Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into . differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation).See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English.
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 ...
Several pronunciation patterns contrast American and British English accents. The following lists a few common ones. Most American accents are rhotic, preserving the historical /r/ phoneme in all contexts, while most British accents of England and Wales are non-rhotic, only preserving this sound before vowels but dropping it in all other contexts; thus, farmer rhymes with llama for Brits but ...
English dialects differ greatly in their pronunciation of open vowels. In Received Pronunciation, there are four open back vowels, /æ ɑː ɒ ɔː/, but in General American there are only three, /æ ɑ ɔ/, and in most dialects of Canadian English only two, /æ ɒ/. Which words have which vowel varies between dialects.
RP has three open back vowels, where GA has only two or even one. GA speakers use /ɑ/ for both the RP /ɒ/ (spot) and /ɑː/ (spa): the father–bother merger. Nearly half of American speakers additionally use the same vowel for the RP /ɔː/ (the cot–caught merger).
Many speakers of American, Canadian, Scottish and Irish English pronounce cot /ˈkɒt/ and caught /ˈkɔːt/ the same. [ k ] You may simply ignore the difference between the symbols /ɒ/ and /ɔː/ , just as you ignore the distinction between the written vowels o and au when pronouncing them.
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.
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 ...