The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. 2000.
Regional Patterns of American Speech
Lee Pederson
Everyone speaks some form of regional dialect—a variety of a language that differs in pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary from those spoken in other regions. In this sense, a region implies a construct of social and historical facts as well as a geographic area. The shared linguistic features that make up a regional dialect include historical facts of migration and community experience, social facts of ethnic identity, and geographic facts of climate and terrain. Each regional dialect also includes a number of social dialects that reflect the age, education, social class, and ethnic identity of its speakers.
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Compared to some languages spoken in countries that have mutually unintelligible dialects, American English shows very little variety. Some commentators have taken this to mean American English has no dialects. This notion was widely held by European observers before the Civil War, including Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, and Charles Dickens, among others. But as early as 1782 Thomas Jefferson distinguished four cultural areas—North, South, Pennsylvania, and New York—based on “characteristics,” the habits and temperament of the people:
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These characteristics grow weaker by gradation from North to South and South to North, insomuch that the observing traveller, without the aid of the quadrant may always know his latitude by the character of the people among whom he finds himself.
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Appropriately enough, Jefferson made these observations in a letter to F. J. Chastellux, a Frenchman who in the same year had applied the word “American” (in its French form, Americain) to the language spoken in our young country. Jefferson's letter identifies the people who were soon to produce the Northern, Southern, Coastal (New York), and Midland (Pennsylvania) dialects.
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The European tourists who denied that America had distinctive dialect areas ignored the importance of time in dialect development. Current study of language variation suggests that a well-defined dialect requires several generations of shared experience among its speakers to produce distinctive patterns. Only now, for example, are the regional dialects of the West—the Rocky Mountain States, the Southwest, and the Pacific Coast—emerging as recognizable patterns that complement the older varieties of American speech in the Eastern, Midwestern, and Southern states.
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Social Forces and Dialect Development
Early observers gave no consideration to the social forces that underlie dialect development. Among other factors, dialects may reflect the speech of early influential groups, such as the East Anglians who settled near Boston and then in Hartford, and whose ancestors settled the areas in which the Inland North emerged; migration routes, such as the settlement of the Interior South out of Pennsylvania (1725–1775); old political boundaries, such as the Western Reserve of Connecticut, in Ohio, which became the terminus for migratory settlers from Hartford; geographic features, such as the Appalachian Mountains, which divided Midland speech to the west and Eastern and Southern speech to the east and south; cultural centers, such as New Orleans, which spread its influence to the north, east, and west without serious competition; social structure, as in the antebellum South, where Blacks and elite whites shared many dialect features, while poor whites shared fewer with either of these groups; recent immigrants, such as today’s population of Cuban Americans in South Florida; and climate, including factors such as the 180-day growing season for cotton in the South and the 2.5 inches of annual rainfall typical in the arid lands of the West.
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Early Modern English
American dialects emerged from the historical variety called Early Modern English (1500–1770). At its center was Elizabethan English, the language of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Bacon, Donne, Raleigh, Spenser, and the Queen herself. During this stage of linguistic development, emigration brought the earliest varieties of English to the New World. Between 1500 and 1700, the number of English speakers nearly doubled, while German, Italian, and Spanish speakers scarcely maintained their numbers, and only French surpassed the growth rate of English among the Western European languages.
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The Beginnings of American English
The fluid structure of Early Modern English underlies the formation of American English. Although the English vowel system changed dramatically from the 15th through the 18th centuries in a process known as the Great Vowel Shift, many English, Scottish, and Irish social dialects were slow to accept all of these emergent features, with the result that the pronunciation of English remained extremely varied. Reflecting the variability of the spoken language, Early Modern English showed great inventiveness and flexibility in word formation and adaptations, as with the free use of affixes in word building (re-,de-, -ish, -ize), the functional shift of parts of speech (nouns used as verbs, verbs as nouns, and both as adjectival or adverbial modifiers), frequent parenthetical expression, and striking verb phrases.
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Drawn from the many currents of that rapidly flowing stream, American English shows a much greater uniformity than its origins might suggest. This is because the inhabitants of the New World cast aside many of their European differences in forming a new identity. Linguist Einar Haugen has called this evolution of the national language in America “Babel in reverse.”
