It ain't the King's English any more

 kw: book reviews, nonfiction, linguistics, united states, dialects

When I was about twelve my family attended a Congregational church in Salt Lake City, Utah. We frequently arrived early, so I would help the ushers fold programs. One day one of the ushers, an elderly man who must have originally come from New York, said to me, "Youse is a good kid." "Youse" is pronounced "use", the noun not the verb, as in "Put that elbow grease to good use." It's the only time in my life that I've heard that, even though I've been to NYC a few times in the ensuing 65 years.

Some 48 years ago we spent part of a year in Houston, Texas, and visited people we knew in Louisiana a couple of times. We got acquainted with a couple of variations on "you". You may have heard the parting greeting, "Y'all come back now, hear?" They do say that in Louisiana, where "y'all is the typical plural form of "you". But in Texas "y'all" is singular, and the plural is "all-a-y'all" or even "all of you-all". I once kidded some of our friends in Texas, "There's a popular convenience store out West, that would have to change it's name if they open any here: Y'all Totem!" (the store was U-Totem, out of business since 1984).

Based on our experiences, living and vacationing all over the continental US, I've compiled this generalized map of various ways people supply the missing plural "you" in "standard" English:

This is strictly from my own impressions and memories. I'd expect a professional linguist to have a more accurate take on this pattern, and perhaps a few expressions I've missed. One such is Rosemarie Ostler, in her book The United States of English: The American Language from Colonial Times to the Twenty-First Century. As a matter of fact, the descriptions of "you" usage in the book are practically identical to these, although with more detail about where certain variations are common.

Much of the discussion in the book concerns vowel shifts that have occurred over the centuries since English immigrants began coming to North America in large numbers. The sounds of a language change over time as the way that the commonest words are pronounced is made easier by shifting the vowels to be easier to say. To a linguist, changing the sound of a vowel is accomplished by changing the position of the tongue and the shape of the mouth and upper throat. For example, the "ee" sound most of us use in "feet" has the tongue high and forward, while the "ih" sound in "will" has the tongue halfway up and still forward. In some regions, however, "will" is pronounced more like "weel", which means the "ee" sound had to "go" somewhere else. Either the mouth now opens more, turning "feet" into "fate", or the tongue moves further back, which yields "feht", where "eh" represents the schwa (shown as "ə" in the phonetic alphabet IPA). That may cause a speaker to move the schwa in words like "about" to a more open "a" sound (think of "about" sounding like "abbot"). And so it goes.

It's amazing that such shifts occur unconsciously. People don't get up one day and say, 'I'm going to harden the "i" in "will" from today forwards.' And however it was that the singular pronouns for second person (formerly "thou" and "thee") were dropped, it didn't take long for people to devise substitutes. Although the area seemingly dominated by "you/you" in the map above is vast, few people live in the middle of the continent; it's "flyover country" for a reason. The number of folks using a regional pluralism is a pretty high percentage.

Again and again I read that words from other languages and cultures were assimilated into English, as English-speaking people spread across the globe during the Colonial Era in North America and the period of the British Empire, and people from all over the Earth immigrated to the United States. Thus "tycoon" and "tsunami" are of Japanese origin, "kowtow" is from Chinese ("t'au kau" is Mandarin for "pray" or "worship"); the verb "smelt" is very old, having entered Anglo-Saxon via Danish, while the noun "smelt", a type of fish, is either Dutch or Danish, and refers to the fishes' odor. A host of food words have both Germanic (Anglo Saxon) and French (Norman) synonyms: meat vs beef, chicken vs pullet, deer vs venison, dove vs pigeon. And many Spanish or Mexican Native words have been mainstreamed ("taco", "amigo", etc.)

Where other languages may take in a word or name and bend it into a more "native" form, English speakers tend to take words in wholesale. Sometimes, a nickname becomes "the name"; for example the painter Dominikos Theotokopoulos, who signed his paintings with his full name in Greek, had the nickname "the Greek" throughout Europe, but the Spanish version of his nickname is the one used here: El Greco.

Such promiscuous borrowing has led to English being the largest language. The initial Oxford English Dictionary had about 291,000 entries, but about 10% have been removed in more recent editions. A comprehensive dictionary of that sort for American English would likely have between half a million and a million words! However, those in common use number about 100,000. A typical U.S. fifth grader knows about 50,000 words. But, as this book shows, going around the country, which 50,000 words a youngster knows will differ. This is why thesauruses exist for English but hardly at all for other languages. English has lots and lots of synonyms. If one were to boil down the "meanings" in a well-constructed, comprehensive thesaurus, the number would likely be in the 20,000-40,000 range.

It took me longer than I like to read the book. It is well written, but the subject does not lend itself to page-turning prose. It can get tedious. The author does well to gather facts in as interesting a way as possible, but there are limits… There are just too many facts, and it is clear she was being very selective, because if the book consisted simply of word-pair lists and other groupings, without any "glue" or other text, it would be quite a bit larger than 230+ pages. The appendix has a useful summary of where phonetic sounds are made in the vocal cavity, and explanations of how the various vowel shifts produced the most common "American English".