What did the Revolution sound like? In 1776, Americans were not only fighting for political independence but also creating the conditions for new, distinctly American ways of speaking.
Join linguist and English-language historian Anne Curzan for a journey to the founding era to explore the state of the English language in the richly multilingual context of 18th-century America. Curzan traces the birth of Americanisms such as maize, backwoods, bluff, and to advocate—and words that were criticized as Americanisms but actually weren’t, such as fellow countryman and mad to mean “angry.” She also illustrates how patterns of immigration shaped the American accents and dialects heard across regions and social groups today, not to mention the birth of new languages.
Two hundred years ago, all this linguistic diversity and change did not go without comment. Ideas of language correctness swirled among the rising middle class and left some ill-founded grammar rules to this day. Noah Webster undertook his famous dictionary as a patriotic project. And Benjamin Franklin’s fears about German speakers, as Curzan shows, bear striking resemblances to debates about language and immigration today.
Curzan offers oodles of fascinating facts about the history of American English and wisdom the past offers for the present.
Curzan is Arthur F. Thurnau professor of English and Linguistics at the University of Michigan.
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