Zeitschrift für interdisziplinäre Geschichte, xxxvii:4 (Frühling, 2007), 513–542.
THE COLONIAL ORIGINS OF AMERICAN SPEECH
Paul K. Longmore
“Good English without Idiom or Tone”: Der
Colonial Origins of American Speech
Questions
about shared language have played an important role in driving
nationalism. European, Asian, and African nationalizing cam-
Schmerzen, facing obstacles of dialect and language diversity, all pro-
moted, and sometimes tried to, enforce particular dialects or lan-
guages as national tongues. But in the colonial movement that
became a quest for American independence, nationalists did not
ªnd it necessary to establish a unifying “national” tongue against
competing dialects or languages. This distinctive feature of Ameri-
can Revolutionary nationalism and nation-building occurred be-
cause of the prior colonial experience. The societies that came to
compose the new nation developed as extraterritorial settler colo-
nies. Their social evolution inºuenced the linguistic evolution of
colonial English speech. By the early to mid-eighteenth century,
varieties of English emerged that many observers perceived as
both homogeneous and matching metropolitan standard English.
Infolge, rather than having to foster or impose a unifying
tongue, American Revolutionary nation builders focused on con-
tinuing to standardize the speech that had developed during the
colonial era. North American British colonials possessed a national
language well before they became “Americans.” This shared man-
ner of speech inadvertently helped to prepare them for independ-
ent American nationhood.1
This study offers not a linguistic analysis but a historical inter-
pretation of Early American English that draws on historical lin-
Paul K. Longmore is Professor of History, San Francisco State University. He is the author of
Why I Burned My Book and Other Essays on Disability (Philadelphia, 2003); “‘They . . . speak
better English than the English do”: Colonialism and the Origins of National Linguistic Stan-
dardization in America,” Early American Literature, XL (2005), 279–314.
© 2007 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
Geschichte, Inc.
1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reºections on the Origin and Spread of National-
ism (New York, 1991; orig. Kneipe. 1983), 44; Joshua A. Fishman, Language and Nationalism, Two
Integrative Essays (Rowley, Masse., 1972); Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780
(New York, 1990), 51–63; Longmore, “‘They . . . speak better English than the English do”:
Colonialism and the Origins of National Linguistic Standardization in America,” Early Ameri-
can Literature, XL (2005), 279–314; Marianne Cooley, “Emerging Standard and Subdialectal
Variation in Early American English,” Diachronica, IX (1992), 180–184.
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514 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
guistics and sociolinguistics, as well as Early American historiogra-
phy and scholarship about nationalism. It examines the interplay
between modes of speech and demographical, geographical, Also-
ziell, and political history. It explains the interaction of linguistic
and historical processes in terms of the experience of these socie-
ties as settler colonies that eventually redeªned themselves into an
independent nation. The emergence of American varieties of
English was ªrst recognized two generations before the Revolu-
tion.
british dialects, standard metropolitan english, and colo-
nial speech In 1724, Hugh Jones, a professor at the College of
William and Mary in Virginia, enlisted in the trans-Atlantic move-
ment to reform English usage throughout the British Empire. His
An Accidence to the English Tongue offered instruction in “the true
Manner of Reading, Writing, and Talking proper English.” The
multitude of dialects indicated a “crisis” in the language: “For
wont of better Knowledge, and more Care, almost every County
in England has gotten a distinct Dialect, or several peculiar Words,
and odious Tones, perfectly ridiculous to Persons unaccustomed
to hear such Jargon: Daher, as the Speech of a Yorkshire and
Somersetshire downright Countryman would be almost unintelligi-
ble to each other; so would it be good Diversion to a polite Lon-
doner
to hear a Dialogue between them.” Noting that such
differences in dialect appeared throughout England, Jones re-
garded them as evidence of linguistic “confusion” and, worse still,
“abuses and corruptions” of the “mother tongue.” His critique
reºected eighteenth-century language reformers’ view of English.
In appraising local and regional dialects, prescriptivists took as
their standard the written and spoken English of “polite” London-
ers, the dialect of genteel people in the imperial metropolis.2
Jones declared that,
to English
provincials, many colonials spoke the language properly. In Vir-
ginia, “the planters, and even the native Negroes”—meaning Af-
rican Americans—“generally talk good English without idiom or
tone.” He claimed that only three types of people spoke “true
Interessant,
in contrast
2 Hugh Jones, An Accidence to the English Tongue (Menston, England, 1967; orig. Kneipe. Lon-
Don, 1724), 11–13, 21, 22.
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 515
English”—the aforementioned Londoners, “most . . . Learned, Po-
lite and Gentile People every where, and the Inhabitants of the Plan-
tations (even the Native Negroes).” In his appraisal, “idiom” re-
ferred to dialect vocabulary and colloquialism; “tone” meant
dialect pronunciation and accents. In describing Anglophone co-
lonials’ speech as “without idiom or tone,” he meant that, in lin-
guistic terms, it leveled the marked differences of England’s various
dialects, and by describing it as “good” and “true,” that it did not
transplant the local and regional dialects that prescriptivists re-
garded as corruptions of “pure” English. He was not contending
that colonial usage satisªed certain abstract objective criteria, Aber,
culturally and historically more signiªcant, that many colonials
emulated the dialect promoted by language reformers as the stan-
dard for English everywhere. Against the charge that Jones’ claims
were mere colonial boosterism, other commentators from the
eighteenth century and later, many of them without any possible
partisan motives, made the same observations.3
Notwithstanding this early testimony, these descriptions of
colonial speech may seem counterintuitive and in need of ground-
ing. Bedauerlicherweise, Jedoch, the relationship between linguistic
history and early American social and political history has received
little scholarly attention. Many historians hold a vague view of co-
lonial English as
somehow perpetuating Elizabethan English.
Their unsophisticated version of what linguists call “colonial lag”
presumes that this transplanted tongue, changing little over time,
preserved the homeland language’s forms at the moment of colo-
nization. But recent historical linguistic scholarship has modiªed
the concept of “colonial
Verzögerung,” emphasizing instead linguistic
change through dialect mixing and leveling—the long-term elim-
ination of the most marked differences among contributing dia-
lects and the eventual formation of new varieties. Noch, just as his-
torians have generally ignored historical
linguistics, historisch
linguists have often shown inadequate, oversimpliªed, or outdated
knowledge of early American history and historiography. More-
über, students of nationalism tend to study European, African, Und
Asian campaigns to foster national tongues but not the language
3
Jones (Hrsg. Richard L. Morton), The Present State of Virginia, From Whence Is Inferred A Short
View of Maryland and North Carolina (Chapel Hill, 1956; orig. Kneipe. London, 1724), 80; idem,
Accidence, 14-15.
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516 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
histories of the European settler colonies that became independent
nations.4
Unlike contemporary languages and dialects, those from the
past cannot be recorded and analyzed by modern linguists.
Written records constitute the sole evidence. But extant docu-
mentary sources provide only limited information about vernacu-
lar colonial speech. They may not yield a body of diverse, quan-
tiªable linguistic data adequate to reconstruct the evolving features
of early American English, though they can deepen historians’ un-
derstanding of early American social and political development.5
Sociolinguistic research into dialect mixing within immigrant
societies can be of some beneªt. Such studies indicate that when
4 Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The Colonial Experience (New York, 1958), 271–284; Da-
vid Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York, 1989), 57–62,
256–264, 470–475, 652–655; Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular
Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990); Michael P. Kramer, Imaging Language
in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, 1992); Jill Lepore, A is for American:
Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States (New York, 2002); Christopher Looby,
Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago, 1996);
David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (New York, 1986). None of these
scholars consults sociolinguistic scholarship. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publi-
cation and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, Masse., 1990), examines
the relationship between print language and the invention of the public sphere rather than the
linguistic evolution of British North American English. Raymond Hickey, "Einführung," In
idem (Hrsg.), Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects (New York, 2004), 8–9;
Gabriella Mazzon, “The Ideology of the Standard and the Development of Extraterritorial
Englishes,” in Laura Wright (Hrsg.), The Development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, Von-
scriptions, Conºicts (New York, 2000), 75; Michael Montgomery, “British and Irish Anteced-
ents,” in Algeo (Hrsg.), English in North America (New York, 2001), 105–109; Edgar W.
Schneider, “The English Dialect Heritage of the Southern United States,” in Hickey (Hrsg.),
Legacies of Colonial English, 262–309. Historical linguists’ accounts of early American history
are sometimes old-fashioned and almost mythic. Zum Beispiel, Hans Kurath, A Word Geogra-
phy of the Eastern United States (Ann Arbor, 1949), vi, 1–7, depicts colonial farming communi-
ties as “democratic” and “middle class” and colonial seaports as more European. Joey Lee
Dillard asserts that American colonists had few books available and mistakenly identiªes Alexis
de Tocqueville as an eighteenth-century writer. Among the few historians that he cites are the
early twentieth-century scholar Charles M. Andrews (All-American English [New York, 1975],
59, 63; Toward a Social History of American English [New York, 1985], 62, 52).
5 For historical linguists’ assessment of the theoretical and methodological problems in gath-
ering data, see Montgomery, “Was Colonial American English a Koine?” in Juhani Klemola,
Merja Kytö, and Matti Rissanen (Hrsg.), Speech Past and Present: Studies in English Dialectology in
Memory of Ossi Ihalainen (New York, 1996), 213–235; idem, “British and Irish Antecedents,”
93–97, 101–104, 109–117, 153; Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 167–187; Hickey, “Introduc-
tion,” 1–10; Kytö, “The Emergence of American English: Evidence from Seventeenth-
Century Records in New England,” in Hickey (Hrsg.), Legacies of Colonial English, 121–123,
132–133.
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 517
migrating dialect speakers of a common tongue come into contact
in a new territory, complex long-term processes of leveling and
simpliªcation result in an unconscious selection of features from
the original contributing dialects. The ultimate product may be a
new compromise dialect called a koine.6
When read in light of sociolinguistic research, historical lin-
guistic studies suggest that in Britain’s North American colonies,
the English language developed along lines characteristic of immi-
grant 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 colo-
nial era. The consensus from eighteenth-century observers to
modern linguists is that whereas deep, geographically based, dia-
lect differences marked early modern British speech, colonial Eng-
lish was signiªcantly less differentiated. In Britain as a whole and
even in England, dialects diverged so widely that speech from one
county to another was often difªcult to comprehend, but the col-
onies’ regional varieties were mutually intelligible. Struck by this
Kontrast, eighteenth-century observers described colonial speech
as virtually dialect-free.7
Their further description of colonial English as pure and
correct was most likely inºuenced not only by the natural propa-
gation of London’s “polite” speech and writing but also by colo-
nials, especially in the elite and middling ranks, both consciously
and unconsciously trying to accommodate their spoken and writ-
ten language to that prestige dialect. This emulation of a metro-
6 The term koine comes from the Greek word for common; it referred to the lingua franca of
the ancient Macedonian Empire.
7 Historical linguists now reject Dillard’s argument in All-American English and Toward a So-
cial History of American English that early American English was a continent-wide koine. Mont-
gomery, “Was Colonial American English a Koine?” 230, is skeptical that colonial American
English, in general, constituted a koine but concludes that koineization of some sort undoubt-
edly occurred. See also Fisher, “British and American, Continuity and Divergence,” 60–61;
Kytö, Variation and Diachrony, With Early American English in Focus (Frankfurt, 1991), 18–23;
idem, “Emergence of American English,” 126; Montgomery, “British and Irish Antecedents,”
115. Two generations before sociolinguists developed koineization studies, Allen Walker
Read, “British Recognition of American Speech in the Eighteenth Century,” Dialect Notes,
VI (1933), 325, schrieb, “This absence of dialect, so puzzling to the commentators, is now ac-
cepted as normal to any colonial speech. In the jostling of speech characteristics imported
from many regions, the peculiarities are very soon worn away and a state approaching homo-
geneity ensues.”
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518 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
politan linguistic standard seems to occur in many colonial settler
societies.8
in the colonial
Additional distinctive factors
situation
strengthened the linguistically and culturally dominant position of
leveled English. Reigning as the language of imperial authority,
law, commerce, and social prestige, it was also, daher, the lan-
guage of social mobility. Other European tongues that competed
with it were at a distinct disadvantage. Over the long run, Dutch
and German retreated into ethnocultural enclaves, and Swedish
and Welsh virtually disappeared. All of these elements contributed
to the development of leveled, mutually comprehensible Ameri-
can varieties of English.
dialect contact in early modern britain and settler socie-
ties Certain eighteenth-century language reformers who noted
the severe differences among Britain’s several languages and many
English dialects contrasted this diversity with the apparent homo-
geneity of colonial English speech. In 1783, Beattie described four
distinct languages—English, Welsh, Erse (Scottish Gaelic), Und
“Scotch” (also known as Scots, a variety of English sufªciently dif-
ferent from southern English to be considered by many a separate
Sprache). He also found that the various dialects of English within
England diverged sharply. Writing six decades after Jones, Er
schrieb, “The dialects of Lancashire and Yorkshire are hardly un-
derstood in London. Even in Kent, and in Berkshire, we hear
words and sounds, that are not known in Middlesex.” In 1762,
Sheridan, a popular lecturer and writer on proper English, antici-
pated Beattie and agreed with Jones: “Thus not only the Scotch,
Irish, and Welsh, have each their own idioms, which uniformly
prevail in those countries, but almost every county in England, hat
its peculiar dialect.”9
Eighteenth-century Britons, language reformers in particular,
became more aware of this dialect diversity partly because increas-
ing internal migration brought speakers of various dialects and
8 Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” offers a compelling examination of the interplay between
the emergence of standard English and koineization in America.
9
James Beattie, “The Theory of Language,” Dissertations Moral and Critical (London, 1783),
in Friedrich O. Wolf (Hrsg.), The Philosophical Works (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1970), III, 298;
Thomas Sheridan, A Course of Lectures on Elocution (New York, 1968; orig. Kneipe. London,
1762), 30. See also Robert Crawford, Devolving English Literature (New York, 1992), 104–105.
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 519
tongues into contact. Those movements and interactions surely
in linguistic terms, to accommodate their
caused individuals,
speech to new linguistic environments. Zum Beispiel, colonial
newspaper advertisements for runaway Irish indentured servants
described some who had resided in London as speaking “good
English,” indicating that they had accommodated their speech to
metropolitan standard English. Doubtless, many transplanting
Anglophone Britons diverged from their native manner of speech
to adopt some of the vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation of
the places to which they relocated. These internal migrants proba-
bly practiced situational code switching, accommodating to the dia-
lects of the new regions but resuming their native dialects when-
ever they returned to their original locales. Noch, although mobile
Britons at the time individually adjusted their speech, major alter-
ations do not appear to have occurred in the dialects to which they
accommodated; nor did a compromise dialect emerge.10
Some long-term contact situations lead to leveling. Mingling
of dialects may ultimately yield a koine. Regional koines incorpo-
rate but simplify elements from the contributing dialects, while
maintaining structural continuity with the original, common lin-
guistic system. Thus are koines and the other varieties mutually in-
telligible. “Koineization” is not inevitable though. Speakers de-
velop koines, largely unconsciously, in response to historically
speciªc, demographical, psychosocial, socioeconomic, cultural, oder
political circumstances that make dialect melding advantageous.
But dialect contact can continue for many years without
koineization. During the several centuries that the dialect of the
elite and middling classes in London and the home counties be-
came the standard of spoken and written English, as domestic mi-
grants transplanted to the metropolis, the London variety absorbed
elements of England’s local and regional dialects, but these piece-
meal alterations did not constitute koineization. The evidence
does not indicate that leveling or koineization occurred in early
modern Britain.11
10 Crawford, Devolving English Literature, 29, N. 39; Barbara A. Fennell, A History of English:
A Sociolinguistic Approach (Malden, Masse., 2001), 148–152, 154–156; Read, “The Assimilation
of the Speech of British Immigrants in Colonial America,” Journal of English and Germanic Phi-
lology, XXXVII (1938), 78.
11 This paragraph summarizes the theoretical models and research ªndings of important
sociolinguistics studies of koineization: Surendar K. Gambhir, “Two Koines Compared: Guy-
anese Bhojapura and Calcutta Bazaar Hindustani,” International Journal of Dravidian Linguistics,
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520 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
The linguistic and historical evidence suggests, Jedoch, Das
koineization probably did occur among British colonizers of
Nordamerika. When speakers of regional and social dialects of a
language come into contact in an environment outside their home
territories, immigrant koines often arise. The need for linguistic, als
well as social, solidarity within settler populations tends to pro-
mote a single speech community in the new geographical and so-
cial environment. The source dialects contribute the elements that
ultimately are reconªgured as the settlers’ common speech and
primary language.12
Sociolinguists have documented koineization in many immi-
grant communities and societies—from the new industrial towns
in Norway and Britain to Hindi-speaking communities in Fiji,
Mauritius, and Guyana. Modern Israeli Hebrew is a prime exam-
ple of an immigrant koine. Most pertinent in this context, linguists
recount the emergence of koines in European colonial settler soci-
ethisch. Spanish koines appeared in Spain’s Latin American posses-
sionen; British overseas colonists generated English koines in New
Zealand and even in such vast territories as Canada and Australia.
Historical linguists generally agree that koineization occurred, Zu
some extent, in the British colonies that became the United States.
When read in light of modern sociolinguistic research and recent
historiography, the historical linguistic evidence for Early Ameri-
XII (1983), 471–472; Jeff Siegel, "Einführung: Controversies in the Study of Koines and
Koineization,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, XCIX (1993), 5–6, 7–8; idem,
“Review Article: Dialect Contact and Koineization,” International Journal of the Sociology of Lan-
Spur, XCIX (1993), 116–118; idem, “Koines and Koineization,” Language Sociology, XIV
(1985), 364–366; idem, “Mixing, Leveling, and Pidgin/Creole Development,” in Arthur K.
Spears and Donald Winford (Hrsg.), The Structure and Status of Pidgins and Creoles (Philadelphia,
1997), 126; Peter Trudgill, Dialects in Contact (New York, 1986), 95–98. J. David Burnley,
“Sources of Standardisation in Later Middle English,” in Joseph B. Trahern, Jr. (Hrsg.), Standard-
izing English: Essays in the History of Language Change (Knoxville, 1989), 23–41; Joseph M.
Williams, Origins of the English Language: A Social and Linguistic History (New York, 1975), 86,
92–94; John H. Fischer, The Emergence of Standard English (Lexington, 1996), 145–156.
12
See Siegel, "Einführung: Controversies,” 6–8; idem, “Koines and Koineization,” 362–
364, 370–375; idem, “Mixing, Leveling, and Pidgin/Creole Development,” 126–129; idem,
“Review Article,” 116–118; Nicole Domingue, “Internal Change in a Transplanted Lan-
Spur,” Studies in the Linguistic Sciences, IV (1981), 151; Haim Blanc, “The Israeli Koine as an
Emergent National Standard,” in Joshua A. Fishman, Charles A. Ferguson, and Jyotirindra
Das Gupta (Hrsg.), Language Problems of Developing Nations (New York, 1968), 237–251;
Gambhir, “Two Koines Compared”; Trudgill, Dialects in Contact, 95–126; idem, Elizabeth
Gordon, and Gillian Lewis, “Determinism in New-Dialect Formation and the Genesis of
New Zealand English,” Journal of Linguistics, XXXVI (2000), 299–318.
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 521
can English suggests the likelihood of a long-term process of dia-
leveling, and simpliªcation leading to regional
lect mixing,
koineization.13
dialect mixing in britain’s north american colonies Much
of the historical linguistic research traces American speech back to
England’s regional dialects, but it has not found that migrating
Anglophones transplanted any particular English dialect intact. In-
stead, it shows extensive mixing of English dialects within the col-
onies. This scholarship describes patterns similar to sociolinguists’
ªndings regarding dialect mixing among transplanted dialect
speakers of a common tongue.14
During the ªrst phase of settlement, because immigrants
exhibits
use
their
diffuseness—that is, ºuctuation and inconsistency in, Zum Beispiel,
concurrently,
dialects
various
Rede
13 On koineization in Norway, see Trudgill, Dialects in Contact, 99–102, 143–148; in Eng-
Land, Paul Kerswill and Ann Williams, “Creating a New Town Koine: Children and Lan-
guage Change in Milton Keynes,” Language in Society, XXIX (2000), 65–115; in Fiji, Guyana,
and Mauritius, Gambhir, “Two Koines Compared”; Siegel, “Koines and Koineization,” 364;
idem, “Review Article,” 117;
in Israel, Blanc, “Israeli Koine”; Siegel, “Koines and
Koineization,” 364; in Latin America, Margarita Hidalgo, “One Century of Study in New
World Spanish,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language, CXLIX (2001), 9–32; in New
Zealand, Trudgill et al., “Determinism”; in Australia and Canada, Sydney J. Bäcker, The Aus-
tralian Language (Sydney, 1966), 452–456; John Bernard and Arthur Delbridge, Introduction to
Linguistik: An Australian Perspective (Sydney, 1980), 270–285; Trudgill, Dialects in Contact, 143,
145–146.
14 For speciªc studies, see Henry Alexander, “Early American Pronunciation and Syntax,”
American Speech, ICH (1925), 141–148; idem, “The Language of the Salem Witchcraft Trials,”
ibid., III (1928), 390–400; Kurath, “The Origin of Dialectal Differences in Spoken American
English,” Modern Philology, XXV (1928), 385–395; idem, “English Sources of Some American
Regional Words and Verb Forms,” American Speech, XLIV (1969), 60–68; Kytö, Variation and
Diachrony; Anders Orbeck, Early New England Pronunciation, as Reºected in some Seventeenth
Century Town Records of Eastern Massachusetts (Ann Arbor, 1927); Cooley, “Emerging Stan-
dard,” 170–171; Ann Louise Frisinger Sen, “Dialect Variation in Early American English,”
Journal of English Linguistics, VIII (1974), 41–47. For general conclusions about dialect mixing,
see Algeo, “External History," im gleichen (Hrsg.), English in North America, 14-15; Cooley,
“Emerging Standard,” 168, 170–171, 178; Dillard, All-American English, 50, 55; idem, Toward a
Social History of American English, 50–51; Fennell, History of English, 210–213; Guy Jean
Forgue, “American English at the Time of the Revolution,” in Harold B. Allen and Michael
D. Linn (Hrsg.), Dialect and Language Variation (Berkeley, 1986), 514; Kurath, Word Geography;
Kytö, Variation and Diachrony, 18–23; Albert H. Marckwardt (rev. Dillard), American English
(New York, 1980), 70, 89; Thomas Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language
(New York, 1964), 222–223; Montgomery, “British and Irish Antecedents,” 121; Randolph
Quirk, The English Language and Images of Matter (London, 1972), 4–7; Read, “Assimilation of
the Speech of British Immigrants,” 79; idem, “British Recognition of American Speech,” 325.
15 Quotation from Siegel, “Mixing, Leveling, and Pidgin/Creole Development,” 126. Sehen
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522 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
grammar and pronunciation, vocabulary and phraseology. For sev-
eral generations, the enormous “reservoir of linguistic variants”
from the contributing dialects shrinks to “fewer and more regular
forms.” Through a slow and complicated process of leveling and
simpliªcation, marked differences are eliminated, irregularities are
reduced, and a compromise common usage is established. Some
elements are selected for formal and some for informal use. Others
are assigned neutral status or discarded altogether. Some variants
from regional dialects may survive through reallocation as, für in-
Haltung, social-class or stylistic variants. Over three or more genera-
tionen, these unplanned and unconscious processes focus or stabilize
the language and may nativize it as a primary tongue. More recent
immigrants, imitating native speakers as a matter of course, take
natives’ speech ways as their model.15
The linguistic evidence for early American English is far less
extensive than the data used in modern sociolinguistic studies.
This scant evidence and contemporary commentaries suggest a
complex linguistic situation involving both ongoing variation
and diversity and long-term processes of koineization. Allgemein,
the research points toward patterns similar to the sociolinguistic
model outlined above. In several regions colonized during the
seventeenth century—New England, the mid-Atlantic, und das
Chesapeake—colonial English speech appears to have been ini-
tially diffuse. Variation and diversity continued throughout the
eighteenth century, particularly within isolated local speech com-
munities, as well as within individual speech styles and style shift-
ing. dennoch, several generations of American-born Anglo-
phone 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.16
Fischer’s Albion’s Seed, one of the few historical studies to
draw on historical linguistic scholarship and evidence, implizit
supports this sociolinguistic interpretation. Critics charge him
Siegel, "Einführung: Controversies,” 6–8; idem, “Koines and Koineization,” 362–364, 370–
375; idem, “Review Article,” 116–118; idem, “Mixing, Leveling, and Pidgin/Creole Devel-
opment,” 126–129; Domingue, “Internal Change,” 151; Blanc, “Israeli Koine”; Gambhir,
“Two Koines Compared”; Trudgill, Dialects in Contact, 95–126; idem et al., “Determinism.”
16 Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 168–179; Kytö, “Emergence of American English,” 121,
124–126; Montgomery, “British and Irish Antecedents,” 116–117, 120–151.
17 Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 57–62, 256–264, 470–475, 652–655; Jack P. Greene et al., with a
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 523
with overstating the inºuence of particular English regions as
sources of American regional cultures, Aber, at least regarding
speech ways, his analysis is more careful and complex than they
recognize. Although he focuses mainly on the English roots of
American speech, he judiciously describes a complicated process
of linguistic modiªcation. Although he does not draw on socio-
linguistic scholarship on how transplanted languages change in
new geographical and social environments, his analysis suggests a
sociolinguistic process of dialect mixing, leveling, simpliªcation,
and regional koineization. His strongest evidence pointing toward
dialect mixing is demographical.17
Fischer’s examination of ªrst-wave New England settlers’ re-
gional origins suggests extensive dialect contact. Some 60 Prozent
of male Puritans in the Great Migration of 1629 Zu 1640 hailed
from a nine-county region in the eastern part of England, but “a
large minority,” 40 Prozent, emigrated from the remaining thirty-
four English counties. More than 25 percent came from the south
and west, nearly 10 percent from the Midlands and north. Ost-
erners predominated in Massachusetts as a whole, composing the
majority of men in many towns. Zum Beispiel, the men of Salem
and Ipswich, Essex County’s largest and most prosperous towns,
were overwhelmingly East Anglians. But some towns reºected
more diverse origins. Southerners and westerners slightly ex-
ceeded easterners in Sudbury; almost 67 percent of Dorchester’s
male founders transplanted from the south and west; and more
als 90 percent of Gloucester’s men came from that same region.
Outside Massachusetts, New Haven’s early settlers included many
Londoners, whereas New Hampshire and Maine drew large num-
bers of West Countrymen. The West Country was also “an im-
portant secondary” source of migrants to Massachusetts, but many
of these migrants soon moved “west to Connecticut, or south to
Nantucket, or north to Maine.” Fischer concludes that “diversity
reply by Fischer, “Forum: Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America—A Symposium,”
William and Mary Quarterly, XLVIII (1991), 226–309. Some historical linguists seem generally
to accept Fischer’s historical interpretation. Algeo, “External History,” 7–8, 10; Fischer, “Brit-
ish and American, Continuity and Divergence,” in Algeo (Hrsg.), English in North America, 59–
61. For a critical examination that questions Fischer’s handling of linguistic sources and data
but ªnds his use of demographical evidence persuasive, see Montgomery, “British and Irish
Antecedents,” 114.
18 Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 31–36; idem, “Forum,” 264–271, 277.
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524 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
of regional origins became a major factor in the founding of other
New England colonies.”18
Attributing the major inºuence on New England speech to
ªrst-wave immigrants who transplanted from eastern England to
eastern Massachusetts, Fischer describes complicated dialect mix-
ing. He explains that New England speech evolved not through
simple replication but complex derivation. Eastern England’s
speech was not a homogeneous dialect but a family of related dia-
lects. When “these English speech ways” crossed the Atlantic,
“they mixed with one another and merged with other elements,”
das ist, with other English dialects. Mit anderen Worten, from the out-
set, contact among members of the initial in-migrating generation
began to generate dialect mixing. From a linguistic standpoint, es ist
important that the founding generation was followed by two gen-
erations 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.19
Fischer ªnds similar patterns in the late seventeenth-century
upper Delaware Valley. He notes that many founding-generation
Quakers transplanted from England’s North Midlands but many
other early colonizers came from the vicinity of London; jeden
English locality sent emigrants to the Delaware Valley. He explains
too that English North Midlands speech was “a linguistic hybrid
which had evolved through many centuries from a mixture of
British and Scandinavian tongues.” He pinpoints that dialect as
chieºy inºuencing “American Midland” speech, though he does
not identify it as the only source. Eventually, in the upper Dela-
ware Valley, “the rough edges of North Midland speech were
rubbed off by constant friction with dialects from other parts of
England.” As a case in point, “the broad northern come (Profi-
nounced coom) did not survive in Pennsylvania after the mid-
eighteenth century. But less obtrusive North Midland vowels be-
came standard in the Delaware Valley and still survive there to this
day.” English dialect speakers gave up idiosyncratic regional pro-
nunciations, such as coom, and retained or adopted “less obtrusive”
pronunciations, das ist, those occurring more frequently across a
19
20
Idem, Albion’s Seed, 57–62; idem, “Forum,” 275, 277.
Idem, Albion’s Seed, 438–445, 470–475. See also Montgomery, “Solving Kurath’s Puzzle:
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 525
range of dialects. Fischer concludes that though English North
Midlands speech was the most inºuential source, American Mid-
land speech developed, not from one source dialect, “but from a
complex process of mixing and merging” of English dialects.20
Fischer’s analysis of Virginia speech again describes complex
dialect mixing, leveling, and simpliªcation. The early settlers came
from every part of England, but a great majority hailed from the
sixteen southern and western counties. As with England’s eastern
and North Midlands regions, southern and western English modes
of speech “were not monolithic, but comprised a complex family
of local dialects.” For example, “a Sussex countryman commonly
dropped his h’s, but neighboring counties tended to sound that
consonant clearly.” “Somerset folk had a way of turning s into z,
and o into u, so that their county name became Zumerzet.” Mean-
while, inhabitants of Berkeley Hundred in Gloucestershire pre-
served many old Saxon words and pronunciations. “This and that
became thicke and thucke” (oder, eher, thicke and thucke remained
the local equivalents of this and that). He concludes that “the cre-
ation of the Virginia speech way was a cultural process of high
complexity.” “The Virginia dialect as it developed through the
years was not merely a simple replication” of southern and western
English speech. Drawing from, not only those dialects but also the
speech of other regions—particularly London—as well as the ad-
mixture of African and African-American speech, “the transfer of
language” to Virginia “was a dynamic process of linguistic selec-
tion and recombination.”21
In examining how English dialects interacted and changed in
early Virginia, Fischer discerns “an important clue to the dynamics
of language transmission, and to the complex process” of language
evolution. “Most of Berkeley Hundred’s special speech ways did
not survive in Virginia, despite the fact that so many inhabitants
migrated there.” Likewise, “the dropped h of Sussex and the
hard s of Somerset did not take root in Virginia.” Yet because
“most countrymen throughout the south and west of England said
Ah be for I am,” “that usage became an important part of the Vir-
Establishing the Antecedents of the American Midland Dialect Region,” in Hickey (Hrsg.), Leg-
acies of Colonial English, 310–325; idem, “British and Irish Antecedents,” 124–125, 133–136.
21 Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 236–240, 256–262, 264; idem, “Forum,” 278–281, 283; Montgom-
ery, “British and Irish Antecedents,” 125–132.
22 Fischer, Albion’s Seed, 262–263.
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526 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
ginia accent.” This ªnding, declares Fischer, points to the “man-
ner” in which “a new speech way was manufactured out of old
materials.” “From a mixed family of dialects in southern and west-
ern England, local peculiarities tended to disappear and general
characteristics survived.” In other words, dialect mixing eventu-
ated in leveling and simpliªcation. Sociolinguists have docu-
mented this process as occurring often in immigrant societies
where dialects of a common tongue come into contact.22
traits and status of various
Fischer’s analysis points to a major question about how trans-
planted languages change. Which words, pronunciations, Und
forms contribute to the formation of a compromise dialect, welche
are discarded, and why? Some sociolinguists believe that variants
found in the majority of contributing dialects are those most likely
to be retained. Others argue either that the variants used by the
largest number of individual speakers become part of a koine or
that demographical, sozial, cultural, occupational, und politisch
speakers and
factors—the social
groups—outweigh linguistic factors in determining which ele-
ments compose a koine. Even in the modern language environ-
ments from which linguists can gather data as languages evolve, A
multiplicity of contributing factors complicates analysis. Scholars
may never be able to develop detailed evidence for colonial
Amerika, but extrapolations from modern sociolinguistic research
are possible. Though Fischer does not refer to such scholarship, Er
describes patterns that match sociolinguists’ models of the pro-
cesses that lead to immigrant koineization. Careful consideration
of both the surviving evidence and historical
linguistic and
sociolinguistic research supports the view that Anglophone colo-
nials engaged in complex dialect mixing, which resulted in level-
ing,
regional varieties of
English.23
simpliªcation, and production of
the impact of demography and mobility on early american
speech ways
If nonlinguistic factors play an important, even a
23 Kerswill and Williams,”Creating a New Town Koine,” 70, 85, 89, 90, 92; Siegel, "Re-
view Article,” 107, 110, 115, 117–118; Trudgill, Dialects in Contact, 98. Montgomery and
Kytö conclude that, given the absence of adequate documentary evidence of colonial speech,
scholars are justiªed in assuming, under the uniformitarian principle, that the factors affecting
language development in the past are similar to those in the present (Montgomery, “Was Co-
lonial American English a Koine?” 232; Kytö, “Emergence of American English,” 126).
24 Trudgill, Dialects in Contact, 95–98 (95); idem, “A Window on the Past: ‘Colonial Lag’
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 527
determinative, role in linguistic change, what elements beyond
the mingling of English dialect speakers helped to shape colonial
American English? What historically speciªc demographical and
social circumstances inºuenced the re-patterning of pronunciation
and vocabulary?
Because Fischer is most interested in origins and retentions,
he stresses the contributions from the ªrst settlers’ homeland dia-
lects. But corollary to that approach and corroborating other im-
portant aspects of Fischer’s analysis, sociolinguists studying linguis-
tic change in immigrant speech communities focus on the key role
of immigrants’ children and grandchildren. All speakers affect the
evolution of language but in different ways. In-migrating adults
accommodate to the dialects that they encounter even as they re-
main oriented toward their home regions’ dialects. Their children
Und, especially, their grandchildren experience the diminishing
repertoire of variants available from the dialects in contact, sowie
the emerging compromise dialect. They contribute most
als
heavily to the development of a compromise dialect. Zweite- Und
third-generation native-born speakers are central to the linguistic
focusing that leads to a stable idiom. These are the generations
during which koines ªrst appear. Somit, the percentage of chil-
dren arriving with or born to an immigrant generation, the rates at
which subsequent generations reproduce, the rate and volume of
later immigration, and the proportion of immigrants during the
second and third generations all shape dialect mixing and koinei-
zation. Geburt, Tod, and immigration rates can accelerate or retard
leveling and the emergence and stabilization of a new dialect. Von
particular importance is the extent of geographical mobility lead-
ing to social interaction among speakers. Koineization typically
takes at least three generations by which point native-born speak-
ers are often communicating in “a relatively uniªed and distinctive
dialect.”24
These sorts of social and demographical elements undoubt-
edly shaped colonial English. Though colonials everywhere bore
offspring, demographical experience varied by region. From the
and New Zealand Evidence for the Phonology of Nineteenth-Century English,” American
Speech, 74 (1999), 227–239; idem et al., “Determinism,” 302–311; Kerswill and Williams,
“Creating a New Town Koine,” 68–70, 89, 90, 95, 101, 102; Siegel, “Mixing, Leveling, Und
Pidgin/Creole Development,” 128–129.
25
John J. McCusker and Russell R. Menard, The Economy of British America, 1607–1789
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528 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
outset, New England and Mid-Atlantic settlers replaced them-
selves by natural means. Within half a century, zweite- and third-
generation native-born colonials outnumbered the founding im-
migrant generations as well as later-arriving immigrants. But re-
production alone does not direct linguistic change. Seventeenth-
century New Englanders tended not to move out of the relatively
self-contained towns. Isolation probably made the ªrst two gener-
ations’ speech comparatively diffuse. The descendants in the third
Generation, who lived during the transitional decades surrounding
1700, and those in the fourth generation, were more mobile, geo-
graphically and socially, thus increasing social and commercial in-
teraction and likely accelerating linguistic leveling.25
Mid-Atlantic Anglophone colonials were,
von Anfang an,
more mobile, more connected to commercial networks, Und
more involved with a demographically diverse population across a
wider area. Those factors may have accelerated dialect leveling.
Im Gegensatz, 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
the ratio of American-born to immigrant
immigration, kept
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.26
(Chapel Hill, 1985), 217–219, 226–227, 229, 235; Philipp J. Greven, Jr., Four Generations: Popu-
lation, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, 1970), 22–37, 39–40, 104–
120, 123, 125–130, 155–171, 176–196, 211–214, 270–271; Kenneth A. Lockridge, A New
England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York, 1970),
65–68, 146; Gary B. Nash, “Social Development,” in Greene and J. R. Pole (Hrsg.), Colonial
British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore, 1984), 237, 243;
Jim Potter, “Demographical Development and Family Structure,” in ibid., 123–156; Kytö,
“Emergence of American English,” 132.
26 Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America (New York, 1988), 96–99; James T.
Lemon, The Best Poor Man’s Country: A Geographical Study of Early Southeastern Pennsylvania
(New York, 1976; orig. Kneipe. 1972), 10, 13, 71–77; Stephanie Grauman Wolf, Urban Village:
Bevölkerung, Community, and Family Structure in German Town, Pennsylvania 1683–1800 (Prince-
Tonne, 1976), 12–14, 71–81, 94–95, 110–112, 127–153, 332; McCusker and Menard, Economy of
British America, 207–208, 229; Nash, “Social Development,” 238–241, 243–244; Töpfer,
“Demographical Development, 142–144; Allan Kulikoff, “The Colonial Chesapeake: Seed-
bed of Antebellum Southern Culture?” Journal of Southern History, XL (1979), 520–521, 537;
idem, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Cultures in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800
(Chapel Hill, 1986), 32–34, 49–61; McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, 217–
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 529
Some observers attributed the emergence of the regional vari-
eties in American English to other social conditions besides
demographical ones. John Witherspoon, a Scottish immigrant
who became president of the College of New Jersey and signed
the Declaration of Independence, expressed a common opinion
that “being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from
place to place,” Americans were “not so liable to local peculiarities
either of accent or phraseology.” The citizens of his adopted
country certainly had an urge to move. Many of them settled
somewhere, only later to pull up stakes and go somewhere else.
Internal migration threw together speakers of the full array of
English dialects. Historical linguists have long held that, beginning
in the colonial era and throughout American history, geographical
mobility had a leveling inºuence on American speech. But in
early modern Britain, geographical mobility generated dialect
contact without leading to dialect leveling and simpliªcation.
Folglich, linguists conclude that physical relocation by itself
does not inevitably produce dialect melding. The contact among
dialects generated by migration is only a potential ªrst step in a
complex process of linguistic change.27
colonial inducements to alter speech patterns Large-scale
linguistic change occurs through myriad small-scale speech events,
countless encounters between individuals who unconsciously ad-
just their speech styles to one another. Social psychologists lend to
sociolinguistics a paradigm of such interactions called speech-
accommodation theory. It examines the psychosocial factors be-
hind individual style shifting, as well as some of its social conse-
quences. It tries to explain the motivations that lead to speech
in The Miscellaneous Works of
John Witherspoon, The Druid [1781],
220, 227–228; Darrett B. Rutman and Anita H. Rutman, A Place in Time: Middlesex County,
Virginia, 1650–1750 (New York, 1984), 114, 236–240.
the Rev. John
27
Witherspoon (Philadelphia, 1803), 181, 191; Bailyn, Peopling, 49–86; Jessica Cross, The Evolu-
tion of an American Town: Newtown, New York, 1642–1775 (Philadelphia, 1983), 31–33, 110–111;
Greven, Four Generations, 39–40, 125–130, 155–171, 211–214, 270–271; Lemon, Best Poor
Man’s Country, 71–77; Lockridge, New England Town, 146; McCusker and Menard, Economy
of British America, 138, 142–143, 207–208; Wolf, Urban Village, 71–81, 94–95, 110–112, 332;
Boorstin, Americans, 271–273; Marckwardt and Dillard, American English, 70, 89; Thomas
Pyles, Words and Ways of American English (New York, 1952), 72; Quirk, English Language, 4.
On geographical mobility and language change, see Hickey, "Einführung,” 20.
28 Leslie M. Beebe and Howard Giles, “Speech-Accommodation Theories: A Discussion
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530 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
convergence—adaptation by interacting individuals to one an-
other’s speech—and speech divergence—speakers’ accentuation
of differences. Speech-accommodation theory posits that individ-
uals are motivated toward convergence to attain one or more of
three goals—efªciency in communication, social approval, Und
positive social identity. Another possible distinct motivating factor
that the theory recognizes is the pursuit of material interests in the
form of occupational mobility or economic gain. Among the ele-
ments determining the magnitude of linguistic convergence are
environmental conditions “that may increase the need for social
approval and/or high communicational efªciency.” This recogni-
tion of environmental factors makes room for the inºuence of
such material interests.28
Both the motivating goals and the conditions that shape lin-
guistic convergence were present in the colonies. At least one
eighteenth-century commentator, foreshadowing those ideas, rec-
ognized that not just geographical movement but also social inter-
action prompted Anglophone colonials to drop “the peculiarities
of their several provincial idioms, retaining only what was funda-
mental and common to them all.” “Intercourse and intermar-
riages” fostered what later linguists would call speech accommo-
dation. Geographical mobility jumbled Anglophones within the
American landscape.29
More pertinent to the present point, colonials organized a
collective way of life oriented toward both settlement and resettle-
ment. At every stage of internal migration, they had to adjust and
adapt, meaning that they had to communicate with one another
and accommodate their speech. Colonial life became increasingly
mobile physically and ºuid socially. Colonizers needed viable
working communities, comprising a wide range of individuals and
social groups, to contest indigenous peoples and imperial rivals for
territory and resources. Accomplishing such geopolitical goals also
required the motivation of material, psychic, and social rewards.
Colonization facilitated individual and familial quests for greater
wealth and higher status. These factors certainly prompted indi-
in Terms of Second-Language Acquisition,” International Journal of the Sociology of Language,
XLVI (Amsterdam, 1984), 5–32.
29
olution (London, 1793), II, v.
“Advertisement of an English Friend,” in David Ramsay, The History of the American Rev-
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 531
viduals to accommodate their speech styles to one another, sowie
as toward standard English.30
The imperatives and motivations that spurred colonization af-
fected the transfer of speech in yet another way. Because English
speech marked social station, the general absence of upper-class
Britons from transatlantic migration inhibited direct transplanta-
tion of elite social dialects. Infolge, individuals in every colonial
region and, more to the point, all social ranks employed speech
forms that Britons of higher status thought vulgar. Zum Beispiel,
many colonials pronounced cover as kivver, engine as ingine, yesterday
as yisterday, yes as yis, and Sarah as Sary. In Britain, these pronunci-
ations 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.31
Immigration to colonial British America generated new
ethnocultural patterns that inºuenced American speech ways.
Apart from the settlers of New Netherlands, the tiny Swedish
settlements on the Delaware,
and some Welsh migrants,
seventeenth-century colonizers were overwhelmingly English. Als
ein Ergebnis, several generations of Anglophone colonials in many
places developed leveled and increasingly identiªable American
speech before the arrival of speakers of Scots, the Scottish variety
of English, or any continental European language. Not until the
eighteenth century, especially after 1720, did large numbers of im-
migrants arrive from all parts of the British Isles—Scotland and
Ireland as well as England and Wales—and from Europe, intro-
ducing an even greater range of dialects and tongues. But these
new arrivals came into colonies that had been forming distinctive
ways of speaking for two to ªve generations. Their impact on
mid-Atlantic colonial English speech came only in the form of re-
gional variations, not radical and difªcult-to-comprehend dialect
differences.
By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, these later im-
30 Cross, Evolution, 31–33, 110–111; Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic
Empire,” in Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Hrsg.), Strangers within the Realm: Cultural Margins of
the First British Empire (Chapel Hill, 1991), 96–97.
31 Dillard, All-American English, 54; idem, Toward a Social History of American English, 57–58;
Kurath, Word Geography, 4, 7; Sen, “Dialect Variation,” 41–47.
32 On English linguistic dominance, see Sally Schwartz, “A Mixed Multitude”: The Struggle
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532 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
migrants either abandoned their native tongues and completely as-
similated to English (Swedes, Welsh, and many Dutch) or prac-
ticed situational code switching, using their native tongues in
ethnocultural enclaves and speaking English in the wider world
(Dutch and Germans). In a sense, both British regional-dialect
speakers and immigrants who spoke other languages faced the
same linguistic situation. They all had to accommodate to the es-
tablished and dominant speech of Anglophone native speakers, Die
North American varieties of English. Darüber hinaus, elite and mid-
dling colonials increasingly sought to merge this speech with the
standard English of the imperial metropolis—the language of gov-
ernance and business for all colonials regardless of ethnocultural or
linguistic background, as well as a means of social mobility and a
marker of social status. Non-Anglophone colonials who wished to
rise had to switch codes in particular situations or assimilate com-
pletely to the dominant varieties.32
By the 1720s, the bulk of white inhabitants along most of the
Atlantic seaboard were no longer immigrants speaking a myriad of
English dialects. Most were now natives who probably spoke lev-
eled colonial forms of English. Regional varieties that derived
speakers had probably
from the varying mixtures of dialect
emerged, but the differences among them were, literally, not so
pronounced as the divergences among homeland British dialects.
Many colonials were likely using several, mutually intelligible, Re-
for Toleration in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York, 1987), 80, 86, 88–90; on Dutch, Randall H.
Balmer, A Perfect Babel of Confusion: Dutch Religion and English Culture in the Middle Colonies
(New York, 1989), 29, 72–73, 89, 100, 117–119, 120–121, 129–130, 139, 141–144, 152–153,
225, N. 36; Cross, Evolution, 143–144, 163, 172, 257–258, 271; Donna Merwick, Death of a
Notary: Conquest and Change in Colonial New York (Ithaca, 1999), 152, 154–155, 171–172,
182, 236, 238; A.Gregg Roeber, “‘The Origin of Whatever Is Not English among Us’:
The Dutch-speaking and the German-speaking Peoples of Colonial British America," In
Bailyn and Morgan (Hrsg.), 221, 223–236; Alexander J. Wall, “The Controversy in the Dutch
Church in New York Concerning Preaching in English,” New-York Historical Society
Quarterly, XII (1938), 39–58; on German, Roeber, “‘Origin,’” 221, 244–282; Schwartz,
“Mixed Multitude,” 7–8, 25–26, 73, 79, 131, 145–146, 148, 150, 185–193, 216, 231–232, 235,
244, 251–253, 263, 289, 293, 360, N. 232; Wolf, Urban Village, 138–153; on Swedish,
Schwartz, “Mixed Multitude,” 69–73, 78–79, 99–100, 108–109, 293; on Welsh, Boyd
Schlenther, “’The English is Swallowing Up Their Language’: Welsh Ethnic Ambivalence in
Colonial Pennsylvania and the Experience of David Evans,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History
and Biography, CXIV (1990), 201–228; Schwartz, “Mixed Multitude,” 25, 77–78, 79, 109–110,
293; on “the founder principle,” the important role of founding generations in language for-
mation, see Hickey, "Einführung,” 12–13; on Scotch and Irish inºuences on American
Midland speech, Montgomery, “Solving Kurath’s Puzzle”; idem, “British and Irish Anteced-
ents,” 133–136.
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 533
gional koines. Darüber hinaus, whereas the ªrst settlements were a bro-
ken chain, the colonies after 1670 stretched continuously along
the seaboard. Infolge, from the late seventeenth to the mid-
eighteenth century, intercolonial migration may have woven the
several earlier regional processes of leveling into a more extensive
continental process. This expansion did not generate an American
continental koine but may have helped to make the several re-
gional varieties more comprehensible to one another.
eighteenth-century descriptions of american english Such
were the developments that Jones and other commentators de-
scribed to British readers. Their accounts ªrst appeared in the
1720s and continued into the nineteenth century. Some historical
linguists have raised important questions about their value as
sources of linguistic data, Aber, despite their limitations, these data
can yield useful evidence.
The range of observers is noteworthy. Many made “tours” of
Nordamerika, but they were not mere tourists in the modern
sense. “Tours” could extend from a few months to several years.
Zusätzlich, books titled “Tours” or “Travels” could be much
more than impressionistic descriptions of a place. They were often
forerunners of modern, ªrst-person ethnographic reports. More-
über, the most valuable descriptions did not come from travelers
but from observers who stayed in the colonies for a longer time.
Among them, William Eddis and Jonathan Boucher eventually re-
turned to England, but Eddis was secretary to Maryland’s gover-
nor from 1769 Zu 1777 and Boucher a tutor and Anglican parson
in the Chesapeake from 1759 Zu 1775. Jones taught at the College
of William and Mary from 1716 Zu 1721, and after brieºy revisit-
ing England, spent the rest of his life in Virginia and Maryland.
Witherspoon, zu, abandoned England for good. Other important
commentators were native-born Americans, most notably Ben-
jamin Franklin, Noah Webster, and Timothy Dwight.33
33 Thomas Anburey, Travels Through The Interior Parts of America (New York, 1969; orig.
Kneipe. London, 1789), 2v.; Patrick Campbell, Travels in the Interior Inhabited Parts of North Amer-
ica in the Years 1791 Und 1792 (Toronto, 1937; orig. Kneipe. Edinburgh, 1793); Nicholas Cresswell,
The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774–1777 (New York, 1924); John Davis, Travels of Four Years
and a Half in the United States of America During 1798, 1799, 1800, 1801, Und 1802 (New York,
1909; orig. Kneipe. London, 1803); Adam Gordon, “Journal of an Ofªcer’s Travels in America
and the West Indies, 1764–1765,” in Newton D. Mereness (Hrsg.), Travels in the American Col-
onies (New York, 1916); Johann David Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation [1783–1784] (Phila-
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534 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
These men wrote lengthy accounts based not only on exten-
sive personal observation but also on research. Jones’ The Present
State of Virginia (London, 1724) is a major primary source for early
eighteenth-century Virginia. Eddis’ Letters From America . . . 1769
Zu 1777 offers a shrewd description of late colonial America by a
functionary of the imperial administration. Dwight’s Travels in
New England and New York is a hefty four-volume overview of the
early national northeastern United States.34
Their keenness did not necessarily qualify them for linguistic
Analyse. None could be called a professional linguist in the mod-
ern academic sense. The travelers were amateurs; the sojourners
and permanent settlers were serious students of languages. Jones
and Webster came the closest to the current conception of a lin-
guist. Noch, scholars who question the value of this sort of evidence
tend to overlook Jones. His An Accidence to the English Tongue was
the ªrst grammar written in America. A contribution to the trans-
atlantic language-reform movement, it sought to ªx “a Publick
Standard” by serving as “a Touchstone to true English.” His in-
tended audience was not just colonials; it also included Britons and
“Foreigners,” by which he meant non-Anglophone European im-
migrants. The other commentators were not linguists, but they
were men of letters. Most made their living with words, as schol-
ars, clergymen, or colonial administrators, a few of them assuming
more than one of those roles.35
delphia, 1911), II, 62. Montgomery, “Was Colonial American English a Koine?” 218, calls
these observers “visitors, travelers, and journalists, mostly British”; Cooley, “Emerging Stan-
dard,” 169, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 183, labels their comments “journalistic.” The
terms journalist and journalistic do not accurately describe these writers. They did not keep
journals in the more modern private sense; they intended their accounts for a public audience.
The profession of journalism did not exist in the eighteenth century. William Eddis (Hrsg.
Aubrey C. Land), Letters From America (Cambridge, Masse., 1969); Anne Y. Zimmer, Jonathan
Boucher, Loyalist in Exile (Detroit, 1978); Morton, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Jones, Present
State of Virginia, 3–44; Martha Lou Lemmon Stohlman, John Witherspoon: Parson, Politician, Pa-
triot (Philadelphia, 1976).
34 Dwight (Hrsg. Barbara Miller Solomon and Patricia M. King), Travels in New England and
New York (New York, 1969), 4v. Montgomery, “Was Colonial American English a Koine?”
218, argues that “we know almost nothing about the range and frequency of contacts such
observers had with the common populace.” But given the length of time that they resided in
Amerika, anywhere from seven years to a lifetime, and the nature of early American social re-
Beziehungen, as well as the extensive research that many of them did, these commentators’ descrip-
tions were not likely to have sprung from ºeeting observation.
35 Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 175, distinguishes between “professional” and “nonpro-
fessional” commentators. Referring to individuals such as Webster, Montgomery coins the
term “language specialists” (“Was Colonial American English a Koine?” 219; “British and Irish
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 535
More important, a number of these observers were active in
the language-reform campaign. Jones was the earliest and Webster
the most noted. Witherspoon made his contribution, as did
Boucher to a lesser degree. They did not apply modern, profes-
sional linguistic modes of analysis. Their observations reºected the
the contemporaneous
assumptions,
movement to reform English speech and writing throughout the
Anglophone world. Although they usually described colonial
English only in general terms, they clearly operated from the per-
spective of a language reformer.36
Standards, and agendas of
Beyond their shared assumptions about the English language,
they had widely varying relationships to the colonies that were to
become the independent United States. Jones and Franklin sup-
ported expansion of the Empire, but Franklin became an Ameri-
can nationalist, as did Witherspoon, Webster, and Dwight. Eddis
and Boucher remained loyal; in fact, Boucher vehemently de-
nounced the American Revolution and his former friend George
Washington. Franklin could be called at least a proto-democrat,
whereas Webster and Dwight favored elite rule. Despite these ma-
jor differences in social and political perspective, all of these com-
mentators adopted substantially similar standards for evaluating
English usage and offered substantially similar descriptions of
eighteenth-century American English. As usually happens “when
speakers from the mother country comment upon their language
as spoken in a colony”—in this case, travelers, sojourners, and im-
migrants, as well as American-born colonials schooled in metro-
politan Standard English—they were struck by the ways in which
colonial speech differed from typical English provincial speech.
More than any other feature, they perceived North American
English as unmarked by dialect differences—as homogeneous.37
Antecedents,” 98). Like journalism, the concept of professionalism is largely anachronistic for
the eighteenth century, particularly regarding an academic specialization such as linguistics.
Jones, Accidence, 22, title page; Murray Cohen, Sensible Words: Linguistic Practice in England,
1640–1785 (Baltimore, 1977), 51–52, 59; Richard J. Watt, “Mythical Strands in the Ideology
of Prescriptivism,” in Laura Wright (Hrsg.), The Development of Standard English 1300–1800: Der-
ories, Descriptions, Conºicts (New York, 2000), 38–39.
36 Montgomery argues that the assumptions behind these observers’ judgments are hidden,
but he does not consider their views within the context of the eighteenth-century language-
reform movement (“Was Colonial American English a Koine?” 218–219; “British and Irish
Antecedents,” 93–94, 97–98). Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” explores the inºuence of British
linguistic standards on colonial American usage.
37 An anonymous reader of an earlier version of this article, a linguist, suggested giving
these eighteenth-century
more thought
to the possible motives behind the claims of
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536 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
homogeneous and dialect-free
In 1724, Jones, the ªrst to
comment on the emergence of distinctive American modes of
Rede, contrasted them with England’s dialects. Like many
prescriptivists, he mistakenly attributed dialect differences to igno-
rance and slovenliness about proper pronunciation and vocabu-
lary. Regarding English provincials’ pronunciation, he wrote,
“some Counties not only change the Sound of one Vowel for the
Sound of another; but also drawl their Sound either too long, oder
too ºat; and others speak too quick, and sharp; or else use the
wrong Sound of the same Vowel.” “Neither should the Western
Manner of using (v) für (F) Und (z) für (S) pass unobserved,” he said,
citing a feature that Fischer would mention two-and-a-half centu-
ries later.
Regarding vocabulary, Jones noted that regional inhabitants
sometimes used words “peculiar to the Place where they dwell;
thus some say thick and thuck for this and that [another example that
Fischer shares with him]; bodder is used in one Place, and dunny in
another, instead of deaf; anunt for against; awarter for cross; yatt for
gate; tupp for ramm, &c.” Jones’ taxonomy of dialects illustrates
how carefully language reformers attended to such differences and
opposed them. Starting from that perspective, he contrasted
homeland provincials’ dialect diversity with Virginians’ and other
colonials’ usage of the mother tongue. In Jones’ view, colonial
speech did not transplant noticeable features of British dialects.
Anglophone settlers had leveled out English dialect differences.38
commentators—such as the desire to break away from Britain and to promote new ideas of
equality and classlessness. Notions of “equality," Jedoch, did not become a powerful force
until the early nineteenth century, and “classlessness” does not accurately describe how Amer-
icans have ever thought about social relations. Opportunity and social mobility would be
more accurate. Americans who began to espouse “equality” and “democracy” during the
1780s and 1790s faced the opposition of elitists in favor of a traditional social hierarchy.
Dwight and Webster, being elitists and High Federalists, were not attempting to erase the lin-
guistic markers used in Britain to reinforce social rank. American nationalists, might have
liked the idea of promoting the existence of an American national language. But Boucher and
Eddis, who became British loyalists and left America at the beginning of the Revolution, als-
serted the homogeneity of colonial American English even more emphatically than the na-
tionalists did. Darüber hinaus, neither Jones in the 1720s nor Franklin in the 1750s could have been
inºuenced by nationalistic motives, because no colonials expressed or harbored such thoughts
until the 1760s. Marckwardt and Dillard, American English, 69–70, 89; Montgomery, “British
and Irish Antecedents,” 97, 98.
38
Jones, Accidence, 11-15; idem, Present State of Virginia, 80.
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 537
By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, many observ-
ers were describing this leveled colonial speech as well-established
and well-known. In 1759, Franklin invoked as common knowl-
edge that, although in England individuals’ geographical origins
could be pinpointed by their speech, in North America they could
nicht. 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 di-
alect . . . but in Maryland and throughout the adjacent provinces,
it is worthy of observation that a striking similarity of speech uni-
versally 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 Amer-
ica.” Cresswell, a Derbyshireman who traveled through the Ches-
apeake and the mid-Atlantic, reported, “No County or Colonial
dialect is to be distinguished here, except it be the New England-
ers, who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.”
Boucher considered “the Varieties” of pronunciation in England
and the absence of dialects in the colonies “extraordinary.” “In
Nordamerika,” he reported with wonder, “there prevails . . . A
perfect uniformity.”39
Boucher went too far. Colonial speech was not perfectly uni-
bilden. Regional and local variations were apparent, as was individ-
ual style shifting. Aber, like Boucher, other observers were prone to
overstate its homogeneity because of its obvious contrast with the
profusion of sharp dialect divergences among British speakers.
This relative lack of difference probably resulted from the mixing,
leveling, and simpliªcation that sociolinguists frequently detect in
extraterritorial varieties of a language.40
When observers described colonial English speech as “uni-
bilden,” they did not mean “invariant.” Language use is never truly
homogeneous. Local and individual variations in pronunciation
39 Franklin to the Printer of the Chronicle, The London Chronicle: oder, Universal Evening Post,
10–12 May, 1759, in Leonard W. Labaree et al. (Hrsg.), Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Ha-
ven, 1965), VIII, 340–342; Eddis, Letters
from America, 33; Witherspoon, Druid, 181;
Cresswell, Zeitschrift, 271. Montgomery, “British and Irish Antecedents,” 97–98, points out that
visitors to a new locale often noticed speakers’ intonation ªrst. Jonathan Boucher to Rev. Herr.
James, Dezember 23, 1777, “Letters of Rev. Jonathan Boucher,” Maryland Historical Magazine,
X (1916), 30.
40 Montgomery, “British and Irish Antecedents,” 97–98.
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538 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
and vocabulary appeared throughout the eighteenth century. Al-
though they never restricted intelligibility, they may have gradu-
ally increased. The limited literary evidence for the early to mid-
eighteenth century suggests that regional varieties had already
emerged. The more abundant evidence for the late eighteenth
century indicates that American speech was obviously—perhaps
audibly—displaying greater regional variation. Although observers
still spoke of the comparative uniformity of American speech,
many also began to acknowledge the differences.41
Noch, observers continued to describe American speech as
largely undifferentiated when compared to English speech.
Dwight declared that the differences among Bostonians’, Neu
Yorkers’, and Philadelphians’ accents did not compare with the
extreme divergences among English speakers. Although for years
he had taught “youths from almost all the American states” at Yale
College, he “ordinarily” could not “conjecture from their pro-
nunciation the part of the country which gave them birth.” To
him, “the differences of pronunciation” among Americans were
“of no moment.” The same could not “be said of an equal num-
ber of people in any country of Europe.” In America, Nichts
could “be called without an abuse of language, dialect.” Like
Boucher, Jedoch, Dwight overstated the case. But even his hy-
perbole manages to illustrate what was most important, and char-
acteristic, about early American speech.42
“good,” “pure, and “true” This eighteenth-century percep-
tion of American English as homogeneous and dialect-free was
linked to its evaluation as “good,” “pure,” and “true.” Though
only a few writers cited speciªc examples, many mentioned two
areas of this speech that achieved the standard represented by Lon-
don and its environs—pronunciation/accent and vocabulary/
41 For examples of variation from New England, see Sarah Kemble Knight, The Journal of
Madam Knight [1704; New York, 1825], in Wendy Martin,(Hrsg.), Colonial American Travel Nar-
(New York, 1994), 49–75. Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 168, 170–173, 183;
ratives
Witherspoon, Druid, 181–197. On late eighteenth-century New England speech,
sehen
Anburey, Travels through the Interior, II, 51; Campbell, Travels in the Interior, 157; Cresswell,
Zeitschrift, 271; Read, “British Recognition of American Speech,” 325–328; Henry M. Brooks,
The Olden Time Series. Gleanings Chieºy from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts
(Boston, 1886), 54–55; Davis, Travels of Four Years and a Half, 401.
42 Dwight, Travels in New England and New York, ICH, 367–68; IV, 196.
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 539
phraseology. Eddis declared, “the pronunciation of the generality
of the people has an accuracy and elegance that cannot fail of grati-
fying the most judicious ear.” Boucher claimed that colonials ex-
hibited “the purest Pronunciation of the English Tongue that is
anywhere to be met with.” The terms “accuracy,” “elegance,”
and “purity” were gauges that prescriptivists applied to measure
conformity to standard English.43
Gordon, a Scottish soldier who toured the colonies in the
1760S, made virtually the same point about word usage and gram-
mar. He confessed, “the propriety of Language here [in Philadel-
phia] surprized me much, the English tongue being spoken by all
ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection, surpassing any, aber die
polite part of London.” What his use of the prescriptivist concepts
of “propriety,” “purity,” and “perfection” intended to convey was
that the speech of Philadelphians conformed to the deªnitions and
grammatical rules accepted by the metropolitan elite. Gordon
heard colonial speech for only a few months. Those who heard it
for years often agreed that colonials of “all ranks” spoke proper
English. Already in the mid-1720s, Jones announced that colo-
nials’ speech was “good” and “true” English. Half a century later,
Witherspoon asserted, “the vulgar in America speak much better
than the vulgar in Great-Britain.” Cresswell summed up the eigh-
teenth-century consensus when he declared that Americans “in
general speak better English than the English do.”44
Instead of applying objective standards, the observers said
that the colonials did not reproduce the regional dialects that lan-
guage reformers considered corruptions of “pure” English. Jones
and Witherspoon might conceivably have wanted to show that
colonials were by no means uncivilized bumpkins to place Ameri-
can divergences in a favorable light, but Boucher and Eddis,
43 Eddis, Letters from America, 33; Boucher, “Letters,” 30.
44 Adam Gordon,”Journal of an Ofªcer’s Travels,” 411; Jones, Accidence, 13-15; idem, Pres-
ent State of Virginia, 80; Read, “British Recognition of American Speech in the 18th Cen-
tury,” 322, N. 37; idem, “Bilingualism in the Middle Colonies, 1725–1775,” American Speech,
XII (1937), 93–99; Witherspoon, Druid, 181; Cresswell, Zeitschrift, 271. James Adams, The Pro-
nunciation of the English Language Vindicated from Imputed Anomaly & Caprice (Menston, Ing-
Land, 1968; orig. Kneipe. Edinburgh, 1799), 144–146, described Anglophone dialects in various
regions of the British Isles where “the English classical pronunciation is counteracted.” In
Kontrast, “the Anglo-Americans speak English with great classical purity. Dialect in general is
there less prevalent than in Britain, except amongst the poor slaves.”
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540 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
who made the same claim, became loyalists. Somit, Revolution-
ary incentives do not explain the prevailing view of colonial
speech.45
Other evidence suggests that emulation of a metropolitan lin-
guistic standard may be common in colonial societies. Während der
seventeenth century, a range of French dialects was initially trans-
planted in the French colony on the St. Lawrence River. By the
eighteenth century, Jedoch, many French Canadians appear to
have spoken a strain of their language fairly close to Parisian
French—the emerging “national,” and therefore “imperial,” stan-
dard. This phenomenon allegedly occurred not only among elite
Canadians but also among Canadians in the lower social ranks.
Kalm, a Swedish visitor who toured the northern English colonies
and Canada from 1748 Zu 1751, reported, “All are of the opinion
that in Canada the ordinary man speaks a purer French than in any
province in France, yea that in this respect it can vie with Paris
itself.” As with the observers of eighteenth-century British colo-
nial speech, the hard linguistic data that would conªrm Kalm’s
claims are not available. dennoch, the observation recurs fre-
quently enough in different colonial situations to warrant serious
consideration.46
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 va-
riety of dialects, psychological motivations promoting conver-
gence 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
45 Two centuries later, Thomas Pyles, The Origins and Development of the English Language
(New York, 1964), 222–223, explained that “all types of American English have grown out of
the regional modiªcations of the British Standard.” For that reason, “American English re-
sembles present Standard British English more closely than it resembles any other British type
of speech” and, daher, “compared with British English . . . and other European languages,
American speech is quite homogeneous.” See also Longmore, “‘They . . . speak better Eng-
lish’”; Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 180–184.
46 Peter Kalm (Hrsg. Adolph B. Benson), Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America (New York,
1937), ICH, 554; J. M. Bumsted, “The Cultural Landscape of Early Canada,” in Bailyn and Mor-
gan (Hrsg.), Strangers, 369.
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THE COLON IAL ORIG INS OF A M ERI CAN SPEECH | 541
British colonial elite and middling classes assiduously copied not
just British, or even English, cultural forms; they speciªcally tar-
geted southeastern English fashions, Ideen, institutional models,
and other cultural features. This pattern is typical of colonial elites,
especially in the mature phase of colonies’ development. Im
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.47
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 imper-
atives and motivations inherent in empire-building, prompted
Anglophone colonials to accommodate their various speech ways
to one another. By the early eighteenth century, American variet-
ies of English, extraterritorial immigrant koines, began to emerge
in several regions. In der Zwischenzeit, the settlers’ status within the impe-
rial system also shaped these mixed colonial varieties. In such soci-
ethisch, 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
inºuentially
those in the elite and middling ranks—consciously and uncon-
sciously copied metropolitan Standard English. Both higher-status
and upwardly mobile colonials used this “proper” and “true” Eng-
lish to mark their status within the colonial social hierarchy and el-
evate their individual and collective standing within the Empire.
The regionally differentiated but comprehensible, American colo-
nial language system helped prepare Anglophone colonials to re-
ceive the idea of American nationhood. Although British speech
47 Cross, Evolution, 31–33, 110–111; Kytö, “Emergence of American English,” 124;
Marckwardt and Dillard, American English, 70, 89; Quirk, English Language, 4; Richards,
“Scotland,” 96–97; Longmore, “‘They . . . speak better English.’” Montgomery, “Was Colo-
nial American English a Koine?” 231–232, reasonably concludes that style shifting—accom-
modating 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. Sehen
also Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 180–184. If Montgomery is correct, such style shifting
may have reºected 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.
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542 | PAUL K. LONGM OR E
displayed a diversity of dialects that standardizing reformers and
British nationalists had to combat, American Revolutionary na-
tionalists did not need to impose a common “national” language.
The dominant Anglophone members of the “nation” already ef-
fectively possessed one.48
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48 Cooley, “Emerging Standard,” 168–178; Dillard, All-American English, 45–76; idem, To-
ward a Social History of American English, 51–72; Kytö, Variation and Diachrony, 18–23;
Marckwardt and Dillard, American English, 89; Read, “British Recognition of American
Speech,” 325. On the continued relative homogeneity of American as compared to British
English, see Pyles, Words and Ways, 69–71; Quirk, English Language and Images of Matter, 4–7;
Marckwardt and Dillard, American English, 70; Boorstin, Americans, 273; Pyles, Origins and De-
velopment, 220.
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