ABSTRACT
It is established that the earliest British migrants to the colonies carried a great diversity of dialects with them. It has not been possible, however, to identify the colonial dialects with any of the varieties of England – or those of Ireland or Scotland. Attempted reconstruction of the English of the American colonies has yielded virtually no insight into the English of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the literature on which has concerned itself primarily with the last stages of the Great Vowel Shift and with developing purism. Perhaps this is why the traditional history of the language treated ‘American English’ after discussing Samuel Johnson's dictionary, as a special case of the usage problem. The colonists came ‘promiscuously’ (to use the term of an early observer) from many parts of England, although it might be objected that there was somewhat greater social than geographic selectivity among the colonizing population. Early North American groups are more readily identified as Puritans, Quakers, religious Dissenters of other types, or ‘raw adventurers’ than as natives of Sussex, Wessex or East Anglia. Even aboard ship on the voyage over, as Cressy (1987: 149–51)suggests, ‘a new, if temporary, community’ arose, a bonding among Atlantic travellers of the kind that is found among veterans of other intensive group experiences’ which preceded even what social reorganization took place after arrival. Attempts to find origins in British regions for American regionalisms have led nowhere.
