8 English in North America
Edward Finegan
8.1The colonial period: 1607–1776
In 1607, following several failed attempts, the English succeeded at Jamestown, Virginia, with their first permanent settlement in the New World. In the decades to follow, other English settlements were made at Massachusetts Bay, Plymouth, Providence and elsewhere.
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Explorers and settlers meet Native Americans |
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Along the Atlantic seaboard, explorers and settlers met, mixed with and sometimes married Native Americans and used Native American names for many artifacts in American life and culture, as well as for places and for unfamiliar plants and animals in the new environment. For other places and things English speakers invented new names or invoked familiar ones. Even before 1607, scores of Algonquian words already peppered English. In A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, first published in 1588, Thomas Harriot, an astronomer working for Sir Walter Raleigh, described openauk as ‘a kind of roots of round forme, some of the bignes of walnuts, some far greater’, and sacquenummener as ‘a kinde of berries almost like vnto capres but somewhat greater which grow together in clusters vpon a plant or herb that is found in shallow waters’; the berries would later be called cranberries. For various acorns, Harriot used their Algonquian names (sagatemener, osamener, pummuckoner, sapummener, mangummenauk), as he did for many New World plants, but these names did not survive in English. Among familiar ‘beastes’, he reported abundant deare, conies, squirels and beares, but for unfamiliar animals he again borrowed from Algonquian, calling two ‘small beastes greater then conies which are very good meat’ maquowoc and saquenuckot. Maquowoc, probably referring to mink or muskrat, did not stick, but saquenuckot, reinforced by related Algonquian words in other colonies, has become today’s skunk.
Other New World terms found their way into English before Jamestown, sometimes via Spanish, as with chocolate (through Spanish from Nahuatl), canoe (through French and Spanish from Cariban), cocoa (through Spanish from Nahuatl), maize (through Spanish from Arawakan) and savannah (through Spanish from Taino). Appearing early in the 1600s and still in use are moose, raccoon,
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opossum, moccasin, persimmon, tomahawk, terrapin, powwow, wigwam, hominy, squash, papoose, pone and squaw. More than a hundred others appeared later in the century and hundreds more later again, but many colonial borrowings and innovations flourished only temporarily. No one can determine how many New World words spoken by the colonists are now as alien as Harriot’s sagatemener and maquowoc. Nor could any colonist have predicted which borrowings and innovations would last. As Bailey (2004) notes, the history of North American English cannot be assessed adequately by what survives. To estimate the vocabulary and sounds of a language in earlier times would require familiarity with abundant contemporary documents, the less tutored the better.
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Maintenance and change |
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A modern glossary of colonial English (Lederer, 1985) identifies 3,000 expressions no longer widely familiar at least in their colonial use, including names for fabrics, clothing, food, drink, household items, games, dances, musical instruments, law and punishment, and medicine. It contains expressions for places and people first encountered in the New World and for flora and fauna previously unknown to the colonists. Entries from a single page include bark ‘a bed of Cyprus bark’, barkentine ‘a particular three-masted vessel’, barleycorn ‘one third of an inch or one gram’, barley water ‘a liquid used for inflammatory disorders’, barm ‘the scum that forms on top of fermenting beer’, burnish ‘to grow fat’, barony ‘a political division of a county in Pennsylvania and South Carolina’, barracan ‘a thick material like camlet’, barrow ‘a castrated hog’, basilicon ‘an ointment of beeswax, rosin and lard’, bason ‘a work bench with a heated metal plate’, basset ‘a certain card game’, bastard ‘a sweetened wine’.
Some expressions known regionally today can be traced to the colonial period (Carver, 1992). New England terms used in the 1960s and also in colonial Massachusetts, Connecticut or New Hampshire include alewife ‘herring-like fish’, banker ‘fisherman, fishing vessel’, basket-fish ‘brittle star’, beaver meadow ‘an open grassy area’, black ash ‘American ash’, bonnyclabber ‘solidified sour milk’, buttery ‘pantry’, caboose ‘cook’s galley on a ship’, case ‘general health’, chamber ‘upper room or floor’, clapboard ‘wooden siding’, deacon seat ‘front-row seat in church’, dresser ‘sideboard, cupboard’, fare ‘a catch of fish’, flitch ‘salt pork’, green corn ‘sweet corn’. Among 1960s Southern terms traceable to colonial Virginia and the Carolinas are amber ‘tobacco spit’, baldface ‘a white face’, bat ‘nighthawk’, black gum ‘tupelo’, brake ‘thicket’, branch ‘stream’, case ‘a condition of tobacco leaves’, cat ‘catfish’, chinquapin ‘chestnut’, fever and ague ‘malaria’, Frenchman ‘a spindly tobacco plant’, fresh ‘stream’, ground worm ‘cutwork’, (hog) crawl ‘enclosure for hogs’, honey tree ‘honey locust’.
We can infer a good deal about colonial English from what is known of English in Britain in the 1600s and 1700s, but by the ordinary forces of language evolution the English spoken by the disembarking colonists began immediately to differentiate itself from the English they had spoken in Britain. Besides vocabulary
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borrowed from colonists speaking other European languages and from Native Americans, some English words developed new senses, while other linguistic features continued in the colonies but changed or fell into disuse in England. With divided usages one variant may have flourished in the colonies, the other in England. Gotten, the more common seventeenth-century past participle of get, remained favoured in America, while got grew stronger in England. After fall and autumn travelled to the colonies, fall mostly triumphed, as autumn did in England. Mad meant ‘crazy’ or ‘angry’, but in England (except regionally) it has mostly lost what is now its chief American sense of ‘angry’.
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Waves of immigrant colonists |
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Evidence for the origins of immigrants in four major colonial settlement areas has been gathered by Fischer (1989), drawing on British and transplanted folkways, including ways of speech, building, religion, learning, family and marriage, and food and dress. Viewing seventeenth-century Britain as comprising regions ‘defined primarily by broad ethnic, cultural and historical processes’, he draws parallels between specific English and colonial regions and identifies four major waves of British migration before the War of Independence.
1.New England settlement. In the first migration, 21,000 Puritans chiefly from East Anglia sailed to Massachusetts between 1629 and 1640. Among them were well-educated magistrates and Puritan ministers, as well as yeoman and artisans. About 90 per cent arrived with other family members, and they settled around Massachusetts Bay, whence their children later moved south and west into Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, or north into Vermont and Maine. Men outnumbered women by only three to two.
2.Virginia settlement. The second large-scale migration comprised 45,000 Anglican cavaliers, labourers and servants. Between 1642 and 1675 they left the south and west of England and settled in Virginia. Sixty per cent were farmers, 30 per cent artisans; men outnumbered women five to one.
3.Delaware valley settlement. In this migration, 23,000 emigrants, mostly Friends (Quakers) from the English north midlands (including Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire, Cheshire and Staffordshire) and parts of Wales, settled in the Delaware valley between 1675 and 1715. About 40 per cent were farmers, 40 per cent artisans; men outnumbered women five to two.
4.Backcountry settlement. The largest migration from 1717 to 1775 saw some 250,000 ‘borderlands’ emigrants from the Scottish lowlands, the north of Ireland, and the six northernmost counties of England reach Pennsylvania and the colonial backcountry. Mostly Presbyterians and Anglicans, mostly tenants and cottagers, mostly families, they shared
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a common border culture. As many as two-thirds of these ScotchIrish arrived in the decade immediately preceding 1775. The 1790 census places them largely in the backcountry areas of southwestern Pennsylvania, western Maryland, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia, and in Kentucky and Tennessee.
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Character of colonial English |
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To gauge the character of colonial speech, recall that in 1607 when Jamestown was settled Shakespeare was active in Stratford. Roger Williams, who founded the Providence plantation in Rhode Island, was born in London in 1603, the year Queen Elizabeth died, and wrote his Key into the Language of America in 1643, before becoming friends with John Milton, who was born the year after the Jamestown settlement. Naturally, the English spoken in Massachusetts, Providence, Virginia and Pennsylvania reflected the late sixteenthand seventeenth-century varieties of English the colonists had spoken before embarking for the New World. In the colonies, the regional and social backgrounds of the settlers became thoroughly mixed and yielded different linguistic complexions in different colonies.
During the colonial period, English in Britain was varied and variable. The language of the court, London and the nearby southeast carried prestige, but variation distinguished region from region (see Chapters 5 and 7). Pronunciation in England during the colonial period is treated in Chapter 2; here we underscore the prevalence of variation and emphasise that colonial speech reflected different mixes of English and Irish dialects and the emerging London standard. Colonists disembarking in the New World spoke the dialect of their native region and town, embodying its grammar, vocabulary and accent. Most ships embarking from Bristol, Plymouth, Liverpool and the other ports carried emigrants from different regions, thus mixing dialects before the ships reached the colonies. Then, disembarking in Boston, Philadelphia or Jamestown, new arrivals met a mixture of dialects. The colonial dialect pattern was paisley, not plaid, to borrow Laird’s (1970: 162) metaphor.
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Regional origins of colonial English |
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The English spoken in the New England colonies originated chiefly in East Anglia, London and parts of the southeast; that of Virginia echoed heavier immigration from the southwest; that of Pennsylvania reflected the north of England and the Scotch-Irish. In Ulster, the Scotch-Irish already represented a colony of dialects – with immigrants from the Scottish lowlands, Ireland and parts of northern England, and by the time they arrived in the New World, principally through Philadelphia and Delaware, and moved west through Pennsylvania and south into the backcountry of Virginia, their dialect reflected a mixed linguistic heritage (Montgomery, 2001).