North American English
There are a considerable number of different accents within the regions of both the United States and Canada, originally deriving from the accents prevalent in different English, Scottish and Irish regions of the British Isles and corresponding to settlement patterns of these peoples in the colonies. These were developed and built upon as new waves of immigration, and migration across the North American continent, brought new accents and dialects to new areas, and as these ways of speaking merged and assimilated with the population. It is claimed that despite the centuries of linguistic changes there is still a resemblance between the English East Anglia accents which would have been used by early English settlers in New England (including the Pilgrims), and modern Northeastern United States accents. Similarly, the accents of Newfoundland have some similarities to the accents of Scotland and Ireland.
English-language vowel changes before historic /r/
Words that would have a stressed before intervocalic in the UK's Received Pronunciation (RP) are treated differently in different varieties of North American English. As shown in the table below, in Canadian English, all of these are pronounced with , as in "cord" (and thus merge with historic prevocalic in words like "glory" because of the horse–hoarse merger). In the accents of Philadelphia, southern New Jersey, and the Carolinas (and traditionally throughout the South), these words are pronounced among some with , as in "card" (and thus merge with historic prevocalic in words like "starry"). In the accents of New York City, Long Island, and nearby parts of New Jersey, these words are pronounced with like in RP. However, this is met with hypercorrection of , (thus still merging with historic prevocalic in "starry"). On the other hand, the traditional Eastern New England accents (famously, the Rhode Island and Boston accents) these words are pronounced with without hypercorrection, just like in RP. Most of the rest of the United States (marked "General American" in the table), however, has a distinctive mixed system: while the majority of words are pronounced as in Canada, the four (sometimes five) words in the left-hand column are typically pronounced with ; and the East Coast regions seem to be slowly moving toward this system over time.