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North American regional phonology is the study of variations in the pronunciation of spoken English by the inhabitants of various parts of North America.

In many ways, compared to British English, American English is conservative in its phonology. Dialect in North America is most distinctive on the East Coast of the continent; this is partly because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of British English at a time when those varieties were undergoing changes. The interior of the country was settled by people who were no longer closely connected to England, as they had no access to the ocean during a time when journeys to Britain were always by sea. As such, the inland speech is much more homogeneous than the East Coast speech and did not imitate the changes in speech from England.

[edit] General American

Main article: General American

General American 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.

General American includes various features, 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 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 /ɒrV/ (where V stands for any vowel). Words of this class include, among others: origin, Florida, horrible, quarrel, warren, borrow, tomorrow, sorry, and sorrow. 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).

[edit] Western Dialect

The Western dialect is distinct from strict General American because it possesses the cot-caught merger. Most speakers except some speakers over 60, produce and perceive words such as cot and caught as having the same vowel sound.

[edit] California English

Main article: California English

There are several phonological processes which have been identified as being particular to California English. However, these shifts are by no means universal in Californian speech, and any single Californian's speech may have only some of the changes identified below, or even none of them. California English possesses a new chain vowel shift known as the California vowel shift:

The California vowel shift, based on a diagram at Penelope Eckert's webpage.

• Before /ŋ/, /ɪ/ is raised to [i], so king has the same vowel of keen rather than kin.
• /æ/ is raised and diphthongized to [eə] or [ɪə] before nasal consonants. So "ban" is pronounced "bay-uhn".
• before /ŋ/ it may be identified with the phoneme /e/, so "thank" is pronounced "thaynk".
• Elsewhere /æ/ is lowered in the direction of [a], so "cat" sounds closer to "caht".
• /ʊ/ is moving towards [ʌ], so "put" sounds more like "putt".
• /ʌ/ towards [ɛ], so "putt" can sound slightly similar to "pet".
• /ɛ/ toward [æ], so "kettle" sounds like "cattle".
• /ɑ/ toward [ɔ]: "cot" and "caught" are moving closer to General American "caught".
• The vowels /uː/ ("blue") and /oʊ/ ("mope") are pronounced closer to the front of the mouth.

California English also possesses the following features:

• Traditionally diphthongal vowels such as [oʊ] as in boat and [eɪ], as in bait, have acquired qualities much closer to monophthongs.
• A notable exception to the cot-caught merger may be found within the city limits of San Francisco, especially by older speakers.
• The pin-pen merger is complete in Bakersfield, and speakers in Sacramento either perceive or produce the pairs /ɛn/ and /ɪn/ close to each other ^[1].

[edit] Utah English

Main article: Utah English

Utah English, sometimes humorously referred to as "Utahnics", is a dialect of the English language spoken in the U.S. state of Utah. Influences are as varied as ancestries of its immigrants, from Scottish to Mexican Spanish. Since the field of Sociolinguistics is relatively new to academia, very little research has been done on the dialect. However, a research team at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah has begun a comparative project on the topic.[1] Utah English consists of the following features:

• The merger of /oʊ/ and /ʊ/ to [ʊ] before /ɫ/, making pairs like bowl and bull pronounced the same.
• Further diphthongization of [ɛ] as [ɛɪ]: "egg" and "leg" are pronounced "ayg" and "layg", "leisure" and "pleasure" pronounced "layzhur" and "playzhur."
• The merger of /ɑr/ and /ɔr/, such that "born" may be pronounced "barn" and the town of "American Fork" becomes "American Fark."

[edit] Pacific Northwest English

Main article: Pacific Northwest English

Pacific Northwest English is fairly similar to other areas of the West. It possess features shared in common with California English and West/Central Canadian English, depending on the region. The accent Southern Oregon shares several features of California English (such as the California vowel shift) , and Northern Washington has some features similar to West/Central Canadian English (e.g. Canadian Shift).

• [ɛ] and sometimes [æ] as [eɪ] before /g/: "leg" and "lag" pronounced [eɪg].
• The Pacific Northwest also has some of the features of the California vowel shift and the Canadian vowel shift:
  • /æ/ is raised and diphthongized to [eə] or [ɪə] before nasals by some speakers.
  • /æ/ is lowered in the direction of [a] by some.
  • Other features of the California vowel shift are mostly found in Southern Oregon.

[edit] West/Central Canadian English

Main article: West/Central Canadian English

Overall, the pronunciation of English in most of Canada, and especially in Central and Western Canada, is very similar to the pronunciation of English found in the Western United States; Canadian raising and the Canadian vowel shift are the most distinctive features.

[edit] Canadian raising

Main article: Canadian raising

A number of Canadians have a distinct feature called "Canadian raising" (Chambers 1973). This feature means that the nucleus of the diphthongs /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ are "raised" before voiceless consonants. In most varieties of American English pairs such as pouter/powder and rider/writer are pronounced exactly the same. In Canadian English, however, when a diphthong is followed by the voiceless consonants such as /p/ /t/ /k/ /f/ and some others, the starting point of the diphthong raises from an open central vowel to a mid one.

For example, ride is pronounced [raɪd] but with write, because the diphthong is followed by a /t/, the diphthong raises and the word is pronounced [rəɪt]. Most other speakers of American English do not possess these allophonic sounds ([əʊ] and [əɪ]) but the pronunciation is still marked. The Canadian pronunciation of "about the house" may sound like "a boat the hoas" to speakers of dialects without the raising, and in many cases is misheard (or deliberately exaggerated) as "aboot the hoos". Some stand-up and situation comedians, as well as television shows (such as South Park) exaggerate the pronunciation to *"aboot the hoos" for comic effect. True Canadian raising affects both /aʊ/ and /aɪ/, but a related phenomenon, of much wider distribution throughout the United States, affects only /aɪ/. So, whereas the General American pronunciations of rider and writer are identical ([ɹaɪɾɚ]), those whose dialects include either the full or restricted Canadian raising will pronounce them as [ɹaɪɾɚ] and [ɹəɪɾɚ], respectively. Canadian raising is quite strong in most of Ontario and the Maritimes as well as in the Prairies. It is receding in British Columbia, and many of these speakers do not raise /aɪ/ before voiceless consonants. Younger speakers in the Lower Mainland do not even raise /aʊ/.

[edit] Canadian vowel Shift

Main article: Canadian Shift

The Canadian Shift is a linguistic chain shift, first identified in 1995, found among many anglophone Canadians. This phenonenon is also found scattered throughout the Western United States, even in areas very far from the Canadian border.

This feature is not found in the Atlantic Provinces, east of Quebec; it is only found in Ontario and farther west. It is triggered by the cot-caught merger. As one vowel encroaches upon the space of another, the adjacent vowel in turn experiences a movement in order to maximize phonemic differentiation. The vowels in the words cot /kɒt/ and caught /kɔt/ merge to [kɔt] (equivalent to General American "caught").

• The /æ/ of bat is retracted to [a] (between General American bat and bot)
• The /ɛ/ of bet shifts to [æ] (like General American bat)
• The /ɪ/ in bit then shifts to the [ɛ] (like General American bet)

[edit] Midwestern English

The Midwest contains three distinct dialect regions ^[2]: the Northern dialect (including the Inland Northern sub-dialect), the North Central dialect, and the North Midlands dialect.

[edit] Inland Northern

Main article: Inland Northern American English

The Inland North Dialect is the "standard Midwestern" speech that was the basis for General American in the mid-20th Century, though it has been recently modified by the northern cities vowel shift.

This area is centered on the Great Lakes, and consists of western New York State (Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse), much of Michigan's Lower Peninsula (Detroit, Grand Rapids), Cleveland, Chicago, Gary, and Southeastern Wisconsin (Milwaukee, Racine).

This map shows the approximate extent of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, and thus the approximate area where the Inland North dialect predominates. Note that the region surrounding Erie, Pennsylvania is excluded; the dialect spoken there more closely resembles that of Pittsburgh.

[edit] Northern Cities Vowel shift

Main article: Northern Cities Vowel Shift

Perhaps the most distinctive feature of Inland Northern dialects, this chain shift has been occurring in six stages:

1. The first stage of the shift is the diphthongization of [æ] to [ɪə]. This results in words like "candy" being pronounced more like "kyandy."
2. The second stage is the fronting of [ɑ], which then sounds similar to the former [æ]. "Not" then sounds like "naht."
3. In the third stage, [ɔ] lowers towards [ɑ], causing "stalk" to sound more like "stock".
4. The fourth stage, the lowering of [ɛ], is not unique to this particular vowel shift.
5. During the fifth stage, [ʌ] is backed towards [ɔ]. "Stuck" sounds like "stalk".
6. In the sixth stage, [ɪ] is lowered and backed, although it is kept distinct from [ɛ]. This means that the pin-pen merger does not occur.

Note that this merger is in progress across the region, but that each subsequent stage is a result of the previous one(s), so that an individual speaker may not display all of these shifts, but no speaker will display the last without also showing the ones before it.

[edit] Eastern Dialects

[edit] Boston

Main article: Boston accent

The Boston accent has a highly distinctive system of low vowels, even amongst speakers who do not drop syllable-final /r/. Eastern New England is the only region in North America where the distinction between the vowels in words like father and spa on the one hand and words like bother and hot on the other hand is securely maintained: the former contain [aː] ([faːðə] and [haːt] respectively), and the latter [ɒː] ([bɒːðə] and [hɒːt] respectively). While heart and hot remain distinct for these speakers, the accent of nearby New York (as well as some other non-rhotic accents) uses the same or almost the same vowel in both of these classes: [ɑː]. Received Pronunciation (in England), like Boston English, distinguishes the classes, using [ɑː] in heart and [ɒ] in hot.

[edit] Southern American English

Main article: Southern American English

Few generalizations can be made about Southern pronunciation as a whole, as there is great variation between regions in the South (see different southern American English dialects for more information) and between older and younger people. Upheavals such as the Great Depression, the Dust Bowl and World War II have caused mass migrations throughout the United States. Southern American English as we know it today began to take its current shape only after the World War II. Some generalizations include:

• The merger of [ɛ] and [ɪ] before nasal consonants
• The diphthong /aɪ/ becomes monophthongized.
• Lax and tense vowels often merge before /l/

[edit] Southern Drawl

The Southern Drawl, or the diphthongization/triphthongization of the traditional short front vowels as in the words pat, pet, and pit: these develop a glide up from their original starting position to [j], and then in some cases back down to schwa.

• /æ/ → [æjə]
• /ɛ/ → [ɛjə]
• /ɪ/ → [ɪjə]

[edit] Southern vowel shift

• [ɪ] moves to become a high front vowel, and [ɛ] to become a mid front unrounded vowel. In a parallel shift, the /i/ and /e/ relax and become less front.
• The back vowels /u/ in "boon" and /o/ in "code" shift considerably forward.
• The open back unrounded vowel /ɑr/ "card" shifts upward towards /ɔ/ "board", which in turn moves up towards the old location of /u/ in "boon". This particular shift probably does not occur for speakers with the cot-caught merger.

[edit] References

• Shitara, Yuko (1993). "A survey of American pronunciation preferences". Speech Hearing and Language 7: 201–32. 
• Mencken, H. L. (1936, repr. 1977). The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (4th edition). New York: Knopf. 
• Rainey, Virginia, (2004) Insiders' Guide: Salt Lake City (4th ed.), The Globe Pequot Press, ISBN 0-7627-2836-1
• Brigham Young University Linguistics Department Research Teams
• BYU "Utah English" Research Team's Homepage
• Article about "Utahnics" (social satire)
• "How We Talk: American Regional English Today" by Allan A. Metcalf, 2000, Houghton Mifflin.
• "Utahnics", segment on All Things Considered, National Public Radio February 16, 1997.
• Chambers, J. K. "Canadian raising". Canadian Journal of Linguistics 18.2 (1973): 113–35.
• Dailey-O'Cain, J. "Canadian raising in a midwestern U.S. city". Language Variation and Change 9,1 (1997): 107-120.
• Labov, W. "The social motivation of a sound change". Word 19 (1963): 273–309.
• Wells, J. C. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
• McCarthy, John (1993). A case of surface constraint violation. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 38. 169–95.
• Metcalf, Allan (2000), How We Talk, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.
• George Mason University. The Speech Accent Archive, 22 September, 2004.

1. ^ Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 68. ISBN 3-11-016746-8. 
2. ^ Labov, William, Sharon Ash, and Charles Boberg (2006). The Atlas of North American English. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter, 68. ISBN 3-11-016746-8. 

[edit] See also

• American English
• Canadian English