American Language (81 page)

The American common speech, of course, is closely related grammatically to the vulgar dialects of the British Isles, and in many ways it is identical with them. In both one encounters the double negative, the use of the adjective as an adverb, the confusion of cases in the pronoun and of tenses in the verb, and various other violations of the polite canon. But these similarities are accompanied by important differences. For one thing, vulgar American is virtually uniform throughout the country, whereas the British dialects differ so greatly that some of them are mutually unintelligible. There are, as we have seen in
Chapter VII
, certain group and regional peculiarities in the United States, but virtually all of them have to do with pronunciation and vocabulary, and are thus of no importance to grammar. A Boston taxicab-driver who moved to San Francisco would find the everyday speech of his fellows, save for a few vowel sounds and a few localisms, very like his own, and he would encounter little more difficulty in communicating with them if he moved to Chicago, New Orleans or Denver. For another thing, vulgar American shows the same tendency to ready change that characterizes the standard language, and is thus given to taking in new forms and abandoning old ones more rapidly than any of the English dialects. I myself remember when the use of the present form of the verb for the preterite, as in
he give
, began to develop into a wholesale adoption of a sort of historical present, as in
he win a dollar, I say to him
, and so on. And various observers have noted the disappearance of forms that were common only a generation or two ago, or their descent to the dialects,
e.g., sot
(for sat),
riz, driv, clomb, see’d
, and
gin
(for given).
¹
The English dialects have changed too, as one may
discover by comparing the Cockney of Dickens with the Cockney of today, but they have apparently changed less than vulgar American, and the changes occurring in some of them have affected others hardly at all.

For many years the indefatigable schoolmarm has been trying to put down the American vulgate, but with very little success. At great pains she teaches her pupils the rules of what she conceives to be correct English, but the moment they get beyond reach of her constabulary ear they revert to the looser and more natural speech-habits of home and work-place. They acquire, after a fashion, a reading knowledge of her correct English, and can even make shift to speak it on occasion, or, at all events, something colorably resembling it, but for all ordinary purposes they prefer a tongue that is easier, if less elegant. The schoolmarm’s heroic struggles to dissuade them have got little aid from her professional superiors. They have provided her with a multitude of textbooks, most of them hopelessly pedantic, though others are sensible enough,
²
and they have invented a wealth of teaching methods, mostly far more magical than scientific, but they have not thrown much light upon the psychological problem actually before her. In particular, they have failed to make an adequate investigation of the folk-speech she tries to combat, seeking to uncover its inner nature and account for its vitality. American philologians have printed admirable studies of many of the other languages spoken in the United States, including the most obscure Indian tongues,
³
but incredible as it may seem,
they have yet to produce a grammar of the daily speech of nearly 100,000,000 Americans. It was not until 1908, indeed, that any serious notice of it was taken in academic circles,
⁴
and not until 1914 that an investigation of it was undertaken on an adequate scale and by an inquirer of adequate equipment. That inquirer was Dr. W. W. Charters, then professor of the theory of teaching at the University of Missouri, and now (1936) director of the Bureau of Educational Research at Ohio State University. One of the problems he found himself engaged upon in 1914 was that of the teaching of the grammar of Standard English in the public elementary schools. In the course of his investigation he encountered the theory that such instruction should be confined to the rules habitually violated — that the one aim of teaching grammar was to correct the speech of the pupils, and that it was useless to harass them with principles which they already observed. Apparently inclining to this somewhat dubious notion, Dr. Charters applied to the School Board of Kansas City for permission to undertake an examination of the language actually used by the children in the elementary schools of that city, and that permission was granted.

The materials he gathered were of two classes. First, the teachers of grades III to VII inclusive in twelve Kansas City public schools were instructed to turn over to Dr. Charters all the written work of their pupils, “ordinarily done in the regular order of school work” during a period of four weeks. Secondly, the teachers of grades II to VII inclusive in all the city schools, together with the principals, were instructed to make note of “all oral errors in grammar made in the school-rooms and around the school-buildings” during the five school-days of one week, by children of any age, and to dispatch these notes to Dr. Charters also. The ages thus covered ran from nine or ten to fourteen or fifteen, and perhaps five-sixths of the material studied came from children above twelve. Its examination
threw a brilliant light upon the speech actually employed by children near the end of their schooling in a typical American city, and
per corollary
, upon the speech employed by their parents and other older associates. If anything, the grammatical and syntactical habits revealed were a bit less loose than those of the authentic
Volks-sprache
, for practically all of the written evidence was gathered under conditions which naturally caused the writers to try to write what they thought to be correct English, and even the oral evidence was conditioned by the admonitory presence of the teacher, by her probably frequent failure to note errors, and by her occasional incapacity to detect them. Moreover, it must be obvious that a child of the lower classes, during the period of its actual contact with pedagogy, probably speaks better English than at any time before or afterward, for it is only then that any positive pressure is exerted upon it to that end. But even so, the departures from standard usage that were unearthed were numerous and striking, and their tendency to accumulate in definite groups appeared to show the working of general laws.
⁵

The materials accumulated by Dr. Charters were so large that a complete Virchovian autopsy upon them was impracticable, and in consequence he confined his examination to parts of them. He chose (
a
) the oral errors “reported by the teachers of grades III and VII and by the principals”; (
b
) the oral errors made by another group consisting of the children of grades VI and VII; and (
c
) the written errors made by children of the last-named in twelve schools. The children of grade III had had no formal instruction in grammar, but it was in the curricula of grades VI and VII. He classified the oral errors of his (
a
) group as follows: