The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

7. Varieties of English

Whether you call a long cylindrical sandwich a hero, a submarine, a hoagie, a torpedo, a garibaldi, a poor boy, or any of at least half a dozen other names tells us something about where you come from. Whether you call it cottage cheese, Dutch cheese, pot cheese, smearcase, clabber cheese, or curd cheese tells us something more. If you call the playground toy in which a long plank balances on a fulcrum a dandle you almost certainly come from Rhode Island. If you call a soft drink tonic, you come from Boston. If you call a small naturally occurring object a stone rather than a rock you mark yourself as a New Englander. If you have a catch rather than play catch or stand on line rather than in line clearly you are a New Yorker. Whether you call it pop or soda, bucket or pail, baby carriage or baby buggy, scat or gesundheit, the beach or the shore—all these and countless others tell us a little something about where you come from. Taken together they add up to what grammarians call your idiolect, the linguistic quirks and conventions that distinguish one group of language users from another.

A paradox of accents is that in England where people from a common heritage have been living together in a small area for thousands of years, there is still a huge variety of accents, whereas in America, where people from a great mix of backgrounds have been living together in a vast area for a relatively short period, people speak with just a few voices. As Simeon Potter puts it: “It would be no exaggeration to say that greater differences in pronunciation are discernible in the north of England between Trent and Tweed [a distance of about 100 miles] than in the whole of North America” [Our Language, page 168]. Surely we should expect it to be the other way around. In England, the prolonged proximity of people ought to militate against differences in accent, while in America the relative isolation of many people ought to encourage regional accents. And yet people as far apart as New York State and Oregon speak with largely identical voices. According to some estimates almost two-thirds of the American population, living on some 80 percent of the land area, speak with the same accent—a quite remarkable degree of homogeneity.

Some authorities have suggested that once there was much greater diversity in American speech than now. As evidence, they point out that in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain needed seven separate dialects to reflect the speech of various characters, even though they all came from much the same area. Clearly that would not be necessary, or even possible, today. On the other hand, it may be that thousands of regional accents exist out there and that we’re simply not as alert to them as we might be.

The study of dialects is a relatively recent thing. The American Dialect Society was founded as long ago as 1889, and the topic has been discussed by authorities throughout this century. Even so, systematic scientific investigation did not begin until well into this century. Much of the most important initial work was done by Professor Hans Kurath of the University of Michigan, who produced the seminal A Word Geography of the Eastern United States in 1949. Kurath carefully studied the minute variations in speech to be found along the Eastern seaboard—differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and the like—and drew lines called isoglosses that divided the country into four main speech groups: Northern, Midland, Southern, and New England. Later work by others enabled these lines to be extended as far west as Texas and the prairie states. Most authorities since then have accepted these four broad divisions.

If you followed Kurath’s isoglosses carefully enough, you could go to a field in, say, northern Iowa and stand with one foot in the Northern dialect region and the other foot in the Midland region. But if you expected to find that people on one side of the line spoke a variety of American English distinctively different from people on the other side, you would be disappointed. It is not as simple as that. Isoglosses are notional conveniences for the benefit of geographical linguists. There is no place where one speech region begins and another ends. You could as easily move the line in that Iowa field 200 yards to the north or 14 miles or perhaps even 100 miles and be no less accurate. It is true that people on the Northern side of the line tend to have characteristics of speech that distinguish them from people on the Midland side, but that’s about as far as you can take it. Even within a single region speech patterns blur and blur again into an infinitude of tiny variations. A person in Joliet sounds quite different from a person in Texarkana, yet they are both said to live in the Midland speech area. Partly to get around this problem, Midland is now usually subdivided into North Midland and South Midland, but we are still dealing with huge generalities.

So only in the very baldest sense can we divide American speech into distinct speech areas. Nonetheless these speech areas do have certain broad characteristics that set them apart from one another. People from the Northern states call it frosting. To Southerners it’s icing. Northerners say “greesy.” Others say “greezy.” In the East groceries are put in a bag, in the South in a poke, and everywhere else in a sack—except in one small part of Oregon where they rather mysteriously also say poke. Northerners tend to prefer the “oo” sound to the “ew” sound in words like duty, Tuesday, and newspaper, saying “dooty” instead of “dewty” and so on. The Northern and Northern Midland accents are further distinguished by a more clipped pattern, as evidenced by a pronounced tendency to drop words at the beginning of sentences, as in “This your house?” and “You coming?” People from the same area have less ability to distinguish between rounded vowel sounds like “ö” and “ah” such as exist between cot and caught. In the South, on the other hand, there is a general reluctance or inability to distinguish clearly between fall and foal, oil and all, poet and pour it, morning and moaning, peony and penny, fire and far, sawer and sour, courier and Korea, ahs and eyes, are and hour, and many others.

Sometimes these speech preferences can pinpoint speakers to a fairly precise area. People in South Carolina, for instance, say “vegetubbles,” but in North Carolina it’s “vegetibbles.” North Carolinians also give themselves away when they say, “She’s still in the bed” and “Let’s do this one at the time.” People in Philadelphia don’t say attitude, they say “attytude,” and they don’t have a downtown, they have a center city, which is divided not into blocks but squares. In one small area of eastern Virginia people tend to say about and house as Canadians do, saying (roughly) “aboot” and “hoose.” These linguistic pockets are surprisingly numerous. In southern Utah, around St. George, there’s a pocket where people speak a peculiar dialect called—no one seems quite sure why—Dixie, whose principal characteristics are the reversal of “ar” and “or” sounds, so that a person from St. George doesn’t park his car in a carport, but rather porks his core in a corepart. The bright objects in the night sky are stores, while the heroine of The Wizard of Oz is Darthy. When someone leaves a door open, Dixie speakers don’t say, “Were you born in a barn?” They say, “Were you barn in a born?”

Add all these regional peculiarities together and it might be possible to trace any one person with considerable precision. A sufficiently sophisticated computer could probably place with reasonable accuracy, sometimes to within a few miles, almost any English-speaking person depending on how he pronounced the following ten words: cot, caught, cart, bomb, balm, oil, house, horse, good, and water. Just four of these words—bomb, balm, cot, and caught—could serve as regional shibboleths for almost every American, according to the dialectologist W. Nelson Francis. When an American airline received anonymous telephone threats, the linguistics authority William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania was able to identify the caller as coming from within a seventy-five-mile radius of Boston. His testimony helped to clear a man from greater New York accused of the crime [cited in American Talk, page 2].

Although the main dialect boundaries run from east to west, dividing America into a kind of linguistic layer cake, some important speech differences in fact run from north to south. People along the East Coast tend to pronounce words such as foreign and horrible as “fahrun” and “harruble,” whereas people farther west, whether from the North or South, tend to say “forun” (or “forn”) and “horruble.” People along much of the Eastern seaboard can distinguish between words that are elsewhere in America strictly homonyms: horse and hoarse, morning and mourning, for and four [all cited by Pyles, page 270].

Kurath was aware that his four main speech divisions were not adequate. He subdivided the four regions into eighteen further speech areas, and we should remember that he was only dealing with the eastern states as far south as South Carolina. If we were to project those divisions onto the rest of the country (and bearing in mind that regional differences tend to diminish as we move west), we could expect to find perhaps fifty or sixty subareas. But it may be that a really thorough study would show that there are hundreds, even thousands, of regional speech divisions.

We have really only just begun to look at the matter seriously. The most famous large-scale study of American dialects, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), began work only in 1963, under the direction of Frederic Cassidy. A hundred fieldworkers, armed with stacks of questionnaires, were sent to 1,000 carefully selected communities to interview 2,777 informants. Each questionnaire contained 1,847 questions divided into forty-one categories designed to tease out local or regional names for practically everything, from household utensils to feelings of affection to slang words for passing gas. The researchers collected a phenomenal 2.5 million items. They found more than 100,000 variations in terminology and pronounciation throughout the country, including 79 names for dragonfly, 130 names for oak trees, and 176 names for dust balls under the bed. (We just called them dust balls under the bed.) Something of the colossal scale of the undertaking is indicated by the fact that nearly a century elapsed between the book’s being proposed and the publication of Volume 1 (A to C) in 1985, which itself takes up 1,056 pages. Five volumes altogether are planned.

It seems churlish to say it when so many years of dedicated work have gone into DARE, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that it is not truly comprehensive. In Iowa not one informant was from Des Moines, the state capital, and not one was black. Yet the speech patterns and vocabulary of people raised in Des Moines are quite distinct from those of people brought up in rural areas of the state, and this division is almost certainly even more pronounced among black people. However, a more exhaustive approach would not necessarily guarantee a more accurate survey. Since 1931 diligent scholars have been collecting data for the much more thorough Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada, but they are not finished yet. In 1939, the first volume, the Linguistic Atlas of New England, was produced and the work has been proceeding westward ever since. The problem is that by the time the westernmost states are dealt with more than half a century will have elapsed and the early volumes will be largely out of date.

Why do we have all these regional variations? Why do people in Boston and New York call white coffee “regular” when everywhere else regular coffee is black? Why do people in Texas say “arn” for iron? Why do so many people in New York say “doo-awg” for dog, “oo-awf” for off, “kee-ab” for cab, “thoid” for third, “erster” for oyster? There is certainly no shortage of theories, some of which may be charitably described as being less than half-baked. Charlton Laird, generally a shrewd and reliable observer of the vagaries of English, writes in The Miracle of Language: “The New York City variant of doy for die, boy for buy, thoid for third suggests forms in Yorkshire, which are reflections of the strong influence of old York upon the New York.” That is just nonsense; people in Yorkshire simply do not speak that way and never have. Robert Hendrickson in American Talk cites the interesting theory, which he attributes to a former professor of Hofstra University, that the New York accent may come from Gaelic. The hallmark of the New York accent is of course the “oi” diphthong as in thoidy-thoid for thirty-third and moider for murder, and Hendrickson points out that oi appears in many Gaelic words, such as taoiseach (the Irish term for prime minister). However, there are one or two considerations that suggest this theory may need further work. First, oi is not pronounced “oy” in Gaelic; taoiseach is pronounced “tea-sack.” Second, there is no tradition of converting “ir” sounds to “oi” ones in Ireland, such as would result in murder becoming moider. And third, most of the Irish immigrants to New York didn’t speak Gaelic anyway.

But there are other factors at work, such as history and geography. The colonists along the Eastern seaboard naturally had closer relationships with England than those colonists who moved inland. That explains at least partly why the English of the Eastern seaboard tends to have so much in common with British English—the tendency to put a “yew” sound into words like stew and Tuesday, the tendency to have broader and rounder “a” and “o” sounds, the tendency to suppress “r” sounds in words like car and horse. There are also similarities of vocabulary. Queer is still widely used in the South in the sense of strange or odd. Common still has a pejorative flavor (as in “She’s so common”) that it lacks elsewhere in America. Ladybugs, as they are known in the North, are still called ladybirds in the South and sidewalks in some areas are called pavements, as they are in Britain. All of these are a result of the closer links between such East Coast cities as Boston, Savannah, and Charleston and Britain.

Fashion comes into it too. When the custom arose in eighteenth-century Britain of pronouncing words like bath and path with a broad a rather than a flat one, the practice was imitated along the Eastern seaboard, but not farther inland, where people were clearly less susceptible to considerations of what fashionable society thought of them. In Boston, the new fashion was embraced to such an extent that up to the middle of the last century, according to H. L. Mencken, people used the broad a in such improbable words as apple, hammer, practical, and Saturday.

Related to all these factors is probably the most important, and certainly the least understood, factor of all, social bonding, as revealed in a study by William Labov of the University of Pennsylvania, probably America’s leading dialectologist. Labov studied the accents of New York City and found that they were more complicated and diverse than was generally assumed. In particular he studied the sound of r’s in words like more, store, and car. As recently as the 1930s such r’s were never voiced by native New Yorkers, but over the years they have come increasingly to be spoken—but only sometimes. Whether or not people voiced the r in a given instance was thought to be largely random. But Labov found that there was actually much more of a pattern to it. In a word, people were using r’s as a way of signaling their social standing, rather like the flickerings of fireflies. The higher one’s social standing, the more often the r’s were flickered, so to speak. Upper middle-class speakers pronounced the r about 20 percent of the time in casual speech, about 30 percent of the time in careful speech, and 60 percent of the time in highly careful speech (when asked to read a list of words). The comparable figures for lower-class speakers were 10 percent for the first two and 30 percent for the third. More than that, Labov found, most people used or disregarded r’s as social circumstances demanded. He found that sales assistants in department stores tended to use many more r’s when addressed by middle-class people than when speaking to lower-class customers. In short, there was very little randomness involved.

Even more interestingly, Labov found that certain vowel sounds were more specific to one ethnic group or another. For instance, the tendency to turn bag into something more like “be-agg” and bad into “be-add” was more frequent among second-generation Italians, while the tendency—and I should stress that it was no more than that—among lower-class Jewish speakers was to drawl certain “o” sounds, turning dog into “doo-awg,” coffee into “coo-awfee.” The suggestion is that this is a kind of hypercorrection. The speakers are unconsciously trying to distance themselves from their parents’ foreign accents. Yiddish speakers tended to have trouble with certain unfamiliar English vowel sounds. They tended to turn cup of coffee into “cop of coffee.” The presumption is that their children compensated for this by overpronouncing those vowels. Hence the accent.

So while certain distinctive pronunciations like “doo-er” (or “doo-ah”) for door, “oo-off” for off, “kee-ab” for cab, “moider” for murder, and so on are all features of the New York accent, almost no native New Yorker uses more than a few of them.

Outside New York, regional accents play an important part in binding people together—sometimes in unexpected ways. On Martha’s Vineyard the “ou” sound of house and loud was traditionally pronounced “həus” and “ləoud.” With the rise of tourism, the normal, sharper American “house” pronunciation was introduced to the island and for a while threatened to drive out the old sound. But a study reported by Professor Peter Trudgill in Sociolinguistics [page 23] found that the old pronunciation was on the increase, particularly among people who had left the island to work and later come back. They were using the old accent as a way of distinguishing themselves from off-islanders.

Dialects are sometimes said to be used as a shibboleth. People in Northern Ireland are naturally attentive to clues as to whether a person is Catholic or Protestant, and generally assume that if he has a North Down or east Belfast accent he is Protestant, and that if he has a South Armagh or west Belfast accent he is Catholic. But the differences in accent are often very slight—west Belfast people are more likely to say “thet” for that, while people in east Belfast say “hahn” for hand—and not always reliable. In fact, almost the only consistent difference is that Protestants say “aitch” for the eighth letter of the alphabet while Catholics say “haitch,” though whether this quirk “has been used by both the IRA and the UDR to determine the fate of their captives,” as the Story of English suggests, is perhaps doubtful. It is after all difficult to imagine circumstances in which a captive could be made to enunciate the letter h without being aware of the crucial importance for his survival of how he pronounced it.

Dialects are not just matters of localities and regions. There are also occupational dialects, ethnic dialects, and class dialects. It is not too much to say, given all the variables, that dialects vary from house to house, indeed from room to room within each house, that there are as many dialects in a language as there are speakers. As Mario Pei has noted, no two people in any language speak the same sounds in precisely the same way. That is of course what enables us to recognize a person by his voice. In short, we each have our own dialect.

National accents can develop with considerable speed. Within only a generation or so of its colonization, visitors to Australia were beginning to notice a pronounced accent. In 1965, one “Afferbeck Lauder” published a book called Let Stalk Strine that wittily celebrated the national accent. Among the words dealt with were scona, a meteorological term, as in “Scona rine”; dimension, defined as the customary response to “thank you”; and air fridge, a synonym for ordinary, middling. Other Strinisms noted by Lauder and others are Emma chisit for “How much is it?” emma necks for what you have for breakfast, and fairairs for “a long time,” as in “I waited fairairs and airs.” A striking similarity between Australia and America is the general uniformity of speech compared with Britain. There are one or two differences in terminology across the country—a tub of ice cream is called a bucket in New South Wales and a pixie in Victoria—but hardly more than that. It appears that size and population dispersal have little to do with it. It is far more a matter of cultural identity.[3]

When the first inhabitants of the continent arrived in Botany Bay in 1788 they found a world teeming with flora, fauna, and geographical features such as they had never seen. “It is probably not too much to say,” wrote Otto Jespersen, “that there never was an instance in history when so many new names were needed.” Among the new words the Australians devised, many of them borrowed from the aborigines, were billabong for a brackish body of water, didgeridoo for a kind of trumpet, bombora for a navigable stretch of river containing dangerous rocks, and of course boomerang, koala, outback, and kangaroo. The new natives also quickly showed a gift for colorful slang: tucker for food, slygrogging for sneaking a drink, bonzer for excellent, nong for an idiot, having the shits for being irritable, and, more recently, technicolor yawn for throwing up. Often these are just everyday words shortened: postie for postman, footy for football, arvo for the afternoon, roo for kangaroo, compo for compensation. And then of course there are all those incomparable Australian expressions: scarce as rocking-horse manure, about as welcome as a turd in a swimming pool, don’t come the raw prawn (don’t try to fool me), rattle your dags (get a move on).

Although historically tied to Britain, linguistically Australia has been as receptive to American influences as to British ones. In Australia, people eat cookies, not biscuits; politicians run for office, not stand as in Britain; they drive station wagons rather than estate cars; give their money to a teller rather than a cashier in a bank; wear cuffs on their pants, not turnups; say mail, not post; and cover small injuries with a Band-Aid rather than a plaster. They spell many words in the American way—labor rather than labour, for instance—and, perhaps most significantly, the national currency is the dollar, not the pound.

Canada, too, exhibits a fair measure of hybridization, preserving some British words—tap (for faucet), scones, porridge, zed as the pronunciation for the last letter of the alphabet—that are largely unknown in America. At least one term, riding, for a political constituency, is now pretty well unknown even in Britain. There are said to be 10,000 Canadianisms—words like skookum (strong) and reeve (a mayor), though the bulk of these are used only in small areas and are not necessarily familiar even to other Canadians.

No place in the English-speaking world is more breathtakingly replete with dialects than Great Britain. According to Robert Claiborne in Our Marvelous Native Tongue, there are “no less than 13” separate dialects in Britain. Mario Pei puts the number of dialects as nine in Scotland, three in Ireland, and thirty in England and Wales, but even that is probably an underestimate. If we define dialect as a way of speaking that fixes a person geographically, then it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that in England there are as many dialects as there are hills and valleys. Just in the six counties of northern England, an area about the size of Maine, there are seventeen separate pronunciations for the word house.

Professor Higgins boasted in Pygmalion that he could place any man in London within two miles, “sometimes within two streets.” That isn’t as rash an assertion as it sounds. Most native Londoners can tell whether someone comes from north or south of the Thames. Outside London even greater precision is not uncommon. I live in a dale in Yorkshire that is just five miles long, but locals can tell whether a person comes from up the dale or down the dale by how he speaks. In a nearby village that lies half in Lancashire and half in Yorkshire, people claim to be able to tell which side of the main street a person was born on. There may be some hyperbole attached to that, but certainly Yorkshire people can tell in an instant whether someone comes from Bradford or Leeds, even though the two cities are contiguous. Certain features of British dialects can be highly localized. In Trust an Englishman, John Knowler notes that he once knew a man whose odd pronunciation of the letter r he took to be a speech impediment until he happened to visit the man’s childhood village in an isolated part of Northumberland and discovered that everyone there pronounced r’s in the same peculiar way.

In England, dialects are very much more a matter of class and social standing than in other countries, as George Bernard Shaw well understood when he wrote that “it is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.” At the top end of the social range is the dialect called Fraffly, also largely the work of the tireless Afferbeck Lauder, based on the aristocratic pronunciation of frightfully, as in “Weh sue fraffly gled yorkered calm” (“We’re so frightfully glad you could come”). The main distinguishing characteristic of the speech is the ability to talk without moving the lips. (Prince Charles is an ace at this.) Other examples of Fraffly, or Hyperlect as it has also been called, include “Aim gine to thice naiow” (“I’m going to the house now”), “Good gawd, is thet the tame?” (“Good God, is that the time?”), and “How fay caned a few” (“How very kind of you”).

At the other extreme is Cockney, the working-class speech of London, which has never been more painstakingly recorded than by Shaw in the opening pages of Pygmalion. A brief sampling: “Ow, eez ya-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y’ da-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel’s flahrzn than ran awy athaht pyin.” This translates as “Oh, he’s your son, is he? Well, if you’d done your duty by him as a mother should, he’d know better than to spoil a poor girl’s flowers, then run away without paying.” Even Shaw could keep this up for no more than a few pages, and reverted to normal English spelling for the flower girl with the parenthetical remark “Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.”

In England, as in America, the systematic study of dialects is a recent phenomenon, so no one can say just how many rich and varied forms of speech died before anyone got around to recording them. One of the first persons to think to do so was, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, J. R. R. Tolkien, later to become famous as the author of the Hobbit trilogy, but at the time a professor of English at the University of Leeds. His idea was to try to record, in a comprehensive and systematic way, the dialect words of England before they disappeared forever. Tolkien moved on to Oxford before the work got underway, but he was succeeded by another enthusiast, Harold Orton, who continued the painstaking work. Fieldworkers were sent to 313 mainly rural areas to interview people who were elderly, illiterate, and locally born (i.e., not contaminated by too much travel or culture) in an effort to record the everyday terms for practically everything. The work took from 1948 to 1961 before The Linguistic Atlas of England was produced.

The research turned up many surprising anomalies. The Berkshire villages of Kintbury, Boxford, and Cold Ash are within about eight miles of each other, yet in each they call the outer garment of clothing by a different name—respectively greatcoat, topcoat, and overcoat. In the whole of the north topcoat is the usual word, but in Shropshire there is one small and inexplicable island of overcoat wearers. In Oxfordshire, meanwhile, there is a lozenge-shaped linguistic island where people don’t drink their drinks, they sup them. Sup is the northern word for drink. Why it should end up being used in an area of a few square miles in a southern county by people who employ no other northern expressions is a mystery to which there is no logical answer. No less mysterious is the way the terms twenty-one and one-and-twenty move up the country in alternating bands. In London people say “twenty-one,” but if you move forty miles to the north they say “one-and-twenty.” Forty miles north of that and they say “twenty-one” again. And so it goes right the way up to Scotland, changing from one to the other every forty miles or so. Just to complicate things, in the Lincolnshire town of Boston they say that a person is twenty-one years old, but that he has one-and-twenty marbles, while twenty miles away in Louth, they say the very opposite.

Sometimes relatively obscure English dialect words have been carried overseas where they have unexpectedly prospered. The usual American word for stealing a look, peek, was originally a dialect word in England. The English say either peep or squint; peek exists only in three pockets of East Anglia—but that was the area from which many of the first immigrants came. In the same way, the word in England for the cylinder around which thread is wound is either reel or bobbin. Spool, the main American word, is limited to two compact areas of the Midlands. The casual affirmative word yeah was also until fairly recently a quaint localism confined to small areas of Kent, Surrey, and south London. The rest of Britain would say yes, aye, or ar. Much the same thing seems to have happened elsewhere in the British Empire. Three of the most pervasive Australianisms, fair dinkum, cobber, and no worries, appear to have their roots in English dialectal expressions.

Some idea of the isolation and antiquity of certain dialects is shown in the fact that in the Craven district of Yorkshire until well into this century, shepherds still counted their sheep with Celtic numbers that predated the Roman occupation of the islands. Even today it is possible to hear people using expressions that have changed little from the Middle Ages. The Yorkshire query “Weeah ta bahn?” meaning “Where are you going?” is a direct contraction of “Where art thou bound?” and its considerable age is indicated by the absence of a d on bahn. In South Yorkshire, around Barnsley, people still use thee and thou as they did in Shakespeare’s day, though the latter has been transformed over the centuries into tha’. Complex unwritten rules govern the use of these words both grammatically and socially. Tha’ is used familiarly and is equivalent to the French tu. Thee is used in the objective case. Thus a Barnsley youngster might say to his brother, “Tha’ shurrup or Ah’ll thump thee,” which translates as “You shut up or I’ll punch you.” Tha’ and thee have sprouted the further forms thissen and missen, which are equivalent to yourself and myself. These forms are used all the time, but only in well-defined situations. Parents and other elders use them with children, but children never use them with their parents or elders, only with other children, while teenagers use them among their own sex, but not with the opposite sex.

With all their grammatical intricacies and deviations from standard vocabulary, dialects can sometimes become almost like separate languages. Indeed, a case is sometimes made that certain varieties are separate languages. A leading contender in this category is Scots, the variety of English used in the Lowlands of Scotland (and not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, which really is a separate language). As evidence, its supporters point out that it has its own dictionary, The Concise Scots Dictionary, as well as its own body of literature, most notably the poems of Robert Burns, and it is full of words that would leave most other English speakers darkly baffled: swithering for hesitating, shuggle for shake, niffle-naffle for wasting time, gontrum niddles for a cry of joy, and countless others. Although Scots, or Lallans as it is sometimes also called, is clearly based on English, it is often all but incomprehensible to other English speakers. A few lines from Burns’s poem To a Haggis may give some idea of its majestic unfathomability:

Fair fa’ your honest sonsie face,

Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!

Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,

Painch, trip, or thaim:

Weel are ye wordy o’ a grace

As lang’s my arm.

In America, a case is sometimes made to consider Cajun a separate tongue. Cajun is still spoken by a quarter of a million people (or more, depending on whose estimates you follow) in parts of Louisiana. The name is a corruption of Acadian, the adjective for the French-speaking inhabitants of Acadia (based on Nova Scotia, but taking in parts of Quebec and Maine) who settled there in 1604 but were driven out by the British in the 1750s. Moving to the isolated bayous of southern Louisiana, they continued to speak French but were cut off from their linguistic homeland and thus forced to develop their own vocabulary to a large extent. Often it is more colorful and expressive than the parent tongue. The Cajun for hummingbird, sucfleur (“flower-sucker”), is clearly an improvement on the French oiseaumouche. Other Cajun terms are rat du bois (“rat of the woods”) for a possum and sac à lait (“sack of milk”) for a type of fish. The Cajun term for the language they speak is Bougalie or Yats, short for “Where y’at?” Their speech is also peppered with common French words and phrases: merci, adieu, c’est vrai (“it’s true”), qu’est-ce que c’est (“what is it”), and many others. The pronunciation has a distinctly Gallic air, as in their way of turning long “ā” sounds into “eh” sounds, so that bake and lake become “behk” and “lehk.” And finally, as with most adapted languages, there’s a tendency to use nonstandard grammatical forms: bestest and don’t nobody know.

A similar argument is often put forward for Gullah, still spoken by up to a quarter of a million people mostly on the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina. It is a peculiarly rich and affecting blend of West African and English. Gullah (the name may come from the Gola tribe of West Africa) is often called Geechee by those who speak it, though no one knows why. Those captured as slaves suffered not only the tragedy of having their lives irretrievably disrupted but also the further misfortune of coming from one of the most linguistically diverse regions of the world, so that communication between slaves was often difficult. If you can imagine yourself torn from your family, shackled to some Hungarians, Russians, Swedes, and Poles, taken halfway around the world, dumped in a strange land, worked like a dog, and shorn forever of the tiniest shred of personal liberty and dignity, then you can perhaps conceive the background against which creoles like Gullah arose. Gullah itself is a blend of twenty-eight separate African tongues. So it is hardly surprising if at first glance such languages seem rudimentary and unrefined. As Robert Hendrickson notes in his absorbing book American Talk, “The syntactic structure, or underlying grammar, of Gullah is . . . ​extraordinarily economical, making the language quickly and readily accessible to new learners.” But although it is simple, it is not without subtlety. Gullah is as capable of poetry and beauty as any other language.

One of the first serious investigations into Gullah was undertaken by Joel Chandler Harris, known for his Uncle Remus stories. Harris, born in 1848 in Eatonton, Georgia, was a painfully shy newspaperman with a pronounced stammer who grew up deeply ashamed that he was illegitimate. He became fascinated with the fables and language of former slaves during the period just after the Civil War and recorded them with exacting diligence in stories that were published first in the Atlanta Constitution and later compiled into books that enjoyed a considerable popularity both in his lifetime and after it. The formula was to present the stories as if they were being told by Uncle Remus to the small son of a plantation owner. Among the best known were Nights with Uncle Remus (1881), The Tar Baby (1904), and Uncle Remus and Br’er Rabbit (1906). All of these employed the patois spoken by mainland blacks. But Harris also produced a series of Gullah stories, based on a character called Daddy Jack. This was a considerably different dialect, though Harris thought it simpler and more direct. It had—indeed still has—no gender and no plurals. Dem can refer to one item or to hundreds. Apart from a few lingering West African terms like churrah for splash, dafa for fat, and yeddy or yerry for hear, the vocabulary is now almost entirely English, though many of the words don’t exist in mainstream English. Dayclean, for instance, means “dawn” and trut mout (literally “truth mouth”) means “a truthful speaker.” Other words are truncated and pronounced in ways that make them all but unidentifiable to the uninitiated. Nead is Gullah for underneath. Learn is lun, thirsty is tusty, the other is turrer, going is gwan.

Without any doubt, the most far-flung variety of English is that found on Tristan da Cunha, a small group of islands in the mid-Atlantic roughly halfway between Africa and South America. Tristan is the most isolated inhabited place in the world, 1,500 miles from the nearest landfall, and the local language reflects the fact. Although the inhabitants have the dark looks of the Portuguese who first inhabited the islands, the family names of the 300-odd islanders are mostly English, as is their language—though with certain quaint differences reflecting their long isolation from the rest of the world. It is often endearingly ungrammatical. People don’t say “How are you?” but “How you is?” It also has many wholly local terms. Pennemin is a penguin; watrem is a stream. But perhaps most strikingly, spellings are often loose. Many islanders are called Donald, but the name is always spelled Dondall. Evidently one of the first users misspelled it that way generations ago and the stuck.