Talk:General American English/Archive 1

message: I'm sorely tempted to move this article to General American and switch the direction of the redirect. As the article itself says, the accent is not standard in any official sense, nor is it limited to the Midwest. The term most commonly encountered in linguistics is General American. If no one objects, I'll go ahead and do that. --Angr 23:01, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  move to "General American"? 

message: I removed the following paragraph because it's unclear what is meant by "placing stress on consonants and on syllables in the middle of words". If someone would like to restore this paragraph, let's discuss it here first.
*Individuals from the Midwestern US sometimes have difficulty understanding other dialects of English, because most other dialects, both in other parts of the US and abroad, place less stress on consonants and on syllables in the middle of words.  Since Slavic languages stress consonants even more heavily than does Standard Midwestern, a Russian who learns English extremely well often sounds almost Midwestern (cf. Vladimir Posner).  This is especially noticeable in the speech of interpreters for important Russian officials.  (The exception to this is seen when Russian interpreters have specifically learned to speak British English, and their vowels sound seriously over-emphasized to native English speakers.)
--Angr 20:40, 25 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed paragraph 

message: it doesnt make any sense that midwestern english is standard. if you look at chicago, that is midwest, and i would hardly call them standard, especially when they say words like "accent". cleveland is also in the midwest and has the same weird accent. we can also look at minnesota and wisconsin, both in the midwest and they talk funny as well, especially when they say "about", they use the canadian about. and minnesota people love to say "dontcha know". i seriously doubt minnesota english is standard for usa, maybe canada though. i live in ohio and i must say that people here sound like southerners more than anything else. i might as well be in kentucky. so really, standard american english is NOT based on the midwest.
:I agree with this.  General American doesn't exist.  Of course England's RP does; they have a BBC.  It's run by the government.  America never had such a station.  I think this article should serve to explain why there ISN'T a General American dialect instead of pretending there is one (either that, or it should analyze what the various American accents have in common in comparison with other accents instead of attempting to single out a particular accent as "General American.")
Juppiter 19:20, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: General American exists all right; I'm a native speaker of it. But it isn't codified the way RP is, and there's much more variation allowed within it than within RP. It may be more convenient to define it negatively: General American is any American accent that isn't a local regional accent. I was born in Santa Barbara and my parents grew up in Los Angeles, but I don't have the fronting of /o/ and /u/ or the raising of  to /i/ before  associated with California English. Between the ages of 2 and 9 I lived in Rochester, New York, but I don't have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift. Between the ages of 9 and 21 I lived in Austin, Texas, but I don't have any of the characteristics of a Texas accent (no -monophthongization, no pin-pen merger, neither of the fill-feel and fell-fail mergers, etc.). Lacking a regional accent, but indisputably having an American accent, I default to General American. --Angr/ 20:38, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

text: You are, of course, incorrect.  Just because you perceive differences between the way you speak and the way various acquaintances of yours from other areas speak does not mean that General American is not based on the speech of the midwest.  As for peoplf rom minnesota and wisconsin pronouncing "about" the same as canadians, I can tell you, categorically, your perception is incorrect.  As for people from Minnesota saying "dontcha know", I hardly think the worst stereotypes of Minnesotan you might have picked up upon from watching Fargo qualify as authoritative.  If you admittedly perceive your own pronunciation as "southern", in fact, I would have to, without wanting to sound too insulting, have to dismiss your judgment of both midwestern "accents" an any subsequent comparison to what you apparently erroneously believe to be General American, as terminally flawed.  Tomer TALK 04:47, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
I'd say what's most incorrect about the anonymous statement above are the assumptions that (1) there's a single Midwestern accent, and (2) that General American is based on a regional accent. He's quite right that the local accents of Chicago, Cleveland, and Minnesota aren't General American. He's also right that a lot of Southern features have spread into Ohio. The map shows the region where the local accent comes closest to GenAm, and it's farther west than Chicago and Ohio and farther south than Minnesota and Wisconsin. But even so, saying the local accents of eastern Nebraska, southern and central Iowa, and west-central Illinois come closest to GenAm is not the same thing as saying they are GenAm. GenAm is spoken throughout the country, by people who for whatever reason don't have an accent identifiable with any particular region. (Also, the question of "dontcha know" is irrelevant because it's not a matter of accent. The particular phonetic realization of the /o/ in both words is a matter of accent, but the usage of the phrase itself isn't.) --Angr/ 06:10, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

text: Ah.  I regarded the most relevant part of the "dontcha know" thing as the palatalization of the /t/, rather than anything to do with vowel phonemes.  Hence my characterization of it as an exaggeration rather than a valid identifier of any regional pronunciation. Tomer TALK 06:55, May 30, 2005 (UTC)
Is there any variety of English where "don't you" can't be pronounced "dontcha"? --Angr/ 08:26, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  midwest 

message: 
Could someone who knows about the topic please write on the article where the term General American comes from? The article should also specify how General American is prnounced, with allophones and everything, not just phonemes. 2004-12-29T22:45Z 02:04, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'll see what I can find out about the former. As for the latter, it may be difficult because there is no single, monolithic General American pronunciation; there's a lot of variation within GenAm. --Angr/ 06:19, 21 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Expand this thing 

message: It's mentioned in the article that General American is considered by some to be an accentless variation on the greater language. I would ask, plainly, WHAT variation? I think it's worth noting, whether you want to tack General American to a specific and perhaps somewhat arbitrary spot in the United States, that the high concept here is simply pronouncing words as they appear in the dictionary, be it Webster's, Oxford, Cambridge or what have you. Is it unfair to say that in the face of a proud and very long tradition, people have independently picked up dictionaries and resolved to do what they're told?
Ylem 12:00, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: The word "variation" doesn't occur anywhere in the article, so I'm not sure what you're objecting to. And I think there's hardly anyone who bases their pronunciation on what a dictionary says; rather, it's the other way around. Dictionaries base their pronunciation guides on what people actually say. --Angr/ 12:06, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

text: I think you might have a different definition of "accent" than linguists have. If you look at the article Accent (linguistics) you will see that "Accents mark speakers as a member of a group by their pronunciation of the standard language." (I'm not sure it's necessary to say "standard language", as it's possible to have an accent in a nonstandard or nonstandardized language as well.) General American is a particular pronunciation (or rather, a group of closely related pronunciations) of American English and is therefore an accent. The reason why "accentless" is always written in scare quotes in the article is that technically, "accentless" speech is impossible since every pronunciation is an accent, but laymen often use the word "accent" to mean "nonstandard accent". Laymen often say "So-and-so doesn't have an accent" when what they mean from the linguists' point of view is "So-and-so's accent is standard." Are you sure British dictionaries have included General American pronunciation for hundreds of years? I thought it was a relatively recent thing (in the past 15 years or so) that some British dictionaries have included American pronunciations. And while older dictionaries may have been fairly prescriptive, I think modern dictionaries do a good job of being descriptive instead. Merriam-Webster's Collegiate (11th edn.), for example, bases the pronunciations given on a database of pronunciations used by educated Americans recorded from radio and television since the 1930s. So that dictionary at any rate (and I think really most modern dictionaries) derives its pronuncation guides from what people actually say. It also gives variant pronunciations, including Canadian and British as well as regional accents from within the U.S., when these differ unpredictably from the commonest American pronunciation. --Angr/ 21:10, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  General American: Accent? 

message: In the section "Regional home of General American" the reason given for the location choice for telemarketing firms is the accentless speech.  This may be the reason for the larger area, but I grew up in the region, and the reason frequently cited there is that Omaha was originally chosen as a telemarketing center was because of the high density of long distance lines installed there during the 1950s, due to the needs of the Strategic Air Command located at Offutt Air Force Base.  --Blainster 22:05, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Non-linguistic reasons why Omaha has lots of telemarketing companies might be interesting to add at Omaha, Nebraska or at Telemarketing, but they're completely irrelevant to the discussion of General American. I've changed the wording to "neutreal accents are one of the reasons why" and deleted the rest. --Angr/ 04:29, 2 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Midwest home of telemarketing

message: DragoonWraith 16:56, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Origin" in NY/NJ 

message: Most of our city dwellers speak with an "accentless" accent, very "General American". I don't understand the map for the Midwest and why Ohio is not included in "General American". I can vouch for it :-).
Any others from Central & Southwestern Ohio that can share more about our beautiful "General American" accent.
:Unfortunately, your vouching for it is original research. Published linguistic research does not confirm the absence of regionalisms in Ohio. User:Angr 09:31, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Central & Southwest Ohio 

message: Does the age of a speaker have anything to do with pronounciation? I have noticed that in my region the elderly speak somewhat different. For example for the word "where" they say Hwere, while most others say it without pronouncing the H. Regarding the word sorry, very small children say Sari. I noticed once a mother said to her young daughter "Say you're sorry" so the girl said "I'm sari". How did the small daughter have a different accent?
:Sure, it's very common for there to be linguistic differences between generations. The difference in pronunciation you've noticed in the word "where" is the wine-whine merger, where older people have not done the merger but younger people have. The little girl may well be picking up the accent of other children she knows from school or daycare; children are far more likely to use their peers' pronunciation than their parents'. User:Angr 09:42, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Age of Speaker 

message: Britain is full of many accents sliding and varying in every direction, village to village, hamlet to hamlet. The thing is, some accents in Britain seem to come close to General American. Well maybe not close but the closest thing Britain has. I've noticed that somewhere round Yorkshire in the North of England. My question is...Where in Britain is the closest accent to General American? Could it be possible that a Brit could be confused for a General American Accent speaker?
:I am surprised that you find the non-rhotic Yorkshire accent close to General American, though it does have the "flat a". I think that some of the Border Scots accents, which are both rhotic and have the "flat a" and don't have the distinctive "continental" pronunciation of "u" closer to an American accent (in Yorkshire  "look" and "luck" are ).
:Incidentally some West country accents sound very similar to the "Old Timer" in Deputy Dawg, though that is hardly Genaral American -- Chris Q 12:34, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: If I recall correctly, the "flat a" is a survival of what used to be a widespread British pronunciation - similar to the way that U.S. "lawyer" was a common term on the other side of "the pond" a couple of centuries ago.  Many people suppose the differences between British and U.S. English are due to American corruptions or borrowings from specific localities.  That isn't necessarily a safe assumption. Durova 23:44, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Britain's General American Accent 

message: I think that it should be pointed out that the reason that these three words are pronounced with the vowel from "are" is because the first vowel has been dissimilated from the second in this environment.
It's worth adding this simply for explanatory purposes.  Although what I present here is uncited, I can remember reading something like this in a reliable source.  I recommend that anyone who's interested and has access to a university library find some citations for the following.  
In Linguistic Terms the change is such
/ɒ/ > /ɑ/ / _roʊ
That is the first vowel dissimlates from a second for the feature ROUND in the environment _roʊ.  Naturally /ɒ/ went to /ɑ/ as they share the same place of articulation with regards to tongue position.
Referencing the conversation above about "sorry", in all likelihood this change is probably the result of analogy with "sorrow" as the result of certain similarities in meaning, namely "expression/expressing emotional distress."
By the way, I have a Bachelor of Arts and Sciences in Linguistics from the University of Washington, if any of you were wondering how I'd find something like this.  :) - RedRoot 8-28-2006
:I thought about adding it when I added that section, but I can't find any published sources to back the claim up. Without published sources, it's original research and can't be used. —The preceding signed comment was added by Angr (talk • contribs). 07:44, 29 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation of "Borrow", "Sorrow", "Tomorrow", and "Sorry"