they . . . speak better english than the english do

"They . . . Speak Better English Than the English Do": Colonialismand the Origins of National Linguistic Standardization in America

Longmore, Paul K.

Early American Literature, Volume 40, Number 2, 2005, pp. 279-314(Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina PressDOI: 10.1353/eal.2005.0038

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paul k. longmore San Francisco State University

‘‘They . . . Speak Better English Thanthe English Do’’Colonialism and the Origins of National

Linguistic Standardization in America

Recent scholarship has traced efforts to fashion an American na-tional language through standardization of forms and usage. ChristopherLooby, in Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of theUnited States, David Simpson, in The Politics of American English, 1776–1850, and Kenneth Cmiel, inDemocratic Eloquence: The Fight Over PopularSpeech in Nineteenth-Century America, all examine public debates aboutthese matters and, in particular, the labors of linguistic reformers to shapethe national tongue. But these important studies focus mainly on the revo-lutionary, early national, and antebellum periods, and although Cmielrecounts the impact of late eighteenth-century British prescriptivists onpostrevolutionary American thinking he does not extensively considercolonial efforts to regulate the language.1 In fact, attempts to shape writ-ten and spoken American English according to ideas of correctness, pro-priety, and, most important, a national standard began before AmericanIndependence. But those ideas and that standard were British rather thanAmerican.The effort reflected colonial desire to copymetropolitan Englishlinguistic norms in order to attain cultural legitimacy within the BritishEmpire. Postrevolutionary exertions perpetuated attitudes and activitiesthat began in the late colonial period. This essay examines the colonial ori-gins of the movement to standardize and nationalize American English.

The central fact of colonials’ experience is that they act as agents ofan expansionist imperial society. As one result, dominant colonial groupsare acutely aware of the metropolitan standard of the language they sharewith the homeland. In developing an extraterritorial variety of that lan-guage, they often labor to match the metropolitan standard. Transplantedspeakers of various dialects of a common tongue encounter one another in

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new geographical and social environments. Contact often produces dialectmixing and leveling and a compromise dialect called a koine. Koineizationlargely involves unconscious modification of speech forms. But the atten-tiveness of many colonials to a metropolitan standard indicates that colo-nial koines arise from not just spontaneous changes but conscious shaping.As users of the koine ‘‘nativize’’ their common tongue, they continuouslyrender normative judgments about alternative usages. Prescribing what iscorrect, they seek to standardize the extraterritorial version of the language(Siegel 8; Haas; Stein).

North American British colonials, especially those in the elite and mid-dling ranks, took as their model the written and spoken English of the im-perial center. Like elite and middling Britons, higher-status colonials usedthis ‘‘proper’’ and ‘‘true’’ English to distinguish themselves from peoplebelow them in the social hierarchy. Nonetheless and again like socially am-bitious Britons, many colonials wielded linguistic correctness as a tool ofsocial mobility. Colonials of all ranks emulatedmetropolitan Standard En-glish in order to elevate their standing within the Empire. In the long runin a pattern typical of colonies of settlement, their efforts unintentionallyhelped to create a common language that provided one basis for Americannationhood.

Colonials’ adoption of the metropolitan standard of English and theirmanner of applying it appear in three kinds of evidence: contemporaryobservers’ evaluations of colonial speech; higher-status colonials’ descrip-tions of British immigrants’ non-standard English speech; and colonials’formal efforts to educate themselves in metropolitan Standard English.

Eighteenth-century observers praised Anglophone colonials formatch-ing metropolitan linguistic norms. They focused on pronunciation andaccent, vocabulary and phraseology. William Eddis, secretary to Mary-land’s royal governor (1769–1777), avowed, ‘‘[T]he pronunciation of thegenerality of the people has an accuracy and elegance that cannot fail ofgratifying the most judicious ear’’ (33). Jonathan Boucher, a tutor and An-glican priest in the Chesapeake (1759–1775), asserted that colonials dis-played ‘‘the purest Pronunciation of the English Tongue that is anywhereto be met with’’ (30). ‘‘Accuracy,’’ ‘‘elegance,’’ and ‘‘purity’’ referred to bothcolonials’ emulation of metropolitan standard pronunciation and the ab-sence from their speech of British regional accents. Lord Adam Gordon,

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a Scot, made the same point about word usage and grammar. Describingmid-1760s Philadelphia, he admitted that ‘‘the propriety of Language heresurprized me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in adegree of purity and perfection, surpassing any, but the polite part of Lon-don’’ (411). By ‘‘propriety,’’ ‘‘purity,’’ and ‘‘perfection,’’ he meant that Phila-delphians used words according to the definitions and grammatical rulesaccepted by the metropolitan elite. Like Gordon, other observers cred-ited colonials of ‘‘all ranks’’ with speaking proper English. John Wither-spoon, the Scottish immigrant president of the College of New Jersey, as-serted that ‘‘the vulgar in America’’ spoke ‘‘much better than the vulgar inGreat-Britain’’ (181). Hugh Jones, a professor at William and Mary in theearly eighteenth century, expressed the consensuswhen he called colonials’speech ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘true’’ English (Accidence 13–15, Present State 80; Read,‘‘Bilingualism’’). Nicholas Cresswell agreed. Traveling through the Chesa-peake and mid-Atlantic states during the early years of the Revolution, hedeclared that North Americans ‘‘in general speak better English than theEnglish do’’ (271).

These laudatory comments point to two features of colonial speech.They indicate that colonials had leveled out English dialectal differencesto create compromise dialects, an immigrant koine or, more likely, a set ofregional immigrant koines. Although these koines exhibited the variationsthat would evolve into America’s regional dialects, they were mutuallycomprehensible and far less differentiated thanBritish dialects. At the sametime, the praise recognized the influence of Standard English in shapingcolonial speech. When Jones called colonials’ speech ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘true,’’when Eddis andGordon described its ‘‘accuracy and elegance,’’ ‘‘purity andperfection,’’ when Cresswell andWitherspoon said it was ‘‘better’’ than theEnglish of most people in Britain, they were not saying that colonials hadsatisfied objective criteria of usage. They were declaring that, rather thanreplicating the regional dialects they regarded as corruptions of ‘‘pure’’English, American English matched the speech of the metropolitan core(Longmore, ‘‘Without Idiom’’; Fischer 263).

That elite and middling colonials regarded Standard English as pre-scriptive emerges in a second type of evidence: their descriptions of someBritish immigrants’ nonstandard speech. Eighteenth-century newspaperadvertisements for escaping indentured servants identified many by their

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regional accents and vocabulary. The ads, which were, of course, placedby colonials affluent enough to possess servants, reflect acute awareness oflanguage differences. They also implicitly set forth the ideas about properand improper English typical among people of higher rank. ‘‘Run away,’’announced a 1721 notice in Philadelphia’s American Weekly Mercury, ‘‘aServant Man, named William Newberry, aged about Twenty Years: he isa West-country-Man and talks like one.’’ A decade later, an ad in thatpaper described indentured shoemaker William Richman as ‘‘a WiltshireMan and speaksWest Country.’’ In 1763, theNew York Gazette called MaryLee ‘‘an English Girl’’ who ‘‘speaks in the North Country Dialect.’’ A sub-scriber to the Virginia Gazette in 1745 announced the escape of his ‘‘Ser-vant Woman, named Susanna Weakly . . . [H]er speech is the North ofEngland dialect, and says she was born in Lincolnshire.’’ The convict ser-vant Abraham White, who absconded from his Pennsylvania master in1767, was ‘‘born near Manchester in England, and speaks much with thatdialect’’ (qtd. in Read, ‘‘Assimilation’’). If ads did not specify servants’ re-gional accents, they might refer to their ‘‘broad’’ speech, by which theadvertisers meant ‘‘strongly-marked dialectal or vulgar pronunciation’’(‘‘Broad’’). Newspaper notices also mentioned fleeing Scottish and Irishservants’ accents. They were said to speak, respectively, ‘‘broad Scotch’’and ‘‘the brogue.’’ English ethnolinguistic prejudice apparently promptedsome Irish servants to try to hide their origins. One had ‘‘a little of the IrishBrogue, but denies that Country’’ (qtd. in Read, ‘‘Assimilation.’’ See alsoHamilton 85, 101). These colonial masters obviously believed that fleeingservants would stand out because of their regional accents.

The ads often alluded to the touchstone of Standard English by describ-ing servants as speaking ‘‘bad’’ or ‘‘broken’’ English. They credited thosewhose speech came closer to the criterion with speaking ‘‘good’’ or ‘‘plain’’English. The labels ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ did not refer simply to such infrac-tions as grammatical errors. As important, they were noting deviationsfrom the metropolitan model. A few masters came close to identifying thesource of distinctions between ‘‘good’’ and ‘‘bad’’ English when they at-tributed a servant’s linguistic skill to a sojourn in the imperial capital. Ac-cording to a 1771 Pennsylvania Gazette ad, an Irish servant named JohnBrian, ‘‘by trade a baker,’’ spoke ‘‘very good English, he having lived nearten years in London’’ (qtd. in Read, ‘‘Assimilation,’’ 71, 76, 78, 79).

That metropolitan speech was the measure of ‘‘good English’’ is con-

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firmed in part by negative evidence. Among hundreds of advertisementsfor fleeing servants examined by the historical linguist AllenWalker Read,not one described an escapee as speaking with an East Anglian or south-eastern English accent. Masters referred to that region’s speech only whenthey felt it necessary to explain why absconding servants from the Brit-ish provinces displayed facility in Standard English. Read thought this re-flected advertisers’ own geographical origins (‘‘Assimilation’’ 74, 79). Butthe language historian Randolph Quirk discerned that masters’ failure tomention those accents indicated that for them the speech of London andthe ‘‘home counties,’’ the speech of the metropolitan core, constituted an‘‘unmarked norm’’ against which they contrasted and judged other Britishdialects (24).

Corollary to his point that metropolitan English was an ‘‘unmarkednorm,’’ Quirk also noted that the ads did not identify any runawayas speak-ing with an American accent (24). This again corroborates the conclusionthat British dialectal differences had given way to a leveled, less differen-tiated American koine or koines. These ads also suggest that the colonialkoines, which had become established by the mid-eighteenth century andwere promoted by higher status native speakers, deliberately took metro-politan genteel speech as a model. The alertness of masters to servants’regional accents, to their ‘‘bad’’ and ‘‘broken’’ English and their occasional‘‘good’’ or ‘‘plain’’ speech, complemented British observers’ praise of colo-nial speech as ‘‘pure and perfect,’’ ‘‘accurate and elegant.’’ The ads illumi-nate the cultural significance of those plaudits. The commentators werecommending colonials’—most important, elite and middling colonials’—efforts to emulate metropolitan speech and their success in doing so.

Many colonials consciously schooled themselves in Standard English.Their formal efforts constitute a third kind of evidence that Standard En-glish helped to mold the American colonial koines. They imitated bothspoken and written metropolitan English.

Standardized written forms of language have played an important rolein shaping both national languages, and immigrant and colonial koines(Haugen;Milroy 19–21, 25–26). Themodern notion of a standard language‘‘denotes a form of language—that is of its phonology, morphology, syn-tax, and lexis—which is superordinate to geographically variant forms,and which is realised in both spoken and written modes, and in the latter

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by a consistent orthography’’ (Burnley 23). But metropolitans in the coreregions of European nation-states and provincial or colonial actors in theperipheries had different motives and motivations for supporting stan-dardization of these written and spoken languages.

StandardizedwrittenEuropean languages initiallyoperated in restrictedofficial and elite spheres: state administration, judicial proceedings, andecclesiastical and theological discourse. Over several centuries, state poli-cies gradually encouraged national language rationalization. At first, theydid not seek to replace regional dialects and languages with a commonnational tongue for everyday use. Instead, during the lateMiddle Ages, Re-naissance, and early modern era, some European central states designateda particular dialect or language as the official language of a royal court orof governmental and judicial business. For example, as early as 1539, KingFrancis I decreed that Francien, the dialect of Ile-de-France, would serveas the lone official language of France. Although Francien immediately be-came the language of the kingdom, which is to say, the state, it did notbecome the language of the country. French displaced Latin as the languageof law and state affairs, but only the rise during the nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries of mass popular involvement with politics and mili-tary service, government bureaucracies and public education, and exten-sive communication networks did French become the written language ofthe population at large2 Similar patterns emerged in other European coun-tries. In Spain, Italy, and the German states, chancelleries shaped writtenlanguages to a standard. Educated people more and more wrote in thatlanguage, even as they continued to speak their regional and local dialects.In the long run, the written languages shaped and helped to standardizethe spoken varieties. Over time, throughmass popular education andmassliteracy, state policies deliberately fostered language rationalization as acollective nationalizing experience (Fisher 65–83; Scaglione 9–49).

If state policies purposefully promoted language rationalization, Bene-dict Anderson argues that, during these same centuries, the interactionof capitalism with new printing technology advanced language rational-ization through the development of print languages. Slowing the rate oflinguistic change, print gave European languages a new fixity as well astheir modern forms. Print-languages also made it possible for those whospoke differing dialects to comprehend one another on paper. Print therebycreated unified domains of communication by forming communities of

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readers. Over time, these communities of print readers, numbering in thehundreds of thousands and even millions, came to realize not only theirconnection to one another but also that membership in their particularlanguage-field was exclusive, that members of other language-fields stoodoutside it. As a result, these communities of print-readers constituted thecores of what became ‘‘nationally imagined communities.’’ While Ander-son sees this process as ‘‘largely unself-conscious,’’ Michael Warner re-counts a more deliberate interplay in colonial and revolutionary Americaamong a newdiscourse of print, an emergent bourgeois public sphere, andthe development of a national community. In any case, in Europe printfacilitated the forwarding of some dialects to dominance as the standardforms of each European language, while otherdialects, denied political andcultural status, were increasingly condemned as substandard. Print lan-guages reinforced state policies of language rationalization that promotedstandardized, national written languages (Anderson 44–45; Warner).

The English Crown launched standardization of the English languageduring the late Middle Ages. That fashioning began with an effort to regu-larize orthography. From the late thirteenth century through the early fif-teenth, the official documents produced by the King’s Chancery regular-ized usage for the sake of administrative efficiency. Chancery Standardcame to influence the written language in law, commerce, and literature.Scribes, lawyers, and merchants saw the practical advantages of its con-sistency. Major writers, who were often also government officials, appar-ently adopted Chancery Standard in part to elevate English prose as a liter-ary language. Meanwhile, elite London speech became the prestige spokendialect. The city was both the seat of the royal court and the kingdom’sand empire’s political and cultural capital. From the thirteenth through theeighteenth centuries, literary figures in London, many of them migrantsfrom the provinces, disdained and ridiculed provincial dialects and ‘‘vul-gar’’ speech. Early on, they began towarn against corruption of English byprovincial dialect speakers, the lower classes, and Scots. Corollary to thatcriticism, the Elizabethan flowering of a national literary culture launchedcelebration of the national language. By the latter half of the eighteenthcentury, ideas about Standard English encompassed all of the elements inthe modern conception of standardized language.3

English colonization of America paralleled the campaign to standardizethe English language at home. Throughout the seventeenth century, both

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colonization and culture expressed the emerging English national con-sciousness. Many educated English folk began to adopt a Standard Englishthat transcended local and regional dialects. That domestic cultural de-velopment helped shape colonial English. In the eighteenth century, elitecolonials and members of the upwardly mobile middling classes assidu-ously emulated contemporary, metropolitan Standard English.4

North American colonials’ most energetic efforts tomatch up tometro-politan English occurred at a moment when British linguistic reformerswere campaigningmore vigorously than ever to regulate English usage. Al-ready in the seventeenth century, but increasingly during the eighteenth,a rigorous prescriptiveness about pronunciation, spelling, and grammaremerged in British culture. Early in the eighteenth century, lexicographersand grammarians set out to ‘‘refine,’’ ‘‘ascertain,’’ and ‘‘fix’’ the English lan-guage. By ‘‘ascertain’’ they meant that they wanted to free it ‘‘from ob-scurity, doubt, or change’’; by ‘‘fix,’’ that they wanted to arrest it in place,to keep it from altering. Change, they warned, inevitably led to corrup-tion, confusion of meaning, incomprehensibility. To forestall impendinglinguistic anarchy, some authority must regularize usage. Some reformersproposed an academy to purify and oversee English, an official body likethose in Italy and France, but no state-sanctioned institution was ever cre-ated. Instead, grammarians and rhetoricians functioned as an ‘‘unincor-porated academy.’’ In the mid-eighteenth century, the movement entereda new phase by developing an explicit ideology of standardization. Givingup as impossible the project of ‘‘fixing’’ the language once and for all, lan-guage scholars adopted customary usage as their standard, by which theymeant the ‘‘polite usage’’ of gentlemen. They still endeavored to imposeorder, issuing innumerable prescriptions and proscriptions. Their deter-minations drew on three sources: logic, high literary models of the ‘‘best’’writers in English, and current ‘‘national’’ usage.5

The approach by logic derived from the notion that a ‘‘universal gram-mar’’ underlies and governs all particular languages. The rules of thatgrammar, comparable to the laws of nature, were absolute and unbending.Most of the prescriptive grammarians’ decrees derived from abstract ana-lyses divorced from context or actual usage. Rather than appealing to anyauthority, they issued edicts: ‘‘I can’t conceive it to be English,’’ ‘‘a defor-mity in the language,’’ or simply, ‘‘this is not English.’’ Offering no reasonsfor their rulings, they promulgated them on the basis of alleged logic. In

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fact, ‘‘logic’’ often seemed a matter of preference. But those preferenceswere not personal or idiosyncratic. They were based in culture and class.They reflected the dialect of the elite in the empire’s metropolitan core insoutheastern England.6

The prescriptivists appealed not only to logic but to the ‘‘most repu-table’’ English writers as definitive models. National language standardiza-tion movements commonly establish literary canons of ‘‘great’’ authors.Thesewriters exemplify not only correct and proper but elevated and artis-tic standards, in thewritten formof the language.Mid- and late eighteenth-century British linguistic authorities proclaimed as the finest practition-ers of literary English the essayists and poets of the Augustan Age, withJoseph Addison most prominent. If they regarded their own era as an ageof linguistic degradation, they considered the early eighteenth century thegolden age and last great epoch of English writing. Some prescriptivistsalso adopted early eighteenth-century court pronunciation as their phono-logical standard. Of unspoken significance, the Augustan Age was the lastera in which the empire was still an English dominion, rather than the dis-tinctly different British Empire it became by mid-century. The regulatoryprogram sought in part to safeguard the preeminence of the forms andusages of the previous order of more purely English hegemony.7

The same imperative appeared in the third measure of proper English,‘‘national use.’’ By the mid-eighteenth century, Britain had become a geo-graphically more extensive and socially more fluid linguistic field. Theexpansion of the empire, the union of the three kingdoms, and the sub-sequent opening to give Scots a stake in the system all generated chal-lenges regarding language and communication. Alien influences and di-vergent dialectal practices seemingly threatened to contaminate or crowdout Standard, which is to say, southern, English. Linguistic prescriptivistssternly opposed not only introduction of foreign terms and constructionsbut all British provincialisms and lower-class vulgarisms. They demanded‘‘purity’’ and ‘‘politeness,’’ the customary vocabulary and pronunciationof genteel southern English folk. They tellingly labeled importations andinnovations that violated the principle of purity as ‘‘barbarisms.’’ Theycalled breaches of correct English construction ‘‘solecisms.’’ Deviationsfrom customary meanings of words they condemned as ‘‘improprieties.’’The latter two strictures indicated that infractions entailed not just incor-rectness but unmannerliness and vulgarity.8

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One might deride these axioms as subjective, but principles such as‘‘purity,’’ ‘‘propriety,’’ and ‘‘politeness’’ did not express language reformers’personal whims. Nor did pronouncements against ‘‘solecisms,’’ ‘‘impro-prieties,’’ and ‘‘barbarisms’’ seek to enforce their individual tastes. Rather,these prescriptions grew out of class and ethnocultural perspectives andpractices. In a kingdom that united three countries and a great deal of dia-lect diversity, the standard of ‘‘national use’’ did not, of course, describeactual practice. It sought to make the language of a class and region thetouchstone for the whole (Fisher 148; Fennell 149; Stein 7–9).

The campaign to regulate British English reflected class concerns in sev-eral ways. Prescriptive grammarians and rhetoricians blamed linguisticchange and corruption onpeople of lowextraction.They raised as the stan-dard of correct English the speech of themetropolitan gentry. Some hopedto school the lower classes in imitating their betters, but most apparentlyintended simply to inoculate genteel folk against the contaminating in-fluence of vulgar speech. Much of their audience seems to have been thesocially ambitious middle classes, striving to verify their refinement, anx-ious to avoid embarrassing imputations of commonness.9 Regarding thiscampaign, the historical linguist JosephWilliams observes:

The prescriptive rules that were set down illustrate how minor featuresof language can be seized upon to make large social distinctions. Theytestify evenmore to the insecurities of upwardlymobile speakers. Givena finite set of rules about pronoun forms and so on, such speakers canavoid or follow those rules and know that they are not committing so-cial gaffes that would reveal their changing social status. The advice fallsinto the same class as that provided by etiquette books, interior decora-tors, and caterers: When in doubt, rely on institutionalized advice. Andequally important, knowledge of rules allows those who are insecureabout themselves to judge those others who break the rules. (96)

The new profession of ‘‘orthoepists’’ emerged at mid-century to profitfrom such anxieties by instructing upwardlymobile Britons in ‘‘genteel’’ or‘‘court pronunciation.’’ Thomas Sheridan, the leading orthoepist, warned:

All other dialects, are sure marks, either of a provincial, rustic, pedan-tic, or mechanic education; and therefore have some degree of disgraceannexed to them. And as the court pronunciation is nowhere methodi-

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cally taught, and can be acquired only by conversing with people inpolite life, it is a sort of proof that a person has kept good company,and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered asfashionable people, or members of the beau monde. (30)

And so Sheridan and others set themselves up to teach ‘‘methodically’’what supposedly could only be learned by keeping company with ‘‘polite’’people (Sheridan 31–38, 206–8, 246–47; Fisher 149).

If linguistic prescriptiveness partly grewout of issues of class, it stemmedalso from interactions among Britain’s ethnocultural regions. ‘‘Nationaluse’’ was a formula that not only reproved foreign importations into En-glish but disdained provincial dialects. The reformers decried regional andlocal colloquial speech. Writers guilty of provincialism, they condemnedas disreputable. They vaunted as the national standard the English of themetropolitan core, the region with London, Oxford, and Cambridge as itsaxes. Like other linguistic nationalizers, they elevated a particular region’sdialect as the measure of national usage while scorning and subordinatingother dialects.10

The eighteenth-century movement to regulate British English largelyfollowed the patterns of language standardization in European societiessince the Renaissance. Standard English derived from the speech of theeducated elite and middling classes of the region surrounding the king-dom’s principal urban center. In one way, this process continued the dis-placement of Latin and Norman French underway for several centuries. Inaddition, a comparatively small cadre of writers were regarded as exem-plars of proper literary use of the standardizing language. That languagealso expressed and embodied the national identity. Most important, stan-dardization produced the ‘‘integration and uniformity’’ necessary for com-munication in an extensive, ethnoculturally variegated geopolitical sys-tem. Efficient and profitable management of the expanding empire, fromits core to its contiguous peripheries and overseas extensions, required‘‘a stable, variation-free,’’ consistent written medium. Historical linguistshave identified these early modern, political, economic, and social devel-opments as the trigger for standardization of the English language.11

The campaign against provincial dialects targeted Irish and especiallyScottish usage, or rather misusage, as the most egregious. Joseph Priest-ley would ‘‘allow the Scotch no quarter for their errors.’’ Grammarians’

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discussions of the proper use of ‘‘shall’’ and ‘‘will’’ commonly began withcensure of the Scots and the Irish. In 1763, one dictionary maker faultedDavid Hume by including ‘‘Scotticisms’’ he had found in Hume’s PoliticalDiscourses. The battle against provincial ‘‘barbarisms’’ and ‘‘improprieties’’made Scottish English ‘‘the center of attack’’ (Leonard 177–78). It was onephase of the struggle to establish the English of the metropolitan core asthe British ‘‘national’’ standard.

Though some Scottish writers and intellectuals declared the superiorityof rough-hewn Scots over effete southern English, most not only failed tocounter these criticisms, they agreed with them (Crawford 23; Richards 85;Lauzon 139–43). More than a decade before the English dictionary makercompiled his two-page list of ‘‘Scotticisms’’ that marred the Political Dis-courses, Hume himself, in some copies of the 1752 edition, offered his ownlist of Lowland and Scottish words and colloquialisms that ran to six pages.Hume’s self-criticism reflected his lifelong embarrassment about his pro-vincial speech and his ceaseless quest towrite Standard English. ‘‘Not with-standing all the Pains which I have taken in the Study of the English Lan-guage,’’ he told a friend in 1754, ‘‘I am still jealous of my Pen. As to myTongue, you have seen that I regard it as totally desperate and Irreclaim-able.’’ Hume also enlisted in a Scottish campaign to purify English usage inScotland. He corrected other writers’ prose and welcomed their emenda-tions of his own work (qtd. in Mossner 373, 266, 299, 396). If he lamentedScots’ English speech, he clearly felt that as a class Scotland’s intellectualshad mastered English prose. In 1757, he wrote with great national pride:

Really it is admirable how many Men of Genius this Country producesat present. Is it not strange that, at a timewhen we have lost our Princes,our parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence ofour chief Nobility, are unhappy, in our Accent & pronunciation, speaka very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of; is it notstrange, I say, that, in these circumstances, we shou’d really be the Peoplemost distinguish’d for Literature in Europe? (qtd. in Mossner 370)

Hume was not the only Scottish intellectual who condemned the cor-ruption of Scottish speech while striving to emulate southern English gen-teel pronunciation and prose (Crawford 26–27; Frank 57–60). The phi-losopher James Beattie, who published his own list of Scotticisms in 1779,privately warned his son ‘‘against the use of Scotch words and other similar

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improprieties.’’ The boy not only grew up ‘‘free from provincial peculiari-ties’’ of speech, bragged Beattie, but ‘‘could never endure to read what waswritten in any of the vulgar dialects of Scotland’’ (qtd. in Mossner 373–74).

Beattie andHume joined a crusade to promote the speaking andwritingof Standard English among Scots. The effort enlisted not just intellectu-als and writers but politicians and merchants, gentlemen and ladies, andmembers of the upwardly mobile middling classes.12 Following the Act ofUnion in 1707, Scotland was incorporated into a British Parliament. ButScottish MPs had trouble making themselves understood in London, sothey tried to learn southern English. ‘‘Scots,’’ the Lowland dialect of En-glish, diverged so markedly from southern English as to seem virtuallya foreign language to both southerners and Scots. The need to addressthat problem was surely one reason that in 1762 the University of Edin-burgh established the first professorship of English at any British univer-sity (Mossner 371). And that deficiency was certainly why in 1761 the SelectSociety of Edinburgh for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the En-glish Language in Scotland hosted two series of lectures by Thomas Sheri-dan. Three hundred gentlemen paid a guinea each to hear him hold forthfor four weeks on Elocution and the English Tongue. Following that, helectured for two more weeks to an audience of ladies, as well as to gentle-men unable to attend the earlier lectures.13 Also in 1761, the Select Societyinvited Edinburghers to support recruitment of qualified Englishmen ‘‘toinstruct gentlemen’’ in ‘‘the manner of pronouncing [English] with purity,and the art of public speaking.’’ It also aimed to enlist ‘‘a proper numberof masters from the same country’’ to open schools in Edinburgh to teachchildren how to read English. The project’s rationale asserted:

As the intercourse between this part of Great Britain and the capitaldaily increases, both on account of business and amusement, and muststill go on increasing, gentlemen educated in Scotland have long beensensible of the disadvantages under which they labour, from their im-perfect knowledge of the ENGLISH TONGUE, and the improprietywith which they speak it. (qtd. in Mossner 372–73)

Edinburgh was the dynamic heart of the region of Scotland most energeti-cally involved inBritish imperial commerce. If Scotswere to take advantageof the emerging economic and political, professional, and social opportu-nities of eighteenth-century Britain, if they were to ‘‘make a figure’’ in an

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empire that was being redefined as British but would continue to be domi-nated by the English, they needed to school themselves in the dialect ofthe metropolitan core (Crawford 27, 38–39; Richards 85–86, 102).

James Beattie’s reasons for emulating southern English disclose anotherlevel of motivation. They reveal the ambivalent sense of outsidership of anambitious provincial who longed for acceptance in the imperial center. Onthe one hand, he urged tolerance of accents and dialects.

[W]e ought not to take offence at the tones of a stranger, nor give himany ground to suspect, that we are displeased with, or even sensible ofthem. However disagreeable his accent may be to us, ours, it is likely,is equally so to him. The common rule of equity, therefore, will recom-mend mutual forbearance in this matter. To speak with the English, orwith the Scotch, accent, is no more praiseworthy or blameable, than tobe born in England, or Scotland. (293–97)

Even though Beattie advocated ‘‘forbearance’’ toward the various Brit-ish accents and dialects, and especially, one might surmise, toward ‘‘theScotch,’’ he did not consider ‘‘all provincial accents equally good.’’ Regard-ing not only accent but spelling, syntax, and idiom, he declared that ‘‘everypolite nation’’ has a standard. It appeared in the writings of ‘‘approved au-thors, and the practice of those, who, by their rank, education, and wayof life, have had the best opportunities to know men and manners, anddomestic and foreign literature.’’ Such persons reside ‘‘in the metropolisof a kingdom, and in the most famous schools of learning. . . . The lan-guage, therefore, of the most learned and polite persons in London, andthe neighbouring Universities of Oxford and Cambridge ought to be ac-counted the standard of the English tongue[.]’’ All Britons should reckonprovincial dialects ‘‘as more or less elegant, according as they more or lessresemble’’ this standard (Beattie 297–98).14

But ascertainment of this national standard left British provincials innot just a second-class linguistic status but a conflicted situation. Whilesome reformers such as Thomas Sheridan believed that ‘‘the same modesof language should prevail through thewhole empire,’’ Beattie more realis-tically observed that, ‘‘however desirable,’’ this was ‘‘perhaps impossible.’’He recognized that regional and local dialects had deep historical rootsand continued to divide British people. ‘‘Scotch men have lived forty yearsin London without entirely losing their native tone,’’ he said. ‘‘And it may

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be doubted, whether it is possible for one, who has lived the first twentyyears of his life in North Britain, ever to acquire all the niceties of Englishpronunciation.’’ The several languages of the United Kingdom and eventhe regional and local dialects of English seemed to Beattie so deeply en-trenched as to be ineradicable (Sheridan 205–9, 246–47; Beattie 298–99).

Privately Beattie confessed that for a Scot the effort to learn to writeStandard English was like studying a foreign language. One might succeedinwriting it correctly, but one could never achieve the ease andnaturalness,the idiomatic assurance and grace, of a native speaker:

Our style is stately and unwieldy, and clogs the tongue in pronuncia-tion, and smells of the lamp.We are slaves to the language wewrite, andare continually afraid of committing gross blunders; and, when an easy,familiar, idiomatical phrase occurs, dare not adopt it, if we recollect noauthority, for fear of Scotticisms. In a word, we handle English as a per-son who cannot fence handles a sword; continually afraid of hurtingourselves with it, or letting it fall, or making some awkwardmotion thatshall betray our ignorance.

Beattie strove to surmount this difficulty by ‘‘continually poring upon’’ theAugustan writers, ‘‘Addison, the best parts of Swift, Lord Lyttleton, &c.’’He advised those ‘‘who would acquire a good English style’’ ‘‘to study En-glish authors.’’ But he feared that the limitations of his and his fellow Scots’linguistic provincialism were ‘‘in some respects insuperable after all’’ (qtd.in Mossner 374).

Both the striving and the perceived failure of Beattie and many otherScots grewout of their status as subalterns within a system of internal colo-nialism. They rejected a native Lowland linguistic and literary tradition inScots. Despite Robert Burns’s fame, the vernacular Scottish tradition lan-guished. And few of them knew anything of Highlands Gaelic. Continu-ing a collective cultural commitment dating from the seventeenth century,the eighteenth-century Lowland intellectual and social elite banked thefuture of their class and country on making a place for themselves in theBritish Empire in part by adhering to Standard English. Yet the choice in-volved them in an irresolvable cultural and psychological dilemma. Beat-tie’s ‘‘difficulty’’ and the difficulty of all ambitious Scots—not to mentionWelsh, Irish, and evenmany English provincials—was the classic quandaryof individuals from the peripheries who sought to rise within an internal

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colonial system.Theywould reach for competency in themetropolitan lan-guage and culture, but in the end could never feel sure they held it fast.Strive as they did, they could never finally fully succeed. Or at least, theirsouthern English judges would never recognize their achievements as suc-cess, nor would they themselves.15

It was no accident, then, that Scotsmen and Irishmen andmen from thenorth of England constituted a disproportionate number of eighteenth-century British language reformers. Of some 50 dictionaries and grammarspublished after 1750 and examined in one major study of the language re-form movement, at least 14 were probably written by Scotsmen or Irish-men or were initially published in Scotland or Ireland. Likewise, Sheri-dan, a kind of public tutor to mid-eighteenth-century provincial Britons,was Anglo-Irish. Nor is it surprising that in 1773 an English dictionarymaker,W.William Kenrick, disdainfully dismissed the efforts of these pro-vincials to ‘‘set up schoolmaster.’’ ‘‘There seems indeed a most ridiculousabsurdity,’’ he smirked, ‘‘in the pretensions of a native of Aberdeen or Tip-perary to teach the natives of London to speak and read.’’ 16

It was also no coincidence that a dozen of the tomes prescribing properEnglish usage were composed by Americans. Lindley Murray was one ofthe most successful and influential of the language reformers. A Philadel-phia native, he gave up his lucrative law practice to undertake his life’swork in London: he would propagate the strict and complex rules of therenowned prescriptive grammarian Robert Lowth. Murray’s Grammar ofthe English Language, first published in 1795, ultimately went through 50editions. A revised edition appeared in 1816, followed by an abridgement ofit that sold well over a million copies. Murray epitomized the campaign toregulate English usage throughout the Anglophoneworld. In the course ofhis career, he migrated from a former periphery of the empire to its center(Leonard 179).

Like their Scottish counterparts, members of the British North Ameri-can elites, along with educated ambitious people in the middling ranks,enlisted in an eighteenth-century colonial crusade to shape English usage.Like the Scots, they assiduously emulated metropolitan Standard Englishin order to win recognition as equal partners in the empire. They knewthat not only in everything they did but in everything they said and wrote,metropolitan critics were watching and evaluating them.

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And just as English commentators scorned Scots’ handling of themother tongue, many rendered harsh judgments on colonials’ usage. Onehistorical linguist has referred to the ‘‘spiteful, contemptuous flavor’’ ofthe critics’ ‘‘colonial baiting game’’ (Quirk 14). Three decades before In-dependence, Francis Moore, who unlike most critics had actually visitedthe colonies, contemned as ‘‘barbarous English’’ colonials’ use of bluff todesignate a steep bank (qtd. in Mencken 3). In a more general swipe atcolonial speech, Dr. Samuel Johnson’s 1756 review of a treatise by the colo-nial geographer Lewis Evans described it as written with ‘‘some mixture ofthe American dialect, a tract [trace or trait] of corruption to which everylanguage widely diffused must always be exposed.’’ Other English criticswrote more humorously but no less condescendingly. In 1754, the essayistRichard Owen Cambridge proposed a glossary of American colloquial-isms. He called for ‘‘an explanation of the words, figures, and forms ofspeech’’ of the colonies: ‘‘Whoever considers the destination of our presentexpedition, must think it high time to publish an interpretation of WestIndia phrases, which will soon become so current among us, that no manwill be fit to appear in company, who shall not be able to ornament his dis-course with those jewels.’’ The glossary, ‘‘if well executed,’’ snickered theauthor, ‘‘cannot fail to make the fortune of the undertaker.’’ Cambridgeunknowingly exposed his own geographical ignorance by conflating theWest Indies withNorthAmerica. Despite such revealingly provincial biasesof their own—or rather, because of them—British writers and periodicalssought to amuse not only their English, but even their Scottish, readers,with anecdotes about the vagaries of American colonial speech (qtd. inRead, ‘‘British Recognition,’’ 322 n.37, 313–17).

Following Independence, the British literati continued to ridiculeAmerican English (Cairns 21–22, 24; Read, ‘‘Amphi-Atlantic’’). AssessingJeremy Belknap’s Description of the White Mountains in New Hampshire,the writer for theMonthly Review for February 1787 responded prissily tothe term freshets, ‘‘[W]e are unacquainted with this word.’’ Several yearslater, The British Critic appraised Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures: ‘‘Weshall at all times, with pleasure, receive from our transatlantic brethren realimprovements of our common mother-tongue, but we shall hardly be in-duced to admit such phrases as that at p. 93—‘more lengthy,’ for longer,or more diffuse. But perhaps, it is an established Americanism’’ (qtd. inRead, ‘‘British Recognition,’’ 330 and n.70). And the contributor to The

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European Magazine who reviewed Notes on the State of Virginia was hor-rified at Jefferson’s use of belittle: ‘‘Belittle!—What an expression!—It maybe an elegant one in Virginia, and even perfectly intelligible; but for ourpart, all we can do is, to guess at its meaning.—For shame, Mr. Jefferson!. . . O spare, we beseech you, ourmother tongue!’’ (qtd. in Cairns 35–36). Oninto the nineteenth century, British critics continued to pronounce judg-ment from the lofty seat of imperial cultural superiority. In March 1808,the Monthly Mirror exposed its neoimperial attitude by anachronisticallyreprobating ‘‘the corruptions and barbarities which are hourly obtainingin the speech of our trans-atlantic colonies’’ (qtd. in Mencken 15).

Just as the Scots acquiesced to English critics, so colonials generally de-ferred to them too. Writers from the peripheries of Scotland and NorthAmerica sought validation by emulating the literary English of the metro-politan core. An exchange of letters between David Hume and BenjaminFranklin in 1760 exemplifies the culturally subordinate status of provin-cial authors. Like Hume, Franklin endlessly exerted himself to match upto the dominant literary standard and accepted English linguistic and lit-erary hegemony as appropriate. From London, Franklin sent Hume twopamphlets he had written. In reply, Hume collegially corrected his over-seas counterpart’s use of the Americanisms pejorate, colonize, and unshake-able. The Pennsylvania colonial thanked the Scottish provincial ‘‘for yourfriendly Admonition relating to some unusual Words in the Pamphlet. Itwill be of Service to me’’ (Franklin to Hume; Franklin, ‘‘Observations’’).

The upwardly mobile Franklin, who taught himself to write by model-ing his prose style on Joseph Addison’s, embraced the principles of the pre-scriptive grammarians (Looby 136–37). He would ‘‘give up as bad’’ pejorateand colonize, he told Hume, ‘‘since they are not in common use here, . . .for certainly inWritings intended for Persuasion and for general Informa-tion, one cannot be too clear, and every Expression in the least obscure is aFault.’’ Hewould also abandon unshakeable because, although its meaningwas clear, theword itself was ‘‘rather low.’’ Franklin agreed with the linguis-tic reformers that ‘‘introducing newWords where we are already possess’dof old ones sufficiently expressive, I confess must be generally wrong, as ittends to change the Language.’’ Still, he wished standard usage permitted‘‘making newWords when wewant them, by Composition of old ones who[sic] Meanings are already well understood.’’ In the end though, he agreedwith Hume in hoping ‘‘that we shall always in America make the best En-

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glish of this Island our Standard, and I believe it will be so.’’ Then he closedby implicitly associating himself as an Englishman in America with Englishcultural dominance throughout the empire: ‘‘I assure you, it often givesme Pleasure to reflect how greatly the Audience (if I may so term it) of agood English Writer will in another Century or two be encreas’d, by theIncrease of English People in our Colonies.’’ Was this a sly dig at Hume theHibernian? (Franklin to Hume).

If Franklin did not mean to remind Hume of their respective ethno-linguistic identities, he was not always so willing to acquiesce to Scottishcriticismof colonial speech. In 1758, theLondonChroniclepublished a letterpurportedly written by an officer in General Abercrombie’s army campedat Lake George in New York. Disparaging New Englanders and New York-ers on many grounds, he repeatedly contrasted them with Scots. Amongother accusations, the author, obviously himself a Scot, said scornfully,‘‘[In] their language, dress, and in all their behaviour, they are more boor-ish than any thing you ever saw in a certain Northern latitude.’’ Franklin’sletter to the Chronicle, which refuted the criticisms point by point, pulledlinguistic rank on this particular charge:

[As] to their language, I must beg this gentleman’s pardon if I differfrom him. His ear, accustomed perhaps to the dialect practised in thecertain northern latitude he mentions, may not be qualified to judge sonicely in what relates to pure English. And I appeal to all Englishmenhere, who have been acquainted with the Colonists, whether it is not acommon remark, that they speak the language with such an exactnessboth of expression and accent, that though you may know the nativesof several of the counties of England, by peculiarities in their dialect,you cannot by that means distinguish a North American.

Franklin not only invoked the frequent reports of the homogeneity andpurity of colonial speech. He bluntly called on English ethnolinguistic soli-darity and superiority within the empire, while deftly reminding the Scotjust who were the senior ethnic partners in the imperial system. Mean-while, he implicitly claimed his own greater competency to judge Englishspeech because, though a colonial, he was after all an Englishman (Frank-lin, ‘‘Letter to the Printer’’).

If some British commentators despised colonials’ English usage, others,as Franklin reminded his Scottish adversary, lauded the purity and accu-

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racy of their pronunciation and grammar. In contrast to the critics, mostBritons who praised colonial English had actually visited North America.Butwhether British commentators applauded ordisdainedAmericans’ En-glish, they all assumed it as their prerogative to make such appraisals. Andcolonials of higher status, like their Scottish counterparts, bowed to elitemetropolitans as the best qualified authorities. Colonial gentry yearned forthe praise of English judges, while fearing their criticism—or bridling atit. When they rejected British strictures against colonial usage, they didnot dismiss the observers’ authority. They simply said that the commen-tators had got it wrong. Americans in fact used English properly, theyclaimed; their speech matched the metropolitan standard. The obeisanceof many Americans reflected emulation of—and subservience to—metro-politan English culture. The late colonial gentry pursued the goal of pureand proper English to prove their claims to membership in the empire’sruling class.

Having taken metropolitan English as their model, colonial culturalleaders, like their Scottish counterparts, enrolled in a North Americanphase of the campaign to regulate English usage. Hugh Jones’s An Acci-dence to the English Tongue launched the colonial movement in 1724. Thestate of the language throughout the empire made it imperative to fix ‘‘aPublick Standard . . . as a Touchstone to true English, whereby it might beregulated, and proved.’’ His main audience was ‘‘Such BOYS and MEN,as have never learnt Latin perfectly.’’ This would have included males inthe lesser gentry and the striving middle classes. He also aimed to benefit‘‘the FEMALE SEX,’’ as well as ‘‘the Welch, Scotch, Irish, and Foreigners.’’He would teach these several categories of students to read, write, and talk‘‘proper English,’’ taking ‘‘our correct Modern Authors’’ as literary modelsand London speech as the exemplar of spoken English.Without masteringthe ‘‘Mother Tongue,’’ asserted the William and Mary College professor,‘‘no Englishman of what Condition soever he be, can make any tolerableFigure’’ (Jones, Accidence, [title page], 13, 14, 21–22, 62–63).17

Jones’s arguments and approach would characterize prescriptivist ef-forts in America during the remaining half-century of the colonial era.In this view, the increasing geographical mobility, ethnocultural diversity,and social fluidity of people throughout the British realm and especially inthe continental colonies made regulation of English usage essential. Super-

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vision of the language would ‘‘prevent Irregularity, . . . Abuses and Cor-ruptions.’’ In that sense, it would uphold the cultural ascendancy of theEnglish metropolitan elite (Jones, Accidence, 22).

At the same time, enforcement of Standard English in the colonieswould bolster the dominance of English colonials in the midst of not onlynon-English British colonists but a host of non-Anglophone settlers andsubjugated peoples. The impact of these multiple language contact situa-tions on the formation of American English is a large subject that is ad-dressed elsewhere (Longmore, ‘‘English Tongue’’). Suffice it for now to saythat colonial social conditions bolstered the dominance of the English lan-guage.

The mutual impact on one another of English, African languages, andAfrican American Creole(s) appears to have been the most complex ofthese linguistic encounters and certainly has been themost controversial inlinguistic scholarship. With regard to the development of American vari-eties of English, particularly Southern regional varieties, African and Afri-can American speech probably exerted stronger influence than any of theEuropean tongues. This involved far more than adoption of loan words. Ata deeper level of linguistic impact, many Africanisms were transliteratedinto American English but remained ‘‘masked’’ behind familiar words andphrases such as badmouth, be with it, and do your thing. African and Afri-canAmerican inflections also helped to shape southernAmerican pronun-ciation, as many eighteenth-century observers remarked. These influencesmay have spurred white colonials to school themselves and particularlytheir children in standard metropolitan English.18

English colonial leaders, such as Benjamin Franklin, expressed greaterconcern, sometimes downright alarm, about the growing presence of Eu-ropean immigrants ignorant of English customs, laws, and, of course,language. They called for formal education in ‘‘true’’ English pronuncia-tion and writing. Pennsylvania’s provincial Secretary James Logan worriedabout the clannishness and potential disloyalty of the tiny Swedish popu-lation and suggested that perhaps Swedish Lutheran pastors should be re-quired to preach only in English. The much larger numbers of Germansettlers provoked the greatest fear. Some English leaders called for limitingGermans’ immigration, their right to vote, or even their right to use theirnative tongue. None of these proposals was enacted.19 Even a project in the1750s and 1760s to establish German-English bilingual schools in Pennsyl-

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vania failed because of a lack of financial support. Meanwhile, a similareffort in NewYork succeeded, where the Anglican Society for the Propaga-tion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts displaced Dutch-language schools withEnglish-language schools, thereby helping to Anglicize both Dutch- andFranco-American children. Schooling was used as ameans of both culturalmaintenance and cultural assimilation.20 European colonials’ struggles to-ward bilingualism led to conversational code switching, which often prob-ably produced what a British observer on one occasion called ‘‘such amed-ley of Dutch and English as would have tired a horse’’ (Hamilton 86).His andotherAnglophones’ ridicule doubtless pressured non-Anglophonesettlers to adopt the dominant English tongue (Merwick 182). But in theend, the most notable feature of these language encounters is the limitedscope of official efforts to induce non-Anglophones to switch to English.In fact, English political and, more important, religious leaders often sup-ported maintenance of these European tongues or encouraged bilingual-ism rather than assimilation.21 It appears that the greatest impetus towardbilingualism and linguistic assimilation was the considerable socioeco-nomic advantages those shifts offered non-Anglophone colonials. By themid-eighteenth century, Swedish and Welsh virtually disappeared, whileDutch and German retreated into various cultural enclaves: some fami-lies and churches, as well as more isolated and self-contained localities.22

Outside those sectors, colonials of Dutch or German descent practicedsituational code switching, shifting to the dominant English tongue for thepurposes of schooling, business, or politics, while growing numbers com-pletely assimilated to English.23 (Perhaps that trend helped calm Anglo-phone colonials’ ethnolinguistic fears and biases, for linguistic diversityprovoked much less worry or organized reaction then would appear laterin American history.24

Meanwhile, incentives related to socioeconomic mobility motivatedBritish colonials to seek and support instruction in ‘‘good’’ English. En-glish was the language of trade and politics. As in other colonial societies,fluency in the metropolitan standard language would offer some colonialsaccess and advantages in various occupations and business, in politics andgovernance. Mastery of reading, writing, and speaking English ‘‘with pro-priety’’ would enable individuals to exploit social and economic oppor-tunities in the expanding empire. ‘‘Proper’’ pronunciation and ‘‘correct’’grammar, like genteel manners, could serve as a social escalator. In the

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fluid, mobile social order of late colonial America, with so many individu-als striving to rise to greater wealth and higher status and to acquire themarks of refinement that would verify their achievement, linguistic pre-scriptiveness had great appeal (Bureau of Education 56–66; Baron 8–9).

During the three decades leading up to the Revolution, colonials eagerlysought to school themselves in Standard English. They purchased spell-ers and grammars and dictionaries. Up and down the seaboard, news-paper advertisements announced the arrival of English ‘‘Spelling Books bythe dozens’’ and ‘‘English Grammars’’ and other guides to proper usage.Noting the popularity of these imports, colonial printers began putting outAmerican editions of the same books. Thomas Dilworth’s A New Guide tothe English Tongue became the most popular textbook, perhaps because itincluded a speller and a ‘‘Brief but Comprehensive English Grammar,’’ aswell as a reader. The first edition appeared in London in 1740. BenjaminFranklin reprinted it in Philadelphia in 1747. Between 1747 and 1792, otherAmerican printers issued some three dozen editions. Robert Lowth’s AShort Introduction to English Grammar (London, 1758) also appeared in nu-merous American editions. But beyond those reprints, Lowth’s influenceextended far and wide because other grammarians appropriated his rulesfor their guides. For example, Ash’s Grammatical Institutes (London, 1763;NewYork, 1774) bore the subtitle, ‘‘An Easy Introduction toDr. Lowth’s En-glish Grammar.’’ Further evidencing Lowth’s impact, most American col-leges selected his Grammar as their basic instructional text. Harvard hadadopted it by at least 1774 and continued to use it into the 1840s (Bureauof Education, 22, 33–35). A few colonials composed grammar textbooks oftheir own. Hugh Jones prepared his Accidence in Williamsburg but pub-lished it in London. In 1765, Samuel Johnson, founding president of King’sCollege, issued the first grammar textbook written by an American andpublished in America (Johnson; Bureau of Education 35–36). While it istrue, as Kenneth Cmiel has shown, that production of American grammarsand dictionaries took off in the 1780s, colonials began buying British textsa generation earlier. And even when nationalistic Americans started tocompose their own guides to proper usage, they patterned them on Britishmodels.25

Johnson’s grammar and Harvard’s adoption of Lowth point to anotherphase of the colonial campaign for Standard English: formal instruction inschools and colleges. Educational reformers likeHugh Jones and Benjamin

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Franklin, a projector of the Philadelphia Academy, sought greater atten-tion to reading, writing, and speaking English properly. Their effort waspart of the long-term displacement of Latin by the national vernacular.In his 1749 proposal for the academy, Franklin called for practice in ora-tory to form students’ pronunciation and accent and for instruction in En-glish grammar, with the standard list of ‘‘best Writers’’—Tillotson, Addi-son, Pope, Sidney, Cato’s Letters—as the models. Traditionalists apparentlyresisted Franklin’s modern scheme. The academy’s English program wasnever funded at the same level as its Latin instruction (Labaree 3:397–429).But that gave an opening to private schools in Philadelphia. There and inother colonial cities and indeed in every province, schools offered to teachthe reading and writing of English ‘‘with propriety,’’ that is, according tostandard pronunciation and grammar. During the last quarter-century ofthe colonial era, some five dozen private schoolmasters advertised suchschools. The mid-Atlantic colonies took the lead, opening their first gram-mar schools a decade earlier than the New England and southern colonies.By 1775 more than three dozen seem to have been founded in New York,New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, colonial colleges began to teach ‘‘the English Languagegrammatically,’’ along with instruction in English oratory. The King’s Col-lege 1754 prospectus announced that students would learn ‘‘the arts of rea-soning exactly, of writing correctly, and speaking eloquently.’’ That sameyear, Harvard instituted oratorical disputations in English rather thanLatin. In 1766, Harvard’s overseers committee recommended appointmentof a ‘‘distinct Tutor in elocution, composition in English, Rhetoric, andother parts of Belle Lettres.’’ Even before that, in the 1750s Yale launchedinstruction in English public speaking, while the University of Pennsyl-vania established a professorship in English and Oratory. Beginning in1764, the College of New Jersey supported a preparatory school to instructboys in composition and oration by teaching them the English languagegrammatically. Four years later, the newlyarrived JohnWitherspoonbegangiving lectures on rhetoric. The year after that, the college was offering acourse that included ‘‘Remarks in the Grammar and spelling of the En-glish Tongue.’’ Meanwhile, students at all of the late colonial colleges setup clubs and societies to polish their pronunciation and public speakingskills (Bureau of Education 5, 21–66; Cmiel 277 n.80).

Elite and middling colonials’ adoption of a standard written and spo-ken form of their language helped to complete the creation of an Ameri-

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can koine. Koines draw upon not only the spoken dialects of the commonlanguage but also literary dialects. Establishment of a standard written lan-guage is sometimes the last stage of koineization. In the dissemination andenforcement of the standardized written and spoken language, ‘‘standard-izing agencies,’’ such as schools and colleges, clergy and lawyers, the pressand the literary professions, and all those occupations that involve publicspeaking and writing, exert great influence (Blanc 238, 239–41). Higher-status colonials in these fields probably had particular impact because ofwidespread literacy among eighteenth-century Americans (Dwight 4:198–99; Brown 11–12; Hall 1–47). In addition, middling and lower-status colo-nials likely felt motivated to adopt Standard English because, as speech-accommodation researchers have found, individuals tend to converge theirspeech toward prestige dialects (Beebe and Giles 9–10; Stein 7–8). The im-peratives that spurred colonials helped generate American koines that drewupon Standard written and spoken English.

Nonetheless, some colonial reformers concluded that an academyshould regulate usage. In the Royal American Magazine (January 1774),‘‘An AMERICAN’’ proposed a language society with members from ‘‘eachuniversity and seminary.’’ They should annually ‘‘publish some observa-tions upon the language, and from year to year, correct, enrich and refineit, until perfection stops their progress and ends their labour.’’ The plancopied similar projects for a British language academy but linked perfec-tion of the English language to the rising glory and world historical role ofAmerica:

The Dispensations of Providence, and the present aspect of the world,make it evident, that AMERICA will soon be the seat of science, andthe grand theatre where human glory will be displayed in its bright-est colours. . . . And as LANGUAGE, is the foundation of science, andmedium of communication among mankind, it demands our first at-tention, and ought to be cultivated with the greatest assiduity in everyseminary of learning.’’ Its highest perfection, with every other branchof human knowledge, is perhaps reserved for this LAND of light andfreedom. (‘‘To the LITERATI’’)

During and after the Revolution, linguistic reformers would proclaimtheir program as a cultural concomitant of republican political reformand American nation-building (Cmiel 47–48). In September 1780, JohnAdams proposed to Congress ‘‘The American Academy, for refining, im-

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proving and ascertaining the English Language.’’ But just as the BritishParliament had failed to act on any of the schemes to regulate British En-glish, so the American Continental Congress seems never even to havediscussed Adams’s proposal (Adams to President, 5 September; Adams toJenings; Adams to President, 24 September). Private hortatory rather thanpublic legislative action characterized the American approach to languageregulation. In 1781, John Witherspoon assumed that because each of theUnited States was ‘‘equal to and independent of every other . . . [N]oneof them will agree, at least immediately, to receive laws from another indiscourse, any more than in action.’’ Perhaps in the future ‘‘some centreof learning and politeness will be found which shall obtain influence andprescribe the rules of speech and writing to every other part.’’ For thepresent, he would point out some common errors, improprieties, and vul-garisms (Witherspoon 180–97). Witherspoon’s individual attempt to cor-rect American English was followed by an unofficial academy founded in1788 by young nationalist intellectuals, among them NoahWebster. Char-acteristic of American social reform, the Philological Society was a vol-untary association. It lasted less than two years. Other proposals for insti-tutions to regulate American English fared no better (Read, ‘‘PhilologicalSociety,’’ ‘‘Constitution,’’ ‘‘American Projects’’).

If language shaped the values of a people and influenced the form oftheir government, as republican nationalist intellectuals believed, thenAmerican linguistic independence was essential to political independence.Why then did these efforts fail? NoahWebster, Benjamin Rush, and otherscalled on their countrymen to free themselves from the English metropoli-tan model and erect an American standard. But other Americans offeredat best tepid support for these proposals (Lepore 15–41). Many critics re-acted with startling hostility. They did not oppose regulating and puri-fying American English. They simply wanted to continue shaping it tothe metropolitan English standard. They wanted language reformers tocondemn Americanisms and vulgarisms.26 (The Anglophilic Port Folio ex-pressed contempt of democratic American speech in the most vituperativeterms: ‘‘We are ‘free and equal’ in folly.We are ‘independent’ of precedentand rule, and to clip the king’s English is an ‘unalienable’ privilege, adhesiveto every freeborn boozer, from the clamorous circle of a July feast, down tocitizen Sambo, who tipples alone’’ (qtd. in Read, ‘‘American Projects,’’ 1149n.30). An American academy was necessary to roll back such corruptionsand reassert themetropolitan English standard.The agedDr. Franklin took

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a characteristically more diplomatic approach but nonetheless held fast tothe English literary models of his youth. He urged Webster to preserve‘‘the Purity of our Language’’ by ‘‘correcting the popular Errors severalof our States are continually falling into with respect to both’’ expressionand pronunciation. He listed a few innovations he found particularly dis-tressing and called on the young linguist to ‘‘set a discountenancing Markupon them’’ (Franklin toWebster). American linguistic nationalists wageda protracted and largely unsuccessful struggle against the deeply embeddedcultural assumption that the metropolitan English model was the properstandard. For more than a century after the Revolution, many Americansfelt ambivalent about their own language, sometimes defensively prais-ing it against British and Anglophilic American attacks, sometimes dis-daining its presumed barbarism (Read, ‘‘Edward Everett’s Attitude’’). In1884, Henry Cabot Lodge retrospectively lamented that ‘‘the first step of anAmerican entering upon a literary career was to pretend to be an English-man, in order that he might win the approval, not of Englishmen, but ofhis own countrymen.’’ Lodge recognized this ‘‘fixed and settled habit ofmind’’ as what would later be called a neocolonial mentality (Lodge 352).

If the early national and nineteenth-century view of language reflecteda neocolonial sense of cultural inferiority, in a practical and ironic waythe late colonial emulation of metropolitan Standard English helped pre-pare Americans for independent nationhood. North American provincialsimitated metropolitan English speakers and writers, copied metropolitannorms of spoken and written English, in order to win recognition andstandingwithin the British Empire. But their doing so inadvertently helpedthem to fashion a ‘‘unified linguistic field’’ based on a standardized Ameri-can variety of English. That common language domain in turn providedone necessary means for them to create a distinctive American culture andnation.

notes

I would like to thank Peter Trudgill of the University of Fribourg, James Kohn ofSan Francisco State University, and three anonymous readers for their invaluablefeedback.

1. I do not include Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication andthe Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America, in this literature because it ex-amines the relationship between print language and the invention of the publicsphere rather than the standardization of usage.

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2. Fishman 41–43, 49, 55–62, 124 n.6, 7, 135 n.29; Haas 20–29; Stein 1–3; Laitin 9–13;Hobsbawm 10, 52, 55, 59–62, 93–100, 110–14.

3. Cable; Fisher 1–64, 109–56; Pyles andAlgeo 182; Richards; Burnley; Christianson;Stein 5, 7; Williams 85–94.

4. Dillard, Toward, 4–6; Orbeck 142–43; Pyles and Algeo 214–15; Quirk 4.5. Cmiel 31–34; Fennell 148–58; Leonard 59; Milroy 20; Pyles and Algeo 206–9;Read, ‘‘Projected,’’ 188–205, 347–66; Read, ‘‘Suggestions,’’145–56; Thomas Sheri-dan 205–9, 246–47; Stein 5; Williams 94–96.

6. Beattie; Leonard 35–37, 59, 81, 100–101; Pyles and Algeo 96.7. Cmiel 33–34, 36; Fisher 149; Leonard 127–35, 150–52; Sheridan 30, 37; Stein 7, 11;Wright.

8. Leonard 158–59; Cmiel 32–33, 34; Fisher 148; Klein; Stein 8–9.9. Austin; Cmiel 32–33, 34, 36–38; Fisher 147–51; Klein 36–37; Leonard 169–70, 174;Stein 7–10.

10. Fisher 146–49; Klein 40–42; Leonard 150–59, 161, 177–78, 238, 241–43; Sheridan30–38; Stein 7–10.

11. Cohen 82; Crawford 29 n.39; Ferguson 32; Klein 43–45;Milroy 19–20, 25–26; Stein6–8.

12. Bald; Crawford 16–44, 75–85, 104–5; Durkacz 1–6, 9–30, 45–80; Frank 51–62.13. Mossner 372; Crawford 18, 21, 23, 75–82; Frank 53–56.14. Adam Smith told his students: ‘‘Our words must not only be English and agree-

able to the custom of the country but likewise to the custom of some particu-lar part of the nation . . . As those of the higher rank generally frequent thecourt, the standard of our language is therefore chiefly to bemet with there’’ (Lec-tures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres [qtd. in Crawford 29–30]). See also Leonard161.

15. Crawford 24–27, 38–39; Richards 67–76, 84–86; Mossner 373, 375–76.16. Qtd. in Leonard 179; Read, ‘‘Projected’’; Read, ‘‘Suggestions,’’ 150–51.17. John Witherspoon coined ‘‘Americanism’’ as a counterpart to ‘‘Scotticism’’

(Witherspoon 182). Scottish tutors influenced colonial language instruction andreform (Crawford 39–41).

18. Longmore, ‘‘EnglishTongue’’; Dillard,All–American, 12–13; Dillard,History, 60–114; Davis 93; Gomez 172, 177;Herskovits 291; Janson 390;Malone 475–76;Marck-wardt 65–66; Mencken 112–13; Read, ‘‘British Recognition,’’ 329; Read, ‘‘Speechof Negroes,’’ 249; Schoepf 2:62.

19. Franklin, ‘‘Proposals’’; Read 163; Smith; Schwartz 7–8, 78–80, 86, 88–90, 99–100,185–93, 216, 218, 231–32, 235, 292–93, 360 n.232.

20. Roeber 271–73; Wolf 140, 142, 153; Balmer 72–73, 87–88, 117–19, 217 n.5; Schwartz146, 150, 263; Cross 163, 172, 257–58, 271; Kalm 615.

21. Balmer 72–73, 87–89, 117–21, 129–30, 139, 140, 141–44, 152–53, 217 n.5, 225 n.36;Cross 111, 143–44, 163, 257–58, 172, 258, 271; Roeber 221, 226–27, 232–34, 245–49,251–52, 267–68; Schwartz 73, 78, 99–100, 108–10, 131, 145–46, 148, 251–53, 263, 293;Wall.

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22. On Swedish, see Kalm 683, 687–89; Schwartz 69–71, 79, 293; on Welsh: Schlen-ther; Schwartz 25, 77–79, 109–10, 293; on Dutch: Balmer 100, 117–21, 129–30, 140,141–42, 217 n.5, 225 n.36; Cross 111, 143–44, 163, 172, 257, 271; Roeber 221, 223–36;Prince; Kalm 343, 614–15, 626–27; on German: Lemon 13–15, 43–49; Meinig 138,140; Roeber 221–22, 244–82; Schwartz 25–26, 79, 293, 300; Wolf 138–53.

23. Balmer 129, 141; Hamilton 46–47, 58, 59–60, 64, 67–68, 84, 86, 96; Merwick 152,154–55, 171–72, 182, 236, 238; Schlenther 224–28; Schwartz 7, 73, 78, 79, 131, 145,146; Wolf 139.

24. Commerce, diplomacy, and warfare compelled indigenous peoples and Euro-pean colonizers to invent jargons and pidgins. But these contact languages wereused almost exclusively in frontier zones, and for the most part disappeared withpermanent white settlement. Anglophone colonials did adopt many loan wordsfrom Amerindian languages, but, according to the historical linguists AlbertMarckwardt and J. L. Dillard, this sort of adoption is ‘‘the most superficial typeof borrowing,’’ ‘‘a casual rather than an intimate mingling of the two cultures.’’See Marckwardt and Dillard 13, 23–28, 37, 67–68. Axtell; Bragdon; Dillard, All-American, 3–44; Dillard,Toward, 51–72; Dillard,History, 1–21; Goddard, ‘‘FurtherNote’’; Goddard, ‘‘Some Early’’; Goddard, ‘‘Use of Pidgins’’; Read, ‘‘English ofIndians’’; Silverstein, ‘‘Dynamics’’; Silverstein, ‘‘Encountering.’’

25. Bureau of Education 80; Cmiel 32, 48; Evans 4:18; 6:12, 209, 280, 349.26. Cmiel 52–53, 74–91; Howard 301–5; Mathews 45–52, 65–112, 123–29.

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Williams, Joseph M. Origins of the English Language: A Social and LinguisticHistory. New York: Free Press, 1975.

Witherspoon, John. The Miscellaneous Works of the Rev. John Witherspoon.Philadelphia: Woodward, 1803.

Wolf, Stephanie Grauman. Urban Village: Population, Community, and FamilyStructure in German Town, Pennsylvania, 1683–1800. Princeton: Princeton Univ.Press, 1976.

Wright, Susan. ‘‘The Critic and the Grammarians: Joseph Addison and thePrescriptivists.’’ Towards a Standard English, 1600–1800. Ed. Dieter Stein andIngrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994. 243–84.

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