Phonological Characteristics of American English

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Bamberg, course: Proseminar: English Varieties, language: English, abstract: 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. 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.' One has to keep in mind that GA is not 'a single and totally homogeneous 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.'