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DIALECT

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"Dialect" is a loaded word that presupposes a correct language against which to posit the cultural deficiency of the deviant speaker. Yet throughout the nineteenth century, American discussion of the nation's vernacular language varieties returned again and again to the notion that any border between standard and nonstandard discourse was fundamentally unstable. The post-Revolutionary period had established a strong emphasis on language as an organ of civic order and national unity, which helps to account for a continuing paradox in discussions of American speech—the simultaneous opinions that the United States had no dialects, at least compared to the British model, and that the regional features which were detectable threatened wholesale national fragmentation and cultural collapse. An explanation for this paradox is offered by Charles A. Bristed in his groundbreaking essay "The English Language in America" (1855): "The English provincialisms keep their place; they are confined to their own localities, and do not encroach on the metropolitan model. The American provincialisms are more equally distributed through all classes and localities, and though some of them may not rise above a certain level of society, others are heard everywhere" (pp. 61–62).

Discussion of dialect often moved in this way toward broader analysis of the sociopolitical consequences of American independence and democracy: the restlessness of social mobility that made Alexis de Tocqueville warn of instability, abstraction, and ambiguity in American speech; the postcolonial anxiety that American English was itself merely a dialect, and a deteriorating one according to Henry Alford in A Plea for the Queen's English (1863); and the effects of ethnic intermixture and of the racial oppression that led to the Civil War.

The 1820–1870 period was a major one in the formation and dominance of English in America, a period when regional distinctions within American English became readily identifiable and were used by writers and public speakers alike. The earlier fear that dialects would diverge into mutually unintelligible varieties and the lexicographical efforts of Noah Webster to impose a single national language based on an idealized version of New England speech gave way to a new acceptance of regional folk dialects by politicians in the 1820s and 1830s, when the rise of democracy as a political ideology directed attention to lower-class speech varieties. American writers focused as never before on what they perceived to be the grammatical peculiarities and, most obviously, the pronunciation of the nation's many regional, ethnic, and social dialects, which they attempted to represent in purportedly phonetic spelling. Novelists began to include dialect-speaking characters in their novels, though it was the literary sketch, the short story, and to a lesser extent the poem in which dialect tended to thrive. The uses of dialect ranged from those of protest, in which writers divorced from centers of power found political voice, to much more conservative efforts to burlesque dialect, thus making outlandish speech imply the educational, social, and even biological inferiority of the imagined speaker. The tone of dialect writing may have been predominantly humorous, but behind it lay pronounced anxieties over class hierarchies, over racial and ethnic identity, and over regional relations. Speaking generally, dialect writing can be thought of as a literature of internal conflict between different cultures and political causes.

ETHNICITY AND CULTURAL CONFLICT

The literary emphasis on differences within English undoubtedly diverted attention from the continuing presence—and disappearance—of non-English languages in the United States, thus helping to establish English as the national language without official recognition at the federal level. Rather than simply masking non-English languages, however, the literary appearance of dialect could also register the influence of "foreign" discourse, thus suggesting that the regional characteristics of American English may have emerged from contact with speakers of other languages, not just from British settlement patterns. In his introduction to the Dictionary of Americanisms (1848), John Bartlett believed that German would "leave behind it an almost imperishable dialect as a memento of its existence" (p. xvi), as would Norwegian, Welsh, French, Spanish, and Native American languages. Traces of this ethnic variation, and the cultural contact it implies, can be found in the attempted transcriptions of Irish and Scots English in Hugh Henry Brackenridge's novel Modern Chivalry (1792–1815); in representations of Native American, black, and Irish English in William Gilmore Simms's novel The Yemassee (1835); in the "German-English" dialect poetry of Charles G. Leland (which announces the interest in ethnic dialect writing later in the century); and in the pidgin English of The Chainbearer (1845) by James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851).

Cooper's novels are excellent places to see the politics of dialect at work, as David Simpson argues in his noteworthy critical study The Politics of American English. Pitting Cooper against Noah Webster's linguistic homogenizing and against the transcendentalists' tendency to stress the spiritual unity of all language, Simpson argues that novels such as The Pioneers (1823) and The Deerslayer (1841) place their thematic weight on representations of American English as a collection of competing dialects—vocational, racial, and regional—which reflect the multiple social and cultural conflicts within the nation. Cooper thus refuses simply to target dialect as inferior language that represents cultural and moral debasement. The figure of Natty Bumppo emerges from the cacophony of the Leatherstocking Tales to become an important example of the traditionally "ungrammatical" character whose language obeys natural laws that encode higher moral values. Cooper's focus on the varieties of vernacular discourse is found in a less-developed form in Robert Montgomery Bird's Nick of the Woods (1837)—which features various southern dialects and Quaker English as well as some black and Native American speech—and in more sophisticated ways in the works of northeastern and southwestern humor that attracted international attention in the 1830s. Like Cooper's novel Satanstoe (1845), which detects in the distinction between New England and New York speech profound racial, educational, and moral differences (all to the detriment of New England), these humorous works juxtaposed different social registers of speech while simultaneously contemplating the politics of regional difference, especially as the Civil War approached.

NORTHEASTERN AND SOUTHWESTERN HUMOR

Rustic Yankee speech had been employed for political commentary as early as the 1760s and was common on the stage in humorous portrayals of the stock Yankee figure. George W. Arnold is commonly credited with bringing the political and the humorous together in the mid-1820s in his "Joe Strickland" letters, published in numerous eastern newspapers and written in an alleged Yankee speech (one replete with comic misspellings as well as attempts at regional grammar and phonology) as the lighthearted medium of social satire. The mildly colloquial Maine vernacular of Seba Smith's "Jack Downing" letters became popular in the 1830s as a marker of plain talk that employed self-mocking humor to launch political critiques of the Maine legislature and later of Jacksonian national politics. This northeastern literary tradition was accessed by women writers too, with Frances M. Whitcher's "Widow Bedott" sketches using rustic Yankee ironically to satirize gender relations and to promote feminist causes. Perhaps the best-known example of a politicized use of New England speech was the Biglow Papers by James Russell Lowell (1819–1891), which in two series (collected in 1848 and 1867) opposed the expansionism of the Mexican-American War and supported the Union cause in the Civil War. Hosea Biglow is a Massachusetts farmer whose rustic dialect poetry is imagined by Lowell as a "divinely illiterate" language of the heart with a moral power that outstrips the effete standard language of Biglow's fictional editor (the pedantic parson Homer Wilbur) and that opposes a range of corrupt political discourses advocating belligerent nationalism, slavery, and secession. In his introduction to the second series of the Papers, Lowell aligns his ideas with a Romantic tradition of valuing a certain variety of lowly speech that embodies the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon past rather than valuing nonstandard language per se. Hence Lowell ironically uses a dialect-speaking soldier as the wrongheaded spokesman for Manifest Destiny and exhibits a distaste for the encroaching slang of popular culture.

Humorously political dialect writing may have emerged in the North but it became most self-conscious and sophisticated in writings from the South. The tradition of southwestern humor, much of which appeared in William T. Porter's magazine the Spirit of the Times between 1831 and 1861, was produced quite often by gentlemanly professionals, though its class values were far from stable. Augustus Baldwin Longstreet's collection of sketches Georgia Scenes (1835) helped pioneer a device prevalent in subsequent dialect writing, whereby the standard, implicitly educated language of the narrator "frames" the dialect speech. If the intent of linguistic polarization in works such as Georgia Scenes and Johnson Jones Hooper's Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs (1845) was to satirize Jacksonian democracy by targeting the alleged violence and irresponsibility of its lower-class voices, then the effect is often one in which the over-refinement of the polite language gets submerged by the attractive energy of the rural dialect. In T. B. Thorpe's "The Big Bear of Arkansas" (1841) the compelling vernacular ousts the frame language almost completely to create a subjective reality rich with unconscious significance concerning humans' relationship with the natural world. Joseph G. Baldwin's "Ovid Bolus, Esquire," from The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), is a remarkably complex contemplation of the links between the hyperbolic tallness of vernacular talk and the socioeconomic inflation of the Jacksonian era as well as a virtual treatise on the power within language to outstrip and manipulate the world it purports to represent—a thematic correlative of the stress that nonstandard spelling places on the conventional, and thus pliable, nature of words. Whether in plays such as James Kirke Paulding's The Lion of the West (1830) or in writings by and about the backwoods politician Davy Crockett, the Southwest became humorously associated with the densely metaphorical exaggeration of tall talk, the valuing of big words for their own sakes. This implied a broader definition of dialect not simply as a representation of colloquial speech but as an attitude toward language itself, an attitude typically described as a product of the sublime landscape of the West and the rampant individualism of its frontier freedoms.

THE CIVIL WAR AND BLACK ENGLISH

Miscommunication between speakers of different varieties of a purportedly common tongue is a staple of dialect humor. Little surprise, then, that this kind of writing became the perfect medium for replaying the political differences that culminated in the Civil War. The second wave of dialect humorists of the 1850s and 1860s often deemphasized regional speech in their creation of burlesque languages that forced humor from bad grammar, mixed metaphor, ludicrous misuse of words (malapropism), and unintentional puns, all underscored by the running joke of incorrect spelling. This "misspelling bee" was partly a reaction against strong cultural pressure toward uniform spelling, though the growth of this writing during the Civil War suggests a need for unconventional languages to translate the shock of national conflict. Often dropping the frame device altogether, these humorists emphasized the limited literacy of their narrators and characters, representing their personae in imagined acts of (mis)writing, not speaking, which became a means to satirize the ignorance and ineptitude of opposing political factions. David Ross Locke's "Petroleum V. Nasby" sketches, for instance, attacked the Confederacy ironically by ventriloquizing its voice, while Charles Henry Smith's "Bill Arp" returned the compliment in a parodic southern speech disastrously sympathetic with the North. Of particular note in the southwestern tradition is Sut Lovingood's Yarns (1867) by George Washington Harris (1814–1869), which presents a purportedly Tennessean dialect that becomes almost unreadable in its subversion of conventional literacy. In the voice of white poverty, Sut's violent attacks radiate beyond the occasional target of the North to include the agents of decorum, logic, education, and civilization itself.

A challenge of reading dialect is to decide how far the literary representation distorts speech to champion or demean the speaker, how far it regularizes speech patterns to make the dialect seem more distinct than it was, and how far it represents genuine evidence for linguistic history. This challenge is pronounced with regard to representations of black English, always pressured by the weight of racist ideology. The genre of the ex-slave narrative tended to eschew dialect because of the humanizing implications of mastering the standard language and because ludicrously inaccurate parodies of black speech featured prominently in the tradition of blackface minstrelsy (remarkably popular in the North and South by the 1840s) and in proslavery agitation in the antebellum era. Both of these traditions tended to rationalize black subordination by staging linguistic ineptitude to imply the ignorance, immaturity, and mental inferiority of African Americans. Yet the representation of dialect to inscribe black-white difference may have been a reaction to racial closeness as well. Strong evidence, especially in the writings of visitors to the South such as Charles Lyell, Charles Dickens, and Frances Kemble, suggests that whites learned black English, with the implication that white southern speech may have been influenced by black English—a point that became much more contentious after the war. Many white Americans were clearly aware of distinct forms of black English by the early eighteenth century, though the mid-nineteenth century saw the real emergence of allegedly black speech in mainstream literature: in Cooper's The Spy (1821) and Satanstoe, in William Gilmore Simms's novels and stories, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851–1852), and in Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Gold-Bug" (1843). The linguist J. L. Dillard has argued that the speech of Poe's character Jupiter contains a number of integral features of black English and may suggest the widespread existence of a Creole language beyond the Gullah spoken on the Sea Islands of Georgia and the Carolinas. The ambivalence in well-meaning white reactions to black English can be glimpsed in Stowe's novel as well as in William Francis Allen's discussion of Gullah in his introduction to Slave Songs of the United States (1867). Stowe's attempted spelling of black English is largely inconsistent and stereotypical, yet the novel still recognizes the capacity of African Americans to mask meaning through ambiguous expression—a particular skill of the character Topsy. Allen attributes the "foreignness" of Gullah to a decay, simplification, and corruption of English, but he also recognizes in black dialect a resistance to conventional representation, a tendency for speech patterns to vary tremendously from one plantation to another and between different speakers, an endless capacity to improvise on and resignify English, and a possible survival of African words.

By 1870 dialect had become a crucial aspect of American literary language. Regional speech types were established and recognizable, white writers were grappling with the difference of black English, western speech was drawing widespread attention in the early stories of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, the so-called local color movement had emerged in the New England works of Stowe, and scientific philologists such as William Dwight Whitney were beginning to argue relativistically that all languages were really dialects. The stage was set for the Gilded Age craze for dialect writing, a craze that would only intensify the social, cultural, and racial anxieties with which the representation of dialect had emerged.

See also American English; Blacks; Civil War; Ethnology; Leatherstocking Tales; Proslavery Writing; Satire, Burlesque, and Parody; Tall Tales

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Bartlett, John Russell. The Dictionary of Americanisms. 1848. New York: Crescent, 1989.

Bristed, Charles Astor. "The English Language in America." In Cambridge Essays, Contributed by Members of the University, pp. 57–78. London: J. W. Parker, 1855.

Marsh, George Perkins. Lectures on the English Language. New York: Scribner, 1860.

Secondary Works

Bailey, Richard W. Nineteenth-Century English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

Blair, Walter. Native American Humor (1800–1900). New York: American Book Company, 1937.

Blair, Walter, and Hamlin Hill. America's Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978.

Cmiel, Kenneth. "'A Broad Fluid Language of Democracy': Discovering the American Idiom." Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 913–936.

Cmiel, Kenneth. Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: William Morrow, 1990.

Dillard, J. L. Black English: Its History and Usage in the United States. New York: Random House, 1972.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. "Dis and Dat: Dialect and the Descent." In his Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the "Racial" Self, pp. 167–189. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Gustafson, Thomas. Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language, 1776–1865. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Lynn, Kenneth. Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor. Boston: Little, Brown, 1959.

Read, Allen Walker. "The World of Joe Strickland." Journal of American Folklore 76 (1963): 277–308.

Schmitz, Neil. "Tall Tale, Tall Talk: Pursuing the Lie in Jacksonian Literature." In On Humor: The Best from "American Literature," edited by Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, pp. 190–210. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992.

Shell, Marc. "Babel in America; or, The Politics of Language Diversity in the United States." Critical Inquiry 20 (1993): 103–127.

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

Gavin Jones