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The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language
A riveting, one-of-a-kind anthology of the diversity, strangeness, and power of American English, featuring a tremendous array of essays, letters, poems, songs, speeches, stories, jeremiads, manifestos, and decrees across history, from Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln to Henry Roth and Zora Neale Hurston, from George Carlin and James Baldwin to Richard Rodríguez and Amy Tan, from Tony Kushner and Toni Morrison to Louise Erdrich and Donald Trump.
This volume is a people’s history of English in the United States, told by those who have transformed it: activists, teachers, immigrants, journalists, poets, dictionary makers, actors, musicians, playwrights, preachers, presidents, rappers, translators, singers, children’s authors, scientists, politicians, foreigners, students, homemakers, lexicographers, scholars, newspaper columnists, senators, novelists, and a slew of fanatics. It begins with the English used by the settlers in Plymouth Colony and concludes (for now) with John McWhorter’s tribute to punctuation that bends the rules.
The quest is to understand how an imperial language like English, with Germanic origins, whose spread resulted from the Norman conquest, came to be an intrinsic component of the most influential democratic experiment in the world. Edited by internationally renowned cultural commentator and consultant for the OED Ilan Stavans, it is organized chronologically and offers a banquet of letters, poems, essays, dictionary entries, stories, songs, legislative documents, and other evidence of verbal mutation. Immigrants have propelled these transformations. Hybrid dialects like Yinglish, Spanglish, and Hawaiian pidgin have flowered. Our linguistic and cultural multiplicity has sparked fierce national debates that play out in these pages—from the compulsory education (and deracination) of Native Americans, to the classification of Black Vernacular English (once celebrated and ridiculed as Ebonics), to the dictionary wars over prescriptive versus descriptive usage, to the push for “English only” mandates that persist to this day. What is clear is that as much as we try to corral it, American English gallops ahead to its own destiny.
Driven by American innovators, English has become the global language of both business and entertainment—the medium of the laws that bind us, the art that inspires us, and the connections we forge across cultures. A compendium that is as rich and diverse as the country itself, The People’s Tongue helps us grapple with how English has become the world’s lingua franca.
This volume is a people’s history of English in the United States, told by those who have transformed it: activists, teachers, immigrants, journalists, poets, dictionary makers, actors, musicians, playwrights, preachers, presidents, rappers, translators, singers, children’s authors, scientists, politicians, foreigners, students, homemakers, lexicographers, scholars, newspaper columnists, senators, novelists, and a slew of fanatics. It begins with the English used by the settlers in Plymouth Colony and concludes (for now) with John McWhorter’s tribute to punctuation that bends the rules.
The quest is to understand how an imperial language like English, with Germanic origins, whose spread resulted from the Norman conquest, came to be an intrinsic component of the most influential democratic experiment in the world. Edited by internationally renowned cultural commentator and consultant for the OED Ilan Stavans, it is organized chronologically and offers a banquet of letters, poems, essays, dictionary entries, stories, songs, legislative documents, and other evidence of verbal mutation. Immigrants have propelled these transformations. Hybrid dialects like Yinglish, Spanglish, and Hawaiian pidgin have flowered. Our linguistic and cultural multiplicity has sparked fierce national debates that play out in these pages—from the compulsory education (and deracination) of Native Americans, to the classification of Black Vernacular English (once celebrated and ridiculed as Ebonics), to the dictionary wars over prescriptive versus descriptive usage, to the push for “English only” mandates that persist to this day. What is clear is that as much as we try to corral it, American English gallops ahead to its own destiny.
Driven by American innovators, English has become the global language of both business and entertainment—the medium of the laws that bind us, the art that inspires us, and the connections we forge across cultures. A compendium that is as rich and diverse as the country itself, The People’s Tongue helps us grapple with how English has become the world’s lingua franca.
512 pages, Hardcover
First published February 14, 2023
26 people are currently reading
361 people want to read
About the author
Ilan Stavans
240 books133 followersIlan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. An award-winning writer and public television host, his books include Growing Up Latino and Spanglish. A native of Mexico City, he lives in Amherst, Massachusetts.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
April 2, 2023
This is basically a document reader, and an odd one IMO. I checked this volume out from my library, and I skipped around in it and certainly didn’t read the whole thing cover to cover. I was interested because the description mentioned it contained something written by Louise Erdrich. (Turns out to be an article originally published in the New York Times in 2000, see title below.) Since I had a hard time trying to find the table of contents prior to obtaining it, here it is for anyone else who may be interested:
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Language as Character, by Ilan Stavans Chronology
PART I LANDING MODE
“Letter to Adam Winthrop” (c. 1581) Anne Winthrop
from The New England Primer (1687) Robert Smith
“Proposal for an American Language Academy” (1780)
John Adams
“Letter to John Waldo” (1813) Thomas Jefferson
Preface to An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) Noah Webster
“Indian Names” (1834) Lydia Huntley Sigourney
from Democracy in America (1835) Alexis de Tocqueville
from “On the Natural Languages of Signs; And Its Value and Uses in the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb” (1847) Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet
“Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851) Sojourner Truth
“Gettysburg Address” (1863) Abraham Lincoln
“The Spelling Bee at Angels” (1878) Bret Harte
from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Mark Twain
from English as She Is Spoke, Being a Comprehensive Phrasebook of the English Language, Written by Men to Whom English Was Entirely Unknown (1884) José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino
“Slang in America” (1885) Walt Whitman
“Many a phrase has the English language” (1886) Emily Dickinson
from “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” (1892) Richard Henry Pratt
“When Malindy Sings” (1896) Paul Laurence Dunbar
“On Naming the Indians” (1897) Simon Pokagon
“Three Definitions” (1906) Ambrose Bierce
from The American Scene (1907) Henry James
from The Promised Land (1912) Mary Antin
“Babel Proclamation” (1918) William L. Harding
“The Last Message” (1919) 1 Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
PART II FLY ME TO THE MOON
“The Characters of American” (1919) H. L. Mencken
“next to of course god america i” (1926) E. E. Cummings
from Call It Sleep (1934) Henry Roth
“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” (1935) Thomas Wolfe
from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Zora Neale Hurston
“Strange Fruit” (1939) Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday
“Who’s on First?” (1944) Bud Abbott and Lou Costello
“Go for Broke” (1944) Martin Minoru Iida
“Ough” (1953) Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz
Introduction to William Strunk’s The Elements of Style (1957) E. B. White
from What’s the Good Word (1958) William Faulkner
from Green Eggs and Ham (1960) Dr. Seuss
from “The String Untuned” (1962) Dwight McDonald
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963) Bob Dylan
from The Joys of Yiddish (1968) Leo Rosten
“Word Association” (1975) Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney
“Transcendental Etude” (1977) Adrienne Rich
“If Black English Isn’t a Language, Tell Me What Is?” (1979) James Baldwin
“On Translating My Books” (1979) Isaac Bashevis Singer
from “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) Sugarhill Gang
“Paradoxes and Oxymorons” (1980) John Ashbery
from Riddley Walker (1980) Russell Hoban
from “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” (1981) Richard Rodriguez
“Speech on Language Amendment” (1982) Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa
PART III THE RUCKUS OF POLYPHONY
from “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (1987) Gloria Anzaldúa
“Bilingual Sestina” (1990) Julia Alvarez
“Mother Tongue” (1990) Amy Tan
Angels in America, Part I: Act 1, Scene 8 (1991) Tony Kushner
“Nobel Lecture” (1993) Toni Morrison
“Mute in an English-Only World” (1996) Chang-Rae Lee
“In History” (1997) Jamaica Kincaid
“On His Deafness” (1997) Robert F. Panara
“Memorandum on Plain Language in Government Writing” (1998) Bill Clinton
“Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart” (2000) Louise Erdrich
“A Map to the Next World” (2000) Joy Harjo
“‘Twas the Night” (2001) María Eugenia Morales
“Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” (2001) David Foster Wallace
“The World as India” (2002) Susan Sontag
from The Writer as Migrant (2008) Ha Jin
“Homework: Define Caliente” (2008) Judith Ortiz Cofer
“The Keypad Solution” (2010) Ammon Shea
“English” (2011) Yusef Komunyakaa
“New Words and the Dictionary” (2012) Peter Sokolowski
“The Case for Profanity in Print” (2014) Jesse Sheidlower
“In Defense of Spanglish” (2014) Ilan Stavans
“DNA” (2017) Kendrick Lamar
“Manhattan Is a Lenape Word” (2020) Natalie Diaz
“CNN” (2021) Donald J. Trump
“Lingua / Language” (2022) Jhumpa Lahiri
“English Is a Living Language—Period” (2022) John McWhorter
Acknowledgments
Permissions Index
About the Editor
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Language as Character, by Ilan Stavans Chronology
PART I LANDING MODE
“Letter to Adam Winthrop” (c. 1581) Anne Winthrop
from The New England Primer (1687) Robert Smith
“Proposal for an American Language Academy” (1780)
John Adams
“Letter to John Waldo” (1813) Thomas Jefferson
Preface to An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) Noah Webster
“Indian Names” (1834) Lydia Huntley Sigourney
from Democracy in America (1835) Alexis de Tocqueville
from “On the Natural Languages of Signs; And Its Value and Uses in the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb” (1847) Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet
“Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851) Sojourner Truth
“Gettysburg Address” (1863) Abraham Lincoln
“The Spelling Bee at Angels” (1878) Bret Harte
from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) Mark Twain
from English as She Is Spoke, Being a Comprehensive Phrasebook of the English Language, Written by Men to Whom English Was Entirely Unknown (1884) José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino
“Slang in America” (1885) Walt Whitman
“Many a phrase has the English language” (1886) Emily Dickinson
from “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” (1892) Richard Henry Pratt
“When Malindy Sings” (1896) Paul Laurence Dunbar
“On Naming the Indians” (1897) Simon Pokagon
“Three Definitions” (1906) Ambrose Bierce
from The American Scene (1907) Henry James
from The Promised Land (1912) Mary Antin
“Babel Proclamation” (1918) William L. Harding
“The Last Message” (1919) 1 Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
PART II FLY ME TO THE MOON
“The Characters of American” (1919) H. L. Mencken
“next to of course god america i” (1926) E. E. Cummings
from Call It Sleep (1934) Henry Roth
“Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” (1935) Thomas Wolfe
from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) Zora Neale Hurston
“Strange Fruit” (1939) Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday
“Who’s on First?” (1944) Bud Abbott and Lou Costello
“Go for Broke” (1944) Martin Minoru Iida
“Ough” (1953) Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz
Introduction to William Strunk’s The Elements of Style (1957) E. B. White
from What’s the Good Word (1958) William Faulkner
from Green Eggs and Ham (1960) Dr. Seuss
from “The String Untuned” (1962) Dwight McDonald
“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963) Bob Dylan
from The Joys of Yiddish (1968) Leo Rosten
“Word Association” (1975) Richard Pryor and Paul Mooney
“Transcendental Etude” (1977) Adrienne Rich
“If Black English Isn’t a Language, Tell Me What Is?” (1979) James Baldwin
“On Translating My Books” (1979) Isaac Bashevis Singer
from “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) Sugarhill Gang
“Paradoxes and Oxymorons” (1980) John Ashbery
from Riddley Walker (1980) Russell Hoban
from “Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood” (1981) Richard Rodriguez
“Speech on Language Amendment” (1982) Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa
PART III THE RUCKUS OF POLYPHONY
from “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (1987) Gloria Anzaldúa
“Bilingual Sestina” (1990) Julia Alvarez
“Mother Tongue” (1990) Amy Tan
Angels in America, Part I: Act 1, Scene 8 (1991) Tony Kushner
“Nobel Lecture” (1993) Toni Morrison
“Mute in an English-Only World” (1996) Chang-Rae Lee
“In History” (1997) Jamaica Kincaid
“On His Deafness” (1997) Robert F. Panara
“Memorandum on Plain Language in Government Writing” (1998) Bill Clinton
“Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart” (2000) Louise Erdrich
“A Map to the Next World” (2000) Joy Harjo
“‘Twas the Night” (2001) María Eugenia Morales
“Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage” (2001) David Foster Wallace
“The World as India” (2002) Susan Sontag
from The Writer as Migrant (2008) Ha Jin
“Homework: Define Caliente” (2008) Judith Ortiz Cofer
“The Keypad Solution” (2010) Ammon Shea
“English” (2011) Yusef Komunyakaa
“New Words and the Dictionary” (2012) Peter Sokolowski
“The Case for Profanity in Print” (2014) Jesse Sheidlower
“In Defense of Spanglish” (2014) Ilan Stavans
“DNA” (2017) Kendrick Lamar
“Manhattan Is a Lenape Word” (2020) Natalie Diaz
“CNN” (2021) Donald J. Trump
“Lingua / Language” (2022) Jhumpa Lahiri
“English Is a Living Language—Period” (2022) John McWhorter
Acknowledgments
Permissions Index
About the Editor
January 22, 2024
You get what you expect from this collection of writings on language from history to the present. I was really happy to see Abbott and Costello's "Who's on First" routine included!
February 5, 2023
Started 1-31-23. Finished 2-4-23. A scholarly book about the use of the English language by Americans. It's an anthology of essays by famous and not-so-famous people writing about the changes to the language by people in our country--from Sojourner Truth to Noah Webster to Abbott & Costello ("Who's on First?"). It also covers slang, swear words and their use, incorrect punctuation, and language used by immigrants. It reads like a textbook, so it's slow going, but it's still interesting.
February 6, 2023
This is an anthology of writing about the English language in America. It is a wide-ranging collection in viewpoint, style, and approach. It takes the risk that no one is going to like everything. Anyone interested in the complicated story and state of American English should read it.
The gem for me was a long essay by David Foster Wallace which I had never seen before, despite being a big fan of his. It is in the form of a review of Bryan A. Gardner's wonderful book, "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage". It is really Wallace's defense for teaching "standard English" to minority students.
His argument is not that it is the correct way to speak. He argues that it is the dialect that the rich and powerful people in America speak. If you want to communicate effectively with them, you have to learn their dialect, particularly because the hard truth is that they are not going to learn yours.
The Wallace essay is at odds with many of the pieces in this collection which argue for the validity of the language spoken in Black or Spanish communities. The strength of the book is that Stavans collects pieces that make the best case for each point of view.
Formal essays are only a small part of the book. He collects excerpts from everywhere to illustrate the use of dialects in popular culture. We get a sample of Henry Roth's "Yinglish" and the lyrics from "Rappers Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang, and dialogue between Ricky and Lucy in the "I Love Lucy" show.
Some of the pieces seem to be just things Stavans likes. I am not sure what the Abbot and Costello "Who's on First?" routine adds, although I enjoyed reading it. Some are silly. A partial transcript of Doctor Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham" seemed random.
Most of the pieces I could think of which deserved to be preserved, are here. I was surprised that there was nothing from Leo Rosten's "The Education of Hyman Kaplan". It is the funniest book about immigrants learning English. There is an excerpt from Rosten's other excellent language book, "The Joys of English".
This is an anthology on an important topic. It collects most of what should be read, and it takes interesting and risky choices to round out the picture. A hard job well done.
The gem for me was a long essay by David Foster Wallace which I had never seen before, despite being a big fan of his. It is in the form of a review of Bryan A. Gardner's wonderful book, "A Dictionary of Modern American Usage". It is really Wallace's defense for teaching "standard English" to minority students.
His argument is not that it is the correct way to speak. He argues that it is the dialect that the rich and powerful people in America speak. If you want to communicate effectively with them, you have to learn their dialect, particularly because the hard truth is that they are not going to learn yours.
The Wallace essay is at odds with many of the pieces in this collection which argue for the validity of the language spoken in Black or Spanish communities. The strength of the book is that Stavans collects pieces that make the best case for each point of view.
Formal essays are only a small part of the book. He collects excerpts from everywhere to illustrate the use of dialects in popular culture. We get a sample of Henry Roth's "Yinglish" and the lyrics from "Rappers Delight" by The Sugarhill Gang, and dialogue between Ricky and Lucy in the "I Love Lucy" show.
Some of the pieces seem to be just things Stavans likes. I am not sure what the Abbot and Costello "Who's on First?" routine adds, although I enjoyed reading it. Some are silly. A partial transcript of Doctor Seuss's "Green Eggs and Ham" seemed random.
Most of the pieces I could think of which deserved to be preserved, are here. I was surprised that there was nothing from Leo Rosten's "The Education of Hyman Kaplan". It is the funniest book about immigrants learning English. There is an excerpt from Rosten's other excellent language book, "The Joys of English".
This is an anthology on an important topic. It collects most of what should be read, and it takes interesting and risky choices to round out the picture. A hard job well done.
July 13, 2023
Really not sure what to make of this one. Sure some of the essays are interesting, but I continued to find myself asking again and again “why was this included?”
I’m not sure what the point of this book is. What is Stavans trying to teach us about American English? I walked away not feeling like I learned much of anything.
And then again some of the entries of things I enjoyed, I only really enjoyed because I experienced them in their original medium. Reading a transcript of a scene from I Love Lucy is enjoyable because I love the show, and because Lucile Ball and Desi Arnez are funny. I can’t imagine what, if anything, someone not familiar with the show would get out of its inclusion here.
Similarly, I really like Kendrick Lamar. Damn is an excellent album. Including some of the lyrics from DNA here doesn’t really do anything for anyone.
Definitely not worth anyone’s time.
I’m not sure what the point of this book is. What is Stavans trying to teach us about American English? I walked away not feeling like I learned much of anything.
And then again some of the entries of things I enjoyed, I only really enjoyed because I experienced them in their original medium. Reading a transcript of a scene from I Love Lucy is enjoyable because I love the show, and because Lucile Ball and Desi Arnez are funny. I can’t imagine what, if anything, someone not familiar with the show would get out of its inclusion here.
Similarly, I really like Kendrick Lamar. Damn is an excellent album. Including some of the lyrics from DNA here doesn’t really do anything for anyone.
Definitely not worth anyone’s time.
September 25, 2023
Here is a thought provoking collection of essays on the English language and its relatives, Spanglish and Yiddish, with various Native American languages considered, in addition to the Black vernacular. Discussions of German, Latin, Italian and translations of language are included here with emphasis on difficulties in rendering true translations without altering the authors' meanings. Also covered here is history of language and the shifting and adoption of words from other languages into English, the ever changing English language with constant additions of new words. Rap is included in the collection, as are tweets! (I could have done without the tweets.)
December 30, 2023
I found this anthology unique in its construction. While I would rarely recommend reading an anthology from cover to cover (like I just did), Stavans’ organization of the text was extremely thoughtful in telling the story of American English.
Keep an eye out for my full review on Instagram @thebooknookchronicles or on www.thebooknookchronicles.com either tomorrow or 1/1/24!
Keep an eye out for my full review on Instagram @thebooknookchronicles or on www.thebooknookchronicles.com either tomorrow or 1/1/24!
May 3, 2023
I loved this book so much. It was such a fun, interesting, diverse collection of English. It offered both meditations on English and what it means to Americans and provided examples of great writing from all kinds of voices.
December 2, 2023
I heard the interview with Stavans on NPR and bought the book based on the interview. As with any list, there will be examples one agrees with, and others included or excluded are a puzzle. There were quite a few pleasant surprises, and I enjoyed reading pieces I had never heard of before.
January 26, 2024
The pieces in this book are hit-or-miss for me, mostly miss. But there are a few gems. I did a lot of skimming.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews