Choosing
a Dialect of North American English |
|
Sherry
Ash (Philadelphia) |
English-speaking
North America is divided into a number of dialect areas, with subdivisions
within the larger regions. Discovering
the processes that determine these regions and defining their extent has been the
focus of research designed to create the Atlas
of North American English (Labov, Ash, and Boberg, to appear) for the last
several years. The dialect variants
stem from sound changes which are robust in North America today. Some of these sound changes involve sets of
elements, such as the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Shift; others are
more limited in scope but nonetheless have major phonological consequences,
such as the unconditioned merger of /o/ and /oh/, as in cot and caught. Still others have little effect on the
system as a whole but affect the phonetics of certain elements, such as the
widespread fronting of /uw/, as in food,
and the less prevalent fronting of /ow/, as in go.
The notion of
General American is misleading, and it is not used by researchers in North
America who study North American dialects.
There is no dialect that constitutes General American; rather, there are
many varieties that are accepted as sounding educated and appropriate in any
setting. Speakers from New York City,
from Philadelphia, from Chicago, from Charlotte, North Carolina, from Salt Lake
City, and from Toronto (to name only a few cities representative of different
dialect regions) have profound differences in their phonological systems. However, native North American listeners are
generally deaf to most of these differences.
There are a few features that are known to characterize some dialects:
/r/-vocalization in New York City and Eastern New England and conditioned
/ay/-monophthongization in the South, to name the two of the features that are
most often the subject of public comment.
But in general, Americans have little awareness of the specifics of
dialect differences, and most such differences have little influence on the
social evaluation of a speaker.
Thus, a second
language learner of North American English who wishes to speak like a true
native North American would, in principle, have to choose one dialect and
slavishly learn every detail of it; there is no one "General
American" dialect to look to. A
second language learner who merely wants to sound educated and to be readily
accepted as a skilled speaker of American English would have additional
latitude in the selection of phonological and phonetic features to acquire.
The dialect
regions that have been defined for the Atlas
will be described, and their principal defining features will be
presented. Some of the choices that are
required of a second language learner of North American English will be
highlighted.