If you read Lingua Franca, you might be among the select few who want to know what is really going on with our language, as opposed to the many who mainly want to change it to their liking. Nothing wrong with the latter, except that it’s like wishing for the good old days when chemistry involved just four easy-to-remember elements—earth, air, fire, water—as opposed to the notion promulgated nowadays by professional chemists that there are more than a hundred elements, while the original four have been plutoed.
But if you’re not put off by the realization that language is complex and variable, you might enjoy learning about American English from the pages of American Speech, the quarterly journal of the American Dialect Society. You won’t find it at your neighborhood newsstand, but it’s available at any good research library, and you can get your own copy by joining the ADS—go to www.americandialect.org. (In the interest of full disclosure, I am executive secretary of the ADS.. ) The latest issue, for Summer 2014, includes articles on:
• A study nearly 50 years ago of the speech of young black children in Los Angeles, providing perspective for current studies.
• Reconstruction of 19th century Louisiana English by analyzing the literary dialect of authors such as Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable.
• The etymology of ain’t—most likely derived from haven’t.
• Words that were candidates for Word of the Year 2013, including sharknado (voted Most Unnecessary), Thanksgivukkah (Least Likely to Succeed), twerk, selfie and slash (the punctuation mark).
And there are four articles on teaching about American speech: about using Pinterest, about a Sociolinguistics Artifacts website, about sentence-building assignments, and about Reed-Kellogg diagramming (the latter by the Lingua Franca blogger Lucy Ferriss).
Many scholarly journals wrap themselves in inscrutable professional jargon, but not American Speech. Every one of the articles in this issue is accessible to the general reader.
So—excuse me now, I’ve got something to read.
