The Future of English

The future of English has long been speculated about, and science fiction and fantasy novels and films offer multiple notions about what it might look and sound like hundreds of years from now. Bladerunner (1982) famously offered us "Cityspeak," described in Harrison Ford's voiceover as " gutter talk, a mishmash of Japanese, Spanish, German, what have you." And, as shown in the original screenplay, it was exactly that, including words from Hungarian, Japanese, German, French, and Korean (thought notably not Spanish). However, while it's true that on a drive through LA one can pass through block after block of "Chinatown," "Korea Town," and other such areas, the social forces don't seem to be in place for anything like Cityspeak to evolve any time soon.

Another stab at the future was Anthony Burgess's "Nadsat," the slang he created for the criminal classes in his novel A Clockwork Orange. Nadsat draws from some native English lingo -- schoolboy talk, Cockney rhyming slang, and so forth -- but 90% of it is actually Russian, including some meorable words as "Gulliver" for head (from Russian golava), "lewdies" for people (Russian lyudi), and "droogs" for friends (Russian drug). A few years before he wrote the novel, Burgess and his wife had visited Leningrad, and heard of the problem of violent youths in that city -- but the reals surprise is how well Russian and English work together. A similar blended language, dubbed "Runglish," can often be heard at the International Space Station, which is maintained mostly by US and Russian astronauts/cosmonauts.

Perhaps the most innovative future English was that invented by Russell Hoban for his post-apocalyptic novel Riddley Walker -- the novel is actually written in this language, a degraded, worn-down English known simply as "Tok" (as in "talk" -- Hoban's future is phonetically spelled). It's unfortunate, though, that Tok at times sounds a little too much like the English of rural Yorkshire, with the implication that if such were to become the standard, it would represent a "degrading" of it (then again, Monty Python's famous 'village idiots' seem to have hailed from the North as well). A parallel problem troubles Sandra Newman's new novel The Country of Ice Cream Star, whose future disintegrated English bears an uncomfortable resemblance to Jamaican patwa:

"My name be Ice Cream Fifteen Star. This be the tale of how I bring the cures to all the Nighted States, save every poory children, short for life. Is how a city die for selfish love, and rise from this same smallness. Be how the new America being, in wars against all hope - a county with no power in a world that hate its life. So been the faith I sworn, and it ain't evils in no world nor cruelties in no read hell can change the vally heart of Ice Cream Star."

Crossed histories: Latinx and Anglo

Early Map of St. Augustine, Florida

While we have a tendency to think of English as the predominant language in the United States, it's important to realize a few things right at the start. For one, Spanish was the first European language to be spoken in North America, and in many areas Spanish settlements preceded English-speaking ones by centuries. Even today, there are more Spanish speakers in the U.S. than there are in Spain! Had history gone a little differently, Spanish might well have ended up as the main language of the area that's now the U.S. (French had a shot, too, and Benjamin Franklin even worried that if we weren't careful we'd all end up speaking German!). And, while we in the northeast tend to think of Spanish mission towns in what's now California, the earliest Spanish settlement was actually on the east coast! The  above map sows the town and port of St. Augustine, founded in 1565 and for two centuries the capital of Spanish Florida. The first English settlement, Jamestown, wasn't established until more than forty years later in 1607, and was (temporarily) abandoned a mere three years later; after sporadic attempts to repopulate it, it was abandoned for good in 1699.

The more recent politics of Spanish are the subject of Lippi-Green's chapter, which dopuments, among other things, the recurrent movement to make English the official language of the U.S., sometimes calling itself the "English Only" movement. In California in 1998, Proposition 227 mandated English be used in public schools, reversing the previous reversal of that policy under then-governor Ronald Reagan. 

All of this belies the fact that, just as with English, there are a great many forms of Spanish around the world, and most of them are spoken in at least parts of the U.S.. Even beyond the eight major dialects, there are all sorts of regional inflections, as well as Spanish creoles, every one of them very much alive and well. Not unexpectedly, various sorts of "Spanglish" have also evolved, and are continuing to evolve alongside ever-changing English itself. 

Southern English

The "country bumpkin" meets the "city slicker."

Practically since the birth of the Republic, Americans have been making fun of the way each other talked. As we've seen, this was partly a feature of the differences and distance between them; urban northerners, whose speech came mostly from East Anglia and gave us the "Boston Brahmin" dialect, had an entirely different prestige dialect than those of the southeast, whose "tidewater" tones were broader, more open, and fronted.

In part as a result of this, the American stage developed a long tradition of comic skits involving a "city slicker" from the urban north being taken to town (or away from it, rather) by a seemingly bumpkinish rural denizen. Many of these skits, and lines from them, still ring a distant bell today: "How far to Little Rock?" or "You can't get there from here." To the city slicker's "Have you lived here all your life" came the rube's reply: "Not yet!" The practitioners of the comic "southern" accent today, from Jeff Foxworthy to Larry the Cable Guy, draw upon this same old story. These identical skits were just as popular on early recordings, such as this one.

It can be traced in cartoons and television shows as well, within which there is -- perhaps -- a gradual transition from more comic to more respectful depictions of southern speech and life. From the comic "Beverly Hillbillies" or "Hee-Haw," we moved on to comedy-dramas such as "Designing Women" or "Evening Shade," with even a purely dramatic show ("In the Heat of the Night") now and then. And, as with AAVE, the comedy on stage and screen belies potential prejudice in social life; a "southern" accent can still be read as the speech of a less intelligent, less well-educated person. It's something that's been found in children as young as five years of age, due no doubt in part to their exposure to stereotyped accents in cartoons.