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.
North American English encompasses the English language as spoken in both the United States and Canada. Because of their related histories and cultures, plus the similarities between the pronunciations (accents), vocabulary, and grammar of U.S. English and Canadian English, linguists often group the two together. Canadians are generally tolerant of both British and U.S. spellings, although certain words always take British spellings and others U.S. spellings.
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.
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.
A vowel shift is a systematic sound change in the pronunciation of the vowel sounds of a language.
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.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the English language.
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.
North-Central American English is an American English dialect, or dialect in formation, native to the Upper Midwestern United States, an area that somewhat overlaps with speakers of the separate Inland Northern dialect situated more in the eastern Great Lakes region. In the United States, it is also known as the Upper Midwestern or North-Central dialect and stereotypically recognized as a Minnesota accent or sometimes Wisconsin accent. It is considered to have developed in a residual dialect region from the neighboring Western, Inland Northern, and Canadian dialect regions.
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 cities such as Reading, Camden, Atlantic City, Vineland, Wilmington, and Dover. Philadelphia English is one of the best-studied varieties of North American English, as Philadelphia's University of Pennsylvania was 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 described 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.
Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar phonological system. Among other things, most dialects have vowel reduction in unstressed syllables and a complex set of phonological features that distinguish fortis and lenis consonants.
In the history of English phonology, there have been many diachronic sound changes affecting vowels, especially involving phonemic splits and mergers.
The Low-Back-Merger Shift is a chain shift of vowel sounds found in several dialects of North American English, beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century and most significantly involving the low back merger accompanied by the lowering and backing of the front lax vowels:, , and.
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.
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, short-a raising, or bath 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.
