[mabbo]

How do you decide what the 'standard American accent' is?

I spent some time on a remote team working with a great group of folks from the US South. I'm Canadian. I picked up a lot of accent changes that stick with me today ("y'all" is the best plural second-person pronoun ever).

But even things like California vs New York, there are differences. Urban vs rural. Minnesota vs Florida.

There are interesting implications in how you make those choices. ie: "Well, however I speak is correct" will get you elitism accusations I'm sure.

[ilyausorov]

We can go down a very deep rabbit hole with this question, because you're absolutely right there isn't just one accent spoken in America.

But for what it's worth the term is defined as the "umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans and widely perceived, among Americans, as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics". You can read about that more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_American_English

If you do have the chance to jump into the app and watch some of the videos that our speech coaches, Ron and Eliza, have produced, you may notice they also refer to their own accents as "this accent" as a nod to the fact that ultimately what they are able to teach is the accent they are themselves demonstrating.

[mattzito]

Pure GAE/SAE is fairly arch and stilted - I assume you are chilling out on some of the more arcane aspects like liquid Us in "reduce" and "student" and "forehead" as "fahred"? Most dialect coaches default to something looser when teaching an american accent because SAE sounds almost british if you're strictly adhering to it.

[geofft]

If by "liquid U" you mean pronouncing /ju/, then no, GAE pronounces it "redooce" and "stoodent", not "redyooce" and "styoodent." From the article:

> yod-dropping after alveolar consonants (with new pronounced /nu/, not /nju/)

[mattzito]

That's interesting - Speak with Distinction, which was treated like a bible of SAE when I was in school, leans on /ju/ for stressed syllables:

https://books.google.com/books?id=hM-GDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT126&lpg=...

not my area of expertise, but I had assumed from the article that SAE and GAE are equivalent, but maybe not?

[ilyausorov]

Hey guys, for the record, in our description we used "Standard American accent" as a bit of a catch-all term, not quite in the most technical manner.

One of our dialect coaches, Ron Carlos, slacked me the following blurb: The accent taught in American theater schools (which we're calling SAE here, most would call it Mid-Atlantic) is an accent that was popular in Hollywood in the 40s. Many schools have modified it to sound more modern. And we definitely don’t use that accent in BoldVoice. Ours is more modern: for example, can’t and Cod will have two separate vowel sounds, and Tune and toon will sound the same.

[mattzito]

Okay, that's helpful, thanks for going right to the source - yes, that's what I learned in theater school (referred to as SAE), and found that it was useless for everything except Shakespeare and poetry. I thought it pretty unlikely that was what you were going to teach non-native english speakers.

[geofft]

I'm guessing that the meaning of "General American English" has drifted over the years - it seems like Speak With Distinction is from 1942, when those sorts of pronunciations were common, and it would have been appropriate to teach that to non-native speakers. Now the accent is a little bit different, just like how "business casual" now includes certain types of jeans.