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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.
The United States does not have a concrete "standard" accent in the same way that Britain has Received Pronunciation. A form of speech known to linguists as General American is perceived by many Americans to be "accent-less", meaning a person who speaks in such a manner does not appear to be from anywhere in particular. The region of the United ...
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (abbreviated AHD) uses a phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet to transcribe the pronunciation of spoken English. It and similar respelling systems, such as those used by the Merriam-Webster and Random House dictionaries, are familiar to US schoolchildren.
Received Pronunciation has been the subject of many academic studies, [2] and is frequently used as a model for teaching English to foreign learners. [ 3 ] [ page needed ] The widely repeated claim that only about two percent of Britons speak RP [ 2 ] is no more than a rough estimate and has been questioned by several writers, most notably by ...
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 ...
American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, [b] is the set of varieties of the English language native to the United States. [4] English is the most widely spoken language in the United States; an official language in 32 of the 50 U.S. states; and the de facto common language used in government, education, and commerce throughout the nation. [5]
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 ...
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 ...