American English spelling began as a set of patterns, rules, and preferences that traveled across the Atlantic from England in the seventeenth century on the Mayflower, the Arbella, and dozens of other ships bringing people, books, and pamphlets from one continent to the other. From these beginnings the solidly British core was occasionally expanded and less frequently replaced to yield the orthography that prevails today in the American classroom, newspaper office, publishing house, and private home.

At the core of American orthography is a system that is derived from King Alfred and Abbot Æfric, Chaucer and the Chancery scribes, Shakespeare and Mulcaster, Johnson and Dryden, Murray and Hart and that is shared throughout the English-speaking and -writing world. But intermixed in that core are local preferences and innovations, including variations on specific spellings and spelling rules (for example, traveled, movable, jail), graphemic preferences (encyclopedia, esthetics), and nonstandard commercial uses of orthography (Exxon, Chik-n Flav-r). The origins and evolution of these variations are one concern of this chapter.

No comprehensive history of American English spelling has been written. Krapp (1925, vol. 1) deals almost exclusively with spelling reform and is dated, as is Mencken (1936), which is more comprehensive. Brander Matthews (1892), like Mencken (1936), attempts to contrast American and British spelling, but is no longer current.

Another interest is American orthographic invention that has not resulted in differences between English and American spelling but reflects American attitudes and interests in orthography. American spelling reform movements and attempts to install modified alphabets are one part of this interest.

Introduction

The use of English as the de facto, though unofficial, language of the United States is a natural consequence of history. English, the language of the settlements from which the present nation grew, continued at first to be used just as it was in the motherland. But a gradual loss of contact between that motherland and the colonies and, more important, the natural growth of the language in the new land from the experiences of its speakers there produced many differences, which the Revolution and new nationhood were greatly to increase. So in four centuries a new growth has developed on the “family tree.” The aptness of the arboreal metaphor for the English language, with British English as the trunk from which American, Canadian, Australian, South African, and other branches have grown, has been questioned by John Algeo (“What Is a Briticism?” 1992b), who rightly points out that until the development of American English, there was no “British” English against which to compare it, there was simply English. That is, British English, as surely as American English, was born in 1776. Algeo goes on to say:

The continuity of English

British antecedence to American English is reflected first of all by the fact that the language of the United States of America is called “English.” Language is the soul of a nation, as Solzhenitsyn expressed it in his Nobel lecture. Cultures are universally identified with languages, and this has been especially true since the emergence of nation states in the Renaissance. The English language is inextricably associated with England. When the American colonists separated from the mother country, it would have been natural for them to adopt another designation for their language. But the separation of the American nation from England after 1776 was schizophrenic, characterized on the one hand by violent rejection of English tyranny, as it was regarded by the American revolutionaries, and on the other by acute nostalgia for their English culture.

The rejection was mirrored by the provisions in the United States Constitution against aristocracy and autocracy. The anti-English sentiment of the Founding Fathers has been treated by all historians of the American Revolution, but best from our point of view by David Simpson, The Politics of American English, 1776–1850 (1986). At the meetings of the Continental Congress there were half-hearted suggestions that the new nation should adopt another language, such as Hebrew, French, or Greek. But these suggestions were never taken seriously and were capped off by the observation of the Connecticut representative, Roger Sherman, that “it would be more convenient for us to keep the language as it was, and make the English speak Greek” (Baron 13).

Introduction

Canadian English claims a rather small number of speakers and spans a relatively brief history – the term “Canadian English” was first recorded only in 1854. As a dialect it has typically been described either as an amalgam of British and American features or as a repository of quaint terms such as moose milk. However, as Richard Bailey observes:

It is now generally agreed that Canadian English originated as a variant of northern American English (the speech of New England, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania). Throughout its history, it has been influenced by two powerful external norms, those of British English and American English; the relative prestige of these norms and hence their effect on Canadian English have varied according to the social and political conditions. Nonetheless, Canadian English can be seen as pursuing its own course, with the development of distinctive linguistic features and dialectal forms.

Standard (or general) Canadian English, though perhaps a “scholarly fiction“ (R. Bailey 1982, 152), has traditionally been defined as a class dialect, namely, the variety spoken by educated middle-class urban Canadians from the eastern border of Ontario to Vancouver Island. There is a remarkable homogeneity in speech over this vast area. The differences that mark the major dialects – the English of the Maritimes (Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island), of Quebec (Montreal and the Eastern Townships), and of the Ottawa Valley – from the minor variants found in the West (British Columbia), the Prairies (Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba), and the Arctic North are quite insignificant.

Introduction

Consider three scenarios. First, a distinguished psycholinguist discussing “language mavens” invites his readers to imagine themselves watching a nature documentary:

Viewers would be incredulous at such reports, the psycholinguist predicts: “What on earth could it mean for the song of the humpback whale to contain an ‘error’? Isn't the song of the humpback whale whatever the humpback whale decides to sing?” The psycholinguist contrasts the predicted rejection of judgments about animal behavior with the ready acceptance of similar judgments about human language: “For human language, most people think that the same pronouncements not only are meaningful but are cause for alarm.” He says, “To a linguist or psycholinguist … language is like the song of the humpback whale. The way to determine whether a construction is ‘grammatical’ is to find people who speak the language and ask them.”

Early Newfoundland

Varieties of English have been established in Newfoundland since the early seventeenth century, when small numbers of men began to live year-round near the cod fisheries of the island's coastal waters and the adjacent Grand Bank and when scattered families were established in coastal settlements after the arrival of a few women. The first English birth on the island was recorded in 1613. However, annual fishing voyages had brought Englishmen and other European nationalities to the Newfoundland coasts since at least 1497 (Cell 1969). Several adventurers, for example George Calvert, later Lord Baltimore, attempted to plant colonies in the early decades of the 1600s, but as these did not persist as discrete communities beyond the middle of the seventeenth century, there is little firm documentation about colonists who may have become settlers, married, and produced lines of descendants (Cell 1982).

The island of Newfoundland lies in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River, to the south of Quebec and Labrador. It is the size of the state of Tennessee, and coastal Labrador, which falls within its jurisdiction, is nearly as large as Arizona. Basic to an understanding of the establishment of English in the island of Newfoundland is that from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century, though with interruptions in wartime, it was visited in the summers by thousands of transient fishermen from the southwestern counties of England. At the same time, it was occupied year-round by a strikingly small number of settlers, likewise from the same West Country sources (L. Harris; O'Flaherty; Story).

History, external and internal

The history of a language is intimately related to the history of the community of its speakers, so neither can be studied without considering the other.

The external history of a language is the history of its speakers as their history affects the language they use. It includes such factors as the topography of the land where they live, their migrations, their wars, their conquests of and by others, their government, their arts and sciences, their economics and technology, their religions and philosophies, their trade and commerce, their marriage customs and family patterns, their architecture, their sports and recreations, and indeed every aspect of their lives. Language is so basic to human activity that there is nothing human beings do that does not influence and, in turn, is not influenced by the language they speak. Indeed, if Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956) was right, our very thought patterns and view of the world are inescapably connected with our language.

It is, of course, possible to view the history of a language merely as internal history – a series of changes in the inventory of linguistic units (vocabulary) and the system by which they are related (grammar), quite apart from any experiences undergone by the users of the language. We can describe how the vocabulary is affected by loanwords or how new words are derived from the language's own lexical resources. We can formulate sound laws and shifts, describe changes that convert an inflected language to an isolating one, or a syntax that puts an object before its verb to one that puts the verb before its object.

Grammatical categories

The term grammar in this chapter includes both what linguists call inflectional morphology and what they call syntax.

Morphology describes the rules that govern the minimal meaningful units of a language, called morphemes, and the way those minimal units are combined to make words. For example, English noun morphemes (e.g., dog) permit various suffix morphemes – called inflections – to be appended to indicate plurality (dogs), possession (spelled dog's but pronounced exactly like dogs), and both plurality and possession (spelled dogs' and again pronounced the same as dogs). Similarly, the verb bark is a morpheme that combines with inflectional suffixes to indicate grammatical agreement (spelled-s), past tense and past participle (-ed in both cases for bark), and progressive aspect and gerundive form (for which-ing serves a dual role). Prefix morphemes (e.g., re- for verbs and non- for nouns) will not be treated here, as linguists generally consider them to be features of word formation (termed derivational morphology) rather than features of the grammar of English. In practice, for English, linguists generally restrict the term inflectional morphology to the kinds of suffixes for nouns and verbs already exemplified here; to the various forms of the personal pronouns (e.g., I, me, my, mine); and to comparative and superlative forms of adjectives (i.e., big, bigger, biggest).