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Phonological Generalizations
In order to say something about the phonetic transcriptions in this site, we have
developed a series of phonological generalizations. Generalizations are general rules that
describe a speaker's accent. Generalizations are made based on a comparison between the
sample and our own dialect which happens to be General American English (GAE). We
are not presuming to say that our accent is the only true English accent in comparison to
which all others are deemed sub-standard or faulty. However, it would be impossible to
make generalizations about our samples without some dialect to compare them to. Since
we are American, we chose GAE, specifically English 1.

Our generalizations look at what non-native and non-GAE speakers do that is different
from GAE. Each generalization must have two or more instances in the sample to be
considered a general rule for that speaker. And each generalization must have two or
more instances among a set of speakers to be considered a general rule for that language
set. We divide the generalizations into 3 types: consonantal changes, vowel changes, and
syllable structure changes (additions or subtractions of consonants or vowels):

Consonantal Change

• voicing change
o final obstruent devoicing
o consonant voicing
 + p --> b
 + s --> z
• stop --> fricative
• interdental fricative change
o th --> t/d
o th --> s/z
o th -->f/v
• palatalization
• retroflexing
• alveolar approximant change
o r --> trill
 o r --> uvular fricative
o r --> l
o l --> r
o r-->flap
• w -->fricative
o w --> v
o w --> bilabial
• dentalization
• h --> velar fricative
• sh --> s
• stop --> implosive
• labialization

Vowel Change

• vowel raising
• vowel shortening
• vowel lowering

Syllable Structure Change

• vowel insertion
• consonant deletion
o r-deletion
• cluster reduction
• consonant insertion
o glottal insertion

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this is a project of the linguistics program in the department of english, the college of arts
and science's technology across the curriculum program, and the center for history and
new media at george mason university