A History of English Language

A history of the english language 376
Pioneers in the field were George Hempl, Charles H.Grandgent, and O.F.Emerson. 62
Interest in American dialects led to the formation in 1889 of the American Dialect
Society, which published a journal called Dialect Notes. The society, reorganized, now
issues PADS (Publications of the American Dialect Society). In 1919 H.L.Mencken
published a book of nearly 500 pages which he called The American Language. This
contained a large amount of entertaining and valuable material presented in a popular
way and had the effect of stimulating a wider interest in the subject. It has gone through
four editions, and subsequently two supplements were published (1945 and 1948), both
larger than the original book. 63 A few years later a magazine called American Speech was
launched, in which popular and technical discussions appear as evidence of the twofold
appeal that American English has for the people of this country. In 1925 George P.Krapp
published the first comprehensive and scholarly treatment of American English in his
two-volume work The English Language in America. This is the work of a philologist but
is not without its attraction for the lay person. Subsequently there have been prepared and
published at the University of Chicago A Dictionary of American English on Historical
Principles, edited by Sir William Craigie and James R. Hulbert (4 vols., Chicago, 1938–
1944), and A Dictionary of Americanisms, on Historical Principles, the work of Mitford
M.Mathews (2 vols., Chicago, 1951). An American dictionary comparable with Joseph
Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary has been a goal of the American Dialect Society
since its founding. The Dictionary of American Regional English (1985–) under the
editorship of Frederic G.Cassidy achieves that goal and provides an invaluable account of
American dialects as they were recorded between 1965 and 1970. The five-year period of
fieldwork in more than one thousand communities in all fifty states provides an almost
instantaneous picture in comparison with the time required for most dialect surveys.
Much longer in the making and in many ways the most important of the undertakings
designed to record the characteristics of American speech is the
62
Grandgent was interested in the speech of New England. His most important essays on the New
England dialect are reprinted in a volume called Old and New (Cambridge, MA, 1920). Emerson’s
monograph on the dialect of Ithaca, New York, was the first extensive study of an American
dialect.
63
A convenient abridged edition in one volume, with annotations and new material is by Raven
McDavid, Jr. (New York, 1963).