American English Knows No Bounds
American English infiltrates and seduces other languages as much as it does English spoken in multiple countries. Long after the exploration, settlement, and colonization of the New World, it continues to be a powerful force that alters, modifies and riffs according to the tempo of its own playful measures. Its influence, be it good or bad, knows no bounds.
Modern English grew out of a period that stretched primarily from the 15th to the early 18th century via the elaborate intricacies of the Great Vowel Shift. This revolution in vocabulary had its wicked way with all the vowels, turning monophthongs into diphthongs and providing a double vowel slide between consonants. Change in inflection and spelling occurred due to a combination of factors: compact migration to southern England in the wake of the 14th century bubonic plague and the subsequent dismantling of feudalism; contact with other languages; the rise of the middle class; and the powerful reach of the printing press that promoted literacy as well as standardized spelling. The Anglo-French Wars and the emergence of the Church of England further established the English language as being ruthlessly determined and non-partisan.
Words such as candy and fall were transported over to the Americas as English cargo, only to be replaced with sweets and autumn back in Britain. So too did the English bring rhoticity—the prominent R—before losing it in large swathes of England amid upper class resentment of the Industrial Revolution’s nouveau riche. Dropping the R, particularly after the humiliation of losing the war to America’s revolution, set the English apart from a regrettable defeat.
The sounds of the United States settlements continue to jolt and spread according to ever-shifting patterns of migration. New Netherlands Dutch, despite the 1664 surrender of New Amsterdam to the English, carried on being spoken in Dutch New York circles for at least two more centuries. Despite the many influences on vocabulary and phrases arriving via British, Irish, Italian, Polish, Russian, Yiddish, and German migration, the Dutch stamp on the New York dialect formed the basis for its recognizable and much imitated sound, the prime examples being coffee (kawfee) and talk (tawk). Meanwhile, American English is peppered with indigenous words from both American continents for terrains, customs and wildlife with which the Mayflower pilgrims and those who followed were unfamiliar, e.g. chocolate, hurricane, chipmunk, and hickory.
Elsewhere, Tidewater English arrived via southwest England. Descendants in areas such as the Chesapeake island of Tangier continue to sound like the closest thing America has to its first English settlers, similar to West Country English on the Cornwall and Devonshire coastline. Further south, evidence of early modern English is in the drawl, a common example of the influence of landscape. In a hotter climate abuzz with insects, a muscle slide advances from the front to the back of the mouth. Speech slows down, but if you speed up that southern drawl, a British English accent begins to emerge, just as if one were to accelerate Bayou Cajun to French, or elements of the Appalachian dialect to Scots-Irish Ulster. The further south one travels, the richer the sound. To add to which, the division between North and South is marked by differences in tenets and politics, attributing notions of class to geographically opposite accents.
The African influence on the rhythm and inflection in American English is immense. Vigorously diversified via the slave trade’s brute-force insistence on mixing ethnic groups so as to curtail the chances of rebellion, the resulting Pidgin English lent itself to standard vocabulary and slang. Its overall effect on American English can only be quantified via its cultural impact on the world at large.
Noah Webster’s American Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1828, was to play a huge and significant role in creating general American pronunciations. In a determined and thorough fashion, lexicographer Webster swapped British English for shorter phonetic spelling that had already emerged in the New World, such as theatre instead of theater, while shedding unnecessary vowels such as the U in humour versus humor. This defiant seal on U.S. English spelling promoted the American tendency to stress on all the vowels including those at the end of a word that British English had hitherto tended to quash amid consonants.
Over time, new words sprung from American culture, some with dubious origins. The etymology of jazz, for instance, is believed to have its roots in—amusingly—jism or jizz, meaning energetic and a whole lot more. And while words like cool, bangs, and dude have their origins and erstwhile definitions rooted in areas older than the United States, their common usage is unmistakably American.
