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which it became “stone.” But in the English of England, a further
evolution occurred, producing a vowel with a slight u-glide: stoun.

The American pronunciation remains like that of Shakespeare’s
post–Great Vowel Shift “stone.” Linguists now go out of their way

to challenge the idea that Shakespeare’s English sounded
particularly similar to contemporary speech in the West Virginia

mountains (for a while it was argued that Elizabethan speech

survived there), but it is not incorrect to say that American English
preserves a great many pronunciations that have further evolved in

British English. American English is in fact much more

“conservative” than London English, which has changed rapidly
even since World War II.

The great divisions in worldwide English pronunciation are
nevertheless geographic (even if the most traditional forms are not

necessarily found in England). The major regions are North
America (the United States and Canada are classed together,

although there are differences), Caribbean/South America,

Australia/New Zealand, South Asia (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh),
East Asia (Hong Kong, Singapore, and other former British

colonies), and Africa (particularly South Africa). Speakers are
generally much better at localizing dialects within their own regions

than they are at determining which region a person comes from.
Thus Americans are notoriously unable to separate Australian from

New Zealand accents and South African speakers often do not

easily hear the difference between American and Canadian accents,
particularly if the American accents being compared are from the

Upper Midwest.

Within America Dialects are generally shaped by the same
processes that drive linguistic evolution: inheritance from specific

sources and geographic and social isolation and evolution. For
example, the distinctive New England accent probably owes quite a

bit to the fact that most of the people who originally settled in New
England were from locations within a sixty-mile radius in East

Anglia. By 1776 there were three major varieties of North American

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