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'General American' (sometimes called 'Standard Midwestern', 'Standard Spoken American English' or 'American Broadcast English') is the accent of American English perceived by Americans to be most "neutral" and free of regional characteristics. The General American accent is not thought of as a linguistic standard in the sense that Received Pronunciation (RP) has historically been the standard, prestige variant in England, but its speakers are perceived as "accentless" by most Americans.
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.

Contents

General American in the media

Regional home of General American

Phonology

Consonants

Vowels

Characteristics

See also

External links

Notes

References

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. Since Cronkite was born in Missouri, and spent his first dozen years there, some assumed that General American was the regional accent of the state, although Cronkite's teen years were spent in Texas, which is not known for having "accentless" speakers. 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." Satirist Stephen Colbert, originally from South Carolina, noticed at a young age the fact that films and television used a Southern accent as an indication of a character's stupidity; for this reason, long before his role as a "fake news commentator," he studied the "accentless" accents of newscasters and imitated them [1]. Some sources suggest this is less true today than it was formerly. 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 [2] 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, longtime NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and CNN Headline News personalities Chuck Roberts and Paula Zahn, both of whom were local news anchors in Omaha.

Phonology

Consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:

	Bilabial	Labio- dental	Labio- velar	Dental	Alveolar	Post- alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
'Stop'
'Affricate'
'Nasal'
'Fricative'
'Approximant'
'Lateral approximant'

The phoneme is present only in varieties that have not undergone the wine-whine merger. is often analyzed as a consonant cluster of . Also, many Americans realize the phoneme (often transcribed as ) as a retroflex approximant .

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	Central rhotacized	Back
'Close'
'Near-close'
'Close-mid'	For most speakers, what is often transcribed as is realized as , especially in open syllables. The off-glide is predictable by phonological rule.			For many speakers, what is often transcribed as is realized as , especially in open syllables. The off-glide is predictable by phonological rule.
'Mid'
'Open-mid'				•
'Near Open'

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 since 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 (Wells 1982, 479). Thus, in these cases, the before can be analyzed as an allophone of . Some speakers who have maintained the contrast between and realize phonetically lower, closer to .
and are often analyzed as sequences of , respectively. is actually an indeterminate vowel that occurs only in unstressed syllables.
Since the occurrence of is mostly predictable, it need not be considered a phoneme distinct from .
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'
'Opener component is rounded'

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 in words like ''pearl'', ''car'', and ''court''. Unlike RP, General American is characterized by the merger of the vowels of words like ''f'a'ther'' and ''b'o'ther'', 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; however, the most formal varieties tend to be more conservative in preserving these phonemic distinctions.
One phenomenon apparently unique to General American is the behavior of words that in RP have 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 and in Canadian English they are all pronounced with (thus "sorry" is pronounced by Canadians as "sore-ee"). But in General American there is a split: the majority of these words have , like Canadian English, but the last four words of the list above have , like New York-New Jersey English, for many speakers (Shitara 1993).

See also

★ American 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

★ Course in Phonology, Roca, Iggy & Johnson, Wyn, , , Blackwell Publishing, 1999,

★ A survey of American pronunciation preferences, Shitara, Yuko, , , Speech Hearing and Language, 1993

★ NTC's Dictionary of American English Pronunciation, Silverstein, Bernard, , , NTC Publishing Group, 1994, ISBN 0-8442-0726-8

★ Accents of English, Wells, John C., , , Cambridge University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-521-22919-7 (vol. 1), ISBN 0-521-24224-X (vol. 2), ISBN 0-521-24225-8 (vol. 3)

★ Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, Wells, J. C., , , Longman, 2000, ISBN 0-582-36468-X