General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm), is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. [1] [2] [3] It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, [4] or from the (North) Midland, Western New England, and Western regions of the country are the most likely to be perceived as using General American speech. [5] [6] [7] The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, [8] [9] [10] and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. [8] [11] Some scholars prefer other names, such as Standard American English. [12] [4]
Standard Canadian English accents may be considered to fall under General American, [13] especially in opposition to the United Kingdom's Received Pronunciation. Noted phonetician John C. Wells, for instance, claimed in 1982 that typical Canadian English accents align with General American in nearly every situation where British and American accents differ. [14]
The term "General American" was first disseminated by American English scholar George Philip Krapp, who in 1925 described it as an American type of speech that was "Western" but "not local in character". [15] In 1930, American linguist John Samuel Kenyon, who largely popularized the term, considered it equivalent to the speech of "the North" or "Northern American", [15] but, in 1934, "Western and Midwestern". [16] Now typically regarded as falling under the General American umbrella are the regional accents of the West, [17] [18] Western New England, [19] and the North Midland (a band spanning central Ohio, central Indiana, central Illinois, northern Missouri, southern Iowa, and southeastern Nebraska), [20] [21] plus the accents of highly educated Americans nationwide. [4] Arguably, all Canadian English accents west of Quebec are also General American, [13] though Canadian vowel raising and certain other features may serve to distinguish such accents from U.S. ones. [22] William Labov et al.'s 2006 Atlas of North American English put together a scattergram based on the formants of vowel sounds, finding the Midland U.S., Western Pennsylvania, Western U.S., and Canada to be closest to the center of the scattergram, and concluding that they had fewer marked dialectical features than other regional accents of North American English, such as New York City or the Southern U.S.
Regarded as having General American accents in the earlier 20th century, but not by the middle of the 20th century, are the Mid-Atlantic United States, [5] the Inland Northern United States, [23] and Western Pennsylvania. [5] However, many younger speakers within the Inland North seem to be moving back away from the Northern Cities Shift of front lax vowels that were rising. [24] [25] [26] [27] Accents that have never been labeled "General American", even since the term's popularization in the 1930s, are the regional accents (especially the r-dropping ones) of Eastern New England, New York City, and the American South. [28] In 1982, British phonetician John C. Wells wrote that two-thirds of the American population spoke with a General American accent. [12]
English-language scholar William A. Kretzschmar Jr. explains in a 2004 article that the term "General American" came to refer to "a presumed most common or 'default' form of American English, especially to be distinguished from marked regional speech of New England or the South" and referring especially to speech associated with the vaguely-defined "Midwest", despite any historical or present evidence supporting this notion. Kretzschmar argues that a General American accent is simply the result of American speakers suppressing regional and social features that have become widely noticed and stigmatized. [29]
Since calling one variety of American speech the "general" variety can imply privileging and prejudice, Kretzchmar instead promotes the term Standard American English, which he defines as a level of American English pronunciation "employed by educated speakers in formal settings", while still being variable within the U.S. from place to place, and even from speaker to speaker. [4] However, the term "standard" may also be interpreted as problematically implying a superior or "best" form of speech. [30] The terms Standard North American English and General North American English, in an effort to incorporate Canadian speakers under the accent continuum, have also been suggested by sociolinguist Charles Boberg. [31] [32] Since the 2000s, Mainstream American English has also been occasionally used, particularly in scholarly articles that contrast it with African-American English. [33] [34]
Modern language scholars discredit the original notion of General American as a single unified accent, or a standardized form of English [8] [11] —except perhaps as used by television networks and other mass media. [23] [35] Today, the term is understood to refer to a continuum of American speech, with some slight internal variation, [8] but otherwise characterized by the absence of "marked" pronunciation features: those perceived by Americans as strongly indicative of a fellow American speaker's regional origin, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. Despite confusion arising from the evolving definition and vagueness of the term "General American" and its consequent rejection by some linguists, [36] the term persists mainly as a reference point to compare a baseline "typical" American English accent with other Englishes around the world (for instance, see Comparison of General American and Received Pronunciation). [8]
Though General American accents are not commonly perceived as associated with any region, their sound system does have traceable regional origins: specifically, the English of the non-coastal Northeastern United States in the very early 20th century, which was relatively stable since that region's original settlement by English speakers in the mid-19th century. [37] This includes western New England and the area to its immediate west, settled by members of the same dialect community: [38] interior Pennsylvania, Upstate New York, and the adjacent "Midwest" or Great Lakes region. However, since the early to mid-20th century, [23] [39] deviance away from General American sounds started occurring, and may be ongoing, in the eastern Great Lakes region due to its Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS) towards a unique Inland Northern accent (often now associated with the region's urban centers, like Chicago and Detroit) and in the western Great Lakes region towards a unique North Central accent (often associated with Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota).
Linguists have proposed multiple factors contributing to the popularity of a rhotic "General American" class of accents throughout the United States. Most factors focus on the first half of the twentieth century, though a basic General American pronunciation system may have existed even before the twentieth century, since most American English dialects have diverged very little from each other anyway, when compared to dialects of single languages in other countries where there has been more time for language change (such as the English dialects of England or German dialects of Germany). [40]
One factor fueling General American's popularity was the major demographic change of twentieth-century American society: increased suburbanization, leading to less mingling of different social classes and less density and diversity of linguistic interactions. As a result, wealthier and higher-educated Americans' communications became more restricted to their own demographic. This, alongside their new marketplace that transcended regional boundaries (arising from the century's faster transportation methods), reinforced a widespread belief that highly educated Americans should not possess a regional accent. [41] A General American sound, then, originated from both suburbanization and suppression of regional accent by highly educated Americans in formal settings. A second factor was a rise in immigration to the Great Lakes area (one native region of supposed "General American" speech) following the region's rapid industrialization period after the American Civil War, when this region's speakers went on to form a successful and highly mobile business elite, who traveled around the country in the mid-twentieth century, spreading the high status of their accents. [42] A third factor is that various sociological (often race- and class-based) forces repelled socially-conscious Americans away from accents negatively associated with certain minority groups, such as African Americans and poor white communities in the South and with Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups (for example, Jewish communities) in the coastal Northeast. [43] Instead, socially-conscious Americans settled upon accents more prestigiously associated with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities in the remainder of the country: namely, the West, the Midwest, and the non-coastal Northeast. [44]
Kenyon, author of American Pronunciation (1924) and pronunciation editor for the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary (1934), was influential in codifying General American pronunciation standards in writing. He used as a basis his native Midwestern (specifically, northern Ohio) pronunciation. [45] Kenyon's home state of Ohio, however, far from being an area of "non-regional" accents, has emerged now as a crossroads for at least four distinct regional accents, according to late twentieth-century research. [46] Furthermore, Kenyon himself was vocally opposed to the notion of any superior variety of American speech. [47]
General American, like the British Received Pronunciation (RP) and prestige accents of many other societies, has never been the accent of the entire nation, and, unlike RP, does not constitute a homogeneous national standard. Starting in the 1930s, nationwide radio networks adopted non-coastal Northern U.S. rhotic pronunciations for their "General American" standard. [48] The entertainment industry similarly shifted from a non-rhotic standard to a rhotic one in the late 1940s, after the triumph of the Second World War, with the patriotic incentive for a more wide-ranging and unpretentious "heartland variety" in television and radio. [49]
General American is thus sometimes associated with the speech of North American radio and television announcers, promoted as prestigious in their industry, [50] [51] where it is sometimes called "Broadcast English" [52] "Network English", [23] [53] [54] [55] or "Network Standard". [2] [54] [56] Instructional classes in the United States that promise "accent reduction", "accent modification", or "accent neutralization" usually attempt to teach General American patterns. [57] Television journalist Linda Ellerbee states that "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere", [58] and political comedian Stephen Colbert says he consciously avoided developing a Southern American accent in response to media portrayals of Southerners as stupid and uneducated. [50] [51]
Typical General American accent features (for example, in contrast to British English) include features that concern consonants, such as rhoticity (full pronunciation of all /r/ sounds), pre-nasal T-glottalization (with satin pronounced [ˈsæʔn̩], not [ˈsætn̩]), T- and D-flapping (with metal and medal pronounced the same, as [ˈmɛɾɫ̩]), L-velarization between word-internal vowels (with filling pronounced [ˈfɪɫɪŋ], not [ˈfɪlɪŋ]), yod-dropping after alveolar consonants (with new pronounced /nu/, not /nju/), as well as features that concern vowel sounds, such as various vowel mergers before /r/ (so that Mary, marry, and merry are all commonly pronounced the same), raising of pre-voiceless /aɪ/ (with price and bright using a higher and shorter vowel sound than prize and bride), raising and gliding of pre-nasal /æ/ (with man having a higher and tenser vowel sound than map), the weak vowel merger (with affecting and effecting often pronounced the same), and at least one of the LOT vowel mergers (the LOT–PALM merger is complete among most Americans and the LOT–THOUGHT merger among at least half). All of these phenomena are explained in further detail under American English's phonology section. The following provides all the General American consonant and vowel sounds.
A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:
Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Post- alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||||||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nasal | m | n | ŋ | |||||||||||
Stop | p | b | t | d | k | ɡ | ||||||||
Affricate | tʃ | dʒ | ||||||||||||
Fricative | f | v | θ | ð | s | z | ʃ | ʒ | h | |||||
Approximant | l | r | j | ( ʍ ) | w |
Front | Central | Back | ||||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
lax | tense | lax | tense | lax | tense | |
Close | ɪ | i | ʊ | u | ||
Mid | ɛ | eɪ | ə | ( ʌ ) | oʊ | |
Open | æ | ɑ | ( ɔ ) | |||
Diphthongs | aɪ ɔɪ aʊ |
Following consonant | Example words [67] | New York City, New Orleans [68] | Baltimore, Philadelphia [69] | Midland US, New England, Pittsburgh, Western US | Southern US | Canada, Northern Mountain US | Minnesota, Wisconsin | Great Lakes US | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Non-prevocalic /m,n/ | fan, lamb, stand | [ɛə] [70] [A] [B] | [ɛə] [70] | [ɛə~ɛjə] [73] | [ɛə] [74] | [ɛə] [75] | |||
Prevocalic /m,n/ | animal, planet, Spanish | [ æ ] | |||||||
/ŋ/ [76] | frank, language | [ɛː~eɪ~æ] [77] | [æ~æɛə] [73] | [ɛː~ɛj] [74] | [eː~ej] [78] | ||||
Non-prevocalic /ɡ/ | bag, drag | [ɛə] [A] | [ æ ] [C] | [ æ ] [70] [D] | |||||
Prevocalic /ɡ/ | dragon, magazine | [ æ ] | |||||||
Non-prevocalic /b,d,ʃ/ | grab, flash, sad | [ɛə] [A] | [æ] [D] [80] | [ɛə] [80] | |||||
Non-prevocalic /f,θ,s/ | ask, bath, half, glass | [ɛə] [A] | |||||||
Otherwise | as, back, happy, locality | [ æ ] [E] | |||||||
|
Received Pronunciation | General American | Metropolitan New York, Philadelphia, some Southern US, some New England | Canada | |
---|---|---|---|---|
Only borrow, sorrow, sorry, (to)morrow | /ɒr/ | /ɑːr/ | /ɒr/ or /ɑːr/ | /ɔːr/ |
Forest, Florida, historic, moral, porridge, etc. | /ɔːr/ | |||
Forum, memorial, oral, storage, story, etc. | /ɔːr/ | /ɔːr/ |
The 2006 Atlas of North American English surmises that "if one were to recognize a type of North American English to be called 'General American'" according to data measurements of vowel pronunciations, "it would be the configuration formed by these three" dialect regions: Canada, the American West, and the American Midland. [89] The following charts present the vowels that converge across these three dialect regions to form an unmarked or generic American English sound system.
Wikipedia's IPA diaphoneme | Wells's GenAm phoneme | GenAm realization | Example words |
---|---|---|---|
/æ/ | [ æ ]( )[90] | bath, trap, yak | |
[eə~ɛə] [91] [92] [93] | ban, tram, sand (pre-nasal /æ/ tensing) | ||
/ɑː/ | /ɑ/ | [ɑ~ɑ̈]( )[94] | ah, father, spa |
/ɒ/ | bother, lot, wasp (father–bother merger) | ||
/ɔ/ | [ɑ~ɔ̞~ɒ]( )[94] [95] | boss, cloth, dog, off (lot–cloth split) | |
/ɔː/ | all, bought, flaunt (cot–caught variability) | ||
/oʊ/ | /o/ | [oʊ~ɔʊ~ʌʊ~o̞]( )[96] [97] [98] | goat, home, toe |
/ɛ/ | [ɛ]( )[90] | dress, met, bread | |
/eɪ/ | [e̞ɪ~eɪ]( )[90] | lake, paid, feint | |
/ə/ | [ə~ɐ~ʌ] [61] ( ) | about, oblige, arena | |
[ɨ~ɪ~ə] [99] ( ) | ballad, focus, harmony (weak vowel merger) | ||
/ɪ/ | [ɪ~ɪ̞] [100] ( ) | kit, pink, tip | |
/iː/ | /i/ | [i~ɪ̝i]( )[90] [ failed verification ] | beam, chic, fleece |
happy, money, parties (happY tensing) | |||
/ʌ/ | [ʌ̟~ʌ]( ) | bus, flood, what | |
/ʊ/ | [ ʊ̞ ]( )[100] | book, put, should | |
/uː/ | /u/ | [u̟~ʊu~ʉu~ɵu]( )[101] [97] [102] [96] | goose, new, true |
Wikipedia's IPA diaphoneme | GenAm realization | Example words |
---|---|---|
/aɪ/ | [äːɪ]( )[96] | bride, prize, tie |
[äɪ~ɐɪ~ʌ̈ɪ]( )[103] | bright, price, tyke (price raising) | |
/aʊ/ | [aʊ~æʊ]( )[90] | now, ouch, scout |
/ɔɪ/ | [ɔɪ~oɪ]( )[90] | boy, choice, moist |
Wikipedia's IPA diaphoneme | GenAm realization | Example words |
---|---|---|
/ɑːr/ | [ɑɹ]( ) | barn, car, park |
/ɛər/ | [ɛəɹ]( ) | bare, bear, there |
[ɛ(ə)ɹ] | bearing | |
/ɜːr/ | [ ɚ ]( ) | burn, first, murder |
/ər/ | murder | |
/ɪər/ | [iəɹ~ɪəɹ]( ) | fear, peer, tier |
[i(ə)ɹ~ɪ(ə)ɹ] | fearing, peering | |
/ɔːr/ | [ɔəɹ~oəɹ]( )[106] | horse, storm, war |
hoarse, store, wore | ||
/ʊər/ | [ʊəɹ~oəɹ~ɔəɹ]( ) | moor, poor, tour |
[ʊ(ə)ɹ~o(ə)ɹ~ɔ(ə)ɹ] | poorer |
American English (AmE), sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. English is the most widely spoken language in the United States; the de facto common language used in government, education and commerce; and an official language of most U.S. states. Since the late 20th century, American English has become the most influential form of English worldwide.
Canadian raising is an allophonic rule of phonology in many varieties of North American English that changes the pronunciation of diphthongs with open-vowel starting points. Most commonly, the shift affects or, or both, when they are pronounced before voiceless consonants. In North American English, and usually begin in an open vowel [~], but through raising they shift to, or. Canadian English often has raising in words with both and, while a number of American English varieties have this feature in but not. It is thought to have originated in Canada in the late 19th century.
The phonology of the open back vowels of the English language has undergone changes both overall and with regional variations, through Old and Middle English to the present. The sounds heard in modern English were significantly influenced by the Great Vowel Shift, as well as more recent developments in some dialects such as the cot–caught merger.
Southern American English or Southern U.S. English is a regional dialect or collection of dialects of American English spoken throughout the Southern United States, primarily by White Southerners and increasingly concentrated in more rural areas. As of 2000s research, its most innovative accents include southern Appalachian and certain Texan accents. Such research has described Southern American English as the largest American regional accent group by number of speakers. More formal terms then developed to characterize this dialect within American linguistics include "Southern White Vernacular English" and "Rural White Southern English". However, more commonly in the United States, the variety is known as the Southern accent or simply Southern.
A Baltimore accent, also known as Baltimorese and sometimes humorously spelled Bawlmerese or Ballimorese, is an accent or sub-variety of Delaware Valley English that originates among blue-collar residents of Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It extends into the Baltimore metropolitan area and northeastern Maryland.
Eastern New England English, historically known as the Yankee dialect since at least the 19th century, is the traditional regional dialect of Maine, New Hampshire, and the eastern half of Massachusetts. Features of this variety once spanned an even larger dialect area of New England, for example, including the eastern halves of Vermont and Connecticut for those born as late as the early twentieth century. Studies vary as to whether the unique dialect of Rhode Island technically falls within the Eastern New England dialect region.
In English, many vowel shifts affect only vowels followed by in rhotic dialects, or vowels that were historically followed by that has been elided in non-rhotic dialects. Most of them involve the merging of vowel distinctions and so fewer vowel phonemes occur before than in other positions of a word.
Philadelphia English or Delaware Valley English is a variety or dialect of American English native to Philadelphia and extending into Philadelphia's metropolitan area throughout the Delaware Valley, including southeastern Pennsylvania, all of South Jersey, counties of northern Delaware, and the northern Eastern Shore of Maryland. Aside from Philadelphia and the surrounding counties and arguably Baltimore, the dialect is spoken in places such as Reading, Camden, Atlantic City, Wilmington, Vineland, and Dover. Philadelphia English is one of the best-studied types of English, as Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania is the home institution of pioneering sociolinguist William Labov. Philadelphia English shares certain features with New York City English and Midland American English, although it remains a distinct dialect of its own. Philadelphia and Baltimore accents together fall under what Labov describes as a single Mid-Atlantic regional dialect.
In the history of English phonology, there have been many diachronic sound changes affecting vowels, especially involving phonemic splits and mergers. A number of these changes are specific to vowels which occur before, especially in cases where the is at the end of a syllable.
North American English regional phonology is the study of variations in the pronunciation of spoken North American English —what are commonly known simply as "regional accents". Though studies of regional dialects can be based on multiple characteristics, often including characteristics that are phonemic, phonetic, lexical (vocabulary-based), and syntactic (grammar-based), this article focuses only on the former two items. North American English includes American English, which has several highly developed and distinct regional varieties, along with the closely related Canadian English, which is more homogeneous geographically. American English and Canadian English have more in common with each other than with varieties of English outside North America.
The cot–caught merger, also known as the LOT–THOUGHT merger or low back merger, is a sound change present in some dialects of English where speakers do not distinguish the vowel phonemes in words like cot versus caught. Cot and caught is an example of a minimal pair that is lost as a result of this sound change. The phonemes involved in the cot–caught merger, the low back vowels, are typically represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as and or, in North America, as and. The merger is typical of most Indian, Canadian, and Scottish English dialects as well as some Irish and U.S. English dialects.
New England English is, collectively, the various distinct dialects and varieties of American English originating in the New England area. Most of eastern and central New England once spoke the "Yankee dialect", some of whose accent features still remain in Eastern New England today, such as "R-dropping". Accordingly, one linguistic division of New England is into Eastern versus Western New England English, as defined in the 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England and the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE). The ANAE further argues for a division between Northern versus Southern New England English, especially on the basis of the cot–caught merger and fronting. The ANAE also categorizes the strongest differentiated New England accents into four combinations of the above dichotomies, simply defined as follows:
Inland Northern (American) English, also known in American linguistics as the Inland North or Great Lakes dialect, is an American English dialect spoken primarily by White Americans in a geographic band reaching from the major urban areas of Upstate New York westward along the Erie Canal and through much of the U.S. Great Lakes region. The most distinctive Inland Northern accents are spoken in Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, and Syracuse. The dialect can be heard as far west as eastern Iowa and even among certain demographics in the Twin Cities, Minnesota. Some of its features have also infiltrated a geographic corridor from Chicago southwest along historic Route 66 into St. Louis, Missouri; today, the corridor shows a mixture of both Inland North and Midland American accents. Linguists often characterize the western Great Lakes region's dialect separately as North-Central American English.
Western American English is a variety of American English that largely unites the entire Western United States as a single dialect region, including the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. It also generally encompasses Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, some of whose speakers are classified additionally under Pacific Northwest English.
Midland American English is a regional dialect or super-dialect of American English, geographically lying between the traditionally-defined Northern and Southern United States. The boundaries of Midland American English are not entirely clear, being revised and reduced by linguists due to definitional changes and several Midland sub-regions undergoing rapid and diverging pronunciation shifts since the early-middle 20th century onwards.
The sound system of New York City English is popularly known as a New York accent. The accent of the New York metropolitan area is one of the most recognizable in the United States, largely due to its popular stereotypes and portrayal in radio, film, and television. Several other common names exist based on more specific locations, such as Bronx accent, Brooklyn accent, Queens accent, Long Island accent, North Jersey accent. Research supports the continued classification of all these under a single label, despite some common assumptions among locals that they meaningfully differ.
The distinction between rhoticity and non-rhoticity is one of the most prominent ways in which varieties of the English language are classified. In rhotic accents, the sound of the historical English rhotic consonant,, is preserved in all pronunciation contexts. In non-rhotic accents, speakers no longer pronounce in postvocalic environments: when it is immediately after a vowel and not followed by another vowel. For example, in isolation, a rhotic English speaker pronounces the words hard and butter as /ˈhɑːrd/ and /ˈbʌtər/, but a non-rhotic speaker "drops" or "deletes" the sound and pronounces them as /ˈhɑːd/ and /ˈbʌtə/. When an r is at the end of a word but the next word begins with a vowel, as in the phrase "better apples," most non-rhotic speakers will preserve the in that position since it is followed by a vowel in this case.
Standard Canadian English is the largely homogeneous variety of Canadian English that is spoken particularly across Ontario and Western Canada, as well as throughout Canada among urban middle-class speakers from English-speaking families, excluding the regional dialects of Atlantic Canadian English. Canadian English has a mostly uniform phonology and much less dialectal diversity than neighbouring American English. In particular, Standard Canadian English is defined by the cot–caught merger to and an accompanying chain shift of vowel sounds, which is called the Canadian Shift. A subset of the dialect geographically at its central core, excluding British Columbia to the west and everything east of Montreal, has been called Inland Canadian English. It is further defined by both of the phenomena that are known as Canadian raising : the production of and with back starting points in the mouth and the production of with a front starting point and very little glide that is almost in the Canadian Prairies.
Western New England English refers to the varieties of New England English native to Vermont, Connecticut, and the western half of Massachusetts; New York State's Hudson Valley also aligns to this classification. Sound patterns historically associated with Western New England English include the features of rhoticity, the horse–hoarse merger, and the father–bother merger, none of which are features traditionally shared in neighboring Eastern New England English. The status of the cot–caught merger in Western New England is inconsistent, being complete in the north of this dialect region (Vermont), but incomplete or absent in the south, with a "cot–caught approximation" in the middle area.
In the sociolinguistics of the English language, raising or short-a raising is a phenomenon by which the "short a" vowel, the TRAP/BATH vowel, is pronounced with a raising of the tongue. In most American and many Canadian English accents, raising is specifically tensing: a combination of greater raising, fronting, lengthening, and gliding that occurs only in certain phonological environments or certain words. The most common context for tensing throughout North American English, regardless of dialect, is when this vowel appears before a nasal consonant.