American Language Supplement 2 (21 page)

354. [All the early writers on the American language remarked its strange freedom from dialects.] This freedom, of course, was only relative, for differences between Northern speech and Southern speech were noted even before the Revolution, and when the movement into the west began the pioneers quickly developed dialects that were set off from all those prevailing along the seacoast. But the English travelers who toured the country in the intervals between the Revolution and the War of 1812 were right in reporting that the linguistic differences they found among Americans were vastly less than they had experienced at home.
¹
In all its history, indeed, the United States has produced but one dialect that stumps a visitor from any other part of the country, and that is the so-called Gullah speech of the Negroes of the Southern sea-islands, to be dealt with hereafter. And even these Negroes, when they put their minds to it, can make themselves intelligible to fellow-Americans from thousands of miles away, and it is only a small minority of remote and sequestered individuals among them who find any difficulty in understanding a man from Maine, Texas, Iowa or California. The differences in pronunciation between American dialects seldom impede this free communication, for a man who converts
pass
into
pahs
or drops the final
r
in
father
is still usually able to palaver readily with one who gives
pass
the
a
of
Dan
and wrings the last gurgle out of his
r
’s. The differences in vocabulary are sometimes more puzzling, but they are not, after all, very numerous, and a stranger quickly picks them up. I have often noted that a newcomer to my Maryland Fatherland soon abandons
faucet
, or
tap
, or whatever it was that prevailed in his native wilds, and turns easily to the local
spigot
. In the same way an immigrant to the Deep South is rapidly fluent in the use of
you-all, yonder
and
to carry
in
the sense of to convey. Differences in intonation present greater difficulties, but they are much less marked between any two parts of the United States than they are between any two parts of England, or than between England and this country as a whole.
¹

The origins in British speech of such American regional peculiarities as survive have been discussed in Section 1, and are summarized in various learned publications.
²
The differences implanted by successive waves of Eastern Englishmen, Western Englishmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen and other immigrants, each group with its own characteristic speechways, must have been considerable at the start, but they were soon being worn down and obliterated by the intermingling
gling of the population, and that leveling has been going on ever since, and at a constantly accelerated rate. Webster, in 1789, feared that “the body of the people, governed by habit,” would “retain their [local] peculiarities of speaking, and for want of schools and proper books fall into … inaccuracies which … may imperceptibly corrupt the national language,”
¹
but he noted at the same time that “the establishment of schools and some uniformity in the use of books” might very readily prevent this debasement, and he himself was destined to have more hand than any other in the operation of the second of the influences he named.
²
Bartlett, so late as 1859,
³
was still willing to predict that “in those parts of the country aside from the great thoroughfares,” dialects would become so “firmly established” that “a thousand years might not suffice” to eradicate them, but there are no longer any regions that are really far from “the great thoroughfares,” and hence no longer any dialects that stand entirely apart from the common speech. The railroad, the automobile, the moving-picture and, above all, the radio, have promoted uniformity in even the most remote backwaters, and there is every reason to believe that General American, which has been steadily widening its territory for two generations past, will eventually conquer the whole country.
⁴

Because of its steady encroachment upon the other dialects the area it covers today is shifting and somewhat vague, but all authorities seem to agree that it begins in the East somewhere in the vicinity of the Connecticut river, runs southward to the line of the Potomac and Ohio, and covers the whole country, save for a few outcroppings of Southern or Appalachian-speech, west of the Mississippi. Kenyon and Knott call it Northern American
⁵
and Kurath calls it Western,
⁶
but in view of its immense spread it seems to me that
General is preferable. It is, of course, not entirely uniform throughout its area, and Kurath distinguishes a Central or Midland speech from that of the Great Lakes Basin
¹
and the Far West, but these differences are very slight, and a casual observer from some other
Sprachgebiet
notices no substantial variance between the speech of a Western New Yorker, that of a Michigander, that of a Nebraskan and that of an Oregonian. This General American, says Kurath, is spoken in “the Middle Atlantic States (New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania), the Middle West (Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Northern Missouri), and the Further West to the Pacific Coast.” He might have added most of Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia, a part of Kentucky, and a not inconsiderable part of New England.
²

Southern American marches with General American along the Potomac and Ohio, shows a few dips across the latter into Ohio, Indiana and Illinois, and leaps the Mississippi into Southern Missouri, Arkansas and Eastern Texas. Kurath shows that it is “more varied than either the Eastern or the Western, both geographically and as between the various classes of society.” The educated Southerner tends to move toward General American, but the people of the lower classes, whether white or black, still cling to their ancient speechways,
³
and as a result “cultivated speech and dialects are more clearly separated than in the North.”
⁴
Greet distinguishes three general sub-types of Southern speech – the coastal or Tidewater, the general lowland speech, and that of Appalachia – the Southern hill type. “The speech of the Virginia Tidewater,” he says “has been transplanted successfully to the northern Shenandoah region and to Charlottesville, but outside of Virginia it has made no headway against the General Southern of the lowlands.”
⁵
This General Southern is spoken in “the plantation up-country of Georgia
and South Carolina, the cotton country of Alabama, Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana in so far as the speech is without French influence,” and the Piedmont of Virginia. The speech of the hill people is quite different from both dialects of the Southern lowlands, and in some ways shows resemblances to that of rural New England. “There is no sharper speech boundary in the United States,” says Kurath, “than that following the Blue Ridge from the Potomac to the James.”
¹
This mountain speech is also to be found in the Ozarks, which lie in the corner where Missouri, Arkansas and Oklahoma meet. It was taken there by immigrants from Appalachia and has filtered into the adjacent lowlands.

Dr. Louise Pound has called attention to the fact that the study of dialect, in both England and the United States, came in later than the study of folklore. The latter, she says, was “an offshoot of the Romantic Movement of the late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries,” but the latter had to wait until 1870, when Aldis Wright and Alexander J. Ellis issued simultaneous calls for the organization of the English Dialect Society, which got under way in 1873, with W. W. Skeat (1835–1912) as its director and honorary secretary. There had been, of course, some investigations of dialectal differences before this, beginning with Francis Grose’s “Provincial Glossary” in 1786, and including, for example, Robert Forby’s “Vocabulary of East Anglia” in 1830,
²
but nearly all these had been undertaken by amateurs, and it was not until Skeat applied his extraordinary philological powers to the business that the study of the British dialects got upon a scientific basis.
³
After that the Society published a long series of excellent books upon them, covering nearly all the English counties, and Joseph Wright, deputy professor of comparative philology at Oxford, used the material thus amassed in his large “English Dialect Dictionary.”
⁴
The American
Dialect Society did not follow until 1889.
¹
As I have suggested in Supplement I,
²
it probably owed its organization quite as much to the current discovery of and rage for dialect by American novelists as to the example of the English Society, but it had the advantage from the start of the interest of such competent philologians as E. S. Sheldon, C. H. Grandgent, F. J. Child and J. M. Manly, and until the appearance of
American Speech
in 1925 its organ,
Dialect Notes
, offered the only outlet for scholars investigating American speechways.

Its vicissitudes have been recounted in Supplement I, including the mysterious loss of its collection of 26,000 examples of American dialect words and phrases – a catastrophe which rocked the small world of 100% American
Sprachwissenschaftler
almost as dizzily as the larger world of American physical scientists had been rocked by the hanging of Professor John W. Webster of Harvard in 1850. This collection has not been recovered, but enough of it had been printed in
Dialect Notes
to launch Dr. Harold Wentworth
³
upon his “American Dialect Dictionary,” published in June, 1944. Wentworth, however, was not content to depend upon
Dialect Notes;
he also mined
American Speech
, the newspapers and popular magazines, and the writings of such lay observers as Edward Eggleston, James Russell Lowell, James Lane Allen, Roark Bradford, William Faulkner, Joel Chandler Harris, Vance Randolph, James Whitcomb Riley and the early humorists.
⁴
As a result students of American speechways now have the use of a pioneer work of great value. It brings into one handy volume the accumulated observations of hundreds of men and women, extending over many years, and it is so arranged that consulting it is easy. It shares a defect of the Dictionary of American English, in that most of its materials come from printed sources, but Wentworth has studied them with a critical eye, and added first-hand examples whenever possible, some gathered in the field and the rest borrowed from other workers and the
radio. Unhappily, he has omitted a good many interesting words and phrases without apparent reason, and as a result the student is not infrequently brought up by irritating gaps.