Catterwall

This post is adapted from a presentation I gave to the Musicality Category at the British Association of Barbershop Singers’s Contest and Judging Seminar in February 2025. It explores some of the recurring pronunciation mistakes that British barbershop singers often make when adopting an American accent for stylistic purposes.

Before addressing specific examples, a brief clarification may be helpful. I am aware that not all British barbershop groups aim to sing in an American accent, and some intentionally choose not to. Nevertheless, the topic merits discussion, as the use of American English remains a long-standing traditional characteristic of the barbershop style. The focus here, therefore, is on achieving accuracy and consistency for those who do choose to sing in this manner.

For clarity, the term ‘British English’ in this post refers to Standard Southern British English — the variety commonly heard on national BBC broadcasts — while ‘American English’ refers to General American English, an umbrella American standard originally based on the educated Midwestern accent.

Rhoticity

This section deals with perhaps the most substantial issue I hear from British barbershop groups attempting an American accent: rhoticity. Linguists use this term to describe the conditions that govern how the consonant /r/ is pronounced in different varieties of English.

Whenever I enclose a sound in slashes — like this // — I’m referring to what linguists call a ‘phoneme’. A phoneme is a group of sounds that speakers of a language perceive as belonging to the same underlying unit. For example, the r in very as spoken in Liverpool sounds different from the r in farm in an Irish accent, yet English speakers recognise both as versions of the same sound — the phoneme /r/. Whenever I enclose a sound in square brackets — like this [] — I’m referring instead to a ‘phone’, which is the precise speech sound that is used in a particular context.

One of the clearest distinctions between the standard forms of English in Britain and America lies precisely in rhoticity. American English is rhotic, meaning it retains the consonant /r/ wherever it appears in the spelling. British English, on the other hand, is non-rhotic, meaning that /r/ has been lost whenever it occurred at the end of a syllable — that is, before a pause or another consonant. The contrast is easy to hear in simple word pairs: in British English, car is pronounced /kɑː/, while in American English it is /kɑr/, with the rhotic /r/ pronounced. Likewise, born appears as British /boːn/ versus American /born/. In a small handful of words an /r/ is present but not written — such as colonel or Schoenberg — but usually the spelling will serve as a reliable guide.

In British English, it’s tempting to think of this absence simply as “dropping” the /r/, but the historical presence of the consonant has left clear traces. It often changes the quality of the preceding vowel — which is why beard sounds different from bead.

In American English, vowels are very strongly r-coloured, meaning that a following /r/ changes the acoustic properties of the vowel before it. The effect is so pronounced that phoneticians can sometimes detect traces of /r/ several syllables before or after it actually appears. Because of this, many Americans perceive their six r-coloured vowels — those in near, square, start, north, poor, and nurse — less as a vowel followed by a consonant and more as diphthong-like sequences where the /r/ is built into and inseparable from the vowel itself.

One vowel /ǝ/ — commonly known as schwa — has coalesced entirely with /r/, producing a rhotacised vowel that resembles a long “rrr”. Compare murder in British English /mǝːdǝ/ with American /mɚdɚ/: in the latter, the r-colouring is so strong that the lips round or protrude and the tongue either bunches or curls back, completely transforming the vowel quality.

You can hear this strong r-colouring in the word world in OC Times’s (BHS, AIC Show 2023) performance of What a Wonderful World.

When British speakers attempt an American accent, the pronunciation of /r/ becomes especially important, as its presence or absence can change the meaning of a word. Compare father and farther, or manna and manner. In linguistics, we call such pairs minimal pairs — words that differ by only one sound. In British English, these pairs have become homophones (words that sound the same), since the /r/ is no longer pronounced. In American English, however, the contrast remains meaningful, and the distinction between father and farther is still clearly heard.

Because this difference has disappeared in modern British speech, it can be surprisingly difficult — and often unintuitive — for British speakers to know where to restore the /r/, and equally, where to leave it out. The English actor and comedian Hugh Laurie, who has played several American characters, once joked about his frustration with exactly this problem — a familiar struggle for anyone attempting a convincing American accent.

In fact, Laurie has remarked that, during the filming of House, all the American speakers seemed able to soar freely with their lines, while he felt as though he were the one with a stone in his shoe, constantly thinking, “Hmm, that didn’t sound quite right”. This is precisely the position we find ourselves in as British groups competing at international: we lack the native-speaker intuition of a naturalised American, and it therefore takes an additional degree of work on the accent simply to reach a level playing field with those who were born into speaking it, all just to make the American judges blissfully unaware of the level of effort it requires.

To illustrate this, let’s compare two performances of If I Give My Heart to You: the first by the British group Sussex Kings of Harmony (BABS, Sing 2023), whose singers have non-rhotic accents, and the second by the American Pathfinder Chorus (Central States District, Fall 2017), whose accents are rhotic.

In the first example, we can hear that /r/ is missing from all the syllable endings (heart, darling, care, tenderly, and there) where it would normally be pronounced in American English. In the second example, by contrast, /r/ is consistently articulated in all these positions.

If a judging panel is listening with the expectation that the song should be sung in an American accent — as would be stylistically appropriate for a tune popularised by Doris Day — the absence of /r/ may register at best as a diction issue, and at worst as a loss of clarity in meaning. For instance, the Sussex Kings of Harmony’s pronunciation [hɑˑt] corresponds to heart in British English but could be heard as hot by an American listener. Such differences are likely to stand out even more clearly to an American judging panel than to a British one.

We can hear a similar difference in the baritone solo of The Coffee Song, performed by the British group Ami Quartet (LABBS, Quarterfinal 2025) and the American After Hours (BHS, Midwinter 2019). In the former, the vowel in girl is non-rhotic and lacks the r-colouring present in percolator, her, and perfume. In American English, all these vowels would share the same r-coloured quality, as in the latter performance. As a result, girl could potentially be misheard as gull or even guy — which, in fact, was how I initially perceived it in the room (for further explanation, see the section on Allophony of Consonants below).

Some vowels after which British singers often need to re-insert an /r/ also appear in other words where no /r/ is written or expected. Consider pairs such as caught and court, or passing and parsing, which are homophones in British English. These are what I would call ‘danger vowels’, because it’s easy to accidentally insert an /r/ where one does not belong.

A well-known example comes from The Beatles’s recording of ‘Til There Was You (1963), in which Paul McCartney, attempting an American accent, mistakenly adds an /r/ to the word saw, making it sound like soar.

This is an example of over-correction, or hyper-correction, where McCartney has applied the rule for /r/ re-insertion in his American accent to a situation where it does not actually apply. It serves as a reminder that exceptions to the rule are just as important as the rule itself.

An even more striking case appears in the British group Mumford & Sons’s 2010 cover of Neil Young’s Dance, Dance, Dance, where the chorus is rendered as “da/r/nce, da/r/nce, da/r/nce”. Here, not only is a rhotic incorrectly inserted, but the vowel itself should not be there in the first place: in American English, the word dance uses the vowel of TRAP, not PALM (see the discussion of BATH-broadening below).

Another illustrative example arose when Ciaran Wilson and I were working on some AI teach tracks for an arrangement. For a British speaker, the initial syllables of surprised and suppressed sound identical, making it easy to overlook that in American English a rhotic vowel /ɚ/ should appear in surprised but not in suppressed.

In the initial tracks for this arrangement, a rogue rhotic had been inserted in suppressed — as if it were spelt surpressed — and had to be corrected later. The distinction is subtle, but here are the two versions side by side for comparison.

There is an even subtler /r/ error that British actors — and singers — are particularly prone to making. In British English, /r/ is often re-inserted as a linking sound at the end of a word when the next word begins with a vowel. For example, the r in tuner would normally be silent, but it is pronounced in tune/r/-amp to link the words smoothly (or rather, to separate the words smoothly).

The problem arises because British speakers have little instinct for where /r/ appears historically and where it does not. As a result, they may insert an /r/ where it never appears in American speech: for instance, Pizza/r/ Express, Laura/r/ Ashley, Victoria/r/ and Albert, Hosanna/r/ in the Highest, or the famous example Law/r/ and Order. This phenomenon is traditionally referred to as intrusive-r, and in some accents it can even occur within words, as in draw/r/ing or withdraw/r/al.

It is therefore important for British speakers to learn not to insert a linking-r sound at word boundaries where it does not exist in the spelling. This is not so much a case of hyper-correction, but rather that it feels unintuitive for British speakers to omit /r/ as a separating consonant in these contexts.

The error is especially common with word-final schwa, and if you have ever sung the tag Carolina In My Mind, you may well have done it yourself. Further examples can be heard in the audio clips below:

“Dina/r/, is there anyone finer”: Dinah, Mach 4 (BABS, Sunday Afternoon Show 2012).

“Oklahoma/r/, Oklahoma”: Oklahoma, The Emerald Guard (BHS, International 2015).

“Santa Monica/r/, I swear”: Pink Pony Club, The Light Fantastic (LABBS, Mic Cool 2025).

Although English generally avoids a hiatus between two vowels, American English will simply tolerate it in this context. If a separating sound is needed, American speakers almost always use a glottal stop rather than /r/.

This difference is clear when we compare the chorus of Hallelujah, I Love Him So as performed by the British quartet Barberlicious (LABBS, Semifinal 2023) with the American quartet Dynasty (Sweet Adelines International, Semifinal 2023). The phrase “Halleluja/r/ I”, with a linking-r, not only sounds odd to American ears, but can be interpreted either as “Hallelujah rye” or as if a final /r/ has been inserted (i.e. as if the word were spelt Hallelujar).

This issue works in reverse as well. When American speakers attempt a British accent, it is crucial not only to learn the rule for dropping /r/, but also to understand the correct exceptions to that rule. This was the main challenge for David Zimmerman in his attempt at a British accent with Instant Classic (BABS, Show 2024). To sound convincingly British, he should have used a linking-r in the phrase: “it did get dodgy there fo/r/ a second though, didn’t it?”

BATH-Broadening

After the historic split from American English, Southern British English underwent a change in which certain words that once had the vowel of TRAP became lengthened and ‘broadened’ to the vowel of PALM. This group includes words such as bath, ask, pass, dance, gasp, staff, castle, lance, and can’t. Because this change occurred after the divergence from American English, it does not apply there — in American English, all these words retain the TRAP vowel [æ].

To hear this in context, let’s listen to a short excerpt of I Can’t Help Falling In Love With You, performed by the Irish chorus Athlone A Cappella (IABS, National Chorus Contest 2025).

This is a fascinating example because it brings together features from three different accents. Stylistically, the song is pure Americana: co-composed by three American songwriters and made famous by Elvis Presley on his Blue Hawaii album. Traditionally, we would expect can’t to be pronounced with the [æ] vowel of TRAP, yet here it is realised with a much more backed vowel [ɑː], typical of Southern British English.

Being Irish, the singers have no difficulty with rhoticity: the /r/ is consistently pronounced in all positions, as we would expect from Irish English speakers. Paradoxically, this rhoticity sounds distinctly American, while the broadened vowel in can’t sounds distinctly un-American.

What makes this particularly interesting is that general Irish English does not use a backed vowel in can’t; the usual Irish pronunciation is [aː], somewhere between American TRAP and FATHER. It seems the chorus had to choose between two options and opted for one that does not reflect any single consistent accent. The combination of American-style rhoticity with British-style BATH-broadening creates a slightly jarring effect, almost as if the chorus is not entirely settled on which accent they intend to produce.

The COT and CAUGHT Sets

For most Americans, father and bother rhyme, both using the same unrounded vowel [ɑ]. The distinction between the vowels of COT and CAUGHT is also gradually disappearing in American English — particularly in Eastern accents — as the lip-rounding of CAUGHT weakens. Nevertheless, many Americans still maintain a distinction between these vowels.

For British speakers, this is generally unproblematic because they already keep the vowels separate, but the challenge arises because the sets of words associated with each vowel in American English do not consistently match the sets in British English. The exact distribution depends on the speaker’s dialect, but it is common for words like cloth, boss, coffee, long, and dog to use the vowel of CAUGHT, rather than COT.

A practical anecdote comes from when Ciaran Wilson produced AI teach tracks for an arrangement of Part of a Painting. He applied American-style vowels but naturally sorted word sets according to the patterns of his own accent. Consequently, dock received the vowel of COT, all the vowel of CAUGHT — but what about dogs? Ciaran instinctively placed it in the COT set, whereas it should have been assigned to the CAUGHT set.

Another factor to consider is the openness of the vowel. In Southern British English, the CAUGHT/THOUGHT vowel is pronounced with a relatively high tongue and a closed jaw, sounding similar to the vowel in German oder or French bureau [oː]. In American English, by contrast, the tongue is lower and the jaw more open.

The difference in vowel height is quite striking when we compare two performances of When I Fall in Love: first by the British chorus Avon Harmony (LABBS, Chorus Competition 2019), and then by the American quartet After Hours (BHS, International 2016).

The members of After Hours are predominantly from a region of the USA that preserves a distinction between the vowels of COT and CAUGHT, and this is usually reflected in their singing — for example, fall retains some slight lip-rounding. Despite this, the British pronunciation of fall is still too high and rounded, and sounds very similar to the American pronunciation of full so that it could easily be misheard as such.

This can be clearly observed by comparing Avon Harmony’s fall with a recording of After Hours (BHS, International 2019) singing the word full in Fun and Fancy Free.

This vowel is not only more open in American English, but also in many Northern British accents. This difference allowed for a pun in the recent BBC comedy How Are You? It’s Alan (Partridge) (Series 1, Episode 3), where the phrase “Paul … over” in Partridge’s Southern accent is misheard by a Liverpudlian listener as “pullover”.

The STRUT-Schwa Merger

Many British English speakers maintain a subtle distinction between the STRUT vowel /ʌ/ and the weak vowel known as schwa /ǝ/ (the vowel at the end of words like comma). This means that the phrase “a large an’ tidy room” sounds different from “a large untidy room”.

Most North American English speakers no longer make this distinction: in weak positions the vowel is always [ǝ], though the jaw may open slightly ([ɐ]) in stressed positions or at the ends of words.

In this clip of Gimme Four performing their Jumpin’ Java Medley (BHS, International 2023), note that the second vowel in Java and the stressed vowel in cup are essentially identical.

One of the biggest challenges for Southern British groups is that making the STRUT vowel too open and far back can make it sound like the American LOT vowel [ɑ]. As a result, an American listener might hear hut as hot, and confusion can arise.

For example, compare the ballad Do I Love You? performed by the British group Ami Quartet (BABS, Semifinal 2024) with a performance by the American group Quorum (BHS, International 2022). In Ami’s rendition, the vowel in love is very open and back — so much so that it falls slightly outside the range of realisations that an American speaker might naturally produce. Quorum’s vowel in love, by contrast, is closer in quality to the second vowel of beautiful or wonderful. In this case, the risk of confusion is minimal, though other examples may present greater challenges.

In a small number of short, common words with a grammatical purpose — known as function words, such as the, was, and what — American English often uses the STRUT vowel even when the word is stressed.

We can hear this difference by comparing two performances of What’ll I Do?: one by the British chorus Mantunian Way (BABS, Chorus Competition 2017) and the other by the American quartet Platinum (BHS, International 2000). The vowels used in the word what’ll differ noticeably, so that the British pronunciation might sound slightly like waddle … I do to an American listener — an unfortunate coincidence that has inspired many jokes over the years.

The MARY-MARRY-MERRY Merger

I once spoke to an American who was genuinely surprised to learn that I pronounced all three words — Mary, marry, and merry — differently, and could not understand how this was possible. The merging of vowels before /r/ is fairly common in English (few speakers today pronounce north and force with distinct vowels, for example), but American English has taken this to an extreme, pronouncing Mary, marry, and merry all with the same vowel /er/, as in SQUARE. The following clip features the Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland saying “Merry Christmas”. The vowel is phonetically long, giving it a quality closer to Mary to a British ear. North American varieties lack the general systematic distinction between ‘long’ and ‘short’ vowels found in many British accents (only the quality of vowels, rather than the quantity, can carry the contrast).

American songwriters have sometimes played with the creative possibilities of this vowel merging — for instance, in the refrain of Mary Won’t Marry Me. A clear example can be heard in Max Q’s performance of Here’s To the Losers (BHS, International 2007), where the name Gary is rhymed with Terry, Harry, and Jerry.

As with all of these vowel mergers, the challenges work both ways. When Americans attempt a British accent, they need to un-merge these vowels correctly and consistently, restoring each word to its distinct set.

A clear example of a mistake in this regard can be heard in the YouTube video Google Translate Sings: Mary Poppins, in which the Texan singer Brian Hull pronounces the name Mary with the vowel of British marry [a] — a pronunciation that does not exist naturally in either British or American English.

Tudor musicologist David Skinner grew up in the USA but later moved to the UK, studying at Oxford University and eventually teaching at Cambridge University. His accent has now largely become a naturalised Southern British one, yet he still occasionally shows uncertainty over the Mary–marry–merry vowel sets.

In a podcast interview, he pronounces the name of Queen Mary I initially with the vowel of merry [ɛ], then with a vowel somewhere between merry and marry [æ], and finally with the vowel of marry [a] — never quite reaching the correct quality, which is the vowel of scary [ɛː].

A similar phenomenon occurs in American English before nasal sounds (/n/ and /m/) and is often called ‘ash-tensing’. It is particularly noticeable in this recording of But Thanks Be to God from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah, in which The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square pronounces the vowel in thanks closer to the [ɛ] of DRESS rather than the [æ] of TRAP. This can sound especially unusual to British listeners, who are accustomed to hearing their baroque music sung in British accents.

The Weak Vowel Merger

British English traditionally preserves a distinction between the unstressed vowels in Lennon and Lenin, so that the two words sound different. In North American English, this contrast is often lost: unstressed vowels are pronounced as a schwa [ǝ] in open syllables (when not followed by a consonant) and more like the weak [ɪ] in roses or wicked in closed syllables (when followed by a consonant). The result is that addition and edition become homophones, and paddock : nomadic, dig it : bigot, and abbot : rabbit form rhyming pairs.

Some songs originally composed or arranged by American English speakers rely on this weak vowel merger to make the rhymes work. For example, compare the rhyming couplet taken : makin’ in Aaron Dale’s arrangement of Georgia May, first performed by the British group Origami Dinosaurs (BABS, QuartetCon 2022) and then by the American group Crossroads (on the album Crossroads).

To their credit, the British group clearly recognised that a rhyming couplet was involved and did their best to make it work. However, the rhyme is not perfect, as the compromise leans in the wrong direction — towards [ǝ] when it should be closer to [ɪ].

Treatment of Loanwords

American English has a distinctive system for assigning vowels to words borrowed from other languages, which can differ significantly from British English. In American English, recent loanwords often follow a ‘one vowel fits all’ approach: the stressed syllables are assigned one of five long vowels based solely on the spelling, rather than the pronunciation in the original language. For example, pasta takes the vowel of FATHER /ɑ/, Pedro the vowel of FACE /ej/, Nissan the vowel of FLEECE /i/, baroque the vowel of GOAT /ow/, and Gustav the vowel of GOOSE /ʉ(w)/.

In British English, these same words generally receive short vowels, but there is much more variation, often influenced by the original language’s pronunciation. For instance, shruti gets a long vowel, while Gupta is pronounced with a short vowel.

When foreign loanwords appear in a song, it is therefore important to note how they are normally realised in American English. For example, compare the pronunciation of the Spanish word Diablo in two performances of If the Devil Danced in Empty Pockets: first by the British group Double Bluff (BABS, Semifinal 2023) and second by the American group Throwback (BHS, International 2018).

We can hear immediately that the British singers favour the TRAP vowel, whereas the Americans tend to use the FATHER vowel. This example is particularly complex because the original song is performed in a strong Southern-American accent and actually uses the TRAP vowel in Diablo. However, a quick survey of recordings on YouTube shows that the FATHER vowel is much more common in American Diablo more generally.

Since the ‘country’ style has largely been arranged out of this song for barbershop contest purposes, Diablo pronounced with the FATHER vowel, as in Throwback’s performance, may have been a more appropriate — or at least less distracting — choice. Decisions like this often need to be made on a case-by-case basis.

Allophony of Consonants

In English, a single consonant phoneme can have several different sounds depending on its context and position within a word. Linguists call this phenomenon allophony, and the individual sounds are called allophones.

A familiar example for many barbershoppers is the flapping of /t/ and /d/ in American English at the ends of syllables, which makes words like latter and ladder homophones, both pronounced with an alveolar tap [ɾ] (similar to the r in Spanish pero). The distinction between /t/ and /d/ is therefore lost in this position.

American songwriters frequently exploit this feature when composing rhymes. For example, the following clip demonstrates the couplet soda : quota in The Coffee Song, perfectly rhymed by Frank Sinatra (from the album Ring-A-Ding-Ding!).

The American chorus Ambassadors of Harmony performed Seaside Rendezvous by Queen using the arrangement of the British group The King’s Singers. While the original song already incorporates caricatured elements of Received Pronunciation (RP — the prestigious accent used on post-war British radio) to parody the aristocratic Victorian ‘Great British Seaside Holiday’ culture, The King’s Singers take this exaggeration further, since they generally sing in something approximating a modernised form of RP anyway.

As a result, the Ambassadors seemed uncertain whether to imitate the upper-crust RP or to follow Freddie Mercury’s more Americanised original. This led to some flapping patterns being applied inconsistently: for example, Freddie’s contempla[t]ing became contempla[ɾ]ing, and ma[ɾ]er became ma[t]er in the Ambassadors’s performance.

Another important type of allophony involves the consonant /l/. In British English, /l/ has a ‘light’ or ‘clear’ quality before a vowel, produced with just the tip of the tongue raised to the gums, and a dark quality [ɫ] before a pause or another consonant, where the back of the tongue also rises to make contact with the velum (or ‘soft palate’).

In American English, /l/ is somewhat different: it is never light, even before a vowel, but is always dark or velarised in this position. Before a consonant or a pause, it becomes even darker, with the tip of the tongue sometimes lowered and the back approaching the velum [ʟ] or even the uvula (the “dangly bit” at the back of the throat).

The British quartet Fifth Element (BABS, Swan Set 2024) demonstrate some excellent and convincing American /l/ sounds in their performance of the Spider Man Theme.

Because American English does not have a sound as clear as the British one, the British [l] can sometimes be misheard as another front consonant, such as /j/ (pronounced like the y in yes) — which is why I initially misheard Ami’s girl as guy. Otherwise, listeners must switch between the types of /l/ they expect to hear, depending on which accent they think they are interpreting, which can be quite confusing.

In fact, American /l/ can be so dark that even before vowels it may produce a slight friction at the back of the tongue against the velum or uvula. This feature is clearly audible in the following clip of lawyer David Rudolf speaking to his client Michael Peterson in the crime drama documentary The Staircase.

The darker resonance of velarised [ɫ] also influences nearby vowels, pulling them further back in the mouth. In British English, the vowel in full is pronounced back [ʊ] because the /l/ is dark, whereas in fully the vowel is fronter [ɵ] because the /l/ is light. In American English, this difference in the vowels disappears, since both instances of /l/ are dark.

This effect led the Manchester University Barbershop Singers (BABS, Mixed Chorus Contest 2024) to produce a notably un-American, overly fronted vowel in fully during the title refrain of You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile. The difference becomes obvious when compared to a clip of Theo Hicks, lead of the American quartet Instant Classic, pronouncing the same word in his regular speech.

What Does the Singing Category Say?

The SINGING Category Description [II. Elements of Singing, C. Unity, Page 7-4] has the following to say about ‘6. Diction and Articulation’:

[a] Diction is the choice of word sounds, or pronunciation, as well as the clarity of word sounds, or enunciation. Word sounds include primary and secondary vowel sounds, diphthongs, triphthongs, and consonants. Proper articulation is appropriate execution of those sounds, usually free of regional dialects and intelligible to the listener.

[b] Singers think words and phrases but do not sing words per se. They strive to provide the audience with a collection of sounds that they decode into understandable words. Part of the singer’s job is to determine all the sounds in a lyric line, ensure that the ensemble matches these word sounds, then execute those sounds in a way that allows the audience to easily decode the lyric and enjoy the ensemble’s enhanced expansion.

[c] Proper diction characteristics are clarity, accuracy, ease, uniformity, and expressiveness. Vowels make up a majority of all the sounds in vocal music; they should be true to the words being sung. Natural use of consonants is also very important to diction, as they carry the meaning of the words. They should not be overemphasized, dropped, or substituted inappropriately to attempt better sound flow. Singing them correctly helps to carry the voice, focus it, enhance its loudness, and supply emotion.

Conclusions

I will not attempt to interpret the Singing Category Description, nor to prescribe what kind of accent British barbershop ensembles should or should not use. My aim is simply to encourage groups to consider whether their pronunciation is clear and consistent, whether they are minimising the risk of confusion, distraction, or misinterpretation — particularly for panels of American judges — and whether their choices appropriately reflect the stylistic requirements of the music they have chosen to perform.

Some groups intentionally use a British accent because they prefer the sound, the sense of identity, or simply the comfort and familiarity it provides as British singers. However, the biggest challenge I have observed is that regularity, stability, and constancy in accent choice is sometimes lacking. The listener’s ear and brain are continually adjusting to interpret the linguistic cues correctly, which can distract from the semantic content of the lyrics.

For example, in a performance by the British quartet Trailblazers (BABS, Final 2023), the pronunciation frequently shifts between American and British English. Whether this kind of experimentation is engaging or distracting is ultimately for each individual listener to decide.

The potential pitfalls of this approach might be exemplified by the following clips from Meantime Chorus’s performance of Wait a Bit (BABS, Male Chorus Contest 2024), where inconsistencies in accent create room for misinterpretation.

If it is unclear whether British or American pronunciations are intended, then when not and more are sung with the same vowel (as in the first clip), not is likely to be heard as naught by an American listener — especially if the rhoticity in more cues the ear towards American English. Later in the same performance, if not is sung with a different vowel (as it is in the second clip), and can’t adopts this vowel as well, can’t may be misheard as conned — particularly since a combination of not and can’t both with [ɑ] does not exist in any native English accent.

British listeners are less likely to find these examples confusing, and even American ears can usually resolve the ambiguity from context. Nonetheless, such inconsistencies can be momentarily distracting, and not every listener will regard the risk as worthwhile.

If actors are held to extremely high standards when it comes to the authenticity of their accents, then there seems no reason why singers at the top level should be any different. The question of lyrical intelligibility is crucial, and an American attempt at British English would likely be just as confusing unless the subtleties were mastered. It is taxing for a listener to have to keep adjusting how they are hearing a performance depending on which accent they think they are meant to be interpreting. Even brief moments of inconsistency can divert a judge’s attention away from the music, as they pause — if only for a second or two — to work out what word they just heard. It is not a major issue and is unlikely to cost many (if any) points, but since the category descriptions all emphasise ‘minimising distractions’, anything that could momentarily interrupt immersion in the performance seems worthy of consideration.

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I would like to clarify that the audio clips presented in this post are not intended as criticism or disapproval of any of the groups in question. They are provided purely as sound samples for objective linguistic study and should be taken at face value.