The People’s Tongue: Americans and the English Language (Bookshop|Amazon) reflects 450 years of English as it has been spoken and written in what is now the United States. Edited by Ilan Stavans, this anthology of original texts—essays, articles, poems, songs, speeches, book chapters, television scripts, and more—reflects the richness, diversity, and exuberance of American English. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Rich and Wonderful Anthology of American English”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
And this is the book that I am recommending to anybody who will listen if they love language. It’s called The People’s Tongue, Americans in the English Language. It’s edited by author and academic Elon Stavans.
And it’s this beautifully curated compendium of 450 years of English as it’s been spoken and written in what is now the United States. Now, these are all original texts. They’re from essays and articles and poems and songs and speeches and book chapters and more.
It starts with a love letter from colonial times that’s barely understandable because it contains so many conventions of late Middle English. And from there, the book moves on to text from a New England primer from 1687 that was used to teach children to read. And the collection moves up on into the present, into what Stavans calls the ruckus of polyphony.
And what a ruckus it is. This is a sweeping look at so many writers and speakers, so many views about language. And just to give you a taste, there’s Noah Webster on spelling reform. There’s Thomas Jefferson on the usefulness of neologisms. There’s Simon Pukhagen, who was one of the most prominent Native American writers of the 19th century, and he writes about the limitations of translating indigenous words into English.
And then there’s Thomas Hopkins’ Gallaudet on the beauty and eloquence of sign language, and Walt Whitman on slang, Emily Dickinson’s Sojourner Truth, Mark Twain, Bret Hart, James Baldwin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Zora Neale Hurston, William Faulkner. There’s Toni Morrison’s magnificent lecture accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature.
There’s David Foster Wallace on grammar and usage. And there’s Korean-American novelist Chang-rae Lee’s description of watching his mother struggle to learn English. And also Amy Tan on how her mother’s Chinese-accented English affected her own. And Richard Rodriguez gives a sensuous description of the difference between the sound of Mexican Spanish that he heard at home and the English that he heard out in public.
Louise Erdrich on learning Ojibwe, Jhumpa Lahiri on learning Italian, a gorgeous bilingual sestina by Dominican-American poet Julia Alvarez. There’s Adrienne Rich and Susan Sontag and Tony Kushner and Elon Stavans himself, who’s a Mexican-American writing about Spanglish.
There’s Bob Dylan and Kendrick Lamar, Grant. This is this exuberant, rambunctious, glorious melange of English as it is spoken and written in the United States. What I recommend is just keeping it close to you and reading a chapter a day. They’re relatively short, and it’s just delicious.
Martha, your book recommendations rarely steer me wrong, and we do disagree. It’s for obvious reasons, just because of things like our taste in fiction. But this sounds like something that you and I will 100% agree on. Give me the title again.
It’s a new book, and it’s called The People’s Tongue, Americans in the English Language, edited by Elon Stavans. We will link to this on our website.
We’d love it when you send us your book recommendations. Martha and I are constantly figuring out how to fit more books on our bookshelves and bedside tables. Please send your book recommendations to us, and maybe we’ll share them with everyone else.
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