Contact and the Development of American English

Abstract

In perhaps one fiftieth of the United States there are linguistic substrata. These are formed by the French in parts of northern New England and Louisiana, the Spanish of the Southwest, the small German colonies in Pennsylvania, and the negroes in some districts in the Southeast. Elsewhere English has no substratum in the United States. It is true that in certain large cities there are recently arrived colonies of people of nonEnglish speech, such, for instance, as the Italians of San Francisco and the Poles of Chicago. But in these colonies those of the second generation speak English with little or no foreign accent and those of the third generation generally lose the foreign speech completely. It could not be otherwise with the extreme mobility of our population and the great economic pressure that is put on our immigrants to learn English.