A History of English Language

A history of the english language 368
greater from north to south than from east to west is but a natural consequence of the
geographical configuration of colonial America. 52
251. The Controversy over Americanisms.
From the time that differences in the vocabulary and idiom of Americans began to be
noticed, they became the subject of comment and soon of controversy. In the beginning
English comment was uniformly adverse, at least as far back as the utterances of Dr.
Johnson. 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.
When the injustice of this attitude was perceived, Americans began to defend their use of
English and, with a growing sense of their position among nations, to demand parity for
their speech with the English of England. Over this difference in point of view a
controversy was carried on through most of the nineteenth century.
The first person to use the term Americanism was John Witherspoon, one of the early
presidents of Princeton University. In 1781 he defined it as “an use of phrases or terms,
or a construction of sentences, even among persons of rank and education, different from
the use of the same terms or phrases, or the construction of similar sentences in Great-
Britain.” In justification of the word he added, “The word Americanism, which I have
coined for the purpose, is exactly similar in its formation and signification to the word
Scotticism.” Himself a Scot, he naturally did not look upon differences from the English
of England as necessarily bad. He said, “It does not follow, from a man’s using these, that
he is ignorant, or his discourse upon the whole inelegant; nay, it does not follow in every
case, that the terms or phrases used are worse in themselves, but merely that they are of
American and not of English growth.” 53 So independent an attitude is not surprising in
one who, if he did not paint his name in characters so bold as John Hancock, was
nevertheless one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson, who did
not scruple to coin the word belittle, was independent without being belligerent. He
objected to “raising a hue and cry against every word he [Johnson] has not licensed….
Here where all is new, no innovation is feared which offers good…. And should the
language of England continue stationary, we shall probably enlarge our employment of it,
until its new character may separate it
52
For discussions of the English language in Hawaii, which touch on some of the same problems
found in discussions of AAVE, see John E.Reinecke, Language and Dialect in Hawaii:
Sociolinguistic History to 1935, ed. Stanley M.Tsuzaki (Honolulu, 1969); Elizabeth Carr, Da Kine
Talk: From Pidgin to Standard English in Hawaii (Honolulu, 1972); and the articles by Elizabeth
Carr and Stanley Tsuzaki in Pidginization and Creolization of Languages, ed. Dell Hymes.
53
In the Pennsylvania Journal and Weekly Advertiser, reprinted in M.M.Mathews, The Beginnings
of American English (Chicago, 1931), p. 17.