General American

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General American (sometimes called Standard Midwestern, Standard Spoken American English or American Broadcast English) is one of the most homogeneous and widespread accents of Anglophone North America. It is the accent of American English perceived by Americans to be most "neutral" and free of regional characteristics. 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 the British Received Pronunciation as well as most standard language varieties of many other societies—was never the accent of the entire nation. Rather, it is most closely related to a generalized Midwestern accent and is spoken particularly by many newscasters, in part because the national broadcasters preferred to hire people who exhibited similar speech. Famous news anchor Walter Cronkite is a good example of a broadcaster using this accent. General American is sometimes promoted as preferable to other regional accents; in the United States, classes promising "accent reduction" generally attempt to teach speech patterns similar to this accent. The well-known television journalist Linda Ellerbee, who worked hard early in her career to eliminate a Texas accent, stated, "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere." General American is also the accent generally 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."

Regional home of General American

The Telsur Project of William Labov and others examines a number of phonetic properties by which regional accents of the U.S. may be identified. The area that is most free of these 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). It may therefore be the case that the accents spoken in this region are deemed the most "neutral" by Americans. This is borne out in an article in the November 1998 issue of National Geographic Magazine, in which the locals' "neutral accents" are cited as one of the reasons why Omaha is home to a large number of telemarketing companies.

Notable media personalities from this region include former talk show host Johnny Carson, and CNN Headline News personalities Chuck Roberts, who was a local news anchor in Omaha.

Phonology

Consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:

	Bilabial	Labio- dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m			n			ŋ
Plosive	p  b			t  d			k  g
Affricate					tʃ  dʒ
Fricative		f  v	θ  ð	s  z	ʃ  ʒ			h
Approximant				ɹ		j	(ʍ)  w
Lateral				l

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 a retroflex approximant [ɻ].

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:

Monophthongs	Front	Central		Back
		plain	rhotacized
Close
Near-close
Close-mid
Mid			ɚ
Open-mid			ɝ	•
Near Open

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/ (Wells 1982, 479). Thus, in these cases, the [ɔ] before /ɹ/ can be analyzed as an allophone of /o/. Some speakers who have maintained the contrast between /ɑ/ and /ɔ/ realize /ɔ/ phonetically lower, closer to [ɒ] (Wells 1982, 476).

[ɝ] and [ɚ] are often analyzed as sequences of , respectively. [ə] is actually an indeterminate vowel that occurs only in unstressed syllables. Since the occurrence of [ə] is mostly predictable, it need not be considered a phoneme distinct from /ʌ/.

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

Diphthongs	Offglide is a front vowel	Offglide is a back vowel
Opener component is unrounded	aɪ eɪ	aʊ
Opener component is rounded	ɔɪ	oʊ

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 [ɒɹV] where [V] stands for any vowel. Words of this class include, among others:

• orange
• origin
• Florida
• horrible
• quarrel
• warren
• borrow
• tomorrow
• sorry
• sorrow

These words are treated differently in different North American accents: in New York-New Jersey English they are all pronounced with [-ɑɹ-] and in Canadian English they are all pronounced with [-ɔɹ-] (thus "sorry" is pronounced by Canadians as "sore-ee"). But in General American there is a split: the majority of these words have [-ɔɹ-], like Canadian English, but the last four words of the list above have [-ɑɹ-], like New York-New Jersey English, for many speakers (Shitara 1993).

See also

• American English
• Pacific Northwest English
• Northern cities vowel shift
• International Phonetic Alphabet for English
• IPA chart for English
• Received Pronunciation
• Accent reduction
• Regional vocabularies of American English
• Standard Written English

External links

• The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary
• Hollywords™ Audiovisual Industry Dictionary Project Style Guide (Includes pronunciation guides based on the American Broadcast English (ABE) accent)

Notes

References

• Roca, Iggy & Johnson, Wyn (1999). Course in Phonology. Blackwell Publishing.
• Shitara, Yuko (1993). "A survey of American pronunciation preferences". Speech Hearing and Language 7 201–32.
• Silverstein, Bernard (1994). NTC's Dictionary of American English Pronunciation. Lincolnwood, Illinois: NTC Publishing Group. ISBN 0-8442-0726-8.
• Wells, John C. (1982). Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-22919-7 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-521-24224-X (vol. 2), ISBN 0-521-24225-8 (vol. 3).
• Wells, J. C. (2000). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary. Harlow: Longman. ISBN 0-582-36468-X.

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