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English accents can differ enough to create room for misunderstandings. For example, the pronunciation of "pearl" in some variants of Scottish English can sound like the entirely unrelated word "petal" to an American. For a summary of the differences between accents, see Sound correspondences between English accents.
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 ...
The suffixed, unstressed -day in words like Monday and Sunday is commonly /di/. Lacking or incomplete happy tensing: unstressed, word-final /ɪ/ (the second vowel sound in words like happy, money, Chelsea, etc.) may continue to be lax, unlike the tensed (higher and fronter) vowel [i] typical throughout rest of
The first two sound changes in the shift, with some debate about which one led to the other or came first, [16] are the general raising and lengthening (tensing) of the "short a" (the vowel sound of TRAP, typically rendered /æ/ in American transcriptions), as well as the fronting of the sound of LOT or PALM in this accent (typically ...
This sounds like a /d/ to RP speakers. [ɾ] is an allophone of /r/ in conservative RP. The degree of flapping varies considerably among speakers, and is often reduced in more formal settings. It does occur to an extent in nearly all speakers of American English, with better pronounced with a flap almost ubiquitously regardless of background ...
Boston accents typically have the cot-caught merger but not the father-bother merger.This means that instead of merging the historical "short o" sound (as in LOT) with the "broad a" (as in PALM) like most other American accents, the Boston accent merges it with the "aw" vowel (as in THOUGHT).
For example, /æ/ may be generally raised and /ɑ/ generally fronted in comparison to other American English accents. [9] Some speakers exhibit extreme raising of /æ/ before voiced velars (/ɡ/ and /ŋ/), with an up-glide, and so bag sounds close to beg or is even raised like the first syllable of bagel. Other examples are the words flag and ...
However, some accents, in the north of England and in Scotland, for example, retain a monophthongal pronunciation of this vowel, while other accents have a variety of different diphthongs. Before (historic) /r/, in words like square, the vowel has become [ɛə] (often practically [ɛː]) in modern RP, and [ɛ] in General American. [8]