ABSTRACT
The English language was brought to America by colonists from England who settled along the Atlantic seaboard in the seventeenth century.1 It was therefore the language spoken in England at that time, the language spoken by Shakespeare and Milton and Bunyan. In the peopling of this country three great periods of European immigration are to be distinguished. The first extends from the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 to the end of colonial times. This may be put conveniently at 1787, when Congress finally approved the Federal Constitution, or better, 1790, when the last of the colonies ratified it and the first census was taken. At this date the population numbered approximately four million people, 95 percent of whom were living east of the Appalachian Mountains, and 90 percent were from various parts of the British Isles. The second period covers the expansion of the original thirteen colonies west of the Appalachians, at first into the South and into the Old Northwest Territory, ending finally at the Pacific. This era may be said to close with the Civil War, about 1860, and was marked by the arrival of fresh immigrants from two great sources, Ireland and Germany. The failure of the potato crop in Ireland in 1845 precipitated a wholesale exodus to America, a million and a half emigrants coming in the decade or so that followed. At about the same time the failure of the revolution in Germany (1848) resulted in the migration of an equal number of Germans. Many of the
latter settled in certain central cities such as Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis or became farmers in the Middle West. The third period, the period since the Civil War, is marked by an important change in the source from which our immigrants have been derived. In the two preceding periods, and indeed up to about 1890, the British Isles and the countries of northern Europe furnished from 75 to 90 percent of all who came to this country. Even in the last quarter of the nineteenth century more than a million Scandinavians, about one-fifth of the total population of Norway and Sweden, settled here, mainly in the upper Mississippi valley. But since about 1890 great numbers from Southern Europe and the Slavic countries have poured in. Just before World War I, Italians alone were admitted to the number of more than 300,000 a year, and of our annual immigration of more than a million, representatives of the east and south European countries constituted close to 75 percent.
