NAERD #1

I read chapter 1 of An Introduction to the Pronunciation of North American English by Jørgen Staun. What strikes me is the fact that the author not only tries to avoid the term 'General American' but also fights his corner on calling this pronunciation variety a dialect and not an accent. This is how the author tries to justify his decision:

The frequent concurrence of lexical and pronunciation boundaries explains in part why there is no single non-regional standard American English pronunciation in North America comparable with Received Pronunciation (RP) in English English,which is the standard non-regional pronunciation in England. The existence of a non-regional standard pronunciation like RP in England has lead [sic] to the notion of accent, which refers to a typical and specifiable pronunciation of a language which is characteristic of a geographical region or a social group. Such a standard non-regional pronunciation is justifiable in England because - so supporters of this concept argue - RP is characteristic of a social group and because other accents than RP can be used with the standard grammar and lexicon. The absence of such a variety in North America explains why the term dialect, rather than accent, is used [...].(25)

Accent is the way someone pronounces a language. Everybody therefore has an accent.
Dialect encompasses not only the way someone pronounces a language but also the grammatical forms, syntactical structures and the vocabulary that are used in discourse. As the book is explicitly aimed at "undergraduate university students"(11) this distinction should not be diluted, blurred or abolished.

Staun rejects the term 'General American' as "an actually existing reference dialect, because it ignores such regional distinctions as those established most recently by ANAE [= Atlas of North American English] [...]" (27). He proposes the term 'North American English Reference Dialect' (= NAERD) and delimits it both negatively and positively:

• the Northern Cities Shift,
• the Southern Vowel Shift and
• the split of the TRAP vowel in the East

are restricting features.

• The Low Back Merger,
• the use of the TRAP vowel in bath, staff, etc.,
• rhoticity,
• dark l in lose, lust, etc.,
• flapping of /t/ and /d/,
• yod-deletion

and a few other features characterise NAERD positively.

There are a few typos and technical imprecisions:

• "homogenous" should be "homogeneous" (20);
• "North American Continent" -> "North American continent" (20);
• Hans Kurath's LANE was not published "in 1943" but in three volumes between 1939 and 1943 (22);
• LANE did not only report "both lexical differences and variation in pronunciation" but included grammatical differences as well (22);
• "the existence [...] has lead to the notion [...] -> "has led" (25);
• Kenyon & Knott's Pronouncing Dictionary was not published in 1953 but in 1944 (26);



credit: Eric Johannson

• the flap is "found when unstressed t and d occur between vowels or between an r and a vowel [...]" (31); I wonder how /t,d/ can be unstressed;
• the term "English English" (25) sounds awkward to me.