Pronunciation and Dialects

Though Webster was to change his mind by the end of his life, he was earlier an articulate advocate for something like tolerance of regional variations in pronunciation. The language in the middle States is tinctured with a variety of Irish, Scotch and German dialects which are justly censured as deviations from propriety and the standard of elegant pronunciation. Every deviation from this must be wrong. The dialect of one State is as ridiculous as that of another; each is authorized by local custom; and neither is supported by any superior excellence. If in New-England we hear a flat, drawling pronunciation, in the Southern States we hear the words veal, very, vulgar pronounced weal, wery, wulgar; wine, winter, etc., changed into vine, vinter; soft becomes saft; and raisins and wound, contrary to all rules and propriety, are pronounced reesins, woond. It is the present mode at the Southward, to pronounce u like yu, as in virtyue, fortyune, etc., and in a rapid pronunciation these become virchue, forchune, as also duty, duel, are changed into juty, juel.

American English is regarded as having preserved archaic features which have since been altered in British English--i.e., American speech maintained features of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English--such as the preservation of r in most dialects, and "flat a" [æ] as in "path": features that were lost in southern England at the end of the eighteenth century. In England the flat a became a "broad a" [a:] the sound in "father." Americans generally pronounce either and neither with [i:] vowel (as in "bean"), while in England the pronunciation has followed the pattern of the vowel shift to the diphthong [ai], as in "fight."

Since the initial settlements in the Northern, Mid-Atlantic, and Southern colonies, other distinctive variations in American speech have evolved, including the following:

Eastern New England: Parts of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Vermont. The speech of this region is characterized by the retention of rounded vowel in words like "hot" and "top"; the use of "broad a" [a:] in words like "fast" and "path"; the loss of r in car (Boston is the "focal area" of this dialect).

New York City: the presence or absence of r has become class marker; cot /caught are phonemically contrasted; the pronunciation of curl as "coil" and bird as "boid" is characteristic of working-class speech. Mencken reports that this feature was apparent in speeches by presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith in 1928.

Inland Northern: Western New England, upstate New York, and the basin of the Great Lakes share features of pronunciation resulting from the settlement patterns established during the western migrations along lakes. This variety distinguishes "long" o in words like "mourning" and "hoarse" from the "shorter" sound in "morning" and "horse"; the -th sound (interdental fricative) is "voiced" in "with" (i.e., the sound at the beginning of "the" as contrasted with "thin"); the [s] in "grease" [verb] and "greasy" is voiced (and so rhyme with "sleaze" and "sleazy"); as contrasted with Eastern New England, this is variety retains "post-vocalic r" (as in "car") and has the "flat a" sound (as in "apple").

North Midland speech retains r in all positions (like Inland Northern) and has flat a [æ] in "grass" and "ask." Within this region is a sub-area including the eastern half of Pennsylvania, Southern half of New Jersey, the northern half of Delaware, and adjacent parts of Maryland. Speakers have an unrounded vowel [a:] in words like "forehead," "forest," and "hot"; "short" e (as in "pest") in "care," "Mary," and "merry"; and they merge long and short o before r in "four" and "forty." Another major sub area in this region includes speech of western Pennsylvania and parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. Features include a merger of the vowels in cot /caught; "intrustive r" (e.g., "warsh" for wash); and the syntactical construction "The car needs washed."

South Midland: West Virginia, the mountains of Virginia and North Carolina, most of Kentucky and Tennessee. Post-vocalic r is retained in this variety; the diphthong in "right" and "bye" is often pronounced more like the vowel in "father."

Southern: important focal areas are the Virginia Piedmont and the low country near the coast of South Carolina. This variety is characterized by the loss of r finally and before consonants; the unrounded vowel [a:] in "top" and "hot," flat a in "grass," "dance," and "path." A very distinctive feature is the treatment of the vowel in "house," "South," and "out": instead of diphthong [aw], Southerners begin this diphthong with [æ] before voiced consonants and finally, while in Virginia and South Carolina the diphthong is pronounced similar to that in Canadian speech, with an initial sound like the vowel in "shut," gliding towards the vowel sound in "foot" (former presidential candidate Pat Robertson is representative of this dialect). Also distinctive is the so-called Southern "drawl": diphtongization or triphthongization of stressed vowels in words like "yes." Final consonant cluster reduction occurs in words like "last" and "kept" (i.e., these are pronounced something like "lass" and "kep"). Around Charleston and New Orleans the vowel in curl and bird is pronounced as in NYC. Many speakers insert glide in Tuesday [tyuz-] and make no distinction between the vowels in pin and pen.

General American used to be thought of as most of the Western half of country, and refers to a dialect characterized by the retention of r, "flat a," and an unrounded vowel in hot. This is a kind of "idealized" dialect (broadcast English) generally thought of as "Standard."