American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  My own guess, disregarding this nonsense about adenoids, is that Americans, taking one with another, speak more distinctly than Englishmen largely because their speechways were molded, for four generations, by Noah Webster’s famous Spelling Book. From 1783, when it was first published, until the beginning of the Twentieth Century, when the wizards of Teachers College, Columbia, began supplanting it with spellers of their own, it was the most widely circulated book in the country,1 and the most influential. Indeed, it was the only work on language that the average American ever saw, or even heard of. It had no traffic with slurring, but insisted that all words be pronounced as Jahveh had spelled them out to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or to the sons of Noah after the Flood.2 Webster gave secretary four syllables, and noted that there was what he called “a half accent” on the third;3 he insisted upon full r’s in such words as far, fire and fore, hard, heart and cargo; he frowned upon pronouncing actual as actshual, aperture as apertshure and bounteous as bountcheous, and he even insisted upon spelling pronunciations in such proper names as Norfolk, Thames and Greenwich.4

  But though he was thus very influential in fixing the national standards of pronunciation in rather rigid molds, he was only giving voice and momentum to what was really a spontaneous natural tendency. The Americans, taking one with another, were a highly matter of fact people, and could see nothing save folly in the affected pronunciations that became fashionable in England during the latter half of the Eighteenth Century. Those pronunciations arose in the court circles of London, were adopted by the more pretentious sort of actors, and were propagated and given standing by the pronouncing dictionaries of Thomas Sheridan (1780) and John Walker (1791), both of whom had been actors and teachers of elocution before they put on the shroud of the lexicographer.1 But in the United States such dubious authorities were combatted earnestly and even with some violence (despite a few concessions) by the peppery Webster, and in consequence they were impeded in making converts for their stretched vowels and macerated consonants. American speechways went back to an earlier and less self-conscious era,2 and remained more logical and rational. If the people of the young Republic were influenced at all by relatively recent English precept and example it was by the movement toward spelling-pronunciations which antedated by half a century the rage for actorial affectations. Their speech was thus marked by clarity,1 and not only by clarity but also by a high degree of uniformity, so that nearly all the English travelers who ventured into the country after the Revolution were struck by the comparative absence of class and regional dialects. These Englishmen, accustomed to being beset by what they regarded as gross barbarisms the moment they got out of the ambits of the court, the theatres and the two universities at home, were astonished to discover that nearly all Americans talked alike, on the lower as well as the higher levels of society, and that their talk was generally clear and hence easily understood. There were, of course, some differences, and Webster himself often gave evidence that he was a New Englander and not a Southerner, but such differences were not numerous and none were important. Save, in fact, for a few oddities in vocabulary, it was perfectly possible to understand any man encountered along the road, even in the Far South or beyond the Alleghanies, and there was nothing anywhere that could be reasonably compared to the gnarled and difficult local dialects of Somerset, Lancastershire and Yorkshire, to say nothing of Scotland and Wales, or of proletarian London.2

  Allen Walker Read has devoted two of his valuable studies in the history of American English to the observations of these travelers and of other Eighteenth Century Englishmen.3 The first to discourse upon the subject was probably Hugh Jones, a clerical pedagogue who spent the years from 1716 to 1721 at William and Mary College in Virginia, and while there wrote “An Accidence of the English Tongue” that was the first grammar-book ever begotten on American soil. In another work, “The Present State of Virginia,” he testified that “the planters and even the native Negroes generally talk good English, without idiom or tone.”1 This was confirmed forty years later by a Scotsman of noble birth, Lord Adam Gordon, who made a progress through the colonies in 1764 and 1765. In Philadelphia, he said, “the propriety of language surprised me much, the English tongue being spoken by all ranks in a degree of purity and perfection surpassing any but the polite part of London.” Five years afterward came William Eddis, who wrote home on June 8, 1770:

  In England almost every county is distinguished by a peculiar dialect,… but in Maryland and throughout the adjacent provinces … a striking similarity of speech universally prevails, and it is strictly true that the pronunciation of the generality of the people has an accuracy and elegance that cannot fail of gratifying the most judicious ear.

  The colonists are composed of adventurers not only from every district of Great Britain and Ireland, but from almost every other European government. Is it not, therefore, reasonable to suppose that the English language must be greatly corrupted by such a strange intermixture of various nations? The reverse is, however, true. The language of the immediate descendants of such a promiscuous ancestry is perfectly uniform and unadulterated, nor has it borrowed any provincial or national accent from its British or foreign parentage.…

  This uniformity … prevails not only on the coast, where Europeans form a considerable mass of the people, but likewise in the interior parts, where population has made but slow advances, and where opportunities seldom occur to derive any great advantages from an intercourse with intelligent strangers.

  Such testimonies continued until near the end of the century, when the London reviews launched that ill-humored war upon American speechways which has gone on ever since, with prudent truces every time a pressing need for Yankee bayonets has made it impolitic to be too critical of Yankee talk.2 Even the unhappy success of the Revolution, though it left some bitterness, did not provoke the attack, for the English, during the decade following Yorktown, seem to have entertained some hope that the wayward colonies might return, and, in any case, regarded them disdainfully in the rôle of political and commercial rivals. Indeed, there were Englishmen who spoke favorably of American speech while the struggle was actually going on, and one of them was the otherwise bitterly anti-American Jonathan Boucher,1 who wrote on December 23, 1777 that “in North America there prevails not only, I believe, the purest pronunciation of the English tongue that is anywhere to be met with, but a perfect uniformity.” On July 19 of the same year one Nicholas Cresswell, who came out in 1774 and remained three years, wrote that “though the inhabitants of this country are composed of different nations and different languages, yet it is very remarkable that they in general speak better English than the English do.” “No country or colonial dialect is to be distinguished here,” he went on, “except it be the New Englanders, who have a sort of whining cadence that I cannot describe.” So late as 1791 the editor of an English reprint of Dr. David Ramsay’s “History of the American Revolution” was moved to say in his preface:

  It is a curious fact that there is perhaps no one portion of the British empire in which two or three millions of persons are to be found who speak their mother tongue with greater purity or a truer pronunciation than the white inhabitants of the United States. This was attributed, by a penetrating observer, to the number of British subjects assembled in America from various quarters, who, in consequence of their intercourse and intermarriages, soon dropped the peculiarities of their several provincial idioms, retaining only what was fundamental and common to them all – a process which the frequency or rather the universality of school-learning in America must naturally have assisted.2

  This Englishman’s surmise as to the cause of the uniformity of speech visible in the United States is supported by the fact that immigration from one State or another has been active since the earliest days. The case of Ramsay, noted below, was not unusual even before the Revolution, and today it is a commonplace of observation that the population of the big cities is made up largely of native Americans born elsewhere,
and to a considerable extent in distant States.1 But the early levelling of dialects was more than a mere amalgamation, for the resultant general speech of the country was influenced much more by several of the British dialects than by all the rest. Which of these dialects had the greatest weight has been discussed at length without any unanimous agreement, but the preponderance of opinion seems to be that American English, at least in the North, got most of its characters from the speech of the southeastern counties of England. “While every one of the forty counties,” said John Fiske in “The Beginnings of New England,”2 “was represented in the great Puritan exodus, the East Anglican counties contributed to it far more than all the rest. Perhaps it would not be far out of the way to say that two-thirds of the American people who can trace their ancestry to New England might follow it back to the East Anglican shires of the mother-country; one-sixth might follow it to those southwestern counties – Devonshire, Dorset and Somerset – which so long were foremost in maritime enterprise; one-sixth to other parts of England.” This is confirmed by Anders Orbeck, whose study of the Seventeenth Century town records of Massachusetts3 leads him to conclude that if “Essex, Middlesex, and London, as well as Norfolk, Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire” are included in the East Anglican counties, slightly over 71% of the pioneers of Plymouth, Watertown and Dedham who can be traced came from that area. Further confirmation is provided by Read, who has shown that the Americans of the early Eighteenth Century were quick to notice peculiarities in the speech of recent immigrants from the British Isles, but saw nothing to remark in that of those who came from east of Wiltshire or south of the Wash.1

  Orbeck, in the monograph just mentioned, rehearses the contrary speculations of some of the earlier writers on the subject. In 1885 Senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, then president of the American Antiquarian Society, read at its annual meeting a paper in which he not only sought to show that the speech of New England was based upon that of Kent, but also argued that the same county, which he described as “the England of England,” was the source of many other salient traits of the New England culture.2 Hoar cited many familiar New England terms in support of his contention, e.g., slick for sleek, be for am, grub (food), to argufy, biddy (a chicken), to bolt (food), and brand-new, but he ran these terms no further back than William Holloway’s “General Dictionary of Provincialisms” of 1839, and his own evidence showed that many of them were also to be found in Sussex. A year later, before the same audience, his conclusions were challenged by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who used the second edition of Francis Grose’s “Provincial Glossary,” 1790, and the supplement thereto, published as an appendix to the second edition of Samuel Pegge’s “Anecdotes of the English Language,” 1814.3 Higginson rejected all of Hoar’s evidence, and argued that American English showed very strong North Country influences. Of the terms that he investigated, he said, 109 came from that region, and only 18 from southeastern England. “The proportion of North Country words.” he concluded, “is absolutely overwhelming,” and many of them were also to be found in “the Lowland Scots of Scott and Burns.”1

  Years later a Scottish specialist in mythology, Lewis Spence, convinced himself that “the English spoken in the United States is to a great extent merely the popular Midland English of the Seventeenth Century brought more or less up to date by constant communication with the parent country, yet retaining more of the vocalization of the older form by reason of a certain degree of isolation.” Spence admitted that he also found traces of influence from Norfolk and even from Cornwall, but insisted that the Midlands were the chief source, and professed to find evidences of Danish coloring, stretching back to the Ninth Century.2 But the preponderance of opinion among writers on the subject has always inclined toward the East Anglican theory of American speech origins, which is supported more or less by many familiar New England place-names, e.g., Yarmouth, Ipswich, Haverhill and the nearby (in England) Cambridge and Boston. A good example is offered by Schele de Vere. In his “Americanisms: the English of the New World,” he declared flatly that the early New England immigrants brought from Norfolk and Suffolk “not only their words, which the Yankee still uses, but also a sound of the voice and a mode of utterance which have been faithfully preserved, and are now spoken of as the ‘New England drawl’ and ‘the high, metallic ring of the New England voice.’ ”3 In another place, in speaking of Southern American speech, he said that its disregard for the letter r should be laid upon “the shoulders of the guilty forefathers, many of whom came from Suffolk and the districts belonging to the East Anglians.”4

  Hans Kurath, editor of the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, agrees with this in so far as the coastal South is concerned. “Like the seaboard of New England,” he says, “the Tidewater region of Virginia received most of its early population from Southeastern England.”1 But he holds that the speech of the areas back from the seacoast shows the influence of “Scotch-Irish who spoke … the English of the Lowlands of Scotland or the North of England as modified by the Southern English standard.” This, however, is not borne out by an investigation undertaken by Cleanth Brooks, Jr., who shows in “The Relation of the Alabama-Georgia Dialect to the Provincial Dialects of Great Britain”2 that relatively few of the vowel and consonant forms now to be found in the area examined are also encountered in the Scottish and northern English dialects, but that 93% of the former and 95% of the latter are highly characteristic of southwestern (not southeastern) England. Though, says Brooks,

  the agreement between the southwest dialects and the Alabama-Georgia dialect in a few particulars might be explained as accidental, their agreement in many – indeed, in nearly every instance in which the Alabama-Georgia dialect differs from standard English – makes any explanation on the basis of a merely accidental relationship untenable.… This is not to say for a moment, of course, that the Alabama-Georgia dialect is the dialect of Somerset or Devon, but the fact that the former, wherever it deviates from standard English, deviates with the latter, indicates that it has been strongly colored by it.3

  He goes on:

  Whereas historical corroboration is lacking, there is nothing in the theory of southwest country influence which runs counter to the known facts. The southwest counties are coast counties and were from Elizabethan times active in exploration and colonization. Of the two companies founded in 1606 for the settlement of Virginia, one was composed of men from Bristol, Exeter and Plymouth.

  The area studied by Brooks is a relatively small one, but I think it may be taken as typical of the whole lowland South,4 saving only Tidewater and the bayou region of Louisiana. He follows Krapp1 in holding that in this area “the speech of the Negro and of the white is essentially the same” and that what are commonly regarded as “specifically Negro forms” are only “older English forms which the Negro must have taken originally from the white man, and which he has retained after the white man has begun to lose them.”2 To this another highly competent Southern observer, W. Cabell Greet, agrees. “As the Negro,” he says, “has preserved the Methodist and Baptist camp-meeting hymns of a century ago in his spirituals, English dances in his clogs and jigs and reels, so he has kept old ways of speech.”3 Tidewater Southern differs in many ways from this bi-racial lingo but Greet shows that it is confined to a relatively limited area, radiating from the lowlands to such inland islands as Richmond, Charlottesville and the northern Shenandoah valley, but hardly extending beyond. The rest of the South, until one comes to the mountains, the French areas of Louisiana and the cattle country to the westward, follows the patterns described by Brooks. Tidewater Southern, like the dialect of the narrow Boston area and that of the lower Hudson valley, appears to have been considerably influenced by the fashionable London English of the Eighteenth Century. The reason is obvious. These regions, from the earliest days, maintained a closer contact with England than the other parts of the country, and their accumulation of wealth filled them with social aspiratio
n and made them especially responsive to upper-class example. The Civil War shifted the money of the South from Tidewater to the Piedmont, but the conservative lowland gentry continued faithful to the speechways acquired in their days of glory, and the plain people followed them. But all the more recent intrusions of English ways of speech have entered in the Boston and New York areas and on the level of conscious Anglomania.4

  There remains the speech of the overwhelming majority of Americans – according to some authorities, at least 95,000,000 of the 140,000,000 inhabitants of the continental United States. It is called Northern American by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott,1 Western or General American by George Philip Krapp,2 Middle Western by many lay writers,3 and American Standard by George L. Trager,4 and is described by the last named as “the pronunciation … of the whole country except the old South, New England and the immediate vicinity of New York city.” More, it is constantly spreading, and two of its salient traits, the flat a and the clearly sounded r, are making heavy inroads in the territories once faithful to the broad a and the silent r. “Only in the immediate neighborhood of Boston and in the greater part of New Hampshire and Maine,” says Bernard Bloch,5 “is the so-called Eastern pronunciation universal,” and even in this region there are speech-islands in which it is challenged. New England west of the Connecticut river now belongs predominantly to the domain of General American, and so does all of New York State save the suburbs of New York, and all the rest of the country save the late Confederate States. Even the dialect of Appalachia, though it differs from General American, differs from it less than it differs from any regional variety.