General American

General American (abbreviated as GA or GenAm) is a variety of American English popularly attributed to the majority of Americans, and thus widely perceived to be lacking any regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics. In reality, linguistic research demonstrates General American as more of a continuum than a unified form of American speech, though the term is often used for an umbrella dialect or accent. It is sometimes, though controversially, known as Standard American English.

Standard Canadian English closely aligns to General American speech, especially rather than the United Kingdom's Received Pronunciation in every situation where General American and Received Pronunciation differ. The precise definition and usefulness of "General American" continues to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness.

History, definition, and dialectology

The term "General American" was first disseminated by American English scholar George Philip Krapp, who, in 1925, described it as "Western" but "not local in character." In 1930, American linguist John Samuel Kenyon, who largely popularized the term, considered it equivalent to the speech of "the North," or "Northern American," but, in 1934, "Western and Midwestern."