do you speak American ?

American dialects come in many flavors. The map and list below show the major (and a few minor) geographic dialects and subdialects of English spoken in the United States. Many of these may be further subdivided into local subdialects that are not shown here. Obviously, the borders between dialect regions are not well defined lines, as a map like this would imply, but a gradual transition extending on both sides of the line. Also, as we enter the 21st century, many of the features described below have become much less prevalent than they were during the first half of the 20th century.

Not all people who speak a language speak it the same way. A language can be subdivided into any number of dialects which each vary in some way from the parent language. The term, accent, is often incorrectly used in its place, but an accent refers only to the way words are pronounced, while a dialect has its own grammar, vocabulary, syntax, and common expressions as well as pronunciation rules that make it unique from other dialects of the same language. Another term, idiolect, refers to the manner of speaking of an individual person. No two people's idiolects are exactly the same, but people who are part of the same group will have enough verbal elements in common to be said to be speaking the same dialect.

How do you answer the question “Do you speak American”? Many people might answer that yes, they speak English. But English is not the only language spoken in this country. Twentyeight million people speak Spanish, and more than 2.8 million of them do not speak English at all. Among Americans who speak English at home--82 percent--there is a variation in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, from Maine watermen and Louisiana Cajuns to southern Californians.

There is no one agreed-upon best way to speak American. Many factors contribute to the way a person speaks: regional origin or affinity, ethnicity, social or economic class, level of education. The components of linguistic identity do not always match up neatly. Some people switch from one dialect to another. “You do have to be bilingual in this country,” says Los Angeles disc jockey Steve Harvey, a speaker of Black English. For him and many other Americans, speaking one way at home and another at work is part of living on the ethnic margins of American society.

USA Today Jan, 2005 by Robert MacNeil
ON COLUMBUS AVENUE in New York, a young waitress approaches our table and asks, "How are you guys doin'?" My wife and I are old enough to be her grandparents, but we are "you guys" to her. Today, in American English, guys can be guys, girls, or grandmothers. Girls call themselves guys, even dudes. For a while, young women scorned the word girls, but that is cool again, probably because African-American women use it and it can be real cool--even empowering--to whites to borrow black talk, like the word cool. It is empowering to gay men to call themselves queer, once a hated homophobic term, but now used to satirize the whole shifting scene of gender attitudes in the TV reality show, "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy." As society changes, so does language, and American society has changed enormously in recent decades. Moreover, when new norms are resented or feared, language often is the target of that fear or resentment.