American Language Supplement 2 Read Online Free

of them were also to be found in “the Lowland Scots of Scott and Burns.” 1
    Years later a Scottish specialist in mythology, Lewis Spence, convinced himself that “the English spoken in the United States is to a great extent merely the popular Midland English of the Seventeenth Century brought more or less up to date by constant communication with the parent country, yet retaining more of the vocalization of the older form by reason of a certain degree of isolation.” Spence admitted that he also found traces of influence from Norfolk and even from Cornwall, but insisted that the Midlands were the chief source, and professed to find evidences of Danish coloring, stretching back to the Ninth Century. 2 But the preponderance of opinion among writers on the subject has always inclined toward the East Anglican theory of American speech origins, which is supported more or less by many familiar New England place-names,
e.g., Yarmouth, Ipswich, Haverhill
and the nearby (in England)
Cambridge
and
Boston
. A good example is offered by Schele de Vere. In his “Americanisms: the English of the New World,” he declared flatly that the early New England immigrants brought from Norfolk and Suffolk “not only their words, which the Yankee still uses, but also a sound of the voice and a mode of utterance which have been faithfully preserved, and are now spoken of as the ‘New England drawl’ and ‘the high, metallic ring of the New England voice.’ ” 3 In another place, in speaking of Southern American speech, he said that its disregard for the letter
r
should be laid upon “the shoulders of the guilty forefathers, many of whom came from Suffolk and the districts belonging to the East Anglians.” 4
    Hans Kurath, editor of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, agrees with this in so far as the coastal South is concerned. “Like the seaboard of New England,” he says, “the Tidewater region of Virginia received most of its early population from Southeastern England.” 1 But he holds that the speech of the areas back from the seacoast shows the influence of “Scotch-Irish who spoke … the English of the Lowlands of Scotland or the North of England as modified by the Southern English standard.” This, however, is not borne out by an investigation undertaken by Cleanth Brooks, Jr., who shows in “The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain” 2 that relatively few of the vowel and consonant forms now to be found in the area examined are also encountered in the Scottish and northern English dialects, but that 93% of the former and 95% of the latter are highly characteristic of southwestern (not southeastern) England. Though, says Brooks,
    the agreement between the southwest dialects and the Alabama-Georgia dialect in a few particulars might be explained as accidental, their agreement in many – indeed, in nearly every instance in which the Alabama-Georgia dialect differs from standard English – makes any explanation on the basis of a merely accidental relationship untenable.… This is not to say for a moment, of course, that the Alabama-Georgia dialect is the dialect of Somerset or Devon, but the fact that the former, wherever it deviates from standard English,
deviates with the latter
, indicates that it has been strongly colored by it. 3
    He goes on:
    Whereas historical corroboration is lacking, there is nothing in the theory of southwest country influence which runs counter to the known facts. The southwest counties are coast counties and were from Elizabethan times active in exploration and colonization. Of the two companies founded in 1606 for the settlement of Virginia, one was composed of men from Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth.
    The area studied by Brooks is a relatively small one, but I think it may be taken as typical of the whole lowland South, 4 saving onlyTidewater and the bayou region of Louisiana. He follows Krapp 1 in holding that in this area