“The United States of English” by Rosemarie Ostler: An Introduction to and a Reminder of the Roots and Direction of Our Language
Rosemarie Ostler’s The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2023) is a brief and accessible introduction both to the development of American English(es) in particular and the study of linguistics in general.
The book begins by tracing the origins of American speech back to the colonial period, referring to available written records (e.g., those of the Salem Witch Trials) for vocabulary use and pronunciation. Spelling wasn’t yet standardized at this time, so the orthography in these documents gives scholars an idea of how words — and especially their vowels — sounded.
The first new American vocabulary resulted from the need to give names to strange, new things, such as “racoon, persimmon, [and] cranberry,” which invariably developed from extant Native American words (8). Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, American speakers, including Noah Webster (of dictionary fame), sought to create distance from the British through their language, hence the dropping of u’s from words like colour and turning the s to z in words such as “organize” (8).
Around the same time, grammar books began to appear, and with them the arbitrary “rules” created by their authors, whose linguistic tastes assumed the role of an authority that still echoes to this day. Among these books was Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762 in England, 1775 in America). It is this “guide” we have to thank for the rule “that when a pronoun appeared after a conjunction such as than or as, it should be treated like the subject of an understood sentence, so You are not so tall as me should be You are not so tall as I (am)” (96).
Language has always been one of the strongest markers of class distinction. Books such as Lowth’s helped to create and maintain these distinctions in the U.S. through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But as Ostler shows so well throughout her study, language is always in flux. It doesn’t care for rules or preferences; like life, it will always find a way to adapt. Hence the development of African American English (AAE), which has, beginning in the twentieth century, been studied a great deal. (Unfortunately, prior to this, few if any records of Black speech were kept consistently.) And hence the backlash against dictionaries like Webster’s Third New International, whose editors in the 1960’s provoked a purist furor when they defined “ain’t” without condemning its usage as substandard (195–196).
Here are a few of the worthiest insights Ostler provides:
- Thomas Jefferson invented the word “belittle” and was taken to task by a British critic for it: “‘We forgive all your attacks…,’” the critic wrote, “upon our national character, but for the future spare — O spare, we beseech you, our mother tongue’” (29);
- “[H]ot dog was originally a joking reference to one rumored ingredient of sausages” (55);
- The word “guy” has its origins with Guy Fawkes (91);
- “The southern drawl is on the decline everywhere” (122);
- “One theory is that [jazz] derives from jasm, a variant of jism, a nineteenth-century word for energy or strength that could also be slang for semen” (175);
- The term woke was first used in a similar sense to the one we know today in the 1930’s, having its roots in the Black community. It shows up in writing for the first time in a 1962 piece by William Melvin Kelley for the New York Times, “If You’re Woke, Dig it” (213).
Ostler, who holds a doctorate in Linguistics and has written several books on American English, succeeds in giving the reader a general sense of where American English came from, where it is currently, and where, potentially, it is headed. The Internet will continue to spur many changes. In fact, while The United States of English was published only earlier this year, it is already outdated in at least one sense: Ostler refers to X as Twitter (though, to be fair, so do I, and always will). Included in the book’s appendices are the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and a diagram of where vowels are pronounced in the mouth.
Though by the book’s end I felt as though I’d barely scratched the subject’s surface, it serves as a nice reminder that nothing, not even language, is fixed forever. In its appeal to popular audience and more serious students of language, The United States of English has the potential to spark both further academic study and a more general conversation about how language continues to shape our identities for better and worse.
