The origin
of the English language in United States took place in the last decades of the
sixteenth century, with the arrival of the expeditions commissioned by Walter
Raleigh to the ‘’New World’’. The First venture was a failure. In 1584 the
first group of explorers landed near Roanoke Island, in what is today called
North Carolina, and established a small settlement. But conflict with the
Indians followed, and it proved necessary for a ship to return to England for
help and supplies. By the time those arrived, in 1590, none of the original
group of settlers could be found. The mystery of their disappearance has never
solved.
The first
permanent English settlement dates from 1607, when an expedition arrived in
Chesapeake Bay, and called the settlement Jamestown, after James I. Then, in
1620, the first group of Puritan settlers arrived on the Mayflower ‘’The
Pilgrim Fathers’’, searching for a land where they could found a new religious
kingdom ‘purified’ from the practices which they found unacceptable in the
English Church of the time. They landed at Cape Cod, in Plymouth,
Massachusetts, and established a settlement there. By 1640 around 25,000 people
had settled in the area.
It’s
important to appreciate that these two patterns of settlement resulted in
different linguistic consequences. The southern explorers came mainly from the
West Country, and brought with them the characteristic west-country accent. In
contrast, the Puritans came mainly from East Anglia and the surrounding
countries, and their accent was quite different.
The separateness
of the colonies remained for much of the seventeenth century, but during this
time increasing contacts and new patterns of settlement caused the sharp
divisions between accents to begin to blur. New shiploads of settlers brought
people with a variety of linguistic backgrounds. By 1700, the immigrant
population of the continent had increased to around a quarter of a million.
In the
early eighteen century, there was a vast wave of immigration from northern
Ireland. By the time Independence was declared in 1776, it is thought that no
less than one in seven of the American population was Scots-Irish. They were
seen as frontier people, with an accent which at the time was described as ‘broad’.
There are
many mixed dialect areas, and ‘pockets’ of unexpected dialect forms. But the
mains divisions of North, Midland and South are still demonstrable today.
An
important aspect of American life, its cosmopolitan character, was present from
the beginning, and this had linguistic consequences too. The Spanish had
occupied large areas in the west and south-west of the country; the French were
present in the northern territories around the St. Lawrence, and throughout the
middle regions (French Louisiana)as far as the Gulf of Mexico. The Dutch were
in New York and the surrounding area. Large numbers og Germans began to arrive
at the end of the seventeenth century, settling mainly in Pennsylvania. And
there were increasing numbers of blacks in the south, as a result of the slave
trade from Africa.
During the
nineteenth century, these immigration patterns increased: Large numbers of
Irish came following the potato famine in the 1840s; German and Italians came,
escaping the consequences of the failure of 1848 revolutions; And as the century wore on, there were increasing
numbers of Central European Jews.
The chief
linguistic result of this multilingual setting was a large number of loan words
from Spanish, French, German, Dutch and the other immigrant languages. Words
such as boss, caboose, coleslaw (Dutch), bayou, cache, poker (French), mafia,
capo, espresso (Italian), cafeteria, canyon, coyote (Spanish), dumb,
delicatessen, no way (german)…
Source:
''The English Language'', David Crystal.
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elltankw/history/American_files/image005.jpg
By: Patricia Domínguez.
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