During the seventeenth century, new shiploads of immigrants
brought an increasing variety of linguistic backgrounds into the
country. Pennsylvania, for example, came to be settled mainly
by Quakers whose origins were mostly in the Midlands and the
north of England. People speaking very different kinds of English
thus found themselves living alongside each other, as the ‘middle’
Atlantic areas (New York, in particular) became the focus of settlement.
As a result, the sharp divisions between regional dialects
gradually began to blur.