American English, 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. It is an official language in 32 of the 50 U.S. states and the de facto common language used in government, education, and commerce in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and in all territories except Puerto Rico. Since the late 20th century, American English has become the most influential form of English worldwide.
Canadian English encompasses the varieties of English used in Canada. According to the 2016 census, English was the first language of 19.4 million Canadians or 58.1% of the total population; the remainder spoke French (20.8%) or other languages (21.1%). In the Canadian province of Quebec, only 7.5% of the population are mother tongue anglophone, as most of Quebec's residents are native speakers of Quebec French.
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the British English accent regarded as the standard one, carrying the highest social prestige, since as late as the very early 20th century. It has also been referred to as Queen's English or King's English. The study of RP is concerned only with matters of pronunciation, while other features of standard British English, such as vocabulary, grammar, and style, are not considered.
General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American, is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, 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. The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Some scholars prefer other names, such as Standard American English.
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.
New Orleans English is American English native to the city of New Orleans and its metropolitan area. Native English speakers of the region actually speak a number of varieties, including the variety most recently brought in and spreading since the 20th century among white communities of the Southern United States in general ; the variety primarily spoken by black residents ; the variety spoken by Cajuns in southern Louisiana ; the variety traditionally spoken by affluent white residents of the city's Uptown and Garden District; and the variety traditionally spoken by lower middle- and working-class white residents of Eastern New Orleans, particularly the Ninth Ward. However, only the last two varieties are unique to New Orleans and are typically those referred to in the academic research as "New Orleans English". These two varieties specific to New Orleans likely developed around the turn of the nineteenth century and most noticeably combine speech features commonly associated with both New York City English and, to a lesser extent, Southern U.S. English. The noticeably New York-like characteristics include the NYC-like short-a split, non-rhoticity, th-stopping, and the recently disappearing coil–curl merger. Noticeably Southern characteristics include the fronting of and possible monophthongization of.
A drawl is a perceived feature of some varieties of spoken English and generally indicates slower, longer vowel sounds and diphthongs. The drawl is often perceived as a method of speaking more slowly and may be erroneously attributed to laziness or fatigue. That particular speech pattern exists primarily in varieties of English, the most noticeable of which are Southern American English, Broad Australian English, Broad New Zealand English, and East Midlands English. The word "drawl" is believed to have its origin in the 1590-1600s Dutch or Low German word "dralen" /ˈdraːlə(n)/, meaning "to linger."
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.
California English is the collection of English dialects native to California, largely classified under Western American English. Most Californians speak with a General American accent; alternatively viewed, possibly due to unconscious linguistic prestige, California accents may themselves be serving as a baseline to define the accents that are perceived as "General American". In fact, several vowel features first reported in the 1980s in urban coastal California—including the California Vowel Shift—are becoming common among younger generations across the nation, according to 21st century research.
The TRAP–BATH split is a vowel split that occurs mainly in Southern England English, Australian English, New Zealand English, Indian English, South African English and to a lesser extent in some Welsh English as well as older Northeastern New England English by which the Early Modern English phoneme was lengthened in certain environments and ultimately merged with the long of PALM. In that context, the lengthened vowel in words such as bath, laugh, grass and chance in accents affected by the split is referred to as a broad A. Phonetically, the vowel is in Received Pronunciation (RP), Cockney and Estuary English; in some other accents, including Australian and New Zealand accents, it is a more fronted vowel and tends to be a rounded and shortened in Broad South African English. A trap–bath split also occurs in the accents of the Middle Atlantic United States, but it results in very different vowel qualities to the aforementioned British-type split. To avoid confusion, the Middle Atlantic American split is usually referred to in American linguistics as a 'short-a split'.
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 north 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, Vineland, Wilmington, and Dover. Philadelphia English is one of the best-studied varieties 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.
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.
Older Southern American English is a diverse set of English dialects of the Southern United States spoken most widely up until the American Civil War of the 1860s, gradually transforming among its White speakers—possibly first due to postwar economy-driven migrations—up until the mid-20th century. By then, these local dialects had largely consolidated into, or been replaced by, a more regionally unified Southern American English. Meanwhile, among Black Southerners, these dialects transformed into a fairly stable African-American Vernacular English, now spoken nationwide among Black people. Certain features unique to older Southern U.S. English persist today, like non-rhoticity, though typically only among Black speakers or among very localized White speakers.
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.
Northern American English or Northern U.S. English is a class of historically related American English dialects, spoken by predominantly white Americans, in much of the Great Lakes region and some of the Northeast region within the United States. The North as a superdialect region is best documented by the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE) in the greater metropolitan areas of Connecticut, Western Massachusetts, Western and Central New York, Northwestern New Jersey, Northeastern Pennsylvania, Northern Ohio, Northern Indiana, Northern Illinois, Northeastern Nebraska, and Eastern South Dakota, plus among certain demographics or areas within Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Vermont, and New York's Hudson Valley. The ANAE describes that the North, at its core, consists of the Inland Northern dialect and Southwestern New England dialect.
Transatlantic, Trans-Atlantic or TransAtlantic may refer to:
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 phonetic environments. 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, 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, because it is followed by a vowel.
The distinction between broad and general accents is a socio-economic-linguistic contrast made between different accents of the same language, typically spoken in a single geographical location and perceived by the language users themselves:
A Northeastern elite accent is any of the related American English accents used by members of the wealthy Northeastern elite born between the 19th century and early 20th century, which share significant features with Eastern New England English and Received Pronunciation (RP), the standard British accent. The late 19th century first produced audio recordings of and general commentary about such accents used by affluent East Coast and Northern Americans, particularly New Yorkers and New Englanders, sometimes directly associated with their education at private preparatory schools. Scholars traditionally describe these accents as prescribed or affected ways of speaking explicitly taught in elite schools of that era, though the linguist Geoff Lindsey argues that such accents emerged naturally as an upper-class sociolect; the linguist John McWhorter expresses a middle-ground possibility.
Good American Speech was a consciously learned accent of English promoted in certain American courses on elocution, voice, and acting from the early to mid-20th century. As a result, it became associated with particular announcers and Hollywood actors, mostly in recorded media from the 1920s to 1950s. This speaking style was especially influenced by and overlapped with Northeastern elite accents from that era and earlier. Due to conflation of the two types of accents, both are most commonly known as a Mid-Atlantic accent or Transatlantic accent. Promoters of such accents additionally incorporated features from Received Pronunciation, the prestige accent of British English, in an effort to make them sound like they transcended regional and even national borders.
