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General American is an accent of American English. Within American English, General American and accents approximating it are contrasted with Southern American English, several Northeastern accents, and other distinct regional accents and social group accents like African American Vernacular English.

General American in the media

General American—like British Received Pronunciation (RP) as well as most standard language varieties of many other societies—was never the accent of the entire nation. General American is sometimes promoted as preferable to other regional accents. The well-known television journalist Linda Ellerbee, who worked hard early in her career to eliminate a Texas accent, stated, "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere"; comedian Stephen Colbert worked hard as a child to reduce his South Carolina accent on account of the portrayal of Southerners as stupid on television of the day. General American is also the accent generally taught to people learning English as a second language in the United States, as well as outside the country to anyone who wishes to learn "American English."

Regional home of General American

Further information: North Central American English

It is commonly believed that General American English evolved as a result of an aggregation of rural and suburban Midwestern dialects, though the English of the Upper Midwest can deviate quite dramatically from what would be considered a "regular" American Accent. [1] The local accent often gets more distinct the farther north one goes within the Midwest, and the more rural the area, with the Northern Midwest featuring its own dialect North Central American English. The fact that a Midwestern Dialect became the basis of what is General American English is often attributed to the mass immigration of Midwestern farmers to California and the Pacific Northwest from where it spread.

The area of the United States where the local accent is largely free of regional features

The Telsur Project¹ of William Labov and others examines a number of phonetic properties by which regional accents of the U.S. may be identified. The area with Midwestern regional properties is indicated on the map: eastern Nebraska (including Omaha and Lincoln), southern and central Iowa (including Des Moines), and western Illinois (including Peoria and the Quad Cities but not the Chicago area).

Since the 1960s northeastern Ohio and much of the rest of the Inland North have been affected by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. ²

"The fact that the NCS is well established in Michigan is particularly interesting in light of the dominant beliefs about local speech. As research by Dennis Preston has shown, Michiganders believe they are “blessed” with a high degree of linguistic security; when surveyed, they rate their own speech as more correct and more pleasant than that of even their fellow Mid-westerners. By contrast Indianans tend to rate the speech of their state on par with that Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find Michiganders who will claim that the speech of national broadcasters is modeled on their dialect. Even a cursory comparison of the speech of the network news anchors with that of the local news anchors in Detroit will reveal the fallacy of such claims.

Nevertheless, the Michiganders’ faith that they speak an accentless variety is just an extreme version of the general stereotype of Midwestern English." [2]

Particularly important in setting standards was John Kenyon, the pronunciation editor of the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary.³

Phonology

Consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:

The phoneme /ʍ/ is present only in varieties that have not undergone the wine-whine merger. /ʍ/ is often analyzed as a consonant cluster of /hw/. Also, many Americans realize the phoneme /ɹ/ (often transcribed as /r/) as a retroflex approximant [ɻ].

Vowels

General American has sixteen or seventeen vowel sounds that can be used in stressed syllables as well as two that can be used only in unstressed syllables. Most of the vowel sounds are monophthongs. The monophthongs of General American are shown in the table below:

Depending on one's analysis, people who merge the vowels of cot and caught to /ɑ/ either have no phoneme /ɔ/ at all or have the [ɔ] only before /r/. Words like north and horse are usually transcribed /nɔɹθ/ and /hɔɹs/, but since all accents with cot and caught merged to /kɑt/ have also undergone the horse-hoarse merger, it may be preferable to transcribe north and horse /noɹθ/ and /hoɹs/.⁵ Thus, in these cases, the [ɔ] before /ɹ/ can be analyzed as an allophone of /o/. [ɝ] and [ɚ] are often analyzed as sequences of /ʌr, ər/, respectively. [ə] is actually an indeterminate vowel that occurs only in unstressed syllables. Since the occurrence of [ə] is mostly predictable, it need not be considered a phoneme distinct from /ʌ/.

The vowel of cot, usually transcribed /ɑ/, is actually more of a central vowel and may vary from [a_– to [ɑ₊. Some speakers who have maintained the contrast between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ realize /ɔ/ phonetically lower, closer to [ɒ].⁶

The diphthongs of General American are shown in the next table:

Characteristics

While there is not any single formal definition of General American, various features are considered to be part of it, including rhotic pronunciation, which maintains the coda [ɹ] in words like pearl, car, and court. Unlike RP, General American is characterized by the merger of the vowels of words like father and bother, flapping, and the reduction of vowel contrasts before [ɹ]. General American also generally has yod-dropping after alveolar consonants. Other phonemic mergers, including the cot-caught merger, the pin-pen merger, the Mary-marry-merry merger and the wine-whine merger, may be found optionally at least in informal and semiformal varieties.

One phenomenon apparently unique to General American is the behavior of words that in RP have [ɒɹV] where [V] stands for any vowel. These words are treated differently in different North American accents: in New York-New Jersey English they are all pronounced with [-ɑɹ-] and in Canadian English they are all pronounced with [-ɔɹ-] (thus "sorry" is pronounced by Canadians as "sore-ee"). But in General American there is a split: the majority of these words have [-ɔɹ-], like Canadian English, but the last four words of the list below have [-ɑɹ-], like New York-New Jersey English, for many speakers.⁷ Words of this class include, among others:

See also

• American English
• Pacific Northwest English
• Northern cities vowel shift
• International Phonetic Alphabet for English
• IPA chart for English
• Received Pronunciation
• Accent reduction
• Regional vocabularies of American English
• Standard Written English

External links

• The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
• Hollywords Audiovisual Industry Dictionary Project Style Guide (Includes pronunciation guides based on the American Broadcast English (ABE) accent)

Notes

References

• Labov, William; Sharon Ash & Charles Boberg (2006), The Atlas of North American English, Mouton-de Gruyter, 187–208, ISBN 3-11-016746-8
• Roca, Iggy & Wyn Johnson (1999), Course in Phonology, Blackwell Publishing
• Seabrook, John (May 19, 2005), "The Academy: Talking the Tawk", The New Yorker, <http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/14/051114ta_talk_seabrook>. Retrieved on 2008-05-14
• Shitara, Yuko (1993), "A survey of American pronunciation preferences", Speech Hearing and Language 7: 201–32
• Silverstein, Bernard (1994), NTC's Dictionary of American English Pronunciation, NTC Publishing Group, ISBN 0-8442-0726-8
• Wells, John C. (1982a), Accents of English, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-22919-7
• Wells, John C. (1982b), Accents of English, vol. 2, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-24224-X
• Wells, John C. (1982c), Accents of English, vol. 3, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-24225-8
• Wells, John C. (2000), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (2nd ed.), Longman, ISBN 0-582-36468-X

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• This page was last modified on 21 December 2008, at 23:12.

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