Franklin the Prescriptivist His Views on Language Propriety

This chapter begins by investigating the possible influences of major British language specialists of the eighteenth century and considers whether Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling may have been inspired by figures such as Thomas Sheridan (an Irishman), James Buchanan (a Scot), or the so-called “forgotten phoneticians” (Abercrombie 1948), who proposed pronunciation guides for a rapidly growing middle class.This discussion leads to an examination of the motivations behind these pronunciation guides, as well as evidence highlighting Franklin’s linguistic insecurity. Such insecurity was based on the low self-esteem in which provincial English speakers, living on the geographic and social fringes of England and the Empire, held their own speech. It also explains the root cause of linguistic “mimicry” of the upper classes. The chapter then undertakes a comparative investigation of Thomas Spence’s The Grand Repository of the English Language (1775) and Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling, analyzing the sociolinguistic motivations behind their respective orthographic reforms. There is no evidence that either man influenced the other. These perspectives illuminate Franklin’s and Spence’s prescriptive views on language and their rejection of dialectal English.In particular, an extract published in Poor Richard’s Almanack in 1739 catalogs a string of regional pronunciations and vocabulary found in various American colonies, several of which persist today. This citation is of crucial importance, as it supports the hypotheses presented in Chapters 10 through 12, which argue that recognizably American koines had begun to take shape by around 1700. This conclusion is further corroborated by Noah Webster (1789), who provides numerous examples of regional differences in pronunciation and grammar, tracing their origins back to early modern England – an idea later developed by Alexander Ellis (1869).