N. V. Tatsenko introduction to theoretical phonetics of english

Studies of different accents often concentrate on small communities, but for our purposes it will be more useful to look briefly at differences between some of the largest
groups of speakers of English. A word of caution should be given here: it is all too easy to talk about such things as "Scottish English", "American English", and so on, and to ignore the variety that inevitably exists within any large community of speakers. Each individual's speech is different from any other's; it follows from this that no one speaker can be taken to represent a particular accent or dialect, and it also follows that the idea of a standard pronunciation is a convenient fiction, not a scientific fact.
American. In many parts of the world, the fundamental choice for learners of English is whether to learn an American or a British pronunciation, though this is by no means true everywhere. Since we have given very little attention to American pronunciation in this course, it will be useful at this stage to look at the most important differences between American accents and the BBC accent. It is said that the majority of American speakers of English have an accent that is often referred to as General American (GA); since it is the
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American accent most often heard on international radio and television networks, it is also called Network English. Most Canadian speakers of English have a very similar accent (few British people can hear the difference between the Canadian and American accents, as is the case with the difference between Australian and New Zealand accents). Accents in America different from GA are mainly found in New England and in the "deep south" of the country, but isolated rural communities everywhere tend to preserve different accents; there is also a growing section of American society whose native language is Spanish (or who are children of Spanish speakers) and they speak English with a pronunciation influenced by Spanish.
The most important difference between GA and BBC is the distribution of the [r] phoneme, GA being rhotic (i. e. [r] occurs in all positions, including before consonants and at the end of utterances). Thus where BBC pronounces 'car' as [ka:] and 'cart' as [ka:t], GA has [ka:r] and [ka:rt]. Long vowels and diphthongs that are written with an 'r' in the spelling are pronounced in GA as simple vowels followed by [r]. We can make the following comparisons: