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General American (sometimes called Standard Midwestern 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.
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* 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 personalities Chuck Roberts and Paula Zahn, both of whom were local news anchors in Omaha. Consonants A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below: The phoneme is present only in varieties that have not undergone the wine-whine merger. Also, many Americans realize the phoneme 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: Depending on one's analysis, people who merge the vowels of ''cot'' and ''caught'' to either have no phoneme at all, or have it 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). The diphthongs of General American are shown in the next table: 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 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 {{IPA|ɒrV}} where V stands for any vowel. Words of this class include, among others: 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 . 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 Notes | ||||||||
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