ENGLISH IN COLONIAL AMERICA.

While doing some research, I ran across an interesting article, Paul K. Longmore’s “Good English without Idiom or Tone”: The Colonial Origins of American Speech (pdf of Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxvii:4 (Spring, 2007), 513–542; there doesn’t seem to be a Google cache available):

This study offers not a linguistic analysis but a historical interpretation of Early American English that draws on historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, as well as Early American historiography and scholarship about nationalism. It examines the interplay between modes of speech and demographical, geographical, social, and political history. It explains the interaction of linguistic and historical processes in terms of the experience of these societies as settler colonies that eventually redefined themselves into an independent nation. The emergence of American varieties of English was first recognized two generations before the Revolution…

Some excerpts follow:

When read in light of sociolinguistic research, historical linguistic studies suggest that in Britain’s North American colonies, the English language developed along lines characteristic of immigrant societies, particularly overseas settler colonies. The full array of British dialects mingled to form distinctly American varieties of English. Several regional koines probably evolved during the colonial era. The consensus from eighteenth-century observers to modern linguists is that whereas deep, geographically based, dialect differences marked early modern British speech, colonial English was significantly less differentiated. In Britain as a whole and even in England, dialects diverged so widely that speech from one county to another was often difficult to comprehend, but the colonies’ regional varieties were mutually intelligible. Struck by this contrast, eighteenth-century observers described colonial speech as virtually dialect-free…
In several regions colonized during the seventeenth century—New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the Chesapeake—colonial English speech appears to have been initially diffuse. Variation and diversity continued throughout the eighteenth century, particularly within isolated local speech communities, as well as within individual speech styles and style shifting. Nonetheless, several generations of American-born Anglophone colonials dwelling in the regions that would become the core of the new nation gradually selected or reallocated elements from England’s dialects as they unconsciously fashioned new North American varieties of English…
From a linguistic standpoint, it is important that the founding generation was followed by two generations of American-born colonials but relatively few additional immigrants. Those three seventeenth-century generations began to produce a new variety of English that derived but diverged from the founders’ many native dialects…
Mid-Atlantic Anglophone colonials were, from the start, more mobile, more connected to commercial networks, and more involved with a demographically diverse population across a wider area. Those factors may have accelerated dialect leveling. In contrast, seventeenth-century Chesapeake colonials achieved population stability only after several generations. Lower birth rates and higher infant and child death rates, along with skewed sex ratios and the dependency of population growth on continued immigration, kept the ratio of American-born to immigrant speakers much lower there during the seventeenth century than in the northern regions. These demographical factors may have made Chesapeake English speech diffuse and unfocused for a longer time…
Because English speech marked social station, the general absence of upper-class Britons from transatlantic migration inhibited direct transplantation of elite social dialects. As a result, individuals in every colonial region and, more to the point, all social ranks employed speech forms that Britons of higher status thought vulgar. For example, many colonials pronounced cover as kivver, engine as ingine, yesterday as yisterday, yes as yis, and Sarah as Sary. In Britain, these pronunciations marked lower social status; in America, they became stylistic variants among individuals of every rank and region, not simply indicators of class. The inability of colonial speech to replicate the full range of idioms that registered the British social hierarchy was another form of leveling…
By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, many observers were describing this leveled colonial speech as well-established and well-known. In 1759, Franklin invoked as common knowledge that, although in England individuals’ geographical origins could be pinpointed by their speech, in North America they could not. A few years later, Eddis contrasted England’s extreme dialect differences with the comparative homogeneity of colonial speech: “In England, almost every county is distinguished by a peculiar dialect . . . but in Maryland and throughout the adjacent provinces, it is worthy of observation that a striking similarity of speech universally prevails[.]” Witherspoon made the identical point: “There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America.” Cresswell, a Derbyshireman who traveled through the Chesapeake and the mid-Atlantic, reported, “No County or Colonial dialect is to be distinguished here, except it be the New Englanders, who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.”…
Speech accommodation theory offers a social-psychological explanation for colonials’ efforts to conform to a metropolitan standard: Speakers and writers tend to accommodate their speech toward prestige dialects. In a colonial context of dialect mixing, in which speakers unconsciously select linguistic elements from a variety of dialects, psychological motivations promoting convergence toward the most prestigious metropolitan standard dialect probably operated with even greater force than in other situations of dialect contact and mixing. Members of the North American British colonial elite and middling classes assiduously copied not just British, or even English, cultural forms; they specifically targeted southeastern English fashions, ideas, institutional models, and other cultural features. This pattern is typical of colonial elites, especially in the mature phase of colonies’ development. In the middle decades of the eighteenth century, elite and middling Anglophone colonials energetically schooled themselves as well as people lower down in the social hierarchy in speaking and writing “proper” English. [Footnote: Montgomery, “Was Colonial American English a Koine?” 231–232, reasonably concludes that style shifting—accommodating speech to the social situation and the rank of interlocutors—may partially account for observers’ descriptions of the correctness and purity of early American English speech. See also Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 180–184. If Montgomery is correct, such style shifting may have reflected accommodation to the trend toward standard English. Dwight might have not been able to detect his students’ regional backgrounds by their speech because they were shifting to the standard expected of them at Yale College.]
North American colonization generated more extensive dialect contact and mixing than ever occurred in early modern Britain. The necessities of migration and settlement, along with the imperatives and motivations inherent in empire-building, prompted Anglophone colonials to accommodate their various speech ways to one another. By the early eighteenth century, American varieties of English, extraterritorial immigrant koines, began to emerge in several regions. Meanwhile, the settlers’ status within the imperial system also shaped these mixed colonial varieties. In such societies, dominant groups are acutely aware of the cultural forms and standards of the imperial core. Particularly in the mature phase of social development, Anglophone colonials—most influentially those in the elite and middling ranks—consciously and unconsciously copied metropolitan Standard English. Both higher-status and upwardly mobile colonials used this “proper” and “true” English to mark their status within the colonial social hierarchy and elevate their individual and collective standing within the Empire. The regionally differentiated but comprehensible, American colonial language system helped prepare Anglophone colonials to receive the idea of American nationhood. Although British speech displayed a diversity of dialects that standardizing reformers and British nationalists had to combat, American Revolutionary nationalists did not need to impose a common “national” language. The dominant Anglophone members of the “nation” already effectively possessed one.

The author is a historian, not a linguist, but he seems to have used linguistic sources effectively. I will, of course, be interested to hear from those who know more about the subject than I.

Comments

  1. I’m not an expert, but I think the influence of Scots and Ulster Scots on American English should also be considered.
    And, in New York City and the Hudson Valley, the influence of Dutch.

  2. The author’s position on Scots and Dutch is, I believe, summarized by the second (full) paragraph on page 531 (beginning, “Immigration”). Are you saying that on the contrary these languages had an effect on the leveling of transplanted English dialects that went on before the middle of the eighteenth century, or that they warrant special consideration in the subsequent emergence of American regional dialects in the main (as opposed to within segregated communities that code-switched when interacting outside)?

  3. He quotes Franklin saying that in North America you can’t pinpoint someone’s origin from his speech. But Franklin was born in Boston, where even today, a discerning ear to this day can tell the difference between North Shore, South Shore, Beacon Hill Brahmin and other accents. And there are further variations in Maine and on Martha’s Vineyard. I’m no expert in discerning the differences by neighborhood, but I know Boston area people who “pahk” their “cahs”, and others who “pack” them (with a kind of long a).

  4. Could be. On the other hand, I’ve read claims that you can’t tell where an Aussie comes from by his accent, but when we lived in Australia we met people with sharp ears for making that very distinction. Maybe Franklin was cloth-eared?

  5. But Martin, arguably a lot of those divergences grew more stark after Franklin’s time and are more noticeable now than they would have been in 1770. I would also suspect the massive Irish immigration in the 19th century had some influence on Boston dialects.

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