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American English or US English (en-US according to RFC 3066) is the diverse form of the English language used mostly in the United States of America. It is the primary language used in the United States. According to the 1990 census , 97 percent of U.S. residents speak English "well" or "very well". Only 0.8% (8 people out of a thousand) speak no English at all, as compared with 3.6 percent in 1890.
English was inherited from British colonization. The first wave of English-speaking immigrants was settled in North America in the 17th century. In this century, there were also speakers in North America of the Dutch, French, German, Native American, Spanish, Swedish and Finnish languages.
In many ways, compared to British English, American English is conservative in its phonologyPhonology is a subfield of grammar (see also linguistics). Whereas phonetics is about the nature of sounds (or phones) per se, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language. For example, /p/ and /b/ in English are distinctive units o. It is sometimes claimed that certain rural areas in North America speak " ElizabethanElizabeth I ( September 7, 1533 March 24, 1603) was Queen of England and Queen of Ireland from November 17, 1558 until her death. Sometimes referred to as The Virgin Queen or Good Queen Bess Elizabeth I was the fifth and last monarch of the Tudor dynasty, English," and there may be some truth to this, but the standard American English of the upper Midwest has a sound profile much closer to seventeenth century English than contemporary speech in England. The conservatism of American English is largely the result of the fact that it represents a mixture of various dialects from the British Isles. Dialect in North America is most distinctive on the East Coast of the continent; this is largely because these areas were in contact with England, and imitated prestigious varieties of British English at a time when those varieties were undergoing changes. The interior of the country was settled by people who were no longer closely connected to England, as they had no access to the ocean during a time that journeys to Britain were often by sea. As such the inland speech is much more homogeneous than the East Coast speech, and did not imitate the changes in speech from England.
Most North American speech is rhoticEnglish pronunciation is divided into two main accent groups, the rhotic and the non-rhotic . Rhotic speakers pronounce written r in all positions (except in certain French borrowings where it is never pronounced, like dossier , while non-rhotic speakers, as English was everywhere in the seventeenth century. In most varieties of North American English, the sound corresponding to the letter "R" is a retroflex semivowel rather than a trill or a tap. The trilled or tapped /r/ was a sound change that took place in England in the eighteenth century, and in which most current North American varieties did not participate. The loss of syllable-final /r/ in North America is confined mostly to parts of New EnglandThis article is about the region in the United States of America. For other uses, see New England (disambiguation . The New England region of the United States is located in the northeastern corner of the country. Boston is its business and cultural cente, New York CitySkyline, with Statue of Liberty New York, New York" redirects here. For alternate meanings, see New York, New York (disambiguation). New York — officially named City of New York and often called New York City to distinguish it from the state of New York,, and the southern coast of the United States. In England, lost /r/ was often changed into /ə/ ( schwaIn linguistics and phonology, the schwa is the vowel sound in many lightly pronounced unaccented syllables in English words of more than one syllable. It is most easily described as sounding like the British English "er" or the American English "uh".), giving rise to a new class of falling diphthongs. Furthermore, the "er" sound of (stressed) "fur" or (unstressed) "butter", which is represented in IPA as stressed [ɝ] or unstressed [ɚ] is realized in American English as a monophthongal rhoticized vowel. This does not happen in the non-rhotic varieties of North American speech.
Other British English changes which most North American dialects do not participate include:
North American English, while more phonologically conservative, has undergone some sound changes. These include:
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