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.