What are the Different Accents and Dialects in American English?
With a population of 300 million or so, and a language that has borrowed from nearly every other language in the world, American English is strewn, nay, littered, with dozens of accents and dialects. Some vary from region to region, state to state, county to county, and even neighborhood to neighborhood. George Bernard Shaw’s Professor Henry Higgins would have a grand time sorting them all out. An accent generally refers to how words are pronounced. Dialect is more of a mini-language, incorporating the accent, but adding expressions and phrases unique to itself. American English can be very roughly divided into the following dialects: New England, Mid-Atlantic, Southern, Midwestern, Upper Midwestern, Western, Northwestern and Californian.
