
English language prevalence in the
United States.
Darker shades of blue indicate higher concentrations of native
English speakers in the corresponding states.
[[Image:USA State Languages.svg|thumb|Official language status of
states and territories.
]]
American English (variously abbreviated
AmE,
AE,
AmEng,
USEng,
en-US,
en-US
is the
language code for
American
English , as defined by
ISO
standards (see
ISO 639-1 and
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2) and
Internet standards (see
IETF language tag). also known as
United States English, or
U.S.
English) is a set of
dialects of the English language used mostly in the
United
States
. Approximately two thirds of native speakers of English live in the
United
States
.
English is the most common language in the United States. Though
the U.S.
federal
government has no official language, English is considered the
de facto, "in practice but not
necessarily ordained by law", language of the United States because
of its widespread use. English has been given official status by 30
of the 50 state governments.
The use of English in the United States was inherited from
British colonization.
The first wave of English-speaking settlers arrived in North
America in the 17th century.
During that time, there were also speakers in
North America of Spanish, French, Dutch,
German, Norwegian, Swedish, Scots, Welsh,
Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Finnish, Russian (Alaska
) and
numerous Native American
languages.
Phonology
In many ways, compared to
English English, North American
English is conservative in its
phonology.
Some distinctive accents can be found on the
East Coast (for example, in
Eastern New England and New York City), partly because these areas
were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of
British English at a time when those varieties were undergoing
changes. In addition, many speech communities on the East Coast
have existed in their present locations longer than others. The
interior of the United States, however, was settled by people from
all regions of the existing United States and, therefore, developed
a far more generic linguistic pattern.
Most North American speech is
rhotic, as English was in most
places in the 17th century. Rhoticity was further supported by
Hiberno-English and
Scottish English as well as the fact most
regions of England at this time also had rhotic accents. In most
varieties of North American English, the sound corresponding to the
letter
r is a
retroflex or
alveolar approximant rather than a
trill or a tap. The loss of syllable-final
r in North
America is confined mostly to the accents of
eastern New England,
New York City and surrounding
areas and the coastal portions of the
South, and
African American Vernacular
English.
In rural tidewater Virginia and eastern New England
, 'r' is non-rhotic in accented (such as "bird",
"work", "first", "birthday") as well as unaccented syllables,
although this is declining among the younger generation of
speakers. Dropping of syllable-final
r sometimes
happens in natively rhotic dialects if
r is located in
unaccented syllables or words and the next syllable or word begins
in a consonant. In England, the lost
r was often changed
into (
schwa), giving rise to a new class of
falling
diphthongs. Furthermore, the
er sound of
f'ur
or
butt'er, is realized in AmE as a
monophthongal r-colored vowel (stressed or unstressed as
represented in the
IPA). This does not happen
in the non-rhotic varieties of North American speech.
Some other English English changes in which most North American
dialects do not participate:
- The shift of to (the so-called "broad
A") before alone or preceded by a homorganic nasal. This is the difference between
the British Received
Pronunciation and American pronunciation of bath and
dance. In the United States, only eastern New England
speakers took up this modification, although even there it is
becoming increasingly rare.
- The realization of intervocalic as a glottal stop (as in for
bottle). This change is not universal for British English
and is not considered a feature of Received Pronunciation. This is not a
property of most North American dialects. Newfoundland English is a notable
exception.
On the other hand, North American English has undergone some sound
changes not found in the standard varieties of English speech:
- The
merger of and , making father and bother
rhyme. This change is nearly universal in North American English,
occurring almost everywhere except for parts of eastern New
England, hence the Boston accent.
- The merger of and . This is the so-called cot-caught
merger, where cot and caught are homophones. This change has occurred in eastern New
England, in Pittsburgh and
surrounding areas, and from the Great Plains
westward.
- For speakers who do not merge caught and cot:
The replacement of the cot vowel with the caught
vowel before voiceless
fricatives (as in cloth, off [which is found in some
old-fashioned varieties of RP]), as well as before (as in
strong, long), usually in gone, often in
on, and irregularly before (log, hog, dog, fog
[which is not found in British English at all]).
- The replacement of the lot vowel with the
strut vowel in most utterances of the words was, of,
from, what and in many utterances of the words everybody,
nobody, somebody, anybody; the word because has
either or ; want has normally or , sometimes .
- Vowel
merger before intervocalic . Which vowels are affected varies
between dialects, but the
Mary-marry-merry,
nearer-mirror, and
hurry-furry mergers are all widespread. Another such change is
the laxing of , and to , and before , causing pronunciations like ,
and for pair, peer and pure. The resulting sound
is often further reduced to , especially after palatals, so that cure, pure,
mature and sure rhyme with fir.
- Dropping
of is more extensive than in RP. In most North American
accents, is dropped after all alveolar and interdental consonant, so
that new, duke, Tuesday,resume are pronounced , , , .
- æ-tensing
in environments that vary widely from accent to accent; for
example, for many speakers, is approximately realized as before
nasal consonants. In some accents,
particularly those from Philadelphia
to New York
City
, and can even contrast sometimes, as in Yes, I
'can vs. tin 'can
.
- The flapping of intervocalic and to
alveolar tap before unstressed vowels
(as in bu'tter,
party) and syllabic
(bottle), as well as at the end of a word
or morpheme before any vowel (what
else,
whatever). Thus, for
most speakers, pairs such as ladder/latter, metal/medal,
and coating/coding are pronounced the
same. For many speakers, this merger is
incomplete and does not occur after ; these speakers tend to
pronounce writer with and rider with
. This is a form of Canadian raising but, unlike more extreme
forms of that process, does not affect .
In some areas and idiolects, a phonemic distinction
between what elsewhere become homophones through this process is
maintained by vowel lengthening in the vowel preceding the formerly
voiced consonant, e.g., [læ:·ɾɹ̩] for "ladder" as opposed
to [læ·ɾɹ̩] for "latter".
- Both intervocalic and may be realized as or , rarely making
winter and winner homophones. Most areas in which
/nt/ is reduced to /n/, it is accompanied further by nasalization
of simple post-vocalic /n/, so that V/nt/ and V/n/ remain
phonemically distinct. In such cases, the preceding vowel becomes
nasalized, and is followed in cases where the former /nt/ was
present, by a distinct /n/. This stop-absorption by the preceding
nasal /n/ does not occur when the second syllable is stressed, as
in entail.
- The pin-pen
merger, by which is raised to before nasal consonants, making
pairs like pen/pin homophonous. This merger originated in
Southern American English
but is now also sometimes found in parts of the Midwest and West as
well, especially in people with roots in the mountainous areas of
the Southeastern United
States.
Some mergers found in most varieties of both American and British
English include:
- The
merger of the vowels and before 'r', making pairs like
horse/hoarse, corps/core, for/four, morning/mourning, etc.
homophones.
- The wine-whine merger making
pairs like wine/whine, wet/whet, Wales/whales, wear/where,
etc. homophones, in most cases eliminating
, the voiceless
labiovelar fricative. Many older varieties of southern and
western AmE still keep these distinct, but the merger appears to be
spreading.
Vocabulary
North America has given the English
lexicon
many thousands of words, meanings, and phrases. Several thousand
are now used in English as spoken internationally; others, however,
died within a few years of their creation.
Creation of an American lexicon
The process of coining new lexical items started as soon as the
colonists began borrowing names for unfamiliar flora, fauna, and
topography from the
Native
American languages. Examples of such names are
opossum, raccoon, squash and
moose (from
Algonquian). Other Native American loanwords,
such as
wigwam or
moccasin, describe artificial objects in
common use among Native Americans. The languages of the other
colonizing nations also added to the American vocabulary; for
instance,
cookie, cruller,
stoop, and
pit (of a fruit) from
Dutch;
levee, portage ("carrying of boats or
goods") and (probably)
gopher from
French;
barbecue, stevedore, and
rodeo from
Spanish.
Among the earliest and most notable regular "English" additions to
the American vocabulary, dating from the early days of colonization
through the early 19th century, are terms describing the features
of the North American landscape; for instance,
run, branch,
fork, snag, bluff,
gulch, neck (of the woods),
barrens,
bottomland, notch, knob, riffle, rapids, watergap, cutoff, trail,
timberline and
divide. Already existing words such as
creek, slough, sleet and
(in later use)
watershed
received new meanings that were unknown in England.
Other noteworthy American toponyms are found among loanwords; for
example,
prairie, butte (French);
bayou (
Choctaw via
Louisiana French);
coulee (Canadian
French, but used also in Louisiana with a different meaning);
canyon, mesa,
arroyo (Spanish);
vlei,
kill (Dutch,
Hudson Valley).
The word
corn, used in England to
refer to wheat (or any cereal), came to denote the plant
Zea
mays, the most important crop in the U.S., originally named
Indian corn by the earliest
settlers; wheat, rye, barley, oats, etc. came to be collectively
referred to as
grain (or
breadstuffs). Other notable farm related vocabulary
additions were the new meanings assumed by
barn (not only a building for hay and grain
storage, but also for housing livestock) and
team (not
just the horses, but also the vehicle along with them), as well as,
in various periods, the terms
range,
crib, truck,
elevator, sharecropping and
feedlot.
Ranch, later applied to a
house style, derives from
Mexican Spanish; most Spanish contributions
came after the
War of 1812, with the
opening of the West. Among these are, other than toponyms,
chaps (from
chaparreras),
plaza, lasso, bronco, buckaroo, rodeo; examples of "English" additions from the
cowboy era are
bad man, maverick,
chuck ("food") and
Boot
Hill; from the
California
Gold Rush came such idioms as
hit pay dirt or
strike it rich. The word
blizzard probably
originated in the West. A couple of notable late 18th century
additions are the verb
belittle and the noun
bid,
both first used in writing by
Thomas
Jefferson.
With the new continent developed new forms of dwelling, and hence a
large inventory of words designating real estate concepts
(land
office, lot, outlands, waterfront, the verbs
locate and
relocate, betterment, addition, subdivision), types of
property
(log cabin, adobe in the 18th century;
frame house, apartment,
tenement house, shack, shanty in the 19th century;
project,
condominium, townhouse, split-level, mobile
home, multi-family in the 20th century), and parts thereof
(driveway, breezeway, backyard, dooryard; clapboard, siding, trim,
baseboard; stoop (from Dutch),
family room, den; and, in recent years,
HVAC, central air, walkout
basement).
Ever since the
American
Revolution, a great number of terms connected with the U.S.
political institutions have entered the language; examples are
run, gubernatorial, primary
election, carpetbagger (after
the
Civil War),
repeater,
lame duck and
pork barrel. Some of these are
internationally used (e.g.
caucus,
gerrymander, filibuster, exit
poll).
The rise of capitalism, the development of industry and material
innovations throughout the 19th and 20th centuries were the source
of a massive stock of distinctive new words, phrases and idioms.
Typical examples are the vocabulary of
railroading (see further at
rail terminology) and
transportation terminology, ranging from
names of roads (from
dirt roads and
back roads to
freeways and
parkways) to road infrastructure
(parking lot, overpass,
rest area), and from automotive
terminology to
public
transit (e.g. in the sentence "
riding the
subway downtown"); such American introductions as
commuter (from
commutation ticket), concourse, to board (a vehicle),
to park,
double-park and
parallel park (a car),
double decker or the noun
terminal have long been used in all dialects of English.
Trades of various kinds have endowed (American) English with
household words describing jobs and occupations
(bartender, longshoreman, patrolman, hobo, bouncer,
bellhop, roustabout, white collar, blue collar, employee,
boss [from Dutch],
intern, busboy, mortician, senior citizen), businesses and
workplaces
(department store,
supermarket, thrift store, gift
shop, drugstore, motel, main street,
gas station, hardware store, savings and loan, hock [also from
Dutch]), as well as general concepts and innovations
(automated teller machine, smart card, cash
register, dishwasher,
reservation [as at hotels],
pay envelope, movie, mileage, shortage,
outage, blood
bank).
Already existing English words —such as
store, shop, dry goods, haberdashery, lumber— underwent shifts in meaning; some —such
as
mason, student, clerk, the verbs
can (as in
"canned goods"),
ship, fix, carry, enroll (as in school),
run (as in "run a business"),
release and
haul— were given new significations, while others (such as
tradesman) have retained meanings
that disappeared in England. From the world of business and finance
came
breakeven, merger, delisting, downsize, disintermediation, bottom line; from sports terminology came,
jargon aside,
Monday-morning quarterback, cheap shot, game
plan (
football);
in the
ballpark, out of left
field, off base, hit and run, and
many other
idioms from
baseball; gamblers coined
bluff, blue
chip, ante, bottom dollar, raw deal, pass
the buck, ace in the hole, freeze-out, showdown; miners coined
bedrock, bonanza, peter out, pan
out and the verb
prospect from the noun; and
railroadmen are to be credited with
make the grade, sidetrack, head-on, and the verb
railroad. A number of Americanisms describing material
innovations remained largely confined to North America:
elevator, ground, gasoline; many automotive terms fall in this
category, although many do not
(hatchback, SUV, station wagon, tailgate, motorhome,
truck, pickup
truck, to exhaust).
In addition to the above-mentioned loans from French, Spanish,
Mexican Spanish, Dutch, and Native American languages, other
accretions from foreign languages came with 19th and early 20th
century immigration; notably, from
Yiddish (chutzpah, schmooze, tush and such idioms as
need something like a hole in the head) and
German —
hamburger and culinary terms like
frankfurter/franks, liverwurst, sauerkraut, wiener, deli; scram, kindergarten,
gesundheit; musical terminology
(whole note, half note, etc.); and apparently
cookbook, fresh ("impudent") and
what
gives? Such constructions as
Are you coming with? and
I like to dance (for "I like dancing") may also be the
result of German or Yiddish influence.
Finally, a large number of English colloquialisms from various
periods are American in origin; some have lost their American
flavor (from
OK and
cool to
nerd and
24/7), while others have not
(have a nice day, sure); many are now
distinctly old-fashioned
(swell, groovy). Some English
words now in general use, such as
hijacking, disc jockey, boost, bulldoze and
jazz, originated as American slang.
Among the many English idioms of U.S. origin are
get the hang
of, take for a ride, bark up the wrong tree, keep tabs, run scared,
take a backseat, have an edge over, stake a claim, take a shine to,
in on the ground floor, bite off more than one can chew, off/on the
wagon, stay put, inside track, stiff
upper lip, bad hair day, throw a
monkey wrench, under the weather, jump bail, come clean, come
again?, it ain't over till it's over, what goes around comes
around, and
will the real x please stand up?
Morphology
American English has always shown a marked tendency
to use nouns as verbs. Examples of verbed
nouns are
interview, advocate, vacuum, lobby, room, pressure,
rear-end, transition, feature, profile, belly-ache, spearhead,
skyrocket, showcase, service (as a car),
corner, torch,
exit (as in "exit the lobby"),
factor (in
mathematics),
gun ("shoot"),
author (which
disappeared in English around 1630 and was revived in the U.S.
three centuries later) and, out of American material,
proposition, graft (bribery),
bad-mouth, vacation, major, backpack,
backtrack, intern, ticket (traffic
violations),
hassle, blacktop,
peer-review, dope and
OD.
Compound coined in the U.S.
are for instance
foothill, flatlands, badlands,
landslide (in all senses),
overview (the noun),
backdrop, teenager,
brainstorm, bandwagon, hitchhike,
smalltime, deadbeat, frontman, lowbrow and
highbrow, hell-bent,
foolproof, nitpick, about-face (later verbed),
upfront (in all senses),
fixer-upper, no-show;
many of these are phrases used as adverbs or (often) hyphenated
attributive adjectives:
non-profit,
for-profit, free-for-all, ready-to-wear,
catchall, low-down, down-and-out, down and dirty, in-your-face, nip
and tuck; many compound nouns and adjectives are open:
happy hour, fall
guy, capital gain, road trip, wheat pit, head start, plea bargain; some of these are colorful
(empty nester, loan shark, ambulance chaser, buzz saw, ghetto
blaster, dust bunny), others are euphemistic
(differently abled, human resources, physically challenged,
affirmative action, correctional facility).
Many compound nouns have the form verb plus preposition:
add-on, stopover, lineup, shakedown, tryout, spin-off, rundown ("summary"),
shootout, holdup, hideout,
comeback, cookout, kickback, makeover, takeover,
rollback ("decrease"),
rip-off, come-on, shoo-in, fix-up,
tie-in, tie-up ("stoppage"),
stand-in. These
essentially are nouned
phrasal verbs;
some prepositional and phrasal verbs are in fact of American origin
(spell out, figure out, hold up, brace up, size up, rope in,
back up/off/down/out, step down, miss out on, kick around, cash in,
rain out, check in and
check out (in all senses),
fill in ("inform"),
kick in ("contribute"),
square off, sock in, sock away, factor in/out, come down with,
give up on, lay off (from employment),
run into and
across ("meet"),
stop by, pass up, put up
(money),
set up ("frame"),
trade in, pick up on, pick
up after, lose out.
Noun endings such as
-ee (retiree), -ery (bakery), -ster
(gangster) and
-cian (beautician) are also
particularly productive. Some verbs ending in
-ize are of
U.S. origin; for example,
fetishize, prioritize, burglarize,
accessorize, itemize, editorialize, customize, notarize, weatherize, winterize, Mirandize; and so are some
back-formations (locate, fine-tune,
evolute, curate, donate, emote, upholster, peeve and
enthuse). Among syntactical constructions that arose in
the U.S. are
as of (with dates and times),
outside of,
headed for, meet up with, back of, convince someone to…, not to be
about to and
lack for.
Americanisms formed by alteration of existing words include notably
pesky, phony, rambunctious, pry (as in "pry open," from
prize), putter (verb),
buddy, sundae, skeeter, sashay and
kitty-corner. Adjectives that arose in the U.S. are for
example,
lengthy, bossy, cute and
cutesy, grounded (of a child),
punk (in all
senses),
sticky (of the weather),
through (as in
"through train," or meaning "finished"), and many colloquial forms
such as
peppy or
wacky. American
blends include
motel,
guesstimate, infomercial and
televangelist.
English words that survived in the United States
A number of words and meanings that originated in
Middle English or
Early Modern English and that always
have been in everyday use in the United States dropped out in most
varieties of British English; some of these have cognates in
Lowland Scots. Terms such as
fall ("autumn"),
pavement (to mean "road surface",
where in Britain, as in Philadelphia, it is the equivalent of
"sidewalk"),
faucet, diaper, candy, skillet, eyeglasses,
crib (for a baby),
obligate, and
raise a child are often regarded as
Americanisms.
Fall for example came to denote the season
in 16th century England, a contraction of Middle English
expressions like "fall of the leaf" and "fall of the year". During
the 17th century, English immigration to the colonies in
North America was at its peak, and the new
settlers took their language with them, and while the term
fall gradually became obsolete in Britain, it became the
more common term in North America.
Gotten (
past participle of
get) is often
considered to be an Americanism, although there are some areas of
Britain, such as Lancashire and North-eastern England, that still
continue to use it and sometimes also use
putten as the
past participle for
put (which is not done by most
speakers of American English).
Other words and meanings, to various extents, were brought back to
Britain, especially in the second half of the 20th century; these
include
hire ("to employ"),
quit ("to stop,"
which spawned
quitter in the U.S.),
I guess
(famously criticized by
H. W. Fowler),
baggage,
hit (a place),
and the adverbs
overly and
presently
("currently"). Some of these, for example
monkey wrench and
wastebasket, originated in 19th-century
Britain.
The mandative
subjunctive (as in
"the City Attorney suggested that the case
not be closed")
is livelier in AmE than it is in British English; it appears in
some areas as a spoken usage, and is considered obligatory in
contexts that are more formal. The adjectives
mad meaning
"angry",
smart meaning "intelligent", and
sick
meaning "ill" are also more frequent in American than British
English.
Regional differences
While written AmE is standardized across the country, there are
several recognizable variations in the spoken language, both in
pronunciation and in vernacular vocabulary.
General American is the name given to
any American accent that is relatively free of noticeable regional
influences.
After the
Civil War, the
settlement of the western territories by migrants from the Eastern
U.S. led to dialect mixing and leveling, so that regional dialects
are most strongly differentiated along the
Eastern seaboard.
The Connecticut River and Long Island
Sound
is usually regarded as the southern/western extent
of New England speech, which has its roots in the speech of the
Puritans from East
Anglia
who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
The
Potomac River generally divides a
group of Northern coastal dialects from the beginning of the
Coastal Southern dialect area; in between these two rivers several
local variations exist, chief among them the one that prevails in
and around New York
City
and northern New Jersey
, which developed on a Dutch substratum after the British conquered New
Amsterdam. The main features of Coastal Southern speech can
be traced to the speech of the English from the
West Country who settled in Virginia after
leaving England at the time of the
English Civil War, and to the
African influences from
the African Americans who were enslaved in the South.
Although no longer region-specific,
African American Vernacular
English, which remains prevalent among
African Americans, has a close relationship
to Southern varieties of AmE and has greatly influenced everyday
speech of many Americans.
A
distinctive speech pattern also appears near the border between
Canada
and the United States, centered on the Great Lakes
region (but only on the American side). This
is the
Inland North
Dialect—the "standard Midwestern" speech that was the basis for
General American in the mid-20th Century (although it has been
recently modified by the
northern cities vowel shift).
Those not from this area frequently confuse it with the North
Midland dialect treated below, referring to both collectively as
"Midwestern" in the mid-Atlantic region or "Northern" in the
Southern US. The so-called '"
Minnesotan" dialect is also
prevalent in the cultural
Upper
Midwest, and is characterized by influences from the German and
Scandinavian settlers of the region (yah for yes/ja in German,
pronounced the same way).
In the interior, the situation is very different.
West of the Appalachian
Mountains
begins the broad zone of what is generally called
"Midland" speech.
This is divided into two discrete subdivisions, the North Midland
that begins north of the
Ohio River
valley area, and the South Midland speech; sometimes the former is
designated simply "Midland" and the latter is reckoned as "Highland
Southern."
The North Midland speech continues to expand
westward until it becomes the closely related Western dialect which
contains Pacific Northwest
English as well as the well-known California English, although in the
immediate San
Francisco
area some
older speakers do not possess the cot-caught merger and thus retain the
distinction between words such as cot and caught which reflects a
historical Mid-Atlantic heritage.
The South
Midland or Highland Southern dialect follows the Ohio River in a generally southwesterly
direction, moves across Arkansas
and Oklahoma
west of the Mississippi, and peters out in West Texas. It is a version of the Midland
speech that has assimilated some coastal Southern forms (outsiders
often mistakenly believe South Midland speech and coastal South
speech to be the same).
The island state of Hawaii has a distinctive
Hawaiian Pidgin.
Finally,
dialect development in the United States has been notably
influenced by the distinctive speech of such important cultural
centers as Boston
, Baltimore
, Chicago
, Philadelphia
, Pittsburgh
, Charleston
, New
Orleans
, New York
City
, and Detroit
, which imposed their marks on the surrounding
areas.
Differences between British English and American English
American English and
British English
(BrE) differ at the levels of phonology, phonetics, vocabulary,
and, to a lesser extent, grammar and orthography.The first large
American dictionary,
An
American Dictionary of the English Language, was written
by
Noah Webster in 1828; Webster
intended to show that the United States, which was a relatively new
country at the time, spoke a different dialect from that of
Britain.
Differences in grammar are relatively minor, and normally do not
affect mutual intelligibility; these include: different use of some
verbal auxiliaries; formal
(rather than notional) agreement with
collective nouns; different preferences for
the past forms of a few verbs (e.g. AmE/BrE:
learned/
learnt,
burned/
burnt,
and in
sneak,
dive,
get); different
prepositions and adverbs in certain contexts (e.g. AmE
in
school, BrE
at school); and whether or not a definite
article is used, in very few cases (AmE
to the hospital,
BrE
to hospital). Often, these differences are a matter of
relative preferences rather than absolute rules; and most are not
stable, since the two varieties are constantly influencing each
other.
Differences in
orthography are also
trivial. Some of the forms that now serve to distinguish American
from British spelling (
color for
colour,
center for
centre,
traveler for
traveller, etc.) were introduced by Noah Webster himself;
others are due to spelling tendencies in Britain from the 17th
century until the present day (e.g.
-ise for
-ize, although the Oxford English Dictionary still prefers
the
-ize ending) and cases favored by the
francophile tastes of 19th century
Victorian England, which had little effect
on AmE (e.g.
programme for
program,
manoeuvre for
maneuver,
skilful for
skillful,
cheque for
check, etc.).
AmE sometimes favors words that are
morphologically more complex,
whereas BrE uses clipped forms, such as AmE
transportation
and BrE
transport or where the British form is a
back-formation, such as AmE
burglarize and BrE
burgle (from
burglar).
The most noticeable differences between AmE and BrE are at the
levels of pronunciation and vocabulary.
See also
Bibliography
General
- Ferguson, Charles A.; & Heath, Shirley Brice (Eds.).
(1981). Language in the USA. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
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distinctiveness. In E. Finegan & J. R. Rickford (Eds.),
Language in the USA: Themes for the twenty-first century
(pp. 18–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Language in the USA: Themes for the twenty-first century.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Frazer, Timothy (Ed.). (1993). Heartland English.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
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variation in North American English. New York: Modern Language
Association.
- Garner, Bryan A. (2003).
Garner's Modern American Usage. New York: Oxford
University Press.
- Kenyon, John S. (1950). American pronunciation (10th
ed.). Ann Arbor: George Wahr.
- Kortmann, Bernd; Schneider, Edgar W.; Burridge, Kate; Mesthrie,
Rajend; & Upton, Clive (Eds.). (2004). A handbook of
varieties of English: Morphology and syntax (Vol. 2). Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
- Lippi-Green, Rosina. (1997). English with an accent:
Language, ideology, and discrimination in the United States.
New York: Routedge.
- MacNeil, Robert; & Cran, William. (2005). Do you speak
American?: A companion to the PBS television series. New York:
Nan A. Talese, Doubleday.
- (1921 edition online: www.bartleby.com/185/).
- Schneider, Edgar (Ed.). (1996). Focus on the USA.
Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
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Rajend; & Upton, Clive (Eds.). (2004). A handbook of
varieties of English: Phonology (Vol. 1). Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter.
- Thomas, Erik R. (2001). An acoustic analysis of vowel
variation in New World English. Publication of American
Dialect Society (No. 85). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
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phonetics of American English (2nd ed.). New York: The Ronald
Press Co.
- Trudgill, Peter and Jean Hannah. (2002). International English:
A Guide to the Varieties of Standard English, 4th ed. London:
Arnold. ISBN 0-340-80834-9.
- Wolfram, Walt; & Schilling-Estes, Natalie. (2005).
American English: Dialects and variation. 2nd Edition.
Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell.
History of American English
- Algeo, John (Ed.). (2001). The Cambridge history of the
English language: English in North America (Vol. 6).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Bailey, Richard W. (1991). Images of English: A cultural
history of the language. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
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history. In E. Finegan & J. R. Rickford (Eds.), Language in
the USA: Themes for the twenty-first century (pp. 3–17).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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of the English language in the United States. New York:
William Morrow.
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& D. Denison (Eds.), A history of the English language
(pp. 384–419). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- Kretzschmar, William A. (2002). American English: Melting pot
or mixing bowl? In K. Lenz & R. Möhlig (Eds.), Of
dyuersitie and change of language: Essays presented to Manfred
Görlach on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday
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English. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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English in America. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Regional variation
- Allen, Harold B. (1973-6). The linguistic atlas of the
Upper Midwest (3 Vols). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
- Atwood, E. Bagby. (1953). A survey of verb forms in the
eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press.
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geography. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. ISBN
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(1939-43). Linguistic atlas of New England (6 Vols).
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United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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pronunciation of English in the Atlantic states. Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press.
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Kretzschmar (Ed.). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
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English today Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN
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(eds.). (1986-92). Linguistic atlas of the gulf states (7
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Social variation
African American
- Bailey, Guy; Maynor, Natalie; & Cukor-Avila, Patricia
(Eds.). (1991). The emergence of Black English: Text and
commentary. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
- Green, Lisa. (2002). African American English: A linguistic
introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Pennsylvania Press.
- Lanehart, Sonja L. (Ed.). (2001). Sociocultural and
historical contexts of African American English. Philadelphia:
John Benjamins.
- Mufwene, Salikoko; Rickford, John R.; Bailey, Guy; & Baugh,
John (Eds.). (1998). African American Vernacular English.
London: Routledge.
- Rickford, John R. (1999). African American Vernacular
English: Features, evolution, and educational implications.
Oxford: Blackwell.
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Detroit negro speech. Urban linguistic series (No. 5).
Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
- Wolfram, Walt; & Thomas, Erik. (2002). The development
of African American English: Evidence from an isolated
community. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
American Indian
- Leap, William L. (1993). American Indian English. Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Latino American
- Bayley, Robert; & Santa Ana, Otto. (2004). Chicano English
grammar. In B. Kortmann, E. W. Schneider, K. Burridge, R. Mesthrie,
& C. Upton (Eds.), A handbook of varieties of English:
Morphology and syntax (Vol. 2, pp. 167–183). Berlin:
Mouton de Gruyter.
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New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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of the English of Chicano adolescents in Austin, Texas. (PhD
dissertation, University of Texas at Austin).
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language setting. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences,
15 (1), 1-35.
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phonology. In E. W. Schneider, B. Kortmann, K. Burridge, R.
Mesthrie, & C. Upton (Eds.), A handbook of varieties of
English: Phonology (Vol. 1, pp. 407–424). Berlin: Mouton
de Gruyter.
- Wolfram, Walt. (1974). Sociolinguistic aspects of
assimilation: Puerto Rican English in New York City.
Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
Visual media
- Cran, William (Producer, Director, Writer); Buchanan,
Christopher (Producer); & MacNeil, Robert (Writer). (2005).
Do you speak American? [Documentary]. New York: Center for
New American Media.
- Kolker, Andrew; & Alvarez, Louis (Producers, Directors).
(1987). American tongues: A documentary about the way people
talk in the U.S. [Documentary]. Hohokus, NJ: Center for New
American Media.
Notes
- U.S. English, Inc.
- North American English
(Trudgill, p. 2) is a collective term used for the varieties of the
English language that are spoken in the United States and
Canada.
- Trudgill, pp. 46–47.
- Labov, p. 48.
- According to Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary,
Eleventh Edition. For speakers who merge caught and
cot, is to be understood as the vowel they have in both
caught and cot.
- [1], [2], [3]
- A few of these are now chiefly found, or have been more
productive, outside of the U.S.; for example, jump, "to
drive past a traffic signal;" block meaning "building,"
and center, "central point in a town" or "main area for a
particular activity" (cf. Oxford English Dictionary).
- The Maven's Word of the Day, Random House. Retrieved
February 8, 2007.
- Trudgill,
Peter (2004). New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of
Colonial Englishes.
- [4], [5] Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.
Retrieved April 24, 2007.
- [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27]
- Trudgill, p. 69.
- [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40]
- British author George Orwell (in English People,
1947, cited in OED s.v. lose) criticized an alleged
"American tendency" to "burden every verb with a preposition that
adds nothing to its meaning (win out, lose out,
face up to, etc.)."
- Possible entries for pavement
- A Handbook of Varieties of English,Bernd Kortmann
& Edgar W. Schneider, Walter de Gruyter, 2004, page 115
- Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary. [41] [42] [43]. Retrieved March 23, 2007.
- Cf. Trudgill, p.42.
- Algeo, John (2006). British or American English?.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-37993-8.
- Peters, Pam (2004). The Cambridge Guide to English
Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN
0-521-62181-X, pp. 34 and 511.
External links