Evolution of a language

How American English became its own language: 10 historical twists

If George Washington walked into an average office tomorrow, how many words do you think he’d struggle to understand? Would he be confused by a modern American accent? Ever since the first settlers arrived in North America, British and American English started growing apart. Now, the language that was forged in the US carries traces of its history. In this article, we’ll explore 10 of those modifications.

Linguists have a name for what happened to American English after the colonies split from Britain: colonial lag, coined by scholar Albert Marckwardt in 1958. It means that the speech of populations who move away from the mother country doesn't always keep pace with the changes happening back home.

While British English evolved, the colonies, more isolated, often kept speaking the way everyone did the day they left. A good example of this is "fall," from the 1500s phrase "fall of the leaf," which was standard English until London traded it for the French import "autumn" in the late 1600s. Another is "gotten," which appears throughout Shakespeare, but was no longer used by the 1700s.

The British "R" that vanishes in words like "car" and "father" is a rather new invention. In the 1600s, every English speaker pronounced every R, until fashionable London society started dropping them in the late 1700s as a mark of refinement. Some American port cities with strong ties to England, like Boston and New York, picked up the trend too, which is exactly why some coastal accents still drop the R today.

But settlers moving inland and westward never got the update, so most of American English kept pronouncing every R, the way England once did.

Old English had a perfectly good word for the second person plural: It was gē (pronounced like yay), which then evolved to "ye." Then, sometime in the Middle Ages, "you" swallowed both the singular and the plural, and English speakers have been improvising clarifying terms ever since.

The American South answered with "y'all," likely shaped by Scots-Irish settlers who said, "ye aw." Pittsburgh shortened Scottish "you ones" into the now-iconic "yinz." New York and Philadelphia went with "youse." And across much of the rest of the country, "you guys" became the default, first recorded in the 1890s and now widespread.

When English colonists met animals and plants they'd never seen before, they borrowed the words already in use for them. How else would you call a specific nut that is so hard to crack that you need to use a stone? They went for the term "pecan," derived from the Miami-Illinois Algonquian pakani.

"Skunk" comes from Massachusett Algonquian, the result of combining roots for "urinate" and "fox." "Opossum" derives from Virginia Algonquian for "white dog," and "squash" comes from Narragansett, where it meant "eaten raw or uncooked."

If you ask for a "biscuit" in England, you’ll get something quite different from a chocolate chip cookie. That's because "cookie" isn't English; it's Dutch, from koekje, "little cake," and was carried into New York by Dutch settlers and first recorded in 1808.

This pattern repeats with all of the languages that came into the country, carried by early settlers and immigrants. German immigrants gave America "kindergarten," "pretzel," and "delicatessen." Another example is Spanish-speaking vaqueros of the Southwest, who gave the language "ranch," "corral," and "rodeo." Absorbing these terms started gradually distancing American English from its British counterpart.

Another phenomenon that distanced the two versions of the language was that of old words earning new meanings in America, while Britain retained their old use or forgot them. Take "corn" for example: in Old English it just meant "grain," any grain, which is why the British still call wheat "corn" today, and Americans reserved it for maize.

"Diaper," for centuries, only named a diamond-woven fabric pattern, until Americans repurposed it for infant cloths by 1837, a meaning Britain never adopted, preferring "nappy" instead. "Faucet," which referred to a small part of an old tap mechanism, came to name the whole fixture in the US.

There’s another rule: any word ending in the French-derived "-re" got flipped to "-er" to match how Americans actually said it. So, theatre became theater, centre became center, and the same happened to caliber, fiber, liter, and somber.

Britain, having borrowed these spellings from French centuries earlier, saw no reason to abandon tradition just because the pronunciation no longer matched the letters.

When technology evolves, either a brand new word is invented, or an old one is repurposed. On either side of the Atlantic, regional dialects came up with different terms for the same inventions.

It’s why Americans chose to refer to cellular phones as "cells," while the British named them "mobiles." Battery-powered electric lights became "flashlights" in the US and "torch" in the UK. Another example is the transportation called "streetcar" in the US and "tram" in the UK.

Noah Webster was a Connecticut schoolteacher who in 1783 published what became known as the "Blue-Backed Speller," a schoolbook that eventually sold an estimated 60 to 100 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books in American history.

Webster believed a shared, simplified spelling would help unite a young, fractured nation, so in his 1828 masterwork, An American Dictionary of the English Language, twenty-two years in the making, he deliberately Americanized hundreds of words: "colour" to "color," "defence" to "defense," "plough" to "plow."

What is "General American"? In 1925, linguist George Philip Krapp coined this term, and by 1930 a colleague was insisting some 90 million Americans spoke it natively. But it wasn’t wholly true.

Early radio and film actually relied on something else entirely: the "Mid-Atlantic accent," a deliberately cultivated Anglo-American blend taught at Juilliard and heard in nearly every prestige film through World War II. That artificial accent collapsed after the war, and broadcasters pivoted toward a flatter, Midwestern-inflected sound, epitomized by Walter Cronkite, that masked regional origin entirely.

Tales of The Bard

Shakespeare: 10 facts you didn't know about the world's most famous poet

How much do we really know about Shakespeare? Thirty-nine plays, over a hundred sonnets, and more words invented than any writer in history; we even believe that his life was so tidy that he was born and died on the exact same date. But most of these facts are mere myths: historians now assure us that we do not know his date of birth, we cannot confirm he came up with those 1,700 words, and we don’t really know how to properly spell his surname. Read on to learn 10 decoded facts about The Bard.

Only six authenticated signatures of William Shakespeare survive. And they weren’t the closing etches in manuscripts or letters: they were scrawled onto legal documents.

All six date from the final four years of his life. But the strangest detail is that no two of them spell his name the same way: variations include "Willm Shakp," "William Shakspē," and "Shakspere." Not one matches the spelling we use today.

It might perplex modern readers, but this was common practice among Elizabethan clerks and writers, who treated spelling as a loose suggestion rather than a fixed rule.

Etymology fans have probably read endless lists of words allegedly invented by Shakespeare. "Upstairs," "bedroom," and "assassination" are among those. As many as 1,700 are attributed to him, but this seems to be, mostly, a myth.

The number comes from the Oxford English Dictionary, which credited him with the earliest known written use of many words, not their invention. Many of these terms were likely becoming orally popular, and what Shakespeare did was use them in his works, effectively documenting those new terms for future generations. None of this makes him less remarkable, though: he used roughly 20,000 different words across his plays and poems.

William Shakespeare's grave carries a warning: "Blessed be the man who spares these stones, and cursed be he who moves my bones." His wishes were respected for hundreds of years. While other tombstones in Holy Trinity Church were shuffled and covered to make room for new burials, his stayed untouched.

Then in 2016, researchers scanned the grave with ground-penetrating radar for a documentary marking 400 years since his death. The results were very strange: his skull appeared to be missing. Even more mysteriously, it lined up with an old, long-dismissed magazine story from 1879 about a trophy hunter stealing it.

The Globe Theatre was built in 1599 by Shakespeare’s playing company. It soon became London’s premier and most famous playhouse, drawing up to 3,000 spectators per show. One day in the summer of 1613, the venue was packed for a performance of Shakespeare's historical play Henry VIII. During a dramatic entrance, a stage cannon fired as planned, but a spark from its wadding landed in the thatched roof.

Within an hour, the entire theater, timber, thatch, and all, had burned to the ground, but despite being studded with attendees, there were no casualties. Legend has it that only one injury was recorded: a man whose breeches caught fire, which he doused with a bottle of ale. Two separate ballads about the fire were printed by the very next day. The Globe was rebuilt within a year, this time with a safer tiled roof.

In August 1596, William Shakespeare buried his only son. Hamnet was eleven, and the burial register at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford records his death with no details. We do know that four years later, Shakespeare wrote the story of a grieving prince obsessed with death and his father's ghost: Hamlet.

Historians never confirmed the connection, and found no proof of Shakespeare explaining it, but many 21st-century cultural works have speculated about this interpretation, such as novels or films that explore the writer’s grief.

Every April 23, tributes note that Shakespeare died precisely on his birthday. There's just one problem: nobody actually knows when he was born.

No birth certificate survives from 1564. Historians have only found a baptism record dated April 26, which could possibly suggest that he was born on the days prior, because, at the time, babies were typically baptized a few days after birth. We do know, however, the date of his death: April 23, 1616. He was 52 years old.

Another myth has been circulating for centuries about his death: that Shakespeare and the Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes died on the exact same day, April 23, 1616. Even UNESCO used this seemingly chilling fact to create World Book Day on that date.

But there’s a disappointing catch: in 1616, England was still using the old Julian calendar, while Spain had switched to the newer Gregorian one. The two "April 23rds" were actually ten days apart. To complicate things further, some historians now believe Cervantes died April 22, not April 23, and that the 23rd was actually his burial. Again, the two dates are close enough, but may have been slightly edited for drama.

Scholars have always been puzzled by a strange 7-year-gap of information about his life. Between 1585 and 1592, William Shakespeare simply vanishes from the historical record. The last mention of him before this gap is the baptism of his twins, Hamnet and Judith, in Stratford.

Then, in 1592, he is referenced in a text by a rival London playwright calling him an "upstart crow," which proves that by 1592 he had already made it as an actor and writer in the city. What happened in between is anyone's guess: being a schoolteacher, writing plays, spending time with his family, even working as a secret tutor for families in Lancashire have all been proposed. But there still is no evidence to support any of it.

In 1582, eighteen-year-old William Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six and already pregnant with their firstborn daughter, Susanna. Three years later, she also gave birth to twins Judith and Hamnet.

When William died in 1616, his will left his wife one specific item that has always confounded scholars: his "second-best bed." For centuries this was read as a final insult. But historians now argue the best bed was reserved for guests, while the second-best was the actual marriage bed the couple shared for decades.

If two of Shakespeare's actor friends hadn't decided, seven years after his death, to compile his work into one enormous book, half of his plays might not exist today.

Published in 1623, the First Folio contained 36 plays, and eighteen of them, including Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and The Tempest, had never been printed anywhere before. John Heminges and Henry Condell, who had worked alongside Shakespeare for decades, gathered scripts, prompt books, and old drafts to put it together. Shakespeare himself never published a collected edition of his own plays; he likely saw them as scripts for performance, not literature meant to last.