Beyond simply the varieties of English spoken in the new nation was the variety of other languages that were heard. German was a virtual official language in parts of eastern and central Pennsylvania; French, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, Portuguese, and Ladino were among those also present in the early national years. As long as African slaves continued to be imported into the country—and for at least a generation after—native speakers of dozens of distinct African languages lived in the early United States. Similarly, Native Americans continued to speak several hundred distinct, mutually unintelligible languages and dialects in North America. To this mix of languages we might add the dozens, perhaps hundreds (given their evanescent nature, the exact number is unknown), of Creoles, pidgins, and trade jargons that combined elements of different languages. It is also important to note that spoken languages— contrary to the wishes of lexicographers and authors such as Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) and Noah Webster (1758–1843)—are constantly mutating and evolving. Like culture itself, language cannot be fixed. Hence, the prevalence of Native American loan words such as caribou, moose, powwow, bayou, and tepee or African words such as banana, yam, cola, and goober (peanut) in American English. And in much the way that the computer revolution has transformed modern English, so the industrial revolution transformed nineteenthcentury English. Words such as factory, mill, and engine acquired meanings that would have been almost totally unfamiliar to English speakers in eighteenthcentury America. Much like vocabulary, whole languages themselves come and go. From the colonial era to the early nineteenth century, European languages— usually some variety of English or French—and various pidgins and Creoles supplanted an untold number of non-European languages and dialects. In the South Carolina low country, for example, Gullah, a New World Creole combining elements of English and a variety of African tongues, became the dominant language among some African slaves.
Any complete assessment of language in the early United States must also account for the fact that language is not necessarily a spoken medium. Hence, although elite young American men learned Latin and Greek and possibly Hebrew, few actually knew them as spoken languages. Similarly, a variety of symbol systems and sign systems that themselves might be characterized as languages were used during the period. Native peoples of the Great Plains had developed an elaborate sign language to serve as a sort of lingua franca in that vast, diverse part of North America. In the late 1820s, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the principal of the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb in Hartford, Connecticut, announced the creation of a new sign language designed to allow the deaf to communicate. Several years later Samuel FB Morse devised the system of coded dots and dashes subsequently called Morse Code.
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