English Language Roots in Early America: Roanoke to Plymouth
Roanoke, North Carolina
Sir Walter Raleigh explored what they called “the new world.” Raleigh was Queen Elizabeth’s special favorite. It was his guidance and inspiration that led to the first English-speaking communities in the New World.
- 1584: An expedition commissioned by Walter Raleigh establishes a small settlement on Roanoke Island (current North Carolina). Those settlers disappeared and are known as “the lost colony.”
The Spread of English to America
Raleigh and Elizabeth intended that the venture should provide riches from the New World and a base from which to send privateers on raids against the treasure fleets of Spain. Raleigh himself never visited North America.
Jamestown, Virginia (1607)
In 1606, three ships financed by a London company set sail on the southern route past the Azores and the Canary Islands. They cruised in the West Indies and then headed north, intending to settle somewhere north of the Spanish in Florida and south of the French in Canada. They sailed into Chesapeake Bay, and after about a month, they reached the James River and moored in six fathoms off a wooded island which they named after their new king (Jamestown).
Unlike the unfortunate settlers in Roanoke, the men of Jamestown survived, and the English language took root in the New World. There is still some evidence of the lost voices of the early Americans in the islands of the Chesapeake Bay, one of the biggest of which is Tangier Island, settled around 1688.
Bermuda (1612) and Bahamas (1648)
The year after the Jamestown landing, another ship was wrecked on an island over five hundred miles due of Charleston, now known as Bermuda. The three survivors were joined three years later by a shipload of settlers who set about establishing Bermuda, the second English colony in the New World. In 1648, a breakaway group of religious dissenters sailed south from Bermuda to the Bahamas, further extending the spread of English.
Plymouth, Massachusetts (1620)
There was always a profiteering side to these Virginian expeditions, much in keeping with the spirit of the age. But only a few years later, an emigration began to take place in Massachusetts to the north that was to temper the fire of the southerners with the cold rigor of the Puritan mind and its inflexible ideology.
- 1620: The “Pilgrim Fathers,” the first group of Puritan settlers, arrived at Cape Cod, in Plymouth, Massachusetts. By 1640, around 25,000 people had settled in the area.
There were almost thirty different communities from all over England represented on the Mayflower, a situation repeated on most of the subsequent transatlantic crossings. In the settlement that followed, these influences blended together to mark the beginnings of American English.
“Broken English” and American Indian Loanwords
One of the first surprises for the Plymouth settlers was the appearance of Indians speaking “Broken English.” Varieties of pidgin English spread among the Indian tribes. The settlers of Roanoke, Jamestown, and Plymouth, confronted by the need to communicate with Indians who could not speak a word of English, adapted their speech.
American English became enriched by “wigwam” words. Wigwam is an Algonquin word which first appeared in English in 1628, barely seven years after the Plymouth landing. It was eventually joined by about fifty American Indian words for unfamiliar trees, fruits, animals, shellfish, and foods or the Amerindian culture.
Words from the Indian languages have also been joined by phrases and catchwords of assorted Indian derivation.
The first settlers also scattered their new country with thousands of Indian place names. Twenty-six states have Indian names, and many rivers do as well.
New Words and New Meanings
The pioneers had a strange new landscape to explore and describe. After the first landings, they went inland along the rivers—all words that took up new meanings at this time. They came across new flora and fauna. The first Americans had a new way of life. Words like popcorn all reflect these new experiences.
But there was also the transfer of old words to new objects.
The Preservation of Old Meanings
British visitors to the United States today often note the unmistakable sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century characteristics still evident in American English, preserving features that, to British ears, are distinctly archaic (gotten in place of got).
The English colonists in New England also brought with them the place names from the old country.