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The second open-access monograph in the Publications of the Philological Society has just come out, in two volumes: Gary D. German, Benjamin Franklin: Orthoepist and Phonetician —

Vol. 1: Language, Literacy and Social Mobility in Franklin’s World.
Vol. 2: Colonial American Voices and London Norms: Franklin’s Quest for an Orthographic Reform.

And the Philological Society Blog has an interview with the author. Here's the start of his answer to the initial interview question "about his research process and discoveries":

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.

[…]

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 17th– and 18th-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.

The Philological Society offers this information about the author.

Gary D. (Manchec) German is a dual French and American national. Born in Paris, he was raised in a multilingual household with family roots in Finistère, Lancashire, North Wales, and the United States (Massachusetts and Virginia). He holds two PhDs (in Breton dialectology and in the sociolinguistics/linguistics of Welsh English) and an Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (English sociolinguistics). He is Emeritus Professor of English at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale, Brest, where he taught English phonology and grammar, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics from 1999 to 2018. He has been a member of the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (UBO) for over forty-five years. In this capacity, he taught Breton historical phonology, Breton dialectology and Middle Welsh literature. Previously, he taught English language and linguistics at the Universities of Nantes, Poitiers as well as French and English at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

For another angle on Benjamin Franklin as a linguist, see this detailed account of his (mostly political) relationship with Sir William Jones:  Garland Cannon, "Sir William Jones and Anglo-American Relations during the American Revolution",  Modern Philology 1978.

 

May 19, 2026 @ 7:11 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Language and history, Phonetics and phonology

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