General American Information

General American (GA), also known as Standard American English (SAE), is a major accent of American English. The accent is not restricted to the United States. Within American English, General American and accents approximating it are contrasted with Southern American English, several Northeastern accents, and other distinct regional accents and social group accents like African American Vernacular English.

General American in the media

General American, like British Received Pronunciation (RP) and most standard language varieties of many other societies, has never been the accent of the entire nation. However, it has become widely spoken in many American films, TV series, national news, commercial ads, and American radio broadcasts; political comedian Stephen Colbert worked hard as a child to reduce his South Carolina accent because of the common portrayal of Southerners as stupid on American television.^[1][2] General American is also the accent typically taught to people learning English as a second language in the United States, as well as outside the country to anyone who wishes to learn "American English," although in much of Asia and some other places ESL teachers are strongly encouraged to teach American English no matter their own origins or accents..

Regional home of General American

It is commonly believed that General American English evolved as a result of an aggregation of rural and suburban Midwestern dialects, though the English of the Upper Midwest can deviate quite dramatically from what would be considered a "regular" American Accent. The fact that a Midwestern dialect became the basis of what is General American English is often attributed to the mass migration of Midwestern farmers to California and the Pacific Northwest from where it spread.

The Telsur Project^[3] (of William Labov and others) examines a number of phonetic properties by which regional accents of the U.S. may be identified. The area with Midwestern regional properties is indicated on the map: eastern Nebraska (including Omaha and Lincoln), southern and central Iowa (including Des Moines), and western Illinois (including Peoria and the Quad Cities but not the Chicago area).

Since the 1960s, northeastern Ohio and much of the rest of the Inland North have been affected by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift (abbreviated "NCS").^[4]

The fact that the NCS is well established in Michigan is particularly interesting in light of the dominant beliefs about local speech. As research by Dennis Preston has shown, Michiganders believe they are “blessed” with a high degree of linguistic security; when surveyed, they rate their own speech as more correct and more pleasant than that of even their fellow Mid-westerners. By contrast Indianans tend to rate the speech of their state on par with that of Illinois, Ohio, and Michigan. Indeed, it is not uncommon to find Michiganders who will claim that the speech of national broadcasters is modeled on their dialect. Even a cursory comparison of the speech of the network news anchors with that of the local news anchors in Detroit will reveal the fallacy of such claims. Nevertheless, the Michiganders′ faith that they speak an accentless variety is just an extreme version of the general stereotype of Midwestern English.^[5]

Particularly important in setting standards was John Kenyon, the pronunciation editor of the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary.^[6]

Phonology

Consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:

The phoneme /ʍ/ is present only in varieties that have not undergone the wine–whine merger. /ʍ/ is often analyzed as a consonant cluster of /hw/. Also, many Americans realize the phoneme /ɹ/ (often transcribed as /r/) as postalveolar, with some possible retroflexion.^[7] /t/ undergoes T-glottalization to produce a glottal stop in words like mutton and sit [ʔ].

Vowels

General American has sixteen or seventeen vowel sounds that can be used in stressed syllables as well as two that can be used only in unstressed syllables. Most of the vowel sounds are monophthongs. The monophthongs of General American are shown in the table below:

^* For most speakers, what are often transcribed as /e o/ are realized as [eɪ oʊ], especially in open syllables.

^** The vowel of strut may be more central (usually [ʌ̈]) than back, depending on speaker. For example, speakers from Ohio realize this vowel as an open-mid central unrounded vowel ([ɜ]).^[8] It however remains a back vowel before /ɫ/.

^*** For most speakers, what is transcribed as /æ/ is always raised and sometimes diphthongized when appearing before a nasal consonant (that is, before /m/, /n/ and, for some, /ŋ/). This may be narrowly transcribed as [æ̝ˑ], [æ̝ə] or, based on specific dialect, variously as [ɛə], [eə] or [ɪə] (see Æ-tensing in General American).

Depending on one's analysis, people who merge the vowels of cot and caught to /ɑ/ either have no phoneme /ɔ/ at all or have the [ɔ] only before /r/. Words like north and horse are usually transcribed /nɔɹθ/ and /hɔɹs/, but since all accents with cot and caught merged to /kɑt/ have also undergone the horse–hoarse merger, it may be preferable to transcribe north and horse /noɹθ/ and /hoɹs/.^[9] Thus, in these cases, the [ɔ] before /ɹ/ can be analyzed as an allophone of /o/. [ɝ] and [ɚ] are often analyzed as sequences of /ʌr, ər/, respectively. /ə/ is an indeterminate vowel that occurs only in unstressed syllables.

Among speakers who distinguish between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, the vowel of cot (usually transcribed /ɑ/), is sometimes more of a central vowel which may vary from [a̠] to [ɑ̟], while /ɔ/ is phonetically lower, closer to [ɒ].^[10] Among cot-caught merged speakers, /ɑ/ usually remains a back vowel, [ɑ], sometimes showing lip rounding as [ɑʷ] or [ɒ], and, since these speakers do not distinguish between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/, their retracted allophones for /ɑ/ may be identical to the lowered allophones of /ɔ/ among speakers who preserve the contrast.

The diphthongs of General American are shown in the next table:

Characteristics

While there is not any single formal definition of General American, various features are considered to be part of it, including rhotic pronunciation, which maintains the coda [ɹ] in words like pearl, car, and court. Unlike RP, General American is characterized by the merger of the vowels of words like father and bother, flapping, and the reduction of vowel contrasts before [ɹ]. General American also generally has yod-dropping after alveolar consonants. Other phonemic mergers, including the cot–caught merger, the pin–pen merger, the Mary–marry–merry merger and the wine–whine merger, may be found optionally at least in informal and semiformal varieties.

One phenomenon apparently unique to General American is the behavior of words that in RP have /ɒrV/ where /V/ stands for any vowel (usually /ə/ or /ɨ/). These words are treated differently in different North American accents: in New York–New Jersey English, Philadelphia dialect, and the Carolinas they are all pronounced with /-ɑr-/ and in Canadian English they are all pronounced with /-ɔr-/ (thus an American's sorry sounds like sar-ee to a Canadian). But in General American there is a split: the majority of these words have /-ɔr-/, like Canadian English, but the last four words of the list below have /-ɑr-/, like New York-New Jersey English, for many speakers.^[11] Words of this class include, among others:

See also

• List of dialects of the English language
• Accent reduction
• American English
• English phonology
• English spelling reform
• Northern cities vowel shift
• Pacific Northwest English
• Received Pronunciation
• Regional vocabularies of American English
• Standard written English

Notes

1. ^ Gross, Terry (January 24, 2005), , Fresh Air (National Public Radio), , retrieved 2007-07-11
2. ^ Safer, Morley (August 13, 2006), The Colbert Report: Morley Safer Profiles Comedy Central's 'Fake' Newsman, 60 Minutes, http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/04/27/60minutes/main1553506.shtml, retrieved 2006-08-15
3. ^ Telsur Project home page
4. ^ Labov, Ash & Boberg (2006:187–208)
5. ^ http://www.pbs.org/speak/seatosea/americanvarieties/midwest/
6. ^ Seabrook (2005)
7. ^ Hallé, Best & Levitt (1999:283) citing Delattre & Freeman (1968), Zawadzki & Kuehn (1980), and Boyce & Espy-Wilson (1997)
8. ^ Thomas (2001:27–28)
9. ^ Wells (1982:479)
10. ^ Wells (1982:476)
11. ^ Shitara (1993:?)

References

• Boyce, S.; Espy-Wilson, C. (1997), "Coarticulatory stability in American English /r/", Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 101 (6): 3741–3753, doi:10.1121/1.418333, PMID 9193061
• Delattre, P.; Freeman, D.C. (1968), "A dialect study of American R's by x-ray motion picture", Linguistics 44: 29–68
• Hallé, Pierre A.; Best, Catherine T.; Levitt, Andrea; Andrea (1999), "Phonetic vs. phonological influences on French listeners' perception of American English approximants", Journal of Phonetics 27 (3): 281–306, doi:10.1006/jpho.1999.0097
• Labov, William; Ash, Sharon; Boberg, Charles (2006), The Atlas of North American English, Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, pp. 187–208, ISBN 3-11-016746-8
• Roca, Iggy; Johnson, Wyn (1999), Course in Phonology, Blackwell Publishing
• Seabrook, John (May 19, 2005), "The Academy: Talking the Tawk", The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/11/14/051114ta_talk_seabrook, retrieved 2008-05-14
• Shitara, Yuko (1993), "A survey of American pronunciation preferences", Speech Hearing and Language 7: 201–232
• Silverstein, Bernard (1994), NTC's Dictionary of American English Pronunciation, Lincolnwood, Illinois: NTC Publishing Group, ISBN 0-8442-0726-8
• Thomas, Erik R. (2001), An acoustic analysis of vowel variation in New World English, Publication of the American Dialect Society, 85, Duke University Press for the American Dialect Society, ISSN 0002-8207
• Wells, John C. (1982a), Accents of English, 1, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-22919-7
• Wells, John C. (1982b), Accents of English, 2, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-24224-X
• Wells, John C. (1982c), Accents of English, 3, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-24225-8
• Wells, John C. (2000), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (2nd ed.), Harlow: Longman, ISBN 0-582-36468-X
• Zawadski, P.A.; Kuehn, D.P. (1980), "A cineradiographic study of static and dynamic aspects of American English /r/", Phonetica 37 (4): 253–266, doi:10.1159/000259995, PMID 7443796

External links

• The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
• 'Hover & Hear' pronunciations in a General American accent, and compare side by side with other English accents from the US and around the World.
• Hollywords Audiovisual Industry Dictionary Project Style Guide (Includes pronunciation guides based on the American Broadcast English (ABE) accent)

Categories:

• American English

Related 'General American' Searches:

See Also:

• African Americans In the United States Congress
• Category:lists of American Military Personnel
• Latin American Wars of Independence
• Union (American Civil War)