American Language Supplement 2 (3 page)

This Englishman’s surmise as to the cause of the uniformity of speech visible in the United States is supported by the fact that immigration from one State or another has been active since the earliest days. The case of Ramsay, noted below, was not unusual even before the Revolution, and today it is a commonplace of observation
that the population of the big cities is made up largely of native Americans born elsewhere, and to a considerable extent in distant States.
¹
But the early levelling of dialects was more than a mere amalgamation, for the resultant general speech of the country was influenced much more by several of the British dialects than by all the rest. Which of these dialects had the greatest weight has been discussed at length without any unanimous agreement, but the preponderance of opinion seems to be that American English, at least in the North, got most of its characters from the speech of the southeastern counties of England. “While every one of the forty counties,” said John Fiske in “The Beginnings of New England,”
²
“was represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglican counties contributed to it far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be far out of the way to say that two-thirds of the American people who can trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to the East Anglican shires of the mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those southwestern counties – Devonshire, Dorset and Somerset – which so long were foremost in maritime enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of England.” This is confirmed by Anders Orbeck, whose study of the Seventeenth Century town records of Massachusetts
³
leads him to conclude that if “Essex, Middlesex, and London, as well as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire” are included in the East Anglican counties, slightly over 71% of the pioneers of Plymouth, Watertown and Dedham who can be traced came from that area. Further confirmation is provided by Read, who has shown that the Americans of the early Eighteenth Century
were quick to notice peculiarities in the speech of recent immigrants from the British Isles, but saw nothing to remark in that of those who came from east of Wiltshire or south of the Wash.
¹

Orbeck, in the monograph just mentioned, rehearses the contrary speculations of some of the earlier writers on the subject. In 1885 Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, then president of the American Antiquarian Society, read at its annual meeting a paper in which he not only sought to show that the speech of New England was based upon that of Kent, but also argued that the same county, which he described as “the England of England,” was the source of many other salient traits of the New England culture.
²
Hoar cited many familiar New England terms in support of his contention,
e.g., slick
for
sleek, be
for
am, grub
(food),
to argufy, biddy
(a chicken),
to bolt
(food), and
brand-new
, but he ran these terms no further back than William Holloway’s “General Dictionary of Provincialisms” of 1839, and his own evidence showed that many of them were also to be found in Sussex. A year later, before the same audience, his conclusions were challenged by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who used the second edition of Francis Grose’s “Provincial Glossary,” 1790, and the supplement thereto, published as an appendix to the second edition of Samuel Pegge’s “Anecdotes of the English Language,” 1814.
³
Higginson rejected all of Hoar’s evidence, and argued that American English showed very strong North Country influences. Of the terms that he investigated, he said, 109 came from that region, and only 18 from southeastern
England. “The proportion of North Country words.” he concluded, “is absolutely overwhelming,” and many of them were also to be found in “the Lowland Scots of Scott and Burns.”
¹

Years later a Scottish specialist in mythology, Lewis Spence, convinced himself that “the English spoken in the United States is to a great extent merely the popular Midland English of the Seventeenth Century brought more or less up to date by constant communication with the parent country, yet retaining more of the vocalization of the older form by reason of a certain degree of isolation.” Spence admitted that he also found traces of influence from Norfolk and even from Cornwall, but insisted that the Midlands were the chief source, and professed to find evidences of Danish coloring, stretching back to the Ninth Century.
²
But the preponderance of opinion among writers on the subject has always inclined toward the East Anglican theory of American speech origins, which is supported more or less by many familiar New England place-names,
e.g., Yarmouth, Ipswich, Haverhill
and the nearby (in England)
Cambridge
and
Boston
. A good example is offered by Schele de Vere. In his “Americanisms: the English of the New World,” he declared flatly that the early New England immigrants brought from Norfolk and Suffolk “not only their words, which the Yankee still uses, but also a sound of the voice and a mode of utterance which have been faithfully preserved, and are now spoken of as the ‘New England drawl’ and ‘the high, metallic ring of the New England voice.’ ”
³
In another place, in speaking of Southern American speech, he said that its disregard for the letter
r
should be laid upon “the shoulders of the guilty forefathers, many of whom came from Suffolk and the districts belonging to the East Anglians.”
⁴

Hans Kurath, editor of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, agrees with this in so far as the coastal South is concerned. “Like the seaboard of New England,” he says, “the Tidewater region of Virginia received most of its early population from Southeastern England.”
¹
But he holds that the speech of the areas back from the seacoast shows the influence of “Scotch-Irish who spoke … the English of the Lowlands of Scotland or the North of England as modified by the Southern English standard.” This, however, is not borne out by an investigation undertaken by Cleanth Brooks, Jr., who shows in “The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain”
²
that relatively few of the vowel and consonant forms now to be found in the area examined are also encountered in the Scottish and northern English dialects, but that 93% of the former and 95% of the latter are highly characteristic of southwestern (not southeastern) England. Though, says Brooks,

He goes on:

The area studied by Brooks is a relatively small one, but I think it may be taken as typical of the whole lowland South,
⁴
saving only
Tidewater and the bayou region of Louisiana. He follows Krapp
¹
in holding that in this area “the speech of the Negro and of the white is essentially the same” and that what are commonly regarded as “specifically Negro forms” are only “older English forms which the Negro must have taken originally from the white man, and which he has retained after the white man has begun to lose them.”
²
To this another highly competent Southern observer, W. Cabell Greet, agrees. “As the Negro,” he says, “has preserved the Methodist and Baptist camp-meeting hymns of a century ago in his spirituals, English dances in his clogs and jigs and reels, so he has kept old ways of speech.”
³
Tidewater Southern differs in many ways from this bi-racial lingo but Greet shows that it is confined to a relatively limited area, radiating from the lowlands to such inland islands as Richmond, Charlottesville and the northern Shenandoah valley, but hardly extending beyond. The rest of the South, until one comes to the mountains, the French areas of Louisiana and the cattle country to the westward, follows the patterns described by Brooks. Tidewater Southern, like the dialect of the narrow Boston area and that of the lower Hudson valley, appears to have been considerably influenced by the fashionable London English of the Eighteenth Century. The reason is obvious. These regions, from the earliest days, maintained a closer contact with England than the other parts of the country, and their accumulation of wealth filled them with social aspiration and made them especially responsive to upper-class example. The Civil War shifted the money of the South from Tidewater to the Piedmont, but the conservative lowland gentry continued faithful to the speechways acquired in their days of glory, and the plain people followed them. But all the more recent intrusions of English ways of speech have entered in the Boston and New York areas and on the level of conscious Anglomania.
⁴

There remains the speech of the overwhelming majority of Americans – according to some authorities, at least 95,000,000 of the 140,000,000 inhabitants of the continental United States. It is called Northern American by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott,
¹
Western or General American by George Philip Krapp,
²
Middle Western by many lay writers,
³
and American Standard by George L. Trager,
⁴
and is described by the last named as “the pronunciation … of the whole country except the old South, New England and the immediate vicinity of New York city.” More, it is constantly spreading, and two of its salient traits, the flat
a
and the clearly sounded
r
, are making heavy inroads in the territories once faithful to the broad
a
and the silent
r
. “Only in the immediate neighborhood of Boston and in the greater part of New Hampshire and Maine,” says Bernard Bloch,
⁵
“is the so-called Eastern pronunciation universal,” and even in this region there are speech-islands in
which it is challenged. New England west of the Connecticut river now belongs predominantly to the domain of General American, and so does all of New York State save the suburbs of New York, and all the rest of the country save the late Confederate States. Even the dialect of Appalachia, though it differs from General American, differs from it less than it differs from any regional variety.

What, then, was the origin of this widespread and now thoroughly typical form of speech, and why is it prevailing against all other forms? There are authorities who seek to answer, as in the case of New England, by pointing to population statistics. “The Piedmont of Virginia and the Carolinas, and the Great Valley,” says Kurath in the paper lately quoted, “were largely settled, during the half-century preceding the Revolution, by the Scotch-Irish, who spoke … the English of the Lowlands of Scotland or the north of England as modified by the Southern English Standard. They neither dropped their
r
’s nor did they pronounce their long mid-vowels diphthongal fashion. The large German element from Pennsylvania ultimately acquired this type of English.” Moreover, it also found lodgment in Western New England, which received a considerable admixture of Scotch-Irish during the same period, and the speechways of this region soon “became established in New York State and in the Western Reserve of Ohio,” and thence moved into the whole of the opening West. Unquestionably this influence of Scotch-Irish example was powerful all along the frontier, and even nearer the coast it must have had some effect, for many of the early schoolmasters were Scotsmen or Irishmen. Though some eminent phonologists dissent, and I am mindful of Dr. Louise Pound’s tart but just remark that “it is the amateur in phonetic matters who speaks with strongest conviction and feels surest of his message,”
¹
I find it impossible to put away the suspicion that later tides of pedagogy considerably reinforced the movement away from the southeastern English speechways of the Atlantic seaboard and toward those of the Scotch lowlands and the English North. The original Scottish schoolmasters, to be sure, did not long outlast the Eighteenth Century, nor did the Irishmen who followed them. By the time the great movement into the West was well under way
both were beginning to be displaced by native young men,
¹
and before the Civil War these native young men were giving way in their turn to females. Not many of the latter, in their primeval form, had any education beyond that of the common schools they taught in; the great majority, indeed, were simply milkmaids armed with hickory sticks. They could thus muster up no authority of their own, but had to depend perforce upon that of the books in their hands – and the book that was there invariably, before and above all others, was the aforesaid blue Speller of Noah Webster, When it got any support at all, it was usually from his unfolding series of dictionaries.