ABSTRACT
This chapter narrates the origins of English in America. It looks at the patterns of settlement and the origins of American regional dialects. It charts the relationships among those dialects, while investigating some of the methods used by modern linguists. It introduces students to some major resources for the study of English in America: historical writings in the colonial and early republican periods, Noah Webster’s Dictionary of 1828 and its impact, the emergence of dialect literature, the criticism of H. L. Mencken, and the development of the Linguistic Atlas and the Dictionary of American Regional English.
