11 - Solving Kurath's puzzle: establishing the antecedents of the American Midland dialect region

Summary

Introduction

In the contemporary popular mind the eastern United States is divided into two principal regions, the North and the South. This dichotomy reflects American political history, notably nineteenth-century sectional rivalry that led to a civil war, but it does not necessarily conform to historical or linguistic reality on the ground. It postdates the formative period of American history, when the seaboard North American colonies were settled and migration inland began. In that period a cultural landscape developed that had a three-way territorial differentiation with complex and differing ethnological and social bases: New England (Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Connecticut), the middle colonies (New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware) and the South (Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia). Lexicographer and grammarian Noah Webster noted in his Grammatical Institute of the English Language that ‘language in the middle States is tinctured by a variety of Irish, Scots, and German dialects’ (1783:6). In Dissertations of the English Language he cited distinctive linguistic patterns for each of the three regions, writing for instance that ‘It is a custom very prevalent in the middle states, even among some well bred people, to pronounce off, soft, drop, crop, with the sound of a, aff, saft, drap, crap. This seems to be a foreign and local dialect …’ (1789: 110–11).