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The 2006 Atlas of North American English identifies a "Southeastern super-region", in which all accents of the Southern States, as well as accents all along their regional margins, constitute a vast area of recent linguistic unity in certain respects: [46] namely, the movement of four vowel sounds (those in the words GOOSE, STRUT, GOAT, and ...
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.
A homophone (/ ˈ h ɒ m ə f oʊ n, ˈ h oʊ m ə-/) is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning or in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example rose (flower) and rose (past tense of "rise"), or spelled differently, as in rain, reign, and rein.
Homographs are words with the same spelling but having more than one meaning. Homographs may be pronounced the same , or they may be pronounced differently (heteronyms, also known as heterophones). Some homographs are nouns or adjectives when the accent is on the first syllable, and verbs when it is on the second.
Many of these are degenerations in the pronunciation of names that originated in other languages. Sometimes a well-known namesake with the same spelling has a markedly different pronunciation. These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs, which are written differently but pronounced the same).
A phoneme of a language or dialect is an abstraction of a speech sound or of a group of different sounds that are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of that particular language or dialect. For example, the English word through consists of three phonemes
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.
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.