Made In America - Bill Bryson [26]
The second problem with Fischer’s thesis is that many contemporary accounts do not bear it out. Surprise at the uniformity of American speech is found again and again in letters and journals throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth. In 1770 one William Eddis found it a cause of wonder that ‘the language of the immediate descendants of such a promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform and unadulterated; nor has it borrowed any provincial, or national accent, from its British or foreign parentage.‘18 Another observer stated flatly: ‘There is no dialect in all North America.‘19 John Pickering, president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and arguably the leading authority on American speech of his day, thought America was marked not by the variety of its speech but by its consistency. One could find ‘a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one state and another in America’, he contended, and attributed this to ‘the frequent removal of people from one part of our country to another’. He cited his own New Jersey as a particular example: ‘People from all the other states are constantly moving into and out of this state so that there is little peculiarity of manner.‘20
This isn’t to say that there weren’t distinctive regional varieties of speech in America by the time of the Revolution, merely that they appear not to have been as fixed, evident and susceptible to generalization as we might sometimes be led to believe.
Even less certain is the question of the degree to which American speech had by 1776 become noticeably different from that of Britain. Flexner states that at least as early as 1720 Americans were aware that their language ‘differed seriously’ from that of England.21 In 1756, Samuel Johnson referred without hesitation to an ‘American dialect’, and a popular American play of the day, The Politician Out-Witted, instructed the actors to render British speech as ‘effeminate cries’,22 suggesting that differences in cadence and resonance, if not necessarily of pronunciation, were already evident. On the other hand, Krapp notes that visitors to Boston at the time of the Revolution commonly remarked that the accent of the people there was almost indistinguishable from the English of England.23
What is certain is that Britons and Americans alike sounded quite different from Britons and Americans of today, and in a multitude of ways. Both would have dropped the w sound in backward, Edward and somewhat, but preserved it in sword. They would not have pronounced the c in verdict or predict or the l in vault, fault and soldier. Words like author and anthem would have been pronounced with a hard t, as in orator, or even sometimes a d. Fathoms, for instance, was often spelled ‘fadams.’ Banquet would have been pronounced ‘banket’. Balcony rhymed with baloney (Byron would soon rhyme it with Giorgione). Barrage was pronounced ’bair-idge’ and apparently remained so pronounced up to the time of World War I. Words that we now pronounce with an interiorew sound frequently lacked it then, so that mute, and volume would have been ‘moot’ and ‘voloom’. Vowel sounds in general were much less settled