In Canada it prevails everywhere west of Montreal, and even to the eastward, as we have seen in Section 2, the flat a is dominant along the American border. The so-called Bluenose dialect of “the whole of New Brunswick and the greater part of Nova Scotia outside Halifax”142 has affinities with the common speech of rural New England, but the early settlers of Ontario came mainly from New York and Pennsylvania, and those of the western regions have been principally American Middle Westerners, with admixtures of Germans, Scandinavians, Finns and Russians. In Ontario, the broad a “is never heard in aunt and rather,” but the flat a is occasionally heard even in father.143 Throughout Canada, of course, the American vocabulary is dominant. Its neologisms are frequently denounced by patriotic Canadians with an eye on London, but even the statesmen of the Dominion now employ it in their deliberations. Said the Ottawa Journal in a recent editorial on the subject:
With the disappearance of Gladstonian haberdashery and frock coats, ponderosity of language could no longer be properly sustained, and now antiquarians can trace but the faintest vestiges in the Senate chamber. The stimulus of Burke’s orations and classical English speech has given place to the stimulus of Hollywood and the air waves.144
In Bermuda, rather curiously, the General American flat a is used by the upper classes, and is a sign of social consequence, whereas the Negroes employ the broad English a and are looked down upon for doing so. Says Dr. Harry Morgan Ayres:
I am not prepared to draw with precision the line demarking socially the distribution of this sound. I can only say that my hostess used [the flat a] consistently, even in calm, and her Negro maid, aged nineteen, used [the broad a] with a distribution historically absolutely accurate. How far up the social scale [the broad a] has penetrated I cannot say; I suspect it has gone further in St. George than elsewhere in the islands. In this respect Bermuda presents us with an exact picture of what it is necessary to suppose English of the Seventeenth and early Eighteenth Centuries to have been. It presumably represents the distribution of the sounds which the settlers brought with them, and which they only among English emigrant communities have preserved.145
The r is sounded in Bermuda before consonants and in the terminal position by all classes, save in a few words, e.g., shirker, stern, perfectly, first and further. “It appears to be present in sufficient quantity,” says Dr. Ayres, “to require belief that the English immigrants brought it with them, as they brought it likewise to the American Continent.” In the West Indies, including the Bahamas, an exaggerated form of Southern English prevails among the blacks, with a very broad a dominant. Their white overlords speak Southern English too, but in a more restrained manner, and with touches, now and then, of Lowland Scotch.
In Hawaii there has arisen a dialect of American that is confined to the islands, and is full of interesting peculiarities. Its basis seems to be Beach-la-Mar, the common trade speech of the Western Pacific, in which, for many years past, there have been a number of terms of American origin, e.g., alligator, boss, pickaninny, schooner and tomahawk,146 but since English began to be taught in the Hawaiian schools in 1853, and especially since the American annexation of the islands in 1898, this crude jargon has moved in the direction of Standard American, and today it is very far from its humble beginnings. The original Beach-la-Mar, considerably changed by Chinese influence, still survives,147 but it is spoken only by “the immigrant generation of Orientals and Latins, and some elderly native Hawaiians.”148 The other non-American inhabitants, whether Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, Portuguese, Porto Ricans, Filipinos or native Hawaiians, speak the dialect aforesaid, in varieties ranging from something rising but little above Beach-la-Mar to something hard to distinguish from the speech of native Americans.149 It is used, in one form or other, by probably two-thirds of the people of the islands. It resembles vulgar American in its disregard of grammatical niceties, but its vocabulary differs considerably from the speech of the mainland. Many familiar words and phrases, e.g., to pitchfork, small potatoes and to go the whole hog, are omitted because the objects to which they refer are unfamiliar in Hawaii; other common expressions have been changed in meaning, e.g., bogus has come to mean boastful or a boaster, meat signifies only beef, and by a confusion between laboratory and lavatory, lab has come to mean the latter. There are, of course, many loan-words from Hawaiian and the non-English immigrant languages, e.g., aloha (farewell), haole (a white of Germanic blood), kuleana (a small land-holding) and wikiwiki (quickly) from the Hawaiian; jabon (the shaddock), hekka (a popular stew), and mama-san (an old Japanese woman) from the Japanese; stay (from esta, meaning is) from the Portuguese; kaukau (food) from the Chinese; and bagoong (a shrimpy sauce) from one of the Filipino languages. In addition, there are a number of survivals from Beach-la-Mar, still in wide use, e.g., the use of been as “the common device to express past time of action,” the use of one as the indefinite article, and the use of humbug in the sense of bother. The different races speaking the dialect have borrowed or invented various more or less opprobrious names for one another, e.g., dog-eater for Hawaiian, baccaliaos (codfish) for a Portuguese, yabo (from the Japanese) for a Korean. A recent Japanese immigrant is a Japan jack, and his brother from China is a China jack. The reduplication of words for intensification has been taken over from Hawaiian, e.g., talk-talk and fight-fight. In a number of cases words of similar sound have been confused, with resulting change in the meaning of one or both. Thus slide is commonly pronounced sly, to sly is to slide, and as an adjective sly means slippery. Similarly, to bob has been related (not illogically) to barber, and transformed into to barb. The parts of speech are often interchanged, e.g., taxi signifies the driver as well as his vehicle, a stupid person is a dumb, hungry is used in place of hunger, and politeness serves as adjective instead of polite. Within the confines of any given part of speech there is a disregard of small shades of difference in meaning. Thus, “there was much people, but they had few money.”
The tendency to reduce all the tenses of the verb to a sort of historical present, so marked in vulgar American, goes the full way in the Hawaiian dialect. The auxiliaries been and stay, taken over from Beach-la-Mar and borrowed from Portuguese respectively, serve in lieu of tense inflections, at least in the easier sorts of discourse. Thus, “I been eat” means “I have eaten,” and “Us stay sweating” means “We are sweating” or “We were sweating,” according to the context. The final s is commonly omitted from the third person singular in the present tense, there is a hopeless confusion between the preterite and perfect participle, and to is often dropped before the infinitive, as in “I like go.” In the use of the pronoun all the confusions between case-forms that occur in vulgar American are encountered, and in addition two forms are sometimes joined, as in “Me I will go.” There is also some confusion in number, as in “Take these flowers and put it in a vase.” The noun, in the genitive, seldom shows the final ’s. The common form is “They stayed at Hirata,” not “at Hirata’s.” The noun also loses s in the plural. The article is frequently omitted altogether, and one is often used in place of a. Sometimes a is used in the plural. Among the prepositions there is chaos. Sometimes a preposition is omitted, as in “The horse stepped [on] him”; sometimes it is put where it doesn’t belong, as in “I attend to school”; and sometimes the wrong one is used, as in “We walked till Haina.” The adverbs also suffer severely. Both adverbs and adjectives are placed before the subject when emphasis is desired, and after the interrogatives what and where the verb also precedes the subject. Conjunctions are often omitted between two members of a series, and when a sentence closes with a preposition the preposition is sometimes forgotten. The articulation of those who speak this dialect is reasonably clear, but they have a habit of prolonging stressed vowels, and of clipping unstressed vowels and all consonants. “Sometimes it is difficult for an ear trained to Mainland American speech to catch words because of the comparative rapidity of utterance. There is little drawling, even where there is hesitation; the speed and pitch of ut
terance remind us more of the British norm than of the American.”150 But British influence upon the dialect, of course, is actually infinitesimal. It is a form of American English, and in the course of time it will probably come closer and closer to everyday vulgar American. Since 1896 all the public schools of the islands have been conducted in American English, and every other language currently in use, including Hawaiian, shows signs of dying out.
Those Filipinos who have acquired American English in the public schools of the archipelago do it less violence than the Hawaiians, but nevertheless they make changes in it. It is most unusual for one of them to speak it well. For one thing, they learn it mainly, not by hearing it, but out of books, and under the tutelage of teachers who have learned it in the same way.151 For another thing, it is full of sounds that are strange to their lips, and are not easily mastered, e.g., those of th, sh, f, v, j and z. Thus they commonly convert there into dare, thin into tin, she into see, flea into plea, verb into herb, jelly into chelly, zig-zag into sig-sog, is into iss, and has into hass. They are unable to pronounce combinations of s with t, p, l or k without prefixing e, so that student becomes estudent, space becomes espace, sleep becomes esleep, and skate becomes eskate. The word Filipino, as they utter it, sounds much like Pilipino. The combination of m or n with d is also difficult for them, as is the combination of l and d, so they commonly omit the d in such words as blamed, chained and failed. The r is always heavily trilled. The vowels are easier for them, save the flat a of am, but they often confuse one with another, and in writing they give all the vowels Spanish values, so that chick becomes cheek and shed becomes shade.152 According to Dr. H. Otley Beyer, professor of ethnology in the University of the Philippines, the Filipinos speak no less than 87 languages and dialects, but nearly all of them belong to the Tagala branch of the Malayo-Polynesian family, and show the same general characters. For example, they all put the accent on the penultimate syllable in many common words. Inasmuch as Spanish does the same the natives are inclined to carry that accent into English, and in consequence they often say probábly, charácter and distribúting. Even when they do not push the accent all the way, they move it a step, thus producing such forms as dyséntery and vegétable. They also carry many Tagala idioms into English. Thus, the answer to a negative question is an affirmative, e.g., “Have you no bananas?” “Yes.” The affirmative is also used in answering a question embodying alternatives, and applies to the one mentioned last, e.g., the reply to “Do you prefer meat or fish” is “Yes,” meaning “I prefer fish.” This Filipino English will probably not long survive the American withdrawal from the islands. It is “essentially a bookish language, a language of learning, somewhat in the sense that Latin was the language of learning in the Middle Ages,” and not many natives have ever got sufficient command of it to speak it voluntarily and naturally.153 Article XIII, Section 3 of the Philippine Constitution provides that it is to be supplanted as soon as possible, along with Spanish, by “a common national language based on one of the existing native languages.”
The American spoken by Americans in the Philippines shows a large admixture of Spanish and Tagala words and phrases, just as the American spoken in Hawaii is shot through with terms borrowed from Hawaiian. But in both cases it is pronounced according to the General American pattern, and there are no changes in its grammar and syntax. Here is a specimen from Manila:
Hola, amigo.
Komusta kayo.
Porque were you hablaing with ese señorita?
She wanted a job as lavandera.
Cuanto?
Ten cents, conant, a piece, so I told her no kerry.
Have you had chow? Well, spera, till I sign this chit and I’ll take a paseo with you.154
In this brief dialogue there are eight loan-words from the Spanish (hola, amigo, porque, ese, señorita, lavandera, cuanto and paseo), two Spanish locutions in a debased form (spera for espera and no kerry for no quiero), two loan-words from the Tagala (komusta and kayo),155 two from the Pidgin English of the China coast (chow and chit), one Philippine-American localism (conant), and a Spanish verb with an English inflection (hablaing). The following is from an article on Hawaiian English in the Christian Science Monitor:156
“Are you pau?” asks the American housekeeper of her Japanese yard-man.
“All pau,” he responds.
The housekeeper has asked if the yard-man is through. He has replied that he is. Pau — pronounced pow — conveys just as much meaning to the Honolulan as the English157 word through.
In Honolulu one does not say “the northwest corner of Fork and Hotel streets.” One says “the makai-ewa corner.” Makai means toward the sea. Ewa means toward the north or in the direction of the big Ewa plantation which lies toward the north of Honolulu. Thus the makai-ewa corner means that corner which is on the seaward side and toward Ewa. Instead of saying east or the direction in which the sun rises, Honolulans say mauka, which means toward the mountains. To designate south, they say waikiki, which means toward Diamond Head or Waikiki Beach.
One often hears a little boy say he has a puka in his stocking. The housekeeper directs the yard-man to put the rubbish in the puka. It is a Hawaiian word meaning hole. Another common word is lanai. In English it means porch or veranda. The two words pahea oe are used as a term of greeting. In the States they say, “How do you do?” “How are you?” or “Good Day.” In Honolulu, “Pahea oe?” conveys the same meaning. The response is “Maikai no,” or “Very good,” or “All right.”
At two other places under the American flag dialects of English flourish. One is Key West and the other is the Virgin Islands. The Key West dialect is Southern American showing the influence of Bahaman English and Cuban Spanish. The i is frequently given its Spanish sound, especially in proper names, so that Olivia becomes Oleevia. The a, before g, is transformed into a short i, so that bag becomes big and rag becomes rig. The w and v are exchanged, so that west becomes vest, and visit becomes wisit. The h is treated in the Cockney manner, so that horse becomes orse and the letter l is called hell. Ain’t is often used in place of won’t or haven’t. The -ed ending is omitted from the past tense forms of the verbs. Many Spanish idioms are translated literally, e.g., Quantos años tiene? which becomes “How many years you got?” There are many loan-words from the Spanish, and the inhabitants have invented the usual opprobrious terms for one another, e.g., conch (a West Indian), and saw (a native of Nassau).158 The Virgin Islands dialect, of course, is not American, but English. Basically, it is simply the English of the late Seventeenth Century, but there are many Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and Danish loan-words, and some vestiges of the West Coast African dialects. The phonology shows Danish influence. Among the special characters are the omission of s before consonants, so that stocking becomes tocking, and the use of a collective pronoun, a-wee, corresponding to the Southern American us-all.159 This jargon is spoken not only in the Virgin Islands, but also in the British Lesser Antilles, in Dutch Saba and in French St. Martin, of course with local variations. A somewhat analogous dialect, but much less like Standard English, is spoken in Dutch Guiana, on the South American mainland.160
1 Introduction to the Science of Language, 4th ed., London, 1900, Vol. II, p. 339.
2 For example, A Grammar of Spoken English, by H. E. Palmer; Cambridge, 1922. George O. Curme’s College English Grammar; Richmond, Va., 1925, a popular text by a distinguished American philologian, is founded on “the English language as spoken and written today,” p. iv.
3 Daniel Jones: The Pronunciation of English, 2nd ed.; Cambridge, 1914, p. 1. Jones is a professor of phonetics at University College, London.
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