A History of English Language

The english language in america
365
and into larger domains. As Ronald Butters, the president of the American Dialect
Society, observes, “Whatever social and political directions our linguistic future may
take, Spanish is sure to play an increasing role, one that is different from anything we
have ever experienced.” 46
Although certain patterns in African American Vernacular English have clearly been
influenced by African languages and those in Hispanic American English by Spanish,
many other dialectal differences in the United States have been explained by tracing them
to the districts in England from which the earliest settlers came. 47 If this explanation is
valid, we must believe that the English spoken by the first colonists—mainly those who
came during the seventeenth century—determined the speech of the communities in
which they settled, and that later accretions to the population of districts already occupied
were made sufficiently gradually to be assimilated to the speech that had become
established there. There is nothing in the facts to contradict this assumption. The nucleus
of the New England colonies was in the district around Massachusetts Bay, and the
earliest settlements in the South were in the tidewater district of Virginia. Fortunately, it
is for just these sections that we have the fullest information concerning the English
homes of the earliest settlers. In the Atlas of the Historical Geography of the United
States 48 the evidence has been collected. Of the settlers in New England before 1700,
1,281 have been traced to their source in England, and for Virginia during the same
period the English homes have been found for 637. These numbers, to be sure, are not
large, but it is believed that the group of colonists identified in each case is representative
of the two settlements. The result shows that the predominant element in New England
was from the southeastern and southern counties of England. 49 Sixty-one percent of those
traced are accounted for by
46
“The Internationalization of American English: Two Challenges,” American Speech, 75 (2000),
283–84.
47
For an excellent statement of this view see Hans Kurath, “The Origin of the Dialectal Differences
in Spoken American English,” Modern Philology, 25 (1928), 385–95. A convenient summary of
supporting evidence collected in the years since is Kurath’s Studies in Area Linguistics
(Bloomington, IN, 1972), especially chap. 5, “The Historical Relation of American English to
British English.”
48
Prepared by Charles O.Paullin and John K.Wright (Washington and New York, 1932), pp. 46–
41. To this may be added Marcus L.Hansen, The Atlantic Migration, 1607–1860 (Cambridge, MA,
1940) and the same author’s account of the settlement of New England contributed to the
Handbook of the Linguistic Geography of New England mentioned on p. 399.
49
“The number of settlers from London for New England was 193, or 15 percent; for Virginia 179,
or 28 percent. The counties (with numbers) sending the most settlers to New England are as
follows: Norfolk 125, Suffolk 116, Kent 106, Essex 100, Devon 76, Wiltshire 69; to Virginia,
Gloucester 44, Kent 42, Yorkshire 30, and Lancaster 22. Of the emigrants from Gloucester both to
New England and Virginia more than half came from Bristol. Of the Norfolk emigrants to New
England half came from Hingham and Norwich.” (Paullin and Wright, op. cit., p. 46.)