A history of the English Language

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. 
A history of the english language 336

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gree of uniformity. Those who are familiar with the pronounced dialectal differences that 
mark the popular speech of different parts of England will know that there is nothing 
comparable to these differences in the United States. This was the object of remark as 
early as 1781, when John Witherspoon, the Scottish president of Princeton University, 
observed of the common people in America that “being much more unsettled, and 
moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either 
in accent or phraseology.”
5
Isaac Candler, an Englishman who traveled in America in 
1822–1823, wrote: “The United States having been peopled from different parts of 
England and Ireland, the peculiarities of the various districts have in a great measure 
ceased. As far as pronunciation is concerned, the mass of people speak better English, 
than the mass of people in England. This I know will startle some, but its correctness will 
become manifest when I state, that in no part, except in those occupied by the 
descendants of the Dutch and German settlers, is any unintelligible jargon in vogue. We 
hear nothing so bad in America as the Suffolk whine, the Yorkshire clipping, or the 
Newcastle guttural. We never hear the letter H aspirated improperly, nor omitted to be 
aspirated where propriety requires it. The common pronunciation approximates to that of 
the well educated class of London and its vicinity.”
6
We must not be misled by his 
statement about the goodness of American English. He does not mean that equally good 
English was not spoken in England. What he says is that in America there was little local 
variation and in the matter of pronunciation there was a more general conformance to 
what he conceived to be an educated standard. At about the same time James Fenimore 
Cooper spoke to much the same effect. “If the people of this country,” he said, “were like 
the people of any other country on earth, we should be speaking at this moment a great 
variety of nearly unintelligible patois; but, in point of fact, the people of the United 
States, with the exception of a few of German and French descent, speak, as a body, an 
incomparably better English than the people of the mother country. There is not, 
probably, a man (of English descent) born in this country, who would not be perfectly 
intelligible to all whom he should meet in the streets of London, though a vast number of 
those he met in the streets of London would be nearly unintelligible to him. In fine, we 
speak our language, as a nation, better than any other people speak their language. When 
one reflects on the immense surface of country that we occupy, the general accuracy, in 
pronunciation and in the use of words, is quite astonishing. This resemblance in speech 
can only be ascribed to the great diffusion of
5 
In a paper contributed to the