The West and Midwest: phonology

This topic offers a phonological sketch of the varieties of English spoken across the midwestern and western United States. The area covered can be visualized as a fairly narrow band that stretches from western Pennsylvania across central sections of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois and widens at the Mississippi River to include Missouri, Iowa, and Minnesota and eventually the Great Plains and the western states as it continues to the Pacific coast. To be sure, this vast territory is by no means linguistically homogenous; indeed almost all of the speech characteristics described here occur variably across the regions considered and across speakers within any given region. Nevertheless, there are traits that can be heard throughout this broad territory and that serve to distinguish it from neighboring areas. The region seems also to have some coherence in popular perceptions of American dialects. The speech of this region generally lacks features that are salient markers of place to the ears of most Americans, a tendency that contributes to the perception that the region is “accentless”. This sense of the region is encoded in the notion of a “General American” dialect, a term that was used by observers of American English such as H.L. Mencken before Kurath’s tripartite division (North, Midlands, South) became received wisdom among dialectologists. General American was typically distinguished from Southern and Eastern speech and was defined negatively as a dialect that lacked the regionally distinctive features of the other two. Some linguists still employ the General American label though they are quick to add that it does not designate a monolithic accent.

الاكثر قراءة في Phonology

Minimal pairs and sets

Aspiration

Phones and allophones

Assimilations

Finding the underlying form

The Sonority Sequencing Generalization

Major class features

Feature geometry

Standard lexical sets

Bukusu: nasal+consonant combinations

Place of articulation

Allophony in other languages

Floating tones

Natural classes

Dissimilation

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اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

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جموع المعزين تحيي مراسم يوم العاشر من شهر المحرم عند المرقدين الطاهرين

قسم العلاقات يطلق محطات فتية الكفيل الثقافية في محافظة نينوى

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الآخبار التكنلوجية

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المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Spelling and Pronunciation SUMMARY

American English vs. British English

Morphological Basis of English Spelling

Phoneme–Grapheme Correspondences in English Vowels

Phoneme–Grapheme Correspondences in English Consonants

Spelling and Pronunciation Irregularity of English Spelling

Structural Factors in Second Language Phonology SUMMARY

Perception

Optimality Theory (OT)

Ontogeny Phylogeny Model (OPM)

Markedness

Hypercontrast