Do you Speak American?

Nearly a century ago, just after World War I had ended, there was a groundswell of linguistic patriotism in America. All of a sudden, scholars, writers and politicians were interested in studying, defining and promoting a distinctly "American" version of English.

In 1919, H.L. Mencken published the first edition of what would become one of his more popular books, The American Language. In the early 1920s, some of the country's leading linguists started work on the "Linguistic Atlas of New England", one of the first attempts to systematically document a regional dialect; in 1925, the journal American Speech published its first issue.

By 1922, Rep. Washington J. McCormick had introduced a bill to Congress proposing that the country's "national and official language" be "declared to be the American language." States followed suit, and while most of these bills failed, in 1923 Illinois actually did declare the state's official language to be "American."

But what is American, exactly? In every place that people speak English, whether it's Scotland, Ireland, Australia, Ghana, South Africa, or Canada, the language has its own essential character, sometimes so distinct that people from one place can hardly understand people from another. In this mish-mash of Germanic and Latinate forms, what distinguishes the language that's used in this country? How do you speak American?

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