Phonological Characteristics of American English

Otto-Friedrich Universität Bamberg

Phonological Characteristics of American English

by

 Dominik Borner und Eva Neubert

Table of Contents

1. Introduction 3

2. General American 3

2.1 The Vowels and Diphthongs 4
2.2 The Consonants 5

3. Dialects 6

3.1 The New England or North Eastern Dialect 6
3.2 The New York City Dialect 8
3.3 The Southern Dialect 8
3.4 African-American Vernacular English 10

4. Conclusion 11

5. Bibliography 13

1. Introduction

Even to non-native speakers of the English language it is in most cases an easy task to differentiate between British and American native speakers by listening to their pronunciation. In this term paper the most characteristic phonological features of American English will be named and explained and an overview of the variety of dialects within the United States will be provided. This can be done best by using British Standard English – also known as Received Pronunciation (RP) – as reference accent and pointing out the differences to American English.

2. General American

However, it is hard to work with the term American English when doing a phonological analysis of American speech since it covers a broad spectrum of different dialects. For this reason the term General American (GA), which is widely used and preferred by most linguists today, will be introduced and worked with. General American can be seen as the Standard English of North America, but in contrast to Received Pronunciation, it is not defined by social reputation or a specific geographical origin.¹ Throughout the United States one can not really find a socially preferred accent that is commonly recognized as the standard pronunciation. There have been several different approaches to defining a Standard English for the USA and in this paper General American will be used in means of a range of accents that do not exhibit any of the North-Eastern or Southern features which “are perceived as regional by the majority of American speakers.”² One has to keep in mind that GA is not “a single and totally homogenous accent. But since its internal variation is mainly a matter of differences in the phonetic realizations of a system of phonemes that is by and large shared by all GA speakers, the generalization expressed in the notion ‘General American’ is useful in phonological terms.”³

2.1 The Vowels and Diphthongs

Comparing the vowel charts of General American and Received Pronunciation, one will notice that there are a rather small number of differences in the phonemic inventory of both accents, so the difference in pronunciation must mainly be due to differences in the phonetic realizations of the phonemes.⁴ Concerning the vowels and diphthongs, the only major difference of the GA phonemic inventory compared to the RP inventory is the lack of the short ‘o’ (/? /) and of the centering diphthongs (/I?, e?, ? ?/). The first of these two phenomena is often referred to as the cot-caught merger since in GA the vowels in those two words are turned into a single sound which is very close to the long ‘ah’ vowel (/a :/) so cot and caught become homophones⁵ in American pronunciation. Many GA speakers perceive the vowels /? /, /? :/ and /a :/ as allophones⁶.⁷

Additionally, GA phonology does not have the RP broad A (/a :/) in words such as class or dance, but still uses the older form /æ/. “Formerly, all dialects of the English language had the sound of /æ/ as in cat ( /kæt/ ) in all of these words. At some time, probably during the late eighteenth century, a sound change occurred in southern England that changed the sound of /æ/ to /a :/ in words in which the former sound appeared before”⁸ /f, ?, ð, s, z, v/, “either alone or in the company of /m/ or /n/.”⁹ Using this example it might be surprising to learn that American English is phonologically more conservative than today’s RP. In fact, GA is in various characteristics close to seventeenth century English (The spoken English in some rural areas of the United States is sometimes even said to be Elizabethan English) since the American population did not participate in a lot of sound changes that appeared in England after the settlement of North America.¹⁰

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1 Bronstein, Arthur J.: The Pronunciation of American English, p.6

2 Tottie, Gunnel: An Introduction to American English, p.13

3 Giegerich, Heinz J.: English Phonology, p.47/48

4 Hansen, Klaus: Die Differenzierung des Englischen in nationale Varianten, p.119

5 Homophones are words which have the same phonetic form but unrelated meaning

6 Allophones are different realizations of one phoneme which do not bring about a change of meaning

7 Giegerich, Heinz J.: English Phonology, p.61

8 Broad A – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 24.09.2004

9 ibid.

10 American English - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 24.09.2004