1984/01/01 by Alan Crozier · 4 citations
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Linguistic Variation and Morphology #Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity #Scots #Irish #History #Colonialism #Emigration #Politics #Subject (documents) #American English #Protestantism #Genealogy #Ethnology #Classics #Literature #Law #Linguistics #Archaeology #Art #Political science
paper · doi:10.2307/454783
openalex publication_date 1984/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/17
T IS GENERALLY ADMITTED that some linguistic influence must have been exerted on American speech by people known as Scotch-Irish, who were second largest national group in colonial America, after English. It has been estimated that up to 300,000 Scotch-Irish emigrants went to America in eighteenth century (Doyle 1981, pp.59-60, 73-74). Most of these were Presbyterians, descendants of Lowland Scots who had settled in Ulster as part of seventeenth-century Plantation of province. While Scotch-Irish have been eulogized for their contribution to spheres of religion, education, and politics, enjoying an almost mythical reputation as patriots, pioneers, and Indian fighters, full extent of their influence on American folk speech (and indeed folk culture as a whole) has yet to be assessed. This is a difficult subject, calling for detailed knowledge of dialects on both sides of Atlantic, and it is attended by several problems which will be outlined here. There are many differences from standard British English which are shared by Ulster and America. One difficulty is to decide whether a feature common to both varieties of language is attributable to influence of one on other, or merely a result of what Marckwardt calls the colonial lag(1958, pp. 60-80; cf. Braidwood 1969, pp. 22-32). The English language was transplanted to America and Ulster at same time. Jamestown in Virginia was founded in 1607, and plan for Plantation of Ulster was issued in 1609. Consequently, both America and Ulster have been able to preserve scattered features of Elizabethan English which died out in England. Archaisms which were once standard, such as deck of cards (Standard British pack), use of quit meaning 'to stop', and predicative use of sick for 'ill', have survived independently in American and Ulster (and such archaisms survive also in other British dialects). They do not indicate Scotch-Irish influence on American English. Another problem can be illustrated by American and Ulster dialect