There are, you see, sounds of a mysterious intrinsic meanness, and there are sounds of a mysterious intrinsic frankness and sweetness; and I think the recurrent note I have indicated — fatherr and motherr and otherr, waterr and matterr and scatterr, harrd and barrd, parrt, starrt, and (dreadful to say) arrt (the repetition it is that drives home the ugliness), are signal specimens of what becomes of a custom of utterance out of which the principle of taste has dropped.
James’s observations must have been made west of the Connecticut river and north of the Potomac, for in the Boston area and in all of the South save the mountain region r is elided in something resembling the English manner.84 H. C. Wyld offers evidences85 that it was lost before consonants “at least as early as the Fifteenth Century,” and especially before -s and -sh, as in sca’cely and ma’sh. Krapp gives many examples from the early American town records, and calls attention to the fact that there are survivals in vulgar American, as in cuss, bust, passel (for parcel) and hoss.86 Toward the end of the Eighteenth Century it became fashionable in England to omit the r and Samuel Johnson helped that fashion along by denouncing the “rough snarling letter.” It is now omitted in the middle of words before all consonants, and at the end of words unless the following word of the sentence begins with a vowel. It is retained, says Wyld, “initially, and when preceded by another consonant, before vowels,” as in run and grass; “in the middle of words between vowels,” as in starry and hearing; and usually, “at the end of words when the next word begins with a vowel, and there is no pause in the sentence between the words,” as in for ever, over all and her ear. But Wyld admits that even in the last-named situation “the younger generation” denies it clear utterance. In the American South it is boldly omitted. No Tidewater Virginian says over all; he says ovah all. Krapp speculates somewhat inconclusively regarding the preservation of the r in General American. He says that the emigration to the West was largely made up of New Englanders from west of the Connecticut, and that in that region the r was always sounded. He alludes, too, to the probable influence of Scottish and Irish immigrants. “Perhaps also,” he adds,
formal instruction in the schools and the habit of reading have not been without influence in the Western pronunciation of r. New England has also had its schools and its readers, but students of language are frequently called upon to observe that only in unsettling social circumstances, such as migration, do forces which may long have been present exert their full power.87
The majority of Americans seem to have early abandoned all effort to sound the h in such words as when and where. It is still supposed to be sounded in England, and its absence is often denounced as an American barbarism, but as a matter of fact few Englishmen actually sound it, save in the most formal discourse. Some time ago the English novelist, Archibald Marshall, published an article in a London newspaper arguing that it was a sheer physical impossibility to sound the h correctly. “You cannot pronounce wh,” he said, “if you try. You have to turn it into hw to make it any different from w” Nevertheless, Mr. Marshall argued, with true English orthodoxy, that the effort should be made. “Most words of one syllable beginning with wh,” he said, “and many of two syllables have a corresponding word, but of quite different meaning, beginning with w alone. When-wen, whether-weather, while-wile, whither-wither, wheel-weal. If there is a distinction ready to hand it is of advantage to make use of it.” That is to say, to make use of hwen, hwether, hwile, hwither and hweel. The Americans do not sound the h in heir, honest, honor, hour and humor and their derivatives, and frequently omit it in herb, humble and humility. In the vulgar speech herb is often yarb. In Standard English h is openly omitted from hostler, even in spelling, and is seldom clearly sounded in hotel and hospital. Certain English words in which it is now sounded apparently betray its former silence by the fact that not a but an is commonly put before them. It is still good English usage to write an hotel and an historical.88 The intrusion of h into words where it doesn’t belong, a familiar characteristic of Cockney English, is unknown in any of the American dialects. The authority of Webster was sufficient to establish the American pronunciation of schedule. In England the sch is always given the soft sound, but Webster decided for the hard sound as in scheme. The name of the last letter of the alphabet, which is always zed in England, is often made zee in the United States. Thornton shows that this Americanism arose in the Eighteenth Century. Americans give nephew (following a spelling pronunciation, historically incorrect) a clear f-sound instead of the clouded English v-sound. They show some tendency to abandon the ph(f)-sound in diphtheria, diphthong and naphtha, for a plain p-sound.89 English usage prefers a clear s-sound in such words as issue and sensual, but in America the sound is commonly that of sh. English usage prefers a clear tu-sound in actual, punctuate, virtue, and their like, but in America the tu tends to become choo. On the vulgar level amateur is always amachoor, and picture is pitchur or pitcher. Literature is literater in elegant American and litrachoor among the general; in England it is litrachua or litrichua. The American plain people have some difficulty with t and d. They add a t to close, wish and once, and displace d with t in hold, which becomes holt. In told and old they abandon the d altogether, preferring tole and ole. Didn’t is pronounced di’n’t, and find becomes indistinguishable from fine. The same letter is often dropped before consonants, as in bran(d)-new, goo(d)-sized and corne(d)-beef. The old ax for ask is now confined to a few dialects; in the current vulgate ast is substituted for it. The t is dropped in bankrup, kep, slep, crep, quanity and les (let’s). The l is omitted from a’ready and gent’man, and the first g from reco’nize. As in Standard English, there is a frequent dropping of g in the -ing words, but it is usually preserved in anything and everything.90 The substitution of th for t in height, like the addition of t to once, seems to be an heirloom from the English of two centuries ago, but the excrescent b, as in chimbley and fambly, is apparently native. There are many parallels for the English butchery of extraordinary; for example, bound’ry, pro’bition, int’res’, gover’ment, chrysanthe’um, Feb’uary, hist’ry, lib’ry and prob’ly. Ordinary is commonly enunciated clearly, but it has bred a degenerated form, onry or onery, differentiated in meaning.91 Consonants are misplaced by metathesis, as in prespiration, hunderd, brethern, childern, interduce, calvary, govrenment, and modren. Ow is changed to er, as in piller, swaller, beller and holler, or to a, as in fella, or to i as in minni (minnow). Words are given new syllables, as in ellum, fillum, reality (realty), lozenger, athaletic, bronichal, blasphemious, mischievious, Cubéan, mountainious, tremendious, mayorality and municipal, or new consonants, as in overhall and larcensy.92 In yes the terminal consonant is often omitted, leaving the vowel, which is that of desk, unchanged. This form is sometimes represented in print by yeah, which suggests yay and is inaccurate. But there are many other forms of yes, and Dr. Louise Pound once gathered no less than 37 in a single group of students at the University of Nebraska.93 St. John Ervine, the Anglo-Irish critic, who is ordinarily extremely hospitable to Americanisms, has carried on a crusade against these American yeses, and especially against the one which omits the s and the one usually represented by yep, which last, he says, “can sometimes be heard on English tongues.” He has denounced both as “disgusting.”94 “These variations of a single English word,” he says, “are inevitable in a country with a polyglot population.… When an American immigrant says yah or yep he is probably trying to say yes, just as a baby when it mispronounces a word is trying to pronounce it correctly.”95 He says that the yes without the s sounds as if the speaker “had started out to say yes, but had suddenly contracted a violent pain in his stomach and was unable to sound the sibilant.” No sometimes picks up a terminal p, and becomes nope.
4. DIALECTS
All the early writers on the American language remarked its strange freedom from dialects. The first of them to deal with it at length, the Rev. John Witherspoon, thus sought to account for the fact:
The vulgar in America speak
much better than the vulgar in Great Britain for a very obvious reason, viz., that being much more unsettled, and moving frequently from place to place, they are not so liable to local peculiarities either in accent or phraseology. There is a greater difference in dialect between one county and another in Britain than there is between one State and another in America.96
Timothy Dwight and John Pickering took the same line. “In the United States,” said Dwight in 1815, “there is not, I presume, a descendant of English ancestors whose conversation is not easily and perfectly intelligible to every other.”97 “It is agreed,” said Pickering a year later, “that there is a greater uniformity of dialect throughout the United States (in consequence of the frequent removals of people from one part of the country to another) than is to be found in England.”98 The Rev. Jonathan Boucher, whose glossary was published in 1832, was of the same mind. “There is, properly speaking,” he said, “no dialect in America … unless some scanty remains of the croaking, guttural idioms of the Dutch, still observable in New York; the Scotch-Irish, as it used to be called, in some of the back settlers of the Middle States; and the whining, canting drawl brought by some republican, Oliverian and Puritan emigrants from the West of England, and still kept up by their unregenerated descendants of New England — may be called dialects.”99 J. Fenimore Cooper, already quoted in praise of American speech in Section 1 of this chapter, agreed thoroughly with Witherspoon, Pickering and Boucher. He said in 1828:
If the people of this country were like the people of any other country on earth we should be speaking at this moment a great variety of nearly unintelligible patois, but … there is not, probably, a man (of English descent) born in this country who would not be perfectly intelligible to all whom he should meet in the streets of London, though a vast number of those he met would be nearly unintelligible to him.… This resemblance in speech can only be ascribed to the great diffusion of intelligence, and to the inexhaustible activity of the people which, in a manner, destroys space.100
Cooper added that such meager dialects as were to be encountered in the United States were fast wearing down to uniformity. The differences between New England, New York and Pennsylvania speech, he said, “were far greater twenty years ago than they are now.” A generation later George P. Marsh reported that this ironing out had been arrested. “I think no Eastern man,” he said, “can hear a native of the Mississippi Valley use the o vocative, or observe the Southern pronunciation of ejaculatory or other emphatic phrases, without perceiving a very marked though often indescribable difference between their and our utterance of the same things.” But Marsh was still convinced that American was singularly uniform. He said:
Not only is the average of English used here, both in speaking and writing, better than that of the great mass of the English people; but there are fewer local peculiarities of form and articulation in our vast extent of territory than on the comparatively narrow soil of Great Britain. In spite of disturbing and distracting causes, English is more emphatically one in America than in its native land.101
A great many other authorities might be quoted, all supporting the same doctrine. I choose two, both from the year 1919. The first is the anonymous Englishman who edited the monthly called English, now defunct.102 In his issue for October he said:
The citizen of the United States can travel from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific, from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, without experiencing any change in the pronunciation that can be taken as evidence of dialect; but in England one cannot go from one county to another, and in many cases not from the West to East end of a single town, without noticing a most marked difference in the pronunciation of words. Many a Londoner has been hopelessly baffled when for the first time he has asked a Liverpool policeman or a Glasgow newsboy to direct him, and if an Essex laborer were suddenly to find himself in the bar-parlor of a Dartmoor inn, or at a meeting of Yorkshire miners, he would be scarcely more able to follow the conversation than if he were in Petrograd.
The other authority is the late George Philip Krapp, professor of English at Columbia and the author of two standard works on American pronunciation.103 He said:
Relatively few Americans spend all their lives in one locality, and even if they do, they cannot possibly escape coming into contact with Americans from other localities.… We can distinguish with some certainty Eastern and Western and Southern speech, but beyond this the author has little confidence in those confident experts who think they can tell infallibly, by the test of speech, a native of Hartford from a native of Providence, or a native of Philadelphia from a native of Atlanta, or even, if one insist on infallibility, a native of Chicago from a native of Boston.
Krapp was discussing Standard American, but on the plane of the vulgate the leveling is quite as apparent. That vast uniformity which marks the people of the United States, in political theory, in social habit, in general information, in reaction to new ideas, in deep-lying prejudices and enthusiasms, in the veriest details of domestic custom and dress, is nowhere more marked than in their speech habits. The incessant neologisms of the national dialect sweep the whole country almost instantly, and the iconoclastic changes which its popular spoken form is constantly undergoing show themselves from coast to coast.
Nevertheless, there are dialectical differences in spoken American, and they have been observed and recorded by a multitude of pho-nologists, both professional and lay. The organization of the American Dialect Society in 1889, the continuous, if somewhat infrequent, appearance of Dialect Notes ever since, and the preparation of a Linguistic Atlas of the country are sufficient evidences that American dialects really exist. Disregarding local peculiarities, there are three of them. The most important is that which a leading authority, Dr. Hans Kurath, calls Western American: it is the tongue that the overwhelming majority of Americans speak, and the one that Englishmen always have in mind when they discuss American English. Its territory includes all of New England west of the Connecticut river, the whole of the Middle Atlantic area save the lower Eastern Shore of Maryland and lower Delaware, and all the region west of the Cotton Belts of Texas and Arkansas and north of Central Missouri. In Ohio, Indiana and Illinois it comes down close to the Ohio river, and in the South it includes parts of the mountain country. It is also spoken east of the Connecticut river, in parts of Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Maine, and by many persons in Boston. No other form of American is so widespread, and none other is still spreading. The so-called New England dialect, once spoken all over the territory east of the Hudson, is now pretty well confined to the Boston area, and even there it is decaying. The Southern form of American occupies the area south of the Potomac and west to the Mississippi river, with extensions into Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, parts of Delaware and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and the lower counties of Illinois, Indiana and Ohio. Dr. Kurath believes that these divisions in American English were produced by the character of the immigration settling the different parts of the country, and in this theory most other authorities agree with him. The early settlers of Eastern New England and the Tidewater region of the South came chiefly from the Southern parts of England,104 and they brought with them those characters of Southern English speech that are still marked today in Standard English and separate the dialects of the Boston area and of the South from the speech of the rest of the United States, e.g., the use of the broad a and the elision of r before consonants and in the terminal position. But the western parts of New England and the uplands of the South were settled mainly by immigrants speaking Northern varieties of English — many of them the so-called Scotch-Irish — and so were New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland. When the movement into the West began there were two streams. The one, starting from the Tidewater South, carried Southern English into the cotton lands of Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, into parts of Texas, Arkansas and Missouri, and into all save the mountainous parts of Kentucky; the other, starting from Western New England and the Middle Atlantic region, carried Northern Eng
lish into New York State, the Appalachian region down to the North Carolina-Tennessee border, and virtually the whole of the Middle and Far West. Thus the dialect of the Boston area and that of the South are closely allied. Both are forms of Southern English. But there is much less apparent influence of Southern English in the Western American which now dominates the country. It is, in many ways, nearer related to Lowland Scotch.105
The chief characters of Western, or General American and of New England and Southern American have been indicated in the preceding sections of this chapter. All three show local variations, and in the midst of the areas of each of them there are islands of one or another of the other forms. The literature dealing with some of the regional forms is very extensive; indeed, it is almost as extensive as the literature dealing with American pronunciation in general. This is true, especially, of the dialect of Appalachia, which includes the area of the Ozarks. It is interesting because the people speaking it have been isolated for many years, and have thus preserved speech-forms that have become archaic elsewhere. They are also, in the main, of low economic status, and it is among the poor that ancient forms are least affected by pedagogy and fashion. The dialect of Appalachia is based primarily upon the Southern English of the late Seventeenth Century, but it has been considerably modified by the Northern English brought in by the Scotch-Irish. The mountain folk are fond of thinking of themselves as the only carriers of pure Anglo-Saxon blood in America, but as a matter of fact many of them are Celts, as an examination of their surnames quickly shows. Their dialect was put to extensive literary use106 before it got much attention from philologians, but since an account of it by Dr. Josiah Combs appeared in 1916107 it has been investigated at some length. The Ozark form has been the special province of Vance Randolph, a native of the region where it is spoken, and he has published a number of valuable studies of it.108
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