An Eighteenth-Century Linguistic Borderland
In the eighteenth-century Pennsylvania backcountry, English, Scots-Irish, and German colonials and immigrants met Iroquoian, Algonquian, and Siouan speakers pushed by European settlement or pulled by the Six Nations to buffer Iroquoia. They created a complex, and at times confusing, linguistic landscape. Racial and ethnic diversity was audible, but language was also a permeable boundary. The journals of the Quaker trader James Kenny (1758–59, 1761–63), in manuscript at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and published in this journal nearly a century ago, are remarkable sources that provide insight into intercultural communication and multilingualism amid the overlapping ethnic revitalizations of the Great Awakening and prophetic nativism, pervasive rumors of violence, and warfare.