A History of English Language

A history of the english language 336
December. When the territory was admitted to the Union as a state in September 1851, its
population was at least 150,000, and in not much more than another twelve months it had
become a quarter of a million. Every part of America was represented in it.
242. Uniformity of American English.
In this necessarily rapid survey some emphasis has been laid on the geographical and
ethnic groups represented in the settlement of different parts of the country. The reason
for this emphasis will appear later (§ 250). But it been equally the intention to show that
except for a few districts, such as the region around Massachusetts Bay and the tidewater
section of Virginia, the most prominent characteristic of the occupation of the United
States is the constant mingling of settlers from one part with settlers from other parts. Not
only were practically all sections of the British Isles represented in the original colonists,
with some admixture of the French and the Germans, but as each new section was opened
up it attracted colonists from various districts which had become overcrowded or
uncongenial to them. Thus colonists from Massachusetts went north into Maine and New
Hampshire and south into Rhode Island and Connecticut. Others moved from New
England into New York, New Jersey, and colonies as far south as Georgia, as when a
body from Dorchester in Massachusetts, known as the Dorchester Society, moved to
Georgia in 1752. The Ulster Scots seem to have been of a more roving disposition or a
more pioneering spirit than the English, and their movement from Pennsylvania to the
South, from there into the Old Northwest Territory, and eventually into the Pacific
Northwest seems to indicate that they were generally to be found on each advancing
frontier. Except for a few of the larger cities with numerous recent and as yet
unassimilated immigrants, and except for certain localities such as Wisconsin and
Minnesota where the settlement of large groups of Scandinavians and Germans took
place in the nineteenth century, there is probably nowhere a European population of such
size and extent with so homogeneous a character. 4
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 de-
4
The history of African Americans is strikingly different. The institution of slavery during the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, the decades of segregation in the South following
the Civil War, and the isolation of African Americans in northern cities during the present century
have produced a major anomaly in the structure and mobility of American society. This anomaly
has had its corresponding linguistic effects, which require separate treatment below (§ 250.8). The
uniformity of the language of the majority of Americans, as described in the following paragraphs,
makes the contrast with the English of many African Americans more evident than it would appear
in a linguistically diverse society.