Following his publication of Benjamin Franklin, Orthoepist and Phonetician (Volumes 1 and 2), we asked author Gary German about his research process and discoveries. Congratulations Gary!

1. When did you first come across Franklin’s reform and what about it made you want to take on this study?

It was sometime in 2012 or 2013, while reading George Philip Krapp’s English Language in America (1925, vol. 2), that I became intrigued by his comments on Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling (1768/1779). This sparked my curiosity and led me to explore the subject in greater depth.

As a variationist, when examining the proto-phonemic script Franklin devised for his RMS, I was immediately struck by the fact that he occasionally provided alternative transcriptions of the same word, forms which diverge from the general principles underlying his system. Examples include his dual RMS renderings of learnt/learn: larn’d [læɹnt] versus lɥrn [ləɹn], and perfectly: perfektlɥi [ˈpɛɹfɛktləi] versus pɥrfektli[ˈpəɹfɛktli]. The first two reflect older pronunciations characteristic of seventeenth-century English. At the same time, they correspond closely to forms attested in the rhymes of his poetry (cf. Part III, vol. 2) and, for this reason, may thus be interpreted as conservative New England features. The last two, by contrast, align not only with the internal logic of his RMS system, but also with proto-RP (i.e. late eighteenth-century London English) and, significantly, with aspects of contemporary General American pronunciation. This convergence is unlikely to be accidental (cf. question 6).

Based on this initial phase of research, I wrote an article analysing Franklin’s RMS which Professor Joan Beal (University of Sheffield) kindly accepted to read. She suggested that I submit it to the Transactions of the Philological Society. The referees of this article then proposed that I expand it into a monograph. After submitting my project proposal, one of the referees recommended that I add two levels of contextualisation, the first on Franklin’s life and times and the second on the theoretical and methodological approaches that I adopted in this book. All of Volume I (Parts I and II respectively) are devoted to these topics. 

Part III of Volume 2 consists of a comparative study of the 17^th– and 18^th-century American and English phonology. Part IV offers a detailed analysis of the RMS and concludes that Franklin’s native accent was not the model on which his RMS was based. Part V discusses Franklin’s legacy as a phonetician. In these final chapters, I present evidence showing Franklin’s possible linguistic influence on his friend and fellow Whig, Sir William Jones. Noah Webster’s indebtedness to Franklin is clearly stated in Webster’s book, Dissertations on the English Language (1789) which he dedicated to Franklin. As such, he presented himself as Franklin’s protégé, openly stating that the RMS served as an inspiration for his own spelling reform. In the last chapter of this book, we discover that Webster’s motivations were not at all for the nationalistic reasons we generally imagine. 

2. What were your biggest challenges working on this project? 

One of the principal challenges – there were many – was to establish a sound theoretical and methodological framework for investigating and reconstructing the phonology of colonial American English from a variationist perspective (Part II, Volume 1). This dimension of my work arose in response to a pointed question by a reviewer for the Philological Society who asked whether the focus of my book was to be on ‘American’ or ‘British’ English. The question initially took me aback. At the time, I wondered how I would go about confidently distinguishing how the two differed during the late 18^th century. Developing this aspect of the book proved immensely complex for a fundamental reason. To paraphrase Michael Montgomery (2013: 15), the early history of colonial American English phonology has not been systematically investigated since George Philip Krapp’s English Language in America (1925).

The primary objectives of Part III (Volume 2) were therefore twofold: first, to identify as precisely as possible the phonemic inventory of colonial American English and allophonic variants; and second, to reconstruct the major components of the colonial “feature pool,” particularly for Massachusetts. The ultimate aim was thus to characterise Franklin’s native Boston/Philadelphia-influenced accent. This task was both complicated and intellectually rewarding, not least because my approach, as a variationist, is grounded in a “bottom-up” conception of language (see the introduction to the Glossary of Linguistic and Sociolinguistic terminology for discussion).

To pursue this objective, and taking a cue from Joan Beal (1999), I conducted a detailed comparative phonological analysis of British and American English. This began with an examination of the pronunciations described by sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century English orthoepists, alongside data drawn from seventeenth-century New England and New York town records. The latter are particularly rich in phonetic (mis)spellings of words such as ware, weer, wur, war for ‘were’; fitch, fetch, fotch, fach for ‘fetch’; lingth, lankth for ‘length’; sich, sech for ‘such’ and clooth, cloath for ‘cloth’. These variant spellings reflect a corresponding what I call a ‘phonetic range’ of competing pronunciations that were current in the colonies for any given word, each one representative of dialectal speech across broad areas of southern England.

The demographic composition of individual settlements and colonies also played a crucial role in shaping the early American varieties (cf. Chapters 11 & 12 in particular). As I have just stated, the demographic and dialectal makeup of the colonies as a whole were overwhelmingly southern English. Taking this into account, I organised these variants in accordance with John C Wells’ lexical sets, defining ‘phonetic ranges’ for each key word (Wells 1982, 1988). These competing forms can be viewed as the building blocks of early American pronunciation.

Sociolinguistic processes help explain why certain variants were retained while others receded (often into less prestigious, strictly oral, non-standard varieties), just as in England itself. The seventeenth-century American data examined here correspond closely not only to the descriptions of early English orthoepists, thereby confirming the transmission of dialectal features to the New World, but also to nineteenth- and, to a striking extent, twentieth-century dialectal pronunciations recorded in Great Britain, Ireland, and North America.

A second major challenge lay in the analysis of over 3,000 lines of Franklin’s poetry. To my knowledge, his poems have never previously been studied from a linguistic perspective. This corpus proved to be an immensely rich source of evidence indicating key aspects of his natural ‘American’ pronunciation, an accent that, in many respects, appears close to that of rural southeastern England. To guard against interpretive bias, I analysed the rhyme schemes of over 6,000 lines of poetry by two younger New England poets, Timothy Dwight (Massachusetts) and Joel Barlow (Connecticut). The results showed that their rhyme patterns were extremely similar, often identical.

The findings were both fascinating and perplexing. While 80–85% of the rhymes are “perfect,” 15–20% are “imperfect” when judged against modern RP or General American pronunciation. These imperfect rhymes fall into two main categories: front mid vowels and a wide range of back vowels. The former can be quite easily explained in terms of the Great Vowel Shift. The latter are more problematic, as illustrated by pairs such as blood ~ God, food ~ flood, come ~ home, cup ~ shop, coast ~ cost, sun ~ moon, and road ~ wood (cf. Chapters 20, 21 and 22, Vol. 2, for analysis).

Not only do Franklin, Barlow, and Dwight share these patterns, but they are also attested in English poetry (e.g. Alexander Pope, Robert Herrick, and indeed as far back as William Shakespeare and John Donne). For example, like Franklin, Shakespeare rhymes sun with moon (in his first poem, ‘Venus and Adonis’, 1593). Such correspondences are supported by observations of seventeenth-century orthoepists and by spelling evidence in colonial records. Notably, and to repeat, many of these features persisted into the nineteenth and even late twentieth centuries (e.g. Webster 1789, Wright 1898, 1905; Grandgent 1899; Whitehall 1941; Orton & Deith 1962–1971; Hall 1942; Avis 1971; Shorrocks 1998; Trudgill 2016). A feature known as ‘New England short o’ provides us with important clues to solve this puzzle. To my knowledge, no previous study has systematically integrated British and American data in this way. 

What, then, is the broader significance of these findings? As noted above, the aim was to determine whether Franklin’s native pronunciation corresponded to the proto-phonemic system he proposed in his RMS. The answer is an emphatic ‘no’. Born in 1706, Franklin’s accent derived primarily from late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Boston English, itself shaped by earlier seventeenth-century settlement patterns. An estimated 69% of Boston’s settlers were of East Anglian origin, particularly from Suffolk, as well as from Essex and the London area more broadly (Fischer 1989). The Boston variety emerged from this demographic mix. His subsequent residence in Philadelphia – where approximately 80% of Quakers there were from the Northwest Midlands – may also have reinforced a few detectable traces in his speech (see Part III, Volume 2).

3. Why do you think it is that Franklin’s reform has not been studied in depth until now?

Several factors may account for this. First, Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling is a very short treatise – barely fourteen pages – published as the final chapter of Benjamin Vaughan’s edition of Franklin’s Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces (London, 1779). Its brevity alone gave the impression that it was a hastily conceived work and, for this reason, has discouraged sustained scholarly interest. Indeed, in the same vein, the work is clearly incomplete. Franklin evidently intended to devote more substantial and systematic effort to its treatment. For instance, Vaughan himself notes that Franklin provides only a single full description of the PRICE diphthong, followed by a large blank space, strong evidence that he planned to include further analyses of other diphthongs. 

Sadly, he never completed his treatise, the most plausible explanation lying in his political engagement at the time. When he drafted the initial version of the RMS in July 1768, he was serving as an agent representing the interests of several North American colonies in London. As a Whig, he was deeply involved in contesting the policies of the Tory establishment, including the House of Lords and the King’s Privy Council, particularly with regard to colonial legislative rights which, he argued, were grounded in the English Bill of Rights (1689). These responsibilities almost certainly diverted him from completing the treatise.

To return to your question, Franklin’s RMS has in fact attracted intermittent attention from linguists, beginning with Noah Webster (1789) and continuing with figures such as Alexander John Ellis (1869), Charles Grandgent (1899), George Philip Krapp (1925), Kemp Malone (1925) and Charles Wise (1948), among others. However, these contributions are typically limited to short articles (often three or four pages) or scattered observations within broader works. The topic has never generated sufficient momentum to warrant a full-length monograph. Of these scholars, Wise’s 21-page study remains by far the most substantial and insightful analysis to date.

Although most scholars have regarded Franklin’s reform as ‘interesting,’ many have dismissed it as incomplete, unwieldy, or even unintelligible (Isaacson 2003), largely because of his unconventional alphabet, which includes six newly devised characters. While such criticisms are understandable, they have obscured two crucial points: first, the diachronic and sociolinguistic significance of the variant transcriptions (of the kind discussed above in question 1), and second, the genuinely innovative character of Franklin’s system – particularly his intuitive grasp of concepts such as the phoneme (over a hundred years before it was theorised) and his deep understanding of articulatory phonetics (see Chapters 25–28 of Part IV, Volume 2). His scheme for transcribing the English vocalic system is essentially the same as that adopted by the International Phonetic Alphabet in 1886! These achievements have been overlooked by scholars.

Finally, the relative neglect of the RMS since the mid-twentieth century can be partly explained by broader shifts within linguistics itself. From the 1950s and 1960s onward, scholarly attention increasingly turned to the role of non-English influences on the development of American English, especially in the context of large-scale immigration during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This shift is reflected in the amount of research on African American Vernacular English, as well as on postcolonial Englishes, world Englishes, and creolistics, fields in which the emphasis is placed on mixed linguistic origins. From an academic perspective, this reorientation has been both necessary and productive, especially because such areas of research had previously been neglected and even purposefully marginalised. At the same time, it represented, in part, a corrective to the strongly Anglo-centric perspectives that had dominated nineteenth- and early twentieth-century scholarship. One unfortunate consequence, however, has been a relative decline in interest in and even downplaying of British English influences on the formation of American English. The present study seeks to redress this imbalance by offering what may be the first detailed comparative analysis of British and American historical phonology from a variationist perspective (Part III, Vol. 2).

4. What was it like working with the archives and manuscripts? Can you talk us through how you accessed these?

Quite honestly, while examining the Franklin papers at the American Philosophical Society Archive around 2016 or 2017, I came across – almost by chance – the first manuscript letter that Benjamin Franklin wrote to Polly Stevenson on 20 July 1768. Accompanying this letter was a full table in Franklin’s hand presenting a complete consonant and vowel inventory, including all the characters of his newly devised orthographic system, as well as descriptions of each sound. 

The system was based on the principle of “one letter for one sound,” an idea inspired by Thomas Smith’s De recta et emendata linguae Anglicae scriptione (1568), a source with which Franklin was clearly familiar (cf. Question 5 below). This point has never been recognised previously. Smith is generally regarded as the father of English orthoepy. The July 20 letter is therefore of exceptional importance for several reasons.

• First, unlike the September 26^th and September 28^th letters exchanged with Polly Stevenson in 1768 (entirely written in the new RMS script), and which were later published in Benjamin Vaughan’s 1779 edition of Franklin’s writings, this July 20^th letter has never been studied from a linguistic perspective and was only brought to scholarly attention by William B. Willcox (1972), whose work I was unfamiliar with at the time of my discovery.
• Secondly, as this was Franklin’s first attempt to use his newly devised alphabet, the letter contains numerous transcription errors, many of which he corrected in situ. Others reveal inconsistencies in pronunciation and for this reason, as noted earlier, provide valuable evidence about his New England accent (see Part III).
• Thirdly, it is in this letter that Franklin explicitly asks Polly Stevenson to help him determine whether the phonetic characters he had selected for his proto-phonemic alphabet accurately represented ‘polite’ English pronunciation. This single remark proved crucial to developing my working hypothesis: namely, from the outset, Franklin’s objective in developing the RMS was to provide speakers across the British Empire – most of whom were dialect speakers – with a model of pronunciation based on what he perceived to be cultivated London English. This interpretation challenges long-standing views that his RMS was based on his native Boston accent. It also reveals that assertions regarding the similarities between colonial American English and ‘polite’ London speech have been somewhat exaggerated (cf. Chapters 10 through 12, Vol.1).

This conclusion is reinforced by Polly Stevenson’s personal role in this endeavour. As a young, highly educated (lower?) middle-class speaker from Kensington, London, she was Franklin’s close friend, correspondent and collaborator. Her role provides one of the clearest indications of Franklin’s pro-English, heteronomous vision of the English language. This deduction is also supported by Franklin’s early fascination with the Spectator (cf. (cf. Chapter 2 of Part I) not to mention a letter to Hume (1760) in which he states that the linguistic model for America should be the ‘best English’ of England (cf. Chapter 14, Volume 1).

Another crucial source I examined was Vaughan’s 1779 Political, Miscellaneous, and Philosophical Pieces (London), in which the final chapter presents Franklin’s Reformed Mode of Spelling. Although the 1768 manuscripts preserved in the American Philosophical Society Archive and this 1779 printed version are virtually identical, there are a number of significant differences which I analyse in Part IV (Chapters 26–27). These include, for example, Franklin’s hesitation (in his 1768 vowel and consonant table) between competing pronunciations, such as [ɒi] versus [ʌi ~ əi] in defining his PRICE diphthongs. This suggests his uncertainty as to which form carried greater prestige, underscoring the importance of Stevenson’s input. This also provides very early evidence that [ɒi] was already present in London speech as early as 1768 (as it still is today, cf. Orton and Tilling 1970). 

Finally, these sources bring to light a previously underappreciated fact: Polly Stevenson’s significant role in the development of this orthographic project. This relative neglect is not due to Franklin, who refers to her as his ‘partner’, but rather to later scholarship. In a little-known letter to Franklin dated 1775, Stevenson refers to ‘our alphabet,’ thereby confirming that she regarded herself as an active collaborator in the enterprise.

For the first time, readers are able to consult digitised versions of these two manuscript sources (see Appendices 1 and 2). This study is also the first to provide a systematic transcription of Franklin’s and Stevenson’s RMS letters into the IPA. In addition, each lexical item is included in a 442-word glossary with IPA equivalents (see Appendix 3).

5. What was the most surprising finding you encountered in the materials you worked with?

Frankly, the findings are too numerous either to enumerate or to rank. One of the most significant, as noted above, is that Franklin’s RMS scheme was heteronomous, that is, modelled on what he imagined to be sophisticated London English. Given the considerable diversity of accents in England at the time, this was an inherently challenging task for a provincial speaker such as Benjamin Franklin, and this helps to explain his reliance on Polly Stevenson’s opinions on the matter. Even in London, there was no ‘fix’d’ pronunciation of English, as both Polly Stevenson and Samuel Johnson emphatically stated at the time.

A second, equally important finding is that Franklin’s native pronunciation was the product of a New England koine (with multiple registers) which, in many respects, was very close to contemporary southern rural English dialects. For example, MEAT words were still realised as [ɛː ~ e̞ː] by Franklin and educated his fellow New Englanders, rather than [iː], which is the value Franklin consistently promotes in his RMS. This raising of [ɛː] to [iː] was a relatively recent innovation originating in lower-status 16^th century London speech, and one that had been regarded as ‘vulgar’ in the seventeenth century. For that reason, the fact that this innovation was being resisted by many 18^th-century middle-class speakers in the colonies can be viewed as an early instance of ‘colonial lag’.

By identifying the principal features of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century New England pronunciations, I was able to show that the occasional transcriptional ‘slips’ mentioned earlier are best understood as unconscious reversions to Franklin’s native Boston speech. Many of these forms disrupt the internal consistency of his system and, to my knowledge, have not previously been identified or discussed (see Chapter 28). This interpretation is supported by Franklin’s linguistic background: born in 1706, his father and older siblings were from Northamptonshire and emigrated to Boston in 1683. His mother’s parents were from Norfolk and settled in Watertown, Massachusetts, in 1635. The diachronic evidence presented in Part III (Vol. 2) suggests that Franklin’s idiolect remained, in phonological terms, closer to these seventeenth-century English inputs than to late eighteenth-century London English, and therefore quite distant in certain respects from the innovative model he proposed in his RMS.Lastly, one of the most intriguing discoveries was the extent to which key aspects of Franklin’s RMS were anticipated by and inspired by the work of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English orthoepists such as Thomas Smith (1568) and very probably John Hart (1569). Franklin was certainly familiar with the work of John Wallis (1653) and had studied John Wilkins’ An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668) in detail when he was only sixteen (see Chapter 13, Volume 1). The degree to which he relied on the work of early English orthoepists (but not 18^th century orthoepists!) has never been realised until now (see also Mazarin 2020). 

6. What insights can we gain into the phonology of early American English from Franklin’s reform? How different is it from today’s American phonology?

Somewhat paradoxically, contemporary General American (GA) is, in broad terms, closer in several respects to late eighteenth-century cultivated London English than is English Received Pronunciation (RP). Proto-RP (c. 1780–1800) shared a number of features with present-day GA, for instance, the preservation of:

• postvocalic /r/, although it was already weakening in London English (and New England) (cf. John Walker, 1791); 
• /æ/ [æː ~ ɛː] in words such as past, bath, half, draft, chance. Current RP [aː ~ ɑː] pronunciations were considered ‘vulgar’ at the time; 
• /ɑː ~ ɒː/ in words such as taught, thought, law, so typical of American English today. On the other hand, /ɔː/ was introduced into RP English in 1917 by Daniel Jones (cf. Mazarin 2020). This suggests that American /ɒː ~ ɑː/ in these key words represents a very conservative pronunciation. Note that both English orthoepists, John Wallis, John Wilkins and Franklin, give fall ~ folly as minimal pairs differing only in the length of the vowel. 
• monophthongal /o̞ː/ (with some variants) which later developed into /oʊ/ in both GA and RP during the nineteenth century (now RP /əʊ/). However, there are strong indications that Franklin may also have pronounced both know and now as [əu]. Note that in the Tidewater region of Virginia words such as boat, know, about, are commonly realised as [əʊ]. 

Interestingly, in certain respects, the RMS goes a step further than would be expected. Notably, Franklin systematically centralises <er> in words such as mercy and perfect, at a time when the cultivated pronunciation in both America and London appears to have been [ˈmɛɹsi] and [ˈpɛɹfɛkt]. The evidence demonstrates that [ˈmæɹsi] and [bæɹθ] ‘birth’ were also common in America (Duponceau 1818), whereas the centralised form [ˈməɹsi], now standard in GA, was then associated with lower-status speech in the colonies. Yet, according to Duchet & Trapateau (2019), [əɹ] was apparently more acceptable in London than [æɹ]. This points to an early sociolinguistic divergence between the developing British and American norms.

Franklin’s choice of this centralised variant for his RMS is therefore somewhat puzzling, especially if, as the evidence in Parts III and IV suggests, he himself retained [ɛɹ] in his own speech. Two possible explanations present themselves: either he did not perceive centralisation as socially marked, and/or Polly Stevenson’s pronunciation may have influenced his judgement (in favour of [əɹ]) – perhaps reflecting features of her (lower-?) middle-class London speech. If so, this might indicate that centralisation was more widespread among educated Londoners during the 1760s and 1770s than has generally been assumed. Note, however, that the New England town records show that centralisation, along with other stigmatised features such as r-loss, was part of the colonial feature pool during the 17^th century. 

In sum, the RMS represents an attempt to establish a model of cultivated London English (proto-RP) that was not yet codified. As seen above, a fair number of features of proto-RP have been more faithfully preserved in contemporary General American English. By contrast, RP has since incorporated features that were formerly associated with socially stigmatised varieties of London speech. These innovative features were presumably introduced under the influence of a rising new middle class composed of wealthy artisans and merchants, that is, people sharing the same humble origins as Franklin himself.

7. If Franklin’s reform had actually been adopted, what do you think the long-term impact on English literacy or global English might have been (if any)?

Benjamin Franklin rightly argued that language is in a constant state of flux, and it was on these grounds that he advocated a phonologically based orthography (although the concept had not yet been theorised). In his view, this would have drastically reduced the time required for people having little or no access formal education to learn to read and write. As he noted in his letter to Polly Stevenson of 28 September 1768, literacy might be acquired in a matter of weeks rather than years. At the same time, Franklin was fully aware that such a system would require continual revision, as new pronunciations emerged and older ones fell into disuse.

He maintained that when orthography ceases to correspond to contemporary pronunciation, words risk becoming mere ‘things’, that is, symbols devoid of phonetic substance (as in through, though, thorough, enough). From his perspective, therefore, no permanent, static, spelling system could be justified. For example, his London-influenced representation of the PRICE and CHOICE diphthongs (London ɥi /ʌi/, as opposed to his native Boston [əi ~ ɤi]) would eventually have required modification to forms closer to modern RP and General American /aɪ/ and /ɔɪ ~ o̞ɪ/ respectively. In short, the RMS would have necessitated periodic updating in line with the most prestigious London pronunciations of the time.

Had such a system been adopted, it would likely have produced a far more transparent, consistent, and learnable orthography, with clear pedagogical benefits. It is important to recall, however, that Franklin imagined his 1768 reform would be adopted by all the subjects of the British Empire, of which the American colonies were then an integral part. In this respect, the broader historical context is crucial: had the American War of Independence not occurred, a war he struggled with such energy to avoid (cf. Chapters 6-9, Part I), it is almost certain that middle-class British and American pronunciations would have remained more closely aligned than they are today.

Franklin’s position must also be understood in light of his political and cultural outlook. Many Americans forget that, for most of his life, Franklin was passionate British imperialist who fought strenuously to convince the King’s officials in London that America’s role in the Empire would guarantee England’s economic and geopolitical dominance for centuries to come. From this perspective, his preference for London English as a linguistic model for all English speakers is entirely consistent with his broader intellectual and political commitments.

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