As I said before, my research topic is finding out how American English has become what it’s like now in the modern day! How certain slang became colloquial, why we use certain spellings and such! I’m focusing the scope of my research onto the mid 18th to early 20th century. As I’ve said before, what led me to my original research question was my intrigue when I found in early American writings, many authors didn’t use capitalized letters for Mr. and Miss. and many other titles as a way to seperate American English from British English, but what does that really mean? What was the context like?
Well, in “Speaking American : A History of English in the United States” by Bailey, Richard W. There’s a lot of great historical context and stories about regions and words that show that the separation had undertones of belittlement. In regards of class, “American English” which was still an identity being developed, through interactions between settlers and natives on the frontier, through integration and mixing between settlers from various different countries, it was seen as “impure” and “lower class” for the incorporation of foreign words. I’m also starting to look at A to Zed, A to Zee : a guide to the differences between British and American english by Glenn. Darragh.
Looking at early dictionaries, like The American Spelling Book : Containing an Easy Standard of Pronunciation. Being the First Part of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language by Webster, Noah, show these differences more clearly and was highly influential in standardizing Americanized versions of the English language. Words using ou to o, re to er, and so on. It’s important to note that there were multiple, countless, “American Englishes” at this time, created from all kinds of regional mixing. Like the importance of Spanish in Texas. The Letters of Noah Webster / Edited with an introduction by Harry R. Warfel also help us understand why Webster thought it was so important to create a dictionary in this period, as well as what he did to achieve it.
I’m also going to look at authors like Mark Twain, John Brockden Brown, and other writers for entertainment that would’ve had works in the public sphere and helped shape certain or solidify meanings or showed certain anxieties at the time that may have influenced a certain usage of words. Like the treacherous descriptions of lands in Edgar Huntly.