Standard American English pronunciation

The idea that there should be a “standard” form of a language is a relatively recent development in western culture, at least in the way that “standard” is usually understood in this usage today. People seem always to have noticed language variation, for instance the shibboleth story in the Bible about recognition of spies, and the uses of language variation for more comic effect by Greek and Roman dramatists. However, our modern sense of a “standard language” emerged only during the Neo-Classical period, during the seventeenth century in parts of Europe (as for the Encyclopedists in France) and during the eighteenth century in England. The first citation for the collocation standard English in the Oxford English Dictionary comes even later, from the nineteenth century.

 

The word standard possesses a set of meanings related to criteria for measurement. The original fifteenth-century literal sense of objects, such as standard weights used to compare to working scale weights to enable fair commercial transactions, still survives, but today more emphasis falls on attributive or metaphoric senses in which there is comparative measurement of qualities. In actual use in American English as demonstrated in corpus evidence, standard(s) most frequently refers to a general level of quality, not to a particular authoritative statement of criteria for evaluation. The attributive use of the word in the collocation Standard English may therefore raise the expectation for some people that there must be a perfect and exemplary state of the language, just as there are perfect exemplars for a one-ounce weight or for a measure of length such as a yardstick. The way that most people interpret the collocation, however, will be as a general level of quality. Thus Standard English may be taken to reflect conformance to a set of rules, but its meaning commonly gets bound up with social ideas about how one’s character and education are displayed in one’s speech.

 

The term “General American” is sometimes used by those who expect for there to be a perfect and exemplary state of American English. However, in this essay the term “Standard American English” (StAmE) is preferred; it designates the level of quality (here of pronunciation) that is employed by educated speakers in formal settings. StAmE pronunciation differs from region to region, even from person to person, because speakers from different circumstances in and different parts of the United States commonly employ regional and social features to some extent even in formal situations.

الاكثر قراءة في Phonology

Minimal pairs and sets

Aspiration

Assimilations

Phones and allophones

Feature geometry

The Sonority Sequencing Generalization

Finding the underlying form

Bukusu: nasal+consonant combinations

The Northern Cities Shift

Major class features

Standard lexical sets

Allophony in other languages

Place of articulation

Natural classes

Dissimilation

اخر الاخبار

اخبار العتبة العباسية المقدسة

قسم صناعة الشبابيك يشرع بإدامة شباكين قديمين لمرقد الإمامين العسكريين (عليهما السلام)

فرقة العباس (عليه السلام) تختتم خدماتها المقدمة للزائرين في سامراء

موكب العتبتين المقدستين يحيي ذكرى استشهاد الإمام الهادي (عليه السلام) في سامراء

العتبة العسكرية المقدسة تكرّم وفد العتبة العباسية المقدسة لمشاركته في تقديم الخدمات للزائرين

المزيد

الآخبار الصحية

كنز غذائي على طبقك.. ماذا تفعل السبانخ بجسمك؟

ما لا يتوقعه أحد.. "سر غذائي" في الجبن الدسم

لتحسين الهضم والنوم.. هذا أفضل وقت لتناول العشاء

10 طرق بسيطة وغير مألوفة لحرق المزيد من السعرات يوميا

المزيد

الآخبار التكنلوجية

سابقة بعالم الطيران.. طائرة تقرر الهبوط بنفسها بعد ظرف طارئ

"الإنفلونزا الخارقة" تكتسح دول العالم.. وتثير قلقا كبيرا

مرحلة ما قبل الأعراض.. دواء جديد يستهدف "شرارة" الزهايمر

إزالة ثاني أكسيد الكربون من الغلاف الجوي.. ما دور المحيطات والبحار؟

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