The language of settlers: Daniel Duncan, ‘Placing the Needs Washed Construction in a Broader Settler Colonial Context’, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 31, 2, 2025, pp. 70-79 | settler colonial studies blog

The language of settlers: Daniel Duncan, ‘Placing the Needs Washed Construction in a Broader Settler Colonial Context’, University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 31, 2, 2025, pp. 70-79

18Nov25

Excerpt: In this study, I showed that four settler colonial varieties—Australian English, Canadian English, New Zealand English, and American English—share a minority morphosyntactic feature across a wide geographical space, and that this feature’s presence in each variety is consistent with having been brought by members of the settling population. I suggest that this finding is akin to the homogeneity of national varieties like Canadian English. In this sense, the homogeneity of settler colonial varieties is scalar. At a regional level, in the case of the United States, or national level, in the case of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, the founding population of a given settler colonial state establishes a specific variety (Denis and D’Arcy 2019). These regional and national varieties are not necessarily identical to one another; differences in the exact mix of founding population, plus hundreds of years of drift, lead to differences between them. In addition to this regional/national scale identified by Denis and D’Arcy (2018, 2019), there appears to be a larger, pan-colonial scale to the homogeneity of settler colonial Englishes. Although the specific founding populations of each variety differ, they do share a great deal. To risk oversimplifying, much of the difference in founding populations might be characterized as a matter of the proportion of the overall mix contributed by specific groups rather than a matter of which groups participated at all. In this sense, settler colonial varieties broadly share sets of founding groups. That the AEP, which came from Scots/Scots-Irish settlers, can be found across settler colonial varieties suggests that this shared set of founding groups has resulted in a shared set of minority features as well. In this way, the AEP, while not a majority feature in any settler colonial variety, is nevertheless indicative of a pan-colonial homogeneity in dialectal makeup and dialectal diversity. Further exploring this homogeneity across settler colonial Englishes may be useful in understanding how these varieties developed.

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