The Heart of the Matter: Standard Language in the United States

Lou Spaventa, US

“I am trying to make my accent so it won't bother anyone, but I am not going to drive myself crazy trying to pretend I am an American girl when I am from Colombia. “

Shakira

What precisely is an American accent and what is standard American as in United States American? Politically correct people frown on the use of American to mean people from the United States, but most of the native English-speaking world uses American English to refer to what native-born individuals speak in these United States. American English has perhaps hundreds of vocabulary differences with British English, less so with Canadian English. Pronunciation certainly differs among Americans, Canadians, Australians, Englishmen, New Zealanders, Indians, South Africans, et al. There is no academy to legislate proper usage of American English nor is there a clear geographical area connected to a preferred pronunciation. However, there are dictionaries that give pronunciation, sometimes more than one version for a single dictionary entry. There are teachers of English and English as a Second Language who have an understanding of the way English is used by educated speakers. And there are the speakers of American English themselves who use naïve linguistic judgment to decide whether a person is a native speaker or not, speaks well or not.

The notion of a standard version of American English is probably an artifact of the United States once being a colony of Great Britain. English English speakers historically have had clear perception of social class based upon accent. Witness Shaw’s Pygmalion, which later became My Fair Lady, and is likely one of the only fictional works to have a professor of phonetics as a hero. While My Fair Lady will perhaps be performed well into centuries ahead, Americans watching the play don’t have the same gut reaction to Eliza Doolittle’s accent, beyond difficulty in understanding it. Yet Americans do respond to various uses of English by fellow citizens. In the second part of the twentieth century, one common answer to a teacher’s question of what was standard American speech was that it was modeled on the language of ESL texts coming from writers and researchers in applied linguistics at the University of Michigan. Therefore, models of American English usage followed the native speech of the Midwest. Yet, a closer look at standard speech at that time would reveal quite a few divergent dialects considered standard. Such language was manifest in radio and television broadcasts and, to an extent, knit the nation together. A further explanation of standard American English arose: that it was the speech of broadcast news anchors on then three major networks – CBS, NBC, and ABC (NB, For many years, ABC’s anchor was the late Peter Jennings, a Canadian).

If we look at the modern day U.S., we see the role that technology and immigration from the Pacific Rim have played in creating the American English linguistic community. From rather circumscribed broadcast hours by the three major networks in most of the latter twentieth century, the U.S. airwaves have become saturated 24/7 with many networks offering a wide variety of English speakers. It is quite common to see and hear native speakers of British English and second language speakers of English on CNN for example. Origin of accent is not as easily placed as it once was. How long does it take for the British host of an American TV program to Americanize his or her English? It happens. People consciously or not try to fit in with their peers and tend to speak about things that their peers care about. If their peers are American English speakers, those non-native American English speakers are going to adapt their vocabulary, their phrasing and their pronunciation, although perhaps this latter to a lesser extent.

Change is inevitable when it comes to language. And as David Crystal has pointed out, it is rarely predictable (The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. That’s why language planning is largely a waste of time and resources. Furthermore, there is no rational way to justify a dialect’s primacy. It is a matter of historical and political forces over which people have little control. In the post-millenial United States, young people text message, post on social network sites, listen to music from all over the world, and generally spend very little time reading hard copy of anything. Textbooks and courses are moving into the ether, and predictions are being made on how soon the U.S. education sector will become paperless. Spelling on line is becoming more phonetic to reduce the number of characters used. It is also becoming more iconic with the use of emoticons and numbers to replace words and phrases. Distinctions that were once de rigeur are now seemingly optional. For example, the distinction between ‘few’ for a countable quantity and ‘less’ for a non-count quantity has all but vanished, both in every day speech and on broadcast television. As a linguist and a graybeard, I cringe when I hear an advertiser claim that her product will bring “less problems” if used properly. Then too, I am still surprised when someone refers to the past as “back in the day.” American English is changing, and I can hear the changes quite well. That doesn’t mean I have to embrace them as my preferred way of speaking. And therein, lies the beauty of American English – there is really no one standard that uniformly applies across the country.

Certainly American English users can tell educated speech from other kinds, and seem to expect their teachers and their leaders to use that speech. What categorizes such speech whether in Los Angeles or Boston? Probably accurate grammatical usage, an ability to communicate to a widely varying group of listeners, a sense of the language being used efficiently and with purpose, free of unnecessary emotion or opinion unless engaged in affective or opinionated rhetoric. Perhaps it could be called a language generated at least partly from the distillation of years of reading and writing to a wider audience. The fallacy with this thinking, a thinking I embrace, is that if a Martian were watching the American political scene and presidential elections, he, she or it would hear many an attempt by educated, successful users of American English to sound like their less educated and less successful constituents, trying to win over their audience by being “one of the guys.” Still, if someone were to pin me down, I would stick to my description of what standard American English is.

Of course, there are geographical differences within the United States despite the mass media effect of language leveling. When I was young and had joined many other young Americans from all parts of the country for Peace Corps training in Hilo, Hawaii, it was made crystal clear to me by others that I had a New York accent. Mostly and most of the time, I don’t now. What happened? In assimilating to my peer group, I lost the majority of my New York accent. What do I speak now? A standard American English with a New York flavor, not a New York accent. The same claim can be made by most native Americans with a high school education who have had exposure to a cross-national sampling of American English. We adapt and conform to one another. This is what distinguishes one language speech community from another. Yes, it’s hard to understand a thick African-American accent, a thick New Yorican accent, a thick down East Mainer accent, a thick Texas accent, a thick Cajun accent, a thick Mississippi accent, and it is certainly difficult at times to understand the language of first generation immigrants from Korea, Vietnam, Taiwan, India and Central America. But we manage, and we tend to be laissez fair about language use.

Is this massive intercambio of disparate cultures leading the United States on the road to linguistic ruin? Hardly. It is simply enriching the American English language, and helping it to grow in directions we can neither predict nor control. Language isn’t heading towards some omega point, some pinnacle of perfection. It is just changing – all the time. Welcome to standard American English – it’s awesome!

Please check the Pronunciation course at Pilgrims website.
Please check the Methodology for Teaching Spoken Grammar and English course at Pilgrims website.