Western New England English in the context of "Conservative (language)"

General American English, known in linguistics simply as General American (abbreviated GA or GenAm), is the umbrella accent of American English used 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 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, though this can be a wider term encompassing more than just accent.

Standard Canadian English accents may be considered to fall under General American, especially in opposition to 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.

New England English is, collectively, the various distinct dialects and varieties of American English originating in the New England area. Most of eastern and central New England once spoke the "Yankee dialect", some of whose accent features still remain in Eastern New England today, such as "R-dropping" (though this and other features are now receding among younger speakers). Accordingly, one linguistic division of New England is into Eastern versus Western New England English, as defined in the 1939 Linguistic Atlas of New England and the 2006 Atlas of North American English (ANAE). The ANAE further argues for a division between Northern versus Southern New England English, especially on the basis of the cot–caught merger and /ɑr/ fronting (applying twice, for example, in the phrase Park the car). The ANAE also categorizes the strongest differentiated New England accents into four combinations of the above dichotomies, simply defined as follows:

• Northeastern New England English shows non-rhoticity, the cot–caught merger, and strong /ɑr/ fronting. It centers on Boston, Massachusetts, extending into New Hampshire and coastal Maine.
• Southeastern New England English shows non-rhoticity, no cot–caught merger, and no strong /ɑr/ fronting. It centers on Providence, Rhode Island and the Narragansett Bay.
• Northwestern New England English shows rhoticity, the cot–caught merger, and strong /ɑr/ fronting. It centers on Vermont.
• Southwestern New England English shows rhoticity, no (or a transitional state of the) cot–caught merger, and no strong /ɑr/ fronting. It centers around the Hartford–Springfield area of Connecticut and western Massachusetts.

The Low-Back-Merger Shift is a chain shift of vowel sounds found in several accents of North American English, beginning in the last quarter of the 20th century and most significantly involving the low back merger (which collapses together the low-back vowel sounds: /ɑː/, /ɒ/, and /ɔː/ in words like PALM, LOT, and THOUGHT respectively) accompanied by the lowering and backing of each of the front-lax vowels: /æ/, /ɛ/, and /ɪ/ (in words like TRAP, DRESS, and KIT respectively).

The back and downward movement of all the front lax vowels was first noted as distinguishing certain California English speakers in 1987, and it was soon known by linguists as the California Vowel Shift. Then, it came to distinguish certain Canadian English speakers in a 1995 study, now known in that variety as the Canadian Shift; today, it helps define Standard Canadian English. The California and Canadian Shifts were initially reported as two separate phenomena, but the same basic pattern was next documented among some younger varieties of Western New England English, Western American English, Pacific Northwest English, and Midland American English, all in speakers born from the 1980s onward. Linguists have proposed possible relationships between the low back merger and the similarly structured shifts in these regional dialects, though no unifying hypothesis is dominantly agreed upon yet. Assuming the similar chain shifts found in Canada and various parts of the U.S. have a single common origin, a variety of names have been proposed for this trans-regional chain shift which, besides the low-back-merger shift, include the Third Dialect Shift, Elsewhere Shift, Short Front Vowel Shift, and North American Shift.

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.