Language, American

Language, American. The meaning and significance of the term “American Language” has changed considerably since Roger Williams published A Key into the Language of America in 1643. For Williams, the term referred exclusively to Native American speech. While this usage persisted into the twentieth century, primarily among anthropologists, by the time H.L. Mencken published his landmark study The American Language in 1919, he could with confidence and bravado use the term to refer to English.

In part, the shift reflects the substantive changes that characterize the linguistic history of the United States. With the conquest, settlement, and expansion that established first British and then federal sovereignty over a large part of North America, English became its dominant idiom, the de facto language. At the same time, the particularities of American experience, including the persistence and influx of other languages (native, African, European, and Asian), differentiated the English of the United States from that of Great Britain, transforming it into a distinctively American language.

But the change relates to intellectual and ideological shifts as much as linguistic developments. With the coming of independence, Americans became concerned about the character and quality of the language—or languages—they spoke. The American experiment in self‐government, they believed, depended largely on the integrity of public discourse: Political speech had to be free and sincere, and, most fundamentally, the citizens of the new republic had to be able to understand one another. Moreover, British culture, once a source of pride to the colonists, now became a source of anxiety. How truly independent were they, some questioned, if Americans still read the same literature and spoke the same language as their former oppressors?

Spurred by the heady nationalism that followed the Revolutionary War and sustained by philosophies of linguistic relativism that suggested an intimate, necessary relationship between a nation and its speech, linguistic patriots set out to identify and institute a properly American language. Proposals were even offered in the immediate postwar period (all of them abortive) to change the official language of the United States. Some suggested Greek, the ancient language of democracy; others felt that Hebrew, the language of the chosen people, would be suitable for the new promised land. Most, however, while ambivalent about their cultural heritage, remained content with English. Regardless of its origin, they argued, the quality of the language was the true source of its Americanness. Even before the Revolution ended, John Adams offered a proposal—never implemented—that Congress establish a language academy to ensure a qualitative edge for American English. Others suggested a variety of orthographic and other reforms to purify, improve, and standardize English in America.

The most prominent champion of American English was Noah Webster. While some British and Anglophile linguists denigrated American English as provincial and corrupt, Webster inverted the argument. Combining the Whig mythology of the Revolution with ideas from the relativistic philosophies of the Abbé de Condillac, Johann David Michaelis, and others, Webster argued in such works as Dissertations on the English Language (1789) that just as the government of Great Britain had become corrupt, so had its culture, and in particular its language, which had fallen victim to linguistic tyrants such as Samuel Johnson and Thomas Sheridan. And just as America was a political asylum for Englishmen escaping tyranny, so was it a haven for the unadulterated English of William Shakespeare and Joseph Addison. Moreover, just as the authority of the American government rested upon the consent of the governed, so language use (his primary concern was pronunciation) was not dictated by pedants but determined by common usage, that is, by the people themselves—or, at least, by those of pure Anglo‐Saxon descent.

Throughout American history, intellectuals advanced theories of American English that reflected the philosophies and ideologies of their times. For instance, inspired on one hand by the work of historical and comparative philologists such as Wilhelm von Humboldt and Max Müller and on the other by the expansionism of Jacksonian democracy, Walt Whitman developed an intricate mythology of the Manifest Destiny of American English. For Whitman, the Americanness of English lay in its composite nature (Anglo‐Saxon, Celtic, Romance, Greek, and Latin) and its seemingly unlimited ability, especially in the United States, to appropriate words and phrases from the languages with which it came into contact. In the 1855 preface to Leaves of Grass and the posthumously published An American Primer (1904), Whitman depicted English as the ultimate, eternal, cosmopolitan language, with its roots in the obscure Indo‐European past and its future as limitless as that of America itself.

Of all accounts of the subject, Mencken's The American Language, which saw several editions and was enlarged by two supplements between 1919 and 1948, is the most ambitious and well known. Both a study in philology and a history of ideas, The American Language continued in the tradition of Webster and Whitman to defend American English against its detractors. Conceived in a period that witnessed both America's emergence as a world power and Mencken's ongoing battle against genteel philosophy, Victorian moralism, and bourgeois mediocrity, it portrayed the history of English in America as a manifestation of the nation's true character, its inventiveness, ingenuity, exuberance, and audacity.

As the twentieth century ended, against the background of popular calls for English‐only legislation, some academics, in the spirit of multiculturalism, challenged the notion of English as the exclusive American language, arguing that the United States is and has always been a polyglot nation. Studies of black English (sometimes called Ebonics), the movement for bilingual education, and the project sponsored by Marc Shell and Werner Sollors at Harvard University to study American literary works written in languages other than English all offered evidence of a shift in thinking about American language.
See also Antebellum Era; Cultural Pluralism; Early Republic, Era of the; Literacy; Literature.

Bibliography

George Philip Krapp , The English Language in America, 1925.
Charlton Laird , Language in America, 1970.
Dennis E. Baron , Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language, 1982.
David Simpson , The Politics of American English, 1776–1850, 1986.
Thomas Gustafson , Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865, 1992.
Michael P. Kramer , Imagining Language in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, 1992.

Michael P. Kramer