Did America Invade The Beatles as they invaded America? - A comparative analysis on The Beatles' accent in former and later years

Resumo

The present study aims to understand why some British singers sound like Americans when they sing, using, as an example, the Liverpool band The Beatles. Also, it tends to verify if there are any accent changes in the beginning and in the end of The Beatles’ career. In order to have an overview of the band, eight songs from two different albums, which represent those two different phases of the band - With The Beatles (1963) and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) - were analyzed and compared taking into account the variants of two phonemes (the consonants r and t) in the standard varieties of English from America and Britain. Findings suggest that, although there are oscillations between American and British accents in both albums, With The Beatles has more incidences of words pronounced with an American accent than Sgt. Pepper’s.  Therefore, the paper discusses some possible reasons for these changes in accent and tries to reflect about this phenomenon relating it to the movement of British Invasion in the USA in the 60s.