24. General Overview and Conclusions to Part III

Chapter 24 provides a broad overview of all the data studied in Part III (Chapters 16–23). Here, I assemble the major characteristics of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England feature pool. What is novel about this approach is that, within the diachronic framework proposed by Mazarin (2020) and based on descriptions by English orthoepists, the New England and New York town records, and Franklin’s rhyme schemes, I have identified conservative versus innovative features within the “phonetic ranges” for each vowel in Wells’ key word list. I have argued that the phonetic ranges allow us to identify the “building blocks” of the individual American koines. For example, the word “were” was pronounced [wɛːɹ], [wæːɹ], [wiːɹ], or [wəɹ] in seventeenth-century New England (Orton 1927). This provides a clear sense of the variety of pronunciation heard in the early New England settlements. Innovative, stigmatized features associated with low status London English – such as the lowering of Path words to [aː ~ ɑː] (< EME [æː ~ a]), the raising of Meat words to [iː] (< ME [ɛː]), and postvocalic /r/-loss – were considered vulgar by Franklin, yet these were also elements of the New England feature pool. He consistently sought to preserve the more conservative features of the Massachusetts koine and this is evident in his poetry. As is common today, conservative features were generally preserved by social elites, while innovations tended to spread from below. Interestingly, innovations were also part of Franklin’s own idiolect, such as [hɛːv] for “have,” [ɛːɹ] for “are,” [gɪt] for “get,” and [nuː] for “new,” though in each case the source can be traced to eastern England and the London area. Part IV examines how the pronunciation system he proposed in his Reformed Mode of Spelling contrasts with his native provincial Massachusetts English.Collectively, the mass of data presented in Part III strongly supports the argument that Franklin’s pronunciation remained very close to his original Boston (and Philadelphia-influenced) speech throughout much of his life. It reflects perfect continuity with the New England town records of the preceding century and the testimonies of seventeenth-century English orthoepists. The basic conclusion is that his pronunciation was highly conservative for the time, broadly corresponding to Mazarin’s C1 variety of English and conforming to the period between 1650–1700. This stands in stark contrast to the innovative pronunciation system he advocated in his RMS (cf. Chapter 28).