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Regional dialects in North America are historically the most strongly differentiated along the Eastern seaboard, due to distinctive speech patterns of urban centers of the American East Coast like Boston, New York City, and certain Southern cities, all of these accents historically noted by their London-like r-dropping (called non-rhoticity), a feature gradually receding among younger ...
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, [b] is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. [4] English is the most widely spoken language in the United States; an official language in 32 of the 50 U.S. states; and the de facto common language used in government, education, and commerce throughout the nation. [5]
Dialects can be defined as "sub-forms of languages which are, in general, mutually comprehensible." [1] English speakers from different countries and regions use a variety of different accents (systems of pronunciation) as well as various localized words and grammatical constructions.
The U.S. has dozens of distinct regional accents reflecting not just place, but also race and ancestry. For example, the New Yorker accent is one of the most visible regional accents in American ...
There are a considerable number of different accents within the regions of both the United States and Canada. In North America, different English dialects of immigrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, and other regions of the British Isles mixed together in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The United States does not have a concrete "standard" accent in the same way that Britain has Received Pronunciation. A form of speech known to linguists as General American is perceived by many Americans to be "accent-less", meaning a person who speaks in such a manner does not appear to be from anywhere in particular. The region of the United ...
A California Assembly bill would allow the use of diacritical marks like accents in government documents, not allowed since 1986's "English only" law which many say targeted Latinos.
The early 20th-century accent of the Inland North was the basis for the term "General American", [6] [7] though the regional accent has since altered, due to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift: its now-defining chain shift of vowels that began in the 1930s or possibly earlier. [8]