Westward expansion and urbanization

As the United States expanded, the speech habits of the hearth colonies were carried along with the settlers. Settlement generally proceeded from east to west, and so the influence of colonial speech was carried from east to west. Kretzschmar (1996) shows that the linguistic characteristics of several eastern inland towns are most similar to the characteristics of the coastal cities directly to their east. This fact is not a result of influence of an emerging standard language, but instead a consequence of the economic dominance of the coastal cities over the hinterlands, again a matter of demographics. The younger sons and daughters of the population that occupied the coast moved west in search of more land and opportunity, and they carried their speech with them. New immigrants also often spent time in coastal embarkation areas before they moved west to the frontier, and so began to acquire American English from established colonial models on the coast. Inland speech, however, was never exactly the same as the speech of coastal cities, because the effects of population mixture, and thus the creation of and selection from a pool of linguistic features, operated inland as it had on the coast.

Coastal cities did become wealthy, and so did develop a social hierarchy which allowed for the emergence of sociolinguistic differences. McDavid (1948) carefully separates the loss of postvocalic r in Charleston (which is associated with demographic factors) from nonstandard verb forms and other features that mark socially dispreferred speech. In America just as in England, increasingly during the eighteenth century the notion of a standard began to be associated with social status, so that Swift, Johnson, and other highly cultivated authors came to prefer the usage of the “best” authors over the common parlance. Such preferences became entrenched in the first prominent English grammars, like those by Lowth and Murray. The same attitude is expressed by Anne Royall, a social columnist who often wrote about—pilloried—varieties of American pronunciation that she did not find to be socially acceptable (Mathews 1931). The continuing prevalence of public education extended the influence of such grammars, including Webster’s in America, and thus social preferences in speech became teaching standards. A prime example is the influence of Webster’s “blue-backed speller”, which became one of the most successful textbooks of all time through wide use in American public schools. It thereby succeeded in the creation of particular American habits of spelling (e.g. –er instead of –re, -or instead of –our, and so forth), and a particular American habit of spelling pronunciation, i.e. of attempting to pronounce a sound for every letter in the spelling of a word. The American educational system abetted the social hierarchy in the maintenance of qualitative linguistic preferences by the creation and promulgation of rules of grammar, spelling, and other matters of linguistic propriety. The prevalence of common schools ensured that the emerging idea of a linguistic standard was widely accepted, but it is also the case that citizens with the means to obtain better educational opportunities for their children, or to allow their children to spend more time in the educational system rather than going to work at an early age, were better able to enact the standards in their own speech. Thus was created a cycle that still operates today for the establishment and maintenance of language standards in linkage to the social hierarchy.

Continuing westward settlement in the nineteenth century followed essentially the same patterns, but the connection with eastern colonial speech ways became more diffuse the further west the frontier. West of the Mississippi River, settlement is still not dense enough and is still too recent to have allowed for very extensive development of the local speech patterns characteristic of eastern areas. Continuing urbanization added more ethnic neighborhoods, but again the essential pattern remained the same. Each of the main regional variants of American English – Northern, Midland, and Southern, as described by Kurath (1949) and Kurath and McDavid (1961) – had its own linguistic characteristics, and each region had its own socially preferred models of pronunciation prevalent among the socially prominent and more educated population.