388 E D WA R D F I N E G A N

Still, a stark reminder that the English spoken by the colonists reflected their geographical and social origins can be spied in the role accents played in identifying runaways. Many English and Irish immigrants arrived in the colonies as indentured servants and fled their servitude prematurely. In Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina and Georgia, newspaper notices often identified a runaway’s accent: ‘a West-country man and talks like one’; ‘born in the West of England, and speaks that Country Dialect’; ‘a Yorkshireman who talks very broad’; ‘speaks the North Country Dialect’; ‘born in Cheshire, and speaks in that dialect’; ‘born near Manchester in England, and speaks much with that dialect’; ‘her Speech is the North of England Dialect, and says she was born in Lincolnshire’. Notices also identified Irish and Scottish runaways by their speech: ‘a Scotchman and talks as such’; ‘talks pretty broad Scotch’; ‘has the Irish Brogue on her tongue’; ‘speaks pretty good English, but has a little brogue on it’; ‘talks with the Irish accent very much’; ‘by his dialect may be known to be a native of the north of Ireland’ (Read, 2002: 89–92). From the observation that among hundreds of such notices none identified a runaway as speaking the dialect of East Anglia or the southeastern counties (the dialect nearest to London was that of a runaway from Wiltshire), we infer that that dialect was the norm throughout the colonies (Read, 2002: 86–8).

For over 150 years the colonists remained British, and especially those along the eastern seaboard remained closely tied to England, Ireland or Scotland. From the outset, English-speaking colonists also had contact with speakers of other languages. Besides continuing intercourse with Britain, colonial English swam in the polyglot tides around it, not only local Indians, but Dutch in New Amsterdam, French in Louisiana and Canada, and Spanish in New Spain, among others.

Dialect geographers have with little success tried tracing New World linguistic features to their origins in standard London English or particular regions of the British Isles. The classic position was stated by Hans Kurath, first director of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada:

Most American practices can with some probability be related to specific features once current in Standard British English or still in use in one or another of the regional folk dialects of England. It is also fairly clear that most, if not all, regional variants in American cultivated speech of today can be traced to British cultivated usage of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, and that features of pronunciation confined to certain subareas of the Atlantic seaboard [e.g., the vowel in half, glass, etc. and loss of postvocalic /r/] were not fashionable in the London area until shortly before the American Revolution. (Kurath & McDavid, 1961: vi–vii)

The task is complicated in several ways, including inadequate data (Montgomery, 2001) and the fact that the most significant large-scale investigations of dialects

in the eastern US were completed before the major studies of regional British English (see Chapter 7), which will now help researchers track linguistic relations between North America and the British Isles.

Kurath’s is not the only interpretation of the origins of North American English, and other views will likely influence the eventual understanding of the origins of NAE. Dillard (1992: 22) has emphasised the early sixteenth-century arrivals from Europe in Newfoundland and along the Atlantic coast and the great mixing of tongues in the colonies. He notes, for example, that Manhattan was reported to be home to speakers of sixteen languages in 1644 and that once it became English in 1664 its multilingual character increased further. Similarly, the Delaware valley settlers met Swedes and Finns who had settled earlier, and the Puritans in Massachusetts met Dutch and other Europeans, along with Indian groups. Colonists met Indians speaking 221 languages in four distinct families (Axtell, 2000:16). Such an extraordinary mixing of languages and dialects may point to a radical colonial levelling that gave rise after the Revolution to the major American dialects (Dillard, 1992). However accurate the levelling hypothesis, several British visitors to the colonies in the late 1700s remarked on the homogeneity of English in America (all quoted by Read, 2002: 44–6):

William Eddis in 1770:

In England, almost every county is distinguished by a peculiar dialect; . . .

but in Maryland and throughout adjacent provinces . . . a striking similarity of speech universally prevails; and it is strictly true, that the pronunciation of the generality of the people has an accuracy and elegance, that cannot fail of gratifying the most judicious ear.

The colonists are composed of adventurers, not only from every district of Great Britain and Ireland, but from almost every other European government.

. . . Is it not, therefore, reasonable to suppose, that the English language must be greatly corrupted by such a strange intermixture of various nations? The reverse is, however, true. The language of the immediate descendants of such a promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform, and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed any provincial, or national accent, from its British or foreign percentage.

. . . This uniformity of language prevails not only on the coast, . . . but likewise in the interior parts . . .

Seven years later, Nicholas Cresswell of Derbyshire, having spent three years in Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and New York:

Though the inhabitants of this Country are composed of different Nations and different languages, yet it is very remarkable that they in general speak better English than the English do. No Country or Colonial dialect is to be distinguished here, except it be the New Englanders, who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.

The London editor of Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution in 1791:

390 E D WA R D F I N E G A N

It is a curious fact, that there is perhaps no one portion of the British empire, in which two or three millions of persons are to be found, who speak their mother-tongue with greater purity, or a truer pronunciation, than the white inhabitants of the United States. This was attributed, by a penetrating observer, to the number of British subjects assembled in America from various quarters, who, in consequence of their intercourse and intermarriages soon dropped the peculiarities of their several provincial idioms, retaining only what was fundamental and common to them all; a process, which the frequency or rather the universality of school-learning in North America, must naturally have assisted.

A well-known preacher who lived in Maryland or Virginia between 1759 and 1775 noted that ‘in North America, there prevails not only . . . the purest Pronunciation of the English Tongue that is anywhere to be met with, but a perfect Uniformity’.

We conclude that, in contrast with the dialect diversity of England, colonial English was strikingly homogeneous although not necessarily of a single kind. Eddis speaks of uniformity in Maryland and the ‘adjacent provinces’; Cresswell distinguishes between a more general colonial variety and that spoken in New England. From such comments and from information in other sources, we infer that colonial English had become somewhat levelled as a consequence of people from diverse parts of England, Ireland and Scotland mixing together and mixing with speakers of Dutch, German, Swedish and Finnish.

8.1.7Place-names: Native American, French, Dutch, Spanish,

As noted, English colonists exploring the New World met Native Americans and colonists from other nations. Along with thousands of other names, Manhattan, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri and Alabama echo Native American ones. Reminders of contact with Europeans appear in the Dutch

Harlem and Brooklyn; the French Montreal, Quebec, Vermont and Maine; and, farther west, the Spanish Rio Grande, Sierra Nevada and Santa Fe. English, French and Dutch nobles, explorers and government officials are honored in Carolina (Charles I) and Charleston (Charles II), Maryland (Queen Mary) and Virginia (Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen); Louisiana (Louis XIV) and Lake Champlain (the French explorer Samuel de Champlain); Block Island (the Dutch explorer Adriaen Block) and Cape May and Stuyvesant Falls (named for governors of New Netherlands).

English names include New Hampshire, New Jersey, New London, New York, New England; Boston, Brighton, Essex, Norfolk, Sussex; and hundreds of others. Suggesting strong Dutch influence in the New York City and Hudson valley regions are Flushing (Vlissingen), Staten Island and the Bowery (‘farm’). Wall Street takes its name from the fact that Walloons inhabited lower Manhattan in the seventeenth century. The Spuyten Duyvil Creek separates the upper end of Manhattan Island from the mainland. Dutch kill ‘creek, small stream’ appears

392 E D WA R D F I N E G A N

speech patterns. Thus, the colonial dialect of the northeast formed the bedrock of Canadian English in the east. Newfoundland had been settled much earlier, and its linguistic history (like that of Quebec with its French traditions and language) is independent of most of Canada’s.

When the first US census was taken in 1790, the 13 states and three districts included 3.9 million people. Virginia, the most populous, had nearly 750,000 residents, including 293,000 slaves, while Rhode Island and Delaware had fewer than 70,000 residents each, including slaves. In 1800, the western border of the nation extended only to the Mississippi River, and the population stood at 5.1 million, including nearly 900,000 slaves. The purchase of Louisiana from France in 1803 doubled the nation’s territory, and the frontier proved to be a magnet (see Bailey, 2003; Eble, 2003 commemorates the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition exploring the new territory). By 1850 the population swelled to 23 million and ten years later to 31 million, including nearly 4 million slaves and 4 million foreign-born free persons. Such heavy immigration followed that, of the 49 million residents in 1880, 163,000 had been born in Scotland, 700,000 in England or Wales, and 1.8 million in Ireland. There were also 1.9 million German-born residents, mostly in Illinois, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New York, while from Sweden and Norway had come 350,000 immigrants. Spurred by the need for workers on the transcontinental railroad, nearly 75,000 Chinese-born immigrants lived in California. That state also had 9,000 Mexican-born residents, while Texas had 43,000. (Arizona and New Mexico were not yet populous enough to enter the Union.)

8.2.1American language or American English? Noah Webster

Much has been written about the effect of national independence on Americans’ views of their language. Two perspectives are conveniently, if anachronistically, suggested by the titles of Mencken’s The American Language and Krapp’s The English Language in America. Sometimes one person wavered between the two perspectives. In 1800, when Noah Webster projected a Dictionary of the American Language, he called it ‘a work . . . absolutely necessary, on account of considerable differences between the American and English language’ (Read, 2002: 17). But when it appeared in 1828, it bore the strikingly different title,

An American Dictionary of the English Language, and its author said in the preface that ‘It is not only important, but, in a degree necessary, that the people of this country, should have an American Dictionary of the English Language; for, although the body of the language is the same as in England, and it is desirable to perpetuate that sameness, yet some differences must exist.’ He noted that some US words were unknown in England or unknown in their American senses, citing as examples land-office, land-warrant, consociation of churches, regent of a university, intendant of a city, plantation, selectman, marshal, senate, congress, court and assembly. His dictionary represented an assertion that American English