Do You Speak American?

by Robert MacNeil, William Cran

Is the growing influence of Spanish threatening to displace English in the United States? Are America's grammatical standards in serious decline? Has the media saturation of our culture homogenized our speech?

These and other questions catapulted Robert MacNeil and William Cran, coauthors of the language classic The Story of English, on a journey that took them around the country in search of answers. Do You Speak American?, the companion volume to a PBS special, is the tale of the surprising discoveries they made while interviewing a host of native speakers and observing everyday verbal interactions across the country. Examining the histories and controversies surrounding both written and spoken American English, MacNeil and Cran address highly emotional anxieties and assumptions about our language-and offer some unpredictable responses.

With insight and wit, MacNeil and Cran bring us a compelling follow-up to The Story of English that is at once a celebration and a potent study of our singular language.

Genres: Nonfiction, Linguistics, Language, Reference, Sociology, American, Social Science

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Robert Breckenridge Ware MacNeil, OC, was a novelist and former television news anchor and journalist who paired with Jim Lehrer to create The MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1975. MacNeil wrote several books, many about his career as a journalist, but, since his retirement from NewsHour, MacNeil dabbled in writing novels.

He attended Dalhousie University and later graduated from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1955. He began working in the news field at ITV in London, then for Reuters and then for NBC News as a correspondent in Washington, D.C. and New York City.

On November 22, 1963, MacNeil was covering President Kennedy's visit to Dallas for NBC News. After shots rang out in Dealey Plaza MacNeil, who was with the presidential motorcade, followed crowds running onto the Grassy Knoll (he appears in a photo taken just moments after the assassination). He then headed towards the nearest building and encountered a man leaving the Texas School Book Depository. He asked the man where the nearest telephone was and the man pointed and went on his way. MacNeil later learned the man he encountered at about 12:33 p.m. CST may have been Lee Harvey Oswald. This conclusion was made by historian William Manchester in his book The Death of a President (1967), who believed that Oswald, recounting the day's events to the Dallas police, mistook MacNeil as a Secret Service agent because of his suit, blond crew cut, and press badge (which Oswald apparently mistook for government identification). For his part, MacNeil says "it was possible, but I had no way of confirming that either of the young men I had spoken to was Oswald."

Beginning in 1967, MacNeil covered American and European politics for the BBC and has served as the host for the news discussion show Washington Week in Review. MacNeil rose to fame during his coverage of the Senate Watergate hearings for PBS, which led to an Emmy Award. This helped lead to his most famous news role, where he worked with Jim Lehrer to create The Robert MacNeil Report in 1975. This was later renamed The MacNeil/Lehrer Report and then The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. MacNeil retired on October 20, 1995.

On September 11, 2001, after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, he called PBS, asking if he could help them with their coverage of the attacks, as he recalled in his autobiography, Looking for My Country: Finding Myself in America. He helped PBS in its coverage of the attacks and the aftermath, interviewing reporters, and giving his thoughts on the attacks. He hosted the PBS television show America at a Crossroads, which ran from April 15-20, 2007.

In the late 1990s, he discussed openly his son's homosexuality, saying it could help other fathers to know how he dealt with the fact in a positive way.

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

• Proper: It is I. Improper: It’s me.
• As if, as though are preferred to like: “That process looked like it was going to take a year.”
• As I said preferred to like I said.
• Masterful vs. masterly: a masterful person is dominant, domineering. A masterly piece of work is performed well.
• Wrong: I’m going to jump off of the roof. Right: I’m going to jump off the roof.
• Hopefully: someone or something must be filled with hope. “Hopefully it won’t rain tomorrow” is wrong because who is filled with hope? No one.
• No need for “importantly.” What people mean is “important.”
• Grammar prescriptivist John Simon: “I mean, a society in which Maya Angelou can be thought to be a real poet of some importance is a doomed society. I mean, that is trash…”
• The actors were given a shorthand key to East Coast accents, using the phrase stark naked. In Boston and the Northeast, it would be stack naked; in New York City, stock naked; and in Georgia and the Southeast, stalk naked.
• One nationwide trend is the tendency to pronounce the vowel in the word do more like the sound in dew. He calls it oo-fronting: “Americans used to say ou just like the French vous. That’s almost gone. Only in one or two cities can you still find ou. What you get is a vowel that starts much fronter in the mouth. And it sounds like ew in the most extreme form.” By that change, you sounds like yew.
• In the South, the “oo” sound in school is changing, to produce schuel. Pen and pin are merging.
• Rural Texans may still say tin cints, but not urban Texans.
• In rural west Texas, researchers hear the vowels in words like caught and cot being merged, as are vowel pairs before “l” so that pool and pull sound alike, as do feel and fill, and sale and sell.
• Tom Shales, television critic for the Washington Post, observed that public television consisted largely of “English people talking and animals mating, occasionally interrupted by English people mating and animals talking.”
• Axe vs. ask in black speech: “….in the novels of Trollope, axe appears in the mouths of country squires speaking their local Barchester dialect. In fact axe was used by Southern white speakers until recent years, when it fell out of favor because it had become such a marker for black speech.”
• Babies one day old can distinguish speech from any other sounds, and by four days old they can distinguish their own language from other languages. Starting at 18 months, they can learn two words a day, on average.

(Note: this was published in 2004 so some of this may be out of date already.)

When it comes to language and grammar, I’m a prescriptivist rather than a descriptivist. I understand that language will change and that I have no control over this no matter how much I shake my fist and yell, which I do. My sister is such a prescriptivist that she despairs of the usage of decimate to mean “reduce drastically” or “cause great destruction or harm to” rather than “reduce in number by ten percent.” My biggest pet peeves are:

1. Misuse of disinterested, which means impartial, when uninterested is meant. Why does it matter? Because when you can use either word to mean the same thing, there’s a loss of specificity and precision. The ultimate object of language should be clarity, and language has more meaning the more specific and precise word meanings are.

2. Like, like, like as empty filler word; even academics quoted in the New York Times pepper their speech with likes now. This has spread from the commoners to the elites.

3. Something that happened after this book was published: starting sentences with “so.” I read online somewhere that this began in Silicon Valley. Speakers seem to believe this lends an extra air of authority; most who use it are experts, academics, bureaucrats, journalists, people with degrees. It doesn’t add anything except a soupçon of pretentiousness. It’s empty filler, a verbal crutch. This doesn’t seem to have spread downward to the commoners, yet.

4. When people pronounce the “t” in often. Do you pronounce the “t” in soften??

[Mirrani · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a linguist, but I was raised by one. As a result of hearing different languages and different language dialects throughout my life, I have a love of listening to the various dialects of America (and other countries), which is why I picked up this book. I loved the way it was written, both with an educational tone and with a certain humor.

Being the average, curious American had an advantage when reading through the pages, since the topics covered were widespread. They would have to be, since the book is meant to be a companion to the PBS show and is not very long. I would imagine that serious linguists who are looking for a very deep look into American dialects in general or for something on specific American dialects probably won't find new information here, while those wanting to casually dip into the subject will find themselves happily reading to the end.

I will happily hold out this book to anyone who is curious about American English because I think that a better understanding of language and dialect help us better understand the cultures we aren't always exposed to and bring us to a deeper understanding of those around us. Maybe some day there will be a time when a well educated man won't have to lose his southern accent to be accepted as one of the top in his field. Until then, we can pass around the knowledge within these pages and help people understand the links between dialect and our automatic responses to language itself.

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved reading this book because it was full of so much fascinating information about the American English language. The book provided an excellent overview (with some depth) as to what the major dialects are (Southern, Inland Midwestern, Black, Chicano, etc.), how they have been shaped historically, and how they continue to shape mainstream American English. The book is well organized into chapters that flow and I think it does a nice job of showing both "sides" of each of the major debates about American language and dialects. Overall, I think this is a great mainstream book about the American English language.

This book does not go into as much depth as I would have liked but I don't think that was the intent of it. In order to learn more specifics about dialects and the constantly changing state of our language, you probably need to turn to more academic/research-focused resourcs. It does, however, do a great job of introducing the basics and asks plenty of thought-provoking questions.

[Lori · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book contained a ton of interesting facts. It made me think about language (particularly the language of *others*) in a less critical light. But I had to force myself to finish because the presentation was dry and sometimes too drawn-out. The choppy transitions between topics suggest that this book is a transcript of the TV special, and was not edited to fit the print format. If you are thinking of getting the book, you might consider watching the video instead. (That I plan on watching it should speak to how interesting I found the topic.) I think in video format, this would be much more engaging, and it would be more fun to actually *hear* people talking instead of reading the authors' description of different dialects.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I have noted before on occasion, my native American accent is Western Pennsylvanian [1], one of the dialects spoken of in this book. There are some dialects, and this is one of them, that have a mixed sort of prestige. Locally, and I am a witness of this, there is a great deal of pride in the distinctiveness of the accent of Pittsburgh and surrounding areas, where creek is pronounced crick, where people go to Ver-sails but also Du-kain, where people appreciate Giant Iggle, cheer on the Stillers, and are fond of yinz, as long as you are one of their kind. This particular work is a descriptivist work on the diversity of American dialects and the ways in which they are viewed by others. There were times in reading this book where I cheered the authors on for their dedication to understanding a variety of different dialects and their remarkable divergence in the last few decades, and there were times I wanted to slap the writers upside their head for their whiny left-wing political worldview in matters of language. In short, this was a book that I had strongly ambivalent feelings about.

In terms of its structure and contents, this particular book is a little over 200 pages and is divided topically into eight chapters. The first chapter deals with the language wars, which the authors criticize for the way that some dialects are stigmatized. The authors then discuss the changing dialects of the United States based on their origins in different parts of England, a discussion that wouldn't be out of place in books about population migrations. The third chapter looks at the elements of building a standard American English form based on some of the distinctive qualities of a wide variety of dialects. The fifth chapter looks at the politically charged issue of Hispanic immigration and determines that there is a great deal of assimilation according to past models that has been disguised in large part by the continual nature of that immigration. The sixth chapter looks at how Black English has been simultaneously bad-mouthed and culturally appropriated in part because of its 'forbidden' and 'exotic' nature. The seventh chapter looks at the changing nature of contemporary American English, including the great shift of vowel and consonant sounding in different dialects, and the book ends with an interesting discussion of the difficulties computers have in recognizing distinct accents at present and the implications of dialect standardization based on communicating with computers.

One of the more irritating assumptions this book makes is that it is a bad thing to enforce some sort of common dialect on an entire population or the sake of everyone being able to understand everyone else, regardless of background or one's native dialect. The writers sniff that it is too difficult for people to learn prestige dialects simply in order for a certain uniformity to exist among all who wish to be viewed as cultured people within the United States. At the same time, though, the authors praise those who are able to successfully engage in code-switching, where they are able to use multiple dialects to their own social advantage depending on where they are, which over the course of my own life has been a simple survival skill in the face of fairly large social liabilities. Most European young people who have any remote pretensions towards being intelligent learn three or four languages well enough to communicate through their schooling. It should not be too much to demand knowledge of a common American dialect in addition to a foreign language from any student who wishes to engage in an honorable professional life. We ought to be aware that we are making a demand, but there are prices to living in a free republic, and one of those is encouraging unity among diversity, rather than simply praising diversity for its own sake without anything to counter those centrifugal forces.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2017...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2013...

[Leib Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Book Review
Do You Speak American?
3/5 stars
"A few interesting points; Dated"
*******
Of the book:

-203 pages of text/8 chapters=25/per
-201 point citations.
-4-5 hours of reading time

It seems like all of these books written by linguists are variations on a particular theme, which is to say: a series of trivial anecdotes stapled together around a narrative arc.

On the one hand, it's nice that somebody is studying and writing these things down so that future generations will have an idea of what people spoke like long ago.

But on the other, these differences between regional American English are so small (compared to, say, the difference between Chinese as spoken in Taishan, Guangdong compared to Chinese spoken in Shantou, Guangdong) that ONLY an academic could ferret them out.

And let's not forget that linguists can be certain of something in one generation and then certain of its opposite in the very next--This book says that Southern accents are robust and growing, but an article 20 years later says that the accent is disappearing. (NPR: "Are Southern Accents Disappearing? Linguists say yes.")

This is forgivable, because natural evolution (linguistic, biological, otherwise) is one of those things that is perfectly explicable ex post facto, yet completely unpredictable from current circumstances.

Some of the recurring themes are that:

1. Regional accents are born/stabilize in one place and then go to another and remain stable. (Think: Black people developing a language over centuries in the South, and then moving it with them to the North after the Great Migration. And maintaining it.)

2. Regional accents may recombine and create something new. (Think: Appalachian Southern and more "Gone With The Wind" Southern merging and recombining to produce New Southern.)

I'll just extract some of the most interesting points from each chapter.

1. "The Language Wars" The wars between prescriptivists and descriptivists have been going on since the 1960s. Computer technology has made it possible to search through texts going back centuries and allows us to find that many words and phrases are actually much older than we thought.

2. "Changing Dialects" Dialectic diversity is greatest on the East Coast and in the south, and least through the west. These authors deny that television and radio are homogenizing the language--although they do say that internal migration does do that. (They also seem to think that some type of vowel shift is happening in places like Detroit and Cleveland-- that I've never heard, 20 years after the publication of this book.)

3. "Toward A Standard" The Mid-Atlantic accent was once based on the British Received Pronunciation. (Listen to FDR's fireside chats for something like this.) The postvocalic r was something that showed up *after* that. The neutral newscaster accent is called "Midland." Languages exist as "grapholects" (written forms) and "dialects" (spoken forms), which may have some divergence one from another. Some academics believe that "never before in history have so many people seriously undertaken the challenge to speak or write [American English] well." There is actually an academic journal called "American Speech."

4. "This Ain't Your Momma's South Anymore" roughneck Scotch-Irish brought their accent with them into the parts of the South that are more geographically difficult to access, and have kept it several centuries later. Plantation South English has a different sound because it was brought by people from Southwest England who often sent their children to school in England.

5. "Hispanic Immigration." The US had a war of two years against Mexico that resulted in 13,000 US casualties. They paid $15 million for what is most of the Southwestern United States at the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Just a century ago, every 10th American spoke German in Texas-- a higher percentage of people spoke German then than Spanish today. We have Spanglish AND Chicano English. Author tries to put the best spin on this coming language conflict.

6. "Bad mouthing Black English" Two theories of the reason that black people speak the way that they do:

a. Anglicist theory, which is that it is a match to dialects from the English region of the slave owners. (There is an English dialect where the word "ask" is pronounced "aks.")

b. Creole theory, that black English is a descendant of English pidgin.

27% of black people fail to graduate from high school and only 14% of them get college degrees. Respective figures for whites are 16% and 26%

Black people are reverse migrating to the South from the '70s. Between 1970 and 1990, more returned than left from the period 1914 to 1970.

7. "Language From A State of Change (=California)" A dictionary was actually assembled in order to write the script for the movie "Clueless." The language can be called "Valspeak." The rising voice at the end of a sentence is called "uptalk." The creaky voice at the end of sentences is called "vocal fry."

8. "Teaching computers to speak American."

Lots of speculation here about things that came to pass:

a. You can choose the language/accent of your operating system, 20 years after this author's speculation.

b. Speech to text / text to speech is now a reality. (And trivial, at this point. As well as voice recognition software that allows you to do many things.)

Lots of speculation about things that did NOT come to pass (p.190):

a. Chinese did not become the dominant language;

b. The popular wave of people learning Chinese for business came AND WENT (It peaked in 2013 and then declined by 1/3 between 2016 and 2020.)

c. English is required subject in Chinese schools, and there are 400 million Chinese learning it to this day, compared to about 400,000 Americans learning Chinese);

c. English is actually even *more* entrenched because it's an official/neutral language for The EU (most common second language in 19 of 25 countries), and for a lot of other regions.

d. I don't know how much black English diverged from standard English a quarter century later. The first black president did not use it to communicate with other black people, before or after office. There was the famous "lawyer dog" case In which a court finally decided that AAVE was not suitable for purposes of official communication.

Verdict: Weak recommendation.

1. You could probably just watch the TV series that goes with this, and pick up a more current book on linguistics with some other array of trivial points spliced together to create a book.

2. Linguists don't help anybody when they try to legitimize AAVE: as (black linguist) John McWhorter has noted, there is already way too much anti-intellectualism and separatism within the black subculture and anything that exacerbates that does not help.

Once the linguists open up this issue of the legitimacy of AAVE, then a *lot* of unnecessary energy will be expended trying to figure out Why it can/cannot be used in formal/written contexts. (Meanwhile, people who speak German / Arabic EVERYWHERE IN THE WORLD just use High German/Modern Standard Arabic in formal situations and local German/Arabic in others.)

Black people are already coming in from behind (assumed intellectual inferiority) In most communicative situations, and a linguistic barrier DOES! NOT! HELP!

Quotes:

"A society in which Maya Angelou can be thought to be a real poet of some importance is a doomed society." (p. 24)

"Dictionary of American Regional English, of which four of the five projected volumes have been published."

"SPELL, Society for the Preservation of English Language and Literature, with headquarters in Braselton, Georgia." (p. 63)

"One of the speakers was Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico, who commented that Mexican immigrants who continue to speak Spanish in the United States are doing their patriotic duty to Mexico. "

"The Ohio River has always been the traditional border between Southern and Northern Speech.... The South has become the largest dialect area in the United States."

"The Advent of the talkies meant that the movies had to settle on a form of English that would be understood and accepted all over the United States." (p. 154)

"You're cute. What's your mix?" (p. 200)

[Ryan Rivars · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fun little look into American English and its many dialects. This book is great for those without much background in linguistics.

[Moses Bakst · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quaint little book. Has a smugness about it that shows it could only have been written in the year two thousand. Laser focused on “the rich tapestry that makes us whole” over being a chronicle of the overarching uniqueness of American English.

When you read British English or speak to a Brit you can tell they speak Englishness differently. They avoid beating around the bush. I picked this book up to learn what makes American speech American — no mentions of the Federalist papers or other revolutionary era literature, nothing on Webster’s dictionary. I wish this book focused on the actual topic with the same enthusiasm as the discussions on AAVE and Spanglish.

I didn’t really care about the information on accents but it was well presented so I won’t comment on it.

This book written around 2000 was the last chance to have a view into the old world deep enough to chronicle it- the information is lost now.

[Michele Pfrogner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is presented as a companion book to the PBS series, so now that I have finished this title, I need to find the program! Our language, like our people, keeps changing, and, rather than criticize these dialects, we should embrace them. Growing up in northeastern Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, I loved hearing Pittsburghese!
I fought the Standard English battle all of the time in the classroom as an English teacher. There has to be a "standard" for writing in English, to help prepare for the future, whether through a career, education, promotion or business. I welcomed dialects, slang, and stories from my students; however, depending on the writing assignment, "standard English" had to find its way on the page.
I should have read this book when I was still teaching--it was informative, interesting, and affirming.

[Taryn Trag · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had to do a close reading of this book for my Linguists grad school class. The content of the book is very interesting, and the writing styles of the authors made it entertaining to read. Definitely not a “for enjoyment” book but a good read nonetheless.

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book for those

[Pixie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Written in 2005, it's pretty outdated, but still has some good general info.

[Rex Libris · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book started by discussing the various regional English accents or dialects. When it stayed on the topic of regionalism, the book seemed to be on some solid foundations, though claims were made how Midwestern english is shifting vowel sounds. Living here in the miidle of it all, I do not hear it.

An interesting discussion on Black English indicated that black English has diverged from American English more as time progresses, rather than less as was previously thought. Even more interesting is there is no regionalism in black english. It is the same in the south, the midwest and both coasts.

Discussions on Spanish completely ignored the political ramification of the reconquistadores, and the discussion about language by "political communities" seemed to make every effort to ignore the Newspeak nature of the matter.

I was hoping to get Mencken's history of the language, but it turned out to be the NY Times view of the world.

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a great study on the language of Americans and how it changes in relation to the nation's history and cultural values. It answered some questions I had about the language (such as why some American dialects are rhotic while others are not) and brought up some ideas that I hadn't thought about. Most interesting was the section about how some non-standard American dialects (for example African American Vernacular English) are treated by many as "incorrect" or "lazy" English, and how that affects the people who grow up speaking those dialects. Reading this has helped me to open my eyes about how language should be treated and taught in America, in a way that encourages people to learn how to communicate with the standard dialect (which is to their own benefit and that of others) without making them feel inferior for speaking differently at home.

[Shaun Welch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it was written in 2005, Do You Speak American? is still young enough to be relevant. It is an excellent layman's introduction to the variety of language and dialect that permeates the United States. What people say, how they say it, and how others perceive them for doing so are all covered. The tendency of mainstream America to look down upon the speech of African Americans, immigrants, and other minorities is explored.

So-called grammar Nazis will likely bristle at the contents of these pages. One can only hope it might purge such tendencies from a few of them.

[Lindsey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was assigned to read this for a sociolinguistics class, but it's super interesting...people who don't do the linguist thing would also be interested to read about the development of our language in the US.
Besides grappling with the question what exactly is American English... is a dialect or is it a language? It covers aspects of our speech such as Black English, Chicano English, and Regional Accents and dialects.AND, it does it in a way that is easy to read and fun.

[Hillery · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice enjoyable read on the current state of American English. Delves into the dichotomy of the homogenization of the language at the same time certain regional and group dialects continue to flourish and grow. Also looks at how immigration and the growth of computer speech interfaces are affecting American English. Written by Robert MacNeil who also produced a PBS documentary to accompany this book.

[Marie Hew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super fun for linguists and non-linguists alike! If you are at all interested in how we Americans speak, this is a wonderful book that stands on its own. The authors cover the major dialects spoken in the U.S. and puts into context how they developed. My take away from this book is that how we speak is forever changing and the idea of making English our national language isn't as simply as it may seem. Fun and easy read!

[Ellen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellently detailed for the layreader. I read it for background information regarding American English for the A level English Language classes I teach. We can't access the PBS documentary upon which it's based (the DVD was never released in the UK, and it's out of print in the US, with only very limited clips available on YouTube), but some narratives about more contemporary studies, particularly regarding attitudes towards language variation, are quite useful.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting discussion of "American" English. The authors traveled over the country listening to people speak and noting their 'accents/dialects'. Through their study they discovered some dialects were dying, others were forming. At the same time "American" English adopts many of the words and expressions of different languages and dialects thereby continually evolving and remaining a living language.

[Freda Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was fantastic. I was worried when I first got it that it was going to be illegible for a non-linguist reader like myself. Totally not the case. This book is accessible to anyone. I learned so much about American English and the insane variety of it. I also learned a lot about the politics and racism/sexism/classism involved in the way that we as a country value different ways of speaking English. Super cool book.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gives a nice sense of the organic/dynamic nauture of language and dialects in the US. Each chapter focuses on a different region or dialect such as chicano, black english, computer technologies that attempt to mimic human speech, valley girl, etc. A light read that scratches the surface of linguistics, but a decent introduction peppered with some occasional "no kidding!" insights.

[Sarah Vendetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Linguists. Yawn. It was a hard read, I actually don't think I finished. But the glossy synopsis on the back makes it all very interesting. It is text book style, no story to follow. I wish someone would do a presentation, with all the different dialects and accents, that would hold my attention.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this in one sitting, since I had to keep myself occupied from Portland to LA, via San Francisco. It's super interesting and although I don't feel it's necessarily dumbed down, it is much more accessible than a scholarly book on linguistics. I think it helps that the authors are NOT linguists. If you are interested in American English, I would recommend it.

[Christi · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the topic but had to force myself through the book. It was more of a transcript of the tv show than enjoyable as a read on its own. There were several instances where a speech-sample dialog would have made more sense if it was audible rather than just readable. They should have done some more editing to translate this from tv to book form.

[Tara · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book. It discussed the linguistics of the very different American dialects and changing trends in pronunciation. Even if you are not a linguistic, after the first chapter the book is easy to read and fascinating. As an ESL instructor, I teach vowel pronunciation because if you shift the vowels; you change the entire word dynamic. Highly recommended!

[Jimmy Head · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glad to find out that my horrible Philadelphia accent spread throughout the country in the form of the pronounced "R" at the end of words, unlike Boston, New York, Richmond, and Charlotte. You're welcome, America.
Troubling, though, that African-American speech has diverged even more from the rest of America.

[Samuel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Overall this book was disappointing. It seemed like there had been a lot of research and interesting information that they'd gathered, but the whole book has been "Reader's Digested" down. I felt like I learned less than I would have reading an article in the Economist.

[Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

A light and accessible introduction to how American English actually came to be and how it is changing. What you learned in school is probably wrong, and how you spoke at the time was probably right.

[Webster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compelling

An overall good read, if a bit dated. The author can at times seem awfully "square" - particularly, when describing certainly slang - but makes up for it in earnest objectivity.