Will “American” Ever Be a Fully Distinct Language of Its Own?

More than a decade ago, while on research fellowship at the British Library, I used to while away off-hours at the various pubs in King’s Cross, including a slightly dissolute bar on Cromer Street where in between mysterious meat pies and pints of watery Carling I’d feed the jukebox with pence and soothe a homesick soul with Bruce Springsteen. In retrospect, such maudlin Americanism was embarrassing, though sometimes I had my reasons.

One evening, while chatting with the bartender, I mentioned Somerset County in Pennsylvania, to which she asked why American placenames, American culture in general, were, in her estimation, a pale imitation of that in the United Kingdom. This was a common bit of provincialism I’ve encountered in England, the misunderstanding of American culture as if it was a photocopy of an Anglo-Saxon original, a fallacy equally embraced by our domestic nativists.

Righteously (and fairly) smarting, I asked if the Monongahela flowed through the Cotswolds or the Alleghenies punctured the Cornish horizon? “Allegheny” of course appears nowhere in Dr. Johnson’s dictionary of 1755, but it does appear in Noah Webster’s 1828 An American Dictionary of the English Language as the “chief ridge of the great chain of mountains… which casts all the waters on one side to the east, and the other to the west.” That Lenape placename is included by Webster along with other indigenous etymologies including “hickory,” “squash,” “moccasin,” “opossum,” and “moose” (among dozens of others), none of which Dr. Johnson knew of or would have seen fit to include in his magnum opus.

Webster had the quixotic desire to will a new nation into existence from the raw materials of diction and syntax.

Webster, who you’d be forgiven for erroneously assuming is a marketer’s invention, a kind of lexicographical Cap’n Crunch or Ronald McDonald, was very much an actual curmudgeonly New England scholar, and the locus of quite some controversy in the decades after the Revolution when he advocated for the formation of a separate “American language.” An imperious, condescending, and arrogant gentleman, even Webster’s fellow Federalists mocked him as the “monarch,” while a Republican newspaper referred to him as a “pusillanimous, half-begotten self-dubbed patriot… a dunghill cock of faction.”

Whether lecturing George Washington on how he should hire an American tutor rather than a Scottish for the general’s step-grandchildren or correcting Benjamin Rush after his a safe arrival for a lecture with “Sir, you may congratulate Philadelphia on the occasion,” it appears that Webster didn’t widely endear himself to his contemporaries. And yet Webster’s dictionary, and his earlier attempts at spelling reform, expressed a radical desire to forge an entirely new tongue based in the vernacular genius of the aspiring American people.

A linguistic descriptivist as much as a prescriptivist, Webster may have intellectually been of the impervious elite of the Federalists, but spiritually he was a Democratic-Republican, of Jefferson’s party without even knowing it. That made all the difference as he compiled a vocabulary rugged and coarse for an equivalently unformed land. An opponent of both regional variations in dialect, which he feared threatened union, as well as the King’s English intoned by the nation’s former masters, Webster had the quixotic desire to will a new nation into existence from the raw materials of diction and syntax as he found them in New England hamlets and Mid-Atlantic metropolises, Southern plantations and western frontier towns. “Now is the time and this is the country,” wrote Webster in his 1789 treatise Dissertations on the English Language. “Let us then seize the moment, and establish a national language.” For Webster’s critics, this argument that was made the same year that the Bastille was stormed, was the lexicographical equivalent of Jacobinism.

That his language was English and not American was the cause of ample anxiety for a linguistic nationalist like Webster, no less than my own as evidenced in my rejoinders to a bartender at the Boot Pub more than two centuries later. Linguist Max Weinreich waggishly claimed that a language is simply a dialect with an army and a navy, but even if the Pentagon’s budget was increased ten-fold by no standard would “American” be credibly separate from English. Not for want of trying, Webster did believe that with gradual nudges “American” could differentiate itself from English in the same way that the mother tongue is separate from German and Dutch (or maybe how Scots is from the King’s English).

Central to this vision, early in his career, was Webster’s 1783 The American Spelling Book. Jill Lepore explains in A is for American: Letters and Other Characters in the Newly United States of America (the best current account of Webster) that the scholar “hoped to cultivate a kind of orthographical independence; by eradicating spelling variations within the United States, he hoped to build Americans’ fragile sense of national belonging.” Charmingly labeled the “Blue-Back Speller” for its distinctive cover and binding, Webster’s book is the reason why Americans hypothetically go to “That colorful theater on Center Avenue to analyze a performance” rather that “That colourful theare on Centre Avenue to analyse a performance.” That we still spell it “woman” and “bread” rather than “wiman” and “bred,” or “machine” and “tongue” in lieu of “masheen” and “tung,” speaks to the incompleteness of Webster’s spelling revolution.

Orthography, as any eagle-eyed searcher for typos can attest, remains a cause in the never-ending war of attrition that is the Pedant’s War, but Webster received more opprobrium than most, denounced by the Federalists as the author of a “volume of foul and unclean things” and by the Jeffersonians as a “deceitful newsmonger.” Though it was much maligned and mocked during its years of initial publication, The American Spelling Book nonetheless had a profound pedagogical effect throughout the young nation, even as editors initially refused to part with all of those extraneous “U’s” and double vowels that proliferate in British English. “There iz no alternativ,” implored Webster in his 1790 A Collection of Fugitiv Writings. “Every possible reezon that could ever be offered for altering the spelling of wurds, stil exists in full force.” Not least of Webster’s concern was that spelling reform could be instrumental at the exact moment that American literature was trying to differentiate itself as not merely a parochial peninsula of the Anglophone by making immediately obvious to readers whether something was published in London or Boston, just as today the spelling of “honor” or “honour” differentiates The New York Times from The Guardian.

American claims to linguistic exceptionality when contrasted to our English antecedents tend to oscillate between two extremes: the first claim concerns our tongue’s preservation of an imagined ancient purity, while the second is an exultation of our supposed novel genius. If you’ve ever heard the misnomer that Appalachian English is a variant of the Elizabethan dialect, than you’re already familiar with the former. That popular contention, which still circulates as a given truth, had its origins in an essay by Berea College president and visionary education reformer William Goodell Frost who in an 1899 essay from The Atlantic Monthly claimed that the “rude dialect of the mountains,” in this case a reference to eastern Kentucky, had “frozen in time” the language of Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare, while across the Atlantic a degenerated (and distinctly non-rhotic) dialect survived.

New York-born and an adopted Kentuckian, Frost was an advocate for educating impoverished white and Black Appalachians alike, with his article in The Atlantic an understandable (if misplaced) argument for a kind of linguistic dignity to be afforded to the region. Misplaced because it’s almost certainly not true that Appalachian English is a remnant of a linguistic lost world, that Marlowe’s mighty line or the Bard’s iambic pentameter naturally echoes through the hollers of West Virginia and Kentucky while in far off London (as well as New York and Boston) they’ve lost all their r’s. What Frost’s claim evidences is that perennial American anxiety about speaking a tongue whose name isn’t shared with that of our nationality. Frost’s solution was to try and out-English the English, to make Americans the true inheritors of Shakespeare, for example, whereas Webster (who had no use for the Bard’s “many errors” as he put it) wanted to rip asunder the connections to Britain entirely. This was a wholly more Oedipal project, what Webster announced in his 1828 dictionary when he implored that “New circumstances, new modes of life, new laws, new ideas of various kinds give rise to new words.” New words for a new world, a millennial mission equivalent to what Thomas Paine claimed for the Revolution when he thundered that this generation had it within their power to remake all of history again.

“REVOLU’TION, noun [Latin revolutus, revolvo.]…In politics, a material or entire change in the constitution of government,” reads Webster’s definition. “We shall rejoice,” he writes, to hear that there has been “a revolution.” Though he had the aims of a lexicographer, Webster possessed the soul of a poet, for his desires were more literary than they were simply about compiling references. His dictionary was published eight years after Sydney Smith at The Edinburgh Review had guffawed that “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture of statue?” Even more than his spelling book, Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language was an attempt to fashion the materials for writers to address that sort of condescension.

Because a dictionary, properly understood, isn’t just a repository, but an atlas that sets the contours of the explorable world. And so in Webster, there are the novel words of democracy (caucus, congress, presidential, Americanize), the borrowings from the Dutch and Spanish, Iroquois and Kikongo, and completely new coinages that include “bullfrog,” “hindsight,” “rattlesnake,” “eggplant,” “graveyard,” and the delightful “fopdoodle,” i.e. “FOP’DOODLE, noun An insignificant fellow. [Vulgar and not used.].”

More than a language, Webster gave American writers a certain belief in their capacities for language.

This was a lexicon both earthy and expansive, a diction vulgar and elevated, granular and capricious. An argument if not for the uniqueness of American as a language, then at least for the literary vision of the people who speak in English within the borders of that new nation. Dying at his New Haven house in 1843 at the age of 84, Webster could have never read that canon of the American Renaissance which forever answered The Edinburgh Review, of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), or Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), but is there any doubt that it was through his compendium that so much genius was facilitated? “Noah’s Ark…my Lexicon, was my only companion,” wrote Emily Dickinson in her Amherst garret. “To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,” she writes in her great lyric concerning creative fecundity, that poetic bee to her lexicographical clover, with her first noun appearing in Webster but nowhere in Dr. Johnson.

Becoming synonymous with the very idea of the dictionary wasn’t by any means a given for Webster. By the time he was an old man living near Yale’s campus, the intellectual battles of the Federalists and Jeffersonians had largely subsided, and if Webster was once viewed as a crank, a quack, and a curmudgeon, then as the middle of the nineteenth-century approached he was adopted as a lovable symbol of American letters.

If Webster had failed at crafting a new American language, than perhaps out of the works of the antebellum era “American” emerged as a mode or a genre; as a literary approach to the world exemplified by the enthusiastic exclamation marks of a Whitman and the sly pause of Dickinson’s dashes as much as in any issue of syntax, grammar, or diction. More than a language, Webster gave American writers a certain belief in their capacities for language. All the more crucial in a nation so supremely literary as the United States, which was birthed into being through speech-acts from the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution more than it ever was by a few mere mistakes of lineage and geography. Before there was America, there was the Word.

But by no means was Webster fully accepted as the standard even by the time of his death; his onetime associate and later competitor Joseph Emerson Worcester (whom the older man accused of plagiarism), was the author of a dictionary favored by urbane editors who still saw something proper in its Anglophilia. Peter Martin in The Dictionary Wars: The American Fight Over the English Language explains how during the nineteenth-century this was a Manichean contest between “American reformers versus American traditionalists, between the growth of populist democracy and the defenders of traditional values and manners associated with elegance and refinement.”

In a manner most American, his legacy was only ensured once he was dead and the name was effectively acquired by two brothers in publishing who christened their own dictionary Merriam-Webster, the ultimate commercial victory over mere dusty antiquarianism. Not the father of the American language, but a corporate trademark. Appropriate than that of the words he coined, Webster’s “demoralized” might best match how he’d evaluate his own legacy two centuries later.