North American English Regional Phonology - General American

General American

General American is a notional accent of American English perceived by Americans to be most "neutral" and free of regional characteristics. A General American accent is not a specific well-defined standardized accent in the way that Received Pronunciation (RP) has historically been the standard, prestigious variant of the English language in England; rather, accents with different features can all be perceived as General American provided they lack certain non-standard features.

One feature that General American is generally agreed to include is 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 historic /r/. General American also has yod-dropping after alveolar consonants.

The widespread Mary–marry–merry merger and the wine–whine merger are complete in most regions of North America and very common at least in informal and semi-formal varieties of others; however, the most formal varieties tend to be more conservative in preserving these phonemic distinctions. Other phonemic mergers present in some speakers in certain regions include the cot–caught merger and the pin–pen merger (a conditional merger).

One phenomenon apparently unique to American accents is the irregular 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 /ɔr/, but the last four words of the list above have /ɑr/. In the New York accent, through New Jersey and Philadelphia, and in the Carolinas, most or all of these words are pronounced /ɑr/ by many speakers (Shitara 1993). In Canadian English, however, all of the words in this class are pronounced /ɔr/.