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16 A HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY OF ENGLISH Among the social and demographic factors influencing the development of the language during the EModE period were rapid population growth and the shift from rural to urban living resulting in the levelling of dialect differences. : An early seventeenth-century commentary on English by Alexander Gil, written in Latin, described a variety of English pronunciation, Communis dialectus, a ‘General’ dialect, which is socially and not regionally identified and which exists side by side with the regional Northern, Western, Southern and Eastern varieties.

When the vocal cords are spread and not vibrating, as in breathing, the result is a voiceless sound. In English only one subset of the consonants can be voiceless – /p, t, k, f, θ, s, ʃ, tʃ, h/ – so that the voiced sounds outnumber the voiceless sounds. All English nasals and approximants (/m, n, ŋ, l, r, w, j/, see below) are voiced. The exact phonetic manifestation of consonant voicing in English varies considerably. The ‘voiced’ /b, d, g/ can be realised phonetically very close to [p, t, k] word-initially, especially after a voiceless consonant as in this boy, this day, this guy.

In spite of many bi- or multilingual groups and areas, colonial American English is considered more homogeneous than contemporary British English. 5 English after 1776 By 1776, when the colonists declared their independence from England, the political, cultural and linguistic conditions for identifying American English as a separate variety were at hand. In 1783 the lexicographer whose name would subsequently become synonymous with specifically American dictionary-making, Noah Webster, published his American Spelling Book; he started work on his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1807 and completed the first edition in 1828.