American Language Supplement 2 (22 page)

An inspection of the book makes clear the fact that, in the United States as elsewhere, dialect is mainly a function of the lower orders of the population. Persons of the educated class, though they show the influence of the circumambient patois, not only in vocabulary but also and more particularly in pronunciation and intonation, nevertheless approach the standard speech of the region whenever any care in speaking is indicated. Individuals of this class, living in the country, says Wyld,
¹
will “gain inevitably a very fair knowledge of the local dialect in all its aspects. They can imitate the pronunciation, they know the characteristic grammatical ‘mistakes,’ and they know a considerable number of the typical words and idioms.” Yet they do not use this dialect in conversation among themselves, and seldom if ever in speaking to “their humbler friends,” for if they did so “it would be felt as an insult.” Wyld is discussing Englishmen, but the same thing is true of Americans. No educated Southerner, save with teasing intent, ever uses what he understands to be Negro dialect in addressing Negroes, and no New Yorker, when forced to ask his way in the wilderness of Brooklyn, uses
thoid
. The plain people save on their very lowest levels, understand “good English” quite well, and many of them make not unsuccessful attempts, on occasion, to use it.

Wentworth’s dictionary shows that any given dialect term is apt to be considerably more widespread than is commonly assumed.
To tote
, for example, seems to many persons to be a quite typical Southernism, but he finds examples of it from Maine, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana and Oregon.
To carry
, in the sense of to transport or escort, is also associated in recent years with Southern speech, but he cites its use in Maine.
²
The same wide extension of terms is encountered among the names for common birds, most of which Wentworth does not list. The Florida gallinule
(Gallinula chloropus cachinnans)
, for example, has at least a dozen different designations in various parts of the country, but it is a
mud-hen
in States as far apart as Alabama, California, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri,
New York and Texas, not to mention Quebec.
¹
“Sometimes,” says Bradford F. Swan, “a usage went West with the tide of settlers. On other occasions Western expressions have been spread across the whole nation and are now perfectly familiar to Easterners.”
²
Not infrequently the evidence makes it clear how a given locution got from one place to another. There is, for example, the Pennsylvania use of
all
in such a phrase as “The bread is
all
.” Its old home is in the German counties of its native State, and though it has got as far away as Nebraska and Kansas it is never encountered save in centers of German immigration. Many terms, sometimes thought of as dialectal, are really nearly universal,
e.g., to allow
in the sense of to think, guess or assert;
gallus
, suspenders;
h’ist
, hoist;
bub
, boy;
sass
, sauce; and
brung
, brought.
³
Some specimens of this class belong to ignorant English everywhere, but others seem to be American inventions. Appreciable progress has been made in late years in tracking down the history of the latter, chiefly in the colonial town-records,
⁴
but much remains to be done. What is needed is a coöperative dictionary on a comprehensive scale, following the method of the Dictionary of American English. Since the resurrection of the American Dialect Society in 1941 there have been some efforts, under the able leadership of Dr. George P. Wilson, of the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina, to interest a
competent posse in such an enterprise,
¹
but so far the response has been far from exhilarating. Meanwhile, Wentworth’s volume is a monument to his extraordinary diligence and to the courage of his publisher.
²

The Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, launched in 1928, does not meet the need for the dialect dictionary just mentioned, for though it is on a large scale and is magnificently done it does not undertake to present the whole body of dialect terms, but confines itself to showing the distribution of a relatively small number – less than 800. Those chosen are adroitly selected, and the maps recording them tell the student a great deal, but the scheme inevitably overlooks many of the most interesting oddities of local speech. Not a few recorders of dialect object to it on that ground, and there rages an unhappy dispute between those who favor it and those who are against it. The former say that it offers the only feasible way to determine dialect boundaries with any precision – that the mere accumulation of terms is likely to lay too much stress upon those that are only aberrant and curious, and that the collector has no means of checking their distribution. The latter reply that the sample method, though much more accurate within its limits than their own, nevertheless fails to turn up many of the most interesting and significant specimens of local speech. Differences between philologians are apt to become waspish, and this one has already produced some flashes of sauciness. It is a pity that the brethren cannot get together on a joint or compromise scheme, and
so pool their learning for the edification of all persons at interest and the glory of the Flag.
¹

The first part of the Linguistic Atlas, devoted to New England, was published in six elephant-folio volumes, 14 × 21 inches in size, between 1939 and 1943, along with a 240-page interpretative Handbook. The six volumes are made up of 734 double-page tinted maps showing, in phonetic symbols, the vocabulary and pronunciation encountered in 425 communities in New England and six in New Brunswick. The materials were all collected between September 1, 1931 and October 1, 1933, and less than a dozen field workers bore the heat and burden of gathering them. The arrangement is clear and admirable. Successive maps show how typical people of the communities investigated pronounce common words,
e.g., class, theatre
and
yesterday;
what names they use to designate common objects,
e.g., pail
or
bucket, garret
or
attic, purse
or
pocketbook;
how they conjugate common verbs,
e.g., swelled
or
swole, drove
or
driv, took
or
taken;
and what euphemisms they use for such words as
coffin, bull
and
ram
. The test-words were adroitly chosen, and though there was some variation in the use made of them by the field-agents, they undoubtedly produced a reasonably accurate and more or less comprehensive report on New England speech.

One of the strange facts unearthed has been noted already – that the broad
a
of the Boston area seems to be gradually succumbing to the flat
a
of General American, even within cannon-shot of the Harvard pump. Many other curiosities of American speech will reward the patience and stamina of any reader bold enough to struggle with the six hefty volumes and search the glosses accompanying the 734 maps. Map 372, for example, indicates that in 1933 the hideous
mummy
, borrowed from the English and now fashionable in all the big cities,
²
was just beginning to invade New England. It was supported by a somewhat similar form, apparently indigenous, to wit,
mumma
, but the overwhelming majority of natives, whether urban or bucolic, appear to prefer the more ancient
ma,
maw, mom, mahm, mum, mamma, mommy
or
mother
. So with names for the other parent. Map 371 shows that
pa, paw, pap, pappy, papa, dad
and
daddy
are all in wide use, with marked differences on different age levels. One example of
pater
is reported from the Boston area and one of
governor
from the Maine coast, but both seem to be what the Handbook calls innovations. Such innovations, it says, are “derived from the literary language” or “through contact with the upper classes of society.” Unhappily, the maps do not indicate social levels, and their statistical value is thus diminished.
¹
But they show pretty clearly that the old Yankee dialect is fast losing many of what were once among its characteristic terms.
Pantry
is supplanting
buttery, clothes-press
is yielding to
clothes-closet, shopping
is driving out
trading
, and
to home
is succumbing to
at home
.

The Linguistic Atlas was originally suggested by Dr. E. H. Sturtevant of Yale, a linguistic scholar of eminence, now professor of linguistics emeritus at Yale.
²
Dr. Hans Kurath, then of Ohio State University, later of Brown and now of Michigan, was in charge of it from the start, and his extraordinary learning and energy vitalized the whole enterprise.
³
His principal collaborators were Miles L. Hanley,
⁴
Bernard Bloch,
⁵
the late Guy S. Lowman, Jr., the late
Marcus L. Hansen, Lee S. Hultzén and Herbert Penzl, and he was aided in organizing the field work by Jakob Jud, one of the editors of the Linguistic Atlas of Italy and Southern Switzerland,
¹
and Paul Scheuermeier, a member of its staff. The gathering of materials in other parts of the country and Canada has been in progress for some years, with Albert H. Marckwardt in charge of the Great Lakes and Ohio valley regions, Henry Alexander in charge of Canada, Raven I. McDavid, Jr., in charge of South Carolina, and other competent linguists directing the work elsewhere. To this end funds have been provided by the American Council of Learned Societies
²
and Drs. Kurath, Bloch, Harold Whitehall and others have undertaken the training of field workers.
³
But it is hardly probable that any of the volumes to be brought out hereafter will be on the heroic scale of the New England folios, which cost about $250,000 to produce and were sold at $185 a set. Indeed, Sturtevant seems to be of the opinion
⁴
that a less formidable format, without maps, will be more useful.

It was the dialect of New England that first attracted the attention of writers upon speechways in the United States and as a result the literature upon it is very large. That literature began with Noah Webster’s amateurish effort, in his “Dissertations on the English Language,” 1789, to account for the Yankee drawl,
⁵
and it has culminated in our time in such competent and valuable studies as the Linguistic Atlas and Anders Orbeck’s “Early New England Pronunciation.”
⁶
Two years before Webster, in 1787, the Yankee made his first appearance as a stage type in “The Contrast,” by Royal Tyler, and thereafter he gradually took on popularity, was borrowed by the writers of humorous fiction,
⁷
and finally came to
his apotheosis in “The Biglow Papers” of James Russell Lowell, the first series of which was published in the Boston
Courier
in 1846. When this series appeared in book form, two years later, Lowell added a preface on the Yankee dialect and a glossary thereof, and when a second series followed in 1867 (begun in 1862) he expanded these into a somewhat elaborate treatise. Unhappily, he was untutored in the ways of language, so he fell into two serious errors, all the more confusing because they were antagonistic. The first was the error of seeking to justify every Yankee locution he noticed by showing that it could be found in some English book, and the second was that of listing as Yankeeisms peculiarities of pronunciation and accidence which really belonged to the common stock of ignorant English, and were no more the monopolies of New England than boiled dinners and the Saturday night bath. Thus in his glossary of 1848 he listed
darsn’t
as a Yankeeism, but in his dissertation of 1867 he showed that
darst
is to be found in Chaucer.
¹
Again, he listed
shet (shut)
, and then found it in Arthur Golding (
c
. 1556-
c
. 1605). Yet again, he listed
ben
(
been
), and found it in “Gammer Gurton’s Needle.” In the first series of “The Biglow Papers” Lowell lay down seven rules for distinguishing the Yankee dialect, but Krapp has shown that only two of them, both relating to the pronunciation of
a
, had any validity.
²
Krapp also showed that of forty words distinguished as dialect in six stanzas of Lowell’s “The Courtin’,” only six were really local to New England.
³
A later commentator, Miss Marie Killheffer,
⁴
has exposed the same deficiencies in one later and three earlier attempts to put the Yankee dialect into print. In “The Yankey in England,” published in 1815, David Humphrey used a higher percentage of genuine Yankeeisms than Lowell or than any of the other three dramatists,
⁵
but in a glossary that he appended to the play, intended for the illumination of English audiences, he also included a great many terms that he himself described as “low words in general,”
e.g., agin
for
again, crittur
for
creature
, and
gal
for
girl
. In one soliloquy of 151 words Miss Killheffer finds 32 distinguished as dialectal, and of them only twelve are really peculiar to the Yankee.

Charles Astor Bristed, a dilettante grandson of the original John Jacob Astor, did an essay on “The English Language in America” for a volume of “Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University,” published in London in 1855,
¹
in which he warned the English that Haliburton’s Yankee clock-maker in “Sam Slick” interspersed a good many Westernisms and much general slang with his Yankeeisms.
²
He said that the chief peculiarities of New England speech lay in pronunciation rather than in accidence or vocabulary, and went on:
³