Geographical regional and dialectal variants of American English

Introduction
English Language today is the most popular language as over 300 million people in the world speak English as their first language. This language is national one in such countries as Great Britain, the USA, part of Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
English was first spoken in early medieval England. It is a West Germanic language and it got its name after one of the Germanic tribes, the Angles, that migrated to England. This language is closely related to the Frisian languages. The English vocabulary has been influenced by different Germanic languages: Norse, Latin and French.
The English language has develop during the long time and had a lot of forms: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Modern English. Modern English started to spread around the world in the 17th century and nowadays it is the leading international language. Thousands of people are learning this language as the second one because it is widely used in professional contexts. Also English is the official or one of the official languages in 60 sovereign states. The European Union, United Nations and some other world organisations chose English as the co-official.
There are many Varieties of English, though, The best known national varieties are British (BrE) and American (AmE). They are usually used as standards for education in countries where English is not the national language. At the same time some countries have their own standards of English which are not used internationally. These countries are South Africa, Canada, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. As English has long history, it has undergone different historical and social changes. The most prominent was the Great Vowel Shift, which affected most standard varieties and changed the pronunciation of long vowels.



American English
American English is one of two most popular varieties of English. American English and British English have a lot of differences such as vocabulary, pronunciation and minor features of grammar. American English is spoken in the USA. It cannot be called a dialect as it has Standard American form which is literary normalized. Also it is called American National Standard.
There are historic causes of distinct features of American English. First of all, it should be said that the basis of American English is the language that was brought to the new continent when the first settlers came to America. It happened in the 17th century when colonizers set up the first colonies and they were contemporaries of W. Shakespeare, E. Spenser and J. Milton. That is why the dead words of British English and the words that changed their meaning survived in the USA. Then American English vocabulary was developing for three centuries without the influence of the British stock and was affected by the new surroundings. There were a lot of unknown things in fauna and flora and the early Americans coined words: for animals - bullfrog, moose, opossum, raccoon; for plants - corn, hickory; for different Indian realia – canoe, squaw, wigwam, moccasin, tomahawk; translation loans: pale-face, pipe of peace.
A lot of languages influenced the American variant of English and, as a result, there are certain varieties of educated American speech. They are the