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

Recent scholarship has traced efforts to fashion an American national language through standardization of forms and usage. Christopher Looby, in Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States, David Simpson, in The Politics of American English, 1776–1850, and Kenneth Cmiel, in Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America, all examine public debates about these matters and, in particular, the labors of linguistic reformers to shape the national tongue. But these important studies focus mainly on the revolutionary, early national, and antebellum periods, and although Cmiel recounts the impact of late eighteenth-century British prescriptivists on postrevolutionary American thinking he does not extensively consider colonial efforts to regulate the language.¹ In fact, attempts to shape written and spoken American English according to ideas of correctness, propriety, and, most important, a national standard began before American Independence. But those ideas and that standard were British rather than American. The effort reflected colonial desire to copy metropolitan English linguistic norms in order to attain cultural legitimacy within the British Empire. Postrevolutionary exertions perpetuated attitudes and activities that began in the late colonial period. This essay examines the colonial origins of the movement to standardize and nationalize American English.

The central fact of colonials' experience is that they act as agents of an expansionist imperial society. As one result, dominant colonial groups are acutely aware of the metropolitan standard of the language they share with the homeland. In developing an extraterritorial variety of that language, they often labor to match the metropolitan standard. Transplanted speakers of various dialects of a common tongue encounter one another in new geographical and social environments. Contact often produces dialect mixing and leveling and a compromise dialect called a koine. Koineization largely involves unconscious modification of speech forms. But the attentiveness of many colonials to a metropolitan standard indicates that colonial koines arise from not just spontaneous changes but conscious shaping. As users of the koine "nativize" their common tongue, they continuously render normative judgments about alternative usages. Prescribing what is correct, they seek to standardize the extraterritorial version of the language (Siegel 8; Haas; Stein).

North American British colonials, especially those in the elite and middling ranks, took as their model the written and spoken English of the imperial center. Like elite and middling Britons, higher-status colonials used this "proper" and "true" English to distinguish themselves from people below them in the social hierarchy. Nonetheless and again like socially ambitious Britons, many colonials wielded linguistic correctness as a tool of social mobility. Colonials of all ranks emulated metropolitan Standard English in order to elevate their standing within the Empire. In the long run in a pattern typical of colonies of settlement, their efforts unintentionally helped to create a common language that provided one basis for American nationhood.

Colonials' adoption of the metropolitan standard of English and their manner of applying it appear in three kinds of evidence: contemporary observers' evaluations of colonial speech; higher-status colonials' descriptions of British immigrants' non-standard English speech; and colonials' formal efforts to educate themselves in metropolitan Standard English.

Eighteenth-century observers praised Anglophone colonials for matching metropolitan linguistic norms. They focused on pronunciation and accent, vocabulary and phraseology. William Eddis, secretary to Maryland's royal governor (1769–1777), avowed, "[T]he pronunciation of the generality of the people has an accuracy and elegance that cannot fail of gratifying the most judicious ear" (33). Jonathan Boucher, a tutor and Anglican priest in the Chesapeake (1759–1775), asserted that colonials displayed "the purest Pronunciation of the English Tongue that is anywhere to be met with" (30). "Accuracy," "elegance," and "purity" referred to both colonials' emulation of metropolitan standard pronunciation and the absence from their speech of British regional accents. Lord Adam Gordon, a Scot, made the same point about word usage and grammar. Describing mid-1760s Philadelphia, he admitted that "the propriety of Language here surprized me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks, in a degree of purity and perfection, surpassing...