A history of the English Language

Mi querido Rafa
(Houston, 1981), p. 44; 
Dear Rafe
(Houston, 1985), p. 51. 
Used by permission of Arte Público Press. 
45 
For more on Spanish loanwords, see Garland Cannon, “Recent borrowings from Spanish into 
English,” in 
Spanish Loanwords in the English Language: A Tendency towards Hegemony 
Reversal,
ed. F.R.González (Berlin, 1996), 41–60. 
A history of the english language 364

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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,