has attributed to the miners of California a peculiar, strongly-marked, and affected dialect, but he has drawn on his imagination for the greater part of it. A mixed population like that in the mines, representing every state in the Union, and every county of Great Britain, could not have a dialect; and nowhere is the English language better understood, or spoken with more force, elegance, and purity, by the poorer classes of people, than in this State. 1 If you want to hear the general American of the future, Hollywood and TV-studio based, go to California and listen to the speech of the California-born younger generation (not, of course, to the immigrants from other states, who will carry their local intonations with them to their dying day). Do you recall how in the Presidential campaign of 1960, Kennedy's ahsk and Africar stood out like sore thumbs, while Nixon never drew a lifted eyebrow? Nixon spoke the general American of the future, an American shorn of all local peculiarities. 2 A century seems to have made little difference in the careful observer's s impression of California English. Linguists have provided specific evidence to confirm this impression. In an article based on preliminary results from the Linguistic Atlas of the Pacific Coast, David Reed concluded, &dquo;The popularity of a word in California tends to reflect the generality of its distribution in Eastern dialects. &dquo;3 A recent paper by Carroll Reed and David Reed again puts California in the middle of the road: &dquo;California seems to have more Midland traits than Washington or Idaho, but less than Oregon, &dquo; they report, and &dquo;Southern California shows a curious overlay of Northern and Midland forms, a situation occasioned ... by successive waves of settlement involving the simultaneous rrival of diverse elements by sea as well as by land routes. &dquo;4 Everyone would agree that California English is distinguished by its lack of distinctiveness. Of all speakers back East, Californians sound more like those from areas that once were termed &dquo;General American&dquo;--the Inland North and the North Midlands. Californians pronounce their postvocalic [r]'s, use the front vowel [as] in ask, never intrude an [r] between vowels, and so on. Iwill argue,however, that California's undistinctiveness is not always a copy or an average of Eastern models, and that it is not static. As immigrants have arrived in such numbers as to nearly overwhelm the natives, California English, as reflected in the speech of the native-born younger generations, has modified itself to maintain a structure of its own while remaining as unobtrusive as possible. This ringing conclusion is at present still just a hypothesis, but in the past three years I have gathered a considerable amount of information to support it.
Many members of the Chicano (or Mexican American) ethnic community speak what I will term 'Chicano English', a variety of English that is obviously influenced by Spanish and that has low prestige in most circles, but that nevertheless is independent of Spanish and is the first, and often only, language of many hundreds of thousands of residents of California. 1 In a talk several years ago (Metcalf, 1972a) I deplored the lack of research on Chicano English. I can now report, after a new search for research on the subject, some good news and some bad news.First, the good news. In the past several years real progress has been made in defining and deciding on solutions to the 'language problems' of children and adults who speak Chicano English. Researchers seem more ready than before to recognize that many Chicano English speakers are fluent in English only and should not be barraged with TESOL programs designed for students who have no command of English at all. The notion of respect for the child's language has also begun to take hold, no matter whether that language is standard English, standard Spanish, Chicano English, Chicano Spanish, or even, horror of horrors, a pattern of code-switching between Chicano English and Chicano Spanish.Then, too, there has been mounting evidence that the 'language problem' faced by those who speak Chicano English is not really a language problem, but a social one.
C oals to Newcastle. Roses by different names. Does any reader of Names have to be told that onomastics and dialectology are kissing cousins, often bedfellows, sometimes two sides of the same coin?If so, let that improbably obtuse reader look at any ordinary issue of Names; there will plentifully appear examples of the link between the study of names and the study of language variation. In 1983 alone, and not counting book reviews, Names had articles on geographic variation of nationalistic place names in the United States; upstate vs. downstate in New York; the American terms creek, run and hollow; Celtic names in the American North and South; surnames in the Southern United States; geographical spread of English place-name surnames; changing place names in New Mexico, and the development of ethnic epithets from personal names.All of these topics would have been equally at home in American Speech, journal of the American Dialect Society, whose readers recently have been treated to studies of "Criminal Monickers" and "The Hairbender Beauty Salon de Paris of Ethel." Substantial works on names have likewise appeared in the monograph series Publication of the American Dialect Society, from Frederic G. Cassidy's exemplary The Place Names of Dane County, Wisconsin (No.7, 1947) to Virginia O. Foscue's The Place Names of Sumter County, Alabama (No. 65, 1978).Names and dialect. Which field is the handmaiden, which the maid; which is the branch and which the clinging vine; which the host and which the parasite, may sometimes seem at issue, but it is more often a matter of whether the left hand should serve the right, or which hat a scholar cares to put on.And indeed, the practitioner is often the same. As readers of this journal well know, American scholarly interest in names took much of its impetus from members of the American Dialect Society, some of whom helped with the birth of the American Name Society. Five different scholars have been independently chosen as presidents of both societies -namely, Kemp
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