Introducing the Special Issue “Interface Between Sociolinguistics and Music”

This Special Issue comprises six original studies that explore the interface between sociolinguistics and music, offering new insights into how language is stylized and perceived in English, Spanish, and code-mixed performance. While the relationship between language variation and identity is a long-standing concern in sociolinguistics (see, for example, Eckert, 2008), language in artistic performance has often remained at the margins of variationist and stylistic research. The articles included here expand the field by investigating how artists across genres such as country, blues, indie folk, and música urbana draw on linguistic features to perform authenticity, align with or defy genre conventions, and construct complex identities. While most contributions take a variationist approach, they all engage questions that extend beyond variationist sociolinguistics, including how linguistic choices relate to authenticity and to the negotiation of artists’ sociocultural backgrounds in performance. Together, these studies demonstrate that a singer’s linguistic choice goes beyond mere formal requirements of rhyme and metrics: it stages identity, signals belonging or resistance, and weaves local and global influences into every song.

Thus, Werner and Ledermann (2024) examine how morphosyntactic features of Southern American English (SAE) function as markers of authenticity in country music. Drawing on a corpus of 600 Billboard hits by White and Black artists from both Southern and non-Southern backgrounds, they track twelve well-known SAE features, ranging from a-prefixing and the perfective done to negative concord and personal datives. Using automated and manual tagging and concordance tools, they find that most SAE features are absent or marginally present in the lyrics. The lone exception is negative concord (often realized with ain’t), which appears across all artist groups but, crucially, is also a widespread vernacular feature beyond SAE. Surprisingly, White non-Southern artists deploy the remaining SAE features more frequently than their Southern peers—a pattern the authors refer to as “genre fitting”. This suggests that, in a diversifying country scene, performers consciously adopt a restricted set of vernacular cues to align with audience expectations of authenticity. Werner and Ledermann argue that while SAE morphosyntax has lost its indexical function, accentual features—which are immediately recognizable and tied to Southern identity—continue to serve as the primary authenticity signals. They propose that country music now relies on a selective indexical inventory in which a few high-salience features (especially accent plus negative concord) stand in for deeper regional roots.

Campos-Astorkiza (2024) also analyzes accent shift and stylization, this time with a focus on rhoticity by the lead singer of a UK band, Mumford and Sons, chosen because their four studio albums progress through different styles influenced by American English, ranging from folksy Americana to indie or alt-rock. Their repertoire can thus be used to test the role of American English phonetic features as markers of genre authenticity. Of those, rhotics are the easiest to analyze acoustically in recorded music because they offer a binary opposition, and because previous studies offer points of comparison. A mixed-effects binomial linear regression provides evidence of stylization: while the rhoticity is lower than in US varieties (35%), it is higher than the singer’s spontaneous speech and falls within the norms for non-US performers. The linguistic factors identified as favorable (lexical words, stressed syllables, complex codas, and the NURSE word set) are linked to auditory prominence, evidence that salient contexts offer advantages when performing an accent. Interestingly, these contexts also favor rhotic production in dialects undergoing change towards rhoticity. The analysis also reveals that rhyming rhotic elements tend to agree as an effect of priming and that the singer occasionally overshoots on rhotic production.

The final study on variation in English performed speech, by De Timmerman and Slembrouck (2024), addresses the linguistic dynamics of cover songs through a systematic comparison of African American English (AAE) features in original blues performances and their covers. Drawing on a corpus of 270 tracks from three time periods (the 1960s, 1980s, and 2010s), performed by 45 artists from three socio-cultural groups (African American, non-African American US-based, and non-African American non-US-based), they examine eight phonological and lexico-grammatical features traditionally associated with AAE. Their analysis combines statistical and machine learning approaches to reveal striking consistency in the use of these features across time, background, and song type. The authors argue that the AAE features examined are no longer indexical of community affiliation alone; instead, they have become a sign of authenticity, emblematic of the blues genre itself. Drawing on Irvine and Gal’s (2000) notion of iconization, the authors suggest that the indexical relationship between AAE features and blues authenticity has become so entrenched that the features have become iconic—essential elements of what makes blues sound like blues—and propose the existence of a Standard Blues Singing Style, i.e., a genre-bound vocal register in which AAE features function as indexical cues of authenticity.

The two studies on Spanish language artistic performance are, unsurprisingly, focused on the ubiquitous stylization of coda /s/ weakening in Caribbean inspired musical styles. Thus, Powell (2024) presents an acoustic analysis of /s/ lenition in four artists of pan-Latin música urbana. While connected to Caribbean reggaetón, música urbana has replaced the resistance message with a commoditized party sound. The artists analyzed fit an ethnically ambiguous “Latin” look, devoid of African and Indigenous features; they include a non-native speaker (Anitta), a US-born Mexican heritage speaker (Becky G), a native speaker of an s-retaining dialect (Karol G), and of an s-reducing dialect (Natti Natasha). Powell hypothesizes that /s/ lenition, a stigmatized feature of Afro-Caribbean varieties characteristic of reggaetón, will also be present as an enregistered feature of música urbana. He anticipates higher /s/ lenition in performed speech compared to interviews, with initiative shifts and an increase over time. Allophones identified with PRAAT are analyzed through a mixed-effects logistic regression in Rbrul with linguistic and extralinguistic factors. Sibilants are preferred in interviews by all performers, while Anitta and Becky G decrease their frequency of sibilant coda /s/ in performance speech. Interestingly, predictors, direction of effect, and constraint hierarchy applied across the board. Elision is favored by preconsonantal and word final position, plural markers, faster speech, and collaborations with Caribbean artists, evidence of stylization of vernacular features. Although artists peak at different points, /s/-reduction increases over time (80–90% in 2022). The question is whether the process is merely appropriation or a sign of growing acceptance of Caribbean varieties.

For her part, Hayes, E. N. (2023) compares coda /s/ in the Artistic Performance Speech (APS) and spontaneous speech of Bad Bunny and J Balvin, chosen due to their popularity as the two highest-grossing Latin artists and to their dialectal contrasts. While Bad Bunny speaks a Caribbean variety with frequent and non-stigmatized /s/ weakening, J Balvin’s variety (Medellín Colombian) retains coda /s/. Sibilance in their most popular songs and most viewed unscripted videos is measured with PRAAT and then analyzed through a multinomial regression in R to measure the effect of Artist and Performance Mode on /s/ realization. In APS, Bad Bunny uses aspiration (43%) more than deletion (37%), while J Balvin splits his /s/ production between maintenance and deletion, with little aspiration. Meanwhile, in spontaneous speech, Bad Bunny uses deletion almost categorically (93%), while J Balvin overwhelmingly prefers maintenance (80.8%). In addition, in APS, Bad Bunny aspirates more in informal contexts and when his interlocutor also uses aspiration, while J Balvin’s maintenance decreases when speaking to Puerto Ricans. The difference between APS and spontaneous speech is statistically significant for both artists. However, the direction of this difference is reversed, resulting in a convergence between them in APS. Two alternative motivations are suggested: /s/ weakening may have covert prestige, or it may point to the diffusion of a pan-regional variety through pop music.

Finally, Picone (2024) expands on his own earlier theoretical constructs related to artistic code-switching, defined as the use of two or more languages in the same song by the same singer to convey complex identity or improve marketability (Picone, 2002). In his new work, he invites us to think of artistic language mixing in broader, multimodal semiotic terms. For example, he adds “curated code-switching” to describe mixing by multiple performers singing in their dominant language, in cases where agency rests on behind-the-scenes “curators” (e.g., producers). Picone shows that behind much contemporary artistic code-mixing and multilingual collaborations there are efforts to fuse global and local musical traditions. These bring together dominant Western artistic production in a majority language with marginalized local traditions expressed in immigrant or indigenous languages. Language mixing is a way for popular artists to overcome the obstacles to marketability that could result from reduced intelligibility and potential charges of inauthenticity. Picone also expands semiotic analysis of multilayered artistic discourse to lyrics, music, and visuals, where language choice derives meaning from its domain associations. He exemplifies this analysis with artistic code-switching strategies in high-profile contexts. While this mixing can stave off criticism (Barcelona Olympics), it can also lead to criticisms of crossing, appropriation, and commoditization (South African World Cup), or be used experimentally to achieve universal linguistic harmony (Jon Batiste’s World Music album). Finally, Picone proposes an expansion of the role of code-switching in building identity from the creator to the listener, who can also change self-perception through art, regardless of linguistic proficiency.

The significant contributions of this Special Issue simultaneously point to several possible areas for future development. The types of analyses proposed here for English and Spanish and Western musical genres can be extended to more underrepresented languages, language combinations, and music scenes, such as highlife in West Africa, Indigenous hip-hop in North America, street-music forms in the Middle East, and the bilingual pop of East Asia. Building parallel corpora of studio tracks and live recordings in these contexts will show us how local sounds—whether phonetic, morphosyntactic, or lexical—signal authenticity. It is also time to look beyond accent and syntax: prosody and voice quality offer rich, under-explored pathways to authenticity. Also, although existing literature has documented performers’ choices, audience perspectives remain underexplored (see Jansen, 2022). Picone’s suggestions above could be implemented with the application of methodological innovations such as matched-guise experiments and online surveys to manipulate features like coda /s/ weakening or different types of code-switching to measure their effects on judgments of authenticity and cultural belonging.

Following Picone’s lead, many aspects of code-switching and linguistic hybridity deserve further examination. For example, future research could look at how collaborators weave languages together in songwriting and in live performances. And given the inherently audiovisual nature of musical performance, multimodal and ethnographic methods can be much more fully incorporated into future analyses. For example, video-based gesture coding coupled with participant observation at streamed concerts or open-mic nights will reveal how movement, staging, costuming, styling, and instrumental choices, and crowd interaction co-construct linguistic style. Similarly, digital ethnography and social-network analysis of online music communities and user-generated content can trace how stylizations spread online.

Expanding the methodological tools through qualitative, ethnographic, and multimodal approaches and broadening the linguistic and geographic scope of inquiry is essential for developing a more inclusive sociolinguistics of music. The articles in this Special Issue lay a strong foundation for this work, offering frameworks, datasets, and questions that can guide further research at this interdisciplinary intersection.