The Beginnings of American English

Scope: American English begins with the initial patterns of settlement in the early 17th century.
In this lecture, we look at the nature of those settlements, the historical contexts of 17th - and
18th - century colonization, and the origins of dialect boundaries based in these early settlements.
In addition, we will try to recover the sound and texture of early American English: its
pronunciation, the distinctive features of its grammar and vocabulary, and its divergence from
British English. Finally, we will examine some representative attitudes toward American English
in the 18th century, in accord with this courses focus on the social history of language use and
change.
Outline
I. In this last third of the course, we will focus on the language of America and, more broadly,
the transition of English from the British Isles to the colonies and to the world.
A. One of the central questions we will ask is: What is the relationship between language and
national identity? Further, how did the legacies of colonial expansion and British education
inform the idioms and ideologies of America, India, Australia, South Africa, and Canada?
B. As we study the English language in America, we will look at vocabulary, grammar,
pronunciation, and style. As well see, the differences between British and American English
were noticed relatively early in the life of the American nation.
C. We will also return to the issue of dialects, dialectology as a discipline, and the literary
representation of dialects. Again, well look at the relationship between regionalism and a
standard.
II. Where did American English begin?
A. Early settlements were points of linguistic entry, and many of the seeds of American dialects
and regional forms come from these original settlement points.
1. In New England, settlement occurred in Boston and the Bay Colony in the early 17th century
and in New London, Connecticut, in the early 18th century.
2. The Middle Atlantic region saw settlement in New York (founded as New Amsterdam and
seized by the English from the Dutch in 1644) and Pennsylvania (with Philadelphia founded by
William Penn in 1681).
3. In the South Atlantic region, points of settlement included the Jamestown Colony in Virginia
(1607); Charleston, South Carolina (late 17th century); and Georgia in the 1730s.
B. These areas of settlement are points of dialect origin. Each place was settled by speakers of
distinctive English dialects, and the sounds and forms of the language descended from those
earlier English regions.
C. Many of these settlements were at the mouths of rivers, which became points of linguistic
change. As we saw in earlier lectures, natural boundaries often serve as dialect boundaries.

D. The West was settled beginning in the 19th century with the Louisiana Purchase (1803).
Contact was established with French-speaking groups in New Orleans and throughout the
Northwest. Non-European language groups helped form a regional dialect, and the contact
between English speakers and speakers of Native American languages brought new words into
the language.
E. The California Gold Rush (18481851) brought to the West a pioneering group mainly from
the Northeast. Many of the original settlers came to California by ship, and speech forms in
California came to resemble those of the Northeast.
III. Early American English produced sounds that were different from British English.
A. One of the key features of the sound of American English is the short a (known to
phoneticians as the aesch sound). This is the mid-front vowel heard in cat and hat. In British
English, this sound tended to be pronounced as ah, a sound that remains in the American
pronunciation of father. Some scholars have suggested that this was not a true linguistic change,
but a way of speaking that can be attributed to the pronunciation of the great 18th-century actor
David Garrick.
B. As weve noted in earlier lectures, the r sound becomes variable in certain environments
and often affects preceding vowels. Thus, we have variant pronunciations in England and
America of, for example, clerk (British clark, American clerk) or the name of the British
philosopher Barclay and the American university Berkeley. American English retains the
pronunciation of r at the ends of words (father) and in the middle (lord); British English tends
to reduce this sound.
C. Short o remains a rounded vowel in British English but is unrounded to more of an a
sound in American (not, hop, hot).
D. American English preserves full stresses in pronunciations of polysyllabic words, while
British English tends not to (secretary, necessary, literature).
IV. What differences can we find in grammar and morphology?
A. American English preserves some strong verbs in regional dialects. Recall that strong verbs
signal change in tense by altering meaningfully the root vowel. This tendency gives us
sportscaster Dizzy Deans great line, He slud into third.
B. American regional dialects recreate a second-person plural form in you and yall, as well as
your and youse.
C. In American English, collective nouns, such as the company or the public, take singular
verbs; in British English, they take the plural.
V. Many distinctions emerged in vocabulary in American and British English.

A. In some cases, the Americans and the British use different words for the same thing:
truck/lorry, trunk/boot, elevator/lift.
B. Interestingly, American English preserves older uses of such words as reckon and guess.
Phrases such as I reckon and I guess are obvious Americanisms, but they are really remnants
of much older forms of English, lost by British speakers.
VI. Mixed attitudes toward American English began to take shape as soon as individuals returned
to England from America.
A. Alexander Gil, writing in 1621, condemned the importation of such words as maize and canoe
into the language.
B. Travelers often recorded their responses to American English. Mrs. Frances Trollope, who
visited in the 1830s, commented, How very debased the language has become in such a short
period in America.
C. Certain words and phrases were classified early on as Americanisms: right away; to admire; to
fix (meaning to prepare).
VII. Lets turn now to the writings of two major figures in early America to help us understand
the nature of Americanisms and the relationship between British English and the emerging
language of the Americas.
A. John Witherspoon (1722/231794) came to America from Scotland in 1769 and became a key
figure in American politics and education. Writing in 1781, he argued that American education
needed to tighten up on the teaching of grammar and style.
1. He asserted that Americans committed frequent errors and improprieties of grammar and
usage.
2. For Witherspoon, improprieties were differences in grammar and usage from British English
among the literate and educated classes in America. What he called vulgarisms were terms
from the lower classes that had percolated up into the vocabulary of the educated.
3. But Witherspoon claimed that the vulgar in America speak better than the vulgar in
Britain, a fact explained by the greater mobility and, thus, greater standardization of dialect in
America.
4. Witherspoon coined the term Americanism, insisting that it didnt necessarily mean
inelegant or ignorant. He used the word growth in relation to the language as an aesthetic
term.
5. For Witherspoon, the American language was as distinctive as the American landscape.
Americanisms constituted a new discourse for a new country.
B. Another important figure writing about the language at this time was Noah Webster (1758
1834), born in Hartford, Connecticut, and educated at Yale University. He is best known today, of
course, as the eponymous creator of the dictionary.

1. Before Webster published his famous American Dictionary in 1828, he wrote frequently on
American usage and the ideals of American language.
2. His attitudes were similar to Joseph Priestleys on the relationships between language and
freedom and between language and national identity. In his Dissertations on the English
Language (1791), Webster wrote, A national language is a band of national union.
3. Webster argued that certain words for political or social institutions in Britain, such as
congress or senate, meant something radically different in America. Clearly, he sought to sustain
the notion of American independence and of an American language independent from that of
Britain.
4. In this sentiment and in the American Dictionary of the English Language as a whole, we see a
profound debt to Samuel Johnson and his philosophical inspirations.
a. Johnson noted in one of his essays that difference of thought produces difference of language.
He also felt strongly that a relationship existed between the source of ideas and of sensation.
b. When Webster wrote, Language is the expression of ideas, he was looking back toward a
Johnsonian empirical position that was keyed to the way in which the particular experience of
place generates new ideas.
5. In his Dictionarys preface, Johnson wrote about the futility of trying to fix the language: To
enchain a syllable and lash the wind are equally the undertakings of pride.
a. Such vocabulary could not but resonate in the minds of Johnsons American readers, wrestling
with the ideas of control and colonization.
b. In the same vein, in the preface to his American Dictionary, Webster compared the project of
fixing a language to an attempt to stop the course of the Mississippi, which he says, possesses a
momentum quite irresistible.
c. The American language is itself irresistible, and in subsequent lectures, well look at how it
grows, develops, and offers us new ways of understanding the variety and experience of our
unique culture.