This is a follow-up to
the earlier post on Indian languages. Since there’s still more to write after this, I’m making it a series.
Sources:
@Turquoise Blue on
Francophone Nationalism
@Tsochar on
TV and media
@Venusian Si on the
languages of Long Island
The Languages of the ASB, Part 2: The Confederal languages
French, Dutch, English, and Spanish are considered the ASB’s confederal languages. What this means is a matter of both statute and convention. The four are spoken as either a first or second language by almost the entire population of the confederation; this means that they are the natural languages for anything intended for a broad audience. They dominate the mass media and are almost the exclusive languages of higher education.
Parliament did not formally designate the four confederal languages until the 1990s, responding to activism by the rising Francophone Nationalist movement. But really this did little more than confirm over a century of usual practice. Translators to all four confederal languages are on duty during every session of Parliament. Translation to other languages is available when a member requests it. This had always been the case; the new law merely codified it.
At sessions of Parliament in the old days, members sat not according to party or even by state, but by language. After every speech, translators in the French, English, Spanish, and Dutch speaking sections would interpret for the speaker to each respective section. This time-consuming arrangement lasted a surprisingly long time; members considered it one of the beloved traditions of Parliament. But eventually the traditionalists gave in and acquiesced to translations delivered electronically via auriculars. Even so, the parliamentarians still sit in state delegations rather than by party, and the ordering of the states still derives from the old arrangement based on language.
The four confederal languages have some things in common. All come from Europe. All are fairly large with many speakers both in Europe and around the world. All are spoken as both a first and second language across multiple states, and can be found in every major city across the ASB. All have seen diverse variation in the ways that they are spoken, written, and performed in media. They also have all contributed to the evolution of creole languages within marginalized populations, but that will not be the subject of this post.
Dutch
Of the four, Dutch has the smallest geographic spread. Only one state, New Netherland, can be said to be predominantly Dutch-speaking. But of course, that state contains the confederal capital and chief metropolis, so it exerts a lot of influence on the ASB as a whole. Communities of Dutch speakers can be found all around the borders of New Netherland, with a few more far-flung pockets along Lakes Ontario and Michigan. Dutch is the most important second language in Iroquoia and a few other areas.
New Amsterdam’s importance in trade and media has spread Dutch more widely. Even before the days of film and television, traveling performers spread a culture that made ample use of Dutch slang terms. Midcentury TV comedy built on this culture and made these loanwords even more ubiquitous. The world of finance, which like the performing arts has its center in New Amsterdam, has also spread Dutch terms to other languages within the ASB.
Compared to the other confederal languages, Dutch has seen little call for language regulation. There’s no real need. Everyone knows what constitutes good Dutch: the language as used by educated Manhattaners. Guardianship of the language rests with a cloud of universities, publishing houses, and periodicals that put out regularly updated dictionaries and style guides. These disagree on some details but present a broadly unified picture of cultivated Boreoamerican Dutch. The language has no academy in America and there is very little desire for one.
The Dutch-speaking sphere is so centralized, in fact, that Upstaters and out-of-staters feel a great deal of pressure to change their accents in order to gain an edge professionally. The Mountain Dutch accent of Allegheny and Poutaxia, for instance, is strongly associated with bumbling comic-relief characters from the old Leatherstocking shows. It has been so stigmatized that it has all but disappeared in larger cities, surviving only in rural areas and even then sometimes a source of embarrassment to its speakers.
French
The main part of Francophone Boreoamerica is a wide arc running from the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes and down the Mississippi. Its French language is usually described as a continuum between the French of Canada and that of Lower Louisiana, with all the areas in between being in some way intermediate between those two dialects. This is broadly true, even if it obscures a lot of local variation, such as the Old Inoca loanwords I’ve described in the French of Illinois. Acadia and West Dominica are outside this continuum.
The nature of French colonization has made it the most widely spoken second language. In Choctaw, Dakota, Assiniboia, West Dominica, and large areas of the Upper Country and Canada, indigenous or creole languages are the main ones spoken by the people, with French serving as a medium of communication between groups in education, government, and big business. The role of French as a taught language meant that there were calls from early on for standardization and regulation. People wanted to be sure that they and their children were being taught “good French.”
Therefore, academics and literary figures from the largest Francophone states organized the Académie Boréoaméricaine in 1876. Modeled directly on the Académie Française, its purpose was to guide the printing and teaching of French throughout the Confederation. At first it closely followed the lead of its Parisian model, issuing publications and decisions that were mostly responses to it. As time went on, though, it grew more independent. It is much more tolerant of both regional variation and non-French loanwords, since the notion of linguistic purity is pretty obviously impossible in the context of the ASB. Also lacking is any sense that the French language is under siege by outsiders, though of course some Francophones have political grievances against the English and Dutch, more on that below.
The Académie is based in Chicagou. The city is considered to have the most “average” dialect in the French-speaking states, being about halfway between Québec and New Orleans and culturally influenced by both. The educated speech of Chicagou provides the basis for the language as defined by the Académie. (This is distinct from the working-class French accent of Chicagou, which is also well known and much mocked thanks to Chicagou-based media.)
The rise of Francophone Nationalism in politics since the 1970s, and especially since the 1990s, has threatened to politicize the operations of the Académie. Nationalists have stepped up calls to “purify” Boreoamerican French, especially to purify it of its Dutch and English influences. The erudite Academy members have mostly been of an anti-Nationalist bent and have resisted these calls, which of course have only made them more strident. Nationalist governments in Canada have threatened to withdraw their support from the Académie, but they didn’t follow through with their threat.
English
Just as Dutch is the most geographically centered of the four confederal languages, English is the most scattered. And the Angophone states’ long history of political independence has served to heighten the differences between their dialects. Add in the lack of any tradition of language planning, and you have a recipe for some wild variation in the ways that English is spoken and written in the ASB.
New England, always the sensible and well-educated member of the Anglophone family, decided to do something about this in the mid nineteenth century. Besides standardizing and "rationalizing" English, many were concerned about the spread of Dutch in western New England, especially on Long Island. So, academic and literary lights from all the New England states came together to found the New England Academy in 1854, the first of its kind in Boreoamerica and to date the only language academy in the English-speaking world. The Academy was ambitious from the start, looking to enshrine Yankee usage as equal, even superior, to that of England. Most notably, it championed a reform of English spelling, a project that has continued down through the years and led to the replacement of almost all the “augh” and “ough” words with phonetic equivalents.
However, the work of these pointy-headed New Englanders failed to impress people in the other states. From the 1850s to today, they tend to laugh at the spellings and pronunciation guides as simultaneously semi-literate and hopelessly pretentious. So the English spoken from Pennsylvania to the Caribbean remains without any official regulation. Dictionaries and style guides are published, but no single body, or even single city, can claim to be the authority on the language. Spelling follows the conventions of England much more than Boston.
The overall geography of the standard Englishes looks like this: the New England Academy’s authority is recognized in New England itself as well as in Acadia. Now I should note that the role of English in Acadia is actually quite complex and fraught and will have to be taken up in another post - suffice it to say that unlike the Francophones, the Scots speakers of New Scotland have very good reason to feel linguistically besieged, and that they’ve put strict rules in place to restrict the spread of English that could give OTL’s Office Québécois de la Langue Française a run for its money. But where Acadia does use English, they use the New England standard. The states from Pennsylvania southward use a separate standard, not officially defined but the product of consensus among the institutions of the region. The Great Lakes, which has some influence from New England and some from the south, uses a sort of mix of the two. Newfoundland (and therefore Labrador) mostly look to London.
This means that the confederal government has to decide which spelling system to use when it publishes anything in English. For materials intended to be read widely in all the states, both Yankee and non-Yankee versions usually get made. But it would be unnecessarily time-consuming to do this for things like the official translations of laws and parliamentary records. For these lengthy documents, scribes and translators try to simply alternate between the systems, trying not to overly favor one or the other. It’s the same with other published material. The biggest publishing houses create separate editions with different spellings, but most aren’t able to do this. For that reason readers outside New England are used to seeing all the silly Yankee spellings, while readers within New England sooner or later figure out how to manage all the meddlesome ough’s and augh’s.
Outside of New England, accent and pronunciation are not major issues. Anglophones in the ASB tolerate a lot of different accents from Newfoundland to the Caymans and from Winnipeg to Bermuda. Accents associated with Black and Indian groups historically were stigmatized, but this has faded in recent years as all these marginalized peoples have begun to wear their dialects as a badge of pride.
Spanish
There are two broad Spanish-speaking regions in the ASB. The larger one is the belt of six states from Muscoguia to East Dominica, where Spanish serves as either a primary language or the official second language. The other is the border region from Lower Louisiana to southern Dakota that’s adjacent to Mexico.
The Spanish of the main Hispanophone region occupies the northern end of a Caribbean dialect continuum that stretches from Muscoguia to the mouth of the Amazon. Its phonology and lexicon have been much influenced by African and creole languages, as well as by indigenous languages throughout the region. Within this broad grouping, however, are important local distinctions. It ranges from the relatively crisp and clean sounds of East Florida to the idiosyncratic accent of East Dominica, where, it is said, the memory of starvation under Spanish rule causes the people to swallow all their consonants. Havana, like Chicagou, sits in the geographic, cultural, and media center of its region, and its usage provides something of a neutral standard.
When it comes to language planning, the Hispanophone states follow the more typical Boreoamerican path and do it state by state. The Liga de Academias de la Lengua Castellana en Boreoamérica was formed in 1961 and unites similar bodies in each of six states: Muscoguia, West Florida, East Florida, Seminol, Cuba, and East Dominica. The Liga de Academias focuses more on preserving and celebrating local variety than on maintaining the purity of the language. Along with its universal dictionary, it regularly publishes guides to cubanismos, floridanismos, and so forth.
The Spanish of the far west is entirely different, being a form of Mexican rather than Caribbean Spanish. It has historically been far less influential within the confederation because its speakers, though numerous, are minorities in every state in which they reside. But recently there have been efforts to acknowledge and promote the language, including recognizing “Español praderal” (Prairie Spanish) as a unique variety.
One thing that the ASB does not see is the perception of Spanish as an "immigrant language," its main context within our United States. Yes, immigration has upticked in recent years as mobility has increased, both near the border and in the cities. But just about every social and economic factor surrounding the spread of Spanish in OTL is different in this timeline. Spanish has long been a confederal language in the ASB, so even if Hispanophone populations rise, there is nothing about it that’s new. The situation where Mexican workers do agricultural labor is also absent, since the ASB unlike the USA has a largely indigenous “peasant” class that traditionally does such work. And of course the whole political situation is different. The ASB has no history of intervening in Mexican politics, for example. So while Spanish in the cities may be on the rise due to immigration, this does not seem like any kind of radical change, as much as a shift in the balance of already-established languages.
