the same as that of late eighteenth-century British language reformers like Samuel Johnson: to “stabilize English usage.”25 This approach to the question of American language thus illustrates Tennenhouse’s “diaspora” argument in miniature: Anglo-American culture before and after the very moment of political independence conceived of itself as a branch of a British diaspora, which is to say, it was intent on reproducing the characteristic elements of English culture outside of England. Webster’s project of perfecting American English would certainly seem to be a clear case in point. Yet, as I will argue here, his dream of a distinctly American English also indulged a cultural fantasy of autochthony, despite a cultural reality that looks more like diaspora. As Webster saw it, the English “root or stock,”26 once transplanted to American soil, would reach downward and tap somehow into the primitive Saxon past of the English people, their culture, and its language. According to this strange, seemingly illogical, and yet culturally powerful argument (which I will explore in detail later in this chapter), American English would thus replicate a more original and primordial form of the language than currently existed in Britain itself. Naturally, none of this could occur if Americans rejected English outright; instead they ought to seek to perfect it.
This was by no means a universal presumption. While Webster was focusing his efforts on reconfiguring the system of English spelling, others among his contemporaries proposed building the American language on a basis other than English. One curious notion in circulation at the time, and often mentioned ever since, was the possibility of establishing Greek or Hebrew as the national language.27 It is doubtful that the idea was actually ever seriously considered for adoption, but we can understand why it made for such a good story: such a move would have ensured maximum separation from English, yet without sacrificing the undeniable prestige of an established language. On the other hand, the often-referenced proposal to adopt an indigenous North American language such as Iroquois or Algonquian was almost certainly apocryphal,28 but here again, that only makes its logic more telling: in one stroke, it would have achieved linguistic distance from the metropole, which in itself was merely a negative distinction, while also grounding a positive claim of American autochthony or indigeneity. Webster, as we shall see, would cut his own peculiar path to that claim, even though his starting point was the “inherited” English language.
Even among those who took the same basic tack of Americanizing English, there were more innovative orthographic proposals than Webster’s. The primary line of demarcation was whether the existing twenty-six-letter alphabet was deemed sufficient in itself to support a rational system of spelling, or whether new characters need be introduced to refine the instrument. In 1793, a few years after Webster published his Dissertations, William Thornton proposed and devised a new thirty-character alphabet in Cadmus, or, A Treatise on the Elements of Written Language.29 Even the earlier (1768) plan of Benjamin Franklin had proposed to introduce some additional characters.30 Franklin’s proposal was in fact what awakened the young Webster to the necessity of spelling reform (he had earlier ridiculed any such plans), yet Webster nevertheless continued to insist that the medium of spelling remain the same Roman alphabet in which modern English was already encoded.31 It is telling that this is the site of the only criticism Webster leveled, with some delicacy, against Franklin—to whom he reverently dedicated Dissertations. The problem with Franklin’s “reformed alphabet,” though it solved the problem of imprecise orthography, was that it did so in an inefficient manner: “If any objection can be made to his scheme,” wrote Webster, “it is the substitution of new characters, for th, sh, ng, &c. whereas a small stroke connecting the letters, would answer all the purposes of new characters.”32 In other words, why invent new letters when one might achieve the same result through a clever reapplication of the existing ones? The idea was to retain the standard English alphabet but to make it serve American purposes.
And this was what a reformed “mode of spelling”33 would accomplish: not a new lexicon, not a new alphabet, but a new manner in which phonemes are made to correspond to graphemes. Webster lays out the proposed reforms (as he then envisioned them) in a separate essay which serves as the appendix to Dissertations on the English Language, “An Essay on the Necessity, Advantages, and Practicality of Reforming the Mode of Spelling.”34 There were three pillars to his plan. First, the elimination of all silent or unvoiced letters, which serve only to widen the gulf between spelling and pronunciation. Second, the use of definite-rather than indefinite-sounding letters in spelling all words, thus correcting some of the notorious inconsistencies and absurdities in English orthoepy. The third and least often discussed proposal was to implement diacritical marks (such as existing accents, the addition of points or dots atop standard letters, or the use of ligatures to connect two letters) whenever necessary to indicate that the standard letters, whether alone or in combination, are making a new sound. In this way, “a trifling alteration in a character, or the addition of a point would distinguish different sounds, without the substitution of a new character. Thus a very small stroke across th would distinguish its two sounds. A point over a vowel … might answer all the purposes of different letters. And for the diphthong ow, let the two letters be united by a small stroke, or both engraven on the same piece of metal, with the left hand line of the w united to the o.”35 This rather arcane bit of business is actually quite illuminating, once we read past its technical details to the principle underlying it. For, in the idea of innovation through diacritical modification—with the placing of a dot over a letter as its most elemental iteration—we find a perfect synecdoche of Webster’s entire linguistic project. The elements will remain the same; difference will be lodged in the manner of their arrangement. The modal principle underlying this position about the alphabet is the same premise that animates the whole of Webster’s proposed reforms.
The remaining sections of this chapter systematically take up the logical dimensions and historical layers of this crucial language debate, in an effort to demonstrate its implications for the literary history that issues from it. First, I take a close look at the relationship between Johnson’s and Webster’s language projects and the reasons for their divergent approaches to orthography—reasons that turn out to do less with Revolutionary politics than with the relationship between English and other European vernaculars. I then provide much-needed historical depth to that eighteenth-century discussion about English spelling by tracing its Renaissance roots. Next, with that history in mind, it becomes possible to see how the transatlantic debates about “American language” layered colonial geopolitics and Revolutionary rhetoric atop an older argument about spelling. The chapter’s final section returns to the problem of polyglossia, considering the critical problem of “foreign”—that is, non-English—languages in Webster’s cultural imaginary.
Dr. Johnson and Mr. Webster
The problem of carving an authentic linguistic practice out of an obviously borrowed language had a very concrete parallel in Webster’s own intellectual labors: how, from the starting point provided by his great British precursor, would he arrive at his own American theory of English? Webster had begun his linguistic career as very much a Johnsonian, advocating only the standardization of English and hostile to any scheme of actual reform.36 His break with Johnson occurs only in the late 1780s, and coincides with the increasingly nationalistic tone of Webster’s writing on language.37 In this sense, the relationship he posits between the two national languages in Dissertations on the English Language is mirrored in the relationship between himself and Dr. Johnson. American English would be a version of British English, but at the same time, a variation on it; just so, Webster’s plan was explicitly derived from Johnson’s, while also deviating from it. As Webster worked out the larger problem of linguistic foreign debt, then, he was simultaneously navigating a more local problem of indebtedness.
Samuel Johnson, “the great leviathan of lexicography,” as Mathew Carey called him,38 died in 1784, the year after Webster had published his first major work, the so-called Blue-Backed Speller. And while all American reformers of English necessarily hearkened back to Johnson, no one was more deliberate in doing so than Webster. Like
