Two Questions for Americans!!!

1. Which area's accent is closest to Standard American accent a.k.a general American accent?
I heard it's somewhere in Midwestern area, is that correct?

2. Which state reflects the most typical American life and culture?
I also heard it's somewhere in Midwestern states such as Illinois or Indiana, is that right?

I would like to learn the most standard and typical accent and culture of USA.

1. Actually, it's most of the US outside of New England and the South. Not just the midwest.

2. I have no idea, but I think each region of the US, including the midwest, has its own quirks, so there may not be a single state that we can point out to you.

People from Boston tend to think they have no accent. Midwesterners know that Bostonians have quite strong accents. Midwesterners tend to think they speak "General American". Californians know that Midwesterners have quite strong accents. Californians think they have no accent. Other Westerners think Californians have accents. Other Westerners think that they have no accent. I think I have no accent. So do most people.

<<People from Boston tend to think they have no accent.>>

No they don't. Most people in Boston have a distinctive non-rhotic or semi-rhotic Massachusetts accent, and they're fully aware that this sounds very different from General American.

There's a band starting around Philadelphia, Penn. extending westward across the lower Midwest, expanding both northward and southward west of the Mississippi River and taking in most of the western USA. You can see this at:

http://www.uta.fi/FAST/US1/REF/images/dialectsus.gif

Linguists separate the eastern strip from the western states, but I can't tell the difference. It all sounds to me like what I hear newscasters use. I think this is what is usually referred to as General American.

The second question is harder to answer. The differences among urban, suburban and rural lifestyles are greater than any differences between regions. Suburban life is very similar in all parts of the country, as is urban, though maybe a little less. Rural life would be different in different areas because of differences in landscape, crops, climate, etc.

Everyone has an accent to some degree. However, you have to also look at the intonation of the way a certain individual speaks.

The Midwest is a very vague term. People from Iowa generally speak with a different accent than people from Michigan or Minnesota. There is also a slight difference in the way people from Chicago speak compared to Detroit. The northern portion of the Midwest has strong Swedish/Norwegian/Danish/German/Finnish influences, and these influences are found the further north one travels. Certain Midwestern states, such as Kansas and Missouri, have twangy southern accents in certain parts. Ohio, though some do not consider it a Midwestern state, has certain areas where people speak with a more upper Midwestern accent, areas where people sound identical to those found in Iowa and Nebraska, and areas where people sound more southern. Of course, Iowa and Nebraska both have speakers that say things such as "warsh" and "crick", which is not, in my opinion, accent-free North American English.

The western states and California all have accents, but you have to look closely at the intonation of their speech. Many urban Californians speak fast, but many from the rural areas speak with a slow drawl that is most likely due to the large number of southerners that settled in the area. However, they do not necessarily sound identical to modern day southerners. Of course, the Californian dialect has changed over the years. Take Richard Nixon for example. How many native Southern Californians have an accent similar to his? People from the San Francisco area can sound a lot different from Los Angeles natives, but it is more common among older people. The younger generation seems to have invented their own style of intonation within the last thirty years.

In the Pacific Northwest, there are basically three accents. There is the Western Cascades accent, which sounds almost like a toned-down version of the upper Midwestern accent mixed with a bit of Western Canadian; Eastern Cascades, which is a slower, flat, Midlands type of accent and Californian/Southwestern, which was brought to the area within the last thirty years by the influx of Californian, Arizonan, and Utah natives. However, it should be noted that many younger Pacific Northwesterners have adopted a more Californian way of speaking.

I don't exactly buy into the idea that a General American accent exists. In this day and age, there are influences from nearly everywhere in the average North American's accent.

<<<<<People from Boston tend to think they have no accent. Midwesterners know that Bostonians have quite strong accents. Midwesterners tend to think they speak "General American". Californians know that Midwesterners have quite strong accents. Californians think they have no accent. Other Westerners think Californians have accents. Other Westerners think that they have no accent. I think I have no accent. So do most people.>>>>>

Why, I do believe that Guest has struck gold...

I'm not entirely convinced that GenAm exists in real life either, but I thought I read somewhere that Nebraska was supposed to be the centre of the GenAm area. Also rural areas should probably be excluded, because GenAm is a primarily urban accent.

General American doesn't exist? Call it something else if you want, but it's the generally accepted name for the dialect people in broadcasting use.

>> General American doesn't exist? Call it something else if you want, but it's the generally accepted name for the dialect people in broadcasting use.<<

There is no dialect that is used for broadcasts. There's just a set of stigmatized features that are avoided in broadcasting. Standard Broadcasting English varies from region to region. For example, according to Wikipedia, in the "General American" article, it claims that in General American, words such as "horrible" are pronounced as "hohrrible" (rather than "hahrrible"), but words such as "sorry", and "tomorrow" are "sahri" and "tomahrow". Thus, to pronounce "tomorrow" as "tomohrow", would not be General American. But....Here in the Northwest, many people pronounce it as "tomohrrow". In fact I just turned on the radio, and they were advertising a "concert that would be held tomohrow". Other radio announcers also use other regional pronunciations--I heard another pronounce "when" as "win", as is typical of here.

So, there is no particular dialect that they aim for. In California, for example, radio announcers (from California) would most likely say "tomahrrow". It's just that they avoid stigmatized features.

I think those are very small variations within the sea of variation that is American English. If absolutely identical pronunciation in all cases is the threshold for identifying a standard or dialect, you'll never find any. It's a cluster of features based on the speech of the Mid-Atlantic, Lower Midwest and Western regions.

I grew up in California and Illinois before moving to Mississippi as a teenager. I now live in Tennessee. I would need a lot of training and coaching before I could ever be a news reader (and I'd probably never be a good one), but accent reduction or mitigation would not be needed. My accent is General American, formed by a childhood spent in California and the Midwest.

Our newscasters in Nashville sound much more like the newscasters in LA, who sound like the newscasters in New York. They generally sound like each other more than they sound like their audience, especially in New York and Nashville. They all sound more or less like the natives of the Mid-Atlantic, Lower Midwest and West.