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49-509: I , or i , is the ninth letter and the third vowel letter of the Latin alphabet , used in the modern English alphabet , the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is i (pronounced / ˈ aɪ / ), plural ies . In English, the name of the letter is the "long I" sound, pronounced / ˈ aɪ / . In most other languages, its name matches

98-513: A lowercase form (also called minuscule ). Upper- and lowercase letters represent the same sound, but serve different functions in writing. Capital letters are most often used at the beginning of a sentence, as the first letter of a proper name or title, or in headers or inscriptions. They may also serve other functions, such as in the German language where all nouns begin with capital letters. The terms uppercase and lowercase originated in

147-570: A non-rhotic standard to a rhotic one in the late 1940s, after the triumph of the Second World War , with the patriotic incentive for a more wide-ranging and unpretentious "heartland variety" in television and radio. General American is thus sometimes associated with the speech of North American radio and television announcers, promoted as prestigious in their industry, where it is sometimes called "Broadcast English" "Network English", or "Network Standard". Instructional classes in

196-549: A variety of modern uses in mathematics, science, and engineering . People and objects are sometimes named after letters, for one of these reasons: The word letter entered Middle English c.  1200 , borrowed from the Old French letre . It eventually displaced the previous Old English term bōcstæf ' bookstaff '. Letter ultimately descends from the Latin littera , which may have been derived from

245-480: A General American accent is simply the result of American speakers suppressing regional and social features that have become widely noticed and stigmatized. Since calling one variety of American speech the "general" variety can imply privileging and prejudice , Kretzchmar instead promotes the term Standard American English , which he defines as a level of American English pronunciation "employed by educated speakers in formal settings", while still being variable within

294-434: A continuum of American speech, with some slight internal variation, but otherwise characterized by the absence of " marked " pronunciation features: those perceived by Americans as strongly indicative of a fellow American speaker's regional origin, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status. Despite confusion arising from the evolving definition and vagueness of the term "General American" and its consequent rejection by some linguists,

343-517: A form of this Phoenician yodh as their letter iota ( ⟨Ι, ι⟩ ) to represent /i/ , the same as in the Old Italic alphabet . In Latin (as in Modern Greek ), it was also used to represent /j/ and this use persists in the languages that descended from Latin. The modern letter ' j ' originated as a variation of 'i', and both were used interchangeably for both the vowel and

392-459: A front and back vowel, respectively, and both have uppercase ('I', 'İ') and lowercase ('ı', 'i') forms. The uppercase I has two kinds of shapes, with serifs ( [REDACTED] ) and without serifs ( [REDACTED] ). Usually these are considered equivalent, but they are distinguished in some extended Latin alphabet systems, such as the 1978 version of the African reference alphabet . In that system,

441-636: A higher and shorter vowel sound than prize and bride ), raising and gliding of pre-nasal /æ/ (with man having a higher and tenser vowel sound than map ), the weak vowel merger (with affecting and effecting often pronounced the same), and at least one of the LOT vowel mergers (the LOT – PALM merger is complete among most Americans and the LOT – THOUGHT merger among at least half). All of these phenomena are explained in further detail under American English's phonology section . The following provides all

490-532: A hooked ascender and a baseline serif. The dot over the lowercase 'i' is sometimes called a tittle . The uppercase I does not have a dot, while the lowercase 'i' does in most Latin-derived alphabets. The dot can be considered optional and is usually removed when applying other diacritics . However, some schemes, such as the Turkish alphabet , have two kinds of I: dotted and dotless . In Turkish, dotted İ and dotless I are considered separate letters, representing

539-626: A series of vowel shifts. In the Great Vowel Shift , Middle English /iː/ changed to Early Modern English /ei/ , which later changed to /əi/ and finally to the Modern English diphthong /aɪ/ in General American and Received Pronunciation . Because the diphthong /aɪ/ developed from a Middle English long vowel, it is called "long" ⟨i⟩ in traditional English grammar. The letter ⟨i⟩

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588-456: Is considered to be a separate letter from ⟨n⟩ , though this distinction is not usually recognised in English dictionaries. In computer systems, each has its own code point , U+006E n LATIN SMALL LETTER N and U+00F1 ñ LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH TILDE , respectively. Letters may also function as numerals with assigned numerical values, for example with Roman numerals . Greek and Latin letters have

637-544: Is indicated by the existence of precomposed characters for use with computer systems (for example, ⟨á⟩ , ⟨à⟩ , ⟨ä⟩ , ⟨â⟩ , ⟨ã⟩ .) In the following table, letters from multiple different writing systems are shown, to demonstrate the variety of letters used throughout the world. General American This is an accepted version of this page General American English , known in linguistics simply as General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm ),

686-462: Is the fifth most common letter in the English language . The English first-person singular nominative pronoun is "I", pronounced / aɪ / and always written with a capital letter. This pattern arose for basically the same reason that lowercase ⟨i⟩ acquired a dot: so it wouldn't get lost in manuscripts before the age of printing : The capitalized "I" first showed up about 1250 in

735-404: Is the umbrella accent of American English spoken by a majority of Americans, encompassing a continuum rather than a single unified accent. It is often perceived by Americans themselves as lacking any distinctly regional, ethnic, or socioeconomic characteristics, though Americans with high education, or from the (North) Midland , Western New England , and Western regions of the country are

784-547: Is used to represent the sound /i/ or, more rarely, /ɪ/ . In the International Phonetic Alphabet , ⟨ i ⟩ represents the close front unrounded vowel . The small caps ⟨ ɪ ⟩ represents the near-close near-front unrounded vowel . [REDACTED] Letter (alphabet) A letter is a type of grapheme , the smallest functional unit within a writing system. Letters are graphemes that broadly correspond to phonemes ,

833-539: The English dialects of England or German dialects of Germany ). One factor fueling General American's popularity was the major demographic change of twentieth-century American society: increased suburbanization , leading to less mingling of different social classes and less density and diversity of linguistic interactions. As a result, wealthier and higher-educated Americans' communications became more restricted to their own demographic. This, alongside their new marketplace that transcended regional boundaries (arising from

882-478: The United Kingdom 's Received Pronunciation . Noted phonetician John C. Wells , for instance, claimed in 1982 that typical Canadian English accents align with General American in nearly every situation where British and American accents differ . The term "General American" was first disseminated by American English scholar George Philip Krapp , who in 1925 described it as an American type of speech that

931-419: The 2000s, Mainstream American English has also been occasionally used, particularly in scholarly articles that contrast it with African-American English . Modern language scholars discredit the original notion of General American as a single unified accent, or a standardized form of English —except perhaps as used by television networks and other mass media . Today, the term is understood to refer to

980-629: The American population spoke with a General American accent. English-language scholar William A. Kretzschmar Jr. explains in a 2004 article that the term "General American" came to refer to "a presumed most common or 'default' form of American English, especially to be distinguished from marked regional speech of New England or the South" and referring especially to speech associated with the vaguely-defined " Midwest ", despite any historical or present evidence supporting this notion. Kretzschmar argues that

1029-471: The General American consonant and vowel sounds. A table containing the consonant phonemes is given below: The 2006 Atlas of North American English surmises that "if one were to recognize a type of North American English to be called 'General American'" according to data measurements of vowel pronunciations, "it would be the configuration formed by these three" dialect regions: Canada ,

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1078-645: The Greek diphthera 'writing tablet' via Etruscan . Until the 19th century, letter was also used interchangeably to refer to a speech segment . Before alphabets, phonograms , graphic symbols of sounds, were used. There were three kinds of phonograms: verbal, pictures for entire words, syllabic, which stood for articulations of words, and alphabetic, which represented signs or letters. The earliest examples of which are from Ancient Egypt and Ancient China, dating to c.  3000 BCE . The first consonantal alphabet emerged around c.  1800 BCE , representing

1127-624: The Inland North seem to be moving back away from the Northern Cities Shift of front lax vowels that were rising. Accents that have never been labeled "General American", even since the term's popularization in the 1930s, are the regional accents (especially the r -dropping ones) of Eastern New England , New York City , and the American South . In 1982, British phonetician John C. Wells wrote that two-thirds of

1176-785: The Phoenicians, Semitic workers in Egypt. Their script was originally written and read from right to left. From the Phoenician alphabet came the Etruscan and Greek alphabets. From there, the most widely used alphabet today emerged, Latin, which is written and read from left to right. The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters, nineteen of which the Latin alphabet used, and the Greek alphabet, adapted c.  900 BCE , added four letters to those used in Phoenician. This Greek alphabet

1225-546: The South and with Southern and Eastern European immigrant groups (for example, Jewish communities) in the coastal Northeast. Instead, socially-conscious Americans settled upon accents more prestigiously associated with White Anglo-Saxon Protestant communities in the remainder of the country: namely, the West, the Midwest, and the non-coastal Northeast. Kenyon, author of American Pronunciation (1924) and pronunciation editor for

1274-407: The U.S. from place to place, and even from speaker to speaker. However, the term "standard" may also be interpreted as problematically implying a superior or "best" form of speech. The terms Standard North American English and General North American English , in an effort to incorporate Canadian speakers under the accent continuum, have also been suggested by sociolinguist Charles Boberg . Since

1323-862: The United States that promise " accent reduction ", "accent modification", or "accent neutralization" usually attempt to teach General American patterns. Television journalist Linda Ellerbee states that "in television you are not supposed to sound like you're from anywhere", and political comedian Stephen Colbert says he consciously avoided developing a Southern American accent in response to media portrayals of Southerners as stupid and uneducated. Typical General American accent features (for example, in contrast to British English) include features that concern consonants, such as rhoticity (full pronunciation of all /r/ sounds), pre-nasal T-glottalization (with satin pronounced [ˈsæʔn̩] , not [ˈsætn̩] ), T- and D-flapping (with metal and medal pronounced

1372-534: The accents of highly educated Americans nationwide. Arguably, all Canadian English accents west of Quebec are also General American, though Canadian vowel raising and certain other features may serve to distinguish such accents from U.S. ones. William Labov et al.'s 2006 Atlas of North American English put together a scattergram based on the formants of vowel sounds, finding the Midland U.S., Western Pennsylvania, Western U.S., and Canada to be closest to

1421-673: The center of the scattergram, and concluding that they had fewer marked dialectical features than other regional accents of North American English, such as New York City or the Southern U.S. Regarded as having General American accents in the earlier 20th century, but not by the middle of the 20th century, are the Mid-Atlantic United States , the Inland Northern United States , and Western Pennsylvania . However, many younger speakers within

1470-493: The century's faster transportation methods), reinforced a widespread belief that highly educated Americans should not possess a regional accent. A General American sound, then, originated from both suburbanization and suppression of regional accent by highly educated Americans in formal settings. A second factor was a rise in immigration to the Great Lakes area (one native region of supposed "General American" speech) following

1519-399: The consonant, coming to be differentiated only in the 16th century. In some sans serif typefaces, the uppercase ⟨I⟩ may be difficult to distinguish from the lowercase letter L , 'l', the vertical bar character '|', or the digit one '1'. In serifed typefaces, the capital form of the letter has both a baseline and a cap height serif, while the lowercase L generally has

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1568-438: The days of handset type for printing presses. Individual letter blocks were kept in specific compartments of drawers in a type case. Capital letters were stored in a higher drawer or upper case. In most alphabetic scripts, diacritics (or accents) are a routinely used. English is unusual in not using them except for loanwords from other languages or personal names (for example, naïve , Brontë ). The ubiquity of this usage

1617-566: The distinct forms of ⟨S⟩ , the Greek sigma ⟨Σ⟩ , and Cyrillic es ⟨С⟩ each represent analogous /s/ phonemes. Letters are associated with specific names, which may differ between languages and dialects. Z , for example, is usually called zed outside of the United States, where it is named zee . Both ultimately derive from the name of the parent Greek letter zeta ⟨Ζ⟩ . In alphabets, letters are arranged in alphabetical order , which also may vary by language. In Spanish, ⟨ñ⟩

1666-526: The early to mid-20th century, deviance away from General American sounds started occurring, and may be ongoing, in the eastern Great Lakes region due to its Northern Cities Vowel Shift (NCVS) towards a unique Inland Northern accent (often now associated with the region's urban centers, like Chicago and Detroit) and in the western Great Lakes region towards a unique North Central accent (often associated with Minnesota , Wisconsin , and North Dakota ). Linguists have proposed multiple factors contributing to

1715-442: The former is the uppercase counterpart of ɪ and the latter is the counterpart of 'i'. In Modern English spelling , ⟨i⟩ represents several different sounds, either the diphthong / aɪ / ("long" ⟨i⟩ ) as in kite , the short / ɪ / as in bill , or the ⟨ee⟩ sound / iː / in the last syllable of machine . The diphthong /aɪ/ developed from Middle English /iː/ through

1764-571: The late 7th and early 8th centuries. Finally, many slight letter additions and drops were made to the common alphabet used in the western world. Minor changes were made such as the removal of certain letters, such as thorn ⟨Þ þ⟩ , wynn ⟨Ƿ ƿ⟩ , and eth ⟨Ð ð⟩ . A letter can have multiple variants, or allographs , related to variation in style of handwriting or printing . Some writing systems have two major types of allographs for each letter: an uppercase form (also called capital or majuscule ) and

1813-517: The letter's pronunciation in open syllables . In the Phoenician alphabet , the letter may have originated in a hieroglyph for an arm that represented a voiced pharyngeal fricative ( /ʕ/ ) in Egyptian , but was reassigned to /j/ (as in English " y es") by Semites because their word for "arm" began with that sound. This letter could also be used to represent /i/ , the close front unrounded vowel , mainly in foreign words. The Greeks adopted

1862-452: The most likely to be perceived as using General American speech. The precise definition and usefulness of the term continue to be debated, and the scholars who use it today admittedly do so as a convenient basis for comparison rather than for exactness. Some scholars prefer other names, such as Standard American English . Standard Canadian English accents may be considered to fall under General American, especially in opposition to

1911-427: The non-coastal Northeastern United States in the very early 20th century, which was relatively stable since that region's original settlement by English speakers in the mid-19th century. This includes western New England and the area to its immediate west, settled by members of the same dialect community: interior Pennsylvania , Upstate New York , and the adjacent " Midwest " or Great Lakes region . However, since

1960-522: The northern and midland dialects of England, according to the Chambers Dictionary of Etymology . Chambers notes, however, that the capitalized form didn't become established in the south of England until the 1700s (although it appears sporadically before that time). Capitalizing the pronoun, Chambers explains, made it more distinct, thus "avoiding misreading handwritten manuscripts." In many languages' orthographies, ⟨i⟩

2009-476: The popularity of a rhotic "General American" class of accents throughout the United States. Most factors focus on the first half of the twentieth century, though a basic General American pronunciation system may have existed even before the twentieth century, since most American English dialects have diverged very little from each other anyway, when compared to dialects of single languages in other countries where there has been more time for language change (such as

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2058-588: The region's rapid industrialization period after the American Civil War , when this region's speakers went on to form a successful and highly mobile business elite, who traveled around the country in the mid-twentieth century, spreading the high status of their accents. A third factor is that various sociological (often race- and class-based) forces repelled socially-conscious Americans away from accents negatively associated with certain minority groups, such as African Americans and poor white communities in

2107-439: The same, as [ˈmɛɾɫ̩] ), velarization of L in all contexts (with filling pronounced [ˈfɪɫɪŋ] , not [ˈfɪlɪŋ] ), yod-dropping after alveolar consonants (with new pronounced /nu/ , not /nju/ ), as well as features that concern vowel sounds, such as various vowel mergers before /r/ (so that Mary , marry , and merry are all commonly pronounced the same ), raising of pre-voiceless /aɪ/ (with price and bright using

2156-483: The second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary (1934), was influential in codifying General American pronunciation standards in writing. He used as a basis his native Midwestern (specifically, northern Ohio) pronunciation. Kenyon's home state of Ohio , however, far from being an area of "non-regional" accents, has emerged now as a crossroads for at least four distinct regional accents, according to late twentieth-century research. Furthermore, Kenyon himself

2205-663: The smallest functional units of sound in speech. Similarly to how phonemes are combined to form spoken words, letters may be combined to form written words. A single phoneme may also be represented by multiple letters in sequence, collectively called a multigraph . Multigraphs include digraphs of two letters (e.g. English ch , sh , th ), and trigraphs of three letters (e.g. English tch ). The same letterform may be used in different alphabets while representing different phonemic categories. The Latin H , Greek eta ⟨Η⟩ , and Cyrillic en ⟨Н⟩ are homoglyphs , but represent different phonemes. Conversely,

2254-403: The term persists mainly as a reference point to compare a baseline "typical" American English accent with other Englishes around the world (for instance, see Comparison of General American and Received Pronunciation ). Though General American accents are not commonly perceived as associated with any region, their sound system does have traceable regional origins: specifically, the English of

2303-708: Was " Western " but "not local in character". In 1930, American linguist John Samuel Kenyon , who largely popularized the term, considered it equivalent to the speech of "the North" or "Northern American", but, in 1934, "Western and Midwestern". Now typically regarded as falling under the General American umbrella are the regional accents of the West , Western New England , and the North Midland (a band spanning central Ohio, central Indiana, central Illinois, northern Missouri, southern Iowa, and southeastern Nebraska), plus

2352-508: Was the first to assign letters not only to consonant sounds, but also to vowels . The Roman Empire further developed and refined the Latin alphabet, beginning around 500 BCE. During the fifth and sixth centuries, the development of lowercase letters began to emerge in Roman writing. At this point, paragraphs, uppercase and lowercase letters, and the concept of sentences and clauses still had not emerged; these final bits of development emerged in

2401-592: Was vocally opposed to the notion of any superior variety of American speech. General American, like the British Received Pronunciation (RP) and prestige accents of many other societies, has never been the accent of the entire nation, and, unlike RP, does not constitute a homogeneous national standard. Starting in the 1930s, nationwide radio networks adopted non-coastal Northern U.S. rhotic pronunciations for their "General American" standard. The entertainment industry similarly shifted from

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