Koines and Koineization Another Look at the Data

Chapter 12 is devoted to rehabilitating and redefining the term “koine” and the process of “koineization,” which I argue is not the same as “dialect mixture” (Trudgill 2008, Mufwene 2008). One of the main conclusions of this chapter is that there was not a single American koine, as has often been suggested. Furthermore, each colonial koine that developed within each colony encompassed a range of registers, from the highly formal “disparitary” registers (similar throughout the colonies) down to the highly variable, purely oral, and stigmatized “paritary” registers, which contained remnants of older British basilectal varieties. A key point is to demonstrate that, contrary to Dillard’s conclusions (1972, 1973, 1980, 1992), there was indeed clear linguistic continuity not only between seventeenth- and eighteenth-century southern British English but also the resulting American koines and American non-standard varieties during the 19th and 20th centuries.Within this framework, by the first quarter of the eighteenth century, the koines become recognizable as regional varieties of several nascent American English dialects. Franklin (1739) provides several remarkable examples of these regional shibboleths himself (cf. Chapter 14 for detail). On these grounds, the observations of early English voyagers regarding the uniformity and “purity” of eighteenth-century American English must be tempered. These observations should be understood in conjunction with the complex collection of English basilects back in England.