Demographics and education in the development of a standard Colonial settlement

The first settlement of America occurred in the seventeenth century within the different original colonial hearth areas. Travel was difficult enough so that the separate colonies developed cultural differences early on, including linguistic differences. No colony was settled exclusively from any single region of England; early settlers in every colony came from a variety of areas in England, and thus brought with them various regional English speech characteristics. Kretzschmar (1996) suggests on the basis of dialect evidence that the word stock of the different colonies was largely shared, but preserved differently in each place; in similar fashion, pronunciations characteristic of different parts of England were available in every colony. Out of the pool of language characteristics available in each colony there emerged, within a few generations, the particular set of features that would form the characteristic speech of the colony. No colony sounded too much like any particular area of England because of the mixture of settlers, and for the same reason the different American colonies sounded more similar to each other than to the speech of the old country. At the end of the seventeenth century settlers began to arrive in larger numbers from non-English-speaking places in Europe and Africa, but by then English was well established in most areas of the colonies by the English founder population, and the later arrivals needed to fit themselves into English-speaking communities. The new settlers brought their own language characteristics, and some of these later became established in the speech of the communities that they entered. Of course there were also Native Americans in the colonies before the English founders and features from their languages did and do survive, particularly place names and the names for the flora and fauna of the New World.

The first standardizing effect to be seen in the colonies, then, was the establishment of English as a common community language, out of the welter of languages spoken by the Native Americans and the different settlers. The appearance of a new American English, relatively shared between the colonies when viewed in comparison with the different British regional varieties of the time, does not come from the imposition of a standard, or from the recovery of some basic, essential variety of English from which the British dialects had diverged, but instead from the demographic conditions – mixed settlement – of the founding population that formed communities in each colony. The new American English was also not the same as the emerging standard for English in Britain, and was criticized on those grounds at the time, as for example by John Witherspoon, the first president of Princeton University (Mathews 1931). At the same time, American English and the need of new settlers to learn it became a hallmark of the American experience, part of the voluntary social movement that Crevecoeur (1782) described in “What is an American.”

Along with the formation of new political and social practices in the new American communities came a new commitment to public education. So-called “common schools” were created throughout the states, more quickly and completely in the North but also in the agrarian South. The one-room schoolhouse became an icon of American community action, and whenever the population and resources became dense enough, more elaborate “graded” schools and academies sprang up as well. Basic education in reading and writing began to have an effect on American English from the beginning.