American Language Supplement 2 Read Online Free Page A

“the speech of the Negro and of the white is essentially the same” and that what are commonly regarded as “specifically Negro forms” are only “older English forms which the Negro must have taken originally from the white man, and which he has retained after the white man has begun to lose them.” 2 To this another highly competent Southern observer, W. Cabell Greet, agrees. “As the Negro,” he says, “has preserved the Methodist and Baptist camp-meeting hymns of a century ago in his spirituals, English dances in his clogs and jigs and reels, so he has kept old ways of speech.” 3 Tidewater Southern differs in many ways from this bi-racial lingo but Greet shows that it is confined to a relatively limited area, radiating from the lowlands to such inland islands as Richmond, Charlottesville and the northern Shenandoah valley, but hardly extending beyond. The rest of the South, until one comes to the mountains, the French areas of Louisiana and the cattle country to the westward, follows the patterns described by Brooks. Tidewater Southern, like the dialect of the narrow Boston area and that of the lower Hudson valley, appears to have been considerably influenced by the fashionable London English of the Eighteenth Century. The reason is obvious. These regions, from the earliest days, maintained a closer contact with England than the other parts of the country, and their accumulation of wealth filled them with social aspiration and made them especially responsive to upper-class example. The Civil War shifted the money of the South from Tidewater to the Piedmont, but the conservative lowland gentry continued faithful to the speechways acquired in their days of glory, and the plain people followed them. But all the more recent intrusions of English ways of speech have entered in the Boston and New York areas and on the level of conscious Anglomania. 4
    There remains the speech of the overwhelming majority of Americans – according to some authorities, at least 95,000,000 of the 140,000,000 inhabitants of the continental United States. It is called Northern American by John S. Kenyon and Thomas A. Knott, 1 Western or General American by George Philip Krapp, 2 Middle Western by many lay writers, 3 and American Standard by George L. Trager, 4 and is described by the last named as “the pronunciation … of the whole country except the old South, New England and the immediate vicinity of New York city.” More, it is constantly spreading, and two of its salient traits, the flat
a
and the clearly sounded
r
, are making heavy inroads in the territories once faithful to the broad
a
and the silent
r
. “Only in the immediate neighborhood of Boston and in the greater part of New Hampshire and Maine,” says Bernard Bloch, 5 “is the so-called Eastern pronunciation universal,” and even in this region there are speech-islands inwhich it is challenged. New England west of the Connecticut river now belongs predominantly to the domain of General American, and so does all of New York State save the suburbs of New York, and all the rest of the country save the late Confederate States. Even the dialect of Appalachia, though it differs from General American, differs from it less than it differs from any regional variety.
    What, then, was the origin of this widespread and now thoroughly typical form of speech, and why is it prevailing against all other forms? There are authorities who seek to answer, as in the case of New England, by pointing to population statistics. “The Piedmont of Virginia and the Carolinas, and the Great Valley,” says Kurath in the paper lately quoted, “were largely settled, during the half-century preceding the Revolution, by the Scotch-Irish, who spoke … the English of the Lowlands of Scotland or the north of England as modified by the Southern English Standard. They neither dropped their
r
’s nor did they pronounce their long mid-vowels diphthongal fashion. The large German element from