47. OLD WORLD, NEW WORLD(part -3)

What is certain is that many people, including both Thomas Jefferson and Noah

Webster, expected American English to evolve into a separate language over

time. Benjamin Franklin, casting an uneasy eye at the Germans in his native

Pennsylvania, feared that America would fragment into a variety of speech

communities. But neither of these things happened. It is worth looking at why

they did not.

Until about 1840 America received no more than about 20,000 immigrants a

year, mostly from two places: Africa in the form of slaves and the British Isles.

Total immigration between 1607 and 1840 was no more than one million. Then

suddenly, thanks to a famine in Ireland in 1845 and immense political upheaval

elsewhere, America's immigration became a flood. In the second half of the

nineteenth century, thirty million people poured into the country, and the pacequickened further in the early years of the twentieth century. In just four years at

its peak, between 1901 and 1905, America absorbed a million Italians, a million

Austro-Hungarians, and half a million Russians, plus tens of thousands of other

people from scores of other places.

At the turn of the century, New York had more speakers of German than

anywhere in the world except Vienna and Berlin, more Irish than anywhere but

Dublin, more Russians than in Kiev, more Italians than in Milan or Naples. In

1890 the United States had 800 German newspapers and as late as the outbreak

of World War I Baltimore alone had four elementary schools teaching in German

only.

Often, naturally, these people settled in enclaves. John Russell Bartlett noted that

it was possible to cross Oneida County, New York, and hear nothing but Welsh.

Probably the most famous of these enclaves—certainly the most enduring—was

that of the Amish who settled primarily in and around Lancaster County in

southern Pennsylvania and spoke a dialect that came to be known, misleadingly,

as Pennsylvania Dutch. (The name is a corruption of Deutsch, or German.) Some

300,000 people in America still use Pennsylvania Dutch as their first language,

and perhaps twice as many more can speak it. The large number is accounted for

no doubt by the extraordinary insularity of most Amish, many of whom even

now shun cars, tractors, electricity, and the other refinements of modern life.

Pennsylvania Dutch is a kind of institutionalized broken English, arising from

adapting English words to German syntax and idiom. Probably the best known

of their expressions is "Outen the light" for put out the light. Among others:

Nice Day, say not? – Nice day, isn't it?

What's the matter of him? – What's the matter with him?

It's going to give rain. – It's going to rain

Come in and eat yourself. – Come and have something to eat.

It wonders me where it could be. – I wonder where it could be

Pennsylvania Dutch speakers also have a tendency to speak with semi-Germanic

accents—saying "chorge" for George, "britches" for bridges, and "tolt" for told.Remarkably, many of them still have trouble, despite more than two centuries in

America, with "v" and "th" sounds, saying "wisit" for visit and "ziss" for this.

But two things should be borne in mind. First, Pennsylvania Dutch is an

anomaly, nurtured by the extreme isolation from modern life of its speakers. And

second, it is an English dialect. That is significant.

Throughout the last century, and often into this one, it was easy to find isolated

speech communities throughout much of America: Norwegians in Minnesota

and the Dakotas, Swedes in Nebraska, Germans in Wisconsin and Indiana, and

many others. It was natural to suppose that the existence of these linguistic

pockets would lead the United States to deteriorate into a variety of regional

tongues, rather as in Europe, or at the very least result in widely divergent

dialects of English, each heavily influenced by its prevailing immigrant group.

But of course nothing of the sort happened. In fact, the very opposite was the

case. Instead of becoming more divergent, people over the bulk of the American

mainland continued to evince a more or less uniform speech. Why should that

be?

There were three main reasons. First, the continuous movement of people back

and forth across the continent militated against the formation of permanent

regionalisms. Americans enjoyed social mobility long before sociologists

thought up the term. Second, the intermingling of people from diverse

backgrounds worked in favor of homogeneity. Third, and above all, social

pressures and the desire for a common national identity encouraged people to

settle on a single way of speaking.

People who didn't blend in risked being made to feel like outsiders. They were

given names that denigrated their backgrounds: wop from the Italian guappo (a

strutting fellow), kraut (from the supposed German fondness for sauerkraut), yid

(for Yiddish speakers), dago from the Spanish Diego, kike (from the -ki and -ky

endings on many Jewish names), bohunk from Bohemian-Hungarian, micks and

paddies for the Irish. As we shall see in the chapter on dialects, the usual pattern

was for the offspring of immigrants to become completely assimilated—to the

point of being unable to speak their parents' language.

Occasionally physical isolation, as with the Cajuns in Louisiana or the Gullah

speakers on the Sea Islands off the East Coast, enabled people to be more

resistant to change. It has often been said that if you want to hear what thespeech of Elizabethan England sounded like, you should go to the hills of

Appalachia or the Ozarks, where you can find isolated communities of people

still speaking the English of Shakespeare. To be sure, many of the words and

expressions that we think of today as "hillbilly" words—afeared, tetchy, consarn

it, yourn (for yours), hisn (for his), et (for ate), sassy (for saucy), jined (for

joined), and scores of others—do indeed reflect the speech of Elizabethan

London. But much the same claim could be made for the modern-day speech of

Boston or Charleston or indeed almost anywhere else. After all, every person in

America uses a great many expressions and pronunciations familiar to

Shakespeare but which have since died out in England—gotten, fall (for the

season), the short a of bath and path, and so on.