A curious speech-pocket has been reported on the Hilliard Flats in a valley in the Southwestern corner of the State, near the Utah line.4 The inhabitants of this remote region are the descendants of English coal-miners who got converted to Mormonism in the early 80s, came to Utah in search of salvation, and were put to work in coal-mines not far from their present home. In 1895 there was an explosion in the mines which killed about a hundred of them, and the rest departed for Hilliard Flats, resolved to become farmers. Their speech still shows signs of their English origin. They drop their h’s, add a final r to such words as law, and preserve a number of Briticisms, especially of the Nottinghamshire dialect, e.g., dag, a helping; to dout, to put out a fire; hillins, bed-clothing; to marb, to growl or grumble; to piggle, to pull or tug nervously; to siden, to put in order, and to teem, to pour from one vessel into another. They use sempt for seemed, tret for treated and wed for weeded.
Alaska
The Klondike gold rush of 1897 made all Americans familiar with a number of Alaskan terms, e.g., sourdough and to mush, but few if any of them originated in Alaska. Some came from the Indian languages or from Eskimo or Aleut, others were heritages from the French-Canadian trappers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and yet others were simply Western mining terms.5 After Pearl Harbor there was another and vastly larger influx of Americans made up of soldiers and construction workers, and the population of the Territory is now much greater than it was in 1940. Inasmuch as these newcomers hail from all parts of the United States, the local speech has become inordinately mixed and its earlier vocabulary has been enriched both by importations and by neologisms coined on the spot. One of the latter appears to be no-see-um, a biting insect too small to be seen.1 Of the survivors from pre-Pearl Harbor days a good example is mukluk, defined in an advertisement of an Army supply house as boots made of tanned leather bottoms and canvas-duck tops, with a heavy felt lining and a laminated felt and leather sole.2 Mr. Charles F. Dery, of Whitehorse, Y.T., who has been investigating speechways on both sides of the Alaska-Yukon border, reports that the newcomers have brought in terms from far-distant American dialects, e.g., link as the singular of lynx, which is mistaken for a plural, and mad-ax for mattock from Appalachia; till for to, as in “a quarter till seven,” from Pennsylvania, and wait on from the South.3
Hawaii
There is a somewhat full account of the American English of Hawaii in AL4 pp. 372–77, based on studies by William C. Smith4 and John E. and Aiko Tokimasa Reinecke5 and an article by a correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor.6 English began to be taught in the schools of the islands so long ago as 1853, but the polyglot strata in the native speech of the population, to wit, Polynesian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish and various kinds and levels of English, has made the work of the schoolma’am difficult. Some of the syntactical eccentricities encountered are listed in a series of test papers for pupils in the elementary grades, prepared by Madorah E. Smith and W. B. Coale and published by the University of Hawaii. Among them are difficulties with word order. e.g., “I feed every day the rooster” and “We together went home”; with number, e.g., “The boys is here,” “Give a food to my pet” and “There were four childs”; with tense, e.g., “I bring it tomorrow,” “I began to fell asleep” and “He did not ran”; with prepositions, e.g., “I must to go to Honolulu,” “It’s his turn for do that,” “I attend to school every day” and “My sister stays Japan”; with the articles, e.g., “I must go to the bed,” and with various common idioms, e.g., “Lend me look at the paper,” “Give me a chalk,” “I want to come big” and “We had a good fun.” A number of Hawaiian locutions survive, e.g., “Hemo (take away) this desk” and “I go home pau (after) school,”1 and there are English words and phrases that afflict the schoolma’am, e.g., “We laughed like hell.” A curious habit of using geographical terms or their derivatives in place of the points of the compass, e.g., waikiki, makai and ewa, is noted in AL4, p. 377. Says Dr. Harold S. Palmer, professor of geology at the University of Hawaii:
Ewa lies to the west-northwest of Honolulu, so the direction ewa approximates west. Waikiki approximates east. But in the older Hawaiian usage waikiki would have approximated west to a person situated east of Waikiki beach. For analogy we may think of Albany, Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo and Chicago, and say “Buffalo is Cleveland of Albany” and “Toledo is Cleveland of Chicago.” The use of mauka (Hawaiian ma, toward and uka, mountain) and makai (Hawaiian kai, sea) is very practical in a region where the sun is close to overhead for some hours at midday for some months, so that shadows do not have pronounced directions.”2
Lewis and Marguerite Shalett Herman, in their “Manual of Foreign Dialects,”3 say that “the ordinary young Hawaiian speaks an American form of English with the exception of a few vowel and consonant variations and a smattering of grammatical changes,” but add that “there is an infiltration of a slight Portuguese intonation, from which the Hawaiian dialect obtains its lilt and emphasis, as well as some Pidgin English and Beche le Mar.” The first English spoken on the islands was undoubtedly Pidgin, but it began to give way to more orthodox English at least a century ago,1 and, as I have noted, English has been taught in the schools since 1853. By an act of 1896, when Hawaii was still a more or less independent republic, English was declared to be “the medium and basis of instruction in all public and private schools,” but in 19192 this law was amended to provide that “the Hawaiian language shall be taught in all normal and high schools.” In 1931, however, a further act reduced Hawaiian to the estate of an elective in junior and senior high-schools, and in 1935 a law providing that it should be taught in the grade-schools set up on land occupied by natives under a Homestead Act of 1921 was turned into absurdity by a provision that daily instruction in it should be for “at least ten minutes.”3
The Hermans list the following as the most frequent vowel changes in Hawaiian English: the a of take and that of bat become the e of get; the a of father, that of ball, and the aw of off become the u of but; the i of sit becomes the ee of seat; the oi of oil becomes the a of palm. The sounds of long ee, as in bee, of i in nice, of o in bone, of oo in food and of u in up remain unchanged. Inasmuch as Hawaiian has but five vowels, a, e, i, o and u, and but seven consonants, h, k, l, m, n, p and w, with no diphthongs and no consonant clusters, for “no two consonants can be pronounced without at least one vowel between them,”4 the older natives have difficulty with many American words. But their Americanized juniors are learning to use b, d, f, g, r, s and t, though d and t are commonly dropped when preceded by another consonant, the th of there is changed to d, that of thought is changed to t, and v is changed to w. Also, diphthongs are creeping into such loans from the Hawaiian as lai, in which the vowels were clearly separated in the original.5
The Philippines
375. [Those Filipinos who have acquired American English in the public schools of the archipelago … make changes in it. It is most unusual for one of them to speak it well.] This statement, with the specifications following, was based upon an article by Emma Sarepta Yule, of the College of Agriculture, Los Baños, published in 1925.1 A later report indicates that the Filipinos have made some progress, though not much, since the time of Miss Yule’s paper. That report appeared in the Manila Graphic for September 22, 1938, in the form of an interview with Alice Mary Johnson, professor of English at Union College, Manila. She said:
The mistakes which a native often commits are seldom if ever committed by an American. An American would not, for example, say “I have gone to the movies last night,” but a native, unmindful of the definite past, would say just that.… Countless Filipinos still refer to a woman with the pronouns he or him, or to a man with she or her. Also, they use him for he, she for her, and the other way round.… A reputable story writer uses “work in the farm” for “on the farm.”2
Of Filipino pronunciation her informant, Jose Luna Castro, said:
The accent … is far superior to that of the natives of ten
or twenty years ago.… They enunciate their vowels and consonants with admirable crispness. However (and nobody should be discouraged by this), the accent is none too correct or too pleasant to the American ear.… Twenty years ago Filipinos invariably spoke English with a nasal twang. It was considered smart. It was the result of listening to the early American soldiers, who spoke their own language nasally. Today only a few acquire the affectation, because wider contact with Americans has shown them that Americans themselves – that is to say, educated ones – avoid it.… The average Filipino who speaks and writes the language, and probably thinks in it, occasionally commits mistakes, but on the whole he knows it well enough to utilize it for ordinary use. After all, it is not every American or Englishman who speaks and writes English well enough to be a model.
Miss Johnson predicted that a distinctively Filipino form of English would evolve in the islands. “The great body of it,” she said, will be “essentially American,” and “the variations from the mother-tongue will be more evident in speech than in writing.” At the end of 1945 it was estimated that no less than 5,000,000 of the 16,500,000 inhabitants spoke what is known locally as Bamboo English, as against but 500,000 speaking Spanish. Article XIII, Section 3 of the constitution approved by President Roosevelt on March 23, 1935 ordained:
The National Assembly shall take steps toward the development and adoption of a common national language based on one of the existing native languages. Until otherwise provided by law English and Spanish shall continue as official languages.
A great many proposals for carrying this mandate into effect were made in the Assembly during the years following, and in the end Tagalog was chosen to become official on July 4, 1945 alongside English and Spanish,1 but it has made little more actual progress than Gaelic in Ireland, and the chances seem to be good that English will prevail in the long run. The Americans in the Philippines have taken a number of Spanish and Tagalog loans into their everyday speech, and some of them are in frequent use, e.g., the Spanish lavandera, a laundress; dulce, sweet; basura, a garbage can; sala, a living-room; aparador, a clothes-press; hombre, man, and komusta, how are you? (Sp. como esta?), and the Tagalog tao, man, used of a native peasant. I am informed by a correspondent that there have been some miscegenations between Spanish and English, e.g., shoehombre, a member of the native white-collar class – literally, one high enough in the world to wear shoes regularly.2 A white man married to a native woman is a squaw man and half-breeds are mestizos. Chit (a check or note) and tiffin (lunch) have been borrowed from the vocabulary of the English in the Far East.3
Puerto Rico
“The Puerto Ricans,” writes a correspondent, “are the only people in the world who have no language. They speak Spanish wretchedly and English twice as wretchedly.” The first half of this was supported by Dr. Victor S. Clark, an economist who was the first president of the Insular Board of Education under the military government which followed the Spanish-American War, 1898–1902 “A majority of the people,” he said, “do not speak pure Spanish. Their language is a patois almost unintelligible to the native of Barcelona and Madrid. It possesses no literature and little value as an intellectual medium. There is a bare possibility that it will be nearly as easy to educate these people out of their patois into English as it will be to educate them into the elegant tongue of Castile.” This “bare possibility” was the foundation of the educational scheme adopted for the island by its American saviors, and by 1912 98.4% of all the urban public schools were being taught in English exclusively. It worked very badly, and in 1930 Spanish was restored in the four lower grades, but English was retained through the higher grades and into the high-school and university. In that year a new commissioner of education, Dr. José Padín, made Spanish the sole medium of instruction in the first eight grades. But at some time before 1940 Roosevelt II ordered that English be given first place once more. A year later a native spokesman declared that “the system of education in Puerto Rico has been reduced to an absurdity, and our people are losing their own language without acquiring another.”1
Thereafter the language question became an important part of the Puerto Rican movement for independence, and the discussion of it aroused bitter animosities. A minority of native Uncle Toms, derisively termed pitiyanquis (petite Yankees), declared themselves to be in favor of teaching even Spanish in English, but the overwhelming majority of Puerto Ricans demanded that all elemental teaching be in Spanish, with English taught only as a second language and in the higher grades. In May, 1946 the Puerto Rican Legislature passed an act adopting the latter programme, but it was vetoed by the Governor, Rexford G. Tugwell. The Legislature then repassed it over his veto, and under the Organic Act of March 2, 1917 it went for final decision to President Truman, who vetoed it on October 25. This second veto set off a fresh uproar, for under the same Organic Act the President was required to act upon such a repassed act within ninety days, failing which it became a law. Truman’s defense was that it had not reached him until August 5, but the Puerto Rican Senate insisted that the ninety days should have been counted from the day the act was repassed, and accordingly appealed to the United States District Court of the island, which decided in its favor in March, 1947. The government thereupon appealed to the Supreme Court of Puerto Rico, and by the time these lines get into print the case may be before the Supreme Court of the United States.1
How many Puerto Ricans have acquired a working knowledge of American English is not known with certainty. In 1935 Padín estimated that 400,000 in a population of 1,600,000 had done so,2 but in 1945 the Puerto Rican Teachers’ Association (Asociación de Maestros de Puerto Rico) was still estimating the same number “ten years of age and over” in a population grown to 2,000,000.3 Not many of these speak the language correctly, for most of them have been taught it by native teachers who are themselves far from at home in it. Spanish, indeed, is still the prevailing tongue of the island, save only in a narrow circle of Federal jobholders. Even the intellectuals educated in the United States speak it among themselves, and in the interior English is scarcely known at all. There was no English newspaper until March 7, 1940, when El Imparcial of San Juan began publishing a morning tabloid in the language of the liberators. The next day El Mundo followed with an afternoon World Journal, but it expired in 1946.4 For the following notes upon the insular English I am indebted to Lewis C. Richardson, of the English Institute of the University of Puerto Rico:
One of the effects of Spanish upon it is a tendency toward the simplification of the verb. The Spanish verb is actually much more complex than the English, but ordinary Puerto Rican speech tends to drop final consonants and this is carried over into English, so that the regular English verb has its four forms reduced to two. Thus, of flow, flows, flowed and flowing, the forms flow and flowing are often the only ones remaining, and the past participle, the past tense, the third person singular of the present and the remainder of the present are consolidated in flow. This tendency is supported by the repugnance of Spanish to constellations of final consonants.
The same tendency sometimes operates to eliminate plurals formed without the addition of an extra syllable. Thus, as the Spanish seiz pesos may be reduced to sei peso, so the English six dollars becomes sik dollar.
No Spanish word begins with s plus another consonant. In consequence stop is likely to become estop, skate to become eskate, and state to be confused with estate.
Other peculiarities are the omission of initial w in such words as woman, the substitution of t and d or s for the two sounds of th, the rolling of r’s, a confusion between b and v, and a failure to distinguish between the short and long sounds of i.1
A Puerto Rican tends to put the stress on the pronoun rather than the preposition in such a sentence as “He was walking behind me,” even when there is no contrast between me and some other person. Likewise, when a descriptive adjective is compounded with a noun, the accent is likely to fall upon the noun, as in right ángle.
“I want him
to go” often becomes “I want that he go,” following the pattern of the Spanish “Quiero que él vaya.” The double negative similarly comes into Puerto Rican English through the Spanish, as in “I can’t see nothing” from “No puedo ver nada.” The auxiliary to do, which has no equivalent in Spanish, gives rise to such constructions as “Did he went?,” “Where he went?” and “What means this word?”
Richardson says that Spanish also influences the Puerto Rican English vocabulary through deceptive cognates. Thus actual is used for present in “the present state of affairs,” sympathetic is used for agreeable, artist for actor, and compromised for engaged (to marry). Synonyms of Romance origin are preferred to those of Germanic origin, e.g., force rather than strength, implement or instrument rather than tool, and arm rather than weapon. Most American newspapers spell the name of the island Porto Rico, but its people prefer the Spanish form Puerto Rico, and it is official in all government publications.2 I know of no published study of the English spoken in Puerto Rico, but the Spanish has been the subject of a number of investigations.3 It shows many loans from English.
American Language Supplement 2 Page 30