VIII.—On the Conservatism of Language in a New Country

• Published in: PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America
• Main Author: Bryant, Frank Egbert
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Modern Language Association (MLA) 1907
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/456829; https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S003081290005656X

I cannot begin this discussion more appropriately than by quoting a well known paragraph from Ellis's Early English Pronunciation . In Part I, page 19, he says:— “The results of emigration and immigration are curious and important. By emigration is here specially meant the separation of a considerable body of the inhabitants of a country from the main mass, without incorporating itself with another nation. Thus the English in America have not mixed with the natives, and the Norse in Iceland had no natives to mix with. In this case there is a kind of arrest of development, the language of the emigrants remains for a long time in the stage at which it was when emigration took place, and alters more slowly than the mother tongue, and in a different direction. Practically the speech of the American English is archaic with respect to that of the British English, and while the Icelandic scarcely differs from the old Norse, the latter has, since the colonization of Iceland, split up on the mainland into two distinct literary tongues, the Danish and Swedish. Nay, even the Irish English exhibits in many points the peculiarities of the pronunciation of the xviith century.”