I'm Avi Arditti. Rosanne Skirble is away. This
week on Wordmaster: "Do You Speak American?"That's the name of a new book by journalist Robert MacNeil. Mr. MacNeil -- who was born and raised in Canada -- explores how immigration, technology and other factors have changed the way Americans speak English.
The former television newscaster likes to use everyday experiences to illustrate the changes taking place. For instance, he says that when he and his wife -- both in their mid-70s -- go to New York City restaurants, they're often greeted by a waiter as "you guys," as in: "What'll you guys have?" Yet to be spoken to so casually might offend some people.
Robert MacNeil spoke with VOA's Keming Kuo about the challenges that English presents to its users worldwide.
ROBERT MacNEIL: "The English language, to anybody who is trying to
learn it from the outside and not from birth, is a devil of a language,
with all sorts of nuances. For instance, a hotel in Egypt which put up a
sign saying: "Clients need have no anxiety about the water; it has all
been passed by the management.' You see, to an American or a native
English speaker, that is hilarious because it suggests that it's passed
through the body of the manager. No native speaker of English would make
that mistake. Otherwise, it was a perfectly grammatical sign."
Avi Arditti: Robert MacNeil says one reason American English became such a nuanced,
and sometimes difficult language is that it was shaped by the
country's rapidly changing demographics.
ROBERT MacNEIL: "So
much of the English vocabulary comes from immigration, first of all to
Britain going back 1500 years, but then, in the last couple centuries,
to the United States. And much of our American vocabulary comes from
German or Yiddish or Italian or Dutch or Irish or Scandinavian -- all
those sources of immigration. And certainly an awful lots of words from
Spanish, because the Mexicans owned and lived in what is now a large
part of Southwestern United States."
Avi Arditti: Mr. MacNeil points out
that the United States is a restless, mobile society, with about
one-seventh of its residents moving every year. He says those moves from
rural to suburban and urban areas created peer pressure for many young
people to adopt "inner city lingo" as part of their speech.
ROBERT MacNEIL: "Partly it's explained by one sociolinguist in our book
as a way for young, white males, teenage males, in the suburbs -- where
they grow up feeling kind of safe and everything -- to borrow some of
the overt masculinity of blacks living in the inner cities, where they
at least appear to know how to look after themselves, they know how to
deal with women, they're familiar with weapons and all that sort of
thing. And that has a huge appeal to adolescent white Americans."
Avi Arditti: In his new book, "Do You Speak American?", Robert MacNeil addresses
those who bemoan what they consider the decline of English in America.
ROBERT MacNEIL: "The desire of some people, going back to the
17th century in Britain, to police the language because they want to
control it, and they think it's getting messy. People like Daniel Defoe,
the author of 'Robinson Crusoe,' and Jonathan Swift, the author of
'Gulliver's Travels,' were among those who thought that the language had
gotten out of hand during Shakespeare's time and needed to be guarded
from too much innovation. Daniel Defoe, believe it or not, wanted it to
be as serious a crime to coin your own new word as it would be to
counterfeit money."
Avi Arditti: Mr. MacNeil says schools are criticized
for abandoning strict grammatical discipline, and the media are
criticized for using so much informal or non-standard speech.
ROBERT MacNEIL: "This is not as strict a country, as strict to observe
certain standards, as it used to be. And the language reflects all
that. It's also become a society which partly through the force of law
-- laws against racism and so on -- has become a good deal more tolerant
of races, of other people, of different people. And more tolerant of
people who are fat, who are tall, who are disabled in some way. And the
language reflects that."
Avi Arditti: Twenty years ago, Robert MacNeil
first explored changes in the English language in his book "The Story of
English." Looking toward the next 20 years, he says there will be
additional changes to English in America, with technology playing a
major role.
And that's Wordmaster for this week. Our e-mail
address is word@voanews.com, and our segments are all online at
voanews.com/wordmaster. I'm Avi Arditti.
(Source: VOA/WORDMASTER)
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