Why do North Americans say ‘gotten’? Evidence from Canadian dialects

On 22 February, 2024, Sali Tagliamonte (University of Toronto) will present research on "Why do North Americans say ‘gotten’? Evidence from Canadian dialects". The talk will be followed by a light drinks reception and dinner with the speaker. To RSVP for the dinner, please, complete this google form. All are welcome!

Talk: Why do North Americans say ‘gotten’? Evidence from Canadian dialects

The use of the verb form gotten as the past participle of ‘got’ has a contested pedigree in North America. For American English, a long-standing view is that it is an historical retention from the original British founders (e.g. Curme, 1927; Marckwardt, 1958; Mencken, 1962). In contrast, more recent research argues that it was a 20th century revival driven by mainstream ideology. To date, no studies have considered vernacular dialect data and none to my knowledge have considered Canadian English, the other major North American variety. 

This study examines the variation between got and gotten using speech data from the province of Ontario that spans more than 100 years in apparent-time comprising individuals with birthdates from the late 1800’s to the early 2001’s covering the time period in which gotten is thought to have emerged in the United States. The data are socially stratified by age, sex, occupation, education and represent a continuum of urban to small and remote communities enabling the analyst to probe intersecting geographic, social and linguistic factors. 

Comparative sociolinguistic methods and mixed effects modelling using R (2007) reveal that the form have got was dominant among individuals in the early period and gotten emerged in the 20 th century in the same time frame that it was revived in the United States consistent with the findings of Hundt (2009) and Anderwald (2020) . The key question is what propelled this development? In the US, American “honor” is thought to have created a drive towards making American English distinct from British English. In Canada however there was no comparable endonormative sentiment. Another possibility suggested by Anderwald (2020) , following Jespersen (1933) , is that gotten was the result of influence from Scots-Irish founders who would have used gotten. However, the developmental trajectory in Ontario shows no heightened use of gotten in Scots-Irish dominant communities. Instead, there is a strong and overarching correlation of gotten with females, more education and larger communities, especially Toronto, the capital and urban centre of the province, arguing for a change from above. 

In sum, the Canadian evidence confirms that gotten cannot simply be historical retention, further debunking the myth of American conservatism but implicating American influence on Canadian dialects. More broadly, the rise of gotten in North America can take its place among other changes from above in grandstanding the strong and important influence of metalinguistic discourses and ideology in language change (e.g. Anderwald, 2013; Hinrichs et al., 2015) .

Selected References:

Anderwald, L. (2020). The myth of American English gotten as a historical retention. In Kytö, M. & Smitterberg, E. (Eds.), Late Modern English: Novel Encounters. Amsterdam and New York: John Benjamins. 68-90.

Curme, G. O. (1927). Gotten. American Speech 2(12): 495-496.

Hinrichs, L., Szmrecsanyi, B. & Bohmann, A. (2015). Which-hunting and the standard English relative clause. Language 91(4).

Hundt, M. (2009). Colonial lag, colonial innovation or simply language change? . In Rohdenburg, G. & Schlüter, J. (Eds.), One Language - Two Grammars? Differences between British and American English, . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 13-37.

Jespersen, O. H. (1933). A modern English grammar on historical principles: Part VI: Syntax. London: George Allen & Unwin.