Inland North in the context of "Atlas of North American English"

Midland American English is a regional dialect or supradialect of American English, geographically lying between the traditionally defined Northern and Southern United States. The boundaries of Midland American English are not entirely clear, being revised and reduced by linguists due to definitional changes and several Midland sub-regions undergoing rapid and diverging pronunciation shifts since the early-middle 20th century onwards.

As of the early 21st century, these general characteristics of the Midland regional accent are firmly established: fronting of the /oʊ/, /aʊ/, and /ʌ/ vowels occurs towards the center or even the front of the mouth; the cot–caught merger is neither fully completed nor fully absent; and short-a tensing evidently occurs strongest before nasal consonants. The currently documented core of the Midland dialect region spans from central Ohio at its eastern extreme to central Nebraska and Oklahoma City at its western extreme. Certain areas outside the core also clearly demonstrate a Midland accent, including Charleston, South Carolina; the Texan cities of Abilene, Austin, and Corpus Christi; and central and some areas of southern Florida.

Western New England English refers to the varieties of New England English native to Vermont, Connecticut, and the western half of Massachusetts; New York State's Hudson Valley (from Albany to Poughkeepsie) also aligns to this classification. Sound patterns historically associated with Western New England English include the features of rhoticity (full pronunciation of all r sounds), the horse–hoarse merger, and the father–bother merger, none of which are features traditionally shared in neighboring Eastern New England English. The status of the cot–caught merger in Western New England is inconsistent, being complete in the north of this dialect region (Vermont), but incomplete or absent in the south (southern Connecticut), with a "cot–caught approximation" in the middle area (primarily, western Massachusetts).

Western New England English is relatively difficult for most American laypersons and even dialectologists to identify by any "distinct" accent when compared to its popularly recognized neighbors (Eastern New England English, New York City English, and Inland Northern U.S. English), meaning that its accents are typically perceived as unmarked "General American" varieties. Linguistic research, however, reveals that Western New England English is not simply one single or uniform dialect. Linguist Charles Boberg proposes that it be most generally divided into a Northwestern New England English (a standalone "Vermont" accent) and a Southwestern New England English (a less advanced subdialect of Inland Northern English); however, even Boberg lists the possibilities of several distinct accent divisions of Western New England.

Canadian raising (also sometimes known as English diphthong raising) is an allophonic rule of phonology in many varieties of North American English that changes the pronunciation of diphthongs with open-vowel starting points. Most commonly, the shift affects /aɪ/ or /aʊ/ , or both, when they are pronounced before voiceless consonants (therefore, in words like price and clout, respectively, but not in prize and cloud). In North American English, /aɪ/ and /aʊ/ usually begin in an open vowel [ä~a], but through raising they shift to [ɐ] , [ʌ] or [ə] . Canadian English often has raising in words with both /aɪ/ (height, life, psych, type, etc.) and /aʊ/ (clout, house, south, scout, etc.), while a number of American English varieties (such as Inland North, Western New England, and increasingly more General American accents) have this feature in /aɪ/ but not /aʊ/. It is thought to have originated in Canada in the late 19th century.

In the U.S., aboot [əˈbut], an exaggerated version of the raised pronunciation of about [əˈbʌʊt], is a stereotype of Canadian English.