 2009. After that period, her musical style changes and is based more on electronic instrumentation and even upbeat pop sounds, while her lyrics become more cinematic. By 2010, when she's recorded demos for Born To Die, she's already started using parts of a New York accent and some Lana-isms like the hip-hop slang and the old-fashioned pronunciation of "diamonds." She made special use of the New York accent on Ultraviolence, but by the time she released Honeymoon and Lust For Life, she was starting to leave the choice accent bits out.

Lana is famous for cultivating a very particular aesthetic, one that is mostly visual and lyrical. I would argue that part of this aesthetic is also dialectal. Being that she is not from the South, did not grow up in New York, is not a native Spanish speaker, and is not a film star from the 1950s, her little appropriations would be hard to explain using the argument that she actually speaks all these variants. They only have a vague connection to genre - sure, folk music can be associated with the American South, but surf rock? What genre is a New York accent associated with, show tunes and 80s hip-hop? It's clear that she's lifting from other accents to take advantage of the existing associations they already have. In doing so, she's created a linguistically diverse oeuvre and carved out a voice for herself in a competitive market. Like Taylor, she's learned you don't have to be Southern all the time, but Lana has instead operated outside typical genre. Some people may find her schtick repetitive, but it is unmistakably hers.

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Whomst'd've guessed it?

One of my favorite memes of 2017 has been ‘whomst’. Now ‘whomst’ started appearing early 2017, so it’s basically decrepit in meme years, but since we’re nearing the end of the year I figured it would be fun to look back at this language-based meme.

‘whomst’ is a meme that involves using the word ‘whomst’ instead of ‘who’ to appear intelligent. It has some overlap with the meme ‘me, an intellectual’ which also involves fake intelligence, and the glowing eyes memes, where ‘whomst’ has contractions added to it to become even longer and ‘better’.

One thing I have not seen anyone talk about is the form of the word ‘whomst.’ The consensus is ‘whomst’ is a fancier version of ‘who,’ but very little discussion has been given to why the fancy version of ‘who’ is ‘whomst’ and not ‘whont’ or ‘wholli’ or any other variation. And the truth is, there is very much a reason behind ‘whomst’ taking the form it took.

Hypercorrection

Ladies and gentlemen and members of the audience, this is the phenomenon to blame. The entire motivation for there even being a ‘whomst’ meme, the scourge of all prescriptivists and tool of all station-climbers... hypercorrection. Hypercorrection refers to a phenomenon where someone misuses a construction or word in an attempt to appear more "correct." The seeds of hypercorrection are planted in grammar school, when teachers tell students things like “me and Jane” is incorrect and it should actually be “Jane and I.” (Of course, those of us who study linguistics know that such value judgments are actually arbitrary and not logically consistent or even historically sound… but that’s a topic for another post). English teachers rarely, if ever, know anything about linguistics, and so their understanding of English comes from a different framework. They make statements about how some constructions are unacceptable - even though they sound perfectly normal in colloquial English - and that ‘Standard English’ is the only true way to speak English.

The problem is they often fail to actually teach why the "wrong" form doesn’t work. To use our earlier example, ‘me and Jane’. Let’s look at the pronoun. (The ordering is some weird stuff we won’t get into). Pronouns in English have these two forms, the ‘nominative’ and the ‘accusative.’ The nominative is used when a pronoun is the subject of a verb. This form is ‘I, you, he, she, it, we, they.’ You can say ‘I ran,’ but you can’t say *‘me ran’ in most varieties of English. The accusative case is used when a pronoun is the object of a verb - in other words, when something is being done to the pronoun. You can say ‘I loved him’ but not *‘I love he’.

In Standard English, pronouns in a subject position (the pronoun is the one ‘doing’ something) must be in the nominative case, even when they are joined with another word by using 'and'. So ‘me and Jane ran’ is incorrect in Standard English because *‘me ran’ is unacceptable. ‘Jane and I ran’ is okay because you can say 'I ran.' Now look at ‘He loved Jane and me.’ This one is okay because if we remove Jane, you get ‘he loved me,’ which is grammatical. *’He loved Jane and I’ is not a good sentence because ‘He loved I’ is a bad sentence.

Extra credit: who is correct, Todd or Scott? (spoiler: Todd's version is awkward but the case makes sense because "I and he" is the subject. Scott's "he and me" mixes nominative and accusative case, which is a no-no in Standard English!)

Did your teacher ever teach you any of this? Or did they just say ‘you can’t say me and X, it must be X and I’? Most teachers just broadly tell you that something is wrong and then move along through their long list of arbitrary rules. This leaves people confused and they come up with their own explanations - "'X and me' is wrong, but ‘X and I’ is correct." This leads to constructions that are actually not grammatical in Standard English, like *’between you and I.’ In Standard English, prepositions take the accusative case. It’s ‘with me,’ not *‘with I’. The form should be ‘between you and me’, but if you were never explained how this works, you’re just going to find every instance of ‘me and X’ and replace it with ‘X and I.’ This is a hypercorrection - when you go too far in trying to be right that you end up wrong. Hypercorrections are one of the ways you can spot someone who is not actually comfortable using standard language but is trying to appear as though they do.

The same applies to ‘whom.’ Most people know ‘whom’ exists, but ‘whom’ is virtually extinct in most varieties of English. Unlike the ‘you and I’ example, most teachers won’t even talk about it! Now the reality is that ‘whom’ is simply the accusative form of ‘who’. If you can replace who with a pronoun in the accusative case, you can use ‘whom’. “Who did he love?” “He loved her.” -> “Whom did he love?” If you can replace ‘who’ with the nominative, then don’t change anything. “Who went to the store?” “They went to the store.” The key: whom can never go in the subject position.

Zac Efron demonstrates the social consequences of misusing who and whom.

All of this is lost on people who know there is a word ‘whom’ and that it is used by well-educated people. The assumption is that ‘whom’ is a ‘fancy’ or ‘more correct’ version of ‘who’ and so you get ungrammatical sentences like *‘whom went to the store?’ This is a dead giveaway that a person is not actually well versed on Standard English grammar and is trying hard to look smarter than they really are. This is part one of ‘whomst’. But we’re not content to stop there - there’s an -st there.

The -st

Think about ‘among’ and ‘while.’ In the United States, these are the standard versions. However, there are variants: ‘amongst’ and ‘whilst’. Now, people hate it when two words mean exactly the same thing, so they try to come up with some distinction between them to justify having two different words. ‘Grammar nerds’ will argue over when it is appropriate to use ‘among’ or ‘amongst,’ and people come up with the most bizarre and ahistorical justifications like ‘among is for people and amongst is for inanimate objects’ (I've actually seen this one). The reality is that ‘amongst’ and ‘whilst’ mean exactly the same as their shorter brethren; they are simply older and rarer. If you only encounter ‘amongst’ in literature, though, you may be forgiven for thinking that ‘amongst’ is the ‘literary variant’ - and the logic goes "literary = more educated." This leads to some people falsely saying ‘amongst’ is the ‘proper’ form and ‘among’ is the colloquial!

As you’ll notice, both of these words comprise a well known word (among/while) and what appears to be a suffix, -st. By analogy, couldn’t you just add ‘-st’ to make a word fancy and literary? What if we added it to an already fancy and literary word like… whom? We’d have the most educated word in the world! And so it appears ‘whomst' was born by analogy.

Size Matters

But the whomst meme doesn’t stop there! In many of the comics, ‘whomst’ is simply the first level. To reach true awakening, you must use ‘whomst’d’, or even ‘whomst’d’ve’. Wow, my eyes sure hurt from all this glowing.

This is a weird expansion of the word, because they are adding contractions. Whomst’d would therefore be ‘whomst had’ or ‘whomst would’. ‘Whomst’d’ve’ would be ‘whomst would have’. Contractions are usually considered informal, and double contractions like ‘who’d’ve’ are considered especially unfit for the written page by stodgy guardians of propriety. Why would adding contractions make ‘whomst’ an even more ‘fake intelligent’ word?

My theory - this has to do with the English belief that ‘long words’ are more ‘literary.’ Have you ever heard someone accuse someone else of using ‘big words’? ‘Big words’ refer to words that are usually found in books and are ‘long’. This is in comparison to normal words: lightning, not fulmination. It’s very unusual because this isn’t really a thing in other languages. In Spanish, there are plenty of common words that are long. Agglutinating languages like Turkish and Japanese add so many suffixes to words that almost every word in a normal sentence can be a long word!

The belief that longer word = literary word seems to have some correlation with the fact that the base of English vocabulary is of Germanic origin, while the ‘learned’ vocabulary is of Latin and Greek origin. The Germanic words are often monosyllabic, like ‘egg’ and ‘word’. The Latin words, meanwhile, have many syllables, like ‘deconstruction.’ The meanings of these words are transparent to people who speak Romance languages or Greek (de = to undo; construct = to build; -tion = make the verb into a noun), they are not transparent to English speakers without further explanation. The end result is that an association arises between how long a word is and how learned the user must be.
Now English does not have a ton of suffixes it can add on to ‘whomst’, but it does have contractions. In this way ‘whomst’d’ is longer than ‘whomst’ and ‘whomst’d’ve’ is even longer. You can see it get crazier and more nonsensical with stuff like ‘whomst’d’ve’ll’.

Ask Not For Whomst The Bell Tolls

The fun of this meme is that it’s totally silly - it mocks people who want to put on airs without actually going through the trouble of learning anything new. ‘Whomst’ is brilliant - I don’t know if the originator had -st in mind when coming up with it, but it just works so well by analogy with amongst. Unfortunately, memes have a lifespan, and it appears that ‘whomst’ is nearing its end. Farewell, brave linguistic meme. Whomst’d’ve ever expected you?

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