Historical background

Disregarding Sir Walter Raleigh’s late-fifteenth century “Lost Colony” of Roanoke, permanent English settlement in North America started early in the seventeenth century, and the fact that the earliest settler groups tended to be religious dissenters predominantly from southern parts of England has resulted in the fact that the dialects of the regions where they established their bridgeheads (1607: Jamestown, Virginia; 1620: the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts) have retained higher degrees of similarity to southern forms of British English. Later streams of settlers, migrating from landing sites in or near Pennsylvania into the interior North, the Midlands and the Upper South in search of new lands, brought their northern English or Scottish-derived forms of English and caused these to diffuse, thus giving them a particularly strong role in the evolution of distinctly American ways of speaking. The first two centuries of British settlement (and the French and Indian War of 1756–1763) secured English as the language of the Atlantic seaboard and beyond, the area occupied by the thirteen original colonies that declared their independence in 1776. As a consequence of relatively homogeneous settler groups and long-standing stability in this eastern region along the Atlantic coast, regional dialect differences have been found to be stronger there than further to the West. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 opened up the continent for further exploration and settlement expansion throughout the nineteenth century, invigorated by the California Gold Rush after 1848 and the construction and completion (in 1869) of the transcontinental railway. Linguistically speaking, these processes resulted in even more dialect mixing and relatively higher degrees of linguistic homogeneity. At the same time, for centuries Africans had been brought to the South forcedly as slaves. Emancipation after the Civil War, in 1865, gave them freedom but did not prevent social segregation, which to some degree has persisted to the present day – developments which have resulted in and are reflected by the emergence and evolution of African American Vernacular English and Gullah and which in some respects may be taken to have resulted in a linguistic bridge between inland varieties and the Caribbean. In Canada, the British possession of Newfoundland dates back to the 16^th century, caused it to be settled by people from Ireland and southwestern England, and has left a distinctive dialect there. On the other hand, Canadian English in general is said to have been characterized by a tension between its British roots (reinforced by loyalists who opted for living in Canada after America’s independence) and the continuous linguistic and cultural pressure (or attractiveness, for that matter) exerted by its big southern neighbor. Furthermore, varieties of American English comprise accents forged by immigrant groups from a host of countries of origin, including southern and eastern Europeans, Asians, and South and Central Americans: Today, the most important of these are certainly the forms of English created by contact with Mexican Spanish.

In the Caribbean, the British entered the stage more than a century after the Spanish had established themselves; and the struggle for superiority and influence between these two and a few more European powers (most importantly, the French and the Dutch) shaped the ragged history of the region for centuries. The agents of these struggles were not primarily settlers but buccaneers, planters, and slaves, and many islands changed hands repeatedly (31 times, it is reported, in the case of Tobago). Such political turnovers and other activities resulted in high rates of cross-migration and mutual influences, also linguistically (Holm 1983). The earliest British possessions in the region were St. Kitts (1624; said to have been highly influential in the shaping and dispersal of Caribbean language forms: Baker and Bruyn 1998) and Barbados (1627). Jamaica, the largest and most important stronghold of Caribbean English (and Creole), became British in 1655. Suriname, located on the South American continent but culturally a part of the Caribbean in many ways, presents an exceptional and also linguistically extraordinary case: An English colony for only 16 years (from 1651 to 1657, when it was exchanged for New Amsterdam, which thus became New York), it has retained the English-related creole of its founder years, now called Sranan, and its maroon descendant forms of the interior to the present day, thus being the site of the most conservative and radical creoles in the region. In Trinidad, English and English-based creole replaced French creole only in the course of the nineteenth century. Finally, various historical incidents (minor settlement migrations, like from the Caymans to the Bay Islands of Honduras; logwood cutting, buccaneering and even shipwrecks in Belize and Nicaragua; economic activities, like railroad construction in Costa Rica and the building of the canal in Panama) established pockets of English creoles throughout central America.