Languages, Legends, and American Dreams

Languages, Legends, and American Dreams concerns the development of an American language narrative in the formative years 1750–1850 - from the United States' emergence out of disparate colonies, to its expansion across the North American continent, to the approach of a Civil War that threatened its very existence. Articulated in multiple forms, the narrative links citizenship, patriotism, intelligence, and morality specifically with language use. In effect, the narrative's answer to the question “what is an American” is “someone who speaks English,” which ill-matches the repertoire not only of the colonial and early American periods but of all the eras since then. Like a self-replicating intellectual meme, the American language narrative produced copies of itself throughout the early days of the Republic and through these copies has continued to serve as a sociolinguistic template for processing multilingualism and language diversity in the United States. The book's issue is not simply whether or how English came to be the most widely used language of the United States. It is instead attitudes towards English and specifically how the American language narrative coalesced and influenced the country's linguistic history. The topics are complex, varying by time and locale and also variably situating language in relation to race, sex, religion, ethnicity, economic status, and geography. The book explores these through a loosely affiliated set of legends about language: straightforward stories; first-hand accounts of language usage and interaction; grammar books and children's readers; legislation; popular entertainment; accounts of non-Anglophone culture; archival materials; and educational and commercial enterprises. Drawing on historical linguistics, discourse analysis, memory studies, and social history, the book emphasizes the coherence of the American language narrative and the ways in which it sustains attitudes about languages that contradict linguistic facts. This narrative has provided a template for approaching subsequent language contact situations such as the late-nineteenth-century emigrations from southeast Europe, the Great Migration of the twentieth century, and post-1960 migrations from South America and Asia. Especially in popular discussions, this template often represents English as under siege and as the language of patriotism, education, morality, and citizenship. Ultimately, focusing on historical matters with increasingly controversial contemporary significance, the book shows the persistence of American language myths, however poorly they fit the specifics of language history. It is a book about how legends can replace facts and dreams can replace reality.