“Two nations divided by a common language”: British and American English today

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1. A HISTORY OF AMERICAN ENGLISH 
 
 
 
“ Let us seize the present moment,and establish a national language 
as well as a national government...As an independent nation  
our honor requires us to have a system of our own, 
in language as well as  government.” 
 
Noah Webster, 1789 
 
 
In this first chapter I will introduce the major historical processes which have influenced the 
development of American English and are thus essential in order to understand the divergence of 
American English from its “mother tongue”, British English. The main purpose of this chapter is to 
show the influence that such historical facts and events have had on the American language and 
culture. The first thing do to when trying to understand something about a language is to find out 
something more about the country where it is spoken and most of all something about its history. It 
is customary to divide the history of the United States, and therefore the development of American 
English, into three main periods: the “colonial period”, which goes from the arrival of the first 
settlers in North America in 1607 until the end of the War of Independence in 1783; the “national 
period”, which covers the period between the end of the War of Independence and the end of the 
nineteenth century (including the Civil War); and the third, the “international period”, which runs 
from the end of the Civil War to the present (Kövecses 2000: 19-22). 
 
1.1 - THE COLONIAL PERIOD 
 
The first period is considered by American scholar and professor John Algeo (2001: 4-37), as the 
most important one from a linguistic point of view, since it was the time when the first speakers of 
what later would become American English appeared on the North American continent. After 
several failed attempts by the English to establish settlements on the continent, the first permanent 
one was successfully founded in Jamestown in 1607 and the first colony was established in Virginia 
in 1609. What really drew the English to the New World was the fishing, especially along the north-
east coast of North America and, as a result, by 1620 there was scarcely a bay in North America and 
eastern Canada that had not been explored by the settlers. Soon, because of the new way of life, the 
Jamestown colony began the creation of a new variety of the English language, which permitted the
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settlers to talk about their new experiences. The next successful settlement by English-speakers was 
that of the one-hundred and two Pilgrims coming from England. They were members of a group of 
people called Separatists, who had different beliefs than the English people and did not accept the 
teachings of the Church of England. As not obeying the church meant not obeying the king, they 
decided to cross the Atlantic on the Mayflower and arrived in Massachusetts in 1620. New England 
may have been a new world to them, but it was not an unexplored place and much of the land 
around them had already been mapped and named. For this reason, when they landed at Plymouth 
one of the few tasks they did not have to manage was thinking up names for the landmarks all 
around them. By 1664 the English held most of the Atlantic seaboard, but it is important to 
remember that other European countries were also interested in colonizing the New World and 
indeed there were also French, Spanish and Dutch settlements. They were not as important and 
widespread as the English ones, but they would be of great importance in the development of 
American English (Bryson 1995: 13-16). 
 
Jamestown settlement, 1607 
 
1.1.1 - ARCHAIC FEATURES OF AMERICAN ENGLISH 
 
When the first settlers reached the American continent in the early decades of the seventeenth 
century, their language must have been similar to the English spoken in England in the late 
sixteenth century, the period generally referred to as “Elizabethan” (Kövecses 2000: 22). Even 
though London speech was used by only 5% of all English-speakers, it turned out to be the decisive
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one for the later development of British English and it also left room for American English to 
develop in its own way. Indeed this early form of English had a great deal of flexibility which 
permitted the language to develop in new directions and this opportunity was immediately captured 
by the settlers and the later immigrants. 
 
If one were transported to the Plymouth colony in 1620 and allowed to listen to a conversation of 
the Pilgrims, one would certainly be surprised at how different and almost incomprehensible much 
of their language would be. Though it would be clearly identifiable as English, it would be a variety 
of it unlike any we could possibly hear nowadays. Among the differences there are (Bryson 1995: 
17-20): 
- Kn-, it was commonly pronounced tn. For this reason a word such as “knee” was pronounced as 
“t‟nee”; 
- The interior gh in words like “night” and “light” had was silent, but on or near the end of words 
like “laugh” and “enough”, it was still pronounced or sometimes given an f sound; 
- There was no sound equivalent to the ah in the modern “father” and “calm”; 
- “Was” was pronounced not “woz” but “wass”; 
- “Home” was commonly spelled “whome” and pronounced with a distinct wh sound. 
- The various o and u sounds were confused and unsettled; 
- oi was sounded with a long i, so that “voice” sounded like “vice”; 
- Words that now have a short e were often pronounced and sometimes spelled with a short i. 
Shakespeare commonly wrote “bin” for “been “; 
- Speech was in general much broader, with stresses and a greater rounding of rs. A word like 
“never” would have been pronounced more like “nev-arrr”; 
- Interior vowels and consonants were more frequently suppressed, so that “fault” and “salt” 
became “faut” and “saut” and “somewhat” became “summat”; 
- Differences in idiom abounded, notably with the use of definite and indefinite articles. 
Shakespeare commonly discarded articles where we would think them necessary but at the same 
time he employed them where we would not, so that where we say “at last”, he wrote “at the last”. 
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In terms of language, the Pilgrims could not have come in a more perfect time. Perhaps no other 
period in history has been more linguistically dynamic than that into which they were born. In fact, 
it was the age of Shakespeare, Spenser, Sir Walter Raleigh and Elizabeth I. In the century that 
preceded the Pilgrims‟ arrival on the new continent, English gained 10,000 additional words and 
Shakespeare alone created about 2,000 - “gloomy”, “barefaced”, “radiance”, “countless”, “summit”, 
“leapfrog” (Bryson 1995: 22). However, speakers from other parts of England used other dialects, 
sometimes completely different, which also influenced the language and contributed to making it 
more flexible and adaptable. 
Plymouth colony, 1620 
 
The settlers soon realized that the making of a new nation was not only a physical, mental, and 
emotional task, but also a linguistic one. Everywhere they turned in their new-found land, they 
found objects that they had never seen before, such as the mosquito, at first spelled “mosketoe” or 
“musketto” (Bryson 1995: 25-26). Therefore, of the many tasks that awaited the immigrants on the 
new continent, perhaps the most basic and immediate one was the naming of all these new things, 
but they also had to set up institutions that in many cases differed from the ones they had left behind 
and this also required new names. First they misnamed plants and animals: “bay”, “laurel”, 
“walnut”, “blackbird”, “swallow” and “lark”; all signify different species in America from those of 
England. Then they started borrowing words and expressions from others who inhabited or 
explored the continent even though, for unknown reasons, the colonialists discarded many useful 
English words and began coming up with new ones. In a letter to grammarian John Naldo, dated
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August 16, 1813, Thomas Jefferson said : “The new circumstances under which we are placed, call 
for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects” (Jordan 1988: 491). 
 
What is really important to remember, in order to understand the situation that the settlers were 
facing in North America, is that the first and real owners of the American continent were the 
various native American Indian tribes, speaking a large number of different Indian languages. As 
Bryson (1995: 28) says , the time of the first colonists there were perhaps fifty million Indians in the 
New World and the ones living in North America are generally divided into six geographic, 
linguistic and cultural families. There were those from the plains (Blackfoot, Cheyenne, Pawnee), 
from the eastern woodlands (Algonquian, Iroquois), from south-west (Apache, Navaho, Pueblo), 
from the north-west coast (Haida, Modoc, Tsimshian), from the upland (Paiute, Nez Percé) and 
from the north (Kutchin, Naskapi). The variety of languages spoken on the continent was 
particularly rich, with as many as five-hundred altogether, even though many of these were spoken 
by only a few people. The early colonists began borrowing words from the Indians almost from the 
moment of first contact and the Indians provided them with some 150 new terms. “Moose” and 
“papoose” were taken into English as early as 1603. “Raccoon” is first recorded in 1608, “caribou” 
and “opossum” in 1610, “moccasin” and “tomahawk” in 1612 (Bryson 1995: 29). The first words of 
Indian origin the English settlers came in contact with, were called “wigwam” words, “wigwam” 
(meaning “Indian hut”) being one of the first borrowings into the English language in North 
America. Many of these words came from the domain of trees, plants, fruits, and animals, and this 
was because many of them were unfamiliar to the settlers: “hickory”, “pecan”, “sequoia”,