A

AMERICAN ENGLISH

---

When James Monroe was reelected to the presidency in 1820, the United States had been a sovereign nation for more than four decades. It had its own monetary system and its own Constitution and government, but the nation still did not seem to have its own language. For some it was an important question: If no national language existed, should one be created to establish American identity? And if a national language already existed, what were its characteristics? Inseparable from these questions was the relation of American English to British English. Were they one language or two? Should the people of the United States conform to a British standard, or should they form their own? These questions were vigorously debated during the first half of the nineteenth century and continued to generate controversy decades after the Civil War.

As early as the 1780s patriots called for a national language to confirm America's independence from England. Among the first champions of the cause was Noah Webster (1758–1843), a graduate of Yale University and a lawyer, journalist, and teacher who was destined to become preeminent in the history of American English and immortalized in America's dictionaries. In his Dissertations on the English Language (1789), published more than a decade before his first dictionary, Webster declares: "Customs, habits, and language, as well as government should be national. America should have her own distinct from all the world. Such is the policy of other nations, and such must be our policy, before the states can be either independent or respectable" (p. 179). Supporters and opponents of Webster's position argued the point in letters, speeches, magazines, and books throughout the early years of the Republic.

By the second decade of the nineteenth century the range of attitudes was clear. Many Americans wanted their language to conform as closely as possible to British English so that British readers might continue readily to comprehend the writings of Americans and vice versa; so that Americans of the future could maintain contact with their literary heritage; and for the continued facility of commercial and cultural exchange between the nations. The distinguished philologist John Pickering (1777–1846), compiler of the first significant collection of Americanisms, Vocabulary or Collection of Words and Phrases Which Have Been Supposed to Be Peculiar to the United States of America (1816), repudiated the idea of a unique American language, warned against the natural tendency for that very thing to happen, and cited the "final separation of languages of Spain and Portugal" as an example to be avoided (Baron, p. 34).

Ardent patriots at the other extreme proposed abolishing English altogether, making French or Hebrew the national language, or inventing a new one. The majority of serious commentators took the middle ground, rejecting both colonialist dependence on England and the idea of a separate language. The respected poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Trumbull, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and the poet, editor, and critic James Russell Lowell held views similar to those expressed by John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court, in 1821: "The English language is also ours; and the attempt to change it would be more than Quixotism. The attempt will be to preserve and improve it" (Read, p. 1158). Soon Webster too was no longer calling for a separate language. In 1831, in a letter to the editor of the Westminster Review, he wrote: "Our language is English. . . . It is desirable that the language on both sides of the Atlantic should remain the same . . . but some differences must necessarily exist" (Baron, p. 55). On one point all sides agreed: new words were required to denote activities and features of the landscape existing only in America. Thomas Jefferson, the most illustrious defender of innovation, made the case in a letter dated 16 August 1813 to the grammarian John Waldo, thanking him for his Rudiments of English Grammar (1811): "The new circumstances under which we are placed, call for new words, new phrases, and for the transfer of old words to new objects." Then putting his principle into practice, he added, "Necessity obliges us to neologize" (13:340, 346), thus transforming the young noun "neologism" (coined in 1803), meaning "a new word, usage, or expression," into a verb meaning "create new words."

AMERICANISMS

The expansion of the English language in America to include thousands of words and phrases not known or current in England raised the vexing question of "Americanisms," a term that a Scotsman, the Reverend John Witherspoon (1723–1794)—a former president of Princeton University, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a member of the Continental Congress—claimed to have invented in 1781. In Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), an Americanism is simply "an American idiom." John Russell Bartlett (1805–1886) identified nine classes of Americanisms in the 1859 edition of his Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States. According to the Virginia Literary Museum and Journal of Belles Lettres, published in 1829–1830, Americanisms were of two kinds: "old words used in a new sense" and "new words of indigenous origin" (Mathews, p. 99). Whether or not they were called Americanisms, several classes of words or phrases that distinguished American English from British English were easily identified. The contact of Americans with different cultures enriched American English by hundreds of words derived from European languages, notably French, Dutch, German, and Spanish. But by far the greatest number of loanwords came from American Indian languages. In The English Language in America (1925), George Philip Krapp lists some 250 words of Indian origin, exclusive of proper names. Many remain current: for example such animal names as "caribou," "chipmunk," "hog," "moose," "opossum," "raccoon," "skunk," "woodchuck" (1:165–167).

More likely to be called Americanisms were words and phrases of English origin. H. L. Mencken in The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (1919) at one point lists words that were current in the United States in the nineteenth century but had become obsolete in England, among them "flap-jack," "molasses," "home-spun," "cesspool," "whittle," "hustle," "fall" (for "autumn") (p. 128). Conversely words "in full use in England," such as "yon," "yonder," and "over" (for "too") were becoming obsolete in America (North American Review, October 1860, p. 522). Americans did not hesitate to change the meaning of words still current in England. For instance, in nineteenth-century British, "plantation" meant primarily the act of planting seeds or placing plants into soil; it also meant the planting of persons in some locality, synonymous with "colonization." In America "plantation" came quickly to denote not an activity but a place—an estate or large farm. While in England a "creek" was an inlet of the sea, a narrow passage between islands, even a small port, in America the meaning of a rivulet or stream was firmly established by the eighteenth century. "Store" is another case in point. To the British the noun "store" meant a supply of something held for future use, as a store of food or clothing. "Store" carried a connotation of adequacy or abundance, so that if one had a "store" of food that meant the supply was large. In America "store" by the nineteenth century meant what the British called a "shop": a retail establishment where goods were sold. Numerous other words evolved so quickly and completely in America they soon required definition for the British to understand.

Americans were also prone to converting one part of speech to another. As Mencken points out, "The early Americans showed that spacious disregard for linguistic nicety which has characterized their descendants ever since. They reduced verb-phrases to simple verbs, turned verbs into nouns, nouns into verbs, and adjectives into either or both." He cites as examples the reduction of "to convey by deed" and "to lay on the table," which in American legal parlance became simply "to deed" and "to table" (p. 117). Among the slew of nouns that early became verbs are "to author," "to engineer," "to hog," "to scalp," and "to stump." Verbs that became adjectives by, as Mencken says, "shading down suffixes to a barbaric simplicity" are the likes of "classy," "scary," and "tasty" (p. 117).

American inventiveness shone further in forming compounds of English words, demonstrating "the national talent for condensing a complex thought . . . into a vivid and arresting image" (p. 142). Americans ate hoe-cake, corn-dodgers, pop-corn, egg-plant, and pea-nuts; some lived in the back-woods, others in bottom-lands; they cleared under-brush, burned pine-knots during cold-snaps, and traveled by bob-sled. They rough-housed and had housewarmings and spelling-bees. From the frontier steadily moving westward came a flood of expressions that became metaphors: "to cave in," "to bark up the wrong tree," "to take to the woods," "to darken one's door," "to fly off the handle," "to have a hard row to hoe." Political campaigns after the War of 1812 generated new compounds that endured: "gag-rule," "landslide," "dark-horse," "lame-duck," "on-the-fence." Verbs current in Andrew Jackson's administrations (1828–1836)—"to bolt," "to lobby," "to straddle"—remained staples of political talk. The gold rush of 1849 brought "prospector," "pan-out," "flash in the pan," and "strike it rich" into Americans' vocabulary. With the development of the railroads came more new compounds: "box-car," "hand-car," "round-trip," "cow-catcher."

The constant flow into the language of new words and phrases made inevitable a continuous debate about Americanisms. Which were acceptable? Which should be rejected? In the United States the arguments were exacerbated by the steady barrage of British criticism of American speech. The need to retaliate after defeat in two wars no doubt accounts in part for the savage attacks in the nineteenth century by English quarterlies and English travelers in the United States. But even observers who were most sympathetic to the Republic and were prepared to take a friendly interest in the new country made unfavorable comments. After visiting America in 1837–1838, Captain Frederick Marryat, a British naval officer and novelist, wondered at "how very debased the language has become in a short period in America" (Mathews, p. 131). He admired in American metaphors "an energy which is very remarkable" (p. 139) but noted that, while "their lower classes are more intelligible than ours," the "higher classes" often lapsed from the standard of the "well-educated English" (p. 131).

Hostile critics routinely denounced departures from British usage as barbarisms, corruptions, vulgarisms, and perversions. In Men and Manners in America (1833), for instance, Thomas Hamilton says: "The privilege of barbarizing the King's English is assumed by all ranks and conditions of men . . . . They assume unlimited liberty in the use of expect, reckon, guess and calculate" when what they mean is "think," "believe," or "suppose" (Mencken, p. 24). Marryat and other Englishmen were impressed by the prevalence of the all-purpose verb "to fix," which Godfrey Thomas Vigne identified in 1832 as meaning "to be done, made, mixed, mended, bespoken, hired, ordered, arranged, procured, finished, lent or given" (Mencken, p. 26). Such American substitutes for British words as "rooster" for "cock"—which by the 1820s had become a vulgar term for the male sex organ—"boss" for "master," and "help" for "servant" were also viewed with contempt, as was the promiscuous use of "lady" and "gentleman" applied to men and women of all ranks and conditions—all made more disagreeable by the "nasal twang" English travelers professed to hear everywhere in the United States. In The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843), Charles Dickens puts the defense of America into the tobacco-stained mouth of an uncouth braggart politician, while the most cultured American character delivers criticism of his or her countrymen's manners and speech.

Americans did not stop reading Dickens's novels, but they defended themselves in other ways. Writers in the North American Review accused British observers of fabricating the American speech they criticized. One claimed that the novelist Frances (Fanny) Trollope, in her popular travel book Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), put into the mouths of Americans "English vulgarism[s] unknown in any part of the United States" (January 1833, p. 14). Others noted that British writers used many verbs, such as "advocate," "immigrate," and "progress," that they stigmatized as Americanisms, and that they perpetrated their own neologisms—"guardianize," "gutturality," "heathendom" (January 1847, p. 186)—and even more cumbersome and ridiculous constructions the likes of "cacodemonize," meaning "demonize," and "evangelizationeer," meaning "evangelist." These American critics pointed out that often words and phrases "charged as being new-invented barbarities of ours were mostly drawn from the pure wells of English undefiled, and had happened to be preserved in America while they were lost in England" (January 1833, p. 20). James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) mounts a detailed and lengthy defense of what he calls the Yankee dialect in the introduction to the second series of The Biglow Papers (1867), hoping to show that "the Yankee often has antiquity and very respectable literary authority on his side" (p. 217).

American writers, including those with strong ties to England, defended American English in positive ways, by praising it and using it. Lowell urged American writers to seek language "at its living sources," in "our popular idiom . . . racy with life and vigor, and originality" (p. 214). He prophesied that the United States would be "past all question . . . the great home and centre" of the English language. In "The American Scholar" (1837) Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) declares, "We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe" (p. 47); he pronounces the style of Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and Edward Gibbon "cold and pedantic" (p. 46), declares that "Life is our dictionary" (p. 39), and exhorts American writers to celebrate "the near, the low, the common" (p. 45) in the language of everyday life. The genteel narrator of James Fenimore Cooper's (1789–1851) Leatherstocking Tales uses American words and colloquialisms without comment. His vocabulary in chapter 6 of The Pioneers (1823), describing a local doctor, includes "butternut," "home-spun," "jobber," "meetinghouse," "one-horse sleigh," "settlement," "to shoot up," and "to break the ice."

DEVELOPMENT OF STANDARD AMERICAN ENGLISH

Americans made their most important, far-reaching defense by promoting American English as one language, uniform throughout the country. Many prominent men, including John Adams, John Marshall, and James Fenimore Cooper, all of whom rejected the idea of a separate American language, concurred with Noah Webster's belief that "our political harmony is . . . concerned in a uniformity of language" (Dissertations, p. 20). Both English and American observers noted that differences in the speech of regions and classes were much greater in England than in the United States. Still the peculiarities of idiom and pronunciation marking speech in New England, the South, and the West were feared as sources of linguistic corruption and threats to national unity. The expansion of the United States to the Pacific Ocean, the arrival in the antebellum years of thousands of immigrants, and internal strife foreshadowing the Civil War made ever more urgent the need for one language to unify the nation.

The importance placed on a uniform language at once raised the question of establishing a standard. By what authority was a standard to be created and implemented? The one sustained effort to legislate uniformity was made by William S. Cardell (1780–1828), a grammarian who in 1820 proposed an American Academy of Language and Belles Lettres to establish the forms of good usage and thus, as he told Thomas Jefferson in a letter, to "maintain, as far as practicable, an English standard of writing and pronunciation, correct, fixed, and uniform, throughout our extensive territory" (Baron, p. 101). Cardell envisioned an American equivalent of the venerable Académie Française, or French Academy, founded in 1635 by Cardinal Richelieu to establish and disseminate a standard language, to supplant regional dialects, and to publish an official exhaustive dictionary. Many leading citizens supported these aims, but no organization like the French Academy, which at the end of the twentieth century was publishing the ninth edition of its exhaustive dictionary, ever developed in the United States.

Webster remained aloof from Cardell's efforts, which failed after three years, but his American Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1828 and revised twice in his lifetime, became the single most important work in the development of Standard American English. Preceded by his American Spelling Book; or, First Part of the Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1787), his American Spelling Book, Containing the Rudiments of the English Language, for the Use of Schools in the United States (1804), and his Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (1806), Webster's monumental two-volume work contained definitions of some seventy thousand words, including thousands appearing for the first time in any dictionary (Simpson, p. 141). In the preface to the American Dictionary, Webster states his aim "to ascertain the true principle of the language, in its orthography and structure; to purify it from some palpable errors, and reduce the number of its anomalies, thus giving it more regularity and consistency in its forms, both of words and sentences; and in this manner to furnish a standard of our vernacular tongue."

Webster opposed any standard created by British authority or by a privileged class of Americans. He favored a standard based on "the rules of the language itself, and the general practice of the nation" (Dissertations, p. 27); he sought a closer connection between spoken and written language; but his lifelong effort to eradicate localisms indicates a qualified acceptance of the usages of the common people as a standard. Other writers who were more conservative on language looked for their standard to "the class of highest cultivation as exerted especially through the medium of literature" (North American Review, January 1867, p. 53), "not the usage of the majority, but of the learned" (North American Review, July 1849, p. 98). Washington Irving warned that "any deviation on our part from the best London usage will be liable to be considered as a provincialism" (Read, p. 1165). In Notions of the Americans (1828), James Fenimore Cooper claimed that "the people of the United States . . . speak, as a body, an incomparably better English than the people of the Mother country" (pp. 361–362), but he was an exacting critic of the American penchant for euphemism (polite deflation), affectation (linguistic pretense), and "turgid abuse of terms" (American Democrat, p. 110). In his chapter "On Language" in The American Democrat (1838), Cooper cites departures from British definitions, calling them "popular abuses of significations." For instance, Americans use "park" when they mean "square," "pond" when they mean "lake," and "creek" when they mean "stream." "In pronunciation," Cooper says, "the faults are still more numerous" (p. 111), and he recommends the British pronunciation of "clerk" (clark), "gold" (goold), "lieutenant" (levtenant), and other words as being "more in conformity with polite usage" (p. 112).

Noah Webster came as close as any one person to creating the authority that determines correct usage. But in the absence of an academy or a court, schools were essential in forming and maintaining a national standard. As early as 1789, Webster declared that "nothing but the establishment of schools and some uniformity in the use of books, can annihilate differences in speaking and preserve the purity of the American tongue" (Dissertations, p. 19). In providing teachers and shaping the course of study, New England led the way as the region with the most elementary schools, grammar schools, and private academies as well as with the first two American universities, Harvard (1636) and Yale (1701). Of the standard textbooks studied by millions of children in the nineteenth century, the most nationalistic were Webster's American Spelling Books, followed by his Elementary Spelling Book (1829), which were designed to promote "a uniform national language" (Krapp 1:17). By the 1820s Webster had abandoned his promotion of phonetic spelling, but he established the simplified spellings that distinguish American from British usage, for example, "ax," "wagon," "mold," "medieval," "program," "mask," "check," and "traveled" instead of "axe," "waggon," "mould," "mediaeval," "programme," "masque," "cheque," and "travelled"; and the removal of "u" from "honour," "favour," "neigh-bour," and the like.

Despite such support for American English, Lindley Murray's English Grammar, Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners, first published in 1795 and based on the British grammar of Robert Lowth, bishop of London, remained the preferred school text for more than fifty years. Murray's belief that the standard of good English should be formed on "the practice of the best and most correct writers . . . corroborated by general usage" (Baron, p. 145) was shared by other American grammarians of the period, such as Samuel Kirkham, Goold Brown, and William Chauncey Fowler, who likewise sought to regulate language through rules and exercises. Grammarians differed about the legitimacy of certain words but uniformly condemned as substandard such locutions as "don't know as," "had went," and "us girls go." Some coinages—"funeralize," "happify," "questionize," "publishment"—were generally reviled before they expired. Other favorite targets of purists became accepted English by the end of the century. For instance, "talented" was at first reviled by both British and American grammarians because it was used as a past participle but did not derive from a verb. Although "talented" was widely regarded as an Americanism, in fact it was coined in England early in the seventeenth century, then fell into obscurity there while it was used with greater frequency in the United States. In 1855 the American Charles Astor Bristed defended it in "The English Language in America," saying that "it is of little use to inveigh against such words" (Mencken, p. 70), and by 1911 it had been sanctioned within the pages of the Oxford English Dictionary and inculcated in the speech of both nations. "Reliable," "influential," "lengthy," "jeopardize," and numerous other words have a similar history.

For decades schoolchildren all over the United States studied the "best and most correct writers" in William Holmes McGuffey's Eclectic Reader series, which also contained pronunciation tables and exercises in articulation. Many of the prose selections, drawn from "the purest fountains of English literature," were by British writers of the eighteenth century. The 1853 edition of McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader included selections by Joseph Addison, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, David Hume, Samuel Johnson, and Robert Walpole. Political writings of Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Daniel Webster and seven essays by Washington Irving represented American prose.

An article called "Expression in America" in the May 1857 issue of Harper's New Monthly Magazine emphasized the authority of teachers and ministers in promoting a uniform standard of good usage: "Our schools, colleges, and churches are to decide the speech of the new generations, and our popular education is our national academy" (p. 845). Harper's itself—a periodical with a large national circulation, publishing fiction, poetry, and articles of general interest addressed to a wide audience—represented another institution important in forming Americans' linguistic standard. From its first issue in June 1850 the magazine ardently supported the cause of national unity and opposed sectionalism and "barbaric individualism" (January 1861, p. 262). To help readers acquire "a correct knowledge of English" (April 1860, p. 694) and thus to further the goal of "a pure national speech" (May 1857, p. 845), the magazine published reviews and articles that warned against corruption of the language by "verbal inflation" and "stereotyped grandiloquence" (November 1852, p. 780), the bombast of "the spread-eagle style," and the slang and cant generated by newspapers and political campaigns (February 1867, p. 322). Somewhat ironically, perhaps, a large percentage of the literature published in Harper's was by English writers, including such super-stars as Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray.

Harper's editors stressed the need of "settling the question now so important to the whole nation: 'What language is to be spoken and written in America?'" (May 1857, p. 845). But by 1850 this question essentially had been answered. The rules of polite usage were well enough fixed to distinguish correct English from the vulgar and unschooled. American and British English would not become separate languages. Prophecies that language in America would become as different from British English as Dutch and Swedish are different from German never came to pass. But American English became clearly distinct from the Standard English of Great Britain by hundreds of well-established differences in vocabulary, idiom, spelling, and pronunciation. By mid-century American English had developed into a rich, unique language born of American inventiveness and the confluence of many cultures, a language flexible and capacious enough to accommodate the constant influx of new words and the controversies they generated, able to contain opposing impulses to expand and to regulate the language. In his essay "America's Mightiest Inheritance," published in 1856 in the newspaper Life Illustrated, Walt Whitman extols the American language—"so long in growing, so sturdy and fluent, so appropriate to our America and the genius of its inhabitants."

See also Book Publishing; Colleges; Curricula; Dialect; Editors; Education; English Literature; Harper's New Monthly Magazine; Literary Criticism; Literary Nationalism; Periodicals; Publishers; Rhetoric

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Cooper, James Fenimore. The American Democrat; or, Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America. 1838. Introduction by H. L. Mencken. New York: Knopf, 1931.

Cooper, James Fenimore. Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor. 2 vols. 1828. Edited by Gary Williams. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "The American Scholar." 1837. In Essays and Journals. Edited with an introduction by Lewis Mumford. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968.

Harper's New Monthly Magazine. 5, no. 30 (November 1852); 14, no. 84 (May 1857); 20, no. 119 (April 1860); 22, no. 128 (January 1861); 34, no. 201 (February 1867). Brief quotations in the article come from these issues.

Jefferson, Thomas. The Writings of Thomas Jefferson. 20 vols. Edited by Andrew A. Lipscomb. Washington, D.C.: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association of the United States, 1903–1904.

Krapp, George Philip. The English Language in America. 2 vols. New York: Century, 1925.

Lowell, James Russell. The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1890. Includes both series of The Biglow Papers.

Mathews, Mitford M., ed. The Beginnings of American English: Essays and Comments. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931.

Mencken, H. L. The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States. New York: Knopf, 1919.

North American Review 36, no. 78 (January 1833); 64, no. 134 (January 1847); 69, no. 144 (July 1849); 91, no. 189 (October 1860); 104, no. 214 (January 1867). Brief quotations in the article come from these issues.

Read, Allen Walker. "American Projects for an Academy to Regulate Speech." PMLA 51, no. 4 (1936): 1141–1179.

Webster, Noah. An American Dictionary of the English Language. 1828. 2 vols. Introduction by Mario Pei. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation, 1970.

Webster, Noah. Dissertations on the English Language: With Notes, Historical and Critical, to Which Is Added, by Way of Appendix, an Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling, with Dr. Franklin's Arguments on That Subject. 1789. Introduction by Harry R. Warfel. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1951.

Whitman, Walt. New York Dissected: A Sheaf of Recently Discovered Newspaper Articles by the Author of "Leaves of Grass." Edited by Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimari. New York: Rufus Rockwell Wilson, 1936. Includes the essay "America's Mightiest Inheritance."

Secondary Works

Baron, Dennis E. Grammar and Good Taste: Reforming the American Language. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982.

Kramer, Michael P. Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992.

Marckwardt, Albert H. American English. 2nd ed. Revised by J. L. Dillard. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Simpson, David. The Politics of American English, 1776–1850. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Elsa Nettels