American English 1781 - 1921

The founding of Colonies by British Settlers in Virginia and Massachusetts at the beginning of the seventeenth century signalled the start of European colonization in North America, and established the origins of the political and social experiment that was to become the United States of America.

The geographical separation from Britain, combined with a range of new experiences and contacts, led to the emergence of a distinct style of language and new vocabulary. Eventually, this was to attract the attention of educationalists and philologists, forming the subject of much debate throughout the nineteenth century.

This set reprints a wide range of source texts invaluable to the study of American English.

Volume I contains a selection of articles chronicling the debate over Americanisms in both the American and popular British press.

Additional volumes comprise several glossaries of American English that illustrate the growing creativity, autonomy and specialization of the language, as well as the linguistic debates of the era.

The collection will be of key importance in the study of the first 'world English' to stake its claim outside the British Isles. The issues that arose in the development of English language in America were later to emerge in many other colonial settings where English was adopted as a language - both in settler colonies such as Australia and New Zealand, and in administrative colonies such as India, Malaysia and the Philippines.

More particularly, for scholars and students interested in researching the historical development of English in America, this set brings together for the first time, a selection of the most important texts in an accessible and coherent form.