AHC/WI: American ex-colonies don´t use their mother countries´language

For the United States, perhaps find some way for Henry von Hohenzollern to actually become King of America/Columbia. This would bring about massive German immigration, which was already an extremely prevalent factor. Germans had been in the U.S as long as most Anglos. This would make German a prestige language. With thousands of native German speakers and a German King, German would likely by 1840, become an actual large spoken language. A bloody war of 1812, or some equivalent can see anti-British feeling rising to such an extreme that the government decides to favor German instead of English.
 
What you need is a glut of settlers from one particular region of the mother country. I have read that American regional dialects derive in part from the region of Britain the settlers came from. One thing that doesn't help is the fact that the United States went free as one country. So maybe get a bunch of people speaking a unique English dialect--let's say Yorkshire, into one region that might be good to carve out a country from, let's say Prince Edward Island, and call it "Epicwitia" or something, since Native American names are always cool and that's how all Europeans named everything in the Americas. Speakers of other dialects should be minimal in number and should otherwise be marginalised. With patriotism and independence warfare, this "Epicwitia" could win a war against Britain and in patriotic fervor, establish an "Epicwitian" language which standardises the regional dialect of the rural folk. Initially it is very comprehensible with the Yorkshire dialect, but over the centuries, it separates very much from the Yorkshire dialect. Of course, other English speakers would be barely able to comprehend it, although they probably still could. Compare it to Scots--it looks like badly spelled English based on a stereotypical Scottish accent, but it actually has its own rules, own spelling, etc.

That's a simple example. I think the British North America is far too great of a landmass for individual immigrations to have much of an effect. Even regionally it's difficult. The Caribbean islands of Britain are easier since they speak distinct creole languages, but I think that's cheating.

Conlanging seem interesting, though I find hard to believe Paraguay would try to have a language for themselves when they already have Guarani.

It's not so much a conlang as an exaggeration of the Paraguayan dialect of Spanish's traits, preferably that of the Spanish-speaking peasant which is deliberately as far from that of Spain or Argentina (Paraguay's two biggest enemies by far) as possible. And Dr. Francia was quite the bizarre guy. A reorientation of his interests might serve well for this--make him want to ensure all the Indians are speaking this Paraguayan language.
 
It´s its own case though, but it is a model that one can use to have more creoles in the Caribbean at least.

There are already plenty of other creoles in the Caribbean. Jamaican Patois is mutually incomprehensible with English, as are the other English creoles. I would say that creole languages are predominant on almost every island in the Caribbean. The only glaring exceptions I can think of are Cuba and the Dominican Republic, which is because for some reason Spanish creoles seem really uncommon outside of rare examples like Palenquero. The main issue is not with having more creole languages though, it's having these creole languages be officially recognized. It took until the 1970s for Creole to be recognized in Haiti, for instance, and in most other islands the creole languages (which are by far the most spoken languages) still don't have official status.

The easiest way to raise the prestige of creoles is probably just one that raises the economic development of Haiti and Jamaica, thus increasing the wealth and prestige of the average creole speaker. Haiti and Jamaica have historically been focal points of sorts for the English-creole and French-creole speaking Caribbean, so PODs that strengthen those two would strengthen creoles all through the Caribbean. Alternately, a POD that strengthens Dominica, perhaps with a larger tourism industry, could achieve a similar result given that OTL, Dominica has been disproportionately culturally influential in the Caribbean, especially through kadans-lypso, and Dominican artists were instrumental in raising the profile of Creole in Guadeloupe and Martinique OTL.

Also, Bozal Spanish, a currently extinct Kikongo (and possibly Yoruba) influenced variety of Spanish (or perhaps Spanish creole?) could in an ATL become the dominant language of Cuba, eventually just being known as "Cuban." Such a language would probably resemble a mixture of OTL Cuban Spanish with Habla Congo and Lucumi. A more widespread Santeria religion or other Afro-American syncretic religion might do the trick at preserving linguistic variation.

As for the Dominican Republic, a POD could be that Haiti does not adhere to Spain's ultimatum that it stop supporting the Dominicans in the Restoration War and continues to aid them until the Spanish are thrown out like OTL. After the war, the resulting wave of nationalism is mostly anti-Spanish rather than anti-Haitian and cultural/economic ties with Haiti deepen. This results in a variety of Spanish that is heavily influenced by contact with Haitian Creole (and/or French), moreso than Dominican Spanish OTL, that people refer to simply as "Dominican" due to nationalist fervor.
 
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The easiest way to raise the prestige of creoles is probably just one that raises the economic development of Haiti and Jamaica, thus increasing the wealth and prestige of the average creole speaker. Haiti and Jamaica have historically been focal points of sorts for the English-creole and French-creole speaking Caribbean, so PODs that strengthen those two would strengthen creoles all through the Caribbean. Alternately, a POD that strengthens Dominica, perhaps with a larger tourism industry, could achieve a similar result given that OTL, Dominica has been disproportionately culturally influential in the Caribbean, especially through kadans-lypso, and Dominican artists were instrumental in raising the profile of Creole in Guadeloupe and Martinique OTL.

A problem is that on the islands themselves, the creoles are generally regarded as working-class speech. The upper classes use the European languages as a social marker. Greater economic development might end up meaning a decline in creole/patois use.

In Haiti, Creole gained recognition as it is the sole language of most of the population, in contrast to most of the other islands where people tend to be bilingual. But even there, monolingual Creole speakers generally desire for their children to learn French; it has been proposed to replace French with Creole as the language of instruction in schools, but this has met with considerable resistance.
 
What if countries like the US or the Spanish and Portuguese ex.colonies decide to effectively officialize the local dialect and try to develop the language completely independently from the motherland?

This is already the case but they are still called Spanish, Portuguese and English. You don´t necessarily need to make them completely different, having a situation where it´s basically like Serbo-Croatian is fine, even if I´d like there were enough differences to back it up.

Native language could count but it´s a cheap way to do it, given the challenge is to develop a language from the motherland. A creole or pidgin becoming official is fine.

POD after 1700. Bonus point if the language of the US is officially called Murican.
Not exactly what is asked for, but OTL Norway did just that in the 19th century, that is, after becoming separate from Denmark, taking the local form of Danish, develop it separately and call it Norwegian (Bokmål). (There was also the more famous effort to use the native dialects as basis for a Norwegian standard (Nynorsk), but that has been less successful.)
 
A problem is that on the islands themselves, the creoles are generally regarded as working-class speech. The upper classes use the European languages as a social marker. Greater economic development might end up meaning a decline in creole/patois use.

In Haiti, Creole gained recognition as it is the sole language of most of the population, in contrast to most of the other islands where people tend to be bilingual. But even there, monolingual Creole speakers generally desire for their children to learn French; it has been proposed to replace French with Creole as the language of instruction in schools, but this has met with considerable resistance.

So I don't have data for some of the following claims but I'm ethnically Haitian, have studied Haitian and Caribbean history, currently live there, and am from a Francophone Haitian family.

It's not necessarily true that Creole is regarded as working class speech in Haiti at least. There's a growing movement to embrace Creole among the upper and middle classes, as demonstrated by institutions like the Akadmi Kreyol, Ekol Matenwo, and the Creole orthography all of which were funded and patronized by members of the traditionally Francophone elite. It is true that there are also many people who still think that Creole is working class, but at least in Haiti I think that view hasn't been transferred to my generation. Also I think you're overestimating the resistance to replacing French with Creole, because we are already in the process of opening up several Creole-medium schools. My last note is that Creole did not gain recognition in Haiti just because it is the language of the majority; if that were the case, one would presume that it would have been recognized much sooner than 1987!

My evidence for that is to look at places like Guadeloupe and Dominica, where most of the population is bilingual with a European language but there are still popular movements to preserve and spread Creole. Haitian Creole started to gain recognition in the 70s after the international prestige of Creole was raised due to the commercial success of genres such as konpa, kadans-rampa, and kadans-lypso. It's also around this time that we saw the establishment of Creole-language radio in Dominica, and where the genesis for zouk, a genre from Guadeloupe and Martinique, comes from. The establishment of Haitian Creole as an official language was just part of a contemporary pro-Creole and Afrocentric trend in the Francophone Caribbean that was concurrent with the popularization of pan-Africanism; in fact many Afrocentric Haitians of that generation that I know looked to Kwame Nkrumah as an example.

So I guess to just summarize what I'm saying, the French Creole languages are already moderately prestigious to many of us, so an ATL that has them be even more prominent could just build off of the OTL trend towards Creole media and Afrocentrism in the latter 20th century.

I think that legitimizing Creole languages is a much more difficult task in the Anglophone Caribbean just because anecdotally, most Jamaicans I know for example think that patois is a dialect of English even though they are mutually incomprehensible. For some reason, English-based Caribbean creole languages usually exist on a dialect continuum between standard English and the patois version while French creole languages don't, which makes the creole languages seem like dialects. Given that this is just a linguistic feature, I'm not sure how to work around that.

Sorry if this post seems kind of rough, I'm procrastinating studying for biochem so I couldn't really go back and edit.
 
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So I don't have data for some of the following claims but I'm ethnically Haitian, have studied Haitian and Caribbean history, currently live there, and am from a Francophone Haitian family.

I will defer to your opinion then:). Very interesting summary of the situation.
 
People are looking for American tongues diverging from the mother tongue, but how about the other way around? Have the American language retain archaisms and have the metropole's standard register change rapidly- maybe due to foreign domination? Of course, languages branching off would probably have to coincide with ethnogenesis.

Perhaps Québécois could become a separate language if Quebec gained independence from France, rather than forming a national identity based around a non-English "French" identity?
 
The difference between a language and a dialect is much more political than technical. As someone who speaks both French and Portuguese, I can assure you that Quebecois French and Brazilian Portuguese can be completely unintelligible to their European counterparts particularly when used by people less exposed to the local standard and/or less inclined to follow the local standard language, which is by definition a political construction and somewhat closer to their European counterpart (ie. Standard Brazilian Portuguese is a mix of local Portuguese dialects and normative 19th century European Portuguese), Without the "Europeanizer" standard the American languages would naturally drift apart and eventually be completely unintelligible.
 
What you need is a glut of settlers from one particular region of the mother country. I have read that American regional dialects derive in part from the region of Britain the settlers came from. One thing that doesn't help is the fact that the United States went free as one country. So maybe get a bunch of people speaking a unique English dialect--let's say Yorkshire, into one region that might be good to carve out a country from, let's say Prince Edward Island, and call it "Epicwitia" or something, since Native American names are always cool and that's how all Europeans named everything in the Americas.

Yeah, if Britain had done a bit more "divide et impera", maybe this would have worked.

But even so: The merchants would still use standard English as a lingua franca. Educated people would read English books. And the differences between the various colonies weren't so bad that they'd perpetually feud each other.
 
People are looking for American tongues diverging from the mother tongue, but how about the other way around? Have the American language retain archaisms and have the metropole's standard register change rapidly- maybe due to foreign domination? Of course, languages branching off would probably have to coincide with ethnogenesis.

This did happen to a fair extent IOTL, especially regarding pronunciation. The European forms of the languages tended to experience more changes in this regard than their American counterparts, which preserved some pronunciation rules that became archaic in the old country.

For example, American English has mostly preserved rhotic pronunciation (pronouncing the letter "r" in all positions of a word) while in England, rhotic pronunciation mostly died out in the 18th/19th centuries (though it survives in Scotland and Ireland).
 
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People are looking for American tongues diverging from the mother tongue, but how about the other way around? Have the American language retain archaisms and have the metropole's standard register change rapidly- maybe due to foreign domination? Of course, languages branching off would probably have to coincide with ethnogenesis.

Perhaps Québécois could become a separate language if Quebec gained independence from France, rather than forming a national identity based around a non-English "French" identity?
With a POD in 1700 I would try to make Quebec bigger in population, thus having Ontario and other OTL Canadia area firmly French speaking, then have the British take over anyway and have the colonies rebel WITH the Americans but go on their way, thus you have a Quebec that has no struggle against British Canadians and thus can go its own way + USA that have no Britain around them, thus lessening the influence of it. This is antithetical to the view that you need Britan to be viewed as a perpetual enemy but I still think it can work.

The difference between a language and a dialect is much more political than technical. As someone who speaks both French and Portuguese, I can assure you that Quebecois French and Brazilian Portuguese can be completely unintelligible to their European counterparts particularly when used by people less exposed to the local standard and/or less inclined to follow the local standard language, which is by definition a political construction and somewhat closer to their European counterpart (ie. Standard Brazilian Portuguese is a mix of local Portuguese dialects and normative 19th century European Portuguese), Without the "Europeanizer" standard the American languages would naturally drift apart and eventually be completely unintelligible.
Comepltely unintelligible is strong term, they would still be the closest language to the mother language after all. If people go full local dialect officialization we could have quite the difference there.

This did happen to a fair extent IOTL, especially regarding pronunciation. The European forms of the languages tended to experience more changes in this regard than their American counterparts, which preserved some pronunciation rules that became archaic in the old country.

For example, American English has mostly preserved rhotic pronunciation (pronouncing the letter "r" in all positions of a word) while in England, rhotic pronunciation mostly died out in the 18th/19th centuries (though it survives in Scotland and Ireland).
Nevah.
 
Well, if the Boers in South Africa could formulate a mainly Dutch based language with certain English, Malay elements and even occasional local African terms thrown in and call it 'Afrikaans' (and have it recognized as a language in its own right and the newest official language in the known world), I don't see why Spanish, Portuguese, French or English colonists couldn't have done the same in their respective former colonies.
 
Comepltely unintelligible is strong term, they would still be the closest language to the mother language after all. If people go full local dialect officialization we could have quite the difference there.

True, there will still be some degree of intelligibility. I think that the most plausible scenario for the Americas is not a parallel with Afrikaans, after all, the Boers were simply a very small rural population with very little contact with the outside world, that's not the case of the Americas.

IMHO Norwegian is the best example of a "creation" of a national language that can be applied to the Americas. We only need a strong political will for a standardization which doesn't try to emulate the European normative language. Bello's ortography of the Spanish language was a beginning of such experiment, but it failed to evolve to be like Nynorsk (arguably, Nynorsk itself is also a failure since it didn't become the sole official standard in Norway).

Spanish America is too diverse, complex and unstable to agree with such a complicated matter. Also, the American North-South conflict is the elephant in room when I think about the creation of unique language for the US during the 19th century. However, if we have a Brazilian or Québecois Andrés Bello and a strong nationalist fervor to back him I think that things could be different for Québec and Brazil.
 
if Louisiana became independent or there was less Anglo immigration, Cadjeh colld be independent like Afrkaans. Or Cadjeh revivalists, instead of teaching standard French , could use the local pronunciation for spelling, and the local grammar
The final H is pronounced like the Russian H com soh nasal
 
Spanish America is too diverse, complex and unstable to agree with such a complicated matter. Also, the American North-South conflict is the elephant in room when I think about the creation of unique language for the US during the 19th century. However, if we have a Brazilian or Québecois Andrés Bello and a strong nationalist fervor to back him I think that things could be different for Québec and Brazil.
Do they need to agree? Can´t they each do their own or at least with their neighbours?
 
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