General American

General American (abbreviated as GA or GenAm) is an umbrella variety of American English&mdash;a spectrum of accents &mdash;unified by a sound system separate from the dialects of the American South and East Coast, including New York City and New England, but today widespread throughout the United States. Despite persistent debate, General American is popularly perceived as lacking any notably regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics; however, modern studies link its origins to northern speech patterns of the non-coastal Eastern United States, originating from interior Pennsylvania, upstate New York, and the adjacent Midwestern region prior to the Northern Cities Vowel Shift.

The term was popularized by the American linguist John Samuel Kenyon, who, in 1930, considered it equivalent to the speech of "the North," or "Northern American," but, in 1934, "Western and Midwestern"; however, the term was disseminated earlier, for example, by the American Anglicist George Philip Krapp, who in 1925 considered it "Western" and wide-ranging. According to British phonetician John C. Wells, typical Canadian English aligns to General American rather than England's Received Pronunciation in every situation where these latter two differ. He also concluded that, by 1982, two-thirds of the U.S. population spoke General American English. Due to its prevalence, General American is sometimes, controversially, referred to as a de facto standard accent of the United States.

General American in the media
General American, like British Received Pronunciation (RP) and most prestige accent varieties of many other societies, has never been the accent of the entire nation.

The General American accent is most closely related to a generalized Midwestern accent and is spoken particularly by many newscasters. This has led the accent to sometimes be referred to as a "newscaster accent" or "television English". It is thought to have evolved from the English spoken by colonials in the Mid-Atlantic states, evolved and moved west. General American is sometimes promoted as preferable to other regional accents. In the United States, classes promising "accent reduction","accent modification" and "accent neutralization" 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"; 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.

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 the sounds of General American, especially since that region's twentieth-century Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS). The local accent often gets more distinct the farther north one goes within the Midwest, with the Northern Midwest featuring its own dialect North Central American English. General American is also highly divergent from the accents typical of larger Midwestern cities and the Great Lakes region in general, such as Chicago and Minneapolis, where speech has undergone the NCVS. The fact that a rural 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. However, General American has origins dating back even before conservative Midwestern speech, itself stemming from interior Pennsylvania and upstate New York.

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 with Midwestern regional properties is indicated on the map: eastern Nebraska (including Omaha and Lincoln); northwestern, southern, and central Iowa (including Des Moines, Sioux City and the Iowa-side Quad Cities), with an adjacent narrow strip of northern Missouri; and western and central Illinois (including Peoria, the Illinois-side Quad Cities, and Bloomington-Normal). Notably, this section of Illinois does not include the Chicago area.

According to Matthew J. Gordon, a sociolinguistics and American dialectology researcher:

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

Consonants
A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:


 * Wine–whine merger: largely in effect toward ; the phoneme is retained only in American English varieties that have not undergone the merger, with  often analyzed as a consonant cluster of.
 * as or : many Americans realize the phoneme  (often transcribed as ) as postalveolar, with some possible retroflexion (perhaps, even as ).
 * T-glottalization and intervocalic alveolar flapping: undergoes t-glottalization, producing a glottal stop, before a consonant (particularly a syllabic nasal) or in word-final position, for example, in words like button , mountain , atmosphere , grateful , and cot . The word-final  rule, however, may be superseded by General American's intervocalic alveolar flapping, wherein intervocalic  as well as intervocalic  become  when between a stressed syllable and an unstressed one, or between two unstressed syllables; for example, leader  , catalogue/catalog  , or ratty  . Typically,  and  also between  and a vowel become realized as the flap consonant ; thus: party.
 * L-velarization: the typical English distinction between a "clear L" (i.e. ) and a "dark L" (i.e. or even ) is much less noticeable in General American compared to other English dialects; it may even be altogether absent. Instead, General American speakers pronounce even the "clear" variant as more or less "dark", meaning that all "L" sounds have some degree of velarization. Additionally, some speakers may vocalize  to  when it appears before  (and sometimes also ).

Vowels


General American has eleven or twelve pure vowel sounds (or monophthongs) that can be used in stressed syllables (for some, typically in diphthongized combinations) as well as two to three vowels that can be heard only in unstressed syllables. The monophthongs of General American are shown in the table below:

For most speakers, what are often transcribed as and  are realized in actual speech as the diphthongized  (e.g. in laid and pray) and  (e.g. in so and load) respectively, especially in open syllables.

For most speakers, what is transcribed as is always raised and sometimes diphthongized when appearing before a nasal consonant (that is, before,  and, for some, ). This allophone is especially audible in monosyllabic words, and it may be narrowly transcribed as, or, based on specific dialect, variously as  or  (see Æ-tensing in General American or click "show" below).

and (also transcribed as  and  (the latter is a non-IPA symbol)  ) are indeterminate vowel sounds that occur only in unstressed syllables of certain types. is heard as the $⟨a⟩$ at the beginning of about and at the end of China, as the $⟨o⟩$ in omit, and as the $⟨u⟩$ in syrup. is heard as the $⟨a⟩$ in private or cottage, the $⟨e⟩$ in evading or sorted, the $⟨i⟩$ in sordid, the $⟨u⟩$ in minute, or the $⟨y⟩$ in mythologist. and frequently overlap and easily merge, this is known as the weak-vowel merger.

The vowel of is generally near-open and fronted (approaching ), but speakers from Ohio and the South realize this vowel as an open-mid central unrounded vowel. It however always remains a back vowel before, and often even merges with , so that becomes  or.

In American English, (General American ) and  (General American ) are often analyzed as sequences of  and, respectively. In actual speech, General American speakers pronounce both, without much or any distinction, as ; for example, the word worker  is often realized with two rhyming syllables as.

The General American vowel has a unique quality ; it tends to be slightly less rounded  and more fronted, and perhaps even diphthongized with a somewhat fronter and lower onset.


 * General American speakers are largely divided in how they pronounce the vowel sound in words like cot and caught ; some speakers pronounce the two with the same vowel sound but other speakers pronounce each word with distinct vowel sounds: . Among speakers who distinguish between the two, the vowel of cot (usually transcribed in American English as ), may be more of a central vowel which may vary from  to , while  is phonetically lower, closer to  with only slight rounding. Among speakers who do not distinguish between the two and are thus said to have undergone the cot–caught merger,  usually remains a back vowel, , sometimes showing lip rounding as  (also transcribed  in non-standard IPA), and, because these speakers do not distinguish between  and , their retracted allophones for  may be identical to the lowered allophones of  among speakers who preserve the contrast.


 * Depending on one's analysis, people who merge the vowels of cot and caught to either have no phoneme  at all or have the  only before . Words like north and horse are usually transcribed  and, but because all accents with cot and caught merged to  have also undergone the horse–hoarse merger, it may be preferable to transcribe north and horse  and . Thus, in these cases, the  before  can be analyzed as an allophone of.


 * Unstressed vowels vary in quality:
 * (as in ) ranges from to ;
 * (as in ) ranges from to ;
 * (as in ) ranges from to.


 * The diphthong&mdash; &mdash;before a voiceless consonant may be raised towards  or, a growing phenomenon in General American, predominant historically in the northern, New England, and Mid-Atlantic regions. In the General American accent, this alone causes a distinction, for example, between the words rider and writer . Although present with most U.S. speakers, this phenomenon is considered one of the two variants of so-called "Canadian raising." This raising can also apply across word boundaries, though the position of a word or phrase's stress may deny the raising from taking place. For instance, a high school in the sense of "secondary school" is generally pronounced ; however, a high school in the literal sense of "a tall school" is pronounced [ˌhäɪˈsku̟ɫ].

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

Characteristics
While there is no single formal definition of General American, various features are considered to be part of it, including rhotic pronunciation, which maintains the coda 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. 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 the stressed where /V/ stands for any vowel (usually  or )&mdash;i.e. stressed  followed by a vowel sound. Particularly words using this sound are pronounced distinctly in different North American accents: in New York–New Jersey English, the Philadelphia dialect, and the Carolinas they are all pronounced with and in Canadian English they are all pronounced with. But in General American there is a split: the majority of these words have, like Canadian English, but the first five words of the list below have , like New York-New Jersey English, for many speakers. Words of this class include, among others: