Accents =/= pronunciations of individual words

According to your guess (which I understand is just a random conjecture), the U.S. should pronounce the word "park" about 380 different ways. People in the U.S. have--at most--three to five pronunciations (e.g., "park," "pahk," "pak").

~ BioGio

Accents =/= pronunciations of individual words

 

According to your guess (which I understand is just a random conjecture), the U.S. should pronounce the word "park" about 380 different ways. People in the U.S. have--at most--three to five pronunciations (e.g., "park," "pahk," "pak").

 

~ BioGio

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that of 380 theoretical accents, there is very little chance they would pronounce "Park" all exactly the same. That was just an example to prove the impossibility of a catch-all "American Accent".

Yeah, but what people typically mean when they mention the "American/British pronunciation," they mean the basic, general/more predominant pronunciation (e.g., root/rowt for route). "Park" is not the best example in this case.

~ BioGio

Well the notion comes from the news, where in both countries, there is a perceived "standard accent". Obviously not everyone speaks with the standard accent, but the majority does because that's how the media tells them to speak.

Now, that being said, both the United States and the United Kingdom have a wide variety of different dialects (accents), each of which are all equally valid ways of speaking English.

HOWEVER

If you speak in dialect X, be prepared for people to call you out on pronouncing word Y differently than everyone else who speaks in dialect X. For instance, some people I know who speak "general American" pronounce the word "bagel" with two Gs ("BAG-gull") or "milk" with an A ("malk"). These are examples of them deviating from the local dialect and thus me calling them out on not knowing what food is called.

Ultimately, though, the goal of spoken language is to speak so that people can understand you and in a way that your words don't throw off the flow of conversation... like by pronouncing "calculator" as "KAL-ka-la-ter" when you really mean "KAL-kyoo-la-ter".

This has been linguistics with SPIRIT.