English in North America

doi:10.1017/9781108349406.008

8 - English in North America

from Part II - World Englishes Old and New

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 December 2019

Edited by

Marianne Hundt and

Daniel Schreier: Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Marianne Hundt: Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
Edgar W. Schneider: Affiliation:
Universität Regensburg, Germany

Book contents

Get access

Summary

The many-faceted history of English in North-America has proved a challenge for accounts of the subsequent development of an old language in a new geographical setting. The complexity of the parameters involved has led researchers to engage in language theory and empirical work in various disciplinary traditions, among them dialectology, historical sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. The recent electronic resources and interest in texts written by less educated authors have enabled researchers to ask new questions and re-visit old ones from a fresh perspective. This chapter focuses on the intriguing paths of development of varieties such Anglo-American Englishes, Canadian English, and African American English. It pays attention to processes of change and the role played by e.g. contact phenomena in the life cycles of the varieties. Linguistic conservatism and innovation create tension in the new sociodemographic environment of an emerging variety, promoting or discouraging unification or diversification tendencies. The linguistic features investigated across the varieties in the chapter comprise phonetic and phonological features, morphosyntax, grammar, and vocabulary.

Keywords

Anglo-American Englishes Canadian English African American English settler input leveling phenomena koiné Americanism historical sociolinguistics dialectology corpus linguistics

Information

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Handbook of World Englishes , pp. 160 - 184

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108349406.008 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2020

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Abbott, Orville Lawrence. 1953. A study of verb forms and verb uses in certain American writings of the seventeenth century. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science.Google Scholar

Abbott, Orville Lawrence. 1957. The preterit and past participle of strong verbs in seventeenth-century American English. American Speech 32: 31–42.Google Scholar

Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2014. Burned, dwelled, dreamed: The evolution of a morphological Americanism and the role of prescriptive grammar writing. American Speech 89(4): 408–440.CrossRef Google Scholar

Anderwald, Lieselotte. 2016. Language Between Description and Prescription: Verbs and Verb Categories in Nineteenth-Century Grammars of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Avis, Walter S. 1967. Introduction. In Avis, Walter S., Crate, Charles, Drysdale, Patrick, Leechman, Douglas, Scharill, Matthew H. and Lovell, Charles L., eds. A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles. Toronto: Gage, i–xiixv.Google Scholar

Bailey, Guy. 1997. When did Southern English begin? In Schneider, Edgar, ed. Englishes Around the World, Vol. 1: General Studies, British Isles, North America. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 255–275.Google Scholar

Bailey, Guy, Maynor, Natalie and Cukor-Avila, Patricia, eds. 1991. The Emergence of Black English: Text and Commentary. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar

Bailey, Richard W. 2012. Varieties of English: Standard American English. In J. Brinton, Laurel and Bergs, Alexander, eds. English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1809–1826.Google Scholar

Barber, Charles. 1976/1997. Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar

Boberg, Charles. 2005. The North American regional vocabulary survey: New variables and methods in the study of North American English. American Speech 80(1): 22–60.CrossRef Google Scholar

Boberg, Charles. 2010. The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Brewer, Jeutonne P. 1974. The verb be in early Black English: A study based on the WPA ex-slave narratives. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.Google Scholar

Brinton, Laurel J. and Fee, Margery. 2001. Canadian English. In Algeo, John, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. IV: English in North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 422–440.CrossRef Google Scholar

Campbell, Mildred. 1959. Social origins of some early American. In Smith, James Morton, ed. Seventeenth-Century America. Essays in Colonial History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 63–89.Google Scholar

Cassidy, Frederic G. 1982. Geographical variation of English in the United States. In Bailey, Richard W. and Görlach, Manfred, eds. English as a World Language. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 177–209.Google Scholar

Cassidy, Frederic G. and Hall, Joan Houston. 2001. Americanisms. In Algeo, John, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. IV: English in North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 184–218.CrossRef Google Scholar

Chalkey, Lyman. 1912. Chronicles of the Scotch-Irish Settlement in Virginia: Extracted from the Original Court Records of Augusta County, 1745–1800. Rosslyn, VA: The Commonwealth Printing Company.Google Scholar

Chambers, Jack K. 1986. Three kinds of standard in Canadian English. In Lougheed, W. C., ed. In Search of the Standard in Canadian English (Strathy Occasional Papers on Canadian English 1). Kingston, ON: Queen’s University, 1–15.Google Scholar

Chambers, Jack K. 1994. An introduction to dialect topography. English World-Wide 15: 35–53.Google Scholar

Chambers, Jack K. 2004. “Canadian Dainty”: The rise and decline of Briticisms in Canada. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Legacies of Colonial English. Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 224–241.Google Scholar

Chambers, Jack K. 2014. Canadian English and identity. Annual Review of Canadian Studies 34: 57–65.Google Scholar

Culpeper, Jonathan and Merja, Kytö. 2010. Early Modern English Dialogues: Spoken Interaction as Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Davies, Mark. 2012a. The 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English (1810–2009). In Hegedus, Irén and Fodor, Alexandra eds. English Historical Linguistics 2010. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 217–250.Google Scholar

Davies, Mark. 2012b. Expanding horizons in historical linguistics with the 400 million word Corpus of Historical American English. Corpora 7(2): 121–157.CrossRef Google Scholar

Dollinger, Stefan. 2006. Oh Canada! Towards the Corpus of Early Ontario English. In Renouf, Antoinette and Kehoe, Andrew, eds. The Changing Face of Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 7–25.Google Scholar

Dollinger, Stefan. 2008. New-Dialect Formation in Canada: Evidence from the English Modal Auxiliaries. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar

Dollinger, Stefan. 2012. Varieties of English: Canadian English in real-time perspective. In J. Brinton, Laurel and Bergs, Alexander, eds. English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1858–1879.Google Scholar

Dorrill, George Townsend. 1986. Black and White Speech in the Southern United States: Evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States.Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar

Eliason, Norman E. 1956. Tarheel Talk: An Historical Study of the English Language in North Carolina to 1860. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar

Ellis, Michael and Montgomery, Michael. 2012. LAMSAS, CACWL, and the South-South Midland dialect boundary in nineteenth-century North Carolina. American Speech 87(4): 470–490.CrossRef Google Scholar

Ellis, Michael and Montgomery, Michael. N.d. The Corpus of American Civil War Letters (CACWL). See www.ehistory.org/projects/private-voices.html.Google Scholar

Fairclough, Norman. 1988. Register, power and socio-semantic change. In Birch, David and O’Toole, Michael, eds. Functions of Style. London: Pinter Publishers, 111–125.Google Scholar

Fasold, Ralph W. 1981. The relation between black and white speech in the South. American Speech 56(3): 163–189.CrossRef Google Scholar

Feagin, Crawford. 1979. Variation and Change in Alabama English: A Sociolinguistic Study of the White Community. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar

Feagin, Crawford. 1997. The African contribution to Southern States English. In Bernstein, Cynthia, Nunnally, Thomas and Sabino, Robin, eds. Language Variety in the South Revisited. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 123–139.Google Scholar

Fee, Margery. 1992. Canadian dictionaries in English. In McArthur, Tom, ed. The Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 178–179.Google Scholar

Görlach, Manfred. 1987. Colonial lag? The alleged conservative character of American English and other “colonial” varieties. English World-Wide 8: 41–60.Google Scholar

Görlach, Manfred. 1991. Introduction to Early Modern English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Görlach, Manfred. 1999a. Regional and social variation. In Lass, Roger, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. III: 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 459–538.Google Scholar

Görlach, Manfred. 1999b. Towards a historical dialectology of English. In Görlach, Manfred, Aspects of the History of English. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 94–161.Google Scholar

Greene, Evarts B. and Harrington, Virginia D.. 1966 [1932]. American Population before the Federal Census of 1790. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.Google Scholar

Grund, Peter, Hiltunen, Risto, Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena, Kytö, Merja, Peikola, Matti and Rissanen, Matti. 2009. Linguistic introduction. In Rosenthal, Bernard, Adams, Gretchen A., Burns, Margo, Grund, Peter, Hiltunen, Risto, Kahlas-Tarkka, Leena et al., eds. Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 64–90.Google Scholar

Handlin, Oscar. 1959. The significance of the seventeenth century. In Smith, James Morton, ed. Seventeenth-Century America: Essays in Colonial History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 3–12.Google Scholar

Halliday, M.A.K. 1978. Language as Social Semiotic. The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold.Google Scholar

Hoffman, Michol F. and Walker, James A.. 2010. Ethnolects and the city: Ethnic orientation and linguistic variation in Toronto English. Language Variation and Change 22(1): 37–67.CrossRef Google Scholar

Hundt, Marianne. 2009. Colonial lag, colonial innovation or simply language change? In Rohdenburg, Günter and Schlüter, Julia, eds. One Language, Two Grammars? Differences Between British and American English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 13–37.Google Scholar

Kautzsch, Alexander. 2002. The Historical Evolution of Earlier African-American English: An Empirical Comparison of Early Sources. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.CrossRef Google Scholar

Kautzsch, Alexander. 2012. English in contact: African American English (AAE) early evidence. In J. Brinton, Laurel and Bergs, Alexander, eds. English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1793–1807.Google Scholar

Krapp, George Philip. 1925. The English Language in America, Vols. 1–2. New York: Frederick Ungar.Google Scholar

Kurath, Hans. 1972. Studies in Area Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar

Kurath, Hans. 1977 [1949]. A Word Geography of the Eastern United States. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar

Kurath, Hans, et al. 1939. The Linguistic Atlas of New England. New York: AMS Press.Google Scholar

Kytö, Merja. 1991. Variation and Diachrony, with Early American English in Focus. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar

Kytö, Merja. 2004. The emergence of American English: Evidence from seventeenth-century records in New England. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 121–157.Google Scholar

Kytö, Merja and Romaine, Suzanne. 2000. Adjective comparison and standardisation processes in American and British English from 1620 to the present. In Wright, Laura, ed. The Development of Standard English 1300–1800: Theories, Description, Conflicts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 171–194.Google Scholar

Laird, Charlton. 1970. Language in America. New York: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar

Lanehart, Sonja L. 2012. Varieties of English: Re-viewing the origins and history of African American language. In J. Brinton, Laurel and Bergs, Alexander, eds. English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 1826–1839.Google Scholar

Lass, Roger. 1990. Where do extraterritorial Englishes come from? Dialect input and recodification in transported Englishes. In Adamson, Sylvia M., Law, Vivien A., Vincent, Nigel and Wright, Susan, eds. Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 245–280.Google Scholar

Lipski, John M. 1993. Y’all in American English: From black to white, from phrase to pronoun. English World-Wide 14: 23–56.Google Scholar

Lockridge, Kenneth A. 1974. Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York: W.W. Norton.Google Scholar

Marckwardt, Albert H. 1958. American English. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar

Mathews, Mitford McLeod. 1936. Notes and comments made by British travelers and observers upon American English, 1770–1850. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University.Google Scholar

McCafferty, Kevin and Amador-Moreno, Caroline P.. 2014. “[The Irish] find much difficulty in these auxiliaries … putting will for shall with the first person”: The decline of first-person shall in Ireland, 1760–1890. English Language and Linguistics 18(3): 407–429.Google Scholar

McDavid, Jr., Raven I. 1951. Midland and Canadian words in upstate New York. American Speech 26(4): 248–256.Google Scholar

McDavid, Jr., Raven I. 1958. The dialects of American English. In Nelson Francis, W., ed. The Structure of American English. New York: The Ronald Press Company, 480–543.Google Scholar

Mencken, Henry L. 1963 [1919]. The American Language, Vol. 1 (abridged ed.; ed. by McDavid, Raven I. and Maurer), David W.. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar

Miethaner, Ulrich. 2005. “I Can Look Through Muddy Water”: Analyzing Earlier African American English in Blues Lyrics (BLUR). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar

Montgomery, Michael M. 1989a. Exploring the roots of Appalachian English. English World-Wide 10: 227–278.Google Scholar

Montgomery, Michael M. 1989b. English language. In Wilson, Charles Reagan and Ferris, William, eds. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 761–767.Google Scholar

Montgomery, Michael M. 1998. Multiple modals in LAGS and LAMSAS. In Montgomery, Michael M. and Nunnally, Thomas, eds. From the Gulf States and Beyond: The Legacy of Lee Pederson and LAGS. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 90–122.Google Scholar

Montgomery, Michael M. 1999. Eighteenth-century Sierra Leone English: Another exported variety of African American English. English World-Wide 20: 1–34.CrossRef Google Scholar

Montgomery, Michael M. 2001. British and Irish antecedents. In Algeo, John, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. IV: English in North America.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 86–153.Google Scholar

Montgomery, Michael, Fuller, Janet M. and Sharon, DeMarse. 1993. “The black men has wives and Sweet harts [and third person plural -s] Jest like the white men”: Evidence for verbal -s from written documents of 19th-century African American speech. Language Variation and Change 5(3): 335–354.CrossRef Google Scholar

Montgomery, Michael and Melo, Cecil Ataide. 1990. The phonology of the lost cause: The English of the Confederados in Brazil. English World-Wide 11: 195–216.Google Scholar

Morgan, Marcyliena. 1989. From Down South to Up South: The language behavior of three generations of black women residing in Chicago. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania.Google Scholar

Morgan, Marcyliena. 1993. The Africanness of counterlanguage among Afro-Americans. In Mufwene, Salikoko S., ed. Africanisms in Afro-American Language Varieties Athens: University of Georgia Press, 423–435.Google Scholar

Mufwene, Salikoko S. 1996. The development of American Englishes: Some questions from a creole genesis perspective. In Schneider, Edgar W., ed. Focus on USA Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 231–264.Google Scholar

Mufwene, Salikoko S. 2001. African-American English. In Algeo, John, ed. The Cambridge History of the English language, Vol. 4: English in North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 291–324.Google Scholar

Nevalainen, Terttu and Helena, Raumolin-Brunberg. 2003. Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Pearson Education.Google Scholar

Peitsara, Kirsti. 1996. Studies on the structure of the Suffolk dialect. In Klemola, Juhani, Kytö, Merja and Rissanen, Matti, eds. Speech, Past and Present: Studies in English Dialectology in Memory of Ossi Ihalainen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 284–306.Google Scholar

Perdue, Charles L., Barden, Thomas E. and Phillips, Robert K.. [1976] 1992. Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar

Pomfret, John E. and Shumway, Floyd M.. 1970. Founding the American Colonies, 1583–1660. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar

Poplack, Shana and Tagliamonte, Sali. 2001. African American English in the Diaspora. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Poplack, Shana, Walker, James A. and Malcolmson, Rebecca. 2006. An English “like no other”?: Language contact and change in Quebec. Canadian Journal of Linguistics 51(2–3): 185–213.Google Scholar

Porter, Andrew Neil. 1994. Atlas of British Overseas Expansion. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar

Read, Allen Walker. 1933. British recognition of American Speech in the eighteenth century. Dialect Notes 6: 313–334.Google Scholar

Read, Allen Walker. 1938. The assimilation of the speech of British immigrants in colonial America. The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 37: 70–79.Google Scholar

Rickford, John R. 1999. African American Vernacular English. Malden, MA: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Romaine, Suzanne. 2013. “It snuck in so smooth and slippery we didn’t even hear it”: How snuck snuck up on sneaked. Anglistica 15(1–2): 127–145.Google Scholar

Schneider, Edgar W. 1989. American Earlier Black English: Morphological and Syntactic Variables. Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar

Schneider, Edgar W. 2004. The English dialect heritage of the southern United States. In Hickey, Raymond, ed. Legacies of Colonial English: Studies in Transported Dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 262–309.Google Scholar

Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties Around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Schneider, Edgar W. 2013. Investigating historical variation and change in written documents: New perspectives. In Chambers, J. K. and Schilling, Natalie, eds. The Handbook of Language Variation and Change (2nd ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 57–81.Google Scholar

Schneider, Edgar W. 2015. Documenting the history of African American English: A survey and assessment of sources and results. In Bloomquist, Jennifer, Green, Lisa J. and Lanehart, Sonja L., eds. The Oxford Handbook of African American Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 125–139.Google Scholar

Schneider, Edgar W. and Montgomery, Michael. 2001. On the trail of early nonstandard grammar: An electronic corpus of Southern U.S. antebellum overseers’ letters. American Speech 76: 388–410.Google Scholar

Siebers, Lucia. 2015. Assessing heterogeneity. In Auer, Anita, Schreier, Daniel and Watts, Richard, eds. Letter Writing and Language Change Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 240–263.Google Scholar

Smitherman, Geneva. 1977. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. (Reprint: Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988).Google Scholar

Story, G. M., Kirwin, W. J. and Widdowson, J. D. A., eds. 1990 Dictionary of Newfoundland English (2nd ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. (First edition published in 1982.)Google Scholar

Tagliamonte, Sali. 2006. “So cool, right?”: Canadian English entering the 21st century. Journal of Linguistics 51(2–3): 309–332.Google Scholar

Tagliamonte, Sali. 2008. So different and pretty cool: Recycling intensifiers in Toronto. English Language and Linguistics 12(2): 361–394.Google Scholar

Thompson, Roger. 1994. Mobility and Migration: East Anglian Founders of New England, 1629–1640. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.Google Scholar

Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Wakelin, Martyn. 1988. Tracing the English in American. Righting Words 1988(May–June): 16–23.Google Scholar

Warren, Paul and Britain, David. 2000. Intonation and prosody in New Zealand English. In Bell, Allan and Kuiper, Koenraad, eds. New Zealand English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 146–172.Google Scholar

Wells, John C. 1982. Accents of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar

Wolfram, Walt. 1974. The relationship of white Southern speech to vernacular Black English. Language 50: 498–527.Google Scholar

Wolfram, Walt. 2000. Issues in reconstructing earlier African-American English. World Englishes 19: 39–58.Google Scholar

Wolfram, Walt and Natalie, Schilling-Estes. 1998. American English: Dialects and Variation. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Wolfram, Walt and Thomas, Erik. 2002. The Development of African American English. Oxford, Malden: Blackwell.Google Scholar

Wood, Gordon R. 1977. English language and the westward movement. In Lamar, Howard R., ed. The Reader’s Encyclopedia of the American West, New York: Harper and Row, 349–353.Google Scholar

Woods, Howard B. [1979] 1999. The Ottawa Survey of Canadian English. Kingston: Queen’s University.Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Why this information is here

This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.

Accessibility Information

Accessibility compliance for the HTML of this chapter is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.