18c accents?

Fri Feb 8 17:18:02 UTC 2002

Those interested in American English of the colonial period may wish to
look at Mitford Mathews' *The Beginnings of American English*, originally
published by U of Chicago Press in 1931.  It reprints early commentary from
the likes of John Witherspoon, Noah Webster, Anne Royall, and
others.  Another good source is Fisher and Bornstein's *In Forme of Speche
is Chaunge* (orig. Prentice Hall 1974, later Univ Press of America;  there
is also a Caedmon LP with audio to match parts of the book), which has a
whole section on colonial American English.  More recently, Vol. VI
"English in North America" of *The Cambridge History of the English
Language* contains some good summary information about colonial American
settlement and language (though it sections are perhaps more dependent on
David Fischer's *Albion's Seed* than need be, a work which gives more
credit to localizable British origins of the settlers than some other
historicans, such as Bernard Bailyn).

John Smith, about as early as you'd want to get, published vocabulary from
contacts with Native Americans, some of which survives today.  We hear from
Witherspoon that there were already American English variants in the 18th
century. Anne Royall was representing characteristic regional American
pronunciations (in "literary dialect") in the early 19th century. Before
that we see spellings in early colonial documents that suggest the various
pronunciations then in use. Early records, say, the Salem Witch Trials
(there is a Web site at U of Virginia for texts), recapitulate spellings
used in England--immigrants of course brought their various dialect
features with them--but it isn't long before we see some differences
emerging as the native-born population grew.  The best evidence for the
timing of the emergence of accents may be what happened in the later 19th
century in New Zealand, where what Peter Trudgill calls "embryonic
variants" of the later-characteristic New Zealand accent could be
identified in the first and second generations of native New
Zealanders.  We can surmise, therefore, based on the written evidence and
the example of New Zealand, that there were growing regional American
accents as early as the end of the 17th century, and that such accents
became so well established during the 18th c that they could be pilloried
in dialect writing by about 1800.

Bill

At 10:16 PM 2/3/02 -0500, you wrote:
 >My wife has posed me a question I'm unable to answer: When did American
 >pronunciation start becoming noticeably different from English
 >pronunciation? E.g., is there any record from around the time of the
 >American Revolution ("colonials speak oddly" sort of thing)?
 >
 >She was prompted to this question by listening to the CDs in a book
 >called _Poetry Speaks_, featuring American and English poets reading
 >their own works. The oldest are from circa 1888: Tennyson, Browning, and
 >Whitman. T & B are, she says, "obviously British", though B, who
 >traveled extensively in the US, is "less so". But Whitman "pretty much
 >sounds the way you'd expect an educated mid-Atlantic person to sound;
 >it's clearly not British, but an American accent, and pretty much the
 >same you'd expect to hear today."
 >
 >She also comments that while it's very difficult to make out *what*
 >they're saying -- the originals were on wax cylinders -- the accent and
 >cadence are clearly distinguishable. I haven't listened to these yet.
 >
 >-- Mark A. Mandel
 >    Linguist at Large

Bill Kretzschmar                        Professor of English and Linguistics
Dept. of English                        Phone: 706-542-2246
University of Georgia                   Fax:  706-583-0027
Athens, GA  30602-6205                  Atlas Web Site: us.english.uga.edu