The most pivotal turning point of what would become known as the General American accent was the willingness of the Quakers to share the New World with others from the outset. Early on, the Quakers settled the Delaware Valley alongside a community of Swedes and Finns, who had been part of the New Sweden colony, which had been captured by the Dutch and absorbed into the New Netherland colony. That colony, in turn, ended up being taken over by the British in 1664, who also stuck a “new” moniker (as in New York) on their recently acquired piece of New World heaven.

As settlement of the middle colonies hit its full stride, the diversity of new arrivals and the contact among them appears to have led to a leveling of features to an even greater degree than that occurring elsewhere. Why? Brotherly love, my friend. Unlike the Puritans, who were pretty picky about who settled amongst them, and the Virginians, who were pretty picky about who deserved grants of land, the Quakers were welcoming to all — and come all they did.

In particular, two groups, the Ulster Scots (Scots Irish) and also Palatine Germans coming from the Rhine Valley, started to arrive in large numbers after 1720. These immigrants, who first settled the backcountry of Pennsylvania before pushing farther to the western and southern frontier, brought with them a cultural and linguistic separateness that had an immense impact on the speech of the American heartland.

For instance, from the Scots Irish, we get the now-disappearing but once-prevalent pronoun form “hit” instead of “it” and a very strong dedication to all their “r” sounds. The Scots also contributed to the tendency to make “ow” endings sound more like “er,” as in “feller” for fellow or “winder” for window, along with other traits, like leaning heavily on the “in” pronunciation of the progressive “ing” ending (“goin’,” “huntin’”). And those folk pronunciations comedians play for cheap laughs when imitating so-called rednecks like “thar” for there or “nekkid” for naked? Not mistakes at all — simply older Scots Irish pronunciations retained but stigmatized owing to the less than glowing reputation they attracted, and probably not helped by circulating stories of blood feuds like that which later developed between the Hatfield and McCoy clans.

Even more than their accent, the grammatical contributions the Scots left behind are some we still most recognize today. The Scots gave us phrasing like “the clothes need washed” and a fun desire to stick “uns,” from Scots ane, meaning one, on the back of words as in big’uns and young’uns. They also gifted us the more logical quarter ’til in place of quarter to. Much of this influence played a role in what would become the dialect of the South more generally as Scots Irish settlers and their descendants spread into the backcountry of the Upper and, a bit later, the Lowland South.

On the other hand, the Midland states attracted more German settlement, especially in what became known as the German Belt, an area including upper Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Because of this pattern of upper German/lower Scots settlement, Midland states like Ohio and Illinois are still often noted as having distinct accents associated with their southern and northern sections.

In the Great Lakes region, German mixed with Scandinavian influence from Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish settlers, and this mix is responsible for the Fargo-famous Minnesota accent and the “d” for “th” substituting tendency when rooting for “da” bears in Chicago. And my Ohio-based mother-in-law’s curious habit of saying she brought home “bakery” when referring to the actual cookies and pastries she gets from a bakery (the place), a usage my dialect simply can’t make work? Ja, ein Geschenk (a present) from the Germans! We find a similar meaning as an option for Bäckerei in some dialects of German. Finally, if you’ve ever asked someone if “they want to come with,” this comes from a common German structure in which a prepositional particle (like with) teams up with a verb.

So it is safe to say that worries about English’s certain death from high degrees of foreign immigration are greatly overstated, both in Franklin’s time and our own.

The influence of the Scots Irish and the Germans should not be underestimated: By 1790, about 6% of the total White population was Ulster in origin, with much of it concentrated in certain states like Pennsylvania, where they were about 30% of the population. The Germans too came in substantial numbers, making up around 9% of the population — and another third of Pennsylvania’s residents — by that same date.

As non-English immigrants’ numbers ticked up, Ben Franklin and other notables of the era openly fretted that such linguistic diversity was a threat to the “American” language and the new nation’s identity. In the end, with the exception of the self-isolated German communities that gave rise to Pennsylvania Dutch, a misnomer based on the word Deutsch, which meant “German,” German simply became part of the American dialect landscape.

What Franklin was unaware of was something that modern linguists now know: children learn the language of their peers — no matter what language their parents speak. This means linguistic trouble, but only for their parents’ native tongue. As today with Spanish and English, when one language has higher status, the second generation typically becomes bilingual and, by the third generation, the family loses the heritage language in favor of the new, something known as the three-generation pattern. So it is safe to say that worries about English’s certain death from high degrees of foreign immigration are greatly overstated, both in Franklin’s time and our own.