General American English

 ( American English ) 

Rhoticity is common in most American accents despite being now rare in England because, during the 17th-century British colonization of the Americas, nearly all dialects of English were rhotic, and most English in North America simply remained that way. The North American preservation of rhoticity was also supported by waves of rhotic-accented Scotch-Irish immigrants, most intensely during the 18th century, when this ethnic group eventually made up one-seventh of the colonial population, plus smaller waves during the following two centuries. Scotch-Irish settlers spread from Delaware and Pennsylvania throughout the larger Mid-Atlantic region, the inland regions of both the South and North, and throughout the West: American dialect areas that were all uninfluenced by upper-class non-rhoticity and that consequently have remained consistently rhotic.Wolfram, Walt; Schilling, Natalie (2015). American English: Dialects and Variation. John Wiley & Sons. pp. 103–104. While non-rhoticity spread on the East Coast (perhaps first in imitation of early 19th-century London speech), even the East Coast has gradually begun to restore rhoticity, due to it becoming nationally prestigious since the mid-20th century.

is normally pronounced as a [[glottal stop]]  when both after a vowel (or a [[liquid|liquid consonant]]) and before a syllabic  or any non-syllabic consonant, as in ''button''  and ''fruitcake'' . Similarly, in absolute final position after a vowel or liquid,  is replaced by, or simultaneously articulated with, glottal constriction:Seyfarth, Scott; [[Garellek, Marc|Marc Garellek]] (2015). "[https://pages.ucsd.edu/~mgarellek/files/Seyfarth_Garellek_2015_ICPhS.pdf Coda glottalization in American English]". In ICPhS. University of California, San Diego, p. 1. thus, ''what'' may be transcribed as  and ''fruit'' as . (This innovation of [[/t/ glottal stopping|T-glottalization]] occurs in many British English dialects as well.)
     

Both intervocalic and may commonly be realized as (a nasalized alveolar flap) (flapping) or simply , making winter a homophone with winner in fast or informal speech.

are considered to compose a [[natural class]] of [[tense|Tenseness]] pure vowels ([[monophthongs]]) in General American. All of the tense vowels except  and  can have either monophthongal or diphthongal pronunciations (i.e.  vs ). The diphthongs are the most usual realizations of  and  (as in ''stay''  and ''row'' , hereafter transcribed without the diacritics), which is reflected in the way they are transcribed. Monophthongal realizations are also possible, most commonly in unstressed syllables; here are audio examples for ''potato''  and ''window'' . In the case of  and , the monophthongal pronunciations () are in [[free variation]] with diphthongs (). As indicated in above phonetic transcriptions,  is subject to the same variation (also when monophthongal: ), but its mean phonetic value is usually somewhat less central than in modern Received Pronunciation (RP).  varies between back  and central .
     

Also, some scholars analyze to be an allophone of (the unstressed vowel in words like , banana, oblige, etc.), that surfaces when stressed, so and may be considered to be in complementary distribution, comprising only one phoneme.

Many speakers outside of General American areas in the Inland North, Upper Midwestern, and Philadelphia dialect areas raise before voiced consonants in certain words as well, particularly , and . Hence, words like tiny, spider, cider, tiger, dinosaur, beside, idle (but sometimes not idol), and fire may contain a raised nucleus. The use of , rather than , in such words is unpredictable from the phonetic environment alone, but it may have to do with their acoustic similarity to other words with before a voiceless consonant, per the traditional Canadian-raising system. Some researchers have argued that there has been a phonemic split in those dialects, and the distribution of the two sounds is becoming more unpredictable among younger speakers.

• Mary–marry–merry merger in transition: According to the 2003 dialect survey, nearly 57% of participants from around the country self-identified as merging the sounds (as in the first syllable of parish), (as in the first syllable of perish), and (as in pear or pair).Vaux, Bert and Scott Golder (2003). " How do you pronounce Mary / merry / marry?" The Harvard Dialect Survey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Linguistics Department. The merger is largely complete in most regions of the country, the major exceptions being much of the Atlantic Coast and southern Louisiana.
• Hurry–furry merger: The pre- vowels in words like hurry and furry are merged in most American accents to or a syllabic consonant . Roughly only 10% of American English speakers acknowledge the distinct hurry vowel before , according to the same dialect survey aforementioned.Vaux, Bert and Scott Golder (2003). " fl ourish ". The Harvard Dialect Survey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Linguistics Department.
• Mirror–nearer merger in transition: The pre- vowels in words like mirror and nearer are merged or very similar in most American accents. The quality of the historic mirror vowel in the word miracle is quite variable.Vaux, Bert and Scott Golder (2003). " the first vowel in "m iracle"". The Harvard Dialect Survey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Linguistics Department.
• Americans vary slightly in their pronunciations of R-colored vowels such as those in and , which sometimes monophthongizes towards and or tenseness towards and respectively. That causes pronunciations like for pair/ pear and for peer/ pier. Also, is often reduced to , so that cure, pure, and mature may all end with the sound , thus rhyming with blur and sir. The word sure is also part of the rhyming set as it is commonly pronounced .
• Horse–hoarse merger: This merger makes the vowels and before homophones, with homophonous pairs like horse/hoarse, corps/core, for/four, morning/mourning, war/wore, etc. homophones. Many older varieties of American English still keep the sets of words distinct, particularly in the extreme Northeast, the South (especially along the Gulf Coast), and the central Midlands, but the merger is evidently spreading and younger Americans rarely show the distinction. This merger is also found in most modern varieties of British English.
• "Short o" before r before a vowel: In typical North American accents (both U.S. and Canada), the historical sequence (a short o sound followed by r and then another vowel, as in orange, forest, moral, and warrant) is realized as , thus further merging with the already-merged ( horse– hoarse) set. In the U.S., a small number of words (namely, tomow, sy, sow, bow, and mow) usually contain the sound instead and thus merge with the set (thus, sorry and sari become homophones, both rhyming with starry).

The Mid-Atlantic United States, the Inland Northern United States, and Western Pennsylvania were regarded as having General American accents in the earlier twentieth century but not by the middle of that century. Many younger speakers within the Mid-Atlantic region,Fruehwald, Josef (2013). " The Phonological Influence on Phonetic Change". Publicly Accessible University of Pennsylvania Dissertations. p. 48. . the Inland North,Dinkin, Aaron (2017). " Escaping the TRAP: Losing the Northern Cities Shift in Real Time (with Anja Thiel)". Talk presented at NWAV 46, Madison, Wisc., November 2017. and many other areas, however, appear to be retreating from their regional features towards a more General American accent. The regional accents (especially the r-dropping ones) of Eastern New England, New York City, and the Southern United States have never been labeled "General American", even since the term's popularization in the 1930s. In 1982, British phonetician John C. Wells wrote that two-thirds of the American population spoke with a General American accent.

Since calling one variety of American speech the "general" variety can imply privileging and prejudice, Kretzchmar instead promotes the term Standard American English, which he defines as a level of American English pronunciation "employed by educated speakers in formal settings", while still being variable within the U.S. from place to place, and even from speaker to speaker. However, the term "standard" may also be interpreted as problematically implying a superior or "best" form of speech.: " Standard English may be taken to reflect conformance to a set of rules, but its meaning commonly gets bound up with social ideas about how one's character and education are displayed in one's speech". The terms Standard North American English and General North American English, in an effort to incorporate Canadian speakers under the accent continuum, have also been suggested by sociolinguist Charles Boberg.Boberg, Charles (2021). Accent in North American film and television. Cambridge University Press. Since the 2000s, Mainstream American English has also been occasionally used, particularly in scholarly articles that contrast it with African-American English.Pearson, B. Z., Velleman, S. L., Bryant, T. J., & Charko, T. (2009). Phonological milestones for African American English-speaking children learning mainstream American English as a second dialect.Blodgett, S. L., Wei, J., & O'Connor, B. (2018, July). Twitter universal dependency parsing for African-American and mainstream American English. In Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 1415–1425).

Modern language scholars discredit the original notion of General American as a single unified accent, or a standard English—except perhaps as used by television networks and other mass media.Labov, William (2012). Dialect diversity in America: The politics of language change. University of Virginia Press. pp. 1–2. Today, the term is understood to refer to a continuum of American speech, with some slight internal variation, but otherwise characterized by the absence of "markedness" pronunciation features: those perceived by Americans as strongly indicative of a fellow American speaker's regional origin, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. Despite confusion arising from the evolving definition and vagueness of the term "General American" and its consequent rejection by some linguists, the term persists mainly as a reference point to compare a baseline "typical" American English accent with other World Englishes (for instance, see Comparison of General American and Received Pronunciation).

One factor fueling General American's popularity was the major demographic change of twentieth-century American society: increased suburbanization, leading to less mingling of different social classes and less density and diversity of linguistic interactions. As a result, wealthier and higher-educated Americans' communications became more restricted to their own demographic. This, alongside their new marketplace that transcended regional boundaries (arising from the century's faster transportation methods), reinforced a widespread belief that highly educated Americans should not possess a regional accent. A General American sound, then, originated from both suburbanization and suppression of regional accent by highly educated Americans in formal settings. A second factor was a rise in immigration to the Great Lakes area (one native region of supposed "General American" speech) following the region's rapid industrialization period after the American Civil War, when this region's speakers went on to form a successful and highly mobile business elite, who traveled around the country in the mid-twentieth century, spreading the high status of their accents. A third factor is that various sociological (often race- and class-based) forces repelled socially-conscious Americans away from accents negatively associated with certain minority groups, such as African Americans and poor white communities in the South and with Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups (for example, Jewish communities) in the coastal Northeast. Instead, socially-conscious Americans settled upon accents more prestigiously associated with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities in the remainder of the country: namely, the West, the Midwest, and the non-coastal Northeast.

Kenyon, author of American Pronunciation (1924) and pronunciation editor for the second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary (1934), was influential in codifying General American pronunciation standards in writing. He used as a basis his native Midwestern (specifically, northern Ohio) pronunciation. Kenyon's home state of Ohio, however, far from being an area of "non-regional" accents, has emerged now as a crossroads for at least four distinct regional accents, according to late twentieth-century research.Hunt, Spencer (2012). target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> "Dissecting Ohio's Dialects". The Columbus Dispatch. GateHouse Media, Inc. Archived from the original on September 28, 2021. Furthermore, Kenyon himself was vocally opposed to the notion of any superior variety of American speech.Hampton, Marian E. & Barbara Acker (eds.) (1997). The Vocal Vision: Views on Voice. Hal Leonard Corporation. p. 163.

General American is thus sometimes associated with the speech of North American radio and television announcers, promoted as prestigious in their industry, where it is sometimes called "Broadcast English", "Network English",