Just What is “American Speech” Anyway?

Abstract

At the outset, the following remarks were intended to be but a brief lead-in to a review of Language in Louisiana: Community and Culture (Dajko and Walton 2019), a book which, by virtue of embodying a multilingual panorama of an important region of America, prompts the reflective reader to consider the apparent dissonance between the linguistically inclusive subject matter of the book itself and the relatively restrictive editorial policy, its name notwithstanding, of the journal American Speech for which the book review was solicited (the review, "Language along the Levee: Just Another Big Slice of the American Pie," appears elsewhere in this issue).For as it turned out, most of the book that I was invited to review was not about English (just three of sixteen chapters), whereas English has been the primary focus of American Speech since its inception, and this is still reflected in its current statement of editorial policy. The ensuing effort to fathom the source of this dissonance, it soon became apparent, required a careful chronological reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding the establishment of the original investigative objects, in tandem with the evolving editorial policies and practices, of American Speech and of its sponsoring organization the American Dialect Society. This effort proved to defy easy summarization. An adequate accounting demanded something of greater scope, resulting ultimately in this editorial essay. 1And so I begin this editorial with a provocative, but legitimate, question. For a journal bearing the title American Speech, just what is "American Speech" anyway? As indicated above, in the process of thinking through my approach to the review of a book that brings into the picture the broad spectrum of languages and dialects pertinent to such a linguistically rich region of the United States, and one so vital to the soul of a nation, I rather naturally began musingU n e d i t e d M a n u s c r i p t