If you traveled the United States, you probably noticed different dialects, had difficulty understanding certain words and expressions, and discovered that English seems not to be on the surface an easy Lingua Franca. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” The differences across the land reveal both the dynamic nature of languages and the static nature of cultures. Yes, favored expressions and pronunciations do change, but regional dialects with recognizable colloquialisms indicate a linguistic inertia. In twenty-first century America a push for a new language dynamic appears to be an effort to quash colloquialism, dialect, and language diversity. More on that below.
Lingua Franca
I’ll acknowledge that America does have a lingua franca, as evidenced by the little effort required by people across the nation to understand one another. Regardless of their state of origin, most Americans can understand what reality show participants, reporters, and movie stars utter on screens large and small. Reading online and published stories poses little difficulty regardless of the geographic separation of people. People from Providence, RI, understand just about everything that people from Pittsburgh, PA, New Orleans, LA, and LA, CA say. There might be a little temporal gap between hearing and understanding, but the brains of most speakers of American English can comprehend the meaning in the expressions of others, regardless of differences like the Boston’s “ca,” and Pittsburgher’s “car.” Regional idioms, however, can present at least a momentary challenge.
In some states, visitors from other regions could voice an English equivalent of “Hablo muy poco español,” as in I’m sorry, I don’t speak “Appalachian,” or “Sorry, I never learned much Appalachian in school.” Yes, America has dialects that initially seem very much like foreign languages to interstate visitors. Classifications of American English dialects include major and minor variations, mostly by pronunciation, but also by idiom:
“Hauscome yinz guys wacha Stillers on TV?”
“Ow know. We're sposda go dahntahn for da Stiller game.”
“Nuh-uh! Ahn yinz stayed om?”
“Choobinuptoo?”
“Lassnite we went out the road; safternoon, we’re gazinta tahn.”
“Sup wit u?”
And so on across the country. It’s English, yes, but it requires some careful listening by a brain that knows the lingua franca. And those idiomatic expressions complicate the communication: “Chawt,” for example, is Pittsburghese for “watch out,” as in “Chawt for cops on 79.” Variations in pronunciation exacerbate the problems of inter-dialect communication, just as different words for the same object, process, or idea make communicating more complex than intra-regional talk: Soda in Philadelphia is pop in Pittsburgh.
An Anecdote
I remember the first time I learned I had a dialect. My mother used to say “red up after supper,” meaning “clear the dishes from the table.” When she used the expression during a conversation with Midwesterners, she elicited, “You must be from western Pennsylvania.” It was recognizable as a Pittsburghese. And of course, there are accompanying pronunciations that identify one as a western Pennsylvanian bituminous coal field resident: “Chowd” for “child,” “arn” for “iron”, and “fair” for “fire.”
Wending Our Mutual Way through the Evermore Complicated Maze of Communication
But the lingua franca gets most Americans through the local differences. Now, however, there’s a trend that separates English speakers from now another within a regional dialect. It’s the trend to overturn centuries of pronoun use for the sake of gender identification. Sure, English has long had gender identifiers in the masculine, feminine, and neuter pronouns. And some nouns in the language have just as long a history of being gender identifiers: Man, woman, boy, girl, male, female all come to mind.
Those who would change the lingua franca for the sake of personal identity have gone to extremes in some instances, such as objecting to the use of history because it begins with his. During a recent stay at one of Disney’s hotels in Orlando, I saw a poster for “herstory month.” It’s a great pun, but it alters the inclusiveness of the word history that no doubt will be echoed in the hallowed halls of academia, those outmoded bastions of Standard Formal English now giving way to texting syntax, grammar, and spelling. WTF!
Never having discussed herstory with any Disney “imagineers,” I can only guess they believed the word change to be a necessary acquiescence to political correctness. But rather than ascribe the neologism herstory to fanatics who will angrily “Karen the banner of PC,” I’ll admit that the new word quickens the more cumbersome four-word “the history of women,” the longer “a month of recognition of historical women,” and even “women’s history month.” Such brevity conforms to the needs of a people too lazy to pursue a topic through multiple clicks on a computer mouse. And I’ll also admit that a poster announcing “herstory month,” isn’t surprising in a company that now has a mustachioed XY Snow White ushering little XX-chromosome-bearers into a children’s salon in Disney Springs, where the “little girls” aspire to be princesses (just like the XY princess usher-ette).
It’s Chinese…er Greek to Me
I think my iPhone was made in China. I believe the wood screws I recently used to replace a board on my deck also came from China. Trade is definitely more global now than during any previous era. And trade, like conquest, brings language shifts. No, I didn’t have to learn Mandarin to use the wood screws, and I text and speak in English on the phone, but the oceans that isolated North Americans are no longer a barrier to word and phrase adoption through trade.
It’s obvious that countries butted together enhance language learning out of necessity. One doesn’t have to travel far in Europe to encounter a different language though many European languages are related by some lingua franca, such as the Romance languages of French, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish, or those Germanic languages German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Norwegian. Take the following examples of a request in the Lord’s Prayer that Frederick Bodmer lists in his 692-page The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. *
Gib uns heute unser täglich Brot.— German
Greef ons heden ons dagelijks brood.— Dutch
Giv os i Dag vort daglige Brød.— Danish
Giv oss i dag vårt dagliga bröd.— Swedish
Get oss i dag vort daglego brauð. — Icelandic
And, in English: Give us this day our daily bread. Unlike Europeans living close proximity, Americans find little need to speak other languages save for Spanish spoken by the large Hispanic population and French spoken by those in neighboring eastern Canada. Suffice it to say that one can drive over 2,500 miles crossing the contiguous states without having to speak any language other than English in its five major American dialects.
Consider Bantu languages, probably best known for Swahili, the lingua franca of African East Coast countries that originated as a dialect in Zanzibar. Bantu languages in general use clusters similar to those in English to build words. Consider “clusters” to be units like -er, -ship, -hood, -dom, and -ter and -ther. Take the last two as clusters in father, daughter, mother, brother, sister. Bodmer gives examples in Greek and German:
Greek animals: -x
Alopex—fox
Aspalax—mole
Dorx—roe deer
Hystrix—porcupine
Pithex—ape
German animals: -chs
Dachs—badger
Fuchs—fox
Lachs—salmon
Ochs—ox.
Other German names for animals end in the suffix -er. ** And as I remarked in a recent blog on the use of pronouns, recall that German has grammatical gender with articles like die, der, and das. Well, lo and behold, in the Bantu languages “the name of any thing, any person, or any action is labeled by a particular prefix which assigns it to one of about twenty classes of words labeled in the same way” (204). As Bodmer explains, “The other outstanding peculiarity of the Bantu family is that the noun prefix colors the entire structure of the sentence…The pronoun of the third person has a form which more or less recalls the prefix of the noun represented by it…In Swahili and many other Bantu languages, the personal pronoun is prefixed to the verb even when the sentences has a noun subject, e.g. ba-kazama ba-enda (the girls they go).” The point germane to this discussion is that in Bantu languages which range from sub-Sahara all the way to South Africa, there’s a recognition of a gender relationship between nouns and pronouns. Again, English’s heritage language German keeps grammatical gender in tact, recognizing feminine, masculine, and neuter words, as in Die hübschen amerikanischen Studentinnen (the pretty American coeds). Frankly, I can’t imagine many Germans changing "Sie hat sich ein Bild gekauft” (She bought herself a picture) to some genderless form, maybe with a plural, which even in English and under the current press for PC language gets us into a real linguistic bind: Do we replace it with “They bought themselves a picture”? I can imagine the confusion that this will cause in other circumstances when people try to understand on the basis of a lingua franca: “They want their ticket.”
“Say what? Is it one ticket for several people?
“They want their seat.”
“Plane seats, even in first class, are really cramped. Now you want to squeeze more than one person in a seat? Sorry, they, but we allow only one person in a seat unless it is a parent holding an infant.”
Dynamic Language; Static Language
Yes, the English of Beowulf differs from the English of The Canterbury Tales that, in turn, differs from the English of Hamlet. And that more recent English of Shakespeare differs from the English in am even more modern American play or film. So, yes, language does undergo change. But the Amish are still stuck with ye, thou, thy, and thine. And that indicates a persistent inertia governed by region or by local culture. Sure, there’s little problem of understanding when a Pittsburgher tries to ask directions from a farmer in Lancaster County, a seat of many Amish families. Certainly, I can understand what those antique personal pronouns mean. But grammatical number is different. If one person wants to be referred to by a plural, then I’ll stumble mentally in trying to comprehend meaning.
I’m not arguing for an unchanging language. I have no doubt that I have adopted the changes of the past and current centuries without conscious recognition of doing so. Trained in Standard Formal English, I write these blogs with contractions. I also infuse my writing with words and expressions I learned by inculcation though I do refuse to use some words (e.g., normalcy for normality) and spellings (e.g., alright for all right). My mother, a lover of crossword puzzles whose formal education stopped at ninth grade, hounded my teenage years with admonitions against the colloquial “yinz,” “younz,” “it don’t,” “he don’t,” and other words and expressions she did not want her son to use. I can’t imagine her accepting “they” for “she” or “theirs” for “hers.” And I can say the same for my immigrant grandmothers also spoke grammatically correctly—go figure.
Once learned, language becomes an unconscious mechanism. We don’t think about it unless we find ourselves in a new or artificial context. I am happy to now be outside academia, where every word must conform under penalty and even the least intentional error can infuriate those shielded from anything that offends them. The common language everyone spoke when I was a professor is no longer the common language. Goodbye, lingua franca; hello, whatever anyone with ultra high sensitivity wants others to use.
No doubt the constant haranguing by a Press and PC media either too afraid to laugh at the unnecessary use of a plural pronoun for a singular antecedent or too embedded with a particular agenda, will wear down the resistant. Hear something often enough and you’re bound to repeat it: A forced inculcation appears to be the goal of the pronoun warriors.
Let’s Go to the Trobriand Islands
Worried about plurals? Afraid of the PC police, some screaming Snow Flake, or a boss too afraid to say, “Sorry, you can use whatever words you want, but I am not complying just to protect you from a perceived offense”? Bodmer quotes Bronislaw Malinowski:
“Let us transpose [a ]…peculiarity of Kiriwinian into English, following the native prototype…and imagine that no adjective, no numeral, no demonstrative, may be used without a particle denoting the nature off the object referred to. All names of human beings would take the prefix ‘human.’ Instead of saying ‘one soldier’ we would have to say ‘human-one soldier walks in the street.’ Instead of ‘how many passengers were in the accident?’ ‘How human-many passengers were in the accident?’ Answer: ‘human-seventeen.’ Or again, in reply to ‘Are the Smiths human-nice people?’ We should say, ‘No, they are human-dull?’ Again, nouns denoting persons belonging to the female sex would be numbered, pointed at, and qualified with the aid of the prefix ‘female’; wooden objects with the particle ‘wooden’’ flat or thin things with the particle leafy,’ following in all this the precedent of Kiriwina…’The women of Spain are female-beautiful….’” ***
The people who speak Kirwinian are going to have a difficult time understanding the new English use of pronouns if they leave the islands or receive tourists. But their culture itself poses a problem with plurality: Promiscuous pre-marriage relationships. Yeah, lots of partners is common, or as we English speakers say, “human-many-female partners” with the unfortunate result of human-many HIV infections. What’s worse, ascribing female gender and accurate antecedent-pronoun number agreement or acquiring a life-threatening disease?
If thee is an American in 2023, probably the former.
*Bodmer, Frederick. 1944. ED by Lancelot Hogben. 1972. New York. W. W. Norton & Company, p. 7.
**Bodmer, p. 204.
***Bodmer, pp. 206, 207. From Classificatory Particles ij Krirwina (Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, vol. I, 1917-20).
Lingua Franca
I’ll acknowledge that America does have a lingua franca, as evidenced by the little effort required by people across the nation to understand one another. Regardless of their state of origin, most Americans can understand what reality show participants, reporters, and movie stars utter on screens large and small. Reading online and published stories poses little difficulty regardless of the geographic separation of people. People from Providence, RI, understand just about everything that people from Pittsburgh, PA, New Orleans, LA, and LA, CA say. There might be a little temporal gap between hearing and understanding, but the brains of most speakers of American English can comprehend the meaning in the expressions of others, regardless of differences like the Boston’s “ca,” and Pittsburgher’s “car.” Regional idioms, however, can present at least a momentary challenge.
In some states, visitors from other regions could voice an English equivalent of “Hablo muy poco español,” as in I’m sorry, I don’t speak “Appalachian,” or “Sorry, I never learned much Appalachian in school.” Yes, America has dialects that initially seem very much like foreign languages to interstate visitors. Classifications of American English dialects include major and minor variations, mostly by pronunciation, but also by idiom:
“Hauscome yinz guys wacha Stillers on TV?”
“Ow know. We're sposda go dahntahn for da Stiller game.”
“Nuh-uh! Ahn yinz stayed om?”
“Choobinuptoo?”
“Lassnite we went out the road; safternoon, we’re gazinta tahn.”
“Sup wit u?”
And so on across the country. It’s English, yes, but it requires some careful listening by a brain that knows the lingua franca. And those idiomatic expressions complicate the communication: “Chawt,” for example, is Pittsburghese for “watch out,” as in “Chawt for cops on 79.” Variations in pronunciation exacerbate the problems of inter-dialect communication, just as different words for the same object, process, or idea make communicating more complex than intra-regional talk: Soda in Philadelphia is pop in Pittsburgh.
An Anecdote
I remember the first time I learned I had a dialect. My mother used to say “red up after supper,” meaning “clear the dishes from the table.” When she used the expression during a conversation with Midwesterners, she elicited, “You must be from western Pennsylvania.” It was recognizable as a Pittsburghese. And of course, there are accompanying pronunciations that identify one as a western Pennsylvanian bituminous coal field resident: “Chowd” for “child,” “arn” for “iron”, and “fair” for “fire.”
Wending Our Mutual Way through the Evermore Complicated Maze of Communication
But the lingua franca gets most Americans through the local differences. Now, however, there’s a trend that separates English speakers from now another within a regional dialect. It’s the trend to overturn centuries of pronoun use for the sake of gender identification. Sure, English has long had gender identifiers in the masculine, feminine, and neuter pronouns. And some nouns in the language have just as long a history of being gender identifiers: Man, woman, boy, girl, male, female all come to mind.
Those who would change the lingua franca for the sake of personal identity have gone to extremes in some instances, such as objecting to the use of history because it begins with his. During a recent stay at one of Disney’s hotels in Orlando, I saw a poster for “herstory month.” It’s a great pun, but it alters the inclusiveness of the word history that no doubt will be echoed in the hallowed halls of academia, those outmoded bastions of Standard Formal English now giving way to texting syntax, grammar, and spelling. WTF!
Never having discussed herstory with any Disney “imagineers,” I can only guess they believed the word change to be a necessary acquiescence to political correctness. But rather than ascribe the neologism herstory to fanatics who will angrily “Karen the banner of PC,” I’ll admit that the new word quickens the more cumbersome four-word “the history of women,” the longer “a month of recognition of historical women,” and even “women’s history month.” Such brevity conforms to the needs of a people too lazy to pursue a topic through multiple clicks on a computer mouse. And I’ll also admit that a poster announcing “herstory month,” isn’t surprising in a company that now has a mustachioed XY Snow White ushering little XX-chromosome-bearers into a children’s salon in Disney Springs, where the “little girls” aspire to be princesses (just like the XY princess usher-ette).
It’s Chinese…er Greek to Me
I think my iPhone was made in China. I believe the wood screws I recently used to replace a board on my deck also came from China. Trade is definitely more global now than during any previous era. And trade, like conquest, brings language shifts. No, I didn’t have to learn Mandarin to use the wood screws, and I text and speak in English on the phone, but the oceans that isolated North Americans are no longer a barrier to word and phrase adoption through trade.
It’s obvious that countries butted together enhance language learning out of necessity. One doesn’t have to travel far in Europe to encounter a different language though many European languages are related by some lingua franca, such as the Romance languages of French, Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish, or those Germanic languages German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, and Norwegian. Take the following examples of a request in the Lord’s Prayer that Frederick Bodmer lists in his 692-page The Loom of Language: An Approach to the Mastery of Many Languages. *
Gib uns heute unser täglich Brot.— German
Greef ons heden ons dagelijks brood.— Dutch
Giv os i Dag vort daglige Brød.— Danish
Giv oss i dag vårt dagliga bröd.— Swedish
Get oss i dag vort daglego brauð. — Icelandic
And, in English: Give us this day our daily bread. Unlike Europeans living close proximity, Americans find little need to speak other languages save for Spanish spoken by the large Hispanic population and French spoken by those in neighboring eastern Canada. Suffice it to say that one can drive over 2,500 miles crossing the contiguous states without having to speak any language other than English in its five major American dialects.
Consider Bantu languages, probably best known for Swahili, the lingua franca of African East Coast countries that originated as a dialect in Zanzibar. Bantu languages in general use clusters similar to those in English to build words. Consider “clusters” to be units like -er, -ship, -hood, -dom, and -ter and -ther. Take the last two as clusters in father, daughter, mother, brother, sister. Bodmer gives examples in Greek and German:
Greek animals: -x
Alopex—fox
Aspalax—mole
Dorx—roe deer
Hystrix—porcupine
Pithex—ape
German animals: -chs
Dachs—badger
Fuchs—fox
Lachs—salmon
Ochs—ox.
Other German names for animals end in the suffix -er. ** And as I remarked in a recent blog on the use of pronouns, recall that German has grammatical gender with articles like die, der, and das. Well, lo and behold, in the Bantu languages “the name of any thing, any person, or any action is labeled by a particular prefix which assigns it to one of about twenty classes of words labeled in the same way” (204). As Bodmer explains, “The other outstanding peculiarity of the Bantu family is that the noun prefix colors the entire structure of the sentence…The pronoun of the third person has a form which more or less recalls the prefix of the noun represented by it…In Swahili and many other Bantu languages, the personal pronoun is prefixed to the verb even when the sentences has a noun subject, e.g. ba-kazama ba-enda (the girls they go).” The point germane to this discussion is that in Bantu languages which range from sub-Sahara all the way to South Africa, there’s a recognition of a gender relationship between nouns and pronouns. Again, English’s heritage language German keeps grammatical gender in tact, recognizing feminine, masculine, and neuter words, as in Die hübschen amerikanischen Studentinnen (the pretty American coeds). Frankly, I can’t imagine many Germans changing "Sie hat sich ein Bild gekauft” (She bought herself a picture) to some genderless form, maybe with a plural, which even in English and under the current press for PC language gets us into a real linguistic bind: Do we replace it with “They bought themselves a picture”? I can imagine the confusion that this will cause in other circumstances when people try to understand on the basis of a lingua franca: “They want their ticket.”
“Say what? Is it one ticket for several people?
“They want their seat.”
“Plane seats, even in first class, are really cramped. Now you want to squeeze more than one person in a seat? Sorry, they, but we allow only one person in a seat unless it is a parent holding an infant.”
Dynamic Language; Static Language
Yes, the English of Beowulf differs from the English of The Canterbury Tales that, in turn, differs from the English of Hamlet. And that more recent English of Shakespeare differs from the English in am even more modern American play or film. So, yes, language does undergo change. But the Amish are still stuck with ye, thou, thy, and thine. And that indicates a persistent inertia governed by region or by local culture. Sure, there’s little problem of understanding when a Pittsburgher tries to ask directions from a farmer in Lancaster County, a seat of many Amish families. Certainly, I can understand what those antique personal pronouns mean. But grammatical number is different. If one person wants to be referred to by a plural, then I’ll stumble mentally in trying to comprehend meaning.
I’m not arguing for an unchanging language. I have no doubt that I have adopted the changes of the past and current centuries without conscious recognition of doing so. Trained in Standard Formal English, I write these blogs with contractions. I also infuse my writing with words and expressions I learned by inculcation though I do refuse to use some words (e.g., normalcy for normality) and spellings (e.g., alright for all right). My mother, a lover of crossword puzzles whose formal education stopped at ninth grade, hounded my teenage years with admonitions against the colloquial “yinz,” “younz,” “it don’t,” “he don’t,” and other words and expressions she did not want her son to use. I can’t imagine her accepting “they” for “she” or “theirs” for “hers.” And I can say the same for my immigrant grandmothers also spoke grammatically correctly—go figure.
Once learned, language becomes an unconscious mechanism. We don’t think about it unless we find ourselves in a new or artificial context. I am happy to now be outside academia, where every word must conform under penalty and even the least intentional error can infuriate those shielded from anything that offends them. The common language everyone spoke when I was a professor is no longer the common language. Goodbye, lingua franca; hello, whatever anyone with ultra high sensitivity wants others to use.
No doubt the constant haranguing by a Press and PC media either too afraid to laugh at the unnecessary use of a plural pronoun for a singular antecedent or too embedded with a particular agenda, will wear down the resistant. Hear something often enough and you’re bound to repeat it: A forced inculcation appears to be the goal of the pronoun warriors.
Let’s Go to the Trobriand Islands
Worried about plurals? Afraid of the PC police, some screaming Snow Flake, or a boss too afraid to say, “Sorry, you can use whatever words you want, but I am not complying just to protect you from a perceived offense”? Bodmer quotes Bronislaw Malinowski:
“Let us transpose [a ]…peculiarity of Kiriwinian into English, following the native prototype…and imagine that no adjective, no numeral, no demonstrative, may be used without a particle denoting the nature off the object referred to. All names of human beings would take the prefix ‘human.’ Instead of saying ‘one soldier’ we would have to say ‘human-one soldier walks in the street.’ Instead of ‘how many passengers were in the accident?’ ‘How human-many passengers were in the accident?’ Answer: ‘human-seventeen.’ Or again, in reply to ‘Are the Smiths human-nice people?’ We should say, ‘No, they are human-dull?’ Again, nouns denoting persons belonging to the female sex would be numbered, pointed at, and qualified with the aid of the prefix ‘female’; wooden objects with the particle ‘wooden’’ flat or thin things with the particle leafy,’ following in all this the precedent of Kiriwina…’The women of Spain are female-beautiful….’” ***
The people who speak Kirwinian are going to have a difficult time understanding the new English use of pronouns if they leave the islands or receive tourists. But their culture itself poses a problem with plurality: Promiscuous pre-marriage relationships. Yeah, lots of partners is common, or as we English speakers say, “human-many-female partners” with the unfortunate result of human-many HIV infections. What’s worse, ascribing female gender and accurate antecedent-pronoun number agreement or acquiring a life-threatening disease?
If thee is an American in 2023, probably the former.
*Bodmer, Frederick. 1944. ED by Lancelot Hogben. 1972. New York. W. W. Norton & Company, p. 7.
**Bodmer, p. 204.
***Bodmer, pp. 206, 207. From Classificatory Particles ij Krirwina (Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, vol. I, 1917-20).
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