United States English

Anglo-American varieties of English are remarkably uniform across the United States. In general three broad dialect areas are recognised: (1) Northern, including the area of original settlement, New England, (2) Southern, including the original area of African American English and (3) General, the large expanse in the centre and west of the United States in which the non-regional variety known as General American is spoken. Some authors distinguish a Midland region between the northern and southern areas in the eastern half of the country. In addition there are pockets of distinct speech in the United States, e.g. on the Outer Banks islands off North Carolina or in the Ozark Plateau region of Missouri. There are also remnants of a creole, known as Gullah, on the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Some larger cities have recognisable vernacular forms of English, e.g. New York or Boston.

General American English is recognisable by certain features, such as a retroflex [ɺ], the tapping of intervocalic [t], as in water [wɒ:ſɚ], a long, slight nasalised realisation of the TRAP vowel and a possible lowering and unrounding of the vowel in the LOT lexical set. There are also grammatical features such as auxiliary verb contractions, e.g. gonna, or archaic verb forms, such as gotten. Many specific lexical items also exist, though the American words tend to spread to British English as well, e.g. garbage for rubbish. Differences in word stress are also obvious, e.g. American aˡdult, ˡaddress,ˡinquiry but British ˡadult, aˡddress, inˡquiry.

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