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American Accent
American English
Rhoticity: Most American accents differ from Received Pronunciation and some other British dialects by being rhotic; the rhotic consonant /r/ is pronounced
before consonants and at the end of syllables, and the r-colored vowel [ɚ] is used as a syllable nucleus. For example, while the words hard and singer would be pronounced
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[hɑːd] and [sɪŋə] in Received Pronunciation, they would be pronounced [hɑɹd] and
[sɪŋɚ] in General American. (Exceptions are certain traditional accents found in eastern New England, New York City, and the Southern United States, plus African American Vernacular English.)
Mergers before /r/: R-coloring has led to some vowel mergers before historic /r/ that do not happen in most other native dialects. In many American accents, Mary, merry and marry sound the same (Mary–marry–merry merger), but they have the
vowels /ɛə/, /ɛ/, /æ/ respectively in RP. Similarly, nearer rhymes with mirror (mirror–
nearer merger), though the two have different vowels in RP: / / and /ɪ/. Other mergers before /r/ occur in various American dialects.
Mergers of the low back vowels: Other American mergers that are absent in Received Pronunciation are the merger of the vowels of caught and cot ([kɔːt] and [kɒt] in RP) in many accents, and the merger of father (RP [fɑːðə]) and bother (RP
[bɒðə]) in almost all.
Flat a: Most American accents lack the so-called trap–bath split found in
Southern England: Words like ask, answer, grass, bath, staff, dance are pronounced
with the short-a /æ/ of trap, not with the broad A /ɑ/ of father heard in Southern England as well as in most of the Southern hemisphere.
Flapping of /t/ and /d/: In American English, /t/ and /d/ both become the alveolar flap [ɾ] after a stressed syllable and between vowels or syllabic consonants,
making the words latter and ladder homophones, either as [lædɚ] or [læɾɚ].
The United States does not have a concrete ‘standard’ accent in the same way that Britain has Received Pronunciation. Nonetheless, a form of speech known to linguists as General American is perceived by many Americans to be «accent-less», meaning a person who speaks in such a manner does not appear to be from anywhere. The region of the United States that most resembles this is the central Midwest, specifically eastern Nebraska, southern and central Iowa, parts of Missouri, Ohio and western Illinois, but not the Chicago area.
Northern English Accents
Terms like Yorkshire accent are often surprising to people who live in Yorkshire, as locals will insist quite rightly that there are several different types of Yorkshire accent. A Sheffield accent is different from a Hull accent, which is in turn
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different from a Leeds accent, but there are numerous features that unite speakers from all three cities. In most cases, an accent enables others to place you in a large geographic area, so the term northern accent is a reasonably useful descriptor. In a small number of cases a speaker might have an accent that enables listeners to be even more specific, such as Liverpool accent.
One of the most recognisable differences in England’s accents is the distinction between speakers in the north and Midlands who generally pronounce the vowel in words such as cup, love and under with rounded lips and those in the south, who use a vowel with lips in a more neutral position. If a speaker pronounces the words bull, full and pull to rhyme with cull, gull, hull and skull then they are likely to be from the north or Midlands. For speakers in this part of England, pairs such as stood and stud or could and cud are indistinguishable, blood and flood rhyme with hood and wood and pairs such as book/buck, hook/huck, look/luck, rook/ruck, shook/shuck and took/tuck might well be homophones.
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http://bppk.net/
