330 



American English. 



the important particular that ive have no dialects, " I never found 

 any difficulty in understanding an American speaker," writes the his- 

 torian Freeman;* "but I have often found it difficult to understand 

 * * * a northern-English speaker." Trifling variations in pro- 

 nunciation, and in the use of a few particular words, certainly exist 

 in this country. The Yankee expects " or "calculates," while the 

 Virginian reckons;" the illiterate Northerner " claims," and the 

 Southerner of similar class, by a very curious reversal of the blunder, 

 allows," what better educated people merely assert. The pails and 

 pans of the world at large become buckets " when taken to Ken- 

 tucky. It is evening" in Richmond while afternoon still lingers a 

 hundred miles due north at Washington. Vessels go into "docks" 

 on their arrival at Philadelphia, but into slips" at Mobile ; they arc 

 tied up to "wharves" at Boston and Savannah, but to "piers" at 

 Chicago and Milwaukee. Distances from place to place are measured 

 by '^squares" in Baltimore, by '^blocks" in New York. The 

 "shilling" of our own State is the ^^levy" of Pennsylvania, the 

 '^bit" of San Francisco, the '^ninepence" of oW New England, and 

 the escalan " of New Orleans. But put all these variations together, 

 with such others as more microscopic examination might reveal, and 

 how far short they fall of representing any thing like the real dialectic 

 differences of speech that obtain, and always have obtained, not only 

 as between the three kingdoms, but even between contiguous sections 

 of England itself ! What great city of this country, for example, has 

 developed, or is likely to develop, any peculiar class of errors at all com- 

 parable in fixity and importance to the cockney speech of London ? 

 What two regions can be found within our borders, however sequest- 

 ered and unenlightened, and however widely separated by geographi- 

 cal position, of which the speech of the one presents any difficulty 

 worth mentioning, or even any very startling unfamiliarity in sound 

 or construction, to the inhabitant of the other ? Our omnipresent 

 railroads, telegraph lines, mail routes and printing presses, and the 

 well-marked disposition of every class of our people to make lavish 

 use of these means of intercommunication, both for the rapid diffu- 

 sion of intelligence and the interchange of opinion, and also, so 

 far as lines of travel are concerned, for the frequent transportation of 

 the people themselves hither and thither, with a degree of ease and 

 celerity to which no other country has ever attained — these causes 

 have always favored, and seem likely permanently to maintain, a cer- 



*Article, " Some Impressions of the United States," published in the Fortnightly Re- 

 view, and copied into the Eclectic for October, 1882, p. 435, and Littell for September 9, 

 1882, No. 1994, p. 602. 



