Colonial American English — Comprehensive Study Notes

The Foundations of Colonial American English

• Emergence of American English as a distinct colonial and national variety resulted from Atlantic separation of English and later political separation, plus additional cross-Atlantic and intra-continental influences.
• Guiding questions framing the study:
  • How did early colonial English differ from contemporary American English?
  • Why and how did British and American English diverge?
  • What roles did other languages (Spanish, French, Dutch, Native American languages, African languages) play in shaping American English?
  • How did American English development mirror the creation of an American national identity?
• Overview of factors driving divergence:
  • Physical and political separation across the Atlantic.
  • Migration bringing together speakers from diverse English dialect backgrounds in the New World.
  • Contact with Native American languages and with speakers from other European languages.
  • Over time, American English adapted to New World linguistic needs while developing as a symbol of American identity.
• Common myths addressed:
  • English arrived with a single, continuous presence in North America.
  • Early colonists spoke the same version of English.
  • American English is simply a defective form of British English.
  • Spelling differences always indicate pronunciation differences.
• Introduction to the book’s aims:
  • Build a linguistic foundation to understand subsequent discussions.
  • Prepare for studying diversity in regional, social, and ethnic variation in American English.
  • Trace the emergence of American English from the late 15th century (Age of Discovery) through the American Revolution.

The Foundations of Colonial American English

• By the late 16th century, English had existed for about $1{,}000$ years, deriving from West Germanic-speaking groups (Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes) who migrated to what is now England beginning around AD $449$.
• Old English (OE) text exemplified by Beowulf shows an English markedly different from today’s English, with heavy inflection and rich morphology.
• OE inflection and grammar:
  • Highly inflectional; required affixes to indicate grammatical roles (case, number, gender).
  • Noun declensions displayed case (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative) and gender.
  • Complex verb system and grammatical gender marked on nouns.
• Language contact and borrowing across periods:
  • OE borrowings from Scandinavian languages due to Viking contact; examples include words like sister, skirt, sky, window.
  • ME (Middle English) borrowed extensively from French (language of prestige after 1066): law/government terms such as council, evidence, parliament, tax.
  • Changes accompanying ME transition: loss of inflectional endings, shift from case-based grammar to word-order-based grammar.
• ME dialects in England:
  • Northern, East Midlands, West Midlands, East Anglian, Kentish, Southern, with East Midlands becoming standardized in London.
  • Northern dialect heavily Scandinavian-influenced; East Anglian notable for its role in American English due to large East Anglian emigration.
• Sound changes and pronunciation in ME:
  • Pronunciation differences across regions, including /a:/ vs /o/ shifts, and regional voicing/devoicing patterns.
  • ME dialects exhibited notable phonological variation, including verb endings showing agreement with nouns (e.g., -s, -th, -en).
• Early Modern English (c. 1450–1700) aligns with the Age of Discovery when expansion and exploration intensified linguistic contact.
  • Lexicon expanded through global exposure; some Native American words entered English via Spanish prior to direct contact (e.g., avocado, maize, potato, tomato).
  • Shakespeare’s contemporaries likely familiar with many of the same varieties of English as colonists.
• Major linguistic changes during Early Modern English relevant to the colonies:
  • Emergence of the -th ending for third-person singular declined; passaged examples show variation between older -eth/-est forms and newer -s endings.
  • Great Vowel Shift (GVS) began in the late Middle English period and continued into the 17th–18th centuries, raising long vowels to new positions; regional variation in progress across Britain affected American vowel patterns in the colonies.
• Great Vowel Shift (GVS) overview and examples:
  • Originated in late Middle English; long vowels raised to higher positions.
  • Notable shifts included /uː/ → /a/ or /eɪ/ in some contexts, with different pathways by region.
  • Representative examples from Table 4.3 include changes such as:
  • house: /huːs/ → /haʊs/ or /haus/ depending on region; (illustrative pre/post shift) $ext{Pre-shift: } [hus], ext{Post-shift: } [haus]$
  • boot: /buːt/ → /buːt/ (with regional variation to / Bot/ vs /but/) $ext{Pre: } [bot], ext{Post: } [but]$
  • ride: /raɪd/ → /raid/ (lowering/raising patterns observed in GVS contexts)
  • By the 17th–18th centuries, vowel pronunciation was highly variable; southern areas in early stages, others earlier or later.
• Second-person pronouns evolution:
  • OE system used thou/thee (singular) and ye/you (plural) with subject/object distinctions.
  • Late 13th century: you began to replace thou in many social contexts; by mid-17th century thou largely disappeared from Standard English.
  • Quakers used thou to reflect egalitarian beliefs; thou persisted in some early colonial writings (e.g., Roger Williams and other early writings).
  • By around 1800, thou largely gone from print in American books, with some regional or historical remnants; today, thou is virtually non-existent in standard modern usage.
• Implications of pronoun evolution:
  • The shift to you-as-two-person form simplified pronoun system but erased singular/plural distinction in everyday speech.
  • This change foreshadowed modern informal vs formal address patterns in American English and contributed to the later emergence of regional forms like you all, you guys, yinz, etc.

English Settlement of the American Colonies

• Zelinsky’s Doctrine of First Effective Settlement emphasizes the lasting impact of the first settlers on a region’s cultural geography, even if they were few in number.
• In the American colonies, early English settlers laid the foundation for Colonial American English, while also being shaped by continued contact with multiple languages and regional dialects.
• Four great waves of English-speaking migration to the Atlantic seaboard (following Fischer, 1989):
  1) The Puritans to New England (1629–1641)
  2) The Cavaliers and their servants to Virginia (1642–1675)
  3) The Quakers and others to Pennsylvania (1675–1725)
  4) The Scots-Irish to Appalachia (1717–1775)
• Jamestown, Virginia (1607) as the birth year of continuous English-speaking settlement in what would become the United States; early governance, Anglican church, and tobacco economy established.
• Virginia wave (1642–1675): settlers from across England, often from south and west, including both aristocrats and indentured servants; the mix of social classes contributed to a broad linguistic base; 1619 marked the introduction of enslaved Africans to the Virginia colony, contributing to the Southern English variety.
• New England settlement: Puritans seeking religious freedom; Mayflower voyage (1620) bringing the Plymouth colony; Harvard College founded in 1636; mass migration to Boston and Salem; many settlers originated from East Anglia (Suffolk, Norfolk, Essex); East Anglia’s influence later echoed in New England speech.
• Pennsylvania: Quaker settlement began in 1675; formal charter in 1681 under William Penn; settlers included Lutherans, German Reformed, Amish, Mennonites, Moravians, plus Rhineland and Swiss Germans, Huguenots, and Scots-Irish; southeastern Pennsylvania drew diverse religious groups.
• Appalachia: Scots-Irish wave (1717–1775) became a dominant cultural force in the interior South and Appalachian regions; migration patterns favored frontier settlement and long-term linguistic influence on American regional speech.
• Other migrations and settlements:
  • Maryland (1634): haven for Roman Catholics; Protestant majority early but Catholic settlers present.
  • Mobility and variety of colonists (Indians, vagrants, artisans, merchants, clergy) widened the linguistic base and contributed to the spectrum of colonial American English.
• Early lexical and lexical-phonological outcomes of these waves:
  • East Anglian influence on New England speech, Appalachian Scots-Irish influence on inland dialects, and Southern Va-Old Dominion patterns on colonial English usage.
• Additional language contexts in the colonies:
  • Native American languages contributed place names and lexical items for fauna, flora, foods, housing, cultural items, and social terms (e.g., chipmunk, hominy, tepee, moccasin, tomahawk, powwow, caucus).
  • French, Spanish, and Dutch contact contributed loanwords and placenames, with Dutch influence notable in New York (New Netherland) and in Dutch-derived toponyms (Catskill, Schuylkill, etc.).
  • German settlers contributed words related to food, culture, and social life (sauerkraut, pretzel, pinochle, turnverein, hex, nix, ouch).
  • African languages and enslaved populations introduced terms like banjo, hoodoo, juke, voodoo, zombie; Gullah (Sea Island Creole) developed in Georgia and South Carolina’s coast.
• Language contact and calques:
  • Spanish place names and calques: many toponyms in the American West and Southwest reflect literal translations (e.g., Cuerno Verde -> Greenhorn Mountain).
  • Calques and loan translations also appeared in other regions where linguistic contact occurred.

Other Languages in the New World and Lexical Expansion

• Native American sources of lexical and cultural knowledge influenced everyday life and place naming; major lexical domains included fauna, flora, foods, housing, artifacts, and social practices.
• Loanwords from non-English sources entered Colonial English over time, including lexical items that later became part of American English.
• Anglicization process:
  • When a word is borrowed, English often adapts pronunciation and phonology to English rules (e.g., squash from askutasaquash; raccoon from arahkunem).
  • Folk etymology can reshape borrowed forms to resemble familiar English morphemes.
  • Example: hose vs sockeye adaptation; hokum examples like wiskitjân becoming sockeye; caucus borrowed from Algonquian word for a political meeting; powwow—initially a Native term for a gathering that extended to colonial and then American contexts.
• Spanish and French influences:
  • Spanish: minimal everyday direct influence on everyday Colonial English, but lasting impact on later western U.S. lexicon (cockroach, lariat, lasso, ranch, tequila) and on some place names; calques and translations occurred (e.g., barbacoa).
  • French: initial influence on the English lexicon (bureau, cache, cent, chowder, depot, dime, gopher, lacrosse, levee, prairie, pumpkin, rotisserie, shanty); French words sometimes came from Native American sources (caribou via Algonquian; bayou via Choctaw).
• Dutch influence in New York area:
  • New Amsterdam (later New York City) as a base for fur trade; Dutch words surviving in American English include boss, caboose, cookies, cruller, dope, dumb, poppycock, Santa Claus, sawbuck, sleigh, snoop, spook, stoop, waffle.
  • Place names with Dutch roots and translations into English (Catskill, Fishkill, Schuylkill; Bowery, Bronx, Yonkers).
  • The etymology of yankee remains debated but is sometimes linked to Dutch or Algonquian origins.
• African influences and slavery:
  • Arrival of enslaved Africans began in 1619; by 1807, the U.S. federal slave trade had been abolished, with roughly four million enslaved Africans transported to the United States by that time.
  • African lexical contributions include banjo, hoodoo, juke, voodoo, zombie; Gullah (Sea Island Creole) developed in the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina, illustrating creole formation from African languages in English-speaking contexts.

The Emergence of American English as a Distinct Variety

• Three essential elements to form American English as a distinct national variety:
  • Space: the geographic separation across the Atlantic created different linguistic trajectories in the colonies.
  • Time: language changes unfolded independently in the colonies due to distance and varied contact.
  • Identity: American economic, political, and cultural independence fostered a desire to differentiate from British English (evidenced by American inventions like American spellings and the term Americanisms).
• Lexical expansion and semantic broadening in the New World (Box 4.5):
  • Words broadened to cover new referents encountered in the Americas (e.g., corn expanding from a general grain to maize; other terms like bluff, cliff, neck, bottoms, pond, creek broadened to new features).
  • Compounding productivity rose in the New World, forming many new terms (bullfrog, mudhen, catbird, catfish, razorback, gartersnake, groundhog; backwoods, backstreet, backcountry).
  • Cross-language compounds: cornpone (corn + Virginia Algonquian pone); sleigh bells (Dutch + English); ranchman (Spanish rancho + English man).
• Printing and the written word in Colonial America (Box 4.6):
  • The first printing press in Cambridge, MA, in $1639$; presses in Philadelphia and New York in $1685$ and $1693$ respectively.
  • By $1765$, there were $43$ newspapers; the printed word helped standardize communication and potentially homogenize speech across colonies.
  • Printing contributed to the idea that the written word belonged to the public and connected dialects through shared print.
• Public recognition and debate about American English:
  • John Witherspoon (1781) compiled “Americanisms” documenting words, sayings, and grammatical differences in American colonies, signaling a move to identify American English as distinct.
  • Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) established norms for spelling, grammar, and pronunciation in American English.
  • Early 19th-century debates: American English seen as a distinct language but not fully equal to British English; Webster’s dictionary helped solidify national standards.
• Homogeneity and divergence:
  • Early observers noted perceived uniformity of American English across states, attributed to mobility and language leveling in the colonies (e.g., Witherspoon’s assertion that dialect variance across America was less than across England).
  • Colonial leveling: a tendency to avoid local dialect features that marked people as from a particular Old World English community; instead, a New World identity formed through shared features and practices.
  • Colonial lag concept (Marckwardt, 1958): the idea that colonial varieties preserved older forms longer than their parent variety. Later scholarship (Görlach, Hundt) critiqued this view, arguing against linear models of change and noting substantial overlap in inventories of features across British and American dialects.
• British vs American English divergence (early 19th century):
  • Pronunciation differences: American vowels in unstressed syllables; words ending in -ile often realized differently (e.g., fertile, fragile, servile).
  • Scheduling and hospital/university usage: Americans often drop the definite article before hospital and university; differences in treating collective nouns (singular vs plural in government usage).
  • Lexical differences: a set of words with different American vs British preferences (Table 4.4):
  • British: flat; American: apartment
  • British: pavement; American: sidewalk
  • British: rubber; American: eraser
  • British: chips; American: fries
  • British: tram; American: trolley
  • British: colour; American: color
  • British: centre; American: center
  • British: programme; American: program
  • British: travelled; American: traveled
  • British: Americanisation; Americanization
  • Spelling differences (Table 4.5):
  • centre -> center
  • colour -> color
  • programme -> program
  • catalogue -> catalog
  • travelled -> traveled
  • -ize/-isation variants (American usage often uses -ize or -er forms where British uses -ise or -our forms in some cases, though there are many exceptions).
  • These differences reflect both historical pronunciation shifts and deliberate spelling reforms in the United States as part of establishing a distinct national standard.

Divergence Mechanisms and Debates

• Divergence between British and American English occurred due to:
  • Separation by the Atlantic, leading to independent linguistic trajectories.
  • Regional diversification within the colonies due to diverse origins of settlers (East Anglia, the South, the Midlands, Scotland, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Africa, etc.).
  • Contact with Native American languages and with languages of other colonizing powers (Spanish, French, Dutch, German).
  • Cultural and political identity formation in the United States driving deliberate changes (e.g., Webster’s spelling reforms).
• Important theoretical concepts:
  • Colonial lag: a view that colonial varieties preserve older forms; later critique argues against a simple lag model, noting shared inventories and cross-Atlantic convergence on many forms.
  • Uniformity vs. variation: early observers noted apparent uniformity across American speech despite regional variation; mobility and diffusion contributed to shared features, but regional dialect features persisted (e.g., Appalachia, New England, and the South).
  • Language as identity: American linguistic features served in part as symbolic acts of independence and national identity (e.g., Americanisms, unifying print culture, distinct spelling system).

Notable Figures, Texts, and Artifacts Mentioned

• Box 4.1 The Lost Colony of Roanoke (1587–1590): failed attempt at establishing a lasting colony; illustrates the difficulty of early colonization and the eventual establishment of a continuous English-speaking population in North America.
• Box 4.2 Roger Williams (Providence Plantations, Rhode Island, 1636): advocated church-state separation and fair trade with Native Americans; wrote A Key into the Language of America (1643), one of the first Native American language descriptions in English and an early voice challenging European superiority narratives.
• Box 4.3 Anglicization: the process of making borrowed words conform to English phonology; examples include squash (from Algonquian) and raccoon (from Cree/Algonquian); cough-up processes like folk etymology shaping loanwords.
• Box 4.4 African Languages: overview of Africa’s linguistic diversity (≈ $2{,}000$ languages) and the role of African languages in creoles such as Gullah; notes on the linguistic contribution of African languages to American English, and the Creole languages that emerged in the Western Hemisphere.
• Box 4.5 Lexical Expansion in the New World: semantic broadening and lexical specialization in the New World context (e.g., corn broadened to maize; compounding like bullfrog, groundhog; cross-language compounds like cornpone).
• Box 4.6 Printing and the Written Word in Colonial America: printing presses and the rise of newspapers; publication milestones (1639 Cambridge, 1685 Philadelphia, 1693 New York); 43 newspapers by 1765; print culture as a unifying influence on language.

Implications for Language, Society, and Real-World Relevance

• The emergence of American English reflects both linguistic evolution and social-political development in a new nation.
• The language mirrors the nation’s multicultural roots: Native American languages, African language influences, and multiple European languages contributed to the vocabulary, syntax, and semantics of Colonial American English.
• Lexical and spelling distinctions helped create a national standard that reinforced American identity and facilitated broader literacy and communication across a rapidly expanding territory.
• The study of Colonial American English demonstrates how language acts as a record of migration, colonization, cultural contact, and national self-definition.

Connections to Foundational Concepts and Real-World Relevance

• Language change is driven by space (geography and distance), time (historical context and contact), and identity (social purpose and nationalism).
• The Great Vowel Shift and pronoun evolution illustrate how phonology and grammar can diverge regionally and over time, leading to long-term variation between language varieties.
• The emergence of a national spelling standard (Webster) and a distinctly American lexicon demonstrates deliberate language planning and its social and political motivations.
• The interplay of multiple languages in a settler society demonstrates how language can absorb and transform the linguistic landscape, producing a unique national variety.

Key Takeaways for Exam Preparation

• Colonial American English arose from Atlantic separation, waves of British settlement, and active contact with Native American, African, Spanish, French, Dutch, and German languages.
• The early English spoken in the colonies showed substantial archaic features relative to Modern British English, alongside regional variation tied to the settlers’ origins (notably East Anglia) and later migrations (Scots-Irish, Quakers).
• Major historical changes shaping Colonial English included the loss of strong inflection for nouns, the Great Vowel Shift’s completion across regions, and shifts in second-person pronoun usage from thou/ye to you.
• The four major waves of settlement produced a linguistic landscape that contributed to a relatively uniform colonial English yet preserved regionally distinctive features that would evolve into American regional dialects.
• Contact with Native American and non-English languages contributed a rich lexicon and cultural terms, as well as place names and calques that remained in American English.
• The emergence of American English as a national variety was reinforced by space, time, and identity, aided by print culture and landmark works (Witherspoon’s Americanisms, Webster’s dictionary) that codified norms and aided acceptance of American English as a distinct standard.

Discussion and Study Questions (as in the text)

• How does the development of Colonial American English reflect the growth of a distinct American identity?
• Evaluate the usefulness and limitations of the “family tree” model for representing the historical relationship among languages, particularly in the context of American English.
• What evidence supports or challenges the idea of colonial lag in the development of American English, especially in light of modern scholarship?
• How did the four major waves of migration shape the later regional variation seen in American English, such as in New England, the South, and Appalachia?
• In what ways did non-English languages contribute to the American vocabulary, pronunciation, and spelling systems? Provide concrete examples from Native American, African, Spanish, French, and Dutch sources.
• How did printing and literacy development influence language standardization in Colonial America, and what implications did this have for the spread of Americanisms?