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American English, sometimes called United States English or U.S. English, [b] ... [13] [14] The sound of American English continues to evolve, ...
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 ...
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation , both historically and from dialect to dialect . In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
Rhoticity – GA is rhotic while RP is non-rhotic; that is, the phoneme /r/ is only pronounced in RP when it is immediately followed by a vowel sound. [5] Where GA pronounces /r/ before a consonant and at the end of an utterance, RP either has no consonant (if the preceding vowel is /ɔː/, /ɜ:/ or /ɑː/, as in bore, burr and bar) or has a schwa instead (the resulting sequences being ...
Boston was the American center for training in elocution, public speaking, and acting at this time; [18] [10] [2] therefore, these Northeastern-originated accents also likely contributed to the sound then becoming popular in the American theatre. In particular, the accents of the Northeastern elite already held established connotations of high ...
The most recent work documenting and studying the phonology of North American English dialects as a whole is the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE) by William Labov, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg, on which much of the description below is based, following on a tradition of sociolinguistics dating to the 1960s; earlier large-scale ...
Non-rhotic accents of North American English include New York City, [24] Boston, and older Southern. Unrounding of LOT: /ɒ/ as in lot and bother is unrounded in Norwich, the West Country, in Hiberno-English [25] and most of North American English. The Boston accent is an exception where the LOT vowel is still rounded. [26]
New England English is, collectively, the various distinct dialects and varieties of American English originating in the New England area. [1] [2] Most of eastern and central New England once spoke the "Yankee dialect", some of whose accent features still remain in Eastern New England today, such as "R-dropping" (though this and other features are now receding among younger speakers). [3]