The English that was brought to America in seventeenth century was, of course, the language--or versions of the language--of Early Modern England. The year of the Captain John Smith's founding of Jamestown (1607) coincides roughly with Shakespeare's writing of Timon of Athens and Pericles, and the King James Bible (the "Authorized Version") was published only four years later, in 1611.
It was not long before writers on both sides of the Atlantic began to acknowledge the language's divergence. As early as the mid-seventeenth century, Samuel Johnson, in a review of Lewis Evans's "Geographical, Historical, Political, Philosophical, and Mechanical Essays," pays the [American] writer's language a backhanded compliment:
This treatise is written with such elegance as the subject admits, tho' not without some mixture of the American dialect, a tract ["trace"] of corruption to which every language widely diffused must always be exposed. (In the World, No. 102, Dec. 12, 1754; quoted by Mencken 4)
Johnson's assessment was mild compared to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who asserted in 1822 that "the Americans presented the extraordinary anomaly of a people without a language. That they had mistaken the English language for baggage (which is called plunder in America), and had stolen it" (quoted in Mencken 28).
Noah Webster attributed some of the marked features of New England speech to a conservatism engendered by the relative isolation, vis à vis the rest of the world, of the colonists, stating that New Englanders (of which he was one): have been sequestered in some measure from the world, and their language has not suffered material changes from their first settlement to the present time. Hence most of the phrases used by Shakespear, Congreve, and other writers who have described English manners and recorded the language of all classes of people, are still heard in the