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.
Northern England
Northern English accents have not undergone the – split, and a common shibboleth to distinguish them from Southern ones is the Northern use of the short a (the near-open front unrounded vowel) in words such as "bath" and "castle". On the opposite border, most Northern English accents can be distinguished from Scottish accents because they are non-rhotic, although a few rhotic Lancashire accents remain. Other features common to many Northern English accents are the absence of the – split (so "put" and "putt" are homophones), the reduction of the definite article "the" to a glottal stop (usually represented in writing as "t"), and the T-to-R rule that leads to the pronunciation of "t" as a rhotic consonant in phrases like "get up" ().