The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States

Excerpt from The American Language: A Preliminary Inquiry Into the Development of English in the United States

The aim of this book is best exhibited by describing its origin, I am, and have been since early manhood, an editor of newspapers and books, and a critic of the last named. These occupations have forced me into a pretty wide familiarity with current literature, both periodical and within covers, and in particular into familiarity with the current literature of England and America. It was part of my daily work, for a number of years, to read the principal English newspapers and reviews; it has been part of my work, all the time, to read the more important English novels, essays, poetry and criticism. An American born and bred, I early noted, as everyone else in like case must note, certain salient differences between the English of England and the English of America as practically spoken and written - differences in vocabulary, in syntax, in the shade and habits of idiom, and even, coming to the common speech, in grammar. And I noted too, of course, partly during visits to England but more largely by a somewhat wide and intimate intercourse with English people in the United States, the obvious differences between English and American pronunciation and intonation.

Greatly interested in these differences - some of them so great that they led me to seek exchanges of light with Englishmen - I looked for some work that would describe and account for them with a show of completeness, and perhaps depict the process of their origin. I soon found that no such work existed, in either England or America - that the whole literature of the subject was astonishingly meagre and unsatisfactory. There were several dictionaries of Americanisms, true enough, but only one of them made any pretension to scientific method, and even that one was incomplete. The solitary general treatise on the American dialect, the work of a man foreign to both England and America in race and education, was more than 40 years old, and full of palpable errors.

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