A History of English Language

The english language in america
379
investigator’s linguistic system rather than the subject’s. If the practical implications that
have been drawn from recent sociolinguistic studies are often contradictory, the
contradictions are hardly surprising at our present stage of understanding. 69 It is
unrealistic to expect the discipline of sociolinguistics, which has only recently acquired
its name, to provide immediate solutions to problems that are rooted not only in the
stratification of the language but finally in the society that the language reflects.
At the same time that linguistic geography and sociolinguistics were contributing so
much to our knowledge of the language of the United States in its regional and social
aspects, the study of American English was making great advances in one other direction,
that of its basic structure. In the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth the
interests of linguistic scholars were mainly historical and comparative. Such studies, of
course, still constitute a large and important field of scholarship. But with the increasing
interest in the United States in the recording and interpretation of the languages of Native
Americans, new procedures were found to be necessary to deal with structures totally
different from those of the languages most familiar to us, the languages of Europe and
western Asia. In the new approach Franz Boas and his pupil Edward Sapir were the
pioneers, and their work was supplemented and continued by Leonard Bloomfield. The
publication in 1933 of Bloomfield’s book Language, the most important work on general
linguistics in the first half of the twentieth century, marked a turning point in American
linguistic scholarship. The methods that had proved their worth in the study of Native
American languages began to be applied to the study of American English (and other
modern languages). Starting with the premise that any language is a structured system of
arbitrary signals (here conceived of as vocal sounds), structural linguistics sought to
determine which elements (including stress, intonation, pauses, etc.) are significant and to
describe the pattern in which they are organized. It began with phonemic analysis 70 and
proceeded
69
Cf. the contrasting conclusions drawn by Labov, “The Logic of Nonstandard English,” in
Language in the Inner City, chap. 5, and those by the influential British sociologist Basil Bernstein,
“Elaborated and Restricted Codes: Their Social Origins and Some Consequences,” in The
Ethnography of Communication, ed. J.J.Gumperz and D.Hymes, special pub. of American
Anthropologist, 66, no. 6, part 2 (1964), 55–69.
70
The phoneme is a minimum unit of speech sound in any given language or dialect by which a
distinction is conveyed. Thus the initial sounds of pit and bit in English are different phonemes. On
the other hand, the initial sounds of keep and coop (or Kodak), though physiologically and
acoustically different, are in English (but not, for example, in Arabic) only varieties of the phoneme
/k/ because they always occur in different phonetic environments, and in phonemic transcription
need not be represented by different symbols. Such varieties of the same phoneme are called
allophones and are said to be in complementary distribution. It is customary to enclose phonetic
symbols within brackets [k], phonemes between diagonal strokes /k/.