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VIII.—On the Conservatism of Language in a New Country

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Frank Egbert Bryant
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Extract

I cannot begin this discussion more appropriately than by quoting a well known paragraph from Ellis's Early English Pronunciation. In Part I, page 19, he says:—

“The results of emigration and immigration are curious and important. By emigration is here specially meant the separation of a considerable body of the inhabitants of a country from the main mass, without incorporating itself with another nation. Thus the English in America have not mixed with the natives, and the Norse in Iceland had no natives to mix with. In this case there is a kind of arrest of development, the language of the emigrants remains for a long time in the stage at which it was when emigration took place, and alters more slowly than the mother tongue, and in a different direction. Practically the speech of the American English is archaic with respect to that of the British English, and while the Icelandic scarcely differs from the old Norse, the latter has, since the colonization of Iceland, split up on the mainland into two distinct literary tongues, the Danish and Swedish. Nay, even the Irish English exhibits in many points the peculiarities of the pronunciation of the xviith century.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , 1907 , pp. 277 - 290
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1907

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References

page 277 note 1 Dialect Notes, i, pp. 85 ff., espec. 173. For another illustration, concerning Irish English, cf. Academy, vol. lxi, p. 291 f. Other illustrations might be cited.

page 277 note 1 Eng. Dial. Soc., vol. vii, p. viii.

page 277 note 1 Part iv, p. 1233.

page 277 note 2 The spelling is that found in Ellis.

page 277 note 1 Cf. also Larsen, Jour. of Eng. and Germ. Philol., vi, pp. 99 ff.

page 277 note 1 Nation, vol. lxvii, p. 169 f. Austral English: A Dictionary of Australasian Words, Phrases, and Usages. By Prof. E. E. Morris. Macmillan.

page 277 note 2 Leutzner, in Englische Studien, xi, 173 f., published a note in which he quoted three passages from Froude's Oceana (3886) to show that English is spoken in Australia absolutely without provincialism. This does not prove conservatism, however, but rather a leveling of dialectical forms. Similar statements are quoted by Elliott for early Canadian French.

page 277 note 3 Amer. Jour. of Philol., vol. vii, pp. 141 ff. Cf. also Prof. Elliott's article in vol. x (pp. 133 ff.) of the Journal.

page 277 note 1 Mod. Lang. Notes, vol. ix, cols. 78 ff.

page 277 note 2 Amer. Jour. of Philol., vols. ix and x.

page 277 note 1 P. M. L. A. of A., vol. xiv, pp. 207 ff., 1899.

page 277 note 1 The dialect studied seems to be country as well as town.