American English Began as the First of Britain's Colonial
History | * American English began as the first of Britain's colonial (and later postcolonial) offspring, and it went through the same process of linguistic and cultural appropriation that has shaped other postcolonial varieties * The first English-speaking permanent settlers founded the South Atlantic colonies (beginning with Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607) and New England (where the Mayflower landed the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620). * the original bridgeheads via urban hearths like Boston, Massachusetts, Richmond, Virginia, and then Charleston, South Carolina, such accents got rooted in these regions, in accordance with Mufwene's "Founder Principle" * Eastern New England has continued this tradition largely to the present day: with important cultural centers and economic prosperity through trade, whaling, and later early industrialization those who had established themselves there saw little reason to leave, so linguistically and culturally the region is somewhat different from the rest of the US. Similarly, a conservative and aristocratic plantation culture with a distinctive accent and culture established itself in the coastal South and expanded along the South Atlantic plains into Georgia. * Later waves of immigrants in the seventeenth century came through mid-Atlantic ports, where the Quakers had established themselves in Pennsylvania, and their religious tolerance made the location attractive for many newcomers. * it can be stated that a mixture of the working-class speech from these regions constituted the basis of colonial mid-Atlatic American speech, which later, after the colonial period, became the basis for the mainstream, inland-northern and western type of American English * The Great Lakes Area and the Upper Mississippi region were settled predominantly by people from the inland northern parts of the original colonies, from western New England and upstate New York. * the nineteenth century new lands further west were being taken, a