Talk:General American English

Classification of /oʊ/ as a monophthong according to Wells (and this article)

I'm not familiar with Wells' classification of vowels in American English, but I'm quite confused why the "goat", "home", "toe" vowel is listed as a monophthong. Has there been some sound change in American English in this vowel, or was Wells just wrong? The article does also gives the vowel's IPA diphthong transcription, but doesn't mention why it's considered a monophthong according to Wells (or indeed why it's categorised under the "pure" vowels in this article, despite the article giving its IPA transcription as /oʊ/)

Can anyone shed any light on this? Or perhaps add a note to the article explaining the reason for the conflict (both internally to the article, and with the reality of General American English, at least in the present day)

--Tomatoswoop (talk) 05:19, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

@Tomatoswoop: Search for /i, u, eɪ, oʊ, ɑ/ are considered to compose a natural class of tense monophthongs in General American, especially for speakers with the cot–caught merger. in the article. There's your explanation. I agree that using a monophthongal long back [oː] is probably not a part of General American. It's more Canadian, Scottish or Northern English. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 09:29, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

(edit conflict) See Accents of English, vol. 1, pp. 120–1. Wells analyzes FLEECE, FACE, GOOSE, and GOAT in GA as underlyingly tense monophthongs, but transcribes FACE as /eɪ/ to avoid confusion with RP /e/, which represents DRESS, not FACE. Nardog (talk) 09:34, 4 April 2019 (UTC)

Very interesting, thank you both for drawing my attention to that. Whether that analysis should be considered the "consensus" and therefore reflected in the categorisation system of this article, I absolutely couldn't comment, but assuming that this categorisation is the right way to go about this article, maybe it would be prudent to move that clarification to a more prominent place. Perhaps just before the categorisation into "pure vowels" and dipthongs. Or if not to move the whole bullet point, perhaps add a small note just before the pure vowels table to point out that /oʊ/ and /eɪ/, while written in the table as diphthongs are instead here considered part of the group of "sometimes diphthongised tense vowels" as per Wells. --Tomatoswoop (talk) 03:26, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Also, Kbb2, if you disagree that putting /oʊ/ into the the monophthongal category is the right choice, perhaps you have another reference about general American that is better? I'm no expert, but it does seem to me that the American /oʊ/ is clearly a diphthong, not just a tense vowel, isn't the monophthongal /o/ exactly what Americans mock when parodying a Canadian accent? I won't change it because I'm talking about my own impression here, not some peer reviewed reference, and I'm no expert.--Tomatoswoop (talk) 03:37, 7 April 2019 (UTC)

Are there major sources beyond Wells's 1982 one that regard /oʊ/ and /eɪ/ as monophthongs "underlyingly" or of a "natural class" (what does this mean?)? In other words, is this widely agreed upon and practiced in the American phonological community (of which I'm not even sure we can say the British phonetician Wells is a part) or just one phonetician's view? Labov, for example, seems to avoid speaking of monophthongs vs. diphthongs at the phonemic level in favor of a distinction between "long vs. short vowels" or "checked vs. free vowels" (which Wells uses too). Wolfdog (talk) 23:38, 5 August 2019 (UTC)

Narrow transcriptions

I notice Kbb2 has a tendency to resist and change narrow transcriptions to broader ones. I get the thinking behind this (that we go with a broad phonetic transcription), but, especially when we have exact audio files of speakers, why can't we have very narrow transcriptions? (Maybe we could represent both?) Wolfdog (talk) 12:34, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

@Wolfdog: I assume you're talking about this revert? I reverted you because /l/ in the syllable coda before a consonant or a pause is always velarized (or vocalized) in Standard English (save for very few speakers). The canonical value of the IPA sign ⟨l⟩ does signify a lateral approximant without a secondary articulation, but it can be apical or laminal and dental, alveolar or postalveolar, depending on the language. I see no reason to mark the velarized allophone of /l/ because of how predictable its occurrence is.

The vowel in [mɛlk] probably also isn't a perfect cardinal [ɛ], no? What about the velar stop? Can it be preglottalized or perhaps slightly aspirated? If so, that's not a perfect canonical [k] either.

Are there any other edits of mine you'd like to discuss? Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 13:02, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

The reason to mark the velarized allophone is because it's pronounced that way in the exact audio, which is also a great example of how Americans in general tend to pronounce /l/. I don't understand the urge to change that. I've just noticed you have a tendency to remove narrow markings that make sense and could be useful. Why can't [ˈpɑɹɾi], for instance, be [ˈpʰɑɹɾi]... which is actually what a listener will hear in the audio? Wolfdog (talk) 13:45, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

@Wolfdog: Ok, but what about [ɛ] and [k]?

I don't find it a particularly great example of that. Coda /l/ is velarized by almost all speakers of what you could call Standard English. It's not a marked feature of any accent (in fact, the opposite of that is a marked feature of Welsh and Irish English) and it's allophonic. Plus, you're still assuming that [l] can only denote a 'neutral' lateral approximant without a secondary articulation. It's not true. Besides, why should we only denote the velarization and not the fact that it's apical alveolar? Because the canonical value of IPA ⟨l⟩ can be apical or laminal and dental, alveolar or postalveolar. It's not apical alveolar by definition. Plus, [ɫ] (assuming that this denotes a velarized apical alveolar [l]) isn't the only allophone of /l/, as this consonant can be advanced to the dental position before /θ/ and retracted to the postalveolar place of articulation before /r/. It's also devoiced after onset /p, t, k/.

I write the lateral approximant in [mɛlk] as such because I consider the velarization diacritic to be implied by context, just as the apical diacritic is also implied by context here. In play [pleɪ], the velarized, apical and devoiced diacritics are implied by context as well, whereas in wealth [wɛlθ] the implied diacritics are velarized, laminal and dental. We follow this practice on Australian English phonology, English phonology, Received Pronunciation and other articles. There's no need for a special treatment of a few articles to the exclusion of others.

Similarly, the initial /p/ in party is aspirated by almost all speakers of Standard English. It's the standard allophone of word-initial /p/ and using an actual unaspirated [p] sounds like /b/ to native speakers. You need to differentiate between the two transcriptions. The only signs in [ˈpɑɹɾi] that you could read literally are the first one (the primary stress mark) and the fifth one (the symbol for an alveolar tap). ⟨ɑ⟩ doesn't denote a cardinal [ɑ] but a sound that is more front than that and ⟨i⟩ doesn't denote a cardinal [i] but a sound that is more mid-centralized than that. ⟨ɹ⟩ doesn't denote an alveolar approximant either but a postalveolar or a retroflex one, so ⟨p⟩ in this context denotes an aspirated voiceless bilabial plosive. Broad [ˈpɑɹɾi] translates into narrow [ˈpʰɑ̟ɹ̠ɾi̽].

The voiced plosives are in fact typically unaspirated voiceless or partially voiced, so writing [ˈpʰɑɹɾi] for party and [du] (rather than [d̥u]) for do would be inconsistent even when you disregard the other inconsistencies.

This isn't the first time I see an editor say that using the dark l symbol or the aspiration diacritic somehow makes the transcription narrow. We could write milk with the dark l symbol if we talked about velarization. If we wanted to be consistent, we could use narrow transcription in all places - but there's no point in doing that. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 14:29, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

You're turning back transcriptions where you feel extra detail is already implied by context, but my argument is let's not assume anything is implied. Why make assumptions when we can be straightforward to readers at all levels of familiarity with IPA? This is a website that anyone can view and edit, not a linguistics library. As for your party argument, I get that you're worried about a slippery slope, but [pʰ] is a general established feature of American English (and even English overall, as you say -- and it is clearly what the speaker is doing in this one particular recording) in the exact same way as [ɫ] -- these are in fact the standard AmE allophones -- whereas [i̽] is a token that you're hearing, more open to subjective different transcriptions based on listener. So, yes, I get that initial /p/ in party is aspirated by almost all speakers of Standard English, yet I'm not getting why that means we should leave out the aspiration diacritic. So what? You think aspiration is assumed so let's leave it out, and I'm saying let's not assume that. Not everyone here is an IPA expert: let's leave it in.

I also think you're missing that I'm saying when we have exact audio recordings, even [ˈpʰɑ̟ɹ̠ɾi] would be perfectly appropriate and acceptable. I never brought up the Western New England English example you keep arguing about, but I guess I will now. That revert just continued to make me aware of how you revert narrowing transcriptions that can be useful: WNEE speakers certainly use a velarized /l/ and I still don't really see how it could hurt to show that. I wonder what other editors think. Wolfdog (talk) 23:31, 13 April 2019 (UTC)

I lean towards more narrow transcriptions, even when the phonetic detail conveys predictable allophony, but I do understand the concern about too much detail. Perhaps a good middle ground here would be, outside of immediate discussions of a particular feature (e.g. vowel nasalization, precise vowel height, de-voicedness of lenis stops), we stick to transcribing English with the level of detail we would give it in an IPA for X convention if it were another language we were transcribing for Wikipedia articles. That is, we avoid the level of detail that requires diacritics. Off the top of my head, I imagine that we'd want to indicate predictable vowel length, aspiration, l-velarization, vowel reduction, flapping, and glottalization. I'm sure there's more we could indicate, but we'd want to come to an agreement on it. We can probably get away with avoiding r-coloring of vowels and syllabic vowels consonants, but we'd want to be consistent on how we represent those. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 00:29, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

@Wolfdog: "Let's not assume anything is implied" is never how the IPA works. All sorts of stuff is implied in most transcriptions; in fact, this is how you transcribe words yourself whenever you don't use fully narrow transcription. This is why I asked whether [ɛ] in milk is a cardinal [ɛ] and whether the final [k] was an actual [k] or a preglottalized [ʔk]. It was a recent revert of yours, so it made sense to me to bring it up (especially since it's relevant to the topic of this discussion). You should read the quotes on User:Nardog.

The voiceless stops /p, t, k/ have many allophones in English, and generally they're most variable in the word-final position. How would you transcribe the word top? [tʰɑp]? If so, that's inconsistent. If you wrote it [tʰɑp̚] that'd be only slightly closer to the most common variant as the citation form varies between [tʰɑp] (perhaps with slight aspiration of the final /p/) and [tʰɑp̚], but when top occurs immediately before a word that begins with a vowel it can no longer be pronounced [tʰɑp̚] but either [tʰɑp] or [tʰɑp͡ʔ] (the final /p/ may be glottaly masked). [tʰɑp͡ʔ] may sound the same as [tʰɑp̚] but it's physically impossible to pronounce an intervocalic unreleased plosive. So, given the fact that final /p, t, k/ are actually more variable than initial /p, t, k/ it only makes sense to use the broad transcription of ⟨p, t, k⟩ for those sounds, so what's the problem of transcribing initial /p, t, k/ with ⟨p, t, k⟩? They're invariably aspirated, so [pʰ, tʰ, kʰ] are the only possible allophones.

Narrow transcription of English plosives is just as problematic in the case of RP: the citation form of top is any of the following: [tʰɒp, tʰɒpʰ, tʰɒʔp] (or with affrication instead of aspiration, the vowel is also variable [ɑ ~ ɒ ~ ɒ̝ ~ ɔ̞]), but before a vowel only [tʰɒp, tʰɒpʰ] are possible. So what do we do? We write it [tɒp]. I think we should strive for more or less the same level of narrowness across all articles on English accents and to leave our excessive detail that we probably wouldn't include in articles on the pronunciation of other languages.

Note that speakers who consistently release their final stops don't sound native in American English, so [tʰɑp] can't be said to be a narrow transcription of top.

You're worried that laymen may assume ⟨l⟩ to mean a clear lateral approximant - but that's on them, not on us (or perhaps it's also on us if Wikipedia is actually failing to convey that there are levels of narrowness of phonetic transcription). American /l/ is consistently velarized in all positions, at least in General American, so our readers can always assume [l] to be equal to [lˠ]. In fact, all allophones of /l/ in GA can be defined as velarized lateral approximants, because GA /l/ can be apical or laminal and dental, alveolar or postalveolar, depending on the environment (even though the canonical value of ⟨l⟩ in GA is a velarized apical alveolar lateral approximant).

If we were to also use the ⟨ɫ⟩ in Received Pronunciation, that'd introduce complication to transcription as RP /l/ is dark only before consonants (but not /j/ - another complication) and pauses, so that law, ceiling, million and call up would have to be transcribed with ⟨l⟩ but call and pills would be written with ⟨ɫ⟩. It's better to write [lɔː, siːlɪŋ, mɪljən, kɔːl ʌp, kɔːl, pɪlz] and let the reader figure out which laterals are velarized and which aren't (the rule is very simple, and the fact that General American /l/ is pretty much categorically velarized is even easier to remember). In General South African English call up is [kɔːɫ ʌp] but other words are pronounced the same as in RP. It's simpler to just use ⟨l⟩ for these sounds. Also, younger speakers of RP (but not of General South African English) may vocalize the final /l/ in call and pills, so they should actually be written [k̠ʰɔ̝ːɫ ~ k̠ʰɔ̝ːʊ̯] and [pʰɪ̈ɫz̥ ~ pʰɪ̈ɤ̯z̥] in truly narrow transcription (the /l/ in call up can also be [ɫ] or [ʊ̯] if you put a glottal stop in front of up. So even in RP there's some variability).

It's not our goal to transcribe the recordings but the variety of English in question (I remember that you even argued for transcribing a cot-caught merged pronunciation of water as such in this article). I don't consider [ˈpʰɑ̟ɹ̠ɾi̽] to be an acceptable transcription of party in this context, and by saying that you do you're showing that you need to better differentiate between narrow and broad variants of phonetic transcription. As you said yourself, this isn't a linguistic paper but an encyclopedia.

Also, note that IPA ⟨ɫ⟩ denotes a velarized or pharyngealized lateral (depending on the language), not just a velarized one. American /l/ is rarely (if ever) pharyngeal, so [mɛɫk] isn't really more narrow than [mɛlk], at least in some sense. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 15:18, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

Thanks -- Nardog's page is helpful in some ways, though I have to read your above explanation about a million more times to wrap my head around it. I still find it odd that predictable sounds are the ones most left out rather than the ones that can most easily be left in. My study of IPA was that it was indeed largely phonetic and less so that single symbols represent in fact vast allophonic possibilities in phonetic transcription. Anyway, it just seems to be you and me mostly. If people are ever interested in coming up with a standard for American English here on Wikipedia, I'd be happy to help engage in that work. Wolfdog (talk) 15:46, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I for one would be in complete support of Aeusoes1's suggestion for a compromise. In fact, I really was trying to argue for some kind of middle ground too, since I recognize Kbb2 is concerned about a slippery slope. So! As Aeusoes1 said (I think more clearly than I was able to), I'd agree with indicating down to a "predictable" level of detail, and I'd be totally on-board for the specifics suggested: predictable vowel length, aspiration, l-velarization, vowel reduction, flapping, and glottalization. This would cover of course the two features I mentioned above, but not such insane level of detail as the [i̽] token that worried Kbb2. Wolfdog (talk) 11:11, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

Side-note: I just noticed/remembered that we already had a discussion in the same vein as this with one Erutuon, Nardog etc. over a year ago titled "Aspiration". Although I just skimmed it (and will need to reread it a couple of times), it did seem there was a general consensus for a middle-ground position -- as Aeusoes1 says, now we'd want to come to an agreement on the details. Kbb2, under "Mr KEBAB", it seemed even you were more shifting towards a compromise position at that time. Erutuon seemed in favor of [pʰ] for both pay and play, whereas you commented I think using [CʰV] with vowels and [CC̥] with consonantal sonorants is a good and necessary compromise. Anyway, I'd love to participate in a discussion on the details we'd want to include. Wolfdog (talk) 11:37, 14 April 2019 (UTC)

@Aeusoes1: Our IPA for X conventions don't include aspiration and velarization when those aren't phonemic. Flapping is different than that because it's less predictable than aspiration (which in fact is fully predictable, as is velarization), so we should include it. I'd argue that using distinctively fully voiced stops in the citation forms of words such as bad (especially in the case of the final /d/) sounds just as non-native as not aspirating initial /p, t, k/, even though the vowel length is sufficient to differentiate between bad and bat.

By predictable vowel length do you mean simply transcribing the free vowels with ⟨ː⟩, including in phonemic transcription (so that keep is transcribed /kiːp/ and father /ˈfɑːðər/? If so, I fully agree with that.

What exactly do you mean by vowel reduction? /ə/ is widely considered to have phonemic status in English and that's how we treat it here.

I think that NURSE and LETTER should be transcribed as r-colored. Wells (or whoever it was) made an unfortunate decision to treat those as vowels, rather than as syllabic consonantal approximants. Transcriptions such as [ɜːɹ] or [əɹ] are, IMO, bad practice and even LPD and CEPD write those as r-colored, even though their transcriptions are otherwise to a large extent phonemic. The only difference between SQUARE and NURSE/LETTER is that the latter is a syllabic consonant (sometimes pronounced with a slight schwa onglide), whereas the latter is a front vowel followed by a consonant. Transcriptions such as [ɜːɹ] or [əɹ] fail to show that.

If we want to show glottalization then I think that we also want to explicitly denote syllabic consonants, because pronunciations such as [ˈbʌʔən] for button are probably still used by a minority of speakers. Plus, it's a widely accepted practice to explicitly denote optional schwas (or syllabic sonorants, same thing really) in transcription. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 15:18, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

@Kbb2: Outside of aspiration and velarization, I think we're in broad agreement on most of what you're saying. I think diacritics are the better framework to consider than what would sound non-native or unnatural if it were missing. We should be phonetically precise enough to be accurate, but not so much that we would need combining diacritics on vowels.

I think that indicating aspiration and velarization would be helpful to lay readers. We specialists consider the distribution of aspirated phones to be predictable, but lay readers may not (even if they're native English speakers who produce it). Indicating aspiration is more phonetically accurate and doesn't fall down the trap of too much phonetic detail that we want to avoid.

Velarization is only predictable within a given dialect, and a reader shouldn't be expected to know it. I think we wouldn't want to indicate velarization only if we don't think we could provide consistent accuracy in transcriptions. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 21:15, 15 April 2019 (UTC)

I, of course, still agree will Aeusoes1's points. I am and have been concerned with lay readers. As long as we come to some common agreement, we can practically transcribe American English however we want within IPA parameters. Wolfdog (talk) 13:45, 16 April 2019 (UTC)

Ok, so we add aspiration, length marks, remove the rhotacized diacritic and write NURSE with [ɜːɹ] and LETTER with [əɹ] and transcribe the dark l's. Would everyone be happy with that? Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 08:20, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

That all sounds good to me... I think, ha. Can I just get three clarifications, Kbb2? See below:

1. We're talking about coming to an agreement on what basic level of narrow transcription to use across all articles falling under American English, correct?
2. Can you remind me what we're meaning here by predictability of length marks (which is non-phonemic but still fairly predictable in AmE)? i.e., Are we talking about, for example, where lengthening tends to happen in AmE before voiced consonants but not before voiceless ones? That use of length marks? In the articles you've edited so far, I think you've been simply aligning the length marks to the BrE style; is there a reason to do this for AmE?
3. Kbb2, I thought you would prefer something like [ɚ] to represent NURSE and lettER rather than [ɜːɹ] and [əɹ], no? (Though I do love your use of the inverted "R": [ɹ].)

Wolfdog (talk) 12:21, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

I am in favor of showing aspiration and velarization, but I second Wolfdog's request for clarification about length marks, and prefer transcribing both nurse and letter as an r-colored schwa [ɚ]. — Eru·tuon 19:50, 18 April 2019 (UTC)

Kbb2, can you clarify? Wolfdog (talk) 19:06, 24 April 2019 (UTC)

OK, so I propose GenAm transcription should include these features (some of which are being newly proposed, I think):

• /l/ is transcribed in all environments as [ɫ]
• /r/ is transcribed in all environments as [ɹ]
• Both NURSE and lettER are transcribed in all environments as [əɹ]
• Aspiration is shown in appropriate environments; e.g., popping as [ˈpʰɑpɪŋ]
• /æ/ is transcribed before /m/ and /n/ as [ɛə]
• /t/ is transcribed in appropriate, highly predictable environments as [ʔ]; e.g. catfish as [kʰæʔfɪʃ]
• /t/ and /d/ are transcribed in appropriate, highly predictable environments as [ɾ]; e.g. rating [ˈɹeɪɾɪŋ] (though some words, like skeletal, appear to vary more greatly: [ˈskɛɫətʰəɫ] or [ˈskɛɫəɾəɫ])

There may be others features to delineate, like the inclusion or exclusion of length marks; I personally feel this is a minor element of AmE, trivial for GenAm, but we can discuss. Thanks, all. Wolfdog (talk) 20:10, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

GenAm has dark l in all contexts?! — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 20:08, 1 May 2019 (UTC)

Have you seen the bullet on L-velarization under "Consonants"? Wolfdog (talk) 13:06, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

I see what you mean. That looks very suspect and runs contrary to what I've seen in general about GA. I'll have to dig into the matter, but based on what I know so far, I wouldn't be in favor of velarizing l in all contexts, just in the syllable coda. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 19:35, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

It's a prominent feature of Received Pronunciation (and I guess many accents in England) that l is noticeably less velarized in certain positions than in General American or Australian. It's one feature that I have occasionally noticed in British actors who are using an American accent: they failed to sufficiently velarize their syllable-initial l, giving an odd sort of Irish quality to certain words (sometimes mixed with incongruous features like r-dropping). In my own speech the main contrast between initial and final l seems to be that the final l is somewhat more velarized and the tongue often doesn't touch the teeth or alveolar ridge (l-vocalization). — Eru·tuon 21:41, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

I agree with every one of Erutuon's above sentiments and have made similar observations myself. There may be slight articulatory differences between initial and final /l/ in AmE, but they're both still fairly velar. John C. Wells' Accents of English (Volume 3) says "GenerAm /l/ tends to be rather dark. Before stressed vowels it is neutral or only slightly velarized; preconsonantally and finally definitely dark (velarized)" (490). So... I'd still err on the side of showing velarization in all cases for our broad GenAm transcription. Certainly, as Erutuon suggests, if someone pronounced a perfectly clear initial /l/ and a perfectly dark initial /l/, only the first could sound to my ears like a non-American (or perhaps Spanish-influenced American) dialect. Even the darkest pronunciation of an initial /l/ would fly completely under my radar. Wolfdog (talk) 13:40, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Yeah, it seems like the onset-coda allophony present in RP is echoed in GA, except that onset /l/ can have a slight degree of velarization. But that varies from speaker to speaker. Transcribing all of these as dark would make our transcriptions more opaque by eliminating any representation of this allophony and implying that GA is like Scottish English, which has noticeably dark /l/s in all position. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 14:35, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Well, I guess we just disagree then. Wells is saying that velarization is basically everywhere in GenAm and only differs from one context to another by degree. I think the "echoing" or light/dark allophonic distinction in GenAm is insignificant (probably even absent in some AmE speakers... I certainly don't hear it in my own conscious speech). Every American /l/ is dark compared with RP, as confirmed by Erutuon when noticing some British actors' /l/ pronunciations still sounding wrong when attempting American accents. What Erutuon is presumably noticing is a clear /l/ in non-coda positions when listening to these actors. Americans don't have any clear /l/. Wolfdog (talk) 16:40, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

The quote you've provided indicates that Wells believes it to be "slight velarization." The difference between slight velarization and velarization is not insignificant and Wells demonstrates he sees these two as different elsewhere in Accents of English, when he says (p. 74):

"In RP, GenAm, and many other accents two perceptibly different allophones may be distinguished, clear and dark. The details of the environment in which the dark allophone is used vary, however: thus intervocalically, as in silly, RP uses clear /l/, thus [ˈsɪlɪ], while GenAm uses dark, thus [ˈsɪɫɪ]. In this word, as in others where /l/ is intervocalic (valley, yellow, column), RP thus sides with Irish English against GenAm; compare words such as belt, milk, halt, where RP and GenAm agree in having dark /l/, but Irish English uses a clear variety."

The use of a dark l in additional phonetic contexts may help account for Erutuon's perception of noticeably darker l's in American English that are clear in RP. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 17:23, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Would you be in favor then of transcribing GenAm lilly as [ˈlɪɫi]? Wolfdog (talk) 18:04, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Yes I would. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 23:25, 5 May 2019 (UTC)

Do we know how this allophony for /l/ works postconsonantally in GenAm? For instance, is the /l/ in /fl/ clearer than the /l/ in /gl/ due to voiced/voiceless reasons? Wolfdog (talk) 16:51, 6 May 2019 (UTC)

Probably. My guess is that the differences are slight and the general tendency is how Wells describes it. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 03:14, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Here's another source that suggests "General American /l/ is velarized in all positions" (though I admit the sentence doesn't seem to make grammatical sense to me). And this source says (see under the section "Velarized alveolar lateral) that a velarized /l/ is used "in most Northern varieties of American English" which I take to mean non-Southern (including GenAm) varieties. Another source confirms (per my allophonic distinction question) that American dark /l/ appears strongest in both postvocalic and intervocalic positions, so it works for me too that we represent it that way. Wolfdog (talk) 14:41, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

I'm interested in the Kbb2's proposal to change the transcription of the NURSE vowel to a syllabic consonant, presumably [ɹ̥]. Does anyone know of a published transcription that does this? — Marquetry28 (talk) 06:53, 3 May 2019 (UTC)

I don't have a strong preference in any direction, but I notice sources that use [ɚː] here or [ɚ] here. I do see one use of syllabic [ɹ] here, which happens to be discussing Canadian English but which could just as easily be discussing GenAm, I suppose. Wolfdog (talk) 14:41, 7 May 2019 (UTC)

Old vowel chart

When I first read this article, I found two vowel charts. The first was a graph of vowels for GA speakers without the cot-caught merger; the second, with. Apparently the one for speakers with the cot-caught merger was deleted, along with the reference to the source from which it came. Why was it removed? AnUnnamedUser (talk) 02:24, 21 July 2019 (UTC)AnUnnamedUser (talk) 02:24, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

@AnUnnamedUser: (We're talking about this chart, which originally was uploaded as [1]) It's not useful. The article already explains that the merger is a possibility and how it works. No vowel chart on Wikipedia (maybe with one or two exceptions) covers all of the allophones of any given phoneme.

This chart, which is how the source used to depict (it's been deleted) the vowels of AmE, isn't 100% correct: /u/ is too back, /ɪ/ too front, /ɛ/ too high and [ɚ] could be too low (I think it should be close-mid, like Australian NURSE). Whether we choose this one or the Wells's one would be arbitrary, except for the fact that the latter is based on a more reliable source that actually exists.

Besides, one of your edit summaries reads Kbb2, I think you accidentally deleted the reference for the proper chart with the vowels for GenAm with the low back merger instead of the one without it. Why would I remove Wells's chart and what's "improper" about it? I've demonstrated that the monophthong chart from that Australian source is just as flawed if not more so.

The source itself has deleted the chart with the cot-caught merger, along with the New Zealand English charts and the RP ones. The RP ones are roughly the same as the ones in Received Pronunciation. The NZE ones are clearly unreliable (/e/ is too low, /ɵː/ is too close to /ʉː/, the ending point of /æʊ/ is wrong and so is the starting point of /ɐʉ/), and so is the diphthong chart of cot-caught-merged AmE (the starting point of /eɪ/ is too low, the starting points of /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ too high and the starting point of /oʊ/ is probably too low and/or not central enough (it should be [ɵʊ] or something like that). Wells's diphthong chart looks more correct and less chaotic. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 06:39, 21 July 2019 (UTC)

Requested move 2 August 2019

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Moved. See strong arguments below in support of a page move away from the current title, even though it appears to be the undisputed common name for the subjects of accents and pronunciations of general American English. Since any of the companies mentioned can be called "General American", the term's ambiguity has been established, so using the name as the title of a disambiguation page is a definite consideration. Further, we see no general agreement below as to what title to use for this article, so as closer I am compelled to choose. My choice is based upon giving the title of this article a natural disambiguator that is also in common usage according to reliable sources, and is also based upon giving this article a more precise and recognizable name that already redirects to the current title. In accord with closing instructions, "while consensus has rejected the former title (and no request to bring it back should be made lightly), there is no consensus for the title actually chosen. And if anyone objects to the closer's choice, they may make another move request at any time, which will hopefully lead the article title to its final resting place." Kudos to editors for your input, and Happy Publishing! (nac by page mover) P. I. Ellsworth, ed. ^put'r there  16:56, 25 August 2019 (UTC)

---

General American → General American English – (edited) The phrase General American will be meaningless to most readers until they click the link to the article and begin reading. Article titles should be natural and recognizable for the non-specialist reader, which generally includes using nouns or noun phrases. American as a noun for the language is fairly uncommon in normal usage; see Google Ngram, for instance. (Yes, I'm aware of the 2005 PBS series; it seems obvious that the title was meant to be attention-getting and somewhat tongue-in-cheek, rather than refecting normal usage.) Insofar as General American is used in academia, it's specialist jargon that should be clarified. This is consistent with other pages in Category:American English, such as Southern American English, Western American English, New England English, Inland Northern American English, Appalachian English, etc. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:11, 2 August 2019 (UTC) --Relisting. Dicklyon (talk) 02:05, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

(Addendum) See this list of sources that use General American English for the linguistic variety GBooks search results for General American English. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:09, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose. Unlike Southern American English, Western American English, New England English, Inland Northern American English, Appalachian English, etc., General American does not refer to a dialect with special vocabulary, morphology, etc., but merely to an accent (or a group of accents). Even texts written in a foreign variety of English can be, and frequently are, read using General American. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 23:11, 2 August 2019 (UTC)

  The lead sentence calls it the umbrella variety of American English. It's a form of English, whether a dialect, accent, or whatever. The suggestion that General American English refers to a specific dialect will only be picked up on by a small group of specialist readers; the risk of confusion there is small compared to the benefits of a more recognizable title for the average reader, in my opinion. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:19, 3 August 2019 (UTC) (Edit: as detailed below, several quality sources do in fact refer to General American as a "dialect"; this is one of the two meanings identified by Kövecses (2000, p. 81). —09:20, 23 August 2019 (UTC))

• Support. In the academic papers cited, "General American" is not ambiguous because they are linguistics papers, talking about accents being Southern or General American. The proposal is more natural and recognizable. I don't agree with the comment above me that "General American English" would imply that were a specific dialect, the "General" part of the name already implies it's about something broad. – Thjarkur (talk) 00:11, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

  It seems I wasn't clear enough. I meant "dialect" in the first sense mentioned in article dialect that also covers standard languages, not in the sense that a dialect is something that is only used locally. What I wanted to say was that General American is only a style of pronunciation, not a variety of English that differs from other Englishes on all linguistic levels. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 00:25, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

  @LiliCharlie: Then what about renaming the article General American accent? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:30, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

  At least that's not misleading. General American is an accent like Received Pronunciation, the Mid-Atlantic accent or General Australian, not a complete national variety of Standard English. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 02:07, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose – Where does the idea that article names should be self-evident come from? If that was the case we wouldn't need short descriptions, and disambiguation pages and hatnotes would be considerably shorter. If there's anything remotely close it's WP:NATURALDISAMBIG, but that's for when there's ambiguity. If there was, "General American accent" would at least make more sense than the proposed name. But I don't see a hatnote in this article, nor the necessity for a move. Nardog (talk) 01:27, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

  Per article titling policy, recognizability and naturalness are the first two criteria to consider. Can we assume that you would support a move to General American accent? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:37, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

  No – "General American" is a name "that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize", and is "what the subject is actually called in English". I find "General American accent" redundant, defying the "conciseness" criterion. Nardog (talk) 01:58, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

• Comment Your Ngram link hardly illustrates anything. It just means "speak/spoke English..." has been written more times than "speak/spoke American...", which includes "speak/spoke American English" etc. Nardog (talk) 01:58, 3 August 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. Per LiliCharlie. Since there's no evidence given that "General American" is meaningless to most readers, this can be dismissed pretty easily. As can the notion that "General American" isn't a noun (it's a proper noun!). There's basically no justification for considering it specialist language in need of a common alternative. Sure, it appears more often in specialist literature, but that's because specialist literature talks about it a lot. There's no evidence that "General American English" (or "General American accent") exists as a common name alternative to "General American." No links to non-specialist literature, dictionaries, or even YouTube videos. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 16:11, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

  Please re-read the move request. I didn't say American for the language wasn't a noun; I said it was an uncommon noun in normal usage. The "evidence" that General American will be meaningless to most readers is its virtual non-use in everyday speech. As for links to non-specialist literarure, try Google. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 21:04, 3 August 2019 (UTC)

  I see. So by insisting that we include nouns or noun phrases, you're saying that readers might misinterpret "General American" as an adjective, not that it is one. Another guess that doesn't really have any substantiation.

  The search results you've provided with the sources doesn't really indicate what you think. Actually, it looks a lot like you've just slapped a search result without taking a close look at the results themselves. Let's go through a dozen:

  • Green (2002) uses the phrase "general American English" differently than the subject of this article. This is why she capitalizes it this special way. She is talking about the collective body of American English dialects, not the specific manner of pronunciation (accent) that is the subject of this article. You can see this when she discusses lexicon (p. 20), auxiliaries (p. 44), verbal paradigms (p. 74), and syntax and morphology (p. 76).
  • Wolfram & Schilling (2015) are doing the same. As you can see from their discussion of verbal paradigms (p. 380) and relative pronouns (p. 388).
  • Skandera & Burleigh (2005) do use the phrase "General American English" as synonymous with "General American" but they also use "Standard American English" which is not the same thing and quite a strange error. Nevertheless, we can call this a hit.
  • Schweke (2007) is talking about dialects (with mention of lexicons)
  • Brown (2006) is talking about grammar (auxiliary systems)
  • Bonfiglio (2010) shows up because "General American accent" is in quotes in reference to usage of the early 20th century. Hardly an indicator of contemporary usage.
  • Blumenfield (2013) does use the phrase "General American accent", though take note that he uses "General American" much more frequently.
  • McGuire (2016) is a hit.
  • Rank (2006) is a hit.
  • Dal Vera (2003) is not talking about GA.
  • Tench (2011) seems to use the phrase "General American accent" when introducing the concept to indicate it's an accent, but then slips into using just "General American" or "GA" for the remainder.

  So you've basically found two sources that actually say and do what you say they say and do. That's not common usage. Not even close. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 00:30, 4 August 2019 (UTC)

  "Standard American English" which is not the same thing and quite a strange error – the article we're discussing specifically states that Standard American English is an alternative name for the topic. Blumenfield (2013) ... uses "General American" much more frequently ... Tench (2011) slips into using just "General American" or "GA" for the remainder – the point is how the topics are introduced, since that is the purpose of the title we're discussing. No one is suggesting we replace "General American" with "General American English" throughout the entire article. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 03:00, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

  You've got the burden of proof here. Shifting the goalposts mid-conversation isn't going to help you. Nor is failing to address the arguments of other editors. You made a claim about general usage. Your claim was shown to be quite incorrect. It's hard to take you seriously when you can't even admit you were wrong. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 06:58, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

  See reply below. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 07:46, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

• Oppose per LilCharlie. General American refers to an accent, not a distinct dialect. That "dialect" is American English. Calidum 13:55, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
  • Multiple published sources in fact describe "General American" as a dialect or dialects. Kövecses (2000, p. 81) specifically refers to "three large dialect areas" encompassed by General American, while Labov et al. (2006, p. 263) assign the term to a hypothesized "conservative Inland Northern dialect". Any of the other sources referring to a General American "variety" can also be said to referring to dialect, since the latter term encompasses any given variety of a language. Furthermore, linguists often use dialect in place of accent. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 12:34, 17 August 2019 (UTC)
• Oppose. Article titles should be what the thing is called, not what readers with no knowledge of the matter might expect the thing to be called. W. P. Uzer (talk) 22:21, 4 August 2019 (UTC)
• Support. I think "General American" is too ambiguous of a title for the average reader. Moving to "General American English" or "General American accent" is completely appropriate. Rreagan007 (talk) 14:24, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

  How is it ambiguous? What else does it refer to? Isn't it rather unkind to readers to misinform them as to what the subject of the article is actually called? W. P. Uzer (talk) 20:49, 7 August 2019 (UTC)

  Honestly, when I first saw the title "General American", I had no idea what the heck it referred to. I thought maybe it was referring to an average American person, or perhaps that it was the name of a corporation. Rreagan007 (talk) 02:17, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

  It is the job of the article body to tell users what a term refers to. Page titles, as W. P. Uzer said, tell users what the thing is actually called. Thus we have a page called Oganesson, and it would be incorrect to rename it to something extended like Chemical element Oganesson or Oganesson element because non-experts might think Oganesson is the name of a corporation. In short, we do it the old-fashioned way: We expect users to read our articles, not to deduce an article's content from its title before jumping to the next page, though we do have lead sections providing for users with little time and patience. — P.S.: Mnemotechnically it is a good thing you first thought that General American referred to something else. Mentally contrasting two similar terms is a train of thought that serves your memory and helps you expand your vocabulary. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 04:31, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

  Actually, that's not correct. The subject of the article should be readily apparent from the title. That's why we use the most common name rather than the official name for article titles, so readers will be able to know from the title alone if it is the article that they are looking for. Rreagan007 (talk) 05:28, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

  In which case, "General American" would be the most common name. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 06:06, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

  Exactly. I've known the term General American for decades, and if there were an article entitled General American English I would suspect it deals with something else, maybe a controlled natural language similar to Basic English, not an accent like General Australian or General British. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 08:10, 9 August 2019 (UTC)

  The Oganesson article is not particularly relevant here, but in any case it's unambiguous, unlike "General American", which could potentially refer to a range of things. Titles should be natural and recognizable. This is laid out in the second paragraph of our titling policy. We don't expect readers to read every article to find out what the topic is. Several editors have now indicated that this article's title lacks recognizability in at least some cases. There is little to lose by giving readers more clarity and precision. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 06:54, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

• Comment: according to some of the first sources cited in the article, such as Labov, Ash, & Boberg (2006) and Van Riper (1986), there is no scholarly consensus that the term "General American" refers solely to accent, as opposed to dialect. Therefore any objections along those lines seem to be a red herring. Nonetheless, it's fairly easy to find sources that specifically refer to "General American English" as a phonological system, that is, an accent or system of pronunciation, for instance Adger et al. (2007), Bauman-Wängler (2004),Blumenfeld (2002), Durand et al. (2014), Fogle (2008), Garn-Nunn & Lynn (2004), Green (2002), Hayden (1950), Kalackal (1985), Kennedy (2003), McMillan & Montgomery (1989), Romaine (1998), Silveiro & Watkins (2006), Teschner & Whitney (2004), and others. So "General American English" seems both commonly used and unambiguous, which is something to consider even if "General American" is the most common name used. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:48, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

  You might want to check our system of soft and hard redirects. Standard American English takes readers to a disambiguation page, not here, and explicitly says that it is technically incorrect to refer to General American as "Standard American English". Do you really not know the theoretical and practical problems with "Standard American English" as a concept? Do you not know that it's basically a myth as far as pronunciation goes? Why would we, a locus of accurate and accessible knowledge, want to denigrate ourselves with falsities for the sake of alleviating the slight discomfort some feel between when they learn they are ignorant about something and when they address that ignorance with a few sentences of light reading?

  Given that you've demonstrated several times in this thread alone a troubling difficulty in providing correct analysis on what literature does and does not say, I hope you can indulge all of us in actually providing page numbers and quotations to illustrate this lack of consensus that you allege. You may also want to elaborate to all of us how a source from 1986 (or 1950 for that matter) is still relevant on the matter of this consensus. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 06:47, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

  Shifting the goalposts mid-conversation isn't going to help you. I don't know what this is referring to. I directly responded to your points about "Standard American English" being an error, and the fact that two authors use "General American English" to introduce the topic, which is relevant to how we name the article.

  Nor is failing to address the arguments of other editors. Pot, meet kettle.

  You made a claim about general usage. The only such claim I have made is regarding the lack of usage of "General American" in everyday speech, which I think is just common sense.

  Standard American English takes readers to a disambiguation page, not here, and explicitly says that it is technically incorrect to refer to General American as "Standard American English". You might try reading this article, which states, "Some scholars, despite controversy, prefer the term Standard American English." Whether you or I think that's technically incorrect is irrelevant; we give ideas due weight based on their prominence in published, reliable sources.

  Do you really not know the theoretical and practical problems with "Standard American English" as a concept? Do you not know that it's basically a myth as far as pronunciation goes? None of this is relevant to how published, reliable sources use the term.

  Given that you've demonstrated several times in this thread alone a troubling difficulty in providing correct analysis on what literature does and does not say... That's just, like, your opinion, man. (Kindly refrain from poisoning the well, thanks.)

  I hope you can indulge all of us in actually providing page numbers and quotations... You could always try following the links I posted above, but if you insist:

  • "The Atlas data do not justify the labeling of any one dialect as "General American", a term promoted by John Kenyon to indicate a conservative Inland Northern dialect"
  • "General American has been used to designate a regional type of American English, a type of American English which transcends all American regional boundaries, a variously constituted body of speech features of American English found in the speech of the great majority of Americans, and a set of American dialects which, perhaps by definition, share certain features under discussion ..."

  —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 07:46, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

  Just from a quick search, I see several more sources using "General American" (with a capital G) for a dialect of American English: Bailey (2017), Burkett (1978), Clopper & Bradlow (2009), Herman & Herman (1997), Kövecses (2000), Treiman et al. (1997) and Troutman (2001). Any concerns about giving readers the impression of a dialect therefore seem moot, since that's just what these and other sources call it. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 10:09, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

  Poisoning the well is the name of a type of ad hominem attack where one interlocutor attempts to undermine the credibility of another with irrelevant details. In this case, what I have pointed out is quite relevant, particularly in a discussion that depends on evidence. You made a claim about terminology and provided search results for dozens of sources saying that these sources backed up the idea that "General American English" and "General American accent" exist as a common-name alternatives to "General American." Even if we were to ignore the problem that that links to specialist literature wouldn't back up claims about common-name usage versus usage in specialist literature, almost none of the sources even used those terms in the way that you said that they did. So, to recap, you said that General American is specialist jargon, I said there was no evidence that your proposed terms were common-name alternatives, you provided links to demonstrate that they were, and your links failed to demonstrate that. Then, to add to the absurdity, when I pointed this out, you shifted the goal-posts by saying that it was about how the terms were introduced. No, it's not. It never was and shouldn't be.

  We have high standards for factual accuracy, and if you're going to propose something as drastic as renaming this article, you should come correct and come hard, or not come at all. I'm not going to go easy on you when you demonstrate repeatedly that you don't know what you're talking about. We have all been correcting you every step of the way in this conversation and now, when facts don't back you up, you're appealing to "common sense." This is not convincing.

  I took the time to look through the last set of links you've provided. You've now provided another set of links to books with a claim about what they say. I've indicated that, based on the level of credibility you've demonstrated here, I don't trust your assessment and asked that you actually provide the relevant quotes for all of these sources to save myself and other editors from potentially wasting more time. I've also implied that older sources have less weight than newer ones when it comes to current usage. To be explicit, a source from the 1980s or before is only really going to indicate historical usage.

  If you don't want to actually do this, that's fine. I'll leave it to other editors to determine if they find that convincing. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 17:15, 10 August 2019 (UTC)

  Note that the sources you initially responded to were not ones that I specifically cited. So any problems with the specific sources have been cherry-picked are with those selected by you. You mentioned Skandera & Burleigh (2005) as a "hit"; three more sources that show up for me on the first page of search results are De Houwer & Wilton (2011), McMillan & Montgomery (1989), and Teschner & Whitney (2004), which use "General American English" in the context of phonemes and/or pronunciation.

  Green also discusses differences in pronunciation between African American English and "general American English" (2002, p. 106) (Note that "general" is only sometimes capitalized even in the term "General American", according to Webster's.) I'd say these four or five "hits" out of the first ten results are a pretty good indication that "General American English" is sufficiently common among scholars. However, even a less common but unambiguous name may be appropriate, per our titling policy: "Ambiguous[5] or inaccurate names for the article subject, as determined in reliable sources, are often avoided even though they may be more frequently used by reliable sources."

  I have since offered several more specific sources that use "General American English" to designate a sound system of American English. Considering that your initial comment suggested we look for evidence in YouTube videos, your objection to even a handful of scholarly sources confirming the usage of "General American English" is bizarre. Shifting the goalposts, indeed. Note also that my claim of "common sense" was about the lack of usage of "General American" in everyday speech. This would be the time to refute this claim, if you have evidence to do so. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:16, 11 August 2019 (UTC) (edited 02:49, 11 August 2019 (UTC))

  And yes, how sources introduce the concept is always relevant; is this not what titles do? If there were no ambiguity, sources wouldn't need to add "English" on to the end of "General American", even if they mostly use the briefer term in prose. The fact that "General American English" is mentioned at all in a given source is significant. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:32, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

  Cherry picked? That's quite the accusation of bad faith. You want to maybe walk that back a bit or is it your position that I'm being dishonest? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 02:39, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

  Possibly an injudicious term on my part. Would you consider walking back your multiple accusations of "goalpost shifting" then? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:46, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

  To elaborate on another point, I am not appealing to 'common sense' when the facts don't back me up. I am appealing to more than a dozen published, reliable sources that use "General American English" in the context of this article's subject. The fact that "common sense" also applies here does not indicate shifting goalposts. A move can be advisable for more than one reason. I would have thought that was common sense, but apparently not. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 03:48, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

  I appreciate the attempt to be civil, but you seem to believe that I have chosen a select few sources when in actuality I went through the first two pages of results and examined all of the ones that I could (except one that was a little too old). It's as representative a sample as I could make it. As I said, it looks a lot like you didn't examine the sources from the search results yourself. You haven't demonstrated usage and, when I pointed this out, mentioned "common sense" as a justification for why you don't need to. That's a burden of proof shift. If that isn't an appeal to common sense in lieu of corroboration from sources (which you shouldn't do whether or not you've been tasked with corroboration), I don't know what is. I will not be walking back my charge of goal-post shifting. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 22:30, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

  You haven't demonstrated usage and, when I pointed this out, mentioned "common sense" as a justification for why you don't need to. Where did I say anything resembling this? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 04:43, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

  To be explicit, a source from the 1980s or before is only really going to indicate historical usage. This seems wholly arbitrary, unless the meaning of the terms has radically shifted in the last 40 or so years. In that case, we can excise much of the content from the lead section that relies on either Wells's Accents of English (first published 1982) or Van Riper's "General American: An Ambiguity" (first published 1973, collected in volume 1986, ebook released 2014). In any case, we have multiple sources from 1950 all the way up to 2018 (see quotes below) that use "General American English" for the topic at hand. Rather than a historical curiosity, these show that there is a continuity of usage across multiple decades. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:08, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

Comment: A walk through our five criteria for deciding on an article title:

1. Recognizability – The title is a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize.

• The current title is certainly a name that I—being someone familiar with the subject area—recognize. As I said above, I would hesitate and not be sure if an article entitled General American English deals with the same subject.

2. Naturalness – The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.

• As I write this, General American had 17,268 page views in the past 30 days, General American English had 295. So it seems that the majority of Wikipedia users did not come here via the latter page. And our subject is actually called General American in English, not only in specialized literature, but also in leading English dictionaries such as Webster's and the OED.

3. Precision – The title unambiguously identifies the article's subject and distinguishes it from other subjects.

• General American seems to unambiguously identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects.

4. Conciseness – The title is no longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects.

• General American is shorter than General American English, which would be longer than necessary to identify the article's subject and distinguish it from other subjects.

5. Consistency – The title is consistent with the pattern of similar articles' titles.

• General American is consistent with the naming pattern of page titles such as General Australian and General British, which also refer to accents of English that are used nationwide.

Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 07:15, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

General Australian and General British are redirects, not article titles. So there's no consistency benefit to be had there. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 11:37, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

@LiliCharlie: about #3 (Precision): Published experts are not unanimous on the meaning of "General American"; see my reply to Aeusoes1 below. Also, there are several other topics on Wikipedia that could be referred to as "General American". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:31, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

• Support as per WP:PRECISE – somebody who is not in the linguistics field will have any idea what this means without the word "English". --IJBall (contribs • talk) 17:32, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

  You say "per WP:PRECISE", but my reading of that policy seems to clearly back using "General American" since it says that titles should be no more precise than is needed to unambiguously define the topical scope of an article. Since there's no ambiguity with "General American", adding "English" or "accent" has no disambiguating function. AFAIKT, the experience of simply not knowing the topic just from the title alone is not what WP:PRECISE is about. Do you care to elaborate how WP:PRECISE would back up your stance? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 22:36, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

  Yes, the current title is "ambiguous" – that's what I said. The proposed move removes the ambiguity. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 23:47, 11 August 2019 (UTC)

  I didn't know the expression General American is also used in a different sense and is therefore ambiguous. Please point me to the other article that could justifiably carry that name. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 00:05, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

  I've already explained my reasoning, I don't need to explain it again. The "opposers" of this RM are getting dangerously close to WP:BLUDGEONING – you've made your points, so you can drop it now. --IJBall (contribs • talk) 00:22, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

  IJBall, I think we're talking over each other here a little bit. The term ambiguous in the context of Wikipedia articles means that it is able to be understood to mean multiple things. This is why we disambiguate with redirects, hatnotes, etc. So what you are describing as "ambiguous" is different than WP:PRECISE is talking about. You seem to mean "ambiguous" as simply vague, while WP:PRECISE is saying article titles shouldn't be "ambiguous" in the sense that their titles should be clearly disambiguated. That's why LiliCharlie is asking for what else "General American" could refer to. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 05:08, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

  Just a minor addition: there's a line in WP:UCRN (already quoted earlier by Sangdeboeuf) that uses "ambiguous" in a different sense, not related to the need for disambiguation between titles: Ambiguous or inaccurate names for the article subject, as determined in reliable sources, are often avoided even though they may be more frequently used by reliable sources. But even if it's claimed that the title is ambiguous in this weaker sense, I agree that that should be supported by specifying the other possible meanings of "General American" that give rise to the ambiguity. Colin M (talk) 15:32, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

  Since we're not discussing an actual disambiguation page, I think we can consider partial title matches as giving rise to ambiguity in use of the term. Other topics that might be called "General American" include General American Investors Company and General American Marks Company (a subsidiary of GATX, formerly the General American Transportation Corporation). Terms that redirect to other articles also include General American Oil Company (precursor of Amoco). (A search for "General American Life Insurance Company" yields several more mentions.) —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 09:25, 13 August 2019 (UTC) (edited 23:34, 19 August 2019 (UTC) to remove an unlikely match)

• Oppose W. P. Uzer really hit the nail on the head when they wrote: Article titles should be what the thing is called, not what readers with no knowledge of the matter might expect the thing to be called. I'm generally in favour of moving from jargon-y names to more widely recognizable ones, but this isn't analogous to, say, Geococcyx, an obscure, jargon-y term for a thing that's fairly well-known under a different name (Roadrunner). This is an obscure/specialized term for an obscure/specialized topic. Someone who doesn't know what "General American" is isn't going to suddenly WP:RECOGNIZE the article's topic when they instead see "General American English" - at best, they'll have a better idea of the general domain of the topic. But people aren't arriving at this article out of a vacuum (unless they're surfing the "Random article" button) - anyone who searches for this term, or clicks a link to this article from another article already has some understanding of what they're getting into. Colin M (talk) 00:59, 12 August 2019 (UTC)

  I think you'll find that what the thing is called includes the proposed title "General American English" – see the dozen or so published sources quoted below. Should we not strive to give readers a better idea of the general domain of the topic when doing so incurs no loss of accuracy and only a minor loss of concision? We don't know how many readers are arriving at this article out of a vacuum – most "See also" sections just contain bare titles, and someone who begins typing a similar phrase in the search bar will see the title suggested automatically.

  In our discussion of dialect features, we often use the term General American English ... This term is used simply to refer to varieties of English that are not characterized by the particular dialect trait under discussion ...
  — Adger et al. (2007, p. 187)

  —This is similar to how the topic is characterized in our article. The source goes on to compare GAE pronunciation to the Southern Vowel Shift and Northern Cities Shift (p. 192).

  General American English is rhotic as opposed to British RP, which is a non-rhotic accent.
  — Blumenfeld (2002, p. 23)

  Labov’s (1998) division of American English into Northern, Southern, and 'The Third Dialect' seems unsatisfactory and some method for applying the 'General American' label is necessary. General American English could be defined historically as the variety that has undergone relatively little phonological change over the last 50 or 100 years.
  — Clopper & Bradlow (2009)

  —The source uses "General American" and "General American English" interchangeably.

  [Arpabet] consists of a mapping between the phonemes of General American English and ASCII characters.
  — Durand et al. (2014)

  —The source is discussing phonological transcription, which is related to sociolinguistics.

  In English, some tense vowels are realised as dipthongs in many varieties, including Received Pronunciation and General American English ...
  — Evertz (2018, p. 13)

  Throughout this book we have presented word pronunciations characteristic of what has been referred to in earlier texts as standard American English (SAE) or general American English (GAE).
  — Garn-Nunn & Lynn (2004, p. 133)

  Words in AAE and general American English that have the same meanings may have different pronunciations ...
  — Green (2002, p. 106)

  The purpose of this study is to analyze the relative frequency of occurrence of phonemes in a representative sample of General-American English ... The present study was prompted by the writer's interest in problems of pronunciation faced in the teaching of English as a foreign language to students from abroad.
  — Hayden (1950, p. 217)

  [T]he younger people are gradually adopting the dialect pronunciations of their teachers or co-workers. A highschool girl who had left the mountains and was living with her family in a mid-western city spoke very good General-American English when she was among her schoolmates.
  — Herman & Herman (1997)

  General American English (GAE), a term used for varieties of US English, especially as spoken in the Mid-West, has by far the largest number of speakers of any variety of English.
  — Kennedy (2003, p. 50)

  —This passage comes from a section comparing different accents of English; GAE is compared with RP, Scottish English, Australian English, etc.

  Consider the pronunciation of the final syllable of the following English words: little, button, and, in (rhotic) General American English, cupboard.
  — Plag et al. (2007, p. 53)

  We included, insofar as we could, all previously noted departures from the norms of the conversational pronunciation of educated native speakers of General American English.
  — Prator (1951, p. xii)

  Some writers ... have used the term network English or General American English, as if there were a recognized standard variety of pronunciation.
  — Romaine (1998, pp. 38–39)

  —The source is directly contrasting GAE with Received Pronunciation (RP).

  The standard variety spoken in the United States is called General American (English) or Standard American English.
  — Skandera & Burleigh (2005, p. 6)

  —The use of parentheses shows how "General American" and "General American English" are equivalent terms. The source goes on to contrast GAE and RP (p. 71).

  In [Pronouncing English: A Stress-based Approach] we focus on the prevailing pronunciation of General American English ...
  — Teschner & Whitney (2004, p. xi)

  —The source uses both "General American" and "General American English" in the same paragraph.

  General American English is defined by Giegerich (1992) as 'a cover term used for the group of accents in the United States that do not bear the marked regional characteristics of either the East ... or the South ... It has the largest geographical spread and is the accent most commonly used in the television networks covering the whole of the United States' ...
  — Treiman et al. (1997, p. 230)

  [George Philip] Krapp offered not only General American English as a label for that type of American speech which was neither Eastern nor Southern, but others as well ... 'General American English', 'the General type', 'General American' ... and 'Western or General American English' were all used by him in The English Language in America.
  — Van Riper (1986, p. 124)

  —There's an interesting note about the preference of dictionaries for "General American" on p. 128; I don't see Van Riper himself saying any term is preferable to another. He uses "General American" the most, probably out of convenience.

  In addition to these, Celce-Murcia (1991), Fogle (2008), and Gutierrez-Ang (2009) have chapters on the "General American English Sound System", and Kalackal (1985) has a chapter on the phonology of "General American English". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 04:44, 13 August 2019 (UTC) (edited 12:27, 13 August 2019 (UTC))

  Thank you, this is excellent research. You're right, the quote from W.P. Uzer does oversimplify the situation. I accept that "General American English" is used. But I think we also agree that "General American" is the most commonly used term, right? You say the move "incurs no loss of accuracy and only a minor loss of concision", but I think that's leaving out the greatest loss: WP:NATURALNESS (The title is one that readers are likely to look or search for and that editors would naturally use to link to the article from other articles. Such a title usually conveys what the subject is actually called in English.). Sure, searching Google Books for "General American English" turns up plentiful examples. But what if we were to first select, say, 100 of the highest quality sources dealing with this topic (linguistics textbooks, highly-cited articles from respected journals, etc.) and do a count based on those? How many "General American English"es would you expect to find? 1? 5? 20? 50?

  As a lazier experiment, I searched Language Log (by adding site:languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/ to Google searches) and found 78 results for "General American" and 8 for "General American English". ("General American accent" gets 7). That's a pretty wide disparity. Colin M (talk) 13:30, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

  A lot of those usages seem to be reader comments. As an even lazier experiment, I checked the first five results, and three out of the five were just that. (A fourth one refers to "[pronunciation] norms of general American newscasters", which is an odd framing; are the newscasters or their pronunciation being called "general"?) In any case, I'm doubtful that Language Log is really among the "highest quality sources" on the topic.

  It's not surprising that people frequenting a specialist language blog would often use jargon-y terms; a lot of online enthusiast communities are like that (Wikipedia being no exception). And academic journals will of course use specialist jargon in most cases, since they're written by specialists for other specialists to read.

  While "General American" isn't a technical term like Geococcyx, it's pretty self-evidently a truncated form of "General American English" that specialists – such as Van Riper (1986) – use for the sake of convenience, just as many – such as Wells (1982) – shorten it further into "GenAm".

  We're back to the question of ambiguity vs. frequency of use; WP:UCRN definitely supports using a less common name if it's clearer, which I think the proposed title is. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:43, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

  Sure, but these aren't exactly YouTube comments. The average Language Log commenter likely has an academic background in linguistics. And I'm doubtful of your dubiousness of LL's quality - it's the real deal. The contributors are highly respected/influential linguistics professors. Colin M (talk) 23:13, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

  Whatever the commenters' background, their comments on the site are still self-published and not acceptable as sources. Even if we accept the site as a whole as reliable, it doesn't resolve the ambiguity/commonality issue. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:42, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

  You seem to be hinting that if we had 100 of the highest quality sources dealing with this topic, we would see far more uses of "General American" than "General American English". Obviously we can't make that assumption until we have actually looked at such sources. And that's assuming the sources already provided are not of "highest quality". Many of the sources come from mainstream academic or university publishers, with a couple being peer-reviewed journals. So I don't see any reason to doubt their quality or reliability. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 05:59, 18 August 2019 (UTC)

@Sangdeboeuf: Thank you for being patient with me while I looked through these sources. I appreciate the time you've taken to identify the parts of each source that you feel highlights the usage you are talking about.

There are a few sources that do, as you say, indicate that the term General American English can be used synonymously or even interchangeably with General American as we cover it in this article, e.g. Evertz (2018), Teschner & Whitney (2004), Durand et al. (2014). The clearest example of this is Treiman et al. (1997), which defines General American English with a quote from a source that is describing "General American". If it's just about how the terms are potentially interchangeable, then we could add Blumenfeld (2002), Clopper & Bradlow (2009), Herman & Herman (1997), Plag et al. (2007), which seem to use the terms interchangeably, but use General American (or, in one case GenAm) far more frequently than General American English. Take note that Kennedy (2003) also uses "British Received Pronunciation" where we (and most linguists use "Received Pronunciation"). I'm assuming that no one is planning on proposing a rename to our article on Received Pronunciation, though the logic for such a proposal would be strikingly similar to this one.

There are a few sources that use the phrase General American English, but are talking about something else than what is covered here. I've mentioned Green (2002) already, but this also includes Garn-Nunn & Lynn (2004) and Skandera & Burleigh (2005). Adger et al. (2007) is pretty clear about this as, earlier in the paragraph from the quote provided, they explicitly say that they are referring to a body of dialects with phonological and grammatical features under discussion. Thus, they are not looking at General American as it is covered in this article. It's clear from the next sentence following the quoted one that they are using this as synonymous with Standard English and quite apparent that they are talking about more than accents, as they take more space (pp. 195–208) discussing grammatical issues of "General American English" than pronunciation. Romaine et al. (1998) aren’t really clear on the matter. It seems to me that they are talking about two different things.

"General American English" appears in Van Riper (1986) in reference to usage of the early 20th century. Hardly an indicator of contemporary usage.

I think it would be fair to say that you have found a handful of sources that use the terms General American English and General American interchangeably. You have also found a handful of sources that use General American English to refer to something else. To me, this indicates that the term General American English has such low salience in linguistic literature that there is no clear meaning for it as there is with General American. Thus, in addition to picking a rarely used term, renaming the article to "General American English" would be adding ambiguity that we don't have with the current title. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]}

I'm assuming that no one is planning on proposing a rename to our article on Received Pronunciation, though the logic for such a proposal would be strikingly similar to this one. Your assumption is correct. Such a move would not be necessary, since the term "Received Pronunciation", unlike "General American", is unambiguous and widely understood.

There are a few sources that use the phrase General American English, but are talking about something else than what is covered here ... this also includes Garn-Nunn & Lynn (2004) and Skandera & Burleigh (2005). How does this follow? Both Garn-Nunn & Lynn (2004) and Skandera & Burleigh (2005) use "General American (English)" for a standard variety of pronunciation. Compare this to how one source cited in the lead section of our article describes one meaning of "General American":

Perhaps the typical embodiment of Standard American English ... a certain norm or 'standard' of pronunciation that derives primarily from the Midland and Western regions and that is thus characteristic of the majority of Americans.
— Kövecses (2000, p. 81)

Other sources describing "General American" in terms of standard pronunciation (or "Standard American English" pronunciation) include Benson et al. (1986, pp. 179–180), Kretzchmar (2008, p. 37), Lorenz (2012, p. 12), Van den Doel (2006, p. 15), and von Schneidemesser (2007, p. 286). Additionally, Wells (1982, p. 118) refers to General American as "pronunciation taught to learners of English as a foreign language", which is certainly a feature of any "standard" variety. (Note that not all these sources agree that such a standard variety exists; this is only to show that "General American" is used in this context. From there it follows that discussions of GAE/SAE pertain to the same topic as well.)

Romaine et al. (1998) aren’t really clear on the matter. It seems to me that they are talking about two different things. In the passage I quoted, Romaine is directly contrasting General American English with Received Pronunciation. They are talking about a system of pronunciation variously called "General American" or "Network English" (or "Network Standard"), as described in our article under § In the media: General American is thus sometimes associated with the speech of North American radio and television announcers ... sometimes called a 'newscaster accent', 'television English', or 'Network Standard'. Romaine uses "General American English" equivalently to "General American" as used by MacMahon (1998) and Baugh & Cable (1993), whom Romaine cites on p. 39.

"General American English" appears in Van Riper (1986) in reference to usage of the early 20th century. Hardly an indicator of contemporary usage. Your fixation on historical vs. contemporary usage is simply a red herring, given that you've already acknowledged more recent sources that use the terms interchangeably. George Philip Krapp, who, according to Van Riper (and our article) is responsible for the spread of the term "General American", also used "General American English" and several other terms to refer to the topic; there could be no clearer indication that the terms are equivalent.

You have also found a handful of sources that use General American English to refer to something else. If you're going to make the case that any of these sources are referring to something other than the topic of this article, it would be more convincing to specify what that thing is, rather than simply handwaving it away as "something else".

To me, this indicates that the term General American English has such low salience in linguistic literature that there is no clear meaning for it as there is with General American. First, there is not a clear, agreed-upon meaning for the term "General American", as our article points out under § Disputed usage; this is Van Riper's point in describing the term as "ambiguous" (1982, p. 130). Refer again to Kövecses (2000):

This term [General American] has two uses. One refers to the allegedly uniform kind of American English spoken outside the New England and Southern areas ... The other use of the term refers to a certain norm or 'standard' of pronunciation ...
— Kövecses (2000, p. 81)

Second, the supposed "low salience" of the term "General American English" has no bearing on what we name the topic, since WP:UCRN specifically allows less-common but unambiguous names to be used. "General American English" is less ambiguous than "General American", especially considering other Wikipedia article titles that begin with "General American". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 07:40, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

Given that this literature review was all triggered by a claim that General American is specialist jargon and all you've done is quote specialist literature, there's not much point in going too much deeper on all of this. Quoting specialist literature doesn't work to indicate non-specialist usage.

You haven't explicitly disputed my claims about Green (2002) or Adger et al. (2007). Can I assume that you agree with my reading on these? If so, then that's all that's necessary to indicate what I was saying about the ambiguity of General American English vs. General American.

To sum up, then: the proposed rename is less clear, as there is ambiguity about what the proposed term refers to, and less common, since sources overwhelmingly use "General American". A quick search at the linguistic literature from the last 40 years at JSTOR finds "General American" to appear more often (210 results) than "General American English" (53 results). Of the thirty or so results of the latter group that I could access, there was a roughly equal amount using GAE to mean something different from GA as those using it as a synonym for GA. Two appeared because of the vagaries of punctuation. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 16:26, 17 August 2019 (UTC)

For the record, I haven't made any claims at all about non-specialist usage, and there's no need for any non-specialist literature if it can be shown that "General American English" is an established term in (linguistic) specialist writing. Nonetheless, several of the sources I presented are non-specialist works: Blumenfeld (2002) and Herman & Herman (1997) are manuals for actors; Celce-Murcia (1991), Kennedy (2003), and Prator (1951) are all TEFL/TESL manuals; Fogle (2008) and Gutierrez-Ang (2009) are general communication sciences textbooks; and Treiman et al. (1997) appears in the psychology journal Child Development.

Even conceding that Adger et al. (2007) and Green (2002) are discussing American English dialect features beyond pronunciation as "General American English", the term "General American" can likewise refer to a hypothesized variety of AmE not limited to pronunciation: according to Kövecses, the term "General American" as originally used actually encompasses the Northern American English, Midland American English, and Western American English dialect regions (2000, p. 81), while Van Riper says that "'General American' ... is shown to be split by east-west lines ... in vocabulary (cherry pit/seed), grammar (dove/dived) and pronunciation (the vowels of fog and hog) ..." (1986, p. 119). As such, "General American" is no less vague, and likely more so given that Van Riper is on record direcly calling it "ambiguous" (1982, p. 130).

No one is disputing that "General American" is the more common term; to repeat, WP:UCRN specifically allows for less-common titles in certain situations. I believe this one qualifies. I'm not familiar with searching a specific field on JSTOR; could you provide links to your results supposedly using GAE to mean something different from GA? Once again, it would be more convincing to specify what this "something different" actually is. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 05:03, 18 August 2019 (UTC) (edited 23:13, 19 August 2019 (UTC))

For the record:

You said in your proposal that Insofar as General American is used in academia, it's specialist jargon that should be clarified. (emphasis added).

I said in response to this that there was no evidence that "General American English" (or "General American accent") exists as a common name alternative to "General American."

That's when you provided links. By calling General American "specialist jargon" you were making implicit claims about non-specialist usage, which you were clearly attempting to demonstrate in response to my rebuttal.

I'm not really interested in diving into more links. You now concede that General American is the more common term and LilCharlie has outlined how it fits the five criteria for article titles, and that's really all that matters. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 17:06, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

By calling General American 'specialist jargon' you were making implicit claims about non-specialist usage... That's a non-sequitur, but it doesn't matter; I've established that "General American English" is used in both specialist and non-specialist literarure.

I'm not really interested in diving into more links... This after you (1) requested links to literature, (2) requested quotes and page numbers from said literature when I provided links, and (3) said the sources were all "specialist literature" when a number were explicitly not. Much as I prefer to assume other users are acting in good faith, it seems as though you're simply WP:STONEWALLING this discussion by repeating the same (irrelevant) points and refusing to engage with others' arguments.

You now concede that General American is the more common term... I never disputed that it was. It's irrelevant, since less-common terms can also be used as titles.

...and [LiliCharlie] has outlined how it fits the five criteria for article titles... LiliCharlie used General Australian and General British for comparison. Both those names are redirects to more specific article titles, which actually supports the proposed move. Some of their other points are also debatable (particularly #3, "Precision"), as a full reading of this discussion will show. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:53, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

To repeat my earlier request, please provide a link(s) to the JSTOR search results that you say are using GAE to mean something different from GA, so that other users can verify this statement. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:06, 19 August 2019 (UTC)

I requested links, quotes, and page numbers. You provided them. I responded. As I said, you've demonstrated that both terms are used. That doesn't change my stance on what the title should be for this article, particularly as you also demonstrated ambiguity in the term GAE that isn't present with GA. This notion that the dual meaning of GA as both a body of American English accents and a standard pronunciation is anywhere near the ambiguity found in the literature that you provided strikes me as oversimplistic. There's quite a lot of semantic overlap between the two meanings of GA. That's why, per WP:NOTDIC, we don't have two separate articles called General American (standard language) and General American (accent), even though we acknowledge this dual meaning.

Now you're requesting that I provide links to back up a claim that you have, several times, explicitly said you don't think matters. Why should I bother?

If you'd like to make a more detailed critique of LiliCharlie's title criteria, that would be more relevant. You had only responded to the issue of consistency. To your response, I'd say that LiliCharlie was mistaken to link to "General British", but General Australian links to a section about a variety of Australian called "General Australian" (not General Australian English). Moreover, we have the article Comparison of General American and Received Pronunciation, as well as the absolute paucity of articles using the phrase "General American English" vs the great number using "General American" or its abbreviation "GA". — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 16:06, 20 August 2019 (UTC)

Now you're requesting that I provide links to back up a claim that you have, several times, explicitly said you don't think matters. Once again, your're stonewalling and claiming I said something I didn't. I said that the frequency of use of the two terms as demonstrated so far is irrelevant. Your claim was that sources you found are using GAE to mean something different from GA. That speaks to potential ambiguity, not frequency of use. Once again, what are these sources? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 01:45, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

This is not the first time you have accused me of acting in bad faith and it's getting tiresome. Please reconsider your talk page behavior.

I have already indicated that several of the sources you provided indicate ambiguity. As I have said several times, in the sources you provided, Adger et al. (2007) and Green (2002) use GAE to refer to a body of dialects. You have conceded this, but say that it doesn't matter (and then, strangely, act as though I haven't identified what this alternate meaning is). You have also said that the relative frequency of the use and meanings of terms doesn't matter. I'm sorry, I just don't see the point of going through the links of dozens of sources to identify which ones use what meaning of GAE when what these sources say won't make a difference. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 15:42, 21 August 2019 (UTC)

You have conceded this, but say that it doesn't matter (and then, strangely, act as though I haven't identified what this alternate meaning is). I said the proposed title was arguably less ambiguous than the current title, even taking all the existing sources into account. You only identified Standard English as the meaning of GAE used by Adger et al. (2007). If that's the "something different" you are alluding to vis-a-vis the mysterious JSTOR sources, you haven't said so.

I just don't see the point of going through the links of dozens of sources to identify which ones use what meaning of GAE... The point of talk page discussions is to reach consensus. That is done with reference to published sources and Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. The sources presented so far support "General American English" as a less ambiguous alternative the current title. That can always change if new sources are presented. But if you don't identify your sources, then any arguments based on those sources are moot. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 04:54, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

So we're just ignoring Green (2002) now? I'm sorry, but I think at this point, I'd rather leave it to other editors to decide if I've been unclear. Regards. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 05:37, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

You are correct; Green (2002) was also discussed in terms of dialect features. I've struck the word "only" from my last comment. That doesn't change the fact that you have made a claim about sources using GAE to mean "something different" than the present topic without showing what these sources are. Your responses when asked to substantiate your claim have been evasive and misleading: I never said any potential sources won't make a difference; I asked for sources specifically to inform this discussion with a view to establishing the relative weight (and/or notability) of any alternative meanings. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 11:06, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

[T]he dual meaning of GA as both a body of American English accents and a standard pronunciation.... I assume you meant "accents and standard language/dialect" based on what you wrote two sentences after this one. For the record, the meanings of GA are dialect and pronunciation acccording to Kövecses (2000, p. 81), the former being the original meaning now deprecated by linguists.

There's quite a lot of semantic overlap between the two meanings of GA. That's why, per WP:NOTDIC, we don't have two separate articles called General American (standard language) and General American (accent)... An article would violate WP:NOTDIC if it defined multiple meanings under the same name, since that's exactly what dictionary definitions do. Creating a separate article for GA/GAE as a variety of Standard English would be entirely appropriate as long as the topic were sufficiently notable.

General Australian links to a section about a variety of Australian called "General Australian" (not General Australian English). This is incorrect. The current article uses "General Australian English" three times, including the first mention of the topic; "General Australian" is only used once. So that comparison still supports the proposed move to "General American English". —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 10:58, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

• Support per WP:CONCISE. The title does not concisely describe the subject. Red Slash 23:08, 22 August 2019 (UTC)

  @Red Slash: do you mean WP:PRECISE or WP:CONCISE? —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 00:13, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

• Support. The current fails to define the topic. The current is a jargon, a shortening used in repeated uses where the context is established, and repeated mentions of many variants of English is a tedious repetition of "English". The title is a standalone, context free, description, and should not be in jargon. --SmokeyJoe (talk) 07:22, 23 August 2019 (UTC)

Sources

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Umbrella term?

The link to Umbrella term in the lead sentence (diff) suggests we are talking about the words "General American English". I thought the article was meant to be about the linguistic variety itself. If that's so, we shouldn't be discussing terminology in the first sentence even if we do so in the body. The only source I see for "umbrella term" in this context is Bonfiglio (2002), who says "General American" was "discarded" by post-war linguists. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 22:28, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

I'm not a fan of that wording either. I think "continuum of accents" establishes that there are multiple accents covered under the term. That it is defined by "absences" doesn't seem relevant to this point. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 22:52, 27 August 2019 (UTC)

Oh sorry -- just saw the discussion. Are we making a distinction without a difference here? Should I should remove the piping on "umbrella"? That way it's not referring to "umbrella term" if that's what you don't like. But this is certainly an umbrella variety/accent or umbrella sound system. Wolfdog (talk) 00:28, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

That works for me. The main problem was linking to a topic that deals with semantics rather than language varieties. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 02:58, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

About Steve

My problem with General American English is of a practical nature. I have a brother-in-law, Steve, who was born in Oklahoma, spent most of his life in Maine, and has lived in Germany for about a decade. I can say: Steve still uses General American when he speaks German but *Steve still uses General American English when he speaks German appears to be utter nonsense. (My, as well as my sister's—who is Steve's wife—, parent tongues are German and Chinese.) Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 21:29, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

Both of those sentences about Steve sound confusing to me. Are you saying he speaks German with a GA accent? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 22:42, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

Yes, Steve uses a General American accent when he speaks German or recites Shakespeare, but when he speaks American English he sometimes also uses other accents, depending on his interlocutor and the situation. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 08:06, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

@LiliCharlie: as Aeusoes1 points out, both sentences are unclear, and don't indicate any problem with the article title, which, after all, is based on published, reliable sources. General American, as clearly stated in the lead sentence, is a variety of English, so has no applicability to any other language. Your brother-in-law Steve doesn't use General American when speaking German, any more than you would use Standard German when speaking English. If you wanted to say he speaks German with a General American (English) accent, that would be more clear and accurate. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:41, 28 August 2019 (UTC)

1. I am saying "uses" to stress that he masters several accents, but chooses to use GA, which is well-known, prestigious and easily understood in Germany. (To his surprise, many Germans found his non-rhotic Maine accent difficult to understand and less prestigious, so he stopped using it.)
2. It seems that a majority of experts prefer "General American" to refer to a group of accents, and "Standard American English" to refer to a national variety of Standard English with a particular morphology, syntax, vocabulary, accent, spelling, etc. Irrespective of page titles and possible synonyms, we should have separate articles on those two subjects that are clearly distinct as well as abundantly discussed in linguistic literature. Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 08:06, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

If you're saying he deliberately uses a General American accent when speaking German instead of a regional accent, than "Steve still uses General American" is a rather cryptic way of stating it. Regardless, I don't see how your brother-in-law's travails with language are especially relevant here. —Sangdeboeuf (talk) 23:56, 29 August 2019 (UTC)

• This is one very good reason for wikipedia’s Preference for use of reliably published secondary sources. Lily and Steve are speaking informally. Attempting to document the informal use of English is quite a challenge. If you stick to the language used by reliable secondary sources, such as journal articles and books, you benefit from the editing process that attempts to standardise the language. —SmokeyJoe (talk) 00:04, 30 August 2019 (UTC)

• Yes. But note that documenting word use is the job of dictionaries such as Wiktionary, however "encyclopedia articles focus on factual information concerning the subject named in the article's title." That is to say: If an article's title is ambiguous in encyclopædic sources, it will be disambiguated in a way that only one subject is treated; namely, "the subject" (def. sg.) that the article gives "factual information" on. As a consequence, the third of our five criteria for deciding on an article title (WP:PRECISE) stipulates that "titles should unambiguously define the topical scope of the article ... when a more detailed title is necessary to distinguish an article topic from another, use only as much additional detail as necessary."

Following the tradition of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie as well as the Encyclopædia Britannica, Wikipedia is about topics and factual information rather than their designations. In the factual world we have lots of phoneticians who write on the topic of a group of accents that they most frequently call General American, as well as lots of experts in English Studies who write on the topic of a national variety of Standard English in the US that they sometimes call General American English; we shouldn't be overly worried about those labels, as Wikipedia is about topics, subjects, and factual information, not about the words and expressions that have been used by experts as well as non-experts to refer to them. (I am of course a phonetician who has read thousands of pages about the accent called General American but who doesn't care about Standard American English or English studies in general. I know many accents from around the world without knowing much about the mother tongues of the speakers who typically use those accents. And although I am also fluent in a dozen or so languages: as a phonetician, they are not the topic I focus on.) Love —LiliCharlie (talk) 13:21, 30 August 2019 (UTC)