Tag: historical linguistics

Spoilers! If you aren’t up-to-date with Outlander don’t read this. But also, if you’re not up-to-date with Outlander, don’t read anything! Go catch up on Outlander!

Recommended for Time-travelling Bishes, Outlander Observesses, Historical Linguistics Hunnies, and American Dialect Divas.

This series is about the Starz melodrama Outlander, based on the books by Diana Gabaldon, about a woman from the 1970s who time travels to the 1770s to be with her hunky Scottish beau. If you don’t care about any of that, but are interested in learning about early American English, you’ll do fine. Posts 1-4 in the series discuss what we know about how early Americans spake. But I really think you should watch Outlander though.

Welcome back!

Last time we learned that the Royalists gave Virginia and the Carolinas their distinctive dialect and that Outlander producers don’t care out that. This time we’re going to look at the third and fourth groups of English speakers to arrive in America. This information is from online resources compiled by historical linguist Prof. Edward Vajda at Western Washington University.

The third group of colonists were the Quakers. I’m not going to talk about them since there isn’t any overlap with Outlander. But here’s a table of the features of their dialect anyway.

The Quakers(1675-1725)

Migration: North Midlands of England and Wales to Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey

Feature 1: Phonetic features include the pronunciation of a back rounded [Å] in words such as caught, saw.

Feature 2: Also, the pronunciation of [E] instead of [œ] in bad, and, sack, etc.

Feature 3: Retention of the syllable final [r] in all places.

Words & Expressions: Speakers tried to avoid saying male or female names for animals that might have sexual connotations (bull, cock, etc.), and also avoided names of parts of the body: used rock instead of stone chicken breast/leg =white meat, dark meat.

Influence: a great number of euphemisms because of the above

The last group was the Scot-Irish. This dialect had a huge impact on general American English. It’s also the exact demographic in Outlander. Murtagh and all his friends are these Scots-Irish colonizers, so we should be seeing a lot of this dialect.

However, in the show, Murtagh’s compatriots all appear to be recent arrivals to America. They sound more old world than new. Here is a list of features we could expect to see.

The Scots-Irish (1718-1775)

Migration: North Britain and Northern Ireland to the Appalachian backcountry

Feature 1: Double negatives not nobody

Feature 2: Pronouns: hit (it), youns, (ye ones), (possessives) hisn, hern, yorn, theirn  and them (them boys instead of their boys)

Feature 3: A progressive aspect preposition – a (I’m a talking to you)

Feature 4: Compound nouns: men-folk, man-child, kin folks

Feature 5: Verbing nouns and nouning verbs: She prettied herself up, I’ll muscle it up,  He daddied that child.

Words & Expressions: Slow as Christmas, His backbone’s rubbin’ his belly (very hungry), fixin to, pert near, afeared, beholden, took sick, upped an, swan, swanny (swear), golly, dad blamed. special distance words: This here, that there, that yonder

Influence: Rural midwest English (because they helped colonize the midwest), and rural southern English.

Scots-Irish Expressions in General American: Faster ‘n greased lightning, can’t hold a candle to, sharp as a tack, madder ‘n a wet hen, tuckered out

As you can see, there are a lot of fun and distinctive dialectal features to choose from. And yet, I don’t recall any of Murtagh’s friends using any of these. Again, this really seems like a missed opportunity.

Wouldn’t it have been great to hear some Appalachian Scots-Irish? For example:

Murtagh’s buddy: I’m a fixin’ ta steal that wagon yonder

Murtagh: Ach aye?

Murtagh’s buddy: I’m afeared hit’s pert near faster ‘n greased lightning!

Murtagh: Ach aye!

Murtagh’s buddy: Yorn kin folks are tuckered out.

Murtagh: Ach aye!?

Obviously, the writers of Outlander should give me a call.

Anyways, it wasn’t until after the Revolutionary War that General American really got going. Western expansion leveled out a lot of the distinctive features of the various east coast dialects from the mid-Atlantic to the Ohio valley. One of the biggest features of General American, which we can thank the Scots-Irish for, is that final [r] sound, which they never dropped.

To recap, we learned that American English was well on its way when Claire and Jamie showed up. It had some unique dialectal features thanks to 4 main groups of colonizers, but also a lot of leveling and uniformity between those groups. So while the depiction of the Americans in Outlander might not be too far off, it is unclear in the show’s portrayal of that time, who is a recent colonizer and who is new-world-born and raised. I suppose I can’t fault the show for that. Rather than showing anachronistic, or inaccurate accents, the show decided to mostly skip dialect opportunities and focus more on the settlers. And maybe that’s for the best.

Spoilers! If you aren’t up-to-date with Outlander don’t read this. But also, if you’re not up-to-date with Outlander, don’t read anything! Go catch up on Outlander!

Recommended for Time-travelling Bishes, Outlander Observesses, Historical Linguistics Hunnies, and American Dialect Divas.

This series is about the Starz melodrama Outlander, based on the books by Diana Gabaldon, about a woman from the 1970s who time travels to the 1770s to be with her hunky Scottish beau. If you don’t care about any of that, but are interested in learning about early American English, you’ll do fine. Posts 1-4 in the series discuss what we know about how early Americans spake. But I really think you should watch Outlander though.

Welcome back!

If you missed Posts 1 and 2 of this series, follow this link to go back and read them. If you’re not sure why I’m writing about Outlander, maybe the introduction to the series will help?

Last time we learned that the Puritans gave Boston its distinctive dialect and that Brianna definitely doesn’t have it. This time we’re going to look at the second group of English speakers to arrive in America. This information is from online resources compiled by historical linguist Prof. Edward Vajda at Western Washington University.

The Royalists (or “Cavaliers”) came from south and southwest England and settled in Virginia and the Carolinas. This should be the accent we see the most in Outlander’s Americans. It’s too bad we don’t meet that many of them.

We learned in Post 1 of this series that colonists moved around a lot and so there was a lot of dialect levelling. That’s when everyone mixes together and starts to sound more similar. This is one of the reasons that early American English was relatively uniform.

However, in theory, George Washington, growing up in Virginia would have been more under the influence of this Royalist dialect than any other. The features of this one include that distinctive drawl, loss of Ds and Ts at the end of words (like I tol’ you instead of I told you), and emphasis on the first syllable of words like GUI-tar.

And yet, our brief meeting with young George did not reveal any of these features.

The most notable fact about this dialect is that it was the primary influence on Black American English, which then influenced it right back. Here is a table of its features:

The Royalists or Cavaliers (1642-1675)

Migration: From south and southwest England to Virginia and the Carolinas

Feature 1: That drawl (caused by diphthongalization). House sounded like haahhse and eggs like aaiggs

Feature 2: loss of final t, d after another consonant: And sounded like an and told sounded like tol

Feature 3: Emphasis placed on the first syllable. Guitar sounded like GUI-tar and July sounded like JU-ly

Words & Expressions: Aksed, ain’t, y’all, bucket (instead of pail), snickerdoodles, tacky,  varmint, (from vermin), vittles (from victuals), spitting image of  (from spirit and image of), andthree bricks shy of a load

Influence: A lot of idioms in general standard American English

Black English: Southern dialects were influenced by the English spoken by West Africans when slaves, native speakers of dozens of languages, were forced to learn English. The dialect of English they created was primarily influenced by the speech of the southern whites, then it influenced the speech of southern whites right back.

Shared features: Loss of final t, d after another consonant: Use of double negatives, ain’t, as in early English. Loss of ng: somethin‘, nothin‘, etc.

Unique feature 1: No use of the linking verb ‘to be’  or generalization of one form for it

Unique feature 2: Emphasis on aspect rather than tense: He workin’   (right now) vs.  He be workin’.  This is found in many West African languages.

Unique feature 3: I done gone (from Wolof doon , the completive verb aspect particle + English ‘done’).

Unique feature 4: Regularization of present tense verb conjugation: He don’t, he know it.

Unique feature 5: Voiced th in initial position becomes d: dis, dey; in medial position it becomes v: brother > brovva.Final voiceless th → f  with = wif

Words & Expressions: tote bag (tota = carry in Kikonga), hip (Wolof hepicat one who has his eyes wide open), voodoo (obosum, guardian spirit) mumbo jumbo (from name of a West African god), yam (njami/ Senegal), banana (Wolof).  Also, the phrases: sweet talking, every which way, high-five

Influence: All World Englishes

Again, we don’t get to meet a ton of Americans on the show and that feels like a missed opportunity. The only chances we got were the night Claire and Jamie went to the theatah and at Aunt Jocasta’s dinner party to set Brianna up with man. I didn’t notice any of these features in the Americans we met. Did you? Maybe they were all recent transplants and not really locals.

The only black people who get any screen time are Aunt Jocasta’s house slaves, Phaedra and Ulysses. Phaedra has an inexplicable Scottish accent. Even if she learned English from her owner in the house, she’s not a person in a vacuum. I find it hard to believe that she’d go full Scots. She probably would have been influenced by growing up around Ulysses who doesn’t have a Scottish accent or a southern drawl.

Maybe I’m asking too much here, but a few southern American accents and early Black American English here and there would have really set the scene.

Next time on Investigating Outlander’s Americans – Post 4, we’ll look at the Quakers and the Appalachians, arguably the most important influence on American English and what we should see most of on the show.

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Longmore, Paul K. “‘Good English without Idiom or Tone’: The Colonial Origins of American Speech.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 37, no. 4, 2007, pp. 513–542., doi:10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.513.

Luu, Chi. “When Did Colonial America Gain Linguistic Independence?” Jstor Daily, Jstor, 4 July 2017, daily.jstor.org/colonial-america-gain-linguistic-independence/.

S, R. “Accents and Anachronisms: What Did People Sound like in 18th Century America?” TURN to a Historian, 4 May 2015, spycurious.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/accents-and-anachronisms-what-did-people-sound-like-in-18th-century-america/.

Vajda, Edwards “The Dialects of American English.” Linguistics 201: The Origin of Language, pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/AmericanDialects.htm.

Spoilers! If you aren’t up-to-date with Outlander don’t read this. But also, if you’re not up-to-date with Outlander, don’t read anything! Go catch up on Outlander!

Recommended for Time-travelling Bishes, Outlander Observesses, Historical Linguistics Hunnies, and American Dialect Divas.

This series is about the Starz melodrama Outlander, based on the books by Diana Gabaldon, about a woman from the 1970s who time travels to the 1770s to be with her hunky Scottish beau. If you don’t care about any of that, but are interested in learning about early American English, you’ll do fine. This series discusses what we know about how early Americans spake. But I really think you should watch Outlander though.

Welcome back!

If you missed Post 1 of this series, follow this link to go back and read it. If you’re not sure why I’m writing about Outlander, maybe the introduction to the series will help?

Last time we learned that the American accent in 1770 was definitely a thing, but it wasn’t too far off from British dialects. We also learned that because they were all wandering around and class mixing, their speech wasn’t a marker of social status in the same way it had been in the old world.

For example, “Paul K. Longmore’s “Good English without Idiom or Tone”: The Colonial Origins of American Speech notes that many colonists pronounced “cover as kivver, engine as ingine, yesterday as yisterday, yes as yis, and Sarah as Sary.” While these would have been low class pronunciations in England, colonial Americans didn’t care about all that baloney anymore.

Ya, but what did they sound like?? I know, but we can’t ever really know for sure for sure. On Spycurious, a website devoted to a show called TURN: Washington’s Spies, contributor, ‘RS’, points to sources that claim that there were different American dialects then as there are now. He points out that colonists had a relatively sparse education despite fairly high rates of literacy and due to this (and fewer spelling conventions) people often spelled phonetically.

This is a great clue. Another great clue from RS is David Hackett’s book about Paul Revere’s life and the letters of the time which show the characteristics of the modern Boston accent we’ve come to know and feel some kind of way about.

So there was the beginning of a Boston accent, was there? I had to learn more.

So I found online resources compiled by historical linguist, Prof. Edward Vajda, at Western Washington University. He said that there were four main migrations of English speaking people to American before 1776.

I will tell you about one of those migrations now, but you’ll have to wait for future posts to read about the other 3.

The first were the Puritans starting in 1629. They came from East Anglia to Massachusetts and gave us the Bostonian dialect. This is interesting because Claire keeps telling everyone that she’d been in Boston for the last 20 years, and Brianna is a true Bostonian native, and no one’s like, really? You don’t sound like it. Here are a list of the features from Prof. Vajda that Claire and Bri totally don’t have.

The Puritans (1629-1640)

Migration: From East Anglia to Massachusetts

Feature 1: Caught or bought had an [o] sound instead of a low [a] sound

Feature 2: Deleted R at the end of syllables. Far sounded like fah

Feature 3: Added R after a final schwa. Cuba sounded like Cuber

Words & Expressions: Cuss from curse, conniption fit, pesky, snicker, cool as a cucumber, three sheets to the wind

Influence: Affected dialects from Maine to Wisconsin especially Chicago and New York English

New York English: After the British took possession of the Dutch colony of Nieuw Amsterdam (Manhattan you guys) in 1664 there was a rapid conversion of Dutch speakers to English

Shared features: caught or bought had an [o] sound instead of a low [a] sound. Deleted R at the end of syllables.

Unique feature 1: th sounded like d → them, these were dem, dese

Unique feature 2: er => [schwa + y]  thirty purple birds = theuty peuple beuds uh in final position  were = wuh

Unique feature 3: [oi] → [er] oil = erl (a later development)

Unique feature 4: I want you to (do something) → I want you should (do something)

These are all features of the distinctive modern Bostonian dialect too and yet Brianna and Claire don’t have any of them. And fine, Claire’s a Brit and so was Frank, so Brianna wouldn’t have all of them, but would she really believably have none at all? And, if she lacks all Bostonian features because her parents are English, she would definitely have a couple Britishisms like “at the weekend” or “the loo” or something. But nah, she just speaks general, standard, non-regional American English. Now that’s something to think about.

Next time on Investigating Outlander’s Americans – Post 3, I’ll tell you about the second group of immigrants that shaped American English.

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Longmore, Paul K. “‘Good English without Idiom or Tone’: The Colonial Origins of American Speech.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 37, no. 4, 2007, pp. 513–542., doi:10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.513.

Luu, Chi. “When Did Colonial America Gain Linguistic Independence?” Jstor Daily, Jstor, 4 July 2017, daily.jstor.org/colonial-america-gain-linguistic-independence/.

S, R. “Accents and Anachronisms: What Did People Sound like in 18th Century America?” TURN to a Historian, 4 May 2015, spycurious.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/accents-and-anachronisms-what-did-people-sound-like-in-18th-century-america/.

Vajda, Edwards “The Dialects of American English.” Linguistics 201: The Origin of Language, pandora.cii.wwu.edu/vajda/ling201/test3materials/AmericanDialects.htm.

Spoilers! If you aren’t up-to-date with Outlander don’t read this. But also, if you’re not up-to-date with Outlander, don’t read anything! Go catch up on Outlander!

Recommended for Time-travelling Bishes, Outlander Observesses, Historical Linguistics Hunnies, and American Dialect Divas.

This series is about the Starz melodrama Outlander, based on the books by Diana Gabaldon, about a woman from the 1970s who time travels to the 1770s to be with her hunky Scottish beau. If you don’t care about any of that, but are interested in learning about early American English, you’ll do fine. This series discusses what we know about how early Americans spake. But I really think you should watch Outlander though.

If you missed the introduction to the series follow this link to go back and read it. If you’re not sure why I’m writing about Outlander, it might help?

It is canon in TV Land that all period pieces use various English accents to show The Past and it would truly be jarring to viewers to aim for linguistic accuracy. I get it and I’m fine with it.

However, from Outlander’s season four premier America the Beautiful, I couldn’t stop wondering “Is this American accent anachronistic?” Was there already a distinct dialectal difference between England and the New World before America was even a thing?

Sure there had been several generations of colonists living in what was to become America, but wasn’t there some pop-linguistics circulating that claimed that colonists preserved their English more than their compatriots back home? And that British English changed faster than American English and so the English in the present-day colonies is actually closer to Shakespearean English than that spoken in modern UK?

This long list of questions spurred me to the world wide web for answers. The first source I found about this is my favorite contributor to JSTOR DAILY, Chi Luu. She asserts that there was a distinct American dialect of English by Outlander times. She also points out that it was actually viewed with approval. This is surprising due to the low-key insecurity speakers of American English have when compared to many UK English dialects.

She quotes an Englishperson from 1770 who said it was weird that colonists came from every language background across Europe, but still manage to have an English that was ”uniform, and unadulterated.”

So when Claire meets a young George Washington at a party, and his English is sort of East-coast-boarding-school-proper, it might be accurate.

Another weird thing from that time, is that one couldn’t easily guess where a colonist was from by the way they talked. One piece of evidence for this is that there are wanted ads for escaped indentured servants from the UK that include which UK dialect they spoke. This shows that their speech stood out against the standard American dialect of the time (Luu, 2017).

As we know from Outlander, colonists had to move around a lot for colonizing reasons. You know, like when you sell your daughter’s husband to the first Indigenous people you see and they march him up to New York and then your daughter’s like, “But I wanted to keep him!” and then you have to go all the way up there and try to buy him back?

They also had to continuously interact with other colonizers of all classes. Back home, they might have stayed within linguistic boundaries, but that was not an option in the New World. Outlander’s scenes of Wilmington show people class-mixing all over town! That’s an environment ripe for linguistic leveling. This is a phenomenon I touched on in Joining the Western Region: Sociophonetic Shift in Victoria.

So what did it actually sound like though? We don’t and can’t really know for sure, but apparently it was still very similar to British English. I’ll tell you more about that next time on Investigating Outlander’s Americans – Post 2.

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Longmore, Paul K. “‘Good English without Idiom or Tone’: The Colonial Origins of American Speech.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 37, no. 4, 2007, pp. 513–542., doi:10.1162/jinh.2007.37.4.513.

Luu, Chi. “When Did Colonial America Gain Linguistic Independence?” Jstor Daily, Jstor, 4 July 2017, daily.jstor.org/colonial-america-gain-linguistic-independence/.

S, R. “Accents and Anachronisms: What Did People Sound like in 18th Century America?” TURN to a Historian, 4 May 2015, spycurious.wordpress.com/2015/05/04/accents-and-anachronisms-what-did-people-sound-like-in-18th-century-america/.

Spoilers! If you aren’t up-to-date with Outlander don’t read this. But also, if you’re not up-to-date with Outlander, don’t read anything! Go catch up on Outlander!

Recommended for Time-travelling Bishes, Outlander Observesses, Historical Linguistics Hunnies, and American Dialect Divas.

This series is about the Starz melodrama Outlander, based on the books by Diana Gabaldon, about a woman from the 1970s who time travels to the 1770s to be with her hunky Scottish beau. If you don’t care about any of that, but are interested in learning about early American English, you’ll do fine. This series discusses what we know about how early Americans spake. But I really think you should watch Outlander though.

Like any good Outlander fan, I have a healthy dose of skepticism for the portrayal of the 1700’s. Of course, I’m not an historian- I wholeheartedly believed Roger’s teal and mustard-colored, velveteen shants-suit was historically inaccurate, but come on. That guy looked ridiculous.

But it turns out that the outfit was accurate and it motivated me to do some real research on some of my other questions about the show’s portrayal of the time.

For example:

1. Why does Fergus have a lingering French accent despite being adopted to Scotland before puberty?
2. How did Young Iain acquire Cherokee so quickly?
3. Why does Phaedra, a slave in North Carolina, have a Scottish English accent?
4. Why aren’t Claire, Brie, or Roger ever once questioned about their modern British, American, and Scottish English dialects? It would be so hard not to drop modern slang all over the 1700’s!
5. Finally, are the American accents in the show anachronistic?

While these are all questions worth answering, for this series I’m only going to attempt to answer question 5.

So without further ado, please enjoy Investigating Outlander’s Americans – Post 1.