The Genesis of Colonial American English Phonology. Dialect Mixture or Koineization?

This article outlines the origins and development of early American English phonology between the 17th and 18th centuries. Contrary to Trudgill (2008) and Mufwene (2008), who replace the terms ‘koineization’ and ‘koine’ by ‘dialect mixture’, I see the latter as the inevitable result of interdialectal contact between speakers of the same language while I consider koineization to be a long, primarily oral process, the outcome of which is the production of a koine. However, in the case of colonial British North America, I argue that there was not only one American koine, as has frequently been advanced, but several. Furthermore, I posit the existence of a continuum of registers within each koine ranging from the disparitary (highly formal) to the paritary (highly informal / nonstandard). Although the emphasis has always been on the uniformity and standard nature of early American colonial English, I consider this disparitary register to be especially the result of literacy and the formal teaching of standard English. Koineization, on the other hand, is primarily the consequence of the steady, intergenerational oral transmission of paritary registers, that is, the colonial contact vernaculars. If so, the contemporary American dialects are the product of non-standard linguistic continuity since colonial times and beyond. This view contradicts aspects of Dillard's hypotheses (Dillard 1972; 1973; 1975; 1980; 1992). A combination of theoretical and methodological approaches are employed in this paper involving historical phonology, dialectology, creolistics and sociolinguistics.