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The Rapidly Changing Language of American English

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Classic Interview: William Labov, Professor of Linguistics at University of Pennsylvania and author of Dialect Diversity in America, joins David to discuss the various and changing dialects and accents spoken in American English, and the political and economic factors in those dialects -On the Bonus Show: The biggest property sale on earth, Gmail officially adds the "undo send" feature, a teen dies of the plague in Colorado, more...

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The History and Development of American English

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Academia.edu is a platform for academics to share research papers.

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What did the original colonists sound like?  - Big Questions - (Ep. 36)

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A weekly show where we endeavor to answer one of your big questions. This week, Jacob Mitchell asks, "What did the original colonists sound like? Did they have a modern British accent?" -- Mental Floss Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mf_video Select Images and Footage provided by Shutterstock: www.shutterstock.com Want more of Craig?

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Readers Nick and Riela have both written to ask how and when English colonists in America lost their British accents and how American accents came about.
There are many, many evolving regional British and American accents, so the terms "British accent" and "American accent" are gross oversimplifications. What a lot of Americans think of as the typical "British accent" is what's called standardized Received Pronunciation (RP), also known as Public School English or BBC English. What most people think of as an "American accent," or most Americans think of as "no accent," is the General American (GenAm) accent, sometimes called a "newscaster accent" or "Network English." Because this is a blog post and not a book, we'll focus on these two general sounds for now and leave the regional accents for another time.

English colonists established their first permanent settlement in the New World at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, sounding very much like their countrymen back home. By the time we had recordings of both Americans and Brits some three centuries later (the first audio recording of a human voice was made in 1860), the sounds of English as spoken in the Old World and New World were very different. We're looking at a silent gap of some 300 years, so we can't say exactly when Americans first started to sound noticeably different from the British.

As for the "why," though, one big factor in the divergence of the accents is rhotacism. The General American accent is rhotic and speakers pronounce the r in words such as hard. The BBC-type British accent is non-rhotic, and speakers don't pronounce the r, leaving hard sounding more like hahd. Before and during the American Revolution, the English, both in England and in the colonies, mostly spoke with a rhotic accent. We don't know much more about said accent, though. Various claims about the accents of the Appalachian Mountains, the Outer Banks, the Tidewater region and Virginia's Tangier Island sounding like an uncorrupted Elizabethan-era English accent have been busted as myths by linguists.

Talk This Way

Around the turn of the 18th 19th century, not long after the revolution, non-rhotic speech took off in southern England, especially among the upper and upper-middle classes. It was a signifier of class and status. This posh accent was standardized as Received Pronunciation and taught widely by pronunciation tutors to people who wanted to learn to speak fashionably. Because the Received Pronunciation accent was regionally "neutral" and easy to understand, it spread across England and the empire through the armed forces, the civil service and, later, the BBC.

Across the pond, many former colonists also adopted and imitated Received Pronunciation to show off their status. This happened especially in the port cities that still had close trading ties with England - Boston, Richmond, Charleston, and Savannah. From the Southeastern coast, the RP sound spread through much of the South along with plantation culture and wealth.

After industrialization and the Civil War and well into the 20th century, political and economic power largely passed from the port cities and cotton regions to the manufacturing hubs of the Mid Atlantic and Midwest - New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, etc. The British elite had much less cultural and linguistic influence in these places, which were mostly populated by the Scots-Irish and other settlers from Northern Britain, and rhotic English was still spoken there. As industrialists in these cities became the self-made economic and political elites of the Industrial Era, Received Pronunciation lost its status and fizzled out in the U.S. The prevalent accent in the Rust Belt, though, got dubbed General American and spread across the states just as RP had in Britain.

Of course, with the speed that language changes, a General American accent is now hard to find in much of this region, with New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago developing their own unique accents, and GenAm now considered generally confined to a small section of the Midwest.

As mentioned above, there are regional exceptions to both these general American and British sounds. Some of the accents of southeastern England, plus the accents of Scotland and Ireland, are rhotic. Some areas of the American Southeast, plus Boston, are non-rhotic.

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When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?

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Readers Nick and Riela have both written to ask how and when English colonists in America lost their British accents and how American accents came about. There are many, many evolving regional British and American accents, so the terms "British accent" and "American accent" are gross oversimplifications.

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Resources for English Language Learners and Teachers | Pearson English

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All languages change over time, and there can be many different reasons for this. The English language is no different - but why has it changed over the decades?

Some of the main influences on the evolution of languages include:

The movement of people across countries and continents, for example migration and, in previous centuries, colonisation. For example, English speakers today would probably be comfortable using the Spanish word "loco" to describe someone who is "crazy".

Speakers of one language coming into contact with those who speak a different one. No two individuals speak identically: people from different geographical places clearly speak differently and even within the same community there are variations according to a speaker's age, gender, ethnicity and social and educational background. For example, the word "courting" has become "dating".

New vocabulary required for inventions such as transport, domestic appliances and industrial equipment, or for sporting, entertainment, cultural and leisure reasons. For example, the original late 19th-century term "wireless" has become today's "radio".

Due to these influences, a language always embraces new words, expressions and pronunciations as people come across new words and phrases in their day-to-day lives and integrate them into their own speech.

What changes has the English language seen?

As the English language has changed, it's been easy to pick out words that pass into common usage. Here at Pearson English, we have explored some of these recent changes to the English language. The rise in popularity of internet slang has seen phrases such as "LOL" (Laugh Out Loud), "YOLO" (You Only Live Once) and "bae" (an abbreviated form of babe or baby) become firmly embedded in the English language over the past ten years.

Every decade sees new slang terms like these appearing in the English language. And while some words or abbreviations do come from internet or text conversations, others may appear as entirely new words, a new meaning for an existing word, or a word that becomes more generalised than its former meaning, brought about by any one of the reasons above. Decades ago, "blimey" was a new expression of surprise, but more recently "woah" is the word in everyday usage.

Sentence structure is of course another change to English language. Decades ago, it would have been normal to ask "Have you a moment?" Now, you might say "D'you have a sec?" Similarly, "How do you do?" has become "How's it going?" Not only have the sentences been abbreviated, but new words have been introduced to everyday questions.

Connected to this is the replacement of certain words with other, more-modern versions. It's pretty noticeable that words like "shall" and "ought" are on the way out, but "will", "should" and "can" are doing just fine.

Other changes can be more subtle. A number of verbs can take a complement with another verb in either the "-ing" form or the "to" form, for example "they liked painting/to paint", "we tried leaving/to leave", "he didn't bother calling/to call". Both of these constructions are still used and have been for a long time but there has been a steady shift over time from the "to" to the "-ing" complement.

What do the changes mean?

There are many other changes to the English language - what have you noticed? Have these changes affected your teaching or learning methods? Tell us in the comment section below...

Most contemporary linguistic commentators accept that change in language, like change in society, is inevitable. Some think that is regrettable, but others recognise it as a reinvigoration of a language, bringing alternatives that allow subtle differences of expression.

In our Fact or Fiction report, linguist, writer and lecturer David Crystal considers whether "text speak" is undermining the English language. His response to the naysayers who claim it is damaging the English language is to point out that abbreviations have been around for a long time. While some, such as the ones we discussed above, are new, others, such as the use of "u" for "you" and the number 8 as a syllable in "later", have been around for a century or more. Further to this, research shows that there is in fact a correlation between the ability to use abbreviations and the ability to spell. After all, in order to abbreviate, you have to know which letters to abbreviate.

As with everything, change isn't necessarily a bad thing and, as the needs of English language users continue to change, so will the language!

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How the English language has changed over the decades

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All languages change over time, and there can be many different reasons for this. The English language is no different - but why has it changed over the decades? Some of the main influences on the evolution of languages include: The movement of people across countries and continents, for example migration and, in previous centuries, colonisation.

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NOTE: This guide uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For information about this notation, please visit my page of International Phonetic Alphabet Resources.

There are obviously many North American accents. For reference, here is a list of only the most common classifications in the United States and Canada.

General American

This refers to the spectrum of 'standard' English spoken by newscasters, TV actors, and a large percentage of middle-class Americans.
Prominent Features:

The short-a (as in cat) is raised and diphthongized before nasal consonants. Hence man and can't are pronounced something like IPA meən and keənt ("meh-uhn" and "keh-uhnt.")

Rhotic, meaning the r is pronounced at the end of words like car and mother.

Words like lot and rod are pronounced with an unrounded vowel, as lɑt and ɹɑd ("laht" and "rahd").

The diphthong in words like boat and rode is pronounced relatively back: i.e. IPA boʊt and roʊd

Accent Samples:
Eastern New England English

This describes the classic "Boston Accent." It also refers to related accents in Eastern Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine, Eastern New Hampshire and Eastern Connecticut. The most important feature of this is non-rhoticity: unlike other American accents, New Englanders drop the "r" at the end of syllables. Hence the famous phrase "pahk yuh cahr in hahvuhd yahd" (Park your car in Harvard Yard).
Prominent Features:

Non-rhoticity, as mentioned above.

Fronted pronunciation of words like father and palm, so these are pronounced IPA faðə and pa:m (i.e. this vowel is close to the vowel in words like "cat" and "mad" in General American).

Unlike most other American accents, the vowel in lot and rod is rounded as in most British dialects, pronounced IPA lɒt and ɹɒd ("lawt" and "rawd"). Note that this feature is less prevalent in some sub-dialects, such as Rhode Island.

Accent Samples:
New York City English

One of the more famous American accents, the classic "New Yorkese" has been immortalized by films ("Goodfellas," "Marty," and "Manhattan," among countless others), TV shows ("All in the Family," "Seinfeld," "King of Queens") and plays ("A View from the Bridge," "Lost in Yonkers," "Guys and Dolls").
Prominent Features:

Non-rhoticity: see explanation above.

Tense-lax split: this is a bit hard to explain. In New York City the short-a in words like cat, mad, can't and last follows a complex set of rules whereby some words are pronounced tensely (slightly higher in the mouth) while other words are pronounced laxly (lower in the mouth).

The long-a in words like father and cart is often pronounced back and sometimes rounded: i.e. IPA fɒ:ðə and kɒ:t ("fawthuh" and "kawt").

The vowel in words like thought, north and dog are pronounced is high and diphthongized, pronounced IPA θʊət, nʊəθ, and dʊəg ("thaw-uht," "naw-uht" and "daw-uhg").

Accent Samples:
Mid-Atlantic English

Not to be confused with another meaning of "mid-Atlantic English" that describes the old-fashioned British-sounding accents you hear in movies from the 1930s. This "Mid-Atlantic" refers to the American accents spoken along the urban corridor from the Philadelphia area to Baltimore. It sounds slightly similar to New York City, but with a few major differences.
Prominent Features:

Tense-lax split, similar to New York City (see explanation above).

The vowel in long-a words like father and palm is often back and rounded (i.e. "fawther," "pawm," etc.) as in New York City.

As in New York City, the vowel in thought and dog is pronounced with a high vowel. In the Mid-Atlantic, this tends to be further back: IPA θoət and doəg ("thoh-ut" and "doh-ug").

The diphthong in words like right and kite is raised before voiceless consonants so that kite is pronounced something like IPA kəit (that is, "kuh-eet").

The diphthong in words like goat and road is pronounced fronter in the mouth than in General American accents: hence coat becomes IPA kəʊt.

The "oo" sounds in words like goose and food is pronounced more forward in the mouth than in General American: IPA gʉs and fʉd.

Accent Samples:

Coastal/Lowland Southern English

This is the "classic southern" accent that you typically see in films about Civil War or Plantation life. In contemporary times, the accent is arguably dying out.
Prominent Features:

Non-rhotic. Unlike most non-rhotic dialects however, there is often no linking r between a final r and a vowel sound. So, for example, "better idea" would be pronounced "bettuh idea"

Vowel breaking. This means that in words with short vowels like cat and dress, these vowels can turn into diphthongs (or even triphthongs). So cat can become IPA kæjət for example (i.e. "ka-jut").

The diphthong in words like ride and lime tends to be pronounced as a monopthong: i.e. IPA ɹa:d and la:m. Note that in lowland southern accents, unlike the inland south, this is still usually a diphthong before unvoiced consonants.

All vowels tend to be pronounced longer than in northern American accents.

The vowel in words like thought and long tends to be a diphthong, traditionally IPA ɔo. (That is, caught in this dialect sounds nearly like "coat" as it is pronounced in General American accents).

Accent Samples:

Inland/Mountain Southern

This is the other Southern dialect, sometimes perceived as more guttural. You hear this accent amongst Appalachian natives, Texans, Tennesseeans and many others.
Prominent Features:

Pin-pen merger: This means that words ending in -in, -en, -im and -em are pronounced with the same vowel (this why when somebody from this region says "Ben" is sounds a bit like "bin" to a Northerner.)

Vowel breaking: see explanation under Coastal/Lowland Southern above.

The vowel in words like thought and dog is diphthongized, as in Coastal/Lowland Southern, although here it tends to be a lower: IPA ɑɒ.

The oo sound in goose is more fronted than in General American accents: IPA gʉs.

The long-o in words like goat is also more fronted than in General American (as in Midatlantic English, described above).

The diphthong in words like ride and right tends to be a monophthong, as in Coastal/Lowland Southern. However, in this dialect this diphthong tends to be pronounced as a monophthong whether before an voiceless or voiced consonant.

Accent Samples:

Great Lakes English

This is the accent usually associated with a phenomenon known as the "Northern Cities Vowel Shift." You can hear this accent in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, Rochester and Cleveland.
Prominent Features:

The e in bet can be retracted, to something like IPA bɜt (hence bet can sound slightly like "but.")

The short a in cat and bad can be extremely raised and diphthongized, as far as IPA ɪə. To outsiders cat can sound like "kee-uht."

The o in lot is forward and unrounded, so top becomes IPA tap (that is, to outsiders this can sound like "tap.")

The u in but can is often back and rounded: i.e. cut becomes IPA kɔt. (But can sound to General American speakers like "bought.")

Accent Samples:
Upper Midwestern English

This is the dialect that was made famous by the film "Fargo." It is mostly heard in Minnesota, North Dakota and a few areas in Iowa. It is related to the Great Lakes dialect, although with some substantial differences.
Prominent Features:

The vowel sound in goat is often a strong monopthong, becoming IPA go:t (i.e. "gawwwt").

The prosody (musicality) of the dialect is often influenced by the various Germanic languages that were spoken in the region well into the Twentieth-Century.

Most other features are fairly similar to Great Lakes English, with some difference depending on the specific region.

Accent Samples:
Midland American Accents

This is a vague term that applies to the American accents that lie between North and South, in states like Missouri, Southern Indiana, Southern Illisnois, Southern Pennsylvania, Kansas, Oklahoma, and pockets of a few other states. Accents here vary a good deal, but can best be described as being a combination of Northern and Southern features.

Prominent Features: There's enough variety here that it is hard to pin down widespread features of this dialect area.

Accent Samples:

Western American Accents

This category covers the largest amount of territory, including most of the Mountain and Western states. Accents here can vary from sounding slightly Southern (as in parts of Colorado) to having a bit of a Canadian flavor (the Pacific Northwest).

Prominent Features: The one dominant feature here is something liguists call the Cot-Caught Merger meaning that words like thought, paw and caught are pronounced with the same vowel as not, cod and rock.
Accent Samples:
Central Canadian English

We include Canadian accents in this American accents survey because they are part of the same dialect spectrum as the US. This accent is probably closest to English on the West Coast of the United States, which is rather remarkable in the case of cities like Toronto that are hundreds of miles away from the Pacific!
Prominent Features:

Most features are fairly similar to General American accents, with slightly different placing of the vowels.

Caught-Cot Merger, as in Western American accents (see explanation in that section, above).

Canadian Raising: The diphthongs in words like about and right are raised before voiceless consonants. Hence about becomes something like IPA əbɐʊt and right becomes something like IPA ɹɐit (i.e. "uh-boat" and "ruh-eet").

Accent Samples:
Eastern Canadian English

This curious dialect group can be found in the Provinces of the Atlantic Coast. Many of these dialects maintain some Scottish or Irish features, as they were first settled by these groups. The most notable of these accents is the Newfoundland Dialect, which in some cases sounds much more like an Irish accent than a North American one. Other areas in the region, however, sound more like Central/Western Canada.

Conclusion

Of course, there are many more American accents than this. These are just the largest groupings of accents. There are any number of sub-dialects that are quite unique (New Orleans, African American Vernacular English, Chicago, etc.). Hopefully this guide will serve as a good jumping off point.

Copright (c) 2011 by Ben Trawick-Smith. All rights reserved

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NOTE: This guide uses the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). For information about this notation, please visit my page of International Phonetic Alphabet Resources. There are obviously many North American accents. For reference, here is a list of only the most common classifications in the United States and Canada.

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GoT (2x01) - "The North Remembers" (Jon Snow Scenes)

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"The North Remembers" Debut: SUNDAY, APRIL 1 (9:00-10:00 p.m. ET/PT) As Robb Stark and his northern army continue the war against the Lannisters, Tyrion arrives in King's Landing to counsel Joffrey and temper the young king's excesses.

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Almost from the time that the first Englishman set foot upon American soil, our language began to evolve. 'Americanisms' have been created or changed to produce a language that differs from our forefathers, signifying our uniqueness and independence.

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Two separate genetic analyses have found evidence for a surprising genetic link between the native populations of the Americas and Oceania.

The DNA of some native Amazonians shows significant similarity to indigenous inhabitants of Australia and Melanesia.

The two research groups, however, offer contrasting interpretations of how the Americas were first peopled.

The studies have been published in the journals Science and Nature.

There is agreement that the first people to populate the Americas came though Siberia - along a land bridge connecting it with Europe and Asia. But just where these people came from and when they arrived has been a matter of some debate.

By analysing the DNA of modern native Americans and ancient human remains, the group writing in Science concluded that all present-day Native Americans arrived in a single migration no earlier than 23,000 years ago.

Then, they argue, Native Americans split into two branches around 13,000 years ago: one that is now dispersed across North and South America while the other is restricted to North America.

"Our paper shows that the simplest possible model seems by and large to be true, with [that] one notable exception," Prof Rasmus Nielsen from the University of California, Berkley, told BBC News.

"[So] the fanciful ideas that somehow the Americas were populated by people coming from Europe and all kinds of other places are wrong."

The analysis also rules out a theory, favoured by some, of a staggered migration from Siberia: the first more than 30,000 years ago which was stemmed for 15,000 years because of ice blocking the route, and then a second wave when the route was clear.

But, in agreement with the study in Nature, Prof Nielsen's team does report traces of "Australo-Melanesian" ancestry in certain populations, including those of the Aleutian islands (off Alaska) and the Surui people of the Brazilian Amazon.

Prof David Reich, from Harvard Medical School, led the separate study in Nature. He told the BBC that "both studies show that there have been multiple pulses of migration into the Americas".

According to Prof Reich, the discovery of Oceanian ancestry among certain Native American groups indicates that the Americas were peopled by a more diverse set of populations than previously accepted.

"The simplest possible model never predicted an affinity between Amazonians today and Australasians," he said.

"This suggests that there is an ancestral population that crossed into the Americas that is different from the population that gave rise to the great majority of Americans. And that was a great surprise," he said.

Prof Reich believes that the most plausible explanation is that there was a separate migration from Australasia, possibly around 15,000 years ago. This group, he speculates, was probably more widely dispersed across North America but was eventually pushed out by other native American groups.

Prof Nielsen, however, has a different interpretation. He believes that the traces of Australasian DNA stem from a later migration, around 8,000 years ago, which progressed around the Pacific coast.

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Two separate genetic analyses have found evidence for a surprising genetic link between the native populations of the Americas and Oceania. The DNA of some native Amazonians shows significant similarity to indigenous inhabitants of Australia and Melanesia. The two research groups, however, offer contrasting interpretations of how the Americas were first peopled.

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More people left Phoenix in 2009 than came. The map above visualizes moves to and from Phoenix; counties that took more migrants than they sent are linked with red lines. Counties that sent more migrants than they took are linked with blue lines. Americans are enormously mobile: 37.5 million people moved [...]

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Liitlefinger makes the Knights of the Vale ready for the War to come. House Stark is in need. Will House Arryn help them? Game of Thrones 6x04 (FullHD) subtitled. © All rights reserved by HBO

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migrations to america - Buscar con Google

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Archaeological studies have found that human colonization of North America by the so-called Clovis culture dates back more than 13,000 years ago, and recent archaeological evidence suggests that people could have been on the continent 14,700 years ago-and possibly even several millennia before that. The conventional thought has been that the first migrants who populated the North American continent arrived across an ancient land bridge from Asia once the enormous Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets receded to produce a passable corridor nearly 1,000 miles long that emerged east of the Rocky Mountains in present-day Canada.

Evolutionary geneticist Eske Willerslev, however, believed there was one aspect of the conventional theory that required further investigation. "What nobody has looked at is when the corridor became biologically viable," says Willerslev, director of the Center for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. "When could they actually have survived the long and difficult journey through it?"

A pioneer in the study of ancient DNA who led the first successful sequencing of an ancient human genome, Willerslev specializes in extracting ancient plant and mammal DNA from sediments to reconstruct ancient history. According to a recent profile in the New York Times, "Willerslev and his colleagues have published a series of studies that have fundamentally changed how we think about human history," and a new study published in the journal Nature co-authored by Willerslev may lead to a rethinking of how Ice-Age humans first arrived in North America.

The study's international team of researchers travelled in the dead of winter to the Peace River basin in western Canada, a spot that based on geological evidence was among the last segments along the 1,000-mile corridor to become free of ice and passable. At this crucial chokepoint along the migration path the research team took nine sediment cores from the bottoms of British Columbia's Charlie Lake and Alberta's Spring Lake, remnants of a glacial lake that formed as the Laurentide Ice Sheet began to retreat between 15,000 and 13,500 years ago.

After examining radiocarbon dates, pollen, macro-fossils and DNA from the lake sediment cores, the researchers found that the corridor's chokepoint was not "biologically viable" to have sustained humans on the arduous journey until 12,600 years ago-centuries after people were known to have been in North America. Willerslev's team found that until that time the bottleneck area lacked the basic necessities for survival, such as wood for fuel and tools and game animals to be killed for sustenance by hunter-gatherers.

From the core samples, the researchers discovered that steppe vegetation first began to appear in the region 12,600 years ago followed quickly by the arrival of animals such as bison, wooly mammoths, jackrabbits and voles. Around 11,500 years ago there was a transition to a more densely populated landscape with trees, fish such as pike and perch and animals including moose and elk.

The research team used a technique called "shotgun sequencing" to test the samples. "Instead of looking for specific pieces of DNA from individual species, we basically sequenced everything in there, from bacteria to animals," Willerslev says. "It's amazing what you can get out of this. We found evidence of fish, eagles, mammals and plants. It shows how effective this approach can be to reconstruct past environments.

"The bottom line is that even though the physical corridor was open by 13,000 years ago, it was several hundred years before it was possible to use it," Willerslev says. "That means that the first people entering what is now the U.S., Central and South America must have taken a different route. Whether you believe these people were Clovis, or someone else, they simply could not have come through the corridor, as long claimed."

"There is compelling evidence that Clovis was preceded by an earlier and possibly separate population, but either way, the first people to reach the Americas in Ice-Age times would have found the corridor itself impassable," adds study co-author David Meltzer, an archaeologist at Southern Methodist University.

While later groups may have used the passageway across the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska, the study's authors say the first humans in North America likely migrated along the Pacific coast, although it is still not known exactly how.

"The route taken by first humans coming to America is still unknown, but much evidence points to the Pacific coast," says study co-author Mikkel Winther Pedersen, a Ph.D. student at the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen. "If this is the case, we could be looking at humans who adapted to survive by exploiting the marine resources, whether by boat or from sea-ice. They could have had a subsistence resembling what Inuits have had."

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New Study Refutes Theory of How Humans Populated North America

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Archaeological studies have found that human colonization of North America by the so-called Clovis culture dates back more than 13,000 years ago, and recent archaeological evidence suggests that people could have been on the continent 14,700 years ago-and possibly even several millennia before that.

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Contents

1. Immigration in the Colonial Era

2. Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

3. Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

4. European Immigration: 1880-1920

5. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

6. PHOTO GALLERIES

The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920. Many immigrants came to America seeking greater economic opportunity, while some, such as the Pilgrims in the early 1600s, arrived in search of religious freedom. From the 17th to 19th centuries, hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans came to America against their will. The first significant federal legislation restricting immigration was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. Individual states regulated immigration prior to the 1892 opening of Ellis Island, the country's first federal immigration station. New laws in 1965 ended the quota system that favored European immigrants, and today, the majority of the country's immigrants hail from Asia and Latin America.
WATCH: America: Promised Land on HISTORY Vault
Immigration in the Colonial Era

From its earliest days, America has been a nation of immigrants, starting with its original inhabitants, who crossed the land bridge connecting Asia and North America tens of thousands of years ago. By the 1500s, the first Europeans, led by the Spanish and French, had begun establishing settlements in what would become the United States. In 1607, the English founded their first permanent settlement in present-day America at Jamestown in the Virginia Colony.

Did you know? On January 1, 1892, Annie Moore, a teenager from County Cork, Ireland, was the first immigrant processed at Ellis Island. She had made the nearly two-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean in steerage with her two younger brothers. Annie later raised a family on New York City's Lower East Side.

Some of America's first settlers came in search of freedom to practice their faith. In 1620, a group of roughly 100 people later known as the Pilgrims fled religious persecution in Europe and arrived at present-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, where they established a colony. They were soon followed by a larger group seeking religious freedom, the Puritans, who established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. By some estimates, 20,000 Puritans migrated to the region between 1630 and 1640.

A larger share of immigrants came to America seeking economic opportunities. However, because the price of passage was steep, an estimated one-half or more of the white Europeans who made the voyage did so by becoming indentured servants. Although some people voluntarily indentured themselves, others were kidnapped in European cities and forced into servitude in America. Additionally, thousands of English convicts were shipped across the Atlantic as indentured servants.

Another group of immigrants who arrived against their will during the colonial period were enslaved people from West Africa. The earliest records of slavery in America include a group of approximately 20 Africans who were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619. By 1680, there were some 7,000 Africans in the American colonies, a number that ballooned to 700,000 by 1790, according to some estimates. Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved people to the United States as of 1808, but the practice continued. The U.S. Civil War (1861-1865) resulted in the emancipation of approximately 4 million enslaved people. Although the exact numbers will never be known, it is believed that 500,000 to 650,000 Africans were brought to America and sold into slavery between the 17th and 19th centuries.

Immigration in the Mid-19th Century

Another major wave of immigration occurred from around 1815 to 1865. The majority of these newcomers hailed from Northern and Western Europe. Approximately one-third came from Ireland, which experienced a massive famine in the mid-19th century. In the 1840s, almost half of America's immigrants were from Ireland alone. Typically impoverished, these Irish immigrants settled near their point of arrival in cities along the East Coast. Between 1820 and 1930, some 4.5 million Irish migrated to the United States.

Also in the 19th century, the United States received some 5 million German immigrants. Many of them journeyed to the present-day Midwest to buy farms or congregated in such cities as Milwaukee, St. Louis and Cincinnati. In the national census of 2000, more Americans claimed German ancestry than any other group.

During the mid-1800s, a significant number of Asian immigrants settled in the United States. Lured by news of the California gold rush, some 25,000 Chinese had migrated there by the early 1850s.

The influx of newcomers resulted in anti-immigrant sentiment among certain factions of America's native-born, predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant population. The new arrivals were often seen as unwanted competition for jobs, while many Catholics-especially the Irish-experienced discrimination for their religious beliefs. In the 1850s, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic American Party (also called the Know-Nothings) tried to severely curb immigration, and even ran a candidate, former U.S. president Millard Fillmore (1800-1874), in the presidential election of 1856.

Following the Civil War, the United States experienced a depression in the 1870s that contributed to a slowdown in immigration.

Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation

One of the first significant pieces of federal legislation aimed at restricting immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese laborers from coming to America. Californians had agitated for the new law, blaming the Chinese, who were willing to work for less, for a decline in wages.

For much of the 1800s, the federal government had left immigration policy to individual states. However, by the final decade of the century, the government decided it needed to step in to handle the ever-increasing influx of newcomers. In 1890, President Benjamin Harrison (1833-1901) designated Ellis Island, located in New York Harbor near the Statue of Liberty, as a federal immigration station. More than 12 million immigrants entered the United States through Ellis Island during its years of operation from 1892 to 1954.

European Immigration: 1880-1920

Between 1880 and 1920, a time of rapid industrialization and urbanization, America received more than 20 million immigrants. Beginning in the 1890s, the majority of arrivals were from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe. In that decade alone, some 600,000 Italians migrated to America, and by 1920 more than 4 million had entered the United States. Jews from Eastern Europe fleeing religious persecution also arrived in large numbers; over 2 million entered the United States between 1880 and 1920.

The peak year for admission of new immigrants was 1907, when approximately 1.3 million people entered the country legally. Within a decade, the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) caused a decline in immigration. In 1917, Congress enacted legislation requiring immigrants over 16 to pass a literacy test, and in the early 1920s immigration quotas were established. The Immigration Act of 1924 created a quota system that restricted entry to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in America as of the 1890 national census-a system that favored immigrants from Western Europe-and prohibited immigrants from Asia.

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

Immigration plummeted during the global depression of the 1930s and World War II (1939-1945). Between 1930 and 1950, America's foreign-born population decreased from 14.2 to 10.3 million, or from 11.6 to 6.9 percent of the total population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. After the war, Congress passed special legislation enabling refugees from Europe and the Soviet Union to enter the United States. Following the communist revolution in Cuba in 1959, hundreds of thousands of refugees from that island nation also gained admittance to the United States.

In 1965, Congress passed the Immigration and Nationality Act, which did away with quotas based on nationality and allowed Americans to sponsor relatives from their countries of origin. As a result of this act and subsequent legislation, the nation experienced a shift in immigration patterns. Today, the majority of U.S. immigrants come from Asia and Latin America rather than Europe.

PHOTO GALLERIES

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Immigration in the Colonial Era Immigration in the Mid-19th Century Ellis Island and Federal Immigration Regulation European Immigration: 1880-1920 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 PHOTO GALLERIES The United States experienced major waves of immigration during the colonial era, the first part of the 19th century and from the 1880s to 1920.

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Languages spoken in North America and Siberia are distantly related. What does that tell us about the first Americans?

smithsonianmag.com

A few weeks ago, scientists announced an intriguing finding about the ancestors of today's Native Americans. Previously, genetic analysis had indicated that they'd left Siberia to migrate across ancient Beringia (the strip of land that once connected Asia and what's now Alaska) about 25,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence of human habitation on North America dates to 15,000 years ago.

In reconstructing the ancient Beringian environment, the researchers provided a new clue that could help explain this discrepancy. They drilled into the Bering Sea between Siberia and Alaska and recovered sediment cores, and found that they contained plant fossils and pollen from a wooded ecosystem. Such an ecosystem, the authors argue, would have been an ideal place for humans to live. And with ice covering much of Alaska, the ancestors of Native Americans needn't have just strolled through Beringia, they suggested- they could have lived there for about 10,000 years before moving on.

Now, more evidence for the idea comes from a seemingly unlikely source: languages still spoken in Asia and North America today. A pair of linguistics researchers, Mark Sicoli and Gary Holton, recently analyzed languages from North American Na-Dene family (traditionally spoken in Alaska, Canada and parts of the present-day U.S.) and the Asian Yeneseian family (spoken thousands of miles away, in central Siberia), using similarities and differences between the languages to construct a language family tree.

As they note in an article published today in PLOS ONE, they found that the two language families are indeed related-and both appear to descend from an ancestral language that can be traced to the Beringia region. Both Siberia and North America, it seems, were settled by the descendants of a community that lived in Beringia for some time. In other words, Sicoli says, "this makes it look like Beringia wasn't simply a bridge, but actually a homeland-a refuge, where people could build a life."

Sicoli began looking into the relationships between languages to model migration in the region several years ago, when he was with Holton at the University of Alaska (Sicoli is now at Georgetown University). The relationship between Yenesian and Na-Dene languages-which would theoretically serve as proof that Native Americans' ancestors had migrated from Asia-was proposed as far back as 1923, by Italian linguist Alfredo Trombetti, but the first rigorous research to prove the link was only conducted over the past decade or so.

Sicoli and Holton sought to go a step further: They wanted to not only show the two groups were related, but analyze the similarities and differences between languages in the two families to paint a geographic picture of this ancient migration.

To do so, they relied upon software programs that conduct phylogenetic analyses. Most often, phylogenetics refers to sorting out the evolutionary relationships between different organisms, using genetic similarities and differences to construct an accurate family tree of species. But because languages, like life, gradually evolve over time, linguists have put the same sort of analysis to work in constructing language trees.

The researchers collected data on two Yeniseian languages, 37 Na-Dene languages and Haida (a language spoken on Canada's Pacific coast but not believed to be related to Na-Dene, used as a control) from the Alaska Native Language Archive and several other published sources. Then, they used phylogenetic algorithms to create a family tree of the forty languages, determining which were most closely related based on the number of similarities (such as phonemes that serve particular roles in the language's grammar, for instance).

Their tree confirmed that Yenesian and Na-Dene are related-and that Haida is not-but because these languages were carried by populations of humans that were moving over time, the lengths of branches in the tree also allowed Sicoli and Horton to weigh the odds of two different migration hypotheses. The first, proposed by many linguists, held that the source of both the Yenesian and Na-Dene languages was in Asia, with a subset of its speakers migrating across Beringia and bringing evolved versions of the language to North America. The second held that the source was in Beringia itself, with subsets of its speakers fanning out over both Siberia and North America.

The phylogenetic analysis, based on the degree of similarities between Yenesian and Na-Dene languages and within both groups, strongly supported the latter hypothesis-meaning that residents of communities as far apart as Central Siberia and the Great Plains share common ancestors, who likely lived in Beringia for an extended period of time.

"Growing up, I'd look at maps showing migrations to the Americas, and they'd always just show arrows going in one direction: straight across from Asia to North America," Sicoli says. "What we see now is something more complicated, because some of those arrows go back to Siberia, and it wasn't a non-stop trip."

This fits with what we know about the geography of the region at the time. Asia and Alaska were connected by a land bridge because global sea levels were much lower, largely because of how much water was locked up in glaciers that covered much more of the planet than today. But even though these glaciers opened up the corridor between North America and Asia, they also closed the door, because, as mentioned before, Alaska itself was under a thick sheet of ice at that time.

Thus, the land bridge was a dead end, potentially explaining why these ancient migrants could have spent about 10,000 years in Beringia. Then, about 17,000 years ago, the glaciers began to recede-and sea levels began to rise-providing two reasons to leave Beringia, either for new territory in Alaska or back toward Siberia.

In the future, Sicoli plans to similarly model a greater range of Native American languages, to more broadly reconstruct the waves of migration that eventually brought the descendants of Beringia to present-day California and Central America.

The key, though, will be the work of linguists who are documenting quickly-disappearing indigenous languages before their final native speakers vanish. "A lot of the languages that can be used to answer these questions of ancient migrations are in the process of going extinct," Sicoli says. "So to address these questions in the future, we need people to document these languages right now-otherwise, we're losing our data faster than we can collect it."

About Joseph Stromberg

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Ancient Migration Patterns to North America Are Hidden in Languages Spoken Today

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smithsonianmag.com A few weeks ago, scientists announced an intriguing finding about the ancestors of today's Native Americans. Previously, genetic analysis had indicated that they'd left Siberia to migrate across ancient Beringia (the strip of land that once connected Asia and what's now Alaska) about 25,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence of human habitation on North America dates to 15,000 years ago.

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Find facts about European Immigration to America for kids. European Immigration to America in the 1600's, 1700's, 1800's and 1900's. Statistics of European Immigration to America for kids, children, homework and schools.

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This report provides background on the refugee experience in the United States, including welcoming and exclusionary responses, the impacts of these disparate reactions, and lessons to consider in determining our response to the current refugee crisis

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Today, we are thinking about inconsistent regional accent use in the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones.

Like most fantasy television shows, Game of Thrones is largely populated by English actors speaking with English accents. This is because Americans are still unconvinced that England is a real country, and associate English speech patterns with kings and magic and sorcery and frequent stabbings.

But Game of Thrones takes its accents a step further: Its characters in speak in several different English accents, and often those accents correspond to to the real-world geography of Britain. Eddard Stark, the Lord of Winterfell and Warden of the North, is played by Sheffield's own Sean Bean, sporting his native northern English accent. Tywin Lannister, Lord of Casterly Rock and Warden of the West, is played with a posh southern accent by the great Charles Dance. And so on.

Generally speaking this is very cool (to nerdy Anglophile prisses, I mean. Not to me. I only like sports). It's a useful way for a dense, complicated series to quietly signal backgrounds, affiliations and alliances; it draws on pre-existing associations to quickly develop and define character; and it provides people on the internet with a new axis along which nitpicking can take place.

Which is why we're here! To nitpick.

Why do Ned Stark's kids all have different accents? Stark, as noted above, is played with a distinct, and real ("real") northern accent. Robb Stark, Jon Snow and Theon Greyjoy, Ned's older sons (sort of), are all played by non-northern English actors (Richard Madden, who plays Robb, is from Scotland, which is too far north, I guess; you can listen to his real accent below), but they've all, to varying degrees of success, adopted Bean's Sheffield accent.

The younger Stark kids, however, all have sort of generic southern accents. (Sometimes when Arya Stark speaks you can pick out Maisie Williams' slight West Country accent.) This is, maybe, explained by the fact that the girls and the younger boys have largely been raised by their mother, Catelyn Stark, who is from the Riverlands in the south (of Westeros, not England) (well, south of the North) and, as played by the North Irish actress Michelle Fairley, speaks with a decent though not perfect southern English accent. But! The kids' nurse Old Nan (played by the late Welsh[!] actress Margaret John) has a strong northern accent.

Why do all the Baratheons have different accents? King Robert Baratheon's northern accent, courtesy of York native Mark Addy, is among the best deployments of accent-as-characterization in the series: King Robert and Lord Eddard are boyhood friends who fought side by side in Robert's Rebellion; their similar accents reflect their shared past, communicate their rapport, and warn of the distance between the two men and the posh, RP southern-accented Lannisters. See:

Except that, okay, King Robert isn't from the north, the way Ned is: He's from the Stormlands in the east. And you could maybe explain this away by pointing out that Robert and Ned both grew up as wards of John Arryn, Lord of the Eyrie and Defender of the Vale, and therefore adopted the accent of their foster father. But that would require the people of the Vale, in the east of Westeros, to speak with northern accents-none of which are on display when Catelyn Stark and Tyrion Lannister drop by for a visit in Season One. (In fact, some of the knights in the Vale speak with Welsh accents, which, Jesus.)

Stannis and Renly Baratheon, meanwhile, both speak with very actorly and slightly different southern accents. Whatever.

Why does Thoros of Myr have a Westerosi accent? Just as the Westerosi characters in Game of Thrones have English accents, the characters from the Free Cities and other destinations across the Narrow Sea speak in various "European" accents. Syrio Forel of Braavos is played by Englishman Miltos Yerolemou with a kind of... Mediterranean accent. Jaqen H'ghar, who is maybe Lorathi, has Tom Wlaschiha's native German accent. Carice van Houten, who plays Asshai-born Melisandre, speaks her lines with her Dutch accent. We don't know Shae's background, but since she's played by the German-accented Sibel Kekilli we can assume she's from Lorath. (Not that we've thought about it in any depth before, obviously.)

Thoros of Myr, on the other hand, is from, yes, the Free City of Myr, and yet as played by Paul Kaye he sounds like he's from London. (He seems to speak High Valyrian fine! But his Common Tongue is London through and through.) This kind of works for the whole groovy gay hippy "Brotherhood Without Banners" vibe, but it absolutely does not work for a hypothetical accent spreadsheet some viewers may have created at some dark point in their hypothetical lives.

And also: Jorah Mormont is from far in the north, and is played by the Scottish Iain Glen, yet has the same ACTING! accent that (two of) the Baratheons and (two of the) Lannisters have. (Did he change his accent when he went into exile?)

Davos Seaworth, played by Irishman Liam Cunningham, has a terrific Geordie accent that no one else on Westeros seems to have. (Maybe it's class-based? Not that any of the other working-class characters have it?)

Roose Bolton is a northman through and through, but uses an actorly RP accent as played by Michael McElhatton, who's Irish. Hard to really complain about McElhatton's amazingly creepy voice, though.

Samwell Tarly is from the Reach in the middle of Westeros, and hates the north, and, yet, in the person of John Bradley, speaks with a northern (Mancunian, in this case) accent.

The best I can do with Aiden Gillen, the Irish actor currently using every single vowel sound in every single word he says as Littlefinger, is to pretend that it's not the actor but the character, a very minor rural lord with aspirations at greatness, affecting that bizarre accent to sidestep his (Vale, and therefore "Welsh"?) background.

Peter Dinklage: I mean, I don't know. A disaster, basically, but somehow it works. Nickolaj Coster-Waldau, who plays his brother, somehow manages a better accent despite being Danish.

Good Accent Award: Rose Leslie, who plays the redhead wildling Ygritte, is a super-posh Scot ( two castles, her family owns. Two. Her real name is "Rose Eleanor Arbuthnot-Leslie." Arbuthnot.) who pulls off an incredibly convincing northern accent:

Dorne: What are they even going to do for this. (Australian?)

"The show has dragons, who cares if the accents don't match?": Well, first of all, I care. Second of all, the cornerstone of science fiction and fantasy fandom is nitpicking. Third of all, the fact that Game of Thrones doesn't take place within our collectively agreed-upon reality doesn't release it from its responsibility to verisimilitude or the maintenance of internal consistency within its own systems.

(We, by the way, contacted HBO, but they were unable to provide anyone from the show for interview before the deadline for this piece. "[T]his isn't a subject which has ever come up in my pr dealings on this series," a very accommodating network publicist emailed me. "Sounds like you're a fan[.]" HEH.)

[ image by Jim Cooke]

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What Is Going on With the Accents in Game of Thrones ?

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Today, we are thinking about inconsistent regional accent use in the HBO fantasy series Game of Thrones. Like most fantasy television shows, Game of Thrones is largely populated by English actors speaking with English accents. This is because Americans are still unconvinced that England is a real country, and associate English speech patterns with kings and magic and sorcery and frequent stabbings.

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immigration us history immigration usa history

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Possibly as a way of compensating for the vagaries and skimpiness of the available evidence, Bailey devotes much of his story to the languages English has shared America with. It is indeed surprising how tolerant early Americans were of linguistic diversity. In 1903 one University of Chicago scholar wrote proudly that his city was host to 125,000 speakers of Polish, 100,000 of Swedish, 90,000 of Czech, 50,000 of Norwegian, 35,000 of Dutch, and 20,000 of Danish.

What earlier Americans considered more dangerous to the social fabric than diversity were perceived abuses within English itself. Prosecutable hate speech in 17th-century Massachusetts included calling people "dogs," "rogues" and even "queens" (though the last referred to prostitution); magistrates took serious umbrage at being labeled "poopes" ("dolts"). Only later did xenophobic attitudes toward other languages come to prevail, sometimes with startling result. In the early years of the 20th century, California laws against fellatio and cunnilingus were vacated on the grounds that since the words were absent from dictionaries, they were not English and thus violations of the requirement that statutes be written in English.

Ultimately, however, issues like this take up too much space in a book supposedly about the development of English itself. Much of the chapter on Philadelphia is about the city's use of German in the 18th century. It's interesting to learn that Benjamin Franklin was as irritated about the prevalence of German as many today are about that of Spanish, but the chapter is concerned less with language than straight history - and the history of a language that, after all, isn't English. In the Chicago chapter, Bailey mentions the dialect literature of Finley Peter Dunne and George Ade but gives us barely a look at what was in it, despite the fact that these were invaluable glimpses of otherwise rarely recorded speech.

Especially unsatisfying is how little we learn about the development of Southern English and its synergistic relationship with black English. Bailey gives a hint of the lay of the land in an impolite but indicative remark about Southern child rearing, made by a British traveler in 1746: "They suffer them too much to prowl amongst the young Negroes, which insensibly causes them to imbibe their Manners and broken Speech." In fact, Southern English and the old plantation economy overlap almost perfectly: white and black Southerners taught one another how to talk. There is now a literature on the subject, barely described in the book.

On black English, Bailey is also too uncritical of a 1962 survey that documented black Chicagoans as talking like their white neighbors except for scattered vowel differences (as in "pin" for "pen"). People speak differently for interviewers than they do among themselves, and modern linguists have techniques for eliciting people's casual language that did not exist in 1962. Surely the rich and distinct - and by no means "broken" - English of today's black people in Chicago did not arise only in the 1970s.

Elsewhere, Bailey ventures peculiar conclusions that may be traceable to his having died last year, before he had the chance to polish his text. (The book's editors say they have elected to leave untouched some cases of "potential ambiguity.") If, as Bailey notes, only a handful of New Orleans's expressions reach beyond Arkansas, then exactly how was it that New Orleans was nationally influential as the place "where the great cleansing of American English took place"?

And was 17th-century America really "unlike almost any other community in the world" because it was "a cluster of various ways of speaking"? This judgment would seem to neglect the dozens of colonized regions worldwide at the time, when legions of new languages and dialects had already developed and were continuing to evolve. Of the many ways America has been unique, the sheer existence of roiling linguistic diversity has not been one of them.

The history of American English has been presented in more detailed and precise fashion elsewhere - by J. L. Dillard, and even, for the 19th century, by Bailey himself, in his underread "Nineteenth-Century English." Still, his handy tour is useful in imprinting a lesson sadly obscure to too many: as Bailey puts it, "Those who seek stability in English seldom find it; those who wish for uniformity become laughingstocks."

SPEAKING AMERICAN

By Richard W. Bailey

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speaking american: a history of english in the united states (book)

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Speaking American - A History of English in the United States - By Richard W. Bailey - Book Review

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Possibly as a way of compensating for the vagaries and skimpiness of the available evidence, Bailey devotes much of his story to the languages English has shared America with. It is indeed surprising how tolerant early Americans were of linguistic diversity.

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This collection of recorded interviews documents the stories of people whose lives were shaped by Ellis Island. Passengers, families, immigration officials, military personnel, detainees, and former island employees share their perspectives and relive the moments that formed our collective history. Educational, uplifting, harrowing, and inspiring, these precious cultural artifacts give meaning and texture to our collections.

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Discover | Statue of Liberty & Ellis Island

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This collection of recorded interviews documents the stories of people whose lives were shaped by Ellis Island. Passengers, families, immigration officials, military personnel, detainees, and former island employees share their perspectives and relive the moments that formed our collective history. Educational, uplifting, harrowing, and inspiring, these precious cultural artifacts give meaning and texture to our collections.