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A General American accent is not a specific well-defined standard English in the way that Received Pronunciation (RP) has historically been the standard prestigious variant of the English language in England; rather, accents with a variety of features can all be perceived by Americans as "General American" so long as they lack certain ...
Accent reduction, also known as accent modification or accent neutralization, is a systematic approach for learning or adopting a new speech accent. It is the process of learning the sound system (or phonology ) and melodic intonation of a language so the non-native speaker can communicate with clarity.
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]
The International Dialects of English Archive (IDEA) is a free, online archive of primary-source dialect and accent recordings of the English language. The archive was founded by Paul Meier in 1998 at the University of Kansas and includes hundreds of recordings of English speakers throughout the world.
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.
Most General American accents, but not British ones, have undergone vowel mergers before /r/: the nearer–mirror and hurry–furry mergers, and some variation of the Mary–marry–merry merger, a total three-way merger being the most common throughout North America. [18] GA accents usually have some degree of merging weak vowels.
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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 ...