No, I am
not talking about the band, but the language that we speak in the United States
of America.
Last
month, my blog post was about some of the business classes I've been taking.Recently,
I enrolled in a class about the history of American English.We’ve talked about history,
dialect, accents, words and phrases.Since we can use dialects when writing dialogue,
I thought this class would be helpful.
Our English
started way back in the 1600s, when people from England (perhaps some of your
ancestors) sailed across the Atlantic to settle in the southeastern and
northeastern parts of the United States.In 1607, Jamestown, the first permanent
English settlement, was founded in Virginia.The Pilgrims landed in
Massachusetts in 1620, followed by the Puritans in 1630.Over the years, other
immigrants arrived, including the Quakers, Germans, Scots-Irish and many groups
of people from many lands.As settlement of the US expanded, so did the
language, with different dialects, spellings, and words.
A man by
the name of Noah Webster, who thought that Americans should have their own
language, wrote the first American dictionary.It was published in 1806.The next
edition was published in 1828.It was called the American Dictionary of the
English Language.You can browse that book here: http://1828.mshaffer.com/.
It’s helpful
to study maps to gain a better understanding of dialects.This
map covers the US and Canada and it is very detailed.You can also listen to
samples of dialects on this website, http://aschmann.net/AmEng/.
How do
you speak American English?You can learn more about why you talk a particular
way by taking the following quiz, http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html.
I
touched briefly on the history of our language here today.I will write more
about American English in future blog posts.
Happy
writing!
Debbie A. Byrne has a
B.S. in Mass Communication with a minor in History. She is a member of the
Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and is working on
her first children’s book.
