The language spoken by the first English settlers along the Atlantic coast was the language spoken by Shakespeare and Marlowe. English was going through a great period of change; Itwas the period known as Early Modern English, the period in which the East Midland dialect was becoming the written standard throughout England. Shakespeare‟s time was also during the end of the period of elaboration, a time when English borrowed significantly from other languages, as the language was insufficient on its own, but there were also many regionalvarieties of dialect and accent that were used and speakers of these varieties settled in America at the same time. A few syntactic structures from this period still survive in PresentDay Am.E.
, for example the relic form „gotten‟, now supplanted in Britain by „got‟
, the past
participle of „get‟
, and
the use of „done‟
in a question/ answer scenario. Americans will use
the form „might have done so‟, but not „might have done‟ which is used in Br.E.(Wolframand and Schilling-Estes, 1998:94). In some rural parts of America, it is still possible to hear hundreds of words, meanings and pronunciations that are now obsolete in both standardlanguages. Baugh and Cable (
op.cit
:360) maintain that this often occurs when a language istransplanted in this way, which results in a form of arrested development.