North American English varieties are all by-products of language contact. Contact is an important ecological factor in language evolution in general, both in cases where it has produced creoles and in those where it has produced varieties which are identified by other names.
Regarding the spread of English around the world, I maintain that native Englishes, indigenized Englishes, and English pidgins and creoles have all developed by the same kinds of natural restructuring processes. Structural differences among them are due to variation in the ecological conditions which assigned different values to the variables of the language-restructuring equation and thus determined varying outcomes from one case to another. We will now re-examine some of those putatively nonexceptional cases of traditional genetic filiation (identified as "ordinary" or "natural") and show how contact-based explanations also apply to them.
Let us compare the spread of Vulgar Latin and that of the languages of the Jutes, Angles, and Saxons. Vulgar Latin, which was exported to the Celtic-speaking countries of continental Europe west of the Alps, is a name for vernacular Latin, as a nonstandard variety distinct from Classical Latin. The counterpart of nonstandard varieties of European languages today, it was, as the adjective vulgar (from Latin vulgaris) says, the language of the common people, a social classification that certainly also applies well to most of the West Germanics who invaded England in the fifth and sixth centuries and would develop Old
English. Interestingly, soldiers were involved in both cases of colonization and language spread. The reason why Vulgar Latin was so influenced by the Celtic substrate and became French, Spanish, and Portuguese (focusing on Western Europe, and depending on where the contact took place) certainly had to do with its appropriation by the colonized Celts.
The above appropriation process and shift to the dominant group's language is not different in kind from what produced creoles and indigenized Englishes. Indeed, Thomason and Kaufman recognize the importance of language shift in both the case of the development of indigenized varieties and that of creoles. Since at first glance one can perceive similarities in the domination of England, France, Spain, and Portugal by foreign powers, the following question arises: Why did England not become a Romance country, like France, Spain, and Portugal? Why did it take up to the seventeenth century before more distinctly Celticized English varieties other than Scots English emerged in Wales and Ireland?
Recall that the Romans left England about the same time they left France, Portugal, and Spain, when the western part of the Roman Empire was collapsing. If one invokes the fact that England was subsequently colonized by the Germanics, one cannot overlook the fact that France (then Gaul) also underwent a period of Frankish (i.e., Germanic) domination, and Iberia (Portugal and Spain) was ruled for a while by the Arabs and Visigoths (also a Germanic tribe). Yet, they would gradually become Romance countries precisely after the Romans had left. (There's also the interesting question of why the Eastern Roman Empire, which lasted longer, did not become Romance.) In any case, it is worth noting that England was invaded in the fifth century. The Jutes, Angles, and Saxons settled in England in more or less the same way that the Europeans settled in North America, not mingling with the native populations but pushing them further away from their settlements or killing them--in North America, more by the spread of Old World diseases than in wars. As David Crystal observes in his 1995 book The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, the Germanic invaders called the native Celts "foreigners," the meaning of the term Welsh, and did not mingle with them.
The native Celts seem to have been no more eager to appropriate English in their homeland than the Native Americans wanted to shift to European languages. Changes in socioeconomic conditions led them to do so, several centuries later; and when they did there was substrate influence. The social integration of the Celtic populations in the frontiers of the British Isles, coinciding with the development of potato "plantations" there and the imposition of English as the rulers' language, subsequently produced varieties such as Irish and Scots-Irish Englishes. (The early Anglicization of the Scots, with English hopping over other Celtic populations of northern England in the eleventh century, had to do with an interesting love story. When the English monarchs sought refuge in Scotland from the Norman French invaders, the Scottish king not only married an English princess but also adopted her language for his court.)
Among the reasons why there is no Native American structural influence in North American varieties of English lies in the fact that Native Americans were not integrated in mainstream American society until the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, as minorities, and under socioeconomic pressures from the majority. To date, there are still Native Americans who speak English non-natively, while most of their children, who are more fully assimilated to the dominant culture, speak American English natively. Thus the Native American influence on North American English remains lexical. Likewise, the late assimilation of the Native Celts to the Germanic rule in the British Isles also accounts for its apparently limited influence on English in England proper.
The vernacularization of English
Contrary to what some may think, missionaries' attempt to teach Native American children English in boarding schools and thereby spread English among the indigenous populations was no more successful than similar attempts in Africa and Asia. Outside the boarding school, Native American languages, rather than English, served as the vernacular, especially in intimate settings with relatives and friends. English remained an auxiliary language for those who did not have to live in socioeconomic settings where it was useful and proficiency in it enabled them to be competitive. The globalization of the American economy and the involvement of Native American populations are the factors that did the trick, affecting even those left on the reservations.
Likewise, migrant labor, rather than schools (which taught English as a dead language), are largely responsible for the spread and vernacularization of English in Ireland. The informal contexts of language appropriation are correlated with the nonstandard nature of the varieties which the learners then targeted. They account in part for the extent of substrate influence on the structure of Irish English. This is very similar to cases of language shift and appropriation which resulted in the development of varieties identified, for specific sociohistorical reasons, as creoles.
