Such translations of State laws, however, had already appeared in two of the States, Pennsylvania and Maryland — in the former in 1776, 1778, 1785, 1786 and 1787, and in the latter in 1787. The Germans of Pennsylvania were extraordinarily tenacious of their mother-tongue, and even to this day, as everyone knows, thousands of their descendants still speak it. In 1753, thirty-six years after the beginning of their great influx, Benjamin Franklin wrote to an English friend, Peter Collinson:
Advertisements, intended to be general, are now printed in Dutch [i.e., German] and English. The signs in our streets have inscriptions in both languages, and in some places only German. They begin of late to make their bonds and other legal instruments in their own language, which (though I think it ought not to be) are allowed good in our courts, where German business so increases that there is continued need of interpreters; and I suppose in a few years they will also be necessary in the Assembly, to tell one half of our legislators what the other half say.1
French continued as an active rival to English in Louisiana long after the American flag was run up in 1803. Indeed, its use is still permitted in the courts of the State, though it has been seldom if ever used for some years. The first State constitution, adopted in 1812, was promulgated in both English and French, and it provided that both languages should be used in the publication of the laws. A new constitution, adopted in 1868, abolished the use of French,2 but another, adopted in 1879, permitted the Legislature, at its discretion, to publish the laws in French for the convenience of the French-speaking parishes. Under that discretion they were so published until 1915 or 1916. In New Orleans, of course, English was the language of the courts, but a French newspaper of the city, L’Abeille, lived for years on the revenue derived from printing new laws in French. When French was dropped L’Abeille fell upon evil days, and was eventually absorbed into the Times-Democrat.3 In California and Texas, in the early days, the laws were printed in both English and Spanish, and in New Mexico Spanish is still used. On April 18, 1842, after the beginning of German immigration into Texas, the State Legislature ordained that the laws be printed in German also, and in 1858 it added Norwegian.1 In 1853 a writer in Gleason’s Pictorial reported that the laws of California were being printed, not only in English and Spanish, but also in Chinese, but this seems to have been a false report.2 In New Mexico, until 1941, the Legislature was bilingual and the laws were printed in both English and Spanish.3 Spanish is still permitted in the justices’ courts, the probate court and the district courts of the State, though it has been abolished in the United States district court. There are many Mexicans in New Mexico who cannot speak English, and when they face a jury which includes members who know little or no Spanish it is necessary to employ interpreters for them. I am informed by Mr. Brian Ború Dunne of Santa Fé that these interpreters are not always of ideal competence. He says:
In an embezzlement case in the district court of the First Judicial District, the late and brilliant A. B. Renehan, lawyer of Santa Fé, asked, in addressing the jury: “Who killed Cock Robin?” The interpreter translated this outburst thus: “Quien mató à Cock Robinson?” Mr. Renehan, who was a Spanish scholar, mildly corrected: “I said, ‘who killed Cock Robin!’ ” But the interpreter failed to get it and repeated: “Quien mató à Cock Robinson?”
Mr. Dunne continues:
At political meetings it is customary to call for an interpreter, and the sentences of the so-called orators are usually interpreted between commas thus: “Ladies and Gentlemen, señores y señoras, it gives me great pleasure, me da mucho gusto, this evening, estate noche, to speak to you, di hablar a Ustedes.” Visitors hearing this strange arrangement for the first time usually leave the hall in convulsions, but it is a God-send to reporters who are unfamiliar with shorthand, for it gives them plenty of time to take notes.4
The English tried to wipe out Dutch in New York after the conquest of the colony in 1664, but it carried on an underground existence for many years, and so late as the second half of the Eighteenth Century an English observer was reporting that it was “still so much used in some counties that the sheriffs find it difficult to obtain persons sufficiently acquainted with the English tongue to serve as jurors in the courts of law.”1 Dutch, indeed, was the first language in some of the remoter parts of the Hudson valley until our own time, and also in parts of New Jersey. In Baltimore, down to World War I, there were actually public schools, the so-called German-English schools, in which German was used in the teaching of the elements.
81. [In 1923 bills making the American language official (but never clearly defining it) were introduced in the Legislatures of Illinois, North Dakota, Minnesota and other States. At the same time the Hon. Washington Jay McCormick, then a Republican member of the House of Representatives from Montana, offered a similar bill in Congress.] The text of this bill, along with a statement in support of it by its author, is given in AL4, pp. 81 and 82. It was dealt with jocosely by most of the newspapers that noticed it at all, but a few discussed it more seriously — for example, the Portland Oregonian, which said:
Notwithstanding the obvious chauvinism of the movement, more might be said in its behalf if it were practicable to designate specifically, as the Montana congressman would do, which are the “words and phrases generally accepted as being in good use by the people of the United States.” Right here the difficulty lies. Neither in the United States nor in England is there an equivalent of the French academy as a recognized arbiter of propriety in diction. With certain not very well-defined exceptions, language is with us largely a matter of individual preference. In attempting to separate the sheep from the goats by statutory enactment it is likely that Mr. McCormick has attempted more than he is likely to be able to perform.2
The McCormick bill died in the files of the House judiciary committee, but others substantially like it were offered in the Legislatures of various States. One of them was signed by Governor Len Small of Illinois on June 19, 1923, and went upon the books of the State as Chapter 127, Section 178 of the Acts of the Legislature of that year (albeit with considerable revision). The text of it is given in AL4, pp. 82 and 83.3 Its father was a legislator bearing the ancient Irish name of Ryan, and the Chicago papers, then in the midst of their gory battle with Mayor Big Bill Thompson, professed to see the same Anglophobia in it that prompted his Honor’s historic warning to King George V. The News, when the new law was published, headed a sneering article on it “Illinois State Assembly Adopts Menckenese as Official Language,” and then proceeded to the astonishing disclosure that “the term American language was first substituted for English by the Germans during the war, because of their hatred of all things English.”1 The New York Sun, rather less upset by Big Bill, had thus commented on the act while it was still before the Legislature:
There was a time in American life when it was possible to be both well-fed and 100% American by ordering liberty-cabbage; in these saner times sauerkraut is to be found on the bill-of-fare. Giving a new tag to our language would be just such an adventure in hair-splitting.2
The proposed Minnesota law of 1923, introduced in the State House of Representatives on March 8 by two rural legislators, was reported favorably by the committee on education on April 6, but got no further. It ran as follows:
Section 1. That the official language of the State and people of Minnesota is hereby defined and declared to be the American language.
Section 2. That all laws and parts of laws of this State, including the rules and regulations of the several departments thereof, wherein the printing, speaking, reading, writing or knowledge of the English language is set forth as a requirement for any purpose or use, hereby are amended to the extent of substituting in the text for the word English the word American.
This bill was supported with great vigor by John M. Leonard of St. Paul, president of the American Foundation and founder and business manager of Hail! Columbia, “America’s foremost patriotic magazine,”3 and it also had the countenance of the Hon.
Magnus Johnson, who said a year later: “There will be a day in the near future when there will be only one language in this country — the American,”1 but, as I have said, it failed of passage. Despite this setback the movement continued active in the upper Middle West. In 1927 the Hon. Andrew W. Mellon, then Secretary of Treasury, revived the hopes of its proponents by ordering that the redemption call for the Second Liberty Loan be printed in the American language, and in February, 1934 they got another lift from the Hon. Fred A. Britten of Chicago, who moved in the national House of Representatives that the members of the American corps diplomatique be instructed to carry on their legerdemain in the same. “When an American envoy,” he declared, “begins to lawf and cawf and ape the British, he ought to be brought home and kept here until he speaks the language as we speak it in the United States.”2 Early in 1937 a State senator of North Dakota by the name of the Hon. William A. Thatcher introduced a resolution declaring that American, not English, should be the language of that State thereafter, but though it seems to have been passed by the Senate, it was killed in the House of Representatives.3 So the crusade rested until June 3, 1940, when the Hon. Claude D. Pepper of Florida, in the course of a speech advocated all-out aid to the English and their allies, nevertheless gave formal notice that a resolution he had introduced to that effect was “set down in the American language, in black and white.” A month later the Rochester (N. Y.) Central Trades and Labor Council came to the bat with the following:
Whereas, Since the independence of this country was established we have used a language that carried a misnomer, known as the English language; and
Whereas, We believe no foreign name should be connected with our language;
Therefore, be it resolved, That our representatives in Congress be petitioned to enact a law to the effect, henceforth the language we speak is to be known as the American or United States language.4
Then there was another armistice until April 20, 1944, when the Hon. Edwin B. Roscoe of Passaic, a member of a Model Legislature sponsored in New Jersey by the Y.M.C.A., introduced a bill at the year’s opening session at Trenton providing that “the official language of the State of New Jersey shall be hereafter known as the American language instead of the English language.” What became of this measure I do not know.
8. FOREIGN OBSERVERS
86. [From an early day the peculiarities of American have attracted the attention of Continental philologians, and especially of the Germans]. Among the pioneer writings on the subject were “Die englische Philologie in Nordamerika,” by Dr. Felix Flügel, in Gersdorf’s Repertorium, 1852;1 “Woordenboek van Americanismen,” by M. Keijzer; Gorinchem (Holland), 1854; and “Wörterbuch der Americanismen,” by Friedrich Köhler; Leipzig, 1866. The Keijzer book was based on the first edition of John Russell Bartlett’s “Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States”; Boston, 1848, and that of Köhler on Bartlett’s third edition of 1860.1 Nor was it only in Western Europe that the growing differences between standard English and American were noted in that era. In 1858 Czar Alexander II of Russia ordered that “the American language” be included in the curriculum of the Russian military academies,2 and in 1861 a memorial of the Chinese Prince Kung Ts’in, petitioning his brother, the Emperor Hsien-fung, to establish a Foreign Office on Western lines, asked that men be appointed to its staff who were familiar with English, French and American.3 The first American appointed was William A. P. Martin (1827–1916), an American Presbyterian missionary who had gone out to China in 1850 and lived to be the first president of the Imperial University at Peking.
During the years between the first two World Wars the Germans printed a large number of guides to and studies of American English and there were frequent discussions of it in such learned journals as Anglia, Neueren Sprachen, Anglistische Studien, the Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen, the Giessener Beiträge zur Erforschung der Sprach und Kultur Englands und Nordamerikas, the Neuphilologische Monatsschrift, and the Zeitschrift für französischen und englischen Unterricht. Much of this discussion, of course, consisted only of reviews and summaries of American or English writings on the subject, but there were also some publications embodying original contributions — for example, “Die Volkssprache im Nordosten der Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika,” by Johann Alfred Heil; Breslau, 1927; “Amerikanisches Englisch,” by Hermann U. Meysenbug; Ettlingen and Leipzig, 1929; “A Glossary of Americanisms,” by Dr. H. Mutschmann; Tartu-Dorpat, 1931, and numerous monographs by Dr. Heinrich Spies, Dr. Georg Kartzke and Dr. Walther Fischer. Some of these books and papers are noted in AL4, pp. 85 ff, and others are listed below.4 There was also a large popular literature on the subject, mainly in pamphlet form.1 One of the most curious items thereof was Paustians lustige Sprachzeitschrift für Fortbildung, Nachhilfe und Unterhaltung, a serial published at Hamburg which undertook to teach foreign languages and foreign ways in a painless and even joyous manner by reproducing and expounding comic stories and pictures from foreign publications. On April 25, 1938, for example, it printed on its first page a drawing from the New Yorker, and explained the phrase I guess, which occurred in the legend beneath, thus: “ai gess, amerikanisch für I think = ich glaube, denke, meine.” There was also a considerable interest in American English in Italy before the Italian entrance into World War II,2 and likewise, though to a less extent, in France, Belgium, Russia, Holland and the Scandinavian countries.3 In Holland the lead in American studies has been taken by Dr. R. W. Zandvoort of The Hague, editor of English Studies (Amsterdam), who said in 1934:
Since the Great War it has become increasingly difficult for European teachers and scholars to ignore the fact that different norms of English usage are being evolved in another hemisphere, and that these norms are beginning to encroach on territory where hitherto Standard Southern English has held undisputed sway.… So long as the attitude of educated Americans towards their own form of speech was expressed in the words of Richard Grant White that “just in so far as it deviates from the language of the most cultivated society in England it fails to be English” there was no need for Continental language teachers to take American English seriously. But with its world-wide dissemination through business, literature, the talking film, the gramophone record, on one hand, and the growing determination of Americans to assert their independence in matters of speech on the other, the situation is taking on a different aspect.1
Dr. Zandvoort reported that, at the time he wrote, the majority of Netherlands university pundits, like their opposite numbers in the United States, were still disposed to look down their noses at American English, but that Americanisms were being picked up in large number by their students and that a demand for their consideration in university courses was in the making. Unhappily, the practical difficulty of giving instruction in two forms of the same language was a serious one, especially since Dutch Gymnasium students, by the time they came to English, were already more or less worn out by hard drilling in French, German, Latin and Greek. But Dr. Zandvoort and his fellow advocates of American refused to be daunted. “We look upon American English,” he said, “not as a mere lapse from ‘good’ English, but as a legitimate development, autonomous within its own domain, and from the European point of view subordinate to British English for historical and practical reasons only.”
How the Russians, in 1930, solemnly debated substituting American for English in their schools, on the ground that American is “more democratic” and also more “alive and picturesque,” is set forth in AL4, p. 88, But it was the Japanese who, in the days before Pearl Harbor, took the liveliest interest in American peculiarities of speech, and showed the keenest understanding of their significance. Their philologians, headed by Dr. Sanki Ichikawa, professor of English in Tokyo Imperial University, discussed the subject frequently, at considerable length and with great acumen, both in Studies in English Literature, published by Tokyo University, and in pamphlets and books. In this work they were given active aid
by Western teachers of English resident in Japan, including several Englishmen. Among the latter was H. E. Palmer, linguistic adviser to the Japanese Ministry of Education, who, when he brought out “A Dictionary of English Pronunciation” in 1926, included “With American Variants” in its title, and listed hundreds of them.1 Palmer noted that some of the Americans in Japan managed to achieve a passable imitation of the standard English pronunciation, but for every one who did so, he said, there were “about ten” whose speech remained unmistakably American. Another Englishman in Japan who took cognizance of such differences was Thomas R. G. Lyell, lecturer in English at Waseda University and the Tokyo Foreign Language School, whose “Slang, Phrase and Idiom in Colloquial English and Their Use,” listed many Americanisms.2 There were also a large number in “English Influence on Japanese,” by Professor Ichikawa,3 and yet more in “An Introduction to the Study of Loan-Words in Modern Japanese,” by Sawbay Arakawa.4 In 1930 G. Tomita brought out “English and American of Today,”5 which not only discussed the differences between the English and American vocabularies, but also gave an account of the grammar of vulgar American. Finally, Satoshi Ichiya, a well-known Japanese journalist, set English and American in direct apposition in “King’s English or President’s English?,”6 and decided that the Japanese had better learn American. Ichiya, who wrote in English, was educated at the University of London, and confessed to a nostalgic attachment to English speech-ways, but he concluded that “in an academic discussion of this nature it is not right to allow one’s personal sentiment to carry away with it one’s sense of truth.” He went on:
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