General American English
General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American, is the umbrella accent of American English used 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 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, though this can be a wider term encompassing more than just accent.
Standard Canadian English accents may be considered to fall under General American, 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.Consonants
A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:Pronunciation of R
The phoneme is pronounced as a postalveolar approximant or retroflex approximant, but a unique "bunched tongue" variant of the sound is also associated with the United States, perhaps mostly in the Midwest and the South. All these variants exhibit various degrees of labialization and pharyngealization.Rhoticity
Full rhoticity is typical of American accents, in which is pronounced in all historical environments spelled with the letter. This includes in syllable-final position or before a consonant, such as in pearl, car and fort, whereas most speakers in England do not pronounce this in these environments and so are called non-rhotic. Non-rhotic American accents, such as some accents of Eastern New England, New York City, and African-Americans, and a specific few spoken by Southerners, are often quickly noticed by General American listeners and perceived as sounding especially ethnic, regional, or antiquated.
Rhoticity is common in most American accents despite being now rare in England because, during the 17th-century British colonization of the Americas, nearly all dialects of English were rhotic, and most English in North America simply remained that way. The North American preservation of rhoticity was also supported by waves of rhotic-accented Scotch-Irish immigrants, most intensely during the 18th century, when this ethnic group eventually made up one-seventh of the colonial population, plus smaller waves during the following two centuries. Scotch-Irish settlers spread from Delaware and Pennsylvania throughout the larger Mid-Atlantic region, the inland regions of both the South and North, and throughout the West: American dialect areas that were all uninfluenced by upper-class non-rhoticity and that consequently have remained consistently rhotic. While non-rhoticity spread on the East Coast, even the East Coast has gradually begun to restore rhoticity, due to it becoming nationally prestigious since the mid-20th century.Yod dropping after alveolar consonants
Dropping of the consonant after another consonant, known as yod dropping in linguistics, is much more extensive in American accents than in most of England. In most North American accents, is "dropped" or "deleted" in stressed syllables after all alveolar and dental consonants, so new, Tuesday, assume, duke are pronounced,,, , however, is retained, as in most British accents.T glottalization
is normally pronounced as a glottal stop, both when after a vowel and when before a syllabic or any non-syllabic consonant, as in button and fruitcake. Similarly, in absolute final position after a vowel or liquid, is replaced by, or simultaneously articulated with, glottal constriction: thus, what may be transcribed as and fruit as.The consonants and become a flap both after a vowel or and before an unstressed vowel or a syllabic consonant other than. Common example words include later, party and model. Flapping thus results in pairs of words such as ladder/latter, metal/medal, and coating/coding being pronounced the same. Flapping of or before a full stressed vowel is also possible but only if that vowel begins a new word or morpheme, as in what is it? and twice in not at all. Other rules apply to flapping, to such a complex degree in fact that flapping has been analyzed as being required in certain contexts, prohibited in others, and optional in still others. For instance, flapping is prohibited in words like seduce, retail, and monotone, yet optional in impotence.
Both intervocalic and may commonly be realized as or simply, making winter a homophone with winner in fast or informal speech.Pronunciation of L
England's typical distinction between a "clear L" and a "dark L" is much less noticeable in nearly all dialects of American English; it is often altogether absent, with all "L" sounds tending to be "dark", meaning having some degree of velarization, perhaps even as dark as . The only notable exceptions to this "dark L" today are in some Spanish-influenced American English varieties which can show a clear "L" in syllable onsets and intervocalically.Wine–whine merger
Word pairs like wine/whine, wet/whet, Wales/whales, wear/where, etc. are homophones, in most cases eliminating, also transcribed, the voiceless labiovelar fricative. However, scatterings of older speakers who do not merge these pairs still exist nationwide, perhaps most strongly in the South. This merger is also found in most modern varieties of British English.Vowels
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" accent regions: Canada, the American West, and the American Midland. The following charts present the vowels that converge across these three dialect regions to form an unmarked or generic American English sound system.Vowel length
is not phonemic in General American, and therefore vowels such as are customarily transcribed without the length mark. Phonetically, the vowels of GA are short when they precede the fortis consonants within the same syllable and long elsewhere. All unstressed vowels are also shorter than the stressed ones, and the more unstressed syllables follow a stressed one, the shorter it is, so that in lead is noticeably longer than in leadership.Vowel tenseness
are considered to compose a natural class of tense pure vowels in General American. All of the tense vowels except and can have either monophthongal or diphthongal pronunciations. The diphthongs are the most usual realizations of and , which is reflected in the way they are transcribed. Monophthongal realizations are also possible, most commonly in unstressed syllables; here are audio examples for potato and window. In the case of and, the monophthongal pronunciations are in free variation with diphthongs. As indicated in above phonetic transcriptions, is subject to the same variation, but its mean phonetic value is usually somewhat less central than in modern Received Pronunciation. varies between back and central.Assigning of tense vowels to loanwords
The class of tense pure vowels manifests in how GA speakers treat recent loanwords, particularly borrowed in the last century or two, since in the majority of cases stressed syllables of foreign words are assigned one of these six vowels, regardless of whether the original pronunciation has a tense or a lax vowel. An example of this phenomenon is the Spanish word macho, Middle Eastern word kebab, and German name Hans, which are all pronounced in GA with the tense, the vowel, rather than lax, the vowel, as in Britain's Received Pronunciation.Pre-nasal tensing
For most speakers, the short a sound as in or, which is not normally a tense vowel, is pronounced with tensing—the tongue raised, followed by a centering glide—whenever occurring before a nasal consonant. This sound may be broadly phonetically transcribed as , or, based on one's own unique accent or regional accent, variously as or. In the following audio clip, the first pronunciation is the tensed one for the word camp, much more common in American English than the second, which is more typical of British English. Linguists have variously called this "short a raising", "short a tensing", "pre-nasal /æ/ tensing", etc.Before dark in a syllable coda, and sometimes also are realized as centering diphthongs. Therefore, words such as peel and fool are often pronounced and., , , and vowels
Unrounded
The American phenomenon of the vowel being produced without rounded lips, like the vowel, allows the two vowels to unify as a single phoneme usually transcribed in IPA. A consequence is that some words, like father and bother, rhyme for most Americans. This father-bother merger is widespread throughout the country, except in northeastern New England English, the Pittsburgh accent, and variably in some older New York accents, which may retain a rounded articulation of bother, keeping it distinct from father.– merger in transition
The vowel in a word like versus the vowel in are undergoing a merger, the cot–caught merger, in many parts of North America, but not in certain regions. American speakers with a completed merger pronounce the two historically separate vowels with the same sound, but other speakers have no trace of a merger at all and so pronounce each vowel with distinct sounds. Among speakers who distinguish between the two, the vowel of cot is often a central or slightly advanced back, while is pronounced with more rounded lips and possibly phonetically higher in the mouth, close to or. Furthermore, there are dialectal differences regarding the amount of rounding of, with speakers from Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia having a more rounded vowel than other dialects. Among speakers who do not distinguish between them, thus producing a cot–caught merger, usually remains a back vowel,, sometimes showing lip rounding as. Therefore, even mainstream Americans vary greatly with this speech feature, with possibilities ranging from a full merger to no merger at all. In the West, for instance,,,, and are all typically pronounced the same, falling under one phoneme. A transitional stage of the merger is also common in scatterings throughout the United States, most consistently in 1990s and early 2000s research in the American Midlands lying between the historical dialect regions of the North and the South. Meanwhile, younger Americans, in general, tend to be transitioning toward the merger. According to a 2003 dialect survey carried out across the country, about 61% of participants perceived themselves as keeping the two vowels distinct and 39% do not. A 2009 follow-up survey put the percentages at 58% non-merging speakers and 41% merging.