American Language (68 page)
Authors: H.L. Mencken
The chief characters of Western, or General American and of New England and Southern American have been indicated in the preceding sections of this chapter. All three show local variations, and in the midst of the areas of each of them there are islands of one or another of the other forms. The literature dealing with some of the regional forms is very extensive; indeed, it is almost as extensive as the literature dealing with American pronunciation in general. This is true, especially, of the dialect of Appalachia, which includes the area of the Ozarks. It is interesting because the people speaking it have been isolated for many years, and have thus preserved speech-forms that have become archaic elsewhere. They are also, in the main, of low economic status, and it is among the poor that ancient forms are least affected by pedagogy and fashion. The dialect of Appalachia is based primarily upon the Southern English of the late Seventeenth Century, but it has been considerably modified by the Northern English brought in by the Scotch-Irish. The mountain folk are fond of thinking of themselves as the only carriers of pure Anglo-Saxon blood in America, but as a matter of fact many of them are Celts, as an examination of their surnames quickly shows. Their dialect was put to extensive literary use
106
before it got much attention from philologians, but since an account of it by Dr. Josiah Combs appeared in 1916
107
it has been investigated at
some length. The Ozark form has been the special province of Vance Randolph, a native of the region where it is spoken, and he has published a number of valuable studies of it.
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In his book, “The Ozarks,” he gives the following specimen:
Lee Yancey allus was a right work-brickel feller, clever an’ biddable as all git-out, but he aint got nary smidgin’ o’ mother-wit, an’ he aint nothin’ on’y a tie-whackin’ sheer-crapper noways. I seed him an’ his least chaps a-bustin’ out middles down in ol’ man Price’s bottom t’other ev’nin’, a-whoopin’ an’ a-blaggardin’ an’ a-spewin’ ambeer all over each an’ ever’, whilst thet ’ar pore susy hippoed woman o’ hisn was a-pickin’ boogers out’n her yeller tags, an’ a-scunchin’ cheenches on th’ puncheon with a antiganglin’ noodle-hook. D’rectly Lee he come a-junin’ in all narvish-like an’ tetchous, an’ rid th’ pore ol’ trollop a bug-huntin’ — jes’ plum bodacious hipped an’ ruinated her. They never did have nothin’ on’y jes’ a heap o’ poke salat an’ a passel o’ these hyar hawg-mollies, but he must a got hisse’f a bait o’ vittles some’ers, ’cause come can’le-light he geared up his ol’ piedy cribber an’ lit as huck fer Gotham Holler. The danged ol’ durgen — he, should orter be bored fer th’ simples’.
The pronunciation of this dialect, according to Mr. Randolph,
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is very much like that of general vulgar American as noted in Sections 2 and 4 of the present chapter, but it preserves many early forms that have fallen out of use elsewhere, and reinforces and exaggerates most of those that remain. The short
a
is so much favored that it appears even in
balm
and
gargle
, but in
narrow
and
barrel
a broad
a
is substituted, so that they become
nahrr
’ and
bahr’l
In other situations the broad
a
is turned into a
u
, as in
whut, fur
and
ruther
for
what, far
and
rather
. In
have
and
gather
the
a
becomes
e
, making
hev
and
gether
. A final unstressed
a
often becomes
y
, as in
Clary, alfalfy
and
pneumony. Certain
is nearly always
sartain
, and
celery
is
salery
. The
u
is seldom pronounced correctly.
Brush
is
bresh
,
such
is
sich, sure
is
shore, until
is
ontil, gum
is
goom
and
ewe
is
yo
. The
au
-sound is usually changed.
Saucy
, as in the general vulgate, becomes
sassy
, and
jaundice
is
janders
. In addition,
haunt
is
hant
and
aunt
is either
ant
or something like
ain’t
. The difficulties that all untutored Americans have with
t
are multiplied. “Such nouns as
post
and
nest
,” says Mr. Randolph, “drop the
t
in the singular, but in the plural the
t
is pronounced distinctly and an unaccented syllable added —
nestes
and
postes. T
replaces the final
d
in words like
salad, ballad, killed, errand, scared
and
held
, so that they are best rendered
salat, ballat, kilt, errant, skeert
and
helt
. Occasionally the final
t
is replaced by a
k
-sound, as when
vomit
is turned into
vomick
” An excrescent
t
is added to many words beside the familiar
once, wish
and
close
; thus
sudden
becomes
suddint, trough
is
trought, cliff
is
clift
and
chance
is
chanct
. An intrusive
y
appears in
hear
and
ear
, which become
hyar
and
yhar
. The
sk
of
muskrat
and
muskmelon
is changed to sh. “The -
ing
ending is always pronounced
in
, with the short
i
-sound very distinct.… The Ozarker says
sleepin
’ — never
sleep’n’.
… Sometimes the
g
is dropped from the middle of a word also, as in
strength
and
length
, which are nearly always pronounced
stren’th
and
len’th”.
In many words the accent is thrown forward; thus,
catarrh, guitar, insane, harangue, relapse, police
and
hurrah
are accented on the first syllable. The Ozarker borrows a cockneyism in
hit
for
it
, but he uses it “only at the beginning of a clause, or when unusual emphasis is desired.”
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In most ways the pronunciation of the hillmen of the main Appalachian range is identical with Ozarkian usage, but it shows a stronger influence of Tidewater Southern. There are, of course, many local variations, due to the extreme isolation of the mountain communities. Maristan Chapman discerns three chief sub-dialects — the first spoken in the Cumberlands of Kentucky and Tennessee, the second in the Great Smokies, and the third in the Blue Ridge of Virginia and West
Virginia.
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Differences are to be found, not only in pronunciation, but also in vocabulary, and Mr. Chapman gives some curious examples. In the Cumberlands a small portion of anything is a
smidgen
, in the Great Smokies it is a
canch
, and in the Blue Ridge it is a
tiddy-bit
. In the Cumberlands a cow is a
cow-beast
, in the Great Smokies she is a
cow-brute
, and in the Blue Ridge she is a
she-cow
. In the Ozarks, it may be added,
cow-brute
is a euphemism for
bull
. But these differences are yielding to good roads and the automobile, and in another generation the mountain folk, for the most part, will probably be speaking the general vulgate.
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The mountain type of speech is not confined to the actual mountains. It has been taken to the Piedmont by hill-folk going to work in the cotton-mills, and Dr. W. Cabell Greet says that it is “well fixed on the Southwestern plains and in cities like Fort Worth and Dallas,” and has echoes on the Delmarva Peninsula and on the islands of Chesapeake Bay. He adds that “it is often slower than the speech of the lowlands, where rapid speech is more common than slow speech”; also, that it is “often nasal and high pitched.”
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The popular belief ascribes some of the characters of General Southern American — for example, the elision of the
r
before consonants and the intrusion of the
y
before certain vowels — to Negro influence. This belief is not of recent origin, for on April 15, 1842, Charles Dickens, who was then in the United States, wrote home to his wife: “All the women who have been bred in slave States speak
more or less like Negroes, from having been constantly in their childhood with black nurses.” But Dr. Greet, in a notable essay,
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argues convincingly that the thing has really run the other way. “When the slaves were brought to America,” he says, “they learned the accent of their masters. There is literally no pronunciation common among Negroes, with possible exceptions in Gullah, that does not occur generally in vulgar or old-fashioned American speech.” In this judgment two other students of Negro speech agree completely. One is Cleanth Brooks, Jr., of Louisiana State University, who says:
In almost every case, the specifically Negro forms turn out to be older English forms which the Negro must have taken originally from the white man, and which he has retained after the white man has begun to lose them.
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The other is the late George Philip Krapp, who wrote in “The English Language in America”:
The Negroes omitted their
r
’s because they heard no
r
’s in the speech of their white superiors. Since they were entirely dependent upon hearing in learning the sounds of speech, their sounds could not be affected by the visual impressions of spelling, and for this reason their pronunciation of words with
r
final before consonants may seem broader, may seem fuller and franker, than that of educated white speakers. Even this difference, however, is likely to be an illusion on the part of the critical hearer, who is inclined to hear the speech of educated persons in terms of conventional spelling but of uneducated persons in terms of illiterate spelling.
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In another place
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Dr. Krapp argued that the common belief that the voice of the Negro differs from that of the white man is also unsupported by the facts. There is a slight difference, he said, in speech tunes, but not much. Put a Negro and a white man, both from the same part of rural Georgia and both on the same economic
level, behind a screen and bid them speak the same words, and it will be difficult if not impossible to distinguish one from the other. Dr. Krapp was even indisposed to grant that the use of
I is
for
I am
among the lower orders of Negroes is a true Negroism: he tracked it down in Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary, and found that it was common in England so long ago as the Thirteenth Century.
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Nevertheless, there is a conventionalized Negro dialect, perhaps launched by the minstrel shows of the past generation, that all Americans recognize, and it plays a large part in American literature.
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Perhaps the Negro himself has imitated this dialect: nature, as Oscar Wilde once said, always imitates art. Walt Whitman not only believed in its existence, but saw vast potentialities in it. “The nigger dialect,” he said in “An American Primer,”
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“has hints of the future theory of the modification of all the words of the English language, for musical purposes, for a native grand opera in America, leaving the words just as they are for writing and speaking, but the same words so modified as to answer perfectly for musical purposes, on grand and simple principles.” But it is not certain that Walt knew precisely what he was talking about here.
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Dr. Greet, in the essay above mentioned, says that there are “many
varieties of speech in the South, all closely related to speech in other parts of the country.” He distinguishes three main varieties: the Virginia Tidewater type, the General Southern lowland type, and the Southern hill type. The first named prevails along the coast from the Delmarva Peninsula to South Carolina, and has colonies in the northern Shenandoah region and in the vicinity of Charlottesville. Its territory includes Richmond. The General Southern lowland type prevails everywhere else save in the mountains. In the Virginia Piedmont it is modified by the Tidewater type. The latter is, in general, more “Southern” than the other two: it embodies most of the peculiarities that Northerners associate with sub-Potomac speech,
e.g.
, the intrusion of a
y
-sound before
a
after
g
or
k
, as in
gyarden
and
cyar
. “Elsewhere in the South and Southwest, hill and plain,” says Dr. Greet, “
y
often appears before [
i
, the short
e
of
get
and the flat
a
of
hat
], but never before [broad
a
].” Even in the Tidewater region the
y
is not often heard in “the speech of business and professional men, if we except Episcopal ministers,” but “certain gentlemen of the old school, many ladies of the old families, débutantes who have attended Episcopal institutions, professional Virginians, and parvenues are fond of the sound.” Before
a
as in
gate, a
as in
carry, e
as in
get
and
i
as in
gift
, however, it “has no social merit,” and before
o
as in
cow
it is “a real
faux pas.
” But it is favored before the
ir
in
girls
. “I am sufficiently under the influence of the sentimental South and speech snobbery,” says Dr. Greet, “to think that
gyirls
is a very fine pronunciation. Every man to his own choice.”
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