Concept
General American English
Overview
General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm), is the umbrella accent of American English used by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, or from the (North) Midland, Western New England, and Western regions of the country are the most likely to be perceived as using General American speech.
The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Some scholars prefer other names, such as Standard American English, though this can be a wider term encompassing more than just accent, whereas General American does not incorporate other linguistic features like grammar structures, spelling conventions, vocabulary, etc.
Standard Canadian English accents may be considered to fall under General American, especially in opposition to the United Kingdom's Received Pronunciation. The phonetician John C. Wells, for instance, said in 1982 that typical Canadian English accents align with General American in nearly every situation where British and American accents differ.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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This process of composition is sometimes found in its incipient stage—a stage in which the component words are temporarily united to signify some unnamed object, and do not (from lack of frequent use) permanently cohere. But in the majority of inferior languages, the process of “agglutination,” as it is called, has gone far enough to produce considerable stability in the compound words: there is a manifest…
Herbert Spencer, First Principles
States what General American English is.
Perhaps I am old-fashioned, but I must confess that I view with alarm the theory that language is merely a means of communication, and not also a vehicle of beauty. This tendency is world-wide, but naturally it has advanced in America. In a more or less authoritative book published by the Children’s Foundation,[1] I find some remarks on the teaching of English which seem to exemplify the tendency I deplore. For…
Bertrand Russell, Education and the good life
States what General American English is.
This seems, accordingly, to be the universal practice of all the ancient languages.
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
States what General American English is.
Related ideas
- American English
- Minimal pair
- New England
- African Americans
- Linguistics
- Phoneme
- Phonology
- Pennsylvania
- The New Yorker
- United Kingdom
- University of Pennsylvania
- World War II
- British English
- Loanword
- Quebec
- American Civil War
- Alice Walker
- Idiolect
Place in the tradition
Part of Language.