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It has increasingly become known as a Mid-Atlantic accent, [7] [4] [5] or Transatlantic accent, [11] [6] [2] terms that refer to its perceived mixture of American and British features. In specifically theatrical contexts, it is also sometimes known by names like American Theatre Standard [ 10 ] [ 8 ] or American stage speech . [ 12 ]
English-language scholar William A. Kretzschmar Jr. explains in a 2004 article that the term "General American" came to refer to "a presumed most common or 'default' form of American English, especially to be distinguished from marked regional speech of New England or the South" and referring especially to speech associated with the vaguely-defined "Midwest", despite any historical or present ...
The Special Collections section contains unique information related to accent and dialect studies. For instance, one subsection is devoted to Holocaust survivors while another features readings of "Comma Gets a Cure" (the standard scripted text for most IDEA subjects) by trained speech teachers in the General American dialect.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) can be used to represent sound correspondences among various accents and dialects of the English language. These charts give a diaphoneme for each sound, followed by its realization in different dialects. The symbols for the diaphonemes are given in bold, followed by their most common phonetic values.
Major features of the accent include a high, gliding /ɔ/ vowel (in words like talk and caught); a split of the "short a" vowel /æ/ into two separate sounds; variable dropping of r sounds; and a lack of the cot–caught, Mary–marry–merry, and hurry–furry mergers heard in many other American accents.
Any accent of English, including more recent ones, perceived as a mixture of American and British English, and often perceived as incorporating the prestige speech of one or both countries; Mid-Atlantic accent may also refer to: Philadelphia English, the dialect spoken in the Mid-Atlantic region (Delaware Valley) of the United States
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 accent rapidly declined following the end of World War II, presumably as a result of cultural and demographic changes in the U.S. entering the postwar era. [15] This American version of a "posh" accent has disappeared even among the American upper classes, as Americans have increasingly dissociated from the speaking styles of the East Coast elite. [14]