Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca

by John McWhorter

English has occupied England now for sixteen hundred years, allowing lots of time for divergence. English came to America only four hundred years ago, at which time various dialects from across the Atlantic mixed together into something new and set things at the starting point again. Four hundred years is a relatively short time for major regional differences to evolve. Moreover, increasing literacy and then modern media have made it harder for that kind of thing to happen in America’s life span anyway. Since, especially, commercial radio and sound films in the 1930s—plus the explosion in college degrees after the GI Bill of the 1940s—Americans have come to speak more like one another than they used to. Warnings that dialects are disappearing in the United States entirely are overblown, but dialects are less diverse from one another than before.