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American english
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1. THE HISTORYOF AMERICAN ENGLISH
MICHAEL MONTGOMERY
University of South Carolina
This essay outlines some needs and considerations for histori-
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cal research on American English (AE) from the seventeenth
through the nineteenth century, a period of great dynamism, a
time of extensive contact with other languages and between variet-
ies of English, and indeed the formative period of most major
regional and social varieties of present-day AE. In recent decades
researchers have shown that quantitative variation within synchronic
data sets often indicates ongoing change, even when that change
does not proceed to completion, and in this regard, variation in AE
over the past three to four generations of living Americans identifies
important questions and issues for historical linguists. To exercise
control, however, the ensuing discussion focuses on only the first
three centuries in the part of North America that became the
United States, except when research on present-day varieties has
direct relevance for earlier ones. Our age has witnessed how thor-
oughly English penetrated other languages in the twentieth cen-
tury and assumes that was the time of its most dramatic spread.
While perhaps true for AE or for vocabulary, Bailey (1996) has
shown that the English language dispersed, if anything, more
widely in the nineteenth century. The eighteenth century likewise
saw it spread, as English reached beyond the American littoral well
into the interior, and also to Australasia and South Africa by the
1790s. Already in the seventeenth century, English was planted in
the Caribbean and much of coastal North America, established a
beachhead in India, and penetrated many parts of the east and
north of Ireland.
For the first two and one-half centuries of the period of focus,
little more is understood today about the character or formation of
AE than 40 years ago, despite it being a model testing ground for
issues of language contact (cf. especially Mufwene 2001) and text-
1
,2 pads 88: needed research in american dialects
based sociohistorical linguistics (cf. Kytö 1991). Many factors have
coincided with and helped bring this situation about, more than
anything else the attraction of speech records to the neglect of
written texts and knowledge of how to interpret them. As long ago
as the 1920s Hans Kurath, director of the Linguistic Atlas of the
United States and Canada, posited that interviews with older, less-
traveled speakers in the Atlantic states would offer the best basis
for approximating the AE of the formative period and outlining
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transatlantic linguistic connections and for mapping major dialect
areas (Kurath 1928). More recent quantitative research has also
exploited speech records, that is, of older speakers in conservative
communities, especially to examine morphological features. How-
ever, by using speech records internal reconstruction can proceed
no farther back than the mid-nineteenth century at the very outer
limit. For earlier periods, researchers must use commentary from
travelers, grammarians, and lexicographers, representations of
speech in plays and fiction, manuscripts such as private letters, and
other elements of the written record (see Montgomery 2001, 96–
104), collectively the only record for varieties of English beyond a
century and a half ago. Beyond finding and utilizing older record-
ings more thoroughly and carefully, progress in reconstructing
earlier AE depends to a large extent on pinpointing and interpret-
ing speech-based documents of likely value. It is easy enough to say
that we need more, larger, and earlier data sources, but two other
research needs are equally important:
1. To identify and respect the limitations as well as the advantages of
one’s chosen methodology and data and to avoid unwarranted
assumptions regarding them.
Linguistic studies, like pharmaceuticals, need to be labeled for
potential side effects. Whether for convenience or otherwise, such
caveats have often been neglected for research on African Ameri-
can English (AAE), as when researchers label data from a small,
disparate sample or from a single small community as a socio-
historical “variety” (Poplack and Tagliamonte 1989, inter alia), use
dichotomous social categories such as “black” versus “white” that
, Histor y of American English 3
obscure the complexity of rural communities, or divide and com-
pare speakers by state (Schneider 1989; Rickford 1999; inter alia)
rather than by cultural region (i.e., reflecting internal migration)
or physiographic region (but cf. linguistic geography, especially
Pederson 1986–92). Researchers need to be self-critical of their
methodologies, their categories, and the generalizability of their
findings. Too often social and linguistic categories and variables
are adopted because they are dichotomous and permit binomial
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analysis.
2. To utilize knowledge of social history and the history of the
English language.
Otherwise studies risk being overly enamored of their own meth-
odologies, imposing modern linguistic categories and distinctions
on historical data and making false starts rather than laying a
secure foundation for further research. A great strength of linguis-
tic geography, for example, has been its practitioners’ willingness
to learn from geographers. Too often the field of American En-
glish has seen a simplistic use of history or social profiles of
communities, produced when linguists consult the work of histori-
ans only cursorily for a convenient quotation or summary to frame
an argument. Labov (1972) notwithstanding, historians have been
much better in understanding that each type of evidence has its
problems and what those problems are. By comparison, linguists
have much to learn (Fischer 1970).
As is evident, discussion of needed research is inseparable
from a critique of existing research. Because ADS’s previous Needed
Research collections lacked coverage of history, this chapter will
attempt a perspective somewhat broader than the past two de-
cades. It will take “history” to refer to both internal and external
developments, that is, changes within AE and how historical events
and periods intersect with these. American English may be one of
the most thoroughly documented language varieties (or collec-
tions of varieties) in the world, but the proportion of scholarship
on its historical dimensions remains relatively small.
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