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Dissertations on the English language
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11
It was partly
a matter of honour ‘as an independent nation . . . to have a system
of our own, in language as well as government’. It was partly
a matter of common sense, because in England ‘the taste of her
writers is already corrupted, and her language on the decline’. And
it was partly a matter of practicality, England being at ‘too great a
distance to be our model’. This national or ‘federal’ language was
inevitable, Webster thought, because the exploration of the new
continent would bring many new words into the language, which
Britain would not share; but it also needed fostering. Spelling
reform, he concluded, would be a major step in that direction: ‘a
difference between the English orthography and the American . . .
is an object of vast political consequence’. He was right. Language
and political issues are always very closely connected, as we have
seen in earlier chapters.
9
Examples are given in the section on vocabulary below, p. 158.
10
Attributed to him in
Reader’s Digest
(November 1942); virtually identical
sentiments were expressed by Oscar Wilde and Dylan Thomas.
11
Webster (1789: 22).
142
The future of global English
The forces which shaped the development of American English
are many and various. They have been well summarized by US
dialectologist Frederic G. Cassidy:
12
The effect of the Revolution and of national independence was tremen-
dous. No less a figure than Noah Webster saw here a great opportunity
to cast off the ‘corrupt’ language of England and to rationalize and re-
fine the language for the new nation. The attempt to found an academy
for such a purpose, which had several times failed in Britain, was made
once again under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson. But other forces
were at work – popular forces – which were to have a powerful effect,
especially when actual democracy, rather than limited upper-class gover-
nance, came to the fore under Andrew Jackson.
The surge of population westward, the phenomenon of the expanding
frontier in which the restraints and standards of more settled society were
thrown off, was reflected in the language. With little or no education,
having to cope as best they could with harsh physical conditions, the
‘conquerors of the West’ became freely innovative in their language,
ebullient with descriptive and metaphorical inventions – with ‘tall talk’,
exaggerated humor, vigor that had no time for refinement.
In the East, in the cities, however, education flourished; the lead-
ing class had it and it became a national ideal: the mark of progress in
any settlement was that a school had been started. Self-education, espe-
cially for talented people of humble beginnings, was widely practiced and
admired. Public address, often learned in the ‘school of hard knocks’,
carried to the people educational ideals and their kudos. Some of the
interesting neologisms were the direct offspring of ignorance pretend-
ing to be learned. A whole school of humor portrayed its characters as
unschooled but practically wise.
Cassidy is here thinking of the humour of such authors as Josh
Billings, Artemus Ward, and other ‘cracker-barrel philosophers’
who delighted audiences and readers all over the USA in the
late nineteenth century. ‘Humin natur’, comments Billings, in
his homespun spelling, ‘is the same all over the world, cept in Nu
England, and thar its akordin tu sarcumstances.’
13
12
Cassidy (1982: 204–5).
13
A range of illustrations from both authors are to be found in Crystal
(1995a: 84).
143
ENGLISH AS A GLOBAL LANGUAGE
This kind of humorous writing cannot work unless people can
see it is a joke – in other words, they must be able to recognize the
spellings as non-standard, and be able to identify dialect grammar
and vocabulary. Webster was sixty when Billings was born. Evi-
dently, in quite a short time, American English had settled down
in its new identity, and despite its dialect differences was capable
of providing a unified, literary standard which the new nation was
able to recognize and to which it could respond.
Many distinctive forms also identify the Englishes of the
other countries of the inner circle (p. 60): Australian English,
New Zealand English, Canadian English, South African English,
Caribbean English, and, within Britain, Irish, Scots, and Welsh
English. Among the countries of the outer circle, several vari-
eties have also grown in distinctiveness in recent decades, as we
have seen in chapter 2. There is one group in India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, often collectively called South Asian
English. There is another group in the former British colonies in
West Africa, and a further group in the former British colonies
in East Africa. Other emerging varieties have been noted in the
Caribbean and in parts of south-east Asia, such as Singapore.
These new Englishes are somewhat like the dialects we all rec-
ognize within our own country, except that they are on an inter-
national scale, applying to whole countries or regions. Instead of
affecting mere thousands of speakers, as is typically the case with
rural or urban regional dialects, they apply to millions. They are an
inevitable consequence of the spread of English on a world scale.
The study of language history shows that if two social groups come
to be separated only by a mountain range or a wide river, they will
soon begin to develop different habits of speech. It should not
be surprising, then, to find new national dialects emerging when
groups become separated by thousands of miles, and encounter
totally different climates, fauna, and flora.
Dialects emerge because they give identity to the groups which
own them. If you wish to tell everyone which part of a country
you are from, you can wave a flag, wear a label on your coat, or
(the most convenient solution, because it is always with you, even
in the dark and around corners) speak with a distinctive accent and
dialect. Similarly, on the world stage, if you wish to tell everyone
144
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