The Diffusion of English

The Modern English period saw the rise of another sort of variation, as well, as English began to spread over an increasingly larger area. By Shakespeare's time, English was displacing the Celtic languages in Wales, Cornwall and Scotland, and then in Ireland, where the use of Irish was brutally repressed on the assumption—in retrospect a remarkably obtuse one—that people who were forced to become English in tongue would soon become English in loyalty as well. People in these new parts of the English-speaking world—a term we can begin to use in this period, for English was no longer the lan­guage of a single country—naturally used the language in accordance with their own idiom and habits of thought and mixed it with words drawn from the Celtic languages, a number of which eventually entered the speech of the larger linguistic community, for example, baffle, bun, clan, crag, drab, galore, hubbub, pet, slob, slogan, and trousers.

The development of the language in the New World followed the same process of differentiation. English settlers in North America rapidly devel­oped their own characteristic forms of speech. They retained a number of words that had fallen into disuse in England (din, clod, trash, and fall for autumn) and gave old words new senses (like corn, which in England meant simply "grain," or creek, originally "an arm of the sea"). They borrowed freely from the other languages they came in contact with. By the time of the American Revolution, the colonists had already taken chowder, cache, prai­rie, and bureau from French; noodle and pretzel from German; cookie, boss, and scow and yankee from the Dutch; and moose, skunk, chipmunk, succo­tash, toboggan, and tomahawk from various Indian languages. And they coined new words with abandon. Some of these answered to their specific needs and interests—for example, squatter, clearing, foothill, watershed, con­gressional, sidewalk —but there were thousands of others that had no close connection to the American experience as such, many of which were ulti­mately adopted by the other varieties of English. Belittle, influential, reliable, comeback, lengthy, turn down, make good —all of these were originally Amer­ican creations; they and other words like them indicate how independently the language was developing in the New World.

This process was repeated wherever English took root—in India, Africa, the Far East, the Caribbean, and Australia and New Zealand; by the late nineteenth century, English bore thousands of souvenirs of its extensive trav­els. From Africa (sometimes via Dutch) came words like banana, boorish, palaver, gorilla, and guinea; from the aboriginal languages of Australia came wombat and kangaroo; from the Caribbean languages came cannibal, ham­mock, potato, and canoe; and from the languages of India came bangle, bun­galow, chintz, cot, dinghy, jungle, loot, pariah, pundit, and thug. And even lists like these are misleading, since they include only words that worked their way into the general English vocabulary and don't give a sense of the thousands of borrowings and coinages that were used only locally. Nor do they touch on the variation in grammar from one variety to the next. This kind of variation occurs everywhere, but it is particularly marked in regions like the Caribbean and Africa, where the local varieties of English are heavily influenced by English-based creoles—that is, language varieties that use English-based vocabulary with grammars largely derived from spoken—in this case, African—languages. This is the source, for example, of a number of the distinctive syntactic features of the variety used by many inner-city African Americans, like the "invariant be" of sentences like We be living in Chicago, which signals a state of affairs that holds for an extended period. (Some linguists have suggested that Middle English, in fact, could be thought of as a kind of creolized French.)

The growing importance of these new forms of English, particularly in America, presented a new challenge to the unity of the language. Until the eighteenth century, English was still thought of as essentially a national language. It might be spoken in various other nations and colonies under English control, but it was nonetheless rooted in the speech of England and subject to a single standard. Not surprisingly, Americans came to find this picture uncongenial, and when the United States first declared its indepen­dence from Britain, there was a strong sentiment for declaring that "Amer­ican," too, should be recognized as a separate language. This was the view held by John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and above all by America's first and greatest lexicographer, Noah Webster, who argued that American culture would naturally come to take a distinct form in the soil of the New World, free from what he described as "the old feudal and hierarchical establish­ments of England." And if a language was naturally the product and reflec­tion of a national culture, then Americans could scarcely continue to speak "English." As Webster wrote in 1789: "Culture, habits, and language, as well as government should be national. America should have her own distinct from the rest of the world....'' It was in the interest of symbolically distin­guishing American from English that Webster introduced a variety of spelling changes, such as honor and favor for honour and favour, theater for theatre, traveled for travelled, and so forth—a procedure that new nations often adopt when they want to make their variety of a language look different from its parent tongue.

In fact Webster's was by no means an outlandish suggestion. Even at the time of American independence, the linguistic differences between America and Britain were as great as those that separate many languages today, and the differences would have become much more salient if Americans had systematically adopted all of the spelling reforms that Webster at one time proposed, such as wurd, reezon, tung, iz, and so forth, which would ultimately have left English and American looking superficially no more similar than German and Dutch. Left to develop on their own, English and American might soon have gone their separate ways, perhaps paving the way for the separation of the varieties of English used in other parts of the world In the end, of course, the Americans and British decided that neither their linguistic nor their cultural and political differences warranted recognizing distinct languages. Webster himself conceded the point in 1828, when he entitled his magnum opus An American Dictionary of the English Language. And by 1862 the English novelist Anthony Trollope could write:

An American will perhaps consider himself to be as little like an En­glishman as he is like a Frenchman. But he reads Shakespeare through the medium of his own vernacular, and has to undergo the penance of a foreign tongue before he can understand Moliere. He separates him­self from England in politics and perhaps in affection; but he cannot separate himself from England in mental culture.