LANGUAGE

What is meant by "language" in the context of the early Republic? Do we mean simply the English language, the dominant spoken and written language in the early United States? If so, does it make sense to speak of one "language"? After all, there were (and are) many "Englishes." For instance, there is the language spoken by New Englanders and then there is the one spoken in the Smoky Mountains. We may choose to define these as separate dialects, implying that English speakers in these regions can easily understand each other. But for linguists, levels of mutual intelligibility are not necessarily meaningful. After all, the English spoken in northern Maine differs significantly from that spoken in the Smoky Mountains. And the reason for this is partly the very real difference in the character of these varieties of English: they had (and have) distinct vocabularies, distinct syntax, and widely differing pronunciation.

varieties of american english

The various types of English in the new United States had their origins in patterns of immigration during the colonial era. Settlers from different regions of England and Britain carried with them distinct patterns of speech. Settlers in Virginia came primarily from the East Midlands of England. Those who traveled to New England came from London as well as the East Midlands. The British migrants to Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley were primarily from the North and North Midlands. And through the eighteenth century Irish and Scottish migrants settled regions adjoining the Blue Ridge and Appalachian Mountains. As these initial foci of settlement expanded to the West, North, and South, they carried with them their regional English.

Although the varieties of American English had their origins in British English, by the early nineteenth century they had acquired distinctive American qualities. Americans, for example, came to prefer "fall" to "autumn," and they came to use the term "creek" to mean small stream or brook, whereas in Britain the term refers more specifically to a small seacoast inlet. American spelling also came to be very different from English spelling. Because printers in the Northeast were prepared to adopt Noah Webster's more economical spellings, Americans now write "color" and "labor" instead of the English "colour" and "labour." Aside from being simpler, these spellings saved printers money by reducing the amount of costly metal type required for printing.

non-english languages

Beyond simply the varieties of English spoken in the new nation was the variety of other languages that were heard. German was a virtual official language in parts of eastern and central Pennsylvania; French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, Portuguese, and Ladino were among those also present in the early national years. As long as African slaves continued to be imported into the country—and for at least a generation after—native speakers of dozens of distinct African languages lived in the early United States. Similarly, Native Americans continued to speak several hundred distinct, mutually unintelligible languages and dialects in North America. To this mix of languages we might add the dozens, perhaps hundreds (given their evanescent nature, the exact number is unknown), of Creoles, pidgins, and trade jargons that combined elements of different languages.

It is also important to note that spoken languages—contrary to the wishes of lexicographers and authors such as Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) and Noah Webster (1758–1843)—are constantly mutating and evolving. Like culture itself, language cannot be fixed. Hence, the prevalence of Native American loan words such as caribou, moose, powwow, bayou, and tepee or African words such as banana, yam, cola, and goober (peanut) in American English. And in much the way that the computer revolution has transformed modern English, so the industrial revolution transformed nineteenth-century English. Words such as factory, mill, and engine acquired meanings that would have been almost totally unfamiliar to English speakers in eighteenth-century America. Much like vocabulary, whole languages themselves come and go. From the colonial era to the early nineteenth century, European languages—usually some variety of English or French—and various pidgins and Creoles supplanted an untold number of non-European languages and dialects. In the South Carolina low country, for example, Gullah, a New World Creole combining elements of English and a variety of African tongues, became the dominant language among some African slaves.

Any complete assessment of language in the early United States must also account for the fact that language is not necessarily a spoken medium. Hence, although elite young American men learned Latin and Greek and possibly Hebrew, few actually knew them as spoken languages. Similarly, a variety of symbol systems and sign systems that themselves might be characterized as languages were used during the period. Native peoples of the Great Plains had developed an elaborate sign language to serve as a sort of lingua franca in that vast, diverse part of North America. In the late 1820s, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the principal of the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut, announced the creation of a new sign language designed to allow the deaf to communicate. Several years later Samuel F. B. Morse devised the system of coded dots and dashes subsequently called Morse Code.

language and culture

Finally, "language" does not necessarily mean specific systems of speech. It can also refer to that collection of thoughts, sentiments, values, or assumptions that allow certain behavior (sometimes involving speech or writing; sometimes not) to have a specific meaning in a specific time and place. To modern Americans, for instance, the "tweaking" or twisting of a nose has little real meaning. But to politicians in the early United States, such an act carried with it very specific and widely recognized implications: it was one man's way of accusing another of being a liar and a coward. In other words, those distant figures—Aaron Burr or Alexander Hamilton or Andrew Jackson—understood a very different language of politics from the one that would be familiar to us. Instead of discipline and party loyalty, the governing values—some might even say the "grammar"—of their political language was personal honor and reputation. Indeed, every profession or social grouping uses a distinct language—a language sometimes involving speech, sometimes centering on gesture or comportment, sometimes having to do with clothing or insignia.

Insofar as we can generalize about language in the early United States, we can thus say that language was many, many things to many, many people. Much like the values or customs or cultural habits of the early United States, so the languages of the nation reflected a vast array of social, ethnic, and economic imperatives.

a national language

For some members of the founding generation, much as for some Americans in the early twenty-first century, this was a disturbing reality. A nation of many and diverse languages would—in their minds—be a weak, incoherent nation and as such a nation prone to the sorts of corruption and conflict that appeared to plague the bodies politic of the Old World. Indeed, the entire philosophical project of the American Enlightenment (and, really, everything we call the Enlightenment) was founded on faith in the idea that human speech, and its accrued conventions, obscured truth and, in doing so, produced human conflict. Whether Patrick Henry's oratory or the social facts and statistics in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) or Noah Webster's lexicon—all sought more transparent, less historically inflected modes of communication. Human beings, they believed, needed to find ways to communicate and discover truths unhindered by the cumulative effects of politics and self-interest that left language a cloudy, imprecise, and deeply flawed medium.

Although everyone who gave the issue any thought at all assumed all language to be flawed and opaque, they also believed that some languages were simply better than others (a notion that has no currency among turn-of-the-twenty-first century linguists). The thinking went something like this: as human creations, languages bore the imprints of the minds that fashioned them. Crude minds would thus fashion crude tongues. Hence, among Americans inclined to think about such things, there was no doubt that some form of English, the product of the most historically advanced society on earth, would be the language of the United States. Because the language had been fashioned by people achieving the highest known levels of literacy and social development, it would be well suited to the needs of a modern republic. As such, it would inevitably displace minority languages, whether those of native peoples, African slaves, or non-English-speaking Europeans.

Contrary to what is occasionally asserted, no one ever seriously proposed German or any other European tongue as an alternative language for the new nation. Noah Webster and others may have believed that English would have to be improved to adequately serve the new Republic, but no one ever seriously proposed that America be anything other than an English-speaking country.

It is one thing to envision an English-speaking nation, and another to create one. Noah Webster may have envisioned a simplified, standardized idiom bringing the republican people of the United States together, and he may have believed his lexicon and his spelling texts could produce such a result. But he was profoundly mistaken. Languages become national not because of the interventions of pedants and grammarians. Of far greater importance has been the growth of mass media such as cheap newspapers and magazines. Still, even with the regularizing influence of print, one has to feel for those purists among us making usually futile efforts to protect American English from neologisms, regionalisms, and other developments that they might call "corruptions." For most linguists, language change represents neither corruption nor improvement. It simply is. It is an inevitable facet of that ever-fluid and endlessly adaptive thing called language.

See alsoEuropean Influences: Enlightenment Thought; German-Language Publishing; Immigration and Immigrants .

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Edward G. Gray