From Geordie to Jazz: Salience in Songs of Newcastle and New Orleans

Dr Dana Serditova (Universität Freiburg/Br.)

From the jazz clubs of New Orleans to the rock stages of Newcastle, singers often incorporate the distinctive features of regional dialects in their performances. For researchers, songs can serve as a valuable resource for studying salient linguistic features and local identity.

In the course of the talk, we will look at sociophonetic features in two culturally distinct urban centers: Newcastle, England, and New Orleans, Louisiana. We will analyze how regional linguistic characteristics such as rhoticity, vowel mergers, and monophthongization in New Orleans, and 'g'-dropping, vowel quality, and near glottalization in Newcastle, are expressed in local music. We will then compare these linguistic features in music to everyday speech in each city and examine their impact on perceptions of regional identity and linguistic salience. Ultimately, the goal of this talk is to showcase how the concept of salience can be studied through local artists and their use of regional features in song.

Details | Anglophone Linguistics and Literary Studies | University of Basel

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