The nineteenth century saw a massive increase in American
immigration, as people fled the results of revolution, poverty, and
famine in Europe. Large numbers of Irish came following the
potato famine in Ireland in the 1840s. Germans and Italians came,
escaping the consequences of the failed 1848 revolutions. And,
as the century wore on, there were increasing numbers of Central
European Jews, especially fleeing from the pogroms of the 1880s.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, immigrants were
entering the USA at an average of three-quarters of a million a
year. In 1900, the population was just over 75million. This total
had doubled by 1950.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.