General American

Encyclopedia : G : GE : GEN : General American

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General American is a national accent of American English based on speech patterns common in the Midwest of the United States and those used by many American network television broadcasters. It is also sometimes called Standard Midwestern or American broadcast English. The General American accent or dialect is not thought of as a linguistic standard in the sense that Received Pronunciation (RP) is the standard, prestige variant in England and British society historically, but its speakers are perceived as "accentless" by most Americans. The idea of a uniform media American accent has declined in popularity since the late 1960s.

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 RP as well as most standard language varieties of many other societies—was never the accent of the entire nation. Rather, it was derived from 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. The famous news anchor Walter Cronkite is a good example of this accent. Since Cronkite was born in Missouri, some assumed that General American was the regional accent of the state, although Cronkite grew up in Texas, which is not known for having "accentless" speakers. General American is sometimes promoted as preferable to other regional accents; in the U.S., 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." Some sources suggest this is less true today than it was formerly. General American is also the accent generally taught to individuals from other countries learning English as a second language in the U.S., as well as outside the U.S. to anyone who wishes to learn 'American English'.

Regional home of General American

The Telsur Project[link] 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 northern 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 anchor Chuck Roberts, 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	p  b				t  d			k  g
Affricate						tʃ  dʒ
Nasal	m				n			ŋ
Fricative		f  v		θ  ð	s  z	ʃ  ʒ			h
Approximant			(ʍ)  w		ɹ		j
Lateral approximant					l

The phoneme /ʍ/ is present only in varieties that have not undergone the wine-whine merger. Also, many Americans realize the phoneme /ɹ/ 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	Central rhotacized	Back
Close	i			u
Near-close	ɪ			ʊ
Close-mid	e			o
Mid		ə	ɚ
Open-mid	ɛ		ɝ	ʌ • (ɔ)
Open	æ			ɑ

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 it 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).

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

Diphthongs	Closer component is front	Closer component is back
Opener component is unrounded	aɪ	aʊ
Opener component is rounded	ɔɪ

Characteristics

While there is and can be no single formal definition of General American, various features are considered to be part of it, including rhotic pronunciation, which maintains the coda [r] 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; 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 {{IPA where [V] stands for any vowel. Words of this class include, among others:

• 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 [-ɑr-] and in Canadian English they are all pronounced with [-ɔr-]. 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 above have [-ɑr-], like New York-New Jersey English, for many speakers (Shitara 1993).

Ethnic origin

Little is known about the origin of General American pronunciation; whether it originated from the melting pot of languages or whether it can be traced back to a single immigrant group. The largest ethnic group in the U.S. is German Americans. The areas with an perceived accent generally tend to correspond to to areas where Germans do not form the plurality. It is not known whether German Americans or their Low Saxon dialect had any effect on the formation of General American.

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

External links

• [The CMU Pronouncing Dictionary]

References

English dialects

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