Lecture 7. MODERN ENGLISH
Plan of the Lecture:
1. The American English
2. Linguistic Nationalism
3. English Grammar in the New World
4. Pronunciation and Dialects
5. Black English
6. Irish and Scottish Dialect
7. Cockney
8. Estuary English
The American Language
The English that was brought to America in seventeenth century was the language/or versions of the language of Early Modern England. The year of the Captain John Smith's founding of Jamestown (1607) coincides roughly with Shakespeare's writing of Timon of Athens and Pericles, and the King James Bible (the "Authorized Version") was published only four years later, in 1611.
It was not long before writers on both sides of the Atlantic began to acknowledge the language's divergence. Johnson's assessment was mild compared to that of S.T. Coleridge, who asserted in 1822 that "the Americans presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language. That they had mistaken the English language for baggage (which is called plunder in America), and had stolen it"
Noah Webster attributed some of the marked features of New England speech to a conservatism engendered by the relative isolation, vis à vis the rest of the world, of the colonists, stating that New Englanders: have been sequestered in some measure from the world, and their language has not suffered material changes from their first settlement to the present time.
Three stages of settlement and influence can be discerned:
1. Beginning with the English settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the landing of the Puritans in Massachusetts in 1620 (though the Pilgrims encountered Native Americans who were already speaking English), the English language is established in America (along with Dutch, German, French, and other tongues).
2. The American Revolution creates a separate political identity, and along with it an expressed desire for a distinct linguistic identity. The Louisiana Purchase and the consequent expansion westward, accelerated by the discovery of gold in California contribute to linguistic intermingling and dialect leveling in the West.
3. The period of European immigration to the US after the Civil War marks the next stage of large-scale linguistic infusions. Since the vast majority of these immigrants settled in the North, that is arguably the region where the greatest linguistic impact of immigration was also felt.
Since the mid-20th century, large numbers of Spanish-speaking immigrants have come to the U.S. from Mexico, Latin America, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, many settling in the formerly Spanish-speaking states of California, New Mexico, parts of Texas, and Arizona. Since the 1960s and the War in Vietnam, large numbers of Indo-Chinese immigrants have arrived, especially in the Pacific Coast states. One consequence of recent immigration, especially where Spanish-speakers are nearing majority status, is the passage of "English Only" or "Official English" laws. In 1999 22 states have adopted such laws and three others have Official English laws of somewhat different status: Louisiana has required records to be kept in English since 1811; Hawaii has English and Hawaiian established as official languages; and English was accorded official status by the Supreme Court in Massachusetts.
Linguistic Nationalism
As perception of the country as a nation separate from England grew, so too did perception of language differences. In January 1774, and anonymous writer (possibly John Adams) issued a proposal in the Royal American Magazine for a national academy.
The English language has been greatly improved in Britain within a century, but its highest perfection, with every other branch of human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this land of light and freedom. As the people through this extensive country will speak English, their advantages for polishing their language will be great, and vastly superior to what the people of England ever enjoyed.
A few years later (September 5, 1780), John Adams wrote to the president of Congress from Amsterdam proposing that Congress establish an "American Academy for correcting, improving and ascertaining the English language".
An early factor in the evolution of American English was the need to name unfamiliar features of the landscape, flora, and fauna of the New World. One source for such words was the rich, but often difficult (for English speakers) vocabulary of the Native Americans. Captain John Smith, in trying to transcribe arakun wrote rahougcum (1608). This is the source of now-familiar word, raccoon. Other words derived from Native American languages include: hickory, hominy, moccasin, moose, muskrat, opossum, papoose, pecan, persimmon, pone, powwow, skunk, squash, squaw, succotash, terrapin, toboggan, tomahawk, totem, wigwam, woodchuck.
Earlier Spanish and Portuguese explorers, encountering Native Americans in the West Indies, Mexico, and Central and South American, had provided forms that became the English words barbecue, cannibal, canoe, chocolate, maize, potato, tomato, savannah. Although it enters the language somewhat later (1825), the word coyote also derives from the Nahuatl word coyotl (via Spanish).
The word "Amercanism" has been in use since after the Revolution to refer disparagingly to words or usages of supposed American origin. John Witherspoon, first president of Princeton University claims the credit for coining the term and details its signification.
English Grammar in the New World
Lindley Murray (1745-1826), an American expatriate living in England, all but cornered the market during first quarter of eighteenth century with his English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners. Published in York in 1795, Murray's grammar was first printed in America in Boston in 1800 and went through more than 100 editions, selling more than 2 million copies. Murray's work borrowed from Priestly's grammar, Campbell's rhetoric, and Lowth's grammar and relied heavily on teaching by showing incorrect examples (false syntax).
Noah Webster (1758-1843) produced his own speller, grammar, and reader, published in 1783, 1784, and 1785 as A Grammatical Institute of the English Language. The speller, The American Spelling Book sold more than 80 million copies in 100 years, providing Webster with sufficient income to turn his attention entirely to linguistic concerns. Webster's rhetoric is generally that of a descriptivist, one who bases his claims on observations of usage rather than on the analogy of the grammatical structures of Latin, though at points in his career he did succumb, if only temporarily, to the siren song of prescription.
Webster's growing familiarity with educated practice modified his views. He had condemned the use of who in Who did you marry? when writing the Grammatical Institute (1784), but accepted it in the 1789 Dissertations. In a passage that simultaneously illustrates the alteration of his views and underscores his disdain for grammarians too much influenced by Latin, he wrote that Whom do you speak to? was "never used in speaking, as I can find, and if so, it is hardly English at all." He thought only who had been used in asking questions "until some Latin student began to suspect it bad English, because not agreeable to the Latin rules. At any rate, whom do you speak to? is a corruption, and all the grammars that can be formed will not extend the use of the phrase beyond the walls of a college".
In 1828, at the age of 70, Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language in 2 volumes. His stated aim was to show the distinctiveness of American English; yet he had not succeeded in making it as distinctive as he had once hoped to. His first dictionary, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), had included the simplified spellings "ake, crum, fether, honor, iland, ile (for aisle), theater, wether". But even these innovations constituted a compromise; in his "Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling", he had advocated "doctrin, medicin, examin, determin, disciplin, and opak". Many of the reforms introduced in the American Dictionary did succeed and today constitute the primary differences between British and American spelling. These include the simplification of the word-final -ck spellings (as in musick, magick) to -c; the -our spellings (e.g., colour, honour) to -or; and the -re spellings (inherited from French, in, e.g., centre, theatre) to -re.
Goold Brown published The Grammar of English Grammars in 1851. Richard Grant White, author of Words and Their Uses (1870) and Every-Day English (1880), did not believe that Americans had right to establish their own standard. Words and Their Uses went through thirty-three editions in thirty years and was still in copyright as late as 1927. Among the words he condemned were: donate, jeopardize, resurrect, initiate, practitioner, photographer, pants, conversationalist, standpoint, presidential, gubernatorial, shamefaced, and reliable.