When did Americans start sounding funny to English1
ears? The story is not as simple as some believe. Thanks to a
remarkable kind of linguistic melting pot process, early
Americans spoke with a standard dialect all their own that was4
often met with approval by English observers, in contrast to
how certain American accents are sometimes judged today.
From the early eighteenth century, while British7
English speakers could easily reveal details about their
background through their speech, it was much harder to
pinpoint an American speaker’s background in the same way.10
Many described the American dialect of the day as being,
surprisingly, pretty close to the accepted British grammatical
standard of London “polite” society, even if there were some13
accent differences and linguistic variation. While these would
have been indicators of lower status in England, in colonial
America speakers of all classes and regions might have used16
these forms, diluting them as signs of social status.
Some fairly resilient linguistic myths have arisen as
folk explanations for why British and American dialects are the19
way they are, including the often-cited belief that Shakespeare
sounded much more American than he did British, and thus
American English must be free from any modern linguistic22
“corruption” that followed.
George Philip Krapp, among others, makes a
compelling argument against the theory that a transplanted25
dialect or language suddenly has its linguistic development
arrested, so that examples like American English or Acadian
French must simply be more archaic than the dialects that28
continued evolving in their home countries.
Far from being an isolated community, the American
colonies developed culturally and linguistically while being in31
constant contact with the outside world and with a healthy flow
of immigrants from many different backgrounds. The truth is,
in the context of a linguistic melting pot, a kind of linguistic34
leveling occurs, and a common mode of speech, or koine,
emerges. No single dialect is really transplanted intact and
unchanging. American English is not eighteenth-century British37
English frozen in time while British English varieties changed
in a different direction. American English behaves no
differently from any other dialect in this way; it develops and40
innovates but also maintains certain linguistic characteristics
meaningful to its speech community, in the same way that
British English does.43
But in order for linguistic innovation to really take
root, you need a bunch of colonial babies. The founding
generation of settlers wasn’t immediately followed by a huge46
influx of immigrants with other dialects and languages until an
American koine was already mostly established by newer
generations of Americans, at which point more recent49
immigrant waves began to adopt the prevailing ways of
speaking. Many eventually abandoned their native tongue and
assimilated into the wider linguistic community.52
So by the time of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, it’s clear Americans didn’t have to hold their
tongue with the British — they spoke with the national dialect55
that had steadily evolved for at least two generations before
1776.
Chi Luu. When Did Colonial America Gain Linguistic
Independence? Internet: <https://daily.jstor.org> (adapted).