| Contributing to the discussion of what makes American literature American, I present a method for adopting lexicostatistics to the analysis of contemporary American and British English in order to assess the relative difference between nineteenth-century American and British English, a necessary first step in determining whether or not an American language can account for an American literature. Specifically, I use a computer-assisted analysis of selected word frequency distributions as the means to measure particular present and past lexical patterns for American and British Englishes. Since actual differences between American and British English exceed expected differences, I conclude that a distinct American language could have been responsible for the early nineteenth-century emergence of American literature. |
