What do you think, guys? Is “y’all” in trouble?

For some time, “y’all” has been assaulted by “you guys” aiming to replace it as the go-to second-person-plural pronoun in the South. Is the Solid South still holding firm at the Mason-Dixon line, or is “you guys” infiltrating and spreading like kudzu, as it is elsewhere?

I wonder because I know some claim that it is. In the Dictionary of American Regional English, the usage note for “you guys” says “orig. chiefly North; now widespread; esp freq. among younger speakers.” It backs this up with two citations that indicate the invasion has been on its way at least since the recent turn of the century:

2000 American Speech 75.417: Meanwhile, just as y’all seems to be spreading outside the South, you-guys is moving into the South, especially among younger speakers.

2002 Alcalde July–Aug 10 cTX: From this office … you can hear it in the classrooms, at the shuttle bus stops. “You guys know where this stops?” You can hear it in the bookstores and restaurants that encircle campus. “You guys know what you want to order yet?” I’m speaking, of course, about the impending death of the expression “y’all” at the hands of the address “you guys,” like an aggressive exotic species supplanting a native one.

In our South, nevertheless, “you guys” has felt pushback. It’s one of the “pet peeves” that the lexicographer Erin McKean wrote about for The Boston Globe in 2010, republished with more than 100 comments in Language Log.

Ever since “thee” and “thou” almost completely vanished from English by the 18th century, leaving the more genteel “you” to encompass the vacated singular space as well as plural, speakers of English have sought alternatives that would allow them once again to distinguish between second-person singular and plural.

One candidate is “y’all.” It goes back as far as the mid-19th century and has served as a sign of the South. The other, “you guys,” emerged around 1900 after complicated twists and turns from the name of England’s most notorious terrorist, Guy Fawkes, who almost succeeded in the failed Gunpowder Plot of 5 November 1605.

But back to my original question: Is “you guys” displacing “y’all” in the South — or retreating? Or is it a standoff?

And have you changed the second-person plural you use?

I haven’t done a careful study to find the answer. But I’d like to learn the situation on the ground today. So if you know the territory, could you take a moment to post your answer? Thanks!

Across the street from the building that houses the linguists, philosophers, and computer scientists at my university (on the left in the picture above) is the city’s huge central mosque. Hundreds of Muslims stream out of its doors after lunchtime prayers on Fridays to socialize in the courtyard. Men with men, of course (women have a separate exit door round the back).

A few yards away on the mosque side of the street is Maqbool’s, a grocery store run by Pakistanis (I’ll use that designation here, though many of the ethnic Pakistanis I interact with every day have Scottish accents, and some were born here).

Yesterday I stopped by Maqbool’s to buy fresh chili peppers (at about a fifth of the supermarket prices elsewhere!). Ahead of me at the cash desk was a young woman, chatting and laughing with the storekeeper in a language I had studied for a while at the University of York when I was an undergraduate: Hindustani (also known as Hindi-Urdu).

I watched with interest. Social interaction between the sexes in public is rather unusual in the local Muslim population. And then I noticed the woman’s long black hair flowing free around her shoulders. No nod toward standard Muslim head-covering at all, not even a loosely draped headscarf. That was unusual too. It occurred to me that she was probably Indian, not Pakistani.

As if reading my mind, the man behind the counter unexpectedly stopped speaking Hindustani and asked in English: “Are you from India?”

She said she was. There was a little more friendly Hindustani conversation, and she paid for her purchases and said a smiling goodbye.

The fact that at first he hadn’t noticed is a measure of the similarity between what Indians always call Hindi and Pakistanis always call Urdu. The two are often referred to, even by native speakers, as quite different languages — especially by those who are tempted to individuate languages by reference to writing systems (a practice that breeds much of the confusion over how many languages are spoken in China). A standardized variety of Hindustani known in India as Modern Standard Hindi is the designated official language of the Indian federal government; it is written (from left to right) with the Sanskrit-derived Devanagari script, and draws its learned and religious terminology from Sanskrit sources. And a standardized variety known as Modern Standard Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, written (right to left) with a script adapted from Arabic by the Persians, Nastaliq; it draws the learned and religious strata of its vocabulary from Persian and Arabic sources.

The religious, cultural, and orthographic differences were amplified in 1947 into a massive political separation when Britain partitioned South Asia into India and Pakistan. The process led to 14 million people becoming refugees. At least two million disappeared (the actual number killed in the violence as Hindus fled south and Muslims fled north has never been determined, but it was huge).

We have seen similar tragedies more recently elsewhere: The Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians of the former Yugoslavia use essentially the same language, but for cultural, religious, and above all political reasons they were reconstructed in the 1990s as distinct languages (see my June 2013 post, A Trinity of Languages), and the speakers were induced to fight disastrous and near-genocidal wars against each other.

Despite the disastrously hostile relations that have persisted between India and Pakistan (both nuclear-armed), language does not divide the populations of the Hindustani-speaking areas. Hindi and Urdu are not just recognizably linguistic cousins (like Hebrew and Arabic, or German and Dutch), but much closer — close enough to be called regional dialects of a single language. They share all of their basic structure, especially in grammar.

As long as it is just casual chat over the grocery counter, there is no communication barrier at all. And individual Indians and Pakistanis do not hate each other. Before 1947, Hindus and Muslims (and Buddhists and Christians) had coexisted fairly peacefully for centuries in South Asia.

Maqbool is a visibly Pakistani name (the letter q originates in Persian loanwords which Hindus generally don’t use); the young Indian woman could have noted that and shopped elsewhere.

The man behind the counter could have turned cold and unfriendly on realizing her nationality.

These things did not happen. Far away from the toxic political hostility and military posturing of the rival countries of India and Pakistan, they laughed and joked in a friendly way across the supposed barriers of language, culture, ethnicity, religion, dress, nationality, and sex.

Imagine, as John Lennon put it.

Cuenca, Ecuador

¿Adónde van? Asked the bus-station clerk in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, yesterday morning.

It’s a reasonable question. Where am I going?

A few moments later from a rear seat I watch the dust and urban squalor along the River Guayas transition to miles of lush banana fields before we reach Puerto Inca, where the change really begins. After a left turn, the bus climbs 14,000 feet in an hour. In that ascent, languages and cultures transform like flora and fauna.

As we approach the 13,959-foot Paso Tres Cruces, the continental divide from which all waters flow east to the Amazon and eventually the Atlantic, I huddle up to my son (who’s awake, surprisingly) and take out his jacket.

Santiago had been in Massachusetts speaking mostly English for several weeks. He seemed primed to get back into Spanish — and had any number of questions that 4-year-old boys ask people near them on buses: “Did you know I am from Puerto Rico? Have you heard Despacito? Are there fast trains in Ecuador? Does this bus have a big engine?”

There’s flash of light as we break the cloud cover. Heads pop up around the bus almost in unison and look about. The landscape from the clouds to the peaks is barren and windswept.

A woman next to us whispers: “Achachay.”

“¿Qué es achachay?” says Santiago.

“Tener frío mijo,” (“to be cold, my son”) says the woman. Some think the Kichwa term achachay is an onomatopoeia for teeth chattering. Kichwa, or Quichua, is the variety of Quechua spoken in much of Ecuador. Quechua is perhaps the most widely spoken pre-Columbian language in the Americas, and has a significant influence on Andean Spanish.

Santiago’s mother (my wife, Joanna, asleep beside us) speaks an Ecuadorian Spanish with many Kichwa influences — like atatay for “dirty”; mashi for “companion”; michi for “kitten”; and ñaña/o for “sister/brother” — but terms for “cold” don’t come up often in Puerto Rico.

The bus goes in and out of clouds again. In the distance are enormous mountains, brown and sparsely shrubbed near the top, dotted at lower altitudes with occasional huts amid a patchwork of tended fields. The graphite-black rivers that twist through the valleys are too far down to see from the road. 

After the pass is an hourlong descent to the plateau, a place treasured by empires: the Cañari then Inca and then Spanish occupied the region in the last two millennia, each renaming it in their own language. Now the capital city is called Cuenca and the province Azuay.

Arriving via bus from the coast is a rather peculiar experience.

After flights from Newark to San Salvador to Guayaquil last night, it was 86 F. at 9 a.m. when we left our hotel for the bus station. The docksides of the port were a mile away — but the salt air and smells of fish and garbage dominated the surroundings. Humidity fogged my glasses at the curb as we waited for the taxi. Our cab driver wore a guayabera that would not have been out of place in Mayagüez or La Habana, and spoke a Spanish not unlike that of the Caribbean, with great speed, nearly silent s, and intervocalic d.

He lowered the music as he leaned out the window to speak to me. On the radio was a song in Spanglish by Aventura, a Dominican-Bronx bachata group. I nodded about the five-dollar fare, blocking the sun with my forearm.

Mentally one is still in Guayaquil when the bus stops in Cuenca, 8,400 feet above sea level.

When the door of the bus swings open and you step down, the cool dry air of the mountains hits – and it’s clear you’ve carried the atmosphere of the coast intact with you inside of the bus. Walking those first few paces in Cuenca you’re still in Guayaquil, and stare about as if the surroundings were unexpected.

Grey, drizzly skies and mountains fill the horizon; people idling about the station are reserved, dressed in light jackets with dark tones; there is less noise, no blaring music. The language echoing about the hall has the sing-song tonalities similar to the Spanish in Chile and Argentina, a vocabulary infused by Kichwa, and the occasional voseo for second-person singular.

My sisters-in-law greet us and dote adoringly on Santiago as I get our bags.

“It was cold on the bus,” says Santiago. “¡Achachaty!”

I order an espresso at the station café, munition against the altitude.

Cuenca has a small colonial quarter up on a diminutive meseta surrounded by four rivers. I think of it as a Cañari-Inca-Spanish Nantucket tucked away in mountains that are beyond description. It is beautiful after the rain.

Pre-Columbian farming terraces (some still in use) rise up the banks at the confluence of two rivers, and above those are the cobblestoned streets of the town center, and above those is the cathedral.

The part of town around the market is Kichwa-speaking. Many in this area have relatives in Spain or New York, or have lived there and returned: There’s been a multilingual life here for centuries.

Now we are in a car bumping up and down cobblestones, with two or three conversations occurring simultaneously; laughter erupts every few seconds as Santiago’s cousins tell him new Kichwa words and he tries to pronounce them.

At the corner of Calle Miguel de Santiago and Calle Rafael Salas, streets named for two painters, we get our things from the trunk.

For just under two decades I have been coming to this place. It is the childhood home of Joanna and, by connections both cultural and physical, of our son. It’s where I’ve written two books, watched four World Cup finals, and considered applying to jobs in Puerto Rico.

As much as I would like to inscribe here the character of this unique corner of South America, to me it is a place where my mind is always re-engaged by the question: “where are you going?”

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His books include After American Studies (Routledge, 2018), In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, and, as editor, Paris in American Literatures.

U. of Barcelona

What was it like studying at a Spanish university?

Soto-González: The matriculation process went smoothly and classes were not as demanding as I expected. The professors are not strict with attendance or class participation. Sadly, the courses were given with a slightly Eurocentric perspective. Aside from the U.S., Mexico, and Cuba, they knew very little, especially on themes relating to art. The difference between my Spanish peers and Latin-American/Asian peers was noticeable with respect to grades, interactions with professors, and overall treatment: Xenophobia can still be a serious institutional problem.

Fernández de Jesús: At the beginning it was challenging. It took time to get used to the teaching style, since it is different from Puerto Rico, and at the same time I was adapting to a new country. After those early difficulties, things got easier, and overall the experience was satisfying.

How did professors and students respond to Puerto Rican Spanish? 

Soto-González: Often I had to explain the political relations between Puerto Rico and the U.S. for people to understand my constant use of Spanglish — and how I could change from one language to another in the same sentence without any problem. My peers loved it, and actually asked for help with their English. On the other hand, professors didn’t like it, and instead asked that every international student take a Catalan-language course (because we were in Catalonia, not Spain) and improve our Castilian.

Fernández de Jesús: Students and professors seemed confused by my accent, since Puerto Rican Spanish is not very common there. Puerto Rican immigrants are rare in Spain, and not many Spaniards have traveled to Puerto Rico. I was asked if I were Canarian, Andalusian, Cuban, or Dominican, and every so often Colombian or Venezuelan. Many people said my accent was funny in a positive way.

Did you experience any confusion because of the variances in Spanish between Spain and Puerto Rico?

Soto-González: I experienced many difficulties adapting to the language, even though it’s my native tongue. Even simple words were sometimes complicated. I expected “¡oye tío!” and lots of swearing but was surprised at the constant use of Catalan in Spanish — catañol. So it was not only a question of regionalisms and different words, there was another language mixed in the matter.

I had peers from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Mexico, and for the first six months almost every conversation involved the “weirdness” of Castilian and the difficulties of the Catalan. But once we adapted, we started learning and using new words in our vocabulary.

Some professors didn’t know how to say some things or communicate a thought in full Castilian Spanish. In written assignments, they had to ask us individually what we meant because they didn’t understand us and we didn’t understand them. That was a fundamental factor in the learning and grading process; some faculty opted for ignoring more than half of the class and did not read their assignments.

There were also variances in Spanglish. It was surprising that Spaniards use many words from English that we don’t use in Puerto Rico. Like “bol” instead of “envase,” referring to a bowl, and “footing” in Spain means “jogging” rather than what it means in English. They also modify the spelling of some English words to make them more pronounceable in Spanish, like “cúter” for “cutter”.

Fernández de Jesús: The variance was confusing at the beginning, yes, but only with a few people, mainly the elderly. It was mostly related to pronunciation. The common struggle I had was that people asked me to repeat and to speak slower because it was hard for them to understand my accent. But I did not interpret this as people trying to correct me; it was just a normal issue when people with different dialects of a language interact.

My Spanish went through some changes, especially in vocabulary. There are many words in Puerto Rican Spanish that have other meanings or are different in Spain’s Spanish. I incorporated some Spanish phrases and words as a substitution for their Puerto Rican equivalents. I still even use some of them. My syntax changed in past and future conjugations: Spaniards tend to use the compound past (present perfect) for recent events and the simple future, in contrast to the simple past (preterit) and the occasional phrasal future tense of Puerto Ricans (estarán llegando instead of the Spanish llegarán). My accent and pronunciation changed slightly.

I had Mexican, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Argentinian, Chilean, and Dominican friends and classmates. They suffered fewer changes in their way of speaking Spanish, basically because they had other people of their respective countries to talk to in the area, while I did not.

Did you ever have to change a word or phrase to reduce the influence of English in your Spanish? 

Soto-González: There’s no doubt that Spanglish is a way of life. I came to reason with myself, and became very cautious about my expression depending on with whom I spoke. At the beginning I tried speaking only full-on Spanish; it didn’t work. The occasional “so…” and “anyway…” and “OK …” were constantly present. When I forced it, I couldn’t even translate them to Spanish. But in the end my Spanglish was more useful than anything: All of my peers said they envied it. Even with my faulty Spanglish-to-Spanish translations, my Castilian with these nuances seemed more complex, more eloquent, and sometimes more expressive than that of my Spanish peers and professors.

I realized in Spain that my English was excellent, and that sometimes it was easier to communicate in that language instead of Spanish.

Fernández de Jesús: Yes, this happened often. Otherwise they would not understand what I was meaning. I even learned the Spanish equivalent of some words and phrases which I did not know, since I always used them in Spanglish. On the other hand, I was surprised by the fact that some words that we mostly use in Spanish in Puerto Rico, in Spain they used them in Spanglish, like “stop” instead of “pare” for the traffic sign, “marketing” instead of “mercadeo,” “flipar” (“flip out”) instead of “caerse para atrás” or “entusiasmarse,” among other examples.

It was a great linguistic experience. My vocabulary and perceptiveness developed, and I can also say that now I can speak two varieties of Spanish.

Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera is an associate professor in the department of humanities at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His books include After American Studies (Routledge, 2018), In Paris or Paname: Hemingway’s Expatriate Nationalism, and, as editor, Paris in American Literatures.

I believe peak s-backing was reached on August 1, 2018. In a segment of NPR’s All Things Considered that day, the host, Audie Cornish; the NPR correspondent she was speaking with, Ayesha Rascoe; and the news figure being discussed, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, all engaged in s-backing, which is a term for pronouncing the s in a word as if it were sh. It’s called s-backing because you move your tongue toward the back of your mouth in order to do it. Some linguists refer to the phenomenon as “retracted (str).”

Here’s the segment. Rascoe says “shtrongly” at the 0:35 and 2:01 marks, Cornish says “obshtruction” at 1:27, and Sanders says “obshtruction” at 1:46.

The piece was no fluke. I feel that I cannot go more than a couple of hours before hearing someone say shtrength, shtreet, or shtructure.

As the NPR examples suggest, s-backing seems to occur most frequently in words with the “str” consonant cluster. But not exclusively: The Ohio State linguists Brian Joseph and Richard Janda encountered it in the words understand, disrespect, screen, sprinkler, still, school, and small. (A separate phenomenon, surely, accounts for the bizarre fact that roughly half of Americans pronounce grocery as if it were spelled groshery.)

The phenomenon was first observed, among Philadelphia residents, by the University of Pennsylvania linguist William Labov in a 1984 study. It has subsequently been reported in Georgia, southern Louisiana, and Columbus, Ohio, and outside the United States in Cockney and Estuary English and in New Zealand.

I became aware of s-backing through Michelle Obama, a big user. The Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten once described her speaking style:

Here she is in London, talking about all the “ekshtraordinary” women she has met, and her father’s “shtruggle” with illness. Here she is as a commencement speaker, discussing “shtrategic choices.” Here she is talking about people being “stopped on the shtreet” because of the color of their skin. She says “frushtrated.” She says “shtructural.”

Obama is an African-American woman, as are Audie Cornish and Ayesha Rascoe. It would seem a reasonable hypothesis that s-backing is a feature of that language community. Or perhaps the former first lady, having been seen and heard so frequently, influenced the way they, and possibly also Sarah Huckabee Sanders and others, speak. But Brian Joseph, in personal correspondence, cautioned me against jumping to that conclusion: “Despite what many people think, there is much less overt ‘modeling’ of speech on popular figures. … I think that Labov has shown pretty convincingly that the people you interact with on a daily basis have more of an impact on your speech.”

OK, fine. But my admittedly less than comprehensive survey of the literature on this subject leaves me unsatisfied. Several scholars, including David Durian and Duna Gylfadottir (her paper is called “Shtreets of Philadelphia”), chart an increase in s-backing in particular cities and regions, especially among younger people, but I haven’t found anything that measures what seems to me a big increase on a national level.

And why do people do it? Durian’s paper, focusing on Columbus, Ohio, reports that s-backing is linked with an urban identity. And a 2011 paper by Kathryn Campbell-Kibler has some interesting findings regarding male speakers. Avoiding s-backing, she found, “carries strong social meaning across multiple speakers and other linguistic cues, making speakers sound less masculine, more gay and less competent”; conversely, s-backing increases “perceptions of the complex style ‘masculine, unintelligent, straight man.’”

But that’s kind of it. I would love to see national research on how many people s-back, who they are, and (I know I’m asking for the moon here) why they do it. If such a study were to come down the pike, I would be exshtremely grateful.

Jason Statham and Bingbing Li in The Meg, a bilingual Chinese/American movie.

There was breaking news about foreign languages last Thursday afternoon: Chinese has now overtaken German in popularity as a subject among high-school seniors in England. (I would bet the same holds for California, but I don’t have the figures.) At “A-level” — the key determinant of eligibility for college, roughly like a U.S. high-school diploma — 3,334 students took Chinese this year (up 8.6 percent on last year), and only 3,058 took German (down 16.5 percent since 2017).

I did a brief interview about this on an evening-commute-time radio talk show, discussing why Chinese is a tough subject (answer: the extraordinarily complex writing system makes for a vast memory burden), and which language high-schoolers should be advised to learn (answer: the language of the people you most identify with — simply liking people enough to want to speak the way they do is the most powerful determinant of success in learning a foreign language really well).

But reflecting on the topic later, I decided that the news media should have done more research on the story. How many of the 3,334 students doing Chinese had a Chinese family of origin? Britain, like California, has been absorbing Chinese immigrants for more than a hundred years.

For purposes of high-school language lessons, “Chinese” means Mandarin Chinese, a standardized variant of the language of the Beijing area. The Independent stated that Mandarin is “the first language of over 1.25 billion people worldwide.” It isn’t. (The number of true native speakers is probably well below 500 million.) In the Hong Kong area, from which a huge proportion of the Chinese immigrants are drawn, Cantonese is the local language (despite government denials). Nonetheless, immigrants who had some schooling in China would generally have been taught at least some Mandarin in school. That would tend to make passing the 12th-grade Mandarin Chinese exam pretty easy for a teenage immigrant. And even children who left China too early to have learned much Mandarin might learn a bit from parents or grandparents, enough to give them a head start.

Nothing wrong with that: Immigrants face many problems in their new land, and if in this respect they get a small advantage from their bilingualism, so much the better. But how many takers were indeed in the position of studying Chinese as a heritage language? Maybe such data are not collected. They should be. From the newspaper accounts you might think that flocks of far-sighted English teenagers were gravitating toward the very difficult task of learning Chinese in order to reach out to a coming world economic superpower. The situation could be very different: English teenagers becoming even less interested in foreign languages than they used to be, while ethnic Chinese increasingly take up the study of their parents’ or grandparents’ native language. It would be interesting to know which picture is closer to the truth.

Another question is about the expectations of those learning Mandarin. Are the A-level takers making the assumption that they will be able to master enough characters to be fully literate, capable of reading (or even writing) business or political documents in Chinese? Or are they mainly interested in developing enough spoken Mandarin to permit a little polite conversation? Traditional ways of teaching Chinese, ignoring pinyin romanization, treat the learning of several hundred characters as a sine qua non, but Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese at the University of Pennsylvania, has often expressed the view that the traditional methods represent a huge mistake: If taught without the character system, using pinyin for taking notes, he says spoken Chinese is actually very easy to learn.

I was mulling these things over after the early evening radio spot when I realized that I still had time to catch a movie, so I went out to see The Meg, a creature feature about a team of marine scientists who discover in deep water off the Chinese coast that Carcharocles megalodon is not as extinct as they thought.

The film is much better than its initial reviews suggested. It turns out to be a very successful Chinese/American bilingual co-production (worldwide gross over $300 million and rising daily). The Chinese cast members sometimes speak to each other in Chinese with English subtitles. They include the distinguished leader of the scientific team, Dr. Minway Zhang (Winston Chao), and his oceanographer daughter Suyin Zhang (Bingbing Li, giving a lovely performance as the female romantic lead opposite Jason Statham, playing the heroic rescue diver Jonas Taylor).

Listed in the final credits, along with enough special-effects people to populate a medium-size town, are the names of dozens and dozens of translators. Solid evidence that, if nothing else turns up, there’s paid work in today’s film industry for those who command both English and Chinese.

“Correct” summerhouse

“Incorrect” summerhouse

Correct summerhouse

Incorrect summerhouse

I have a distinguished colleague who unceasingly tries to persuade me to see that my attempts at descriptive grammar really have a prescriptive subtext. We were both participants in a workshop on the history and philosophy of linguistics last week, and the dispute reared its ugly head again.

Being a descriptive linguist has nothing to do with the crazy notion that “anything goes” or the absurd idea that everything anyone says has to be accepted as correct. So I acknowledge that rules of grammar have what philosophers call normative force, not in virtue of containing normative predicates like ought, but in the sense that they are intended to define a distinction (over an indefinitely large range) between two kinds of sentence structure: the kind that the described language has and the kind that it does not have.

But in my colleague’s view, though I may claim that I am trying to make a neutral statement of the right structural principles, my description harbors advisory or recommendatory force like a lurking virus. My humble scribe’s garment does not quite hide the uniform of the authority-wielding storm trooper glimpsed beneath.

The disagreement between us smoulders on without resolution, despite the responses I offer on each point. Let me illustrate a few of them. I will paraphrase my colleague’s positions as fairly as I can. (You may be tempted to doubt my sincerity in this, but you shouldn’t; I’m playing by philosophy rules here.)

Objection 1: So-called descriptive grammarians often slip into calling ungrammatical strings of words “wrong” or “bad” — self-evidently negative evaluative words. So the very terms in which grammarians talk reveal their underlying condemnatory attitude.

Response to Objection 1: No, they reveal nothing. Certainly, in casual talk, grammarians use terminology borrowed from ethics, like “wrong” or “bad” to characterize word sequences that violate the grammar of the language. We use “bad” to characterize putrid eggs, too, without implying any disapprobation or blame. It’s just a façon de parler. Mentally replace “x is bad” by “x is out of compliance with the principles of grammatical organization for the language or dialect under consideration” if you really need to.

Objection 2: Your book, The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, claims to be a grammar of “standard English.” The very name of the language you treat lacks neutrality, implying a standard that people ought to comply with.

Response to Objection 2: Call it something else if the usual term worries you. Call it Stuck-Up White People’s English if you like (though the late Kofi Annan spoke it too). The name we use for it is a complete red herring as regards the logical character of the grammatical rules it observes.

Objection 3: Even a supposedly simple descriptive rule like “The suffix s occurs on the end of any present-tense verb with a third-person singular subject” in effect suggests a model people should follow. Foreign learners will understand you as saying that they ought to put an s on the end of these verbs.

Response to Objection 3: In describing a structural regularity I am not recommending that it be respected. If I show you the design plan for my summerhouse, and you imagine that I’m saying yours ought to have a tilted flat roof like mine, that would be an insane misinterpretation. There is no covert recommendation that you should build yours just the same, or that you should build one at all.

As it happens, given an accurate description of a language, a learner can misinterpret it as a recommendation to speak in accord with it, and will be well served in that respect (it’s the language they want to learn). This simply reminds us that accuracy of description dissolves the reasons for discord between descriptively and prescriptively motivated grammarians.

Objection 4: But millions of English speakers around the world never put an s on the end of present-tense verbs with third-person singular subjects. Your grammar is defining them as thereby getting something wrong. That too is prescriptive.

Response to Objection 4: But without an account of the normal practice in the dialect that I describe, how can you even frame this objection? How can you identify the interdialectal difference? Dialect A may have a restriction which is completely absent in dialect B; dialect C may operate with a restriction similar to dialect A but different in detail. Describing any one of them is not tantamount to recommending in its favor or deprecating the others.

But the dispute grumbles on regardless. I will never convince my colleague, it seems. My only consolation is the warm feeling in my tummy that comes from knowing I am right. He seems completely intractable. Unless of course it’s me.

Noam Chomsky: no Philly vowels
(Image via Wikipedia)

If you really want to know how people use the English language in North America, you will find one consistently reliable peer-reviewed source of information, four times a year: the journal American Speech, sponsored by the American Dialect Society and published by Duke University Press.

And though it is scholarly and research based, there’s a surprising amount of information that is intelligible to anyone, even without special training in linguistics. The current editor is Thomas C. Purnell of the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

American Speech covers everything from — well, just take a look at the latest issue, Volume 93, No. 2, dated May 2018.

It begins with a look at New York City’s three distinctive vowels as they declined in prestige from 1933 to 2003, as reflected in the movies from 1933 to 2003. Charles Boberg analyzes 22 films with actors who grew up in New York City and vicinity, playing New York characters.

Pronunciations in the South are next, a detailed study by Charlie Farrington, Tyler Kendall, and Valerie Fridland of what linguists call the “Southern Vowel Shift.” They find that the Southern vowels are dynamic, involving movement, as well as distinctive positions.

Moving on to the vowels of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, Wil Rankinen finds UP pronunciation sounding more and more like Canadian. He notes differences between Finnish-American influenced UP dialects and those with Italian-American influences.

The main section concludes with Soohyun Kwon’s study not of a whole region but of one individual, the prominent linguist Noam Chomsky. Born and raised in Philadelphia, at age 27 Chomsky moved to Boston, where he lived for more than 50 years, leaving three distinctive Philadelphia vowels behind. Kwon compares recordings of two of Chomsky’s talks, in 1970 and 2009.

Not all of this will be immediately comprehensible to nonspecialists, but next come three articles on “teaching American speech,” aimed at bridging the gap. Charlotte Vaughn, Tyler Kendall, and Kaylynn Gunter write about a three-week lab for an introductory-linguistics course focusing on intensifiers like very, really, and super. Mark Canada suggests teaching linguistics through lexicography, in this case writing a definition for a word the student has made up. Finally, Julie S. Amberg and Deborah J. Vause tell about “a scaffolded curriculum for the introductory-linguistics class.” This included team interviews with students who do not share exactly the team members’ speech.

That’s all for this issue. Other issues include the regular feature “Among the New Words,” about neologisms; book reviews; and a “Miscellany” section of short articles. You get both print and electronic versions as part of membership in the American Dialect Society, or otherwise by subscription.

Donald Trump has a unique way of speaking and writing. But for a president his language is not unprecedented. Or not unpresidented.

In 2004, after considering the speech of all 42 different presidents until then (Grover Cleveland, you recall, was both the 22nd and 24th president), I found two qualities that we the people look for in the language of our presidents: They should be dignified — but also down to earth.

Dignity came first. George Washington, who knew he was establishing the model for the presidency, needed above all to be dignified, because he represented the dignity and status of the new democratic United States of America. Civilized countries in the 18th century were still mostly governed by hereditary aristocrats and royalty, outstanding supposedly because of generations of good breeding. The United States audaciously organized itself on the radical premise that all men are created equal, and that leadership would depend on merit, not ancestry.

To demonstrate this, our president needed to appear equal to the crowned heads of Europe. Washington, of course, did just that, speaking and writing with force and dignity.

Washington was much on the minds of his immediate successors, who like him were cultivated and dignified. Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and J.Q. Adams all followed with Washington’s ideal in mind. And all of them came from elite families, provided with education, travel, and experience in matters of state and government.

As late as 1828, nearly 40 years after Washington became president in 1789, someone writing about presidential styles would have made it clear that there was one essential quality for a president: dignity.

And then came Andrew Jackson. In contrast to his predecessors, he was born in a log cabin in the wilderness to dirt-poor Scotch-Irish immigrant parents. Most of his presidential predecessors had college educations, in a time when going to college was rare, but Jackson had only a year or two of formal education. Nevertheless, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans had learned to read and write and speak eloquently long before he became president. He continued the tradition of presidential dignity, but he added a second admirable trait — he was down to earth.

He became president in 1829, defeating the most highly educated president of all, John Quincy Adams. The son of our second president had gone on diplomatic missions to countries as varied as France and Russia, had been a U.S. secretary of state, and was Boylston professor of rhetoric at Harvard while serving in the U.S. Senate.

Quincy’s partisans could scarcely believe Jackson would be a serious contender for the presidency. In newspapers, the Facebook of that time, they spread the fake news that Jackson could barely read and write. How could he, with such a hardscrabble background?

But the franchise was widening, and the 1828 election made it clear that Americans wanted a president who would be of the people, not above them. So Jackson was elected and then re-elected. For the rest of the 19th century, being born in a log cabin was such a positive quality that candidates rewrote their biographies to include it. It helped Abe Lincoln, of course, and he was the real thing. But William Henry Harrison, born to a distinguished Virginia family and college educated, would be portrayed as the “log cabin and hard cider” candidate leading to his victory in 1840.

Nevertheless, Washington’s example of cultivation and dignity wasn’t eliminated. Jackson was after all a gentleman and well-spoken, like most of his successors, but now a candidate would have an additional advantage if he was down to earth. Down to earth but cultivated; cultivated but plainspoken: These have been our expectations, or at least our hopes, ever since. Notable examples of down to earth, unpretentious presidents include Teddy Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan, and George W. Bush. Barack Obama could be down to earth too, having both African-American vernacular and sojourns at Columbia and Harvard Law School.

So where does President Trump fit in? Obviously, his language is down to earth, way down, deeper than any president before him. His manner of down-to-earthiness is his own, molded by his use of Twitter. He is so successful at being down to earth that he makes little attempt to appear dignified or cultivated. That’s a break from the dignity we have expected from his 43 predecessors.

The current crowned heads of Europe, as well as their democratic leaders, are shocked at his coarseness. And his election shocked supporters of his Democratic opponent, just as Jackson’s election shocked Quincy’s partisans. In that way, though not in eloquence, he has more in common with Andrew Jackson than might appear at first glance.

Allan Metcalf is the author of Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush (2004).

Jonah Hill in his younger days

Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air on October 30, the actor and director Jonah Hill was talking about his childhood obsession with movies. “I had ran through so many films,” he said.

In a 2017 interview also on NPR, the director Bryan Fogel talked about Grigory Rodchenkov, a Russian doctor who masterminded the doping of athletes at the Sochi Winter Olympics. “What happened at Sochi he was incredibly upset about,” Fogel said, “because he had went from being a scientist, meaning his whole life is — yes, it’s doing the exact opposite of what he should be doing, but he was using science to beat the system.

You see what Hill and Fogel were doing, grammatically. They were using the preterite (ran, went) instead of the past participle (run, gone). This is by no means a new thing. Writing in 1781, John Witherspoon decried the “vulgarisms” had fell, had rose, had broke, had threw, and had drew. 

Such constructions have long flourished in the American vernacular. Joseph Whitehouse, a Virginian on the Lewis and Clark expedition, wrote in his journal, “At this run, we were met with by Robert Fields, (one of the party that had went with Captain Clark).” A line of testimony in an 1870 murder trial went, “I had a laugh as to how I had went through the arrangement.” The narrator of William Faulkner’s 1931 novella “Spotted Horses” says: “Flem had done already disappeared; he had went on to see his wife.”

Often, a double substitution is made, with the participle being used instead of the preterite. “She gone home,” or, as in the lyrics of “Frankie and Johnny,” “He done her wrong.”

In the fourth (1936) edition of The American Language, H.L. Mencken notes, “The substitution of the preterite for the … participle seems to me to be increasing of late, and such striking examples as ‘How old of a cat have you ever saw?’ are surely not uncommon.” He remarks that Ring Lardner’s unlettered letter-writing  ballplayer Jack Keefe, in You Know Me Al, favors have wrote, have ate, have went, have drank, etc., etc. (For example: “I says Do you supose the people over there has heard a bout me and he says Sure because they have wrote a lot of letters asking me to be sure and bring you and Mathewson a long.”)

All the people and characters quoted above are Caucasian, but the construction is also a feature of African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). In her dissertation, The Evolution of AAVE in a Rural Texas Community (1995), Patricia Cukor-Avilla quotes an informant using both had went and had took: “Cause we had went to — one day my mom had took us out to eat. We had went to, to go eat. Then we had went to the mall, then we had went to Quick As A Flash.” In a 2012 interview, the African-American former baseball player Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd said: “Some of the best games I’ve ever, ever pitched in the major leagues I stayed up all night; I’d say two-thirds of them. If I had went to bed, I would have won 150 ballgames in the time span that I played.”

I believe the substitution is still increasing — as Mencken perceived it to be in 1936 — with the added wrinkle that it’s currently seen not only in speech but in various kinds of online writing. (It still is virtually absent in published and edited work, other than in dialogue.) Another difference is that it is showing up among unexpected people. Jonah Hill and Bryan Fogel are city-born Caucasians who both went to the University of Colorado. And my colleagues report preterite-for-participle increasingly showing up in student papers. Some of this is probably due to white kids mimicking the lingo they’ve heard from rappers. But that’s not the whole explanation: This construction just seems to be in the air.

The Corpus of Global Web-Based English, consisting of about 1.9 billion words published online in 2012 and 2013, shows the geographical distribution of Hill’s had ran, with the highest popularity in Ireland, followed by Great Britain and the United States, and then Canada:

Had ran shows up a lot on Twitter as well, with these hits in a seven-hour span:

Three of the tweeters in that screenshot are from the U.S., two from Britain (had ran turns up an awful lot in football contexts), and one from Japan.

I have never said had went or had ran, but I would like to, quite a lot. The “mistake” just feels somehow stronger and more emphatic than the standard version.

“If I had gone outside this morning, I would have frozen my keister off”: tame.

“If I had went outside this morning, I would have froze my keister off”: vivid and crisp.

So when the conversational time seems right, I may just try to work a preterite into a participle slot. I’ll let you know how it turns out.