The People's Tongue : Americans and the English Language.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stavans, Ilan.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English language--United States.

English language.

Language and culture--United States.

Language and culture.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (1 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

La Vergne : Restless Books, 2023.

Summary:

A riveting, one-of-a-kind anthology of the diversity, strangeness, and power of American English that features a tremendous array of letters, poems, memoir, jeremiads, stories, songs, documents, and more from Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln to Henry Roth and Zora Neale Hurston, from George Carlin and James Baldwin to Richard Rodrguez and Amy Tan, from Tony Kushner and Toni Morrison to Louise Erdrich and Donald Trump.This volume is a kind of peoples history of English in the United States, told by those who have transformed it: activists, teachers, immigrants, journalists, nurses, poets, astronauts, dictionary makers, actors, musicians, playwrights, preachers, Supreme Court Justices, rappers, translators, singers, childrens book authors, scientists, politicians, foreigners, students, homemakers, lexicographers, scholars, newspaper columnists, TV personalities, senators, novelists, technology innovators, and a bunch of fanatics.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 first and 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, autobiographical reflections, op-eds, dictionary entries, stories, songs, legislative documents, and other evidence of verbal mutation. It addresses Ebonics, and Yinglish, Spanglish, and other linguistic concoctions, including sci-fi inventions.In pages in which the story is not only the what but the how, The Peoples Tongue starts with samples of the English used by the settlers in Plymouth Colony and it ends with President Donald Trump's tweets.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Dedication

Introduction: Language as Character, by Ilan Stavans

Chronology

Part I. Landing Mode

“Letter to Adam Winthrop” (c. 1581)

from The New England Primer (1687)

“Proposal for an American Language Academy” (1780)

“Letter to John Waldo” (1813)

Preface to An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)

“Indian Names” (1834)

from Democracy in America (1835)

from “On the Natural Languages of Signs; And Its Value and Uses in the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb” (1847)

“Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851)

“Gettysburg Address” (1863)

“The Spelling Bee at Angels” (1878)

from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

from English as She Is Spoke, Being a Comprehensive Phrasebook of the English Language, Written by Men to Whom English Was Entirely Unknown (1884)

“Slang in America” (1885)

“Many a phrase has the English language” (1886)

from “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” (1892)

“When Malindy Sings” (1896)

“On Naming the Indians” (1897)

“Three Definitions” (1906)

from The American Scene (1907)

from The Promised Land (1912)

“Babel Proclamation” (1918) Generated by AI.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

Part of the metadata in this record was created by AI, based on the text of the resource.

ISBN:

9781632062666

1632062666

OCLC:

1505734593