A History of English Language

The english language in america
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this number had grown to about 25,000 inhabitants. The majority of the settlers came first
to Massachusetts, but in a very few years groups in search of cheaper land or greater
freedom began to push up and down the coast and establish new communities. In this
way Connecticut got its start as early as 1634, and the coasts of Maine and Rhode Island
were early occupied. New Hampshire was settled more slowly because of the greater
resistance by the Native Americans. New England was not then misnamed: practically all
of the early colonists came from England. East Anglia was the stronghold of English
Puritanism, and, as we shall see, there is fair evidence that about two-thirds of the early
settlers around Massachusetts Bay came from the eastern counties.
The settlement of the Middle Atlantic states was somewhat different. Dutch
occupation of New York began in 1614, but the small size of the Netherlands did not
permit of a large migration, and the number of Dutch in New York was never great. At
the time of the seizure of the colony by the English in 1664 the population numbered only
about 10,000, and a part of it was English. After the Revolution a considerable movement
into the colony took place from New England, chiefly from Connecticut. New York City
even then, though small and relatively unimportant, had a rather cosmopolitan population
of merchants and traders. New Jersey was almost wholly English. The eastern part was an
offshoot of New England, but on the Delaware River there was a colony of Quakers
direct from England. At Burlington opposite sides of the town were occupied by a group
from Yorkshire and a group from London. Pennsylvania had a mixed population of
English Quakers, some Welsh, and many Scots-Irish and Germans. William Penn’s
activities date from 1681. Philadelphia was founded the following year, prospered, and
grew so rapidly that its founder lived to see it the largest city in the colonies. From about
1720 a great wave of migration set in from Ulster to Pennsylvania, the number of
emigrants being estimated at nearly 50,000. Many of these, finding the desirable lands
already occupied by the English, moved on down the mountain valleys to the southwest.
Their enterprise and pioneering spirit made them an important element among the
vigorous frontier settlers who opened up this part of the South and later other territories
farther west into which they pushed. But there were still many of them in Pennsylvania,
and Franklin was probably close to the truth in his estimate that in about 1750 one-third
of the state was English, one-third Scots, and one-third German. Germantown, the first
outpost of the Germans in Pennsylvania, was founded in 1683 by an agreement with
Penn. In the beginning of the eighteenth century Protestants in the districts along the
Rhine known as the Palatinate were subject to such persecution that they began coming in
large numbers to America. Most of them settled in Pennsylvania, where, likewise finding
the desirable lands around Philadelphia already occupied by the English, they went up the
Lehigh and Susquehanna valleys and formed communities sufficiently homogeneous to
long retain their own language. Even today “Pennsylvania Dutch” is spoken by scattered
groups among their descendants. Lancaster was the largest inland town in any of the
colonies. Maryland, the southernmost of the middle colonies, and in some ways actually a
southern colony, was originally settled by English Catholics under a charter to Lord
Baltimore, but they were later outnumbered by new settlers. The Maryland back country
was colonized largely by people from Pennsylvania, among whom were many Scots-Irish
and Germans.