Do You Speak American?

The People’s Tongue: An Anthology of American English

Discover the sweep, diversity, and wide register of American English with The People’s Tongue, an exuberant anthology compiled by Ilan Stavans, a multilingual Mexican-American writer and professor of humanities at Amherst College. This anthology begins in the 16th century with a letter written by Anne Winthrop, mother of the Puritan John Winthrop, and ends with the writings of rapper Kendrick Lamar, novelist Jhumpa Lahiri, and linguist John McWhorter.

A Needed Anthology

The People’s Tongue is a needed anthology, compiled with all the enthusiasm, questioning, and curiosity one would hope for. Even as it comes laureled with blurbs from writers and scholars of the highest status, the book seems ever so out of step with the rising sense in recent years, among many people who care about language (or at least say they do), that our speech and writing must be surveilled and questioned at every turn. And so we are implored to watch for telltale signs of not only bias and hate but also what sounds suspiciously like any opinion that happens to be at odds with prevailing winds. Not so in The People’s Tongue, which places passion before politics and comes off as robustly and unapologetically American.

The Founding Era

During the Founding Era, differing notions on how to oversee the development of English in America and what to say of its relationship with British English gave rise to competing ideologies that, in one form or another, are still with us today. The People’s Tongue includes John Adams’s 1780 “Letter to the President of Congress,” proposing an “American Academy for refining, improving, and ascertaining the English Language.” Adams made his case, interestingly, not by cataloguing the verbal misfires of his fellow citizens in the manner of a grammar vigilante. Instead, he blamed the absence of an academy for the lack of a grammar or dictionary of public authority—and this but 25 years after Samuel Johnson brought out his still-celebrated dictionary.

Stavans has paired Adams’s proposal with Thomas Jefferson’s 1813 letter to John Waldo, which cited usage itself as the “arbiter of language,” one “giving law to grammar, and not grammar to usage.” Of the two Founders, Adams began with the problem of authority in language, asking, To whom can we appeal for rulings on correctness and eloquence? Jefferson instead dwelt on the specific circumstances of the American experiment and recommended an improvisatory approach to language, citing future needs that could not yet be named.

The Importance of Language

More than a few observers of the time understood language to be a building block of the new nation. Its presumed significance took the form of a deference toward dictionaries and an emphasis on what is specifically American. Noah Webster is, of course, the major figure here. In 1786, as he traveled and gave the lectures that came to fill out his Dissertation on the English Language, he wrote to Ben Franklin, “The favorable reception my lectures have generally met with encourages me to hope that most of the Americans may be detached from an implicit adherence to the language and manners of the British nation.”

In the introduction to his 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, as this anthology shows, Webster wrote of language as a matter of national unity: “Language is the expression of ideas; and if the people of one country cannot preserve an identity of ideas, they cannot retain an identity of language.” Literature, too, was profoundly important. Webster quoted Samuel Johnson (about whom he didn’t always have nice things to say), writing, “The chief glory of a nation arises from its authors.” In its definitions, Webster’s 1828 dictionary patriotically cited the authority of “Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jay, Madison” and so on, placing these names alongside British greats “Boyle, Hooker, Milton, Dryden, Addison… .”

Travel the Long, Eventful Road

The People’s Tongue is a powerful read on the whole, but it also succeeds within its own inner circles, offering points and counterpoints from various spots on the cultural and political spectrum. From Simon Pokagon, a leader of the Potawatomi, discussing Indian place names to The Joys of Yiddish to Kendrick Lamar’s musing, “I got hustle, though, ambition flow inside my DNA,” the selections give urgent voice to a multitude of yearnings.

Of course, one reads an anthology on American English not so much for individual brickbats as for the chance to travel the long, eventful road from The New England Primer to the Founders to Lincoln to Twain to Mencken to Toni Morrison, and it is here that The People’s Tongue really succeeds. It might have been twice or thrice as long, but, as is, it has velocity.

A Controversial Dictionary

Dictionaries continue to loom large in The People’s Tongue, maybe too large. Stavans includes two essays that comment at length on the great controversy over Webster’s Third, the unabridged dictionary published by Merriam-Webster in 1961. They are, certainly, the two most widely read pieces of lexicographical criticism in the half century that followed.

The first, “The String Untuned” by Dwight Macdonald, first published in the New Yorker and collected in Against the American Grain, is the truer of the two, as it provides a good description of how the dictionary was made and a caustic account of the thinking behind it, based in part on Macdonald’s visit to Merriam-Webster, where he interviewed its editor Philip Gove. Macdonald committed elementary errors, though. He misread cross-references at knowed and masses and made a hash of the dictionary’s handling of disinterested and uninterested. These errors plus Macdonald’s unfailing condescension add up to a not fair hearing for this important but beleaguered dictionary.

In his 2001 essay “Present Tense,” first published in Harper’s, David Foster Wallace fashioned himself as one bred, from early on in life, to be a connoisseur of usage and dictionaries. Only when Wallace tried to show readers what an awful dictionary Webster’s Third was by quoting at length from what he called its “now classic introduction,” he ended up quoting another book entirely, recycling a bit of midcentury propaganda from the National Council of Teachers of English that was quoted in Macdonald’s essay (and in another