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A number of words that have arisen in the United States have become common, to varying degrees, in English as it is spoken internationally. Perhaps the most famous is OK, which is sometimes used in other languages as well. Other American introductions include "belittle," " gerrymander" (from Elbridge Gerry), " highfalutin " (from Hiram Falutin ), " applesauce", " blizzard" and " teenager," and there are of course many more.
A number of words that originated in the English of the British Isles are still in everyday use in North America, but are no longer used in most varieties of British English. The most conspicuous of these words are fall, the season; and gotten as a past participle of get. Some dialects of North American English use boughten, especially as a contrast to home-made. Americans are likelier than Britons to name a stream whose breadth or volume is judged insufficient to dignify it with the name of river a creek. The word diaper goes back at least to Shakespeare, and usage was maintained in the U.S. and Canada, but was replaced in the British Isles with nappy.
Some of these words are still used in various dialects of the British Isles, but not in formal standard British English. Many of these older words have cognates in Scots.
The subjunctive mood is livelier in North American English than it is in British English; it appears in some areas as a spoken usage, and is considered obligatory in more formal contexts in American English. British English has a strong tendency to replace subjunctives with auxiliary verb constructions.
Written American English is fairly standardized across the country. However, there is some variation in the spoken language. There are several recognizable regional variations (such as New York-New Jersey English), particularly in pronunciation, but also in slang vocabulary.
Most traditional sources cite Standard Midwestern American English (alternately referred to as General American) as the unofficial standard accent and dialect of American English. However, many linguists claim "California English" has become the de facto standard since the 1960s or 1970s due to its central role in the American entertainment industry; others argue that the entertainment industry, despite being in California, uses Midwestern.
African American Vernacular English (AAVE, colloquially known as Ebonics) contains many distinctive forms.Regional dialects in North America are most strongly differentiated along the eastern seaboard. The distinctive speech of important cultural centers like Boston, Massachusetts (see Boston accent phonology), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Charleston, South Carolina, and New Orleans, Louisiana imposed their marks on the surrounding areas. The Connecticut River is usually regarded as the southern/western extent of New England speech, while the Potomac River generally divides a group of Northern coastal dialects from the beginning of the Coastal Southern dialect area (distinguished from the Highland Southern or South Midland dialect treated below, although outsiders often mistakenly believe that the speech in these two areas is the same); 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. A distinctive speech pattern was also generated by the separation of Canada from the United States, centered on the Great Lakes region. This is the Inland North dialect - the "standard Midwestern" speech that is generally considered free from regional marking in the United States of America (those not from this area frequently confuse it with the North Midland dialect dealt with in the following paragraph, referring to both collectively as "Midwestern").
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 speech of California, although in the immediate San Francisco area the speech more closely resembles that of the mid-Atlantic region.
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. This is the dialect associated with truck drivers on the CB radio and country music. It is a version of the Midland speech that has assimilated some coastal Southern forms, most noticeably the loss of the diphthong /aj/, which becomes /A:/, and the second person plural pronoun "you-all" or "y'all". Unlike Coastal Southern, however, South Midland is a rhotic dialect, pronouncing /r/ wherever it has historically occurred.
The northern cities, which corresponds to a broad swath of the United States, beginning near Syracuse, New York and extending west through Cleveland, Ohio, Chicago, Illinois, and north to Minneapolis, Minnesota, have undergone a shift called the northern cities vowel shift, where the vowels in the words stuck, stalk, stock, and stack have shifted from [ʌ], [ɔ], [ɑ], [æ] (SAMPA [V], [O], [A], [{]) to [ɔ], [ɑ], [a], [eæ] (SAMPA [O], [A], [a], [e{]). This type of shift, where a group of sounds all shift at once, some taking the place of others, is called a chain shift.
The sounds of American speech can be identified with a number of public figures. President John F. Kennedy spoke in the accent associated with the Boston Irish, while President Jimmy Carter speaks with a Southern coastal dialect. The North Midlands speech is familiar to those who have heard Neil Armstrong and John Glenn, while the South Midland speech was the speech of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
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