Regional Patterns of American Speech

Early American Evidence The first substantial collection of immigrant literature appeared in New England, where writers recorded a variety of occasional spellings and distinctive forms derived from Elizabethan English. In The History of Plimoth Plantation, 1620-1647, William Bradford wrote burthen, fadom, furder, gifen (given), gusle (guzzle), trible (triple), and vacabund (vagabond). Roger Williams rhymed abode/God, blood/good, and America/away in A Key into the Language of America (1643). Anne Bradstreet paired conceit/great, stood/flood, and satisfy/reality in The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650). Two generations later, Edward Taylor alternated spoil and spile, as well as soot and sut, and rhymed is/kiss, far/cur, and vile/soil. 10 Early American grammar also showed a great variety of forms and constructions. In 1630, while sailing westward aboard the Arbella, John Winthrop preached "A Modell of Christian Charity," which included the line "We must love brotherly without dissimulation; we must love one another with a pure heart fervently." Bradford used rid, runned (and ranne), drunk, writ, and shrunk as past forms of ride, run, drink, write, and shrink, respectively. Williams declared, "My disease is I know not what" and offered the interrogative form "Sleep you?" In her captivity narrative of 1676, Mary Rowlandson wrote, "It is not my tongue or pen can express the sorrow of my heart." 11 During these same years, cultural activity all along the Atlantic seaboard produced the first Americanisms. The following native words, among hundreds of others, originated, gained special meaning, or entered the English language through American speech in the 17th century: creek, fat pine, green corn, and papoose from Massachusetts; catfish, corn (maize), mock[ing]bird, polecat (skunk), and raccoon from Virginia; Chippewa, groundhog, Manhattan, and Podunk from New York; gang [of birds], hominy, snakeroot, and Virginian from Maryland; oyster rake, samp, and wampum from Rhode Island; grocery (store), hotcakes (corn cakes), pea-vine (a climbing plant similar to the pea), and sunfish from Pennsylvania; settlement and swampland from Connecticut; Dutch grass (any one of various grasses) and hickory nut from South Carolina; and frontier from New Jersey. Beyond the frontiers, pilot (a guide over a land route) appeared in what is now Colorado, and Miami in what is now Illinois. 12 Native American Influences These words suggest the importance of Native American loans, especially for artifacts and places. From the Algonquian dialects alone, English and French in the New World borrowed more than a hundred terms that remain current today. In addition to Chippewa, hominy, Manhattan, papoose, Podunk, samp, squash, and wampum, the eastern tribes provided caribou, mackinaw, pone, Tammany, terrapin, and toboggan. Native American loanwords often suggest multiple language contacts. For instance, caribou and toboggan entered through Canadian French in the north; barbecue came out of the West Indies through Spanish, while canoe also came from the West Indies but traveled through both Spanish and French before entering English. Spanish later transmitted coyote and peyote from the Nahuatl language of Mexico. From Quechua, probably through the cooperative efforts of French and Spanish, the New Orleans term lagniappe appeared somewhat later. 13 American place names are the greatest Native American contribution. From Appalachia and the Alleghenies, across all five of the Great Lakes (Erie, Ontario, Huron, Michigan, and Superior [Ojibwa Gitchi via French Supérieur]); from Chicago to Sitka, native words cover the continent. Emblematic of American language and culture are the blends, such as Bayou La Batre, Alabama (Choctaw bayuk, "creek" + French de la Batre, "of the [artillery] battery"), and Minneapolis, Minnesota (Dakota minne, "water" + Greek/English (a)polis, "city"), or the loan translations Spearfish, South Dakota, Ten Sleep, Wyoming, Warroad, Minnesota, and Yellow Dirt Creek, Georgia, besides the native loans of the state names Alabama (people), Dakota (people), and Minnesota (Dakota minne, "water" + sota, "white"). 14 Loans from the European Languages Early loans from European languages correspond with Dutch, French, and German settlements in the coastal colonies and along the first interior frontiers. During their New Amsterdam experience the Dutch added to American English the words boss, Bowery, coleslaw, cookie, sleigh, stoop, and waffle. Later they gave more place names, such as Catskill, Kinderhook, and Schuyler. Thoreau spoke of "Yankee ingenuity" in 1843, a durable nickname that probably had its origin in Jan (Janke), the Dutch diminutive for John (Johnny); Saint Nicholas, clipped to Sinterklaas in Dutch, became Santa Claus before the Revolutionary War. 15 French loans contrast sharply with the Dutch and later German contributions. Although they also gave English ordinary household words such as chowder, pumpkin, sashay, shanty, and shivaree, the enterprising French illustrate their experience in a distinctive set of loans. Explorers, missionaries, and frontier warriors made American words of bateau, crevasse, levee, portage, prairie, and voyageur. As the English, Dutch, and Swedes struggled to control the seaboard, the French ranged across the interior and left their mark with the names of places at Bienville, Cape Girardeau, Prairie du Chien, and Sault Sainte Marie. 16 Early German loans on the frontier are difficult to ascertain. Like the Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxons in England, the Germans and English spoke languages with a common word stock that still endures in the basic vocabularies of both cultures. For the same reason it is impossible to determine with certainty whether schlemiel is of Yiddish or German origin and whether spook is of Dutch or German origin. Only when the Germans established discrete territories, as the Dutch had in New York, did the loans begin to appear in significant numbers from Pennsylvania, Cincinnati, Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis, and east-central Texas. From early Pennsylvania, American English probably received smearcase (cottage cheese), panhas (scrapple, from German dialectal pann, pan + has, hare), rainworm (earthworm), and possibly George Washington’s most familiar title, The Father of His Country, which first appeared as Der Landes Vater on a Nord Amerikanische Kalender for 1779. 17

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