Made In America - Bill Bryson [25]
So what did they sound like, these new Americans? Had they by 1776 adopted a distinctive American accent? Did Jefferson speak with a southern drawl and Adams with the pinched nasal tones of a New Englander, or did they sound like the Englishmen they still loosely felt themselves to be? The evidence is tantalizingly ambiguous. Certainly regional differences were evident in America in 1776 and had been for some time. As early as 1720, visitors to New England were speaking of a ‘New England twang’, which bore a noticeable resemblance to the ‘Norfolk whine’ of England. In much the same way, visitors to the South sometimes remarked on the resemblance of speech there to the Sussex accent. Some detected quite specific differences. One observer in 1780 claimed that natives of the neighbouring towns of Easthampton and Southampton on Long Island could be distinguished in an instant by their peculiarities of speech. Much the same claim was sometimes made for proximate communities in Virginia.
The evidence suggests that in 1776 southerners would have been struck by the New England habit of saying ‘kee-yow’ and ‘nee-yow’ for cow and now, for saying ‘marcy’ for mercy, ’crap’ for crop and ‘drap’ for drop. (This last variation, incidentally, accounts for our pair of words strap and strop.) Northerners would have regarded as curious the southern habit of saying ‘holp’ for help, for rhyming wound in the sense of an injury with swooned – New Englanders rhymed it with crowned – and for using y’all for a collective sense of you (a practice that had been a distinguishing feature of southern speech since the 1600s).
In his much-praised book Albion’s Seed, David Hackett Fischer carefully argues that regional accents – indeed discrete regional cultures – were well in place in America by the time of the Revolution. He points out that American colonists came in four distinct waves: Puritans from eastern England to New England in 1629-40, a mix of elite royalists and indentured servants to Virginia in 1642-75, groups from the north Midlands and Wales to the Delaware Valley beginning in about 1675, and a great mass from the Scottish borders and Northern Ireland to Appalachia in 1718-75. ‘By the year 1775 these four cultures were fully established in British America. They spoke distinctive dialects of English, built their houses in diverse ways, and had different methods of doing much of the ordinary business of life.‘15
By assembling in America in enclaves that reflected their geographic origins, the four main waves of immigrants thus managed to preserve distinctive regional identities. That is why, for instance, horses in New England (as in East Anglia) neigh, while those in the middle states of America (and the Midlands of England) whinny.16 Noting that many words became associated early on with the speech of Virginia – afeared, howdy, catercorner, innards, traipse, woebegone, bide and tarry for stay awhile, tote for carry, disremember for forget, pekid for being pale or unwell – Fischer says: ‘Virtually all peculiarities of grammar, syntax, vocabulary and pronunciation which have been noted as typical of Virginia were recorded in the [southern England] counties of Sussex, Surrey, Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Oxford, Gloucester, Warwick or Worcester.‘17 They may indeed have been recorded there – it would be surprising if they were not – but in fact at least some of the words he uses to support his thesis (for instance, poorly for being unwell and right good for something meritorious or agreeable) were primarily northern expressions.
Neat though it is, Fischer’s argument presents two problems. First, with the exception of the final wave of immigrants from the Scottish borders and Ulster, the geographic background of colonial immigrants was nothing like as uniform as Fischer implies. The Puritan movement may have had its base in East Anglia – and this clearly accounts