Western American English

Western American English
Western U.S. English
Region	Western United States
Language family	Indo-European Germanic West Germanic North Sea Germanic Anglo–Frisian Anglic English North American English American English Western American English
Early forms	Old English Middle English Early Modern English
Dialects	California English Pacific Northwest English
Language codes
ISO 639-3	–
Glottolog	west2920  Western American English
States where Western American English and its dialects are spoken
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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.^[1] 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 /aɪ/ as a diphthong, from Northern U.S. accents by fronting /u/ (the GOOSE vowel), and from both by most consistently showing the cot–caught merger.^[2] The standard Canadian accent also aligns with this definition, though it typically includes certain additional vowel differences.