'Saying Things That You Can't Say Tomorrow Day'

Abstract

This article investigates whether Arctic Monkeys frontman Alex Turner’s use of northern English linguistic features decreased from the band’s first album Whatever People Say I am, That's What I'm Not (WPS) (2006) to their fifth album AM (2013); whether this was because Turner began to accommodate to American audiences instead of British audiences. An auditory analysis of two songs from each album was conducted to see if Turner’s use of glottalisation and th-fronting, typical northern English variants, changed. The results showed a clear decline in Turner’s use of northern English linguistic features between the two albums. The article concludes that British youth was the intended audience in WPS, but it is unclear who the intended audience is in AM as Turner continued to use other non-standard features that index Turner’s British roots.