Speaking American: A History of English in the United States

by Richard W. Bailey

When did English become American? What distinctive qualities made it American? What role have America's democratizing impulses, and its vibrantly heterogeneous speakers, played in shaping our language and separating it from the mother tongue?

A wide-ranging account of American English, Richard Bailey's Speaking American investigates the history and continuing evolution of our language from the sixteenth century to the present. The book is organized in half-century segments around influential centers: Chesapeake Bay (1600-1650), Boston (1650-1700), Charleston (1700-1750), Philadelphia (1750-1800), New Orleans (1800-1850), New York (1850-1900), Chicago (1900-1950), Los Angeles (1950-2000), and Cyberspace (2000-present). Each of these places has added new words, new inflections, new ways of speaking to the elusive, boisterous, ever-changing linguistic experiment that is American English. Freed from British constraints of unity and propriety, swept up in rapid social change, restless movement, and a thirst for innovation, Americans have always been eager to invent new words, from earthy frontier expressions like "catawampously" (vigorously) and "bung-nipper" (pickpocket), to West African words introduced by slaves such as "goober" (peanut) and "gumbo" (okra), to urban slang such as "tagging" (spraying graffiti) and "crew" (gang). Throughout, Bailey focuses on how people speak and how speakers change the language. The book is filled with transcripts of arresting voices, precisely situated in time and space: two justices of the peace sitting in a pumpkin patch trying an Indian for theft; a crowd of Africans lounging on the waterfront in Philadelphia discussing the newly independent nation in their home languages; a Chicago gangster complaining that his pocket had been picked; Valley Girls chattering; Crips and Bloods negotiating their gang identities in LA; and more.
Speaking American explores--and celebrates--the endless variety and remarkable inventiveness that have always been at the heart of American English.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Linguistics, Language

232 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2011

About the author

Professor Richard Weld Bailey taught in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan for 42 years (1965 –2007), where he was honored in 2002 with a collegiate professorship: the Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English.

He was a pioneer in the application of computers to research in the humanities,attending early conferences sponsored by IBM and the Rand Corporation (1964 and 1967).

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3.0) Interesting, but not deep enough with too few examples and incomplete editing

Okay, so Bailey passed away before publication so whoever took over didn't want to step on his toes too much (they have a note to that effect at the beginning of the book), but they left behind an incompletely edited work. There are grammar and punctuation bugs as well as several sentences that are difficult to parse (or they're downright editing errors).

My interest in his topics were generally directly proportional to how long ago he was talking about. Colonial American English (and its many pidgins with Native American languages, French, Spanish etc.) is really cool. And I had no idea how we'd have any way of knowing what they sounded like. Well, thanks to the fluidity of spelling a few centuries ago, words were often written far more phonetically than they are now. And with several authors' accounts of the same speech, you can get a really good triangulation on the original sounds. Another good source: non-native English speakers: they also tended to go more phonetic, even in later centuries. Of particular interest were the Salem witch trial documents, which were particularly well preserved and offered lots of good material.

So some interesting examples, word and phrase origins, and some tracking of the movement of dialect, accent, pronunciation from the East to the West (who knew Iowans had such an influence on modern white Los Angeles English?).

I'd also recommend not reading this in ebook (or at least on the nook) as the fonts just can't keep up with the IPA phonetic notation (many characters just show up as boxes :( )

Tidbits:

- Dedham, MA was originally named Contentment
- katniss was a Swedish-Native American pidgin name for a particular plant (arrowhead or water-archer? never heard of em either)
- "youns" from Pennsylvania actually comes originally from Northern Ireland!
- levee first used in New Orleans (quite apropos!), but he doesn't give us any origin, nor claim that it was created out of thin air (I'm assuming it was borrowed or adapted from an existing word) in some language.
- hoodoo was Neworleanian, originally from the Caribbean and he claims it's only used down there...though I could've sworn it was used extensively in Alberta when we visited the Dinosaur Provincial Park (and we felt like idiots for never having heard it before)...he gives no definition at all though, so I can't even tell if the word is being used the same way (a pillar of sandstone (usually witha rock atop, which blocked rain erosion) that remains after the rest has eroded away))
- Early 20th century Chicagoans were well-read to the point that they tended to pronounce words closer to their spelling than generally accepted elsewhere, probably influencing the same in farther Western American English...mostly properly pronouncing phonemes that were dropped elsewhere (e.g. Arctic, auxiliary, factory, February). Hm, I find myself doing the same thing...you know, pronouncing them correctly ;)
- Zorro played by a Latino born Catalano and his Mexican nemesis a Texan named Goodman?

The unpolishedness of the work really did me in though:

- I don't like the citation style at all. He optionally puts name, publication date in parens in text after the statement (must infer from context the author and occasionally the publication year, then find them in the bibliography), as well as a third datum--page number? it's not clear at all. There were valuable footnotes separate from these (not citations at all, just extra tidbits--in at least one case, it should've been added to the body of the work itself, not footnoted, as it was relevant to the discussion).
- several times he cited examples to support a claim, but some of the examples clearly didn't fit into the claim he made (they should've just been pulled out; the others fit the claim and sufficed). For example: pronouncing the name, Charles, as "Chals" and the word, parsonage, as "pasneg" were supposedly examples of INSERTING 'r' sounds where they don't belong (as proof that Charlestonians were dropping 'r' after vowels in other words...the idea was that they were intentionally reinserting the 'r's and did so where they didn't used to be). These were examples of 'r' being REMOVED. He also doesn't really make this argument completely, just hints at it (my explanation here actually lays it out more cogently, and it's not very good itself)
- discusses a debate about the meaning of Narrangansett telling us that both sides (a prodigious briar or a name of a cold spring) are incorrect, but doesn't tell us which IS correct (there is a citation, but c'mon is it that hard to just tell us?)
- he tells us parenthetically in one sentence that Conrad Weiser usually spoke German after having made that quite clear in the preceding (lengthy) paragraph. You made your point, just drop the repetition.
- the Swedish gå was written gä in one of his examples...fortunately this doesn't subvert his argument (actually, correcting it would've strengthened it slightly)
- bug: "Nowadays, of course, no one pays any never mind to such structures"...or is this some clarifying structure that I've never encountered before?
- bug: dropped apostrophe in "daughters' ": "...the wealthy in Beverly Hills who paid handsomely to have their daughters Valspeak eliminated."
- did Buffy the Vampire Slayer really introduce "much" used for "often"? I really think we used "Walk much?" when someone tripped back in the early-to-mid-nineties. But I fault the show's lexicographer who claims the construction is his own.

[Kamil Kazmierski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what I think you'd call an 'external history' of American English. There are rich descriptions of the socio-historical circumstances which influenced American English from the time of the earliest English speaking colonies to Hollywood and Silicone Valley. There is much less attention devoted to linguistic descriptions of American English varieties involved, though. These are, by the way, due to the organization of the book implicitly treated as different stages in the development of 'American English'. Maybe a little misleading?

[Brent Mckay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating, quick-reading and accurate overview of American regional language.

[Chaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

An unsurpassed summary on how the United States has as a cultural and historic entity affected the English language worldwide.

[Lynley · Rating 3 out of 5]

~2.5~ read for class idk

[Jacob Lines · Rating 3 out of 5]

Americans speak English differently than Britons do. There are a lot of reasons why. This book presents a history of American English in eight areas that influenced the development of the language: the Chesapeake Bay before 1650, Boston from 1650 to 1700, Charleston from 1700 to 1750, Philadelphia from 1750 to 1800, New Orleans from 1800 to 1850, New York from 1850 to 1900, Chicago from 1900 to 1950, and then Los Angeles from 1950 to 2000. Because of the length of the book – only about 180 pages – it isn’t too detailed about each place and time, but it gives an excellent flavor of what was going on. Lots of borrowing from other languages, changes in accents, fads in vocabulary, the influence of commerce and war, criminal slang working its way to respectability, technology injecting new words, and more. I’ve read plenty of books about the history of English, but I learned some surprising new things in this one. For example, New Orleans was a place of wild and fluid linguistic diversity, yet it was the place where “the great cleansing of American English took place” – a standardization caused by immigrants trying to “model their language and conduct on that of the ‘refined’ Americans they encountered.” Another insight was about New York – in many ways it’s the capital of America, but its speech is not imitated. Rather, it is very different from most American English and is even widely ridiculed. Bailey doesn’t explain why that is, but it is certainly true. A tidbit about Chicago – the uniformity in American speech that emerged from there came about because of the diversity of the populace. Teachers who grew up speaking other languages taught their students English not so much from their experience, but from a “bookish and formal kind of English.” And finally, the chapter about Los Angeles is fascinating. When Hollywood started making “talkies,” they used the Transatlantic accent to bridge the gap between American and English accents. Soon they abandoned that and just used American accents, thus becoming the biggest exporters of American speech.

And, for a Shakespeare lover, here is an intriguing bit that I had never heard of – the Astor Place Riot of 1849 was provoked by a rivalry between two Shakespearean actors, one British and one American, over who was the better, with some observers arguing that Shakespeare should be spoken with an American accent. I will need to look into that further.

[Paul · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's my fault that I went into this book having apparently ignored the subtitle and expecting a survey of current usage, not a history. Still, this book was pretty vague and very largely non-informative. Organizing each chapter into a decade and a location (e.g. New Orleans, 1800-1850) gives the "history" a snapshot feel and provides little context for what was actually happening in the nation (and to the language) as a whole. Far too little is said about the way people actually spoke, though neither does the book really provide a comprehensive history of America (for one thing, the revolutionary war isn't even mentioned.) As the book was published posthumously, an editorial note states that there are some ambiguous passages that they decided to leave in and "let the reader interpret," but what to make of statements like: "Clout is a Chicago word now used nationally for that kind of power (though an isolated example from 1868 suggests it may have originated in New York)." No word on how or why it's a Chicago word (just, you know, that it may actually not be). Bailey provides a few examples here and there of words that came from certain places/eras, but little to no etymological information, and one comes away from the book with little new knowledge. Finally, while surveys of current or even recent usage written by elder scholars are always awkward (not to say Bailey is/was "old"—even a thirty-year-old writing about high school slang can be cringe inducing), but Bailey's in final chapter (Los Angeles, 1950–2000) is definitely no exception. He even refers perplexingly to Tupac as a "New York performer," which is when I sort of lost it. I could call the book a failure, though this wouldn't be fair; I'll say it's certainly not how I'd go about composing/writing a book about the subject.

[Rebecca · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bailey takes us on a tour through time and space, stopping at each location for fifty years as he comes forward in time explaining how American English came about. You get a look at how the different populations that came to American influenced the language in the places they chose to settle down. It is interesting to see the language shift and change and to learn how some words came to be included in the evolving language. But I wouldn’t say that this is a very readable book. Bailey really knew his stuff and you can see the time and research that went into the book. I can appreciate the love he has for his topic but I never felt it myself. So at times this book got a little dry and slow. I’m not a student of the subject so maybe I’m the wrong audience for this book. Because for me, with a more casual interest, I would like something a little less scholarly sounding.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book probably isn't for everyone, but if you love words, the English language, and(or?) history, you'll learn a lot and have interesting language trivia (I won't spoil the coolest thing I learned for you here) to share at parties. Did I say parties? I mean your fellow word-nerd friends. A surprisingly engaging read considering the topic -- the author moves quickly enough that the drier facts don't get boring and you want to keep reading to know more about how our language evolved. The breakdown of the book into sections by geography and time frame is a particularly interesting approach that I never would have thought of before reading this book.

[Amanda Linehan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fascinating! It walks through history one city at a time and discusses the ways that language evolved into the English we know today. I definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in language or American history.

[Jay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite what I thought it would be, I thought it'd be more of an explanation how the different accents came about. This is more about how regionalism provided the distinction of American English as opposed to British English or other national accents. Easily skimmed and sections skipped.

[Milton · Rating 5 out of 5]

The continuing evolution of the American English from the sixteen century to present. How Chesapeake bay, Boston, Charleston and other cities contributed to the growing and widespread of the English language. A must read for anyone interested in this language.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book promised to be a true eye-opener but ended up somehow underwhelming. Still a worthwhile read, but only to people who already find the subject matter fascinating.