There were serious questions about whether English would hold throughout the new United States. There’d never been a native language that stretched over such a large distance as the expanding United States without splitting apart. That it worked—that Virginians spoke the same language as Californians—can be credited to the settlement boom, which swiftly propelled a fairly homogeneous population over a vast expanse. The same wagons and trains that carried the settlers carried the language, too, which survived the long journey with only minor mutations.
