Western American English (also known as Western U.S. English) is a variety of American English that largely unites the entire Western United States as a single dialect region, including the states of California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming. It also generally encompasses Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, some of whose speakers are classified additionally under Pacific Northwest English.
The West was the last area in the United States to be reached during the gradual westward expansion of settlement by English speakers and its history shows considerable mixing and leveling of the linguistic patterns of other regions. Therefore, since the settlement populations are relatively young when compared with other regions, the American West continues to be a dialect region in formation. According to the 2006 Atlas of North American English, as a very broad generalization, Western U.S. accents are differentiated from Southern U.S. accents in maintaining as a diphthong, from Northern U.S. accents by fronting (the vowel), and from both by most consistently showing the cot–caught merger. The standard Canadian accent also aligns with this definition, though it typically includes certain additional vowel differences.
Phonology and phonetics
The Western regional accent of American English is somewhat variable and not necessarily distinct from "General American" or from the speech of younger or educated Americans nationwide. Western American English is defined primarily by two phonological features: the cot-caught merger (as distinct from most traditional Northern and Southern U.S. English) and the fronting of the () vowel but not the () vowel. This fronting is distinct from most Southern and Mid-Atlantic American English, in which both of those vowels are fronted, as well as from most Northern U.S. English, in which both of these remain backed.
Like most Canadian dialects and younger General American, () allophones remain back and may be either rounded or unrounded due to a merger between and (), commonly represented as words like cot and caught, or pod and pawed, becoming perfect homophones. Linguists believe this may be the cause of, or at least related to, more and more Western speakers in general lowering or retracting the vowel and the vowel in a chain shift most intensely associated with California and led by young women. This shift, too, is documented in mainland Canadian English: the Canadian Shift. Unlike in Canada, however, the raising before voiceless consonants of does not exist in Western American English and of is not as consistent and pronounced. Like General American, the West is entirely rhotic, and the Mary–marry–merry merger is complete, so that words like Mary, marry, and merry are all pronounced identically because of the merger of all three of those vowels' sounds when before r.
Notably, though, there are still regions of the West where some speakers do not have a complete merger, most notably San Francisco, California, where younger speakers exhibit the merger more often than older speakers, but also Portland, Oregon and Cowlitz County, Washington, where an incomplete merger exists for some speakers and where merging is not any more advanced among younger speakers than among older ones.
Although it occurs at least occasionally nationwide, T-glottalization at word boundaries, as in "right ankle", is more common in Western dialects, particularly among younger speakers and women. The use of a full (orally released) rather than syllabic pronunciation of in the sequence , in words like "kitten" or "mountain", is a minor but noted variant reported in the West, for example among some Californians and younger, female Utah speakers; thus, kitten as in addition to more General American ; however, this feature has also been reported elsewhere in the country, like New Jersey. Men and teenage girls from Utah are also slightly more likely than average to elide the altogether in these words, and Utahns as a whole are slightly less likely to glottalize the in general.