General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm), is the umbrella accent of American English used by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, or from the (North) Midland, Western New England, and Western regions of the country are the most likely to be perceived as using General American speech.

The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Some scholars prefer other names, such as Standard American English, though this can be a wider term encompassing more than just accent, whereas General American does not incorporate other linguistic features like grammar structures, spelling conventions, vocabulary, etc.

Standard Canadian English accents may be considered to fall under General American, especially in opposition to the United Kingdom's Received Pronunciation. Noted phonetician John C. Wells, for instance, claimed in 1982 that typical Canadian English accents align with General American in nearly every situation where British and American accents differ.

Consonants

A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below:

Pronunciation of R

The phoneme /r/ is pronounced as a postalveolar approximant [ɹ̠] or retroflex approximant [ɻ] , but a unique "bunched tongue" variant of the sound is also associated with the United States, perhaps mostly in the Midwest and the South. All these variants exhibit various degrees of labialization and pharyngealization.

Rhoticity

Full rhoticity (or "R-fulness") is typical of American accents, in which /r/ is pronounced in all historical environments spelled with the letter ⟨r⟩. This includes in syllable-final position or before a consonant, such as in pearl, car and fort, whereas most speakers in England do not pronounce this ⟨r⟩ in these environments and so are called non-rhotic. Non-rhotic American accents, such as some accents of Eastern New England, New York City, and African-Americans, and a specific few (often older ones) spoken by Southerners, are often quickly noticed by General American listeners and perceived as sounding especially ethnic, regional, or antiquated.

Rhoticity is common in most American accents despite being now rare in England because, during the 17th-century British colonization of the Americas, nearly all dialects of English were rhotic, and most English in North America simply remained that way. The North American preservation of rhoticity was also supported by waves of rhotic-accented Scotch-Irish immigrants, most intensely during the 18th century, when this ethnic group eventually made up one-seventh of the colonial population, plus smaller waves during the following two centuries. Scotch-Irish settlers spread from Delaware and Pennsylvania throughout the larger Mid-Atlantic region, the inland regions of both the South and North, and throughout the West: American dialect areas that were all uninfluenced by upper-class non-rhoticity and that consequently have remained consistently rhotic. While non-rhoticity spread on the East Coast (perhaps first in imitation of early 19th-century London speech), even the East Coast has gradually begun to restore rhoticity, due to it becoming nationally prestigious since the mid-20th century.