Editing General American English (section)

===Vowel length===
[[Vowel length]] is not [[phoneme|phonemic]] in General American, and therefore vowels such as {{IPA|/i/}} are customarily transcribed without the length mark.<ref>Some British sources, such as the ''Longman Pronunciation Dictionary'', use a unified symbol set with the length mark, {{IPA|ː}}, for both British and American English. Others, such as ''The Routledge Dictionary of Pronunciation for Current English'', do not use the length mark for American English only.</ref> Phonetically, the vowels of GA are short {{IPA|[ɪ, i, ʊ, u, eɪ, oʊ, ɛ, ʌ, ɔ, æ, ɑ, aɪ, ɔɪ, aʊ]}} when they precede the [[Fortis and lenis|fortis]] consonants {{IPA|/p, t, k, tʃ, f, θ, s, ʃ/}} within the same syllable and long {{IPA|[ɪː, iː, ʊː, uː, eːɪ, oːʊ, ɛː, ʌː, ɔː, æː, ɑː, aːɪ, ɔːɪ, aːʊ]}} elsewhere. (Listen to the minimal pair of {{audio|General American kit kid minimal pair.ogg|''kit'' and ''kid''|help=no}} {{IPA|[ˈkʰɪt, ˈkʰɪːd]}}.) All unstressed vowels are also shorter than the stressed ones, and the more unstressed syllables follow a stressed one, the shorter it is, so that {{IPA|/i/}} in ''l<u>ea</u>d'' is noticeably longer than in ''l<u>ea</u>dership''.{{sfnp|Wells|1982|pp=120, 480–481}}{{sfnp|Wells|2008}} (See [[Stress and vowel reduction in English]].)