American English

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 620.

In the United States of America the most wide-spread type is General American, a term first used in 1924. Like RP in Great Britain GA in America is the social standard: it is regionally neutral, it is used by radio and TV, in scientific and business discourse, it is spoken by educated Americans. This is the most important accent or dialect of English spoken by about 35% of the combined population of the United States and Canada. Since RP and GA are the most widely accepted types of pronunciation the learners of English should know the principal differences between them. In the USA three main types of cultivated speech are recognized: the Eastern type, the Southern type and Western or General American.

1. The Eastern type is spoken in New England, and in New York city. It bears a remarkable resemblance to Southern English, though there are, of course, some slight differences.

2. The Southern typeis used in the South and South-East of the USA. It possesses a striking distinctive feature – vowel drawl, which is a specific way of pronouncing vowels, consisting in the diphthongization and even triphthongization of some pure vowels and monophthongization of some diphthongs at the expense of prolonging their nuclei and dropping the glides.

3. The third type of educated American speech is General American (GA), also known as Northern American or Western American spoken in the central Atlantic States: New York, New Jersey, Wisconsin and others. But being the pronunciation standard of the US it is not considered terrirorial but social first of all. It is commonly believed that General American English evolved as a result of an aggregation of rural and suburban Midwestern dialects, though the English of the Upper Midwest can deviate quite dramatically from what would be considered a "regular" American Accent. The local accent often gets more distinct the farther north one goes within the Midwest, and the more rural the area, with the Northern Midwest featuring its own dialect North Central American English. The fact that a Midwestern Dialect became the basis of what is General American English is often attributed to the mass immigration of Midwestern farmers to California and the Pacific Northwest from where it spread. In an outline of GA accent there will be presented differences between this accent and RP.

The total number of RP and GA consonants differ in one phoneme, it is the GA /ʍ/ which is voiceless, fricative, labiovelar. The GA /r/ is more sonorous than the RP /r/. It is retroflex. /l/ is predominantly dark. /t/ is intermediate between /d/ and /t/. The result is neutralization of the distribution between /t/ and /d/ in the position like latter and ladder. The original distinction is preserved through vowel length with the vowel before /t/ being shorter. /t/ may be omitted in twenty, plenty. It may change into a glottal stop: that one. Glottal stop – /?/. /h/ is voiced in intervocalic position; lost initially in unstressed or weak forms within a phrase. /∫/ is vocalized in version, Asia. The sonorant /j/ is usually weakened or omitted altogether in GA between a consonant and /u:/ tune, tube, student, during.

Principal peculiarities of GA vowels.

1. no opposition between historically long and historically short vowels.

2. /æ/ is long, mostly nasalized, may turn into /e/ as in marry, carry, /æ/ may be used instead of /a:/ as in ask, past, dance.

3. /o/ instead of /o:/

4. /٨/ turns into /зr/ hurry /hзri/

5. Since GA is a rhotic accent with non-prevocalic /r/, many diphthongs are monophthongized before /r/ as /iә/→/ir/ beer, /εә/→/εr/ bare, /oә/→/or/ door, /uә/ → /ur/ tour.