The English Language in America: The

.Settlement of America
The English language was brought to America by colonists from England who settledalong the Atlantic seaboard in the
seventeenth century.1 It was therefore the languagespoken in England at that time, the language spoken by Shakespeare
and Milton andBunyan.
English Settlers found 13 colonies: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts Bay, Maryland,
South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, and Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.
Uniformity of American English.
Linguistically the circumstances under which the American population spread over the country have had one important
consequence. It has repeatedly been observed, in the past as well as at the present day, especially by travelers from abroad,
that the English spoken in America shows a high degree of uniformity.
Those who are familiar with the pronounced dialectal differences that mark the popular speech of different parts of England
will know that there is nothing comparable to these differences in the United States.
Isaac Candler, an Englishman who traveled in America in 1822–1823, wrote: “The United States having been peopled from
different parts of England and Ireland, the peculiarities of the various districts have in a great measure ceased. As far as
pronunciation is concerned, the mass of people speaks better Englishthan the mass of people in England.
The people of America speak an incomparably better English than the people of the mother country."
We speak our language, as a nation, better than any other people speak their language. A.C Baugh
Archaic Features in American English.
 A second quality often attributed to American English is archaism, the preservation of old features of the language
that have gone out of use in the standard speech of England.
 American pronunciation as compared with that of London is somewhat old-fashioned. It has qualities that were
characteristic of English speech in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
 The preservation of the r in General American and a flat a in fast, path, etc. are two such that were abandoned in
southern England at the end of the eighteenth century.
 Most Americans pronounce either and neither with the vowel of teeth or beneath, while in Britain an alternate
pronunciation has developed since the American colonies were established and the more usual pronunciation is
now with an initial diphthong [aI].
 The American use of gotten in place of got as the past participle of get always impresses the British of today as an
old-fashioned feature.
 American English has kept a number of old words or old uses of words no longer used in Britain. Americans still use
mad in the sense of angry, as Shakespeare and his contemporaries did, and they have kept the general significance
of sick without restricting it to nausea. They still speak of rare meat, whereas the British now say underdone. Platter
is a common word in the United States but is seldom used anymore in Britain except in poetry. Americans have kept
the picturesque old word fall as the natural word for the season. They learn autumn, the word used in Britain, in the
schoolroom, and from books. The American I guess, so often ridiculed in England, is as old as Chaucer and was still
current in English speech in the seventeenth century. The phenomenon is not unknown in other parts of the world.
Americanisms:
 Any word or combination of words which taken into English Language in USA, has not gained acceptance in
England or if accepted has retained its sense of foreignness.
 Any word or combination of words which becoming archaic in England has continued in good usage in United
States.
 Often Americans were accused of corrupting the English language by introducing new and unfamiliar words,
whereas they were in fact only continuing to employ terms familiar in the seventeenth century that had become
obsolete in England.
 The first person to use the term Americanism was John Witherspoon in 1781, one of the early presidents of
Princeton University.
The first dictionary of Americanisms was published in 1816 by John Pickering under the title A Vocabulary, or Collection of
Words and Phrases which have been supposed tobe Peculiar to the United States of America.
Noah Webster and an American Language.
The Colonized America used to import books from Europe but as the Declaration of independence was signed, the
patriotism sprang up which led Americans to forego the dependence on mother country. This attitude was ardently shown
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by Noah Webster (1758 – 1843). Noah received his education from Yale, he complied three elementary boos on English, a
spelling book, a grammar and a reader, as the existing elementary books were substandard.
He published in 1783, 1784, and 1785under the high-sounding title A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Theywere
the first books of their kind to be published in this country. The success of the firstpart was unexpectedly great. It was soon
reissued under the title The AmericanSpellingBook and in this form went through edition after edition. It is estimated that in
ahundred years, more than 80 million copies of the book were sold. From a profit of lessthan a cent a copy Webster derived
most of his income throughout his life.
In 1789 he published avolume of Dissertations on the English Language, with Notes Historical and Critical. In1806 he brought
out a small Dictionary, the prelude to his greatest work. This was AnAmerican Dictionary ofthe English Language, published in
1828.
In all of these works and in numerous smaller writings he was animated by a persistentpurpose: to show that the English
language in this country was a distinctly Americanthing, developing along its own lines, and deserving to be considered from
anindependent, American point of view.
He said: “As an independent nation,” he says, “our honor requires us to have asystem of our own, in language as well as
government. Great Britain, whose children weare, should no longer be our standard; for the taste of her writers is already
corrupted, andher language on the decline. But if it were not so, she is at too great a distance to be ourmodel, and to
instruct us in the principles of our own tongue.”
But independence ofEngland was not the only factor that colored people’s thinking in the new nation. Acapital problem in
1789 was that of welding the thirteen colonies into a unified nation,and this is also reflected in Webster’s ideas. In urging
certain reforms of spelling in theUnited States he argues that one of the advantages would be that it would make
adifference between the English orthography and the American, and “that such an event isan object of vast political
consequence.” A “national language,” he says, “is a band ofnational union. Every engine should be employed to render the
people of this countrynational; to call their attachments home to their own country; and to inspire them withthe pride of
national character.”
Webster’s Influence on American Spelling.
 We write honor, color, and a score of words withoutthe u of English honour, colour, etc. \We sometimes employ one
consonant where theEnglish write two: traveler—traveller, wagon—waggon, etc. We write er instead of re ina
number of words like fiber, center, theater.
 We prefer an s in words like defense,offense, and write ax, plow, tire, story, and czar, for axe, plough, tyre, storey,
and tsar.
Main Dialects of American English

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 North American – Standard Dialect

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