Questions tagged [american-english]
The variety of English used in the United States of America.
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Half-letters in American English
I'm an American spending some time in Japan, and notice that even though most people know some English words, they have a hard time understanding and pronouncing a word like "left" because ...
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Is there a Mid-Atlantic pronouncing dictionary?
I’m someone who speaks what I would describe as “a conservative American accent”. I sound like General American from a couple decades ago. I distinguish between the vowels in Mary, marry, and merry, ...
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Origin of vowel-h digraphs that English speakers use to represent phonemes
The majority of English speakers are not proficient in the International Phonetic alphabet or any other phonetic transcription system outside their own orthography. However, we often feel the need to ...
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Unexplained /ɪl/ /ɛl/ phenomenon in American English
(I hope all this background information I’m about to give is relevant.) I’m a teenager from the north side of Chicago with a mostly unplaceable General American accent. I have some general tendencies ...
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L-epenthesis/allophony in unexplained circumstances in American English
I've been having trouble articulating this question, so I'm sorry if it's poorly worded.
I'm a teenage English speaker from Chicago. I've recently noticed a seemingly odd allophonic possibility in ...
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Why isn't the American r considered a vowel?
As a native American English speaker from the Northwest, whenever I isolate the r in words like "right" or "rope" it's always /ɚ/, the same as the r in words like "first" ...
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Preceding 'look' in response to question
Have read that this increased in popularity starting with US president Obama, but what significance does starting a response with a superfluous 'Look, ...' before giving an answer have?
eg, an ...
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Unusual categorization of slang terms in parts of speech ("cap")
I am not educated in syntax (or any formal linguistics really), so my hypotheses and observations in this question may not be super high-level.
I am a young American English speaker from the Midwest. ...
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A better rule for Canadian Raising
I'm a teenager from Chicago with a pretty standard contemporary Midwestern/General American accent (not distinctly Chicago). I'm interested in the phonetic phenomenon of Canadian Raising, in which ...
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Stress, spirantization and other changes in the word "okay"
I'm a teenager from the Midwest. In the English language, many words have significant variance in their range of possible pronunciations. Some words may sound different from speaker to speaker in ...
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Child language acquisition as an explanation for American rounding of the /r/ sound
The English phoneme typically represented by the letter ⟨r⟩ represents a confusing and complicated mess of allophonic realizations, some of which are highly disparate and some of which vary only ...
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What's the geographic distribution of the father/bra split in American English?
In most American English dialects with the father/bother merger, the bother vowel (originally /ɔ/) unrounds, lowers, and merges into the father vowel (originally /ɑ/), with the end result being /ɑ/, ...
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Voiceless Schwa after a plosive consonant
Take American English as an example, what is the difference in sounding between [pʰə̥ˈtʰeɪ̯ɾoʊ̯] and [pʰˈtʰeɪ̯ɾoʊ̯]?
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Do sentences have primary and secondary stresses?
I know that stress can shift in an English phrase or sentence to emphasize the words that mean more specifically what the speaker wishes to express, however I'm talking about the general stress where ...
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Variations of [aɪ] in English
I'm learning IPA and am surprised that some standard American English sounds which seem subtly different to me are all recorded as [aɪ].
Consider the phrase "I like the night", which I ...
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AmE feature related to American multiculturalism?
I speak with a (General) American accent. Native non-American English speakers sometimes tell me that "you pronounce every single syllable in every word." I've also stumbled upon very ...
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The A sound in Ask and At
I was reading a book on rhetoric today and it had the following table of pronounciation:
The thing I find confusing about this table is that I pronounce the A in "ask" and "at" ...
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What is the term for words that were once polite and became impolite?
Sort of the opposite of a euphemism but not exactly -- I am thinking how the word "lady" when used to address an adult, female stranger seems to have a negative connotation as in "...
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In English are there any rules to prefer the word order "rock, paper, scissors" to name the game?
Reading some buzzfeed article I saw someone claiming that in their part of the world they say "paper, scissors, rock" As the article mentions, this seems crazy wrong to most Americans and to ...
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The negative in "Sophie ate all her strawberries and so didn't Amelia"
New England speakers often use a negative form such as so didn't where others would use the positive, as in Sophie ate all her strawberries and so didn't Amelia. Since this usage may confuse a speaker ...
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What is the best book to learn about the linguistics features of American English (particularly phonology and phonetics) in detail?
I have a fairly good understanding of the IPA, Chain Shifts, variations within dialects but I still have troubles with lots of phonological ideas like devoicing, weird consonantal clusters tongue ...
user32747
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Claim that the american r sound is actually [ʁ] out west
This quora answer by Kit di Pomi (and if you browse his other answers he uses a similar uvular transcription) claims that: [ʀ] isn’t used anywhere off-stage as far as I know, typically American ...
user32747
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In English the suffix sometimes changes the stress pattern of the rest of the word. Is English the only language with this system?
TELephone, telePHONic, teLEphony. PHOTograph, photoGRAphic,photOgraphy. biOLogy, bioLOGical.
The suffix changes the stress pattern of the rest of the word. Is English the only language with this ...
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Connection between “wiseguy” and the Cantonese slang 古惑仔
"Wiseguy" can mean a made man in the mafia or a smart ass who acts like they are smarter than others. What I find interesting is that the Cantonese/Chinese slang term 古惑仔(Gu Wac Zai) has ...
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What happened to American Southern Midlands?
About a decade ago discovered the dominant dialect area of my hometown (Tulsa, Oklahoma) was considered to be "(American) Southern Midlands", or "Southern Midlands American English"...
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is american English wrong because i heard people said the British is correct? [closed]
i heard that american English is wrong according to British people and people who use non american English? so is British English correct?
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What are the official names of the various accents in the United States?
What I'm meaning to ask is: What are the technical names for things like the Southern Accent, California accent (or Western, if that's what it is), etc.?
I assume that regional accent differences have ...
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Which online sources provide narrow transcriptions for English?
I've tried a dozen of online English dictionaries, and all of them give broad transcriptions. So it's impossible to tell from them, for example, how many aspirated "p"s there are in "appropriate". ...
user31981
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Aspiration of p, t, k in English
I'm trying to figure out when exactly p, t, k should be aspirated in (American) English.
Here's what I found here:
Voiceless stops are aspirated at the beginning of a word, and at the beginning ...
user31981
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Where are some of the biggest freely available English 1 on 1 conversation corpuses that are in plain text preferably?
I'm looking for a free, preferably plain text, 1 on 1 English casual conversation (such as texting back and forth) corpus that requires little to no preprocessing (finding and replacing characters). ...
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Familiarity with any/innie merger in American English?
It was recently pointed out to me that I pronounce “any” ( and the related anything, anymore, etc.) as /ˈɪn.i/ instead of /ɛn.i/. Does anyone know a regional variation of American English that has ...
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help with the sounds of words [closed]
when we concentrate on articulars sounds we don't think about how people listening to those sounds. How to decide are rounded or unrounded vowels and which are tense or lax vowels? and what clues are ...
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Slip of the tongue
Just now, I had a slip of the tongue which resulted in a silly grammatical error. I said "if I had, I would not commented on it". I added "have" afterwards. My question is "do natives make such ...
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Does the southern pronunciation of Jenny have a triphthong in it?
You know when Forrest Gump yells Jenny's name and it sounds like "Jenneay". I'm wondering if there actually is a triphthong at the end there, or of it is a figment of my imagination. I ...
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Why did Oftentimes not become standard English outside of the US
I had never heard anyone use "oftentimes" as a word until I watched an American in a youtube video about 5 years ago. I am confident that where I am in Australia and in the UK that it wouldn't be ...
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Can medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic /n/ be distinguished easily?
Addendum (0:00am, June 27th, JST): After reading Draconis' answer, I did a little more research and added my findings below the horizontal line.
Can medial /t/ and /d/ before syllabic /n/ be easily ...
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Where does Texan English derive its l-vocalization?
My English teacher grew up in Texas and unsurprisingly her native dialect is Texan English. I noticed that when intervocalic /l/ is followed by /i/, the /l/ is elided and /y/ takes its place. For ...
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Why did Canadian English remain so close to standard U.S English?
TV Stereotypes about exaggerated Canadian accents not withstanding, to me Canadian English sounds identical to standard U.S English. I can't tell English speaking Canadians from Americans with ...
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Does anyone have a link to the American Local News Corpus V1.0?
I found a paper http://www.cs.jhu.edu/~anni/papers/alnc_lrec14.pdf that has made this epic text corpus of over 1 billion words available somewhere, but I can't find it anywhere online.
The paper says ...
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In need of a simple book on English phonology - recommendations? [closed]
SPE of Chomsky and Halle entails far more than I can handle.
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Does English have syllabic fricatives (allophonically)?
When speaking rapidly, it doesn't seem that I make a schwa at all when saying a phrase like, say, "the bus." It seems like I'm saying [ð̩.bʌs]. Is this a documented phenomenon?
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Triggering emotions with language
Emotional responses to certain words is often argued to be a result of nurture(acquired through development), while emotional responses to Tone is largely attributable to nature(born with).
Shouldn't ...
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Which dialect/accent of English has the most/least sounds?
My accent is from New York City, yet I wonder which area has the most or least sounds in their phonemic inventory. While one may have the most vowels and another the most consonants, I would like to ...
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proper terms for tipper and dipper S articulation
I just learned for the first time from a WIRED video about movie accents (at 4:30) that American English has multiple possible places of articulation for the "S" sound. I was able to find terms for ...
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What is the story behind the pronunciation of Logic? [closed]
The English pronunciation seems a peculiar to me, /lɑdʒɪk/, compared to the Greek λόγος, /ló.ɡos/ root, Latin legere carries the hard "g" with only the first vowel sounding different.
English pulls ...
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What is the pronunciation of English word "feeling" in General American accent? The normal sound [ˈfilɪŋ] or add the "l" sound, [ˈfiɫ lɪŋ]?
What is the pronunciation of English word feeling in General American accent? The normal sound [ˈfilɪŋ] or double the "l" sound, [ˈfiɫ lɪŋ] ?
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The ate-eight split?
The words "ate" and "eight" are supposed to be homophones in English, yet in (thick) Hungarian, Dutch and Swedish accents, they are not homophones. As a native Hungarian-speaker, I will attest to this:...
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Impact of European languages on AmE modality and grammatical moods
American English Use subjunctive more than British English and also they heavily use modal verb "would". Grammatical moods like subjunctive in many European languages like German and Spanish are ...
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In spoken English, is there a clear preference for using contractions?
In spoken English, is there a clear preference for using contractions? Does it depend on the locale? I am mostly interested in Midwestern and Northeastern USA, but I would also care to know how it is ...
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References for Italian-American slang (cross-post from English Language & Usage)
This morning I have asked the following question on the English Language & Usage SE:
As an Italian, I find the interaction between my language and the English language fascinating. One big ...
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