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North American English is a collective term for the dialects of the United States and Canada. It does not include the varieties of Caribbean English spoken in the West Indies. Rhoticity: Most North American English accents differ from Received Pronunciation and some other British dialects by being rhotic.
Several pronunciation patterns contrast American and British English accents. The following lists a few common ones. Most American accents are rhotic, preserving the historical /r/ phoneme in all contexts, while most British accents of England and Wales are non-rhotic, only preserving this sound before vowels but dropping it in all other contexts; thus, farmer rhymes with llama for Brits but ...
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into . differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation).See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English.
Most General American accents, but not British ones, have undergone vowel mergers before /r/: the nearer–mirror and hurry–furry mergers, and some variation of the Mary–marry–merry merger, a total three-way merger being the most common throughout North America. [18] GA accents usually have some degree of merging weak vowels.
In the vowels chart, a separate phonetic value is given for each major dialect, alongside the words used to name their corresponding lexical sets. The diaphonemes for the lexical sets given here are based on RP and General American; they are not sufficient to express all of the distinctions found in other dialects, such as Australian English.
Many of these countries, while retaining strong British English or American English influences, have developed their own unique dialects, which include Indian English and Philippine English. Chief among other native English dialects are Canadian English and Australian English, which rank third and fourth in the number of native speakers. [4]
Australian English is notable for vowel length contrasts which are absent from many English dialects. The Australian English vowels /ɪ/, /e/ and /eː/ are noticeably closer (pronounced with a higher tongue position) than their contemporary Received Pronunciation equivalents. However, a recent short-front vowel chain shift has resulted in ...
Received Pronunciation (RP) is the British English accent regarded as the standard one, carrying the highest social prestige, since as late as the very early 20th century. [1] [2] Language scholars have long disagreed on RP's exact definition, how geographically neutral it is, how many speakers there are, the nature and classification of its sub-varieties, how appropriate a choice it is as a ...