30. Franklin and Webster, the Fathers of American Orthography

The first section of this chapter examines Noah Webster’s Dissertations on the English Language (1789). It is here that Franklin’s influence is most clearly evident. Webster dedicates his book to Franklin and it includes a complete reprinting of his Reformed Mode of Spelling (RMS) in the final chapter. While Webster praises the scientific nature of Franklin’s reform, he ultimately rejects it in favor of his own system. This section outlines the technical difficulties and inconsistencies in Webster’s scheme, which help explain why it was largely unsuccessful from the outset.The chapter then considers the arguments in Webster’s work that appear to be either directly inspired by Franklin’s RMS or perhaps intended to appeal to him. It also highlights that energetic resistance to Webster’s proposals for a national “American” pronunciation standard arose not from Great Britain but internally in the new American Republic. Indeed, for many American intellectuals, including Franklin himself, the quarrel with England was political, not cultural or linguistic. For many, London remained the center of English culture and London English continued to serve as the linguistic model throughout much of the 19th century.The remainder of the chapter traces how Webster’s most radical orthographic reforms were progressively whittled away by influential individuals around him, including his own son-in-law, Chauncey Goodrich. Modern American spelling bears little resemblance to the radical proposals both Franklin and Webster advanced. The chapter concludes with the examination of persistent American loyalty to Received Pronunciation (RP) English well into the first quarter of the 20th century (Palmer 1926), a position Franklin may very well have supported.