Abstract
In the early 1600s, when William Shakespeare was penning elegant plays in the language of London and scholars were preparing the King James translation of the Bible, few could have foreseen that English would one day become the dominant language of the vast continent across the North Atlantic. Spanish would have seemed more likely to establish its mastery in North America, since Spain had dominated the population centers of Mexico and the Andes for a century and was expanding its influence northward. 1 By the late 1700s, however, some visionaries were predicting that English would become the dominant language in the Americas. By 1900, the dominance of English north of the Rio Grande was a reality, as the territories from the Atlantic to the Pacific had absorbed a rapidly multiplying population of English speakers from the British Isles and had assimilated an even larger influx of other Europeans, Africans, and Asians.
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Notes
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© 2013 David Northrup
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Northrup, D. (2013). The Language of North America. In: How English Became the Global Language. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137303073_3
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