“General American”

The term “General American” arose as a name for a presumed most common or “default” form of American English, especially to be distinguished from marked regional speech of New England or the South. “General American” has often been considered to be the relatively unmarked speech of “the Midwest”, a vague designation for anywhere in the vast midsection of the country from Ohio west to Nebraska, and from the Canadian border as far south as Missouri or Kansas. No historical justification for this term exists, and neither do present circumstances support its use. While population mixture did make the different colonial varieties of American English more similar to each other than to any form of old-world British English, and there remain some relatively common pronunciation (and other) features that continue to justify use of the term “American English” in opposition to other national terms for English varieties, there has never been any single best or default form of American English that might form the basis for “General American”. Take for example the state of Ohio, often seen as a model for “General American”: the state is divided by Kurath’s major Northern/Midland dialect boundary, and Labov’s more recent Telsur field work yields a map in which no fewer than five boundaries crisscross the state (Labov, Ash and Boberg fc.).

Even Ohio’s educated speakers, speaking in formal settings, tend to make different pronunciation choices. For example, Cleveland speakers might routinely pronounce a common word like on as [an], while the speakers from Columbus might routinely pronounce the word as . No particular notice of the difference would be taken, because these pronunciations are not marked regional or social variants; neither pronunciation needs to be suppressed in order to achieve a StAmE level of quality. Thus a term like “General American” does not represent the condition of American English with respect either to StAmE or to regional and social varieties, because it implies that there is some exemplary state of American English from which other varieties deviate.

On the contrary, StAmE can best be characterized as what is left over after speakers suppress the regional and social features that have risen to salience and become noticeable. Decisions about which features are perceived to be salient will be different in every region, even different for every speaker, depending on local speech habits and the capacity of speakers to recognize particular features out of their varied linguistic experience. Some speakers are better than others at suppression of regional features, and some listeners are more subtle than others at detection of non-local features. The result of such decisions and perceptions is a linguistic continuum for American English in which no region or social group has pride of place (except for Southern American English, which is commonly singled out as a dispreferred variety by speakers from other regions), and a relative level of quality for StAmE that varies from place to place and person to person. When speakers travel outside of their native region, aspects of their pronunciation that are perfectly standard at home can be recognized by local speakers as being out of conformance with local StAmE preferences. This is just as true when Northerners travel South as when Southerners travel North, and people recognized as outsiders because of their speech must face the social consequences.