The Vulgar Tongue: Green's History of Slang by Green Jonathon

Author:Green, Jonathon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2014-10-08T16:00:00+00:00

11 America: Pioneers

‘Peace, Sirrah! — none of your American phrases!’

Joseph Atkinson, A Match for a Widow,

or the Frolics of Fancy (1786)

English, however hotly pursued by Spanish, is America’s national language and has been so since independence was declared on 14 July 1776. That this should be so may have been something of an accident. The pattern of exploration by the European nations had been such that the French, who held vast tracts of the interior, the Germans, who had flooded to Pennsylvania and thence to the Mid-West, and the Dutch, who had substantial settlements around the Hudson valley, might each have put in a bid for linguistic pre-eminence. In the event it was English, the language of the chain of states running along the Eastern seaboard, that ‘won’. And while the Native American tribal languages were the first to be termed an ‘American Language’ – by the seventeenth-century settlers who met them – the creation of ‘American English’ as something quite apart from its ‘English English’ mother tongue was central to the national project. That homegrown variety of English continues to be enriched, as it has been from day one, by a succession of immigrations, but it remains America’s official tongue.

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