It’s more correct to say, for instance, that people living in England developed a new accent than that Americans “lost” their British way of speaking. So trends that surged in the language of London took longer to reach here, if they ever did. Not only was it distant from the cultural centers of Europe, it was far from the most happening place on this side of the Atlantic. At the beginning of the colonial period, America was a backwater. By the time the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, there were people here-most famously the men the new arrivals called Samoset and Squanto-who already spoke a version of English that Puritans could understand.īut the English spoken by American settlers of European origin, too, quickly split off from the English spoken in Britain. Early explorers of North America, he argues, would have used nautical pidgins and passed those on to native people. Dillard, who specialized in African American Vernacular English, demonstrates that the most originally American form of English was a pidgin, originating with sailor’s language. In his 1992 book, A History of American English, the late linguist J.L. In this mish-mash of Germanic and Latinate forms, what distinguishes the language that’s used in this country? How do you speak American?Įnglish in America has always been different than the English spoken in the British metropole.
But what is American, exactly? In every place that people speak English, whether it’s Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Ghana, South Africa, or Canada, the language has its own essential character, sometimes so distinct that people from one place can hardly understand people from another.
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