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When did Americans start sounding funny to English ears? The story is not as simple as some believe. Thanks to a remarkable kind of linguistic melting pot process, early Americans spoke with a standard dialect all their own that was often met with approval by English observers, in contrast to how certain American accents are sometimes judged today.

From the early eighteenth century, while British English speakers could easily reveal details about their background through their speech, it was much harder to pinpoint an American speaker’s background in the same way. Many described the American dialect of the day as being, surprisingly, pretty close to the accepted British grammatical standard of London “polite” society, even if there were some accent differences and linguistic variation. While these would have been indicators of lower status in England, in colonial America speakers of all classes and regions might have used these forms, diluting them as signs of social status.

Some fairly resilient linguistic myths have arisen as folk explanations for why British and American dialects are the way they are, including the often-cited belief that Shakespeare sounded much more American than he did British, and thus American English must be free from any modern linguistic “corruption” that followed.

George Philip Krapp, among others, makes a compelling argument against the theory that a transplanted dialect or language suddenly has its linguistic development arrested, so that examples like American English or Acadian French must simply be more archaic than the dialects that continued evolving in their home countries.

Far from being an isolated community, the American colonies developed culturally and linguistically while being in constant contact with the outside world and with a healthy flow of immigrants from many different backgrounds. The truth is, in the context of a linguistic melting pot, a kind of linguistic leveling occurs, and a common mode of speech, or koine, emerges. No single dialect is really transplanted intact and unchanging. American English is not eighteenth-century British English frozen in time while British English varieties changed in a different direction. American English behaves no differently from any other dialect in this way; it develops and innovates but also maintains certain linguistic characteristics meaningful to its speech community, in the same way that British English does.

But in order for linguistic innovation to really take root, you need a bunch of colonial babies. The founding generation of settlers wasn’t immediately followed by a huge influx of immigrants with other dialects and languages until an American koine was already mostly established by newer generations of Americans, at which point more recent immigrant waves began to adopt the prevailing ways of speaking. Many eventually abandoned their native tongue and assimilated into the wider linguistic community.

So by the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it’s clear Americans didn’t have to hold their tongue with the British — they spoke with the national dialect that had steadily evolved for at least two generations before 1776.

Chi Luu. When Did Colonial America Gain Linguistic Independence? Internet: <https://daily.jstor.org> (adapted ).

Considering the grammatical and semantic aspects of text, decide whether the following items are right or wrong.

The expression “a bunch of” could be replaced by a cluster of without altering the meaning of the passage.