The Word: Bostonians' pahticulah way of talking
Share with others:
Three hundred and fifty years ago, using the wrong pronouns in Massachusetts could land you in hot water.
If you were a Quaker living in a Massachusetts Bay settlement circa 1660, your transgressive language would have made you a target for the governing Puritans. Quakers rejected the hierarchical pronoun system that required ye, you and your to be used as a sign of deference to superiors. Instead, they used the more familiar thee, thou and thy with everyone, regardless of social position. And for the Puritanical powers-that-be, that was enough to cause a person to be banished or even put to death. (Mary Dyer and three other Quakers became known as the "Boston Martyrs" when they were hanged for expressing their religious beliefs.)
This is just one of many fascinating linguistic vignettes revealed in the new book "Speaking American: A History of English in the United States," by the late University of Michigan scholar Richard W. Bailey. Among other things, the book demonstrates that the distinctive speech styles of New England -- from words like selectman to the dropping of r's -- run centuries deep.
Bailey's depiction of Bostonian ways of speaking in the latter half of the 17th century suggests that, then as now, it was a city where a narrow sense of propriety imported from England met an array of global influences. The Puritans' view of language was, to be sure, a fastidious one, matching our preconceptions of straitlaced Colonial life in the age of the Salem witch trials.
After the Restoration of 1660, Bailey argues, the Puritan orthodoxy dating back to the Mayflower gave way to a more variegated language picture, with new waves of immigrants coming on the scene. The Colonists were also interacting more closely with Native Americans during this period, as members of both groups crossed the language divide by becoming bilingual or speaking an intermediary "pidgin" tongue. Words from local Algonquian languages infused the settlers' speech: Wigwam ("hut"), kinkajou ("wolverine''), squaw ("wife"), and papoose ("child") are just a few of the 17th-century borrowings. Netop ("friend") was a popular pidgin greeting at the time. Although the bloody King Philip's War of the 1670s threw up fresh barriers to communication, Native American contact would have a lasting impact on the American-ness of the language. This is most evident in local place names, which mix callbacks to old England (Boston, Essex, Plymouth) with native labels (Mashpee, Saugus, and of course Massachusetts itself).
First Published February 5, 2012 12:00 am
