Реферат: American Riddles

I’ve got to red up the house already!

I asked for a soda, not a Coke!

Dame un bipeo later!

The machine’s all tore up!

Go out to the bahn and check on the horses.

Dose doyty boyds are nesting right under my window!

Broadly considered, there are only two general dialects in the United States, northern and southern, each with numerous variations. The general northern dialect is spoken in all areas of the country outside the Old South of the Confederacy. Greatly influenced by the language of New England, further dialects of the general northern dialect developed with westward expansion. The Great Lakes dialect is spoken from Syracuse to Milwaukee, and its nasal As can be heard in Chicago, Detroit, Buffalo, and Cleveland.

The North Midland dialect, with full Rs pronounced, stretches from south Jersey and northern Maryland across most of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and eastern Oklahoma. The western dialect, also with general northern dialect roots, is relatively new in linguistic history terms and is mixed with regional sounds. Subsets or subdialects of the western dialect include the Southwest, the Pacific Northwest, central and northern California, and the interior western states. The general southern dialect has only two divisions. The southern dialect is spoken in the southeast from Maryland south to Florida and in the lowlands of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and east Texas. The South Midland dialect is spoken in the highlands and inland from southern Ohio through the Texas panhandle. Such broad classifications hardly do justice to the variety of the American language. Ethnic groups bring their own flare to the language—African Americans, Cajuns, Chicanos—and America’s major cities, notably Boston, New York, and San Francisco, have developed a distinctive patois. Teenagers of all ethnic groups continue to make and remake their own languages. Yet even in the face of this complexity and diversity, it has been argued that Americans’ mobility and the constant, flat sounds of so-called standard American over radio and television will wipe out regional linguistic variations. Linguistic boundaries may change and blur, but the fact remains that people in Boston do not sound anything like people in New Orleans. What is really important to the fabric of American life, however, is that Bostonians and New Orleanians, Texans and Michiganders, can all understand each other.

Any Englishman will tell you that there is an American accent. Language also has been a primary but contested issue, especially with new immigrants who have used the discourse of civil rights and ethnic identity to maintain language and media. Most, like their nineteenth-century forebears, still learn English rapidly by the second generation: schools are a major force in teaching language and social mores. Yet tensions may arise between bilinguals and English monolinguals, threatened by prerequisites associated with bilingual status. Mass media, since the turn of the century, have been seen as potent vehicles to teach immigrants language and customs. Hollywood studios, at the same time, often hid the ethnic origins of stars and producers in putting this American dream on screen. Americans' obsession with baseball manifested itself in the language. For instance the name of illustrious basketball player George Herman “Babe” Ruth has entered the language as an adjective for outsized. His accomplishments changed the game into one based on the home run or long ball, resulting in a sudden score with one swing of the bat, instead of a slower game. Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, became known as the “house that Ruth built,” the most venerable of baseball’s venues. While the United States is an English-speaking nation, no official government pronouncement confirmed this—at least until the English-Only campaigns of the 1980s forced this upon state legislatures. Nonetheless, generations of those absorbed by American expansion and immigrants have acceded to the domination of English in education, public life, media and everyday life just as the nation’s projection abroad has gone through English channels. Older inhabitants—including American Indians, Hispanic and French residents and Hawai’ians—as well as generations of immigrants, have held onto their own languages for literary ceremonial and family uses, despite transgenerational pressures to assimilate. Newer immigrants, while adding the variegated presence of more than 300 languages (and variable government support) to an American melting-pot, show similar patterns of change over time. Hence, in the 1990 census, 80 percent of the population spoke only English, while half of the remainder spoke English as well as another language. After more than two centuries, American English—distinguished from its British mother tongue and other colonial developments—represents a unifying feature of American national identity discourse and media.

The unification of this distinctive language, however, has also recognized diversity and challenges as well as changes over time. By the early nineteenth century works such as Webster’s Dictionary and the McGuffey Reader distinguished American English from British counterparts. Distinctions have included forms and usages (often informal) and a rich vocabulary constantly supplemented by encounters with other speakers—Native American place names, diverse food names and basic vocabulary derived from multiple languages, including “buckaroo” (Spanish vaquero “cowboy”), “kibitz” (Yiddish and German words for being a busybody), “moccasin” (used by Virginians from 1612, from the Powhatan or Micmac), “shanty” (from the Irish sean tig “old house” or the French chantier “log hut”), “boss” (Dutch baas), “gung ho” (Chinese kung ho) and “juke” (Wolof dzug).

In the twentieth century while assimilation to English with some bilingualism remained the norm, mass media like the Spanish-language television Telemundo and Univision underscored new transnational support for other languages with large communities of speakers in the US—with 20 million Spanish speakers, for example, the United States ranks sixth among world nations in this language. Yiddish, although limited in speakers (200,000+), survived as a medium of expression in the US after Hitler’s devastation of Central European Jewry. Other important bilingual competencies in the US include French, German, Italian, various forms of Chinese, Tagalog, Polish and Korean, although many others have contributed to the expressiveness and vocabulary of American English. Meanwhile, Native American languages have been revived as expressions of national identity just as Hawai’ian and Hawai’ian pidgin have claimed renewed

emphasis. Perhaps the most controversial language variant of the United States is Black English (“Ebonics”). African slaves, forcibly imported into the United States, combined the vocabularies, structures and rhythms of African languages and speech of the slave trade with English. In isolation, these became strongly marked dialects like Gullah of the Southern coast. In other cases, Black English occupies a post-creole continuum, in which distinctive forms of tense and pronoun use, dual negatives and other features may be used in certain circumstances, but “corrected” in others, especially by speakers who switch fluently to Standard English. The role of Black English as a separate language has been debated by educators and linguists. Moreover, language structure shades over into distinctive styles of rhetoric, expressivity wordplay and music that also define an African American tradition of English used by public figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. or authors like James Baldwin and Ntozake Shange.

Other variations in American English reflect historical differences of region, immigration, class and education. American accents may be identified with cities (Brooklyn, New York City NY, Chicago, etc.), although migration also means that newer areas may lack any identifiable accent—one rarely speaks of a Phoenix or Seattle accent. Regional accents, in turn, tend to reflect associations of regional culture—identification of a New England accent with powerful history and Yankee harshness, or of a Southern accent with ease but a lack of development. Slang and jargons associated with particular groups have been vital parts of the reinvention of English from generation to generation. Some inventions have endured — from the ubiquitous “OK,” which may have African roots, to more recent ephemera. Professional jargons circulate rapidly through mass media, despite those critics who decry their obfuscation or lack of creativity. Slang, as a creation of those outside the mainstream, occupies an even more confusing position as the slang of youth becomes the home language of new generations. One notes shifts, for example, not only in individual words but in the vocabularies of profanity and sexuality that baby boomers use fluently in contrast to their parents (and perhaps to children who are ingrained in proper speech as they develop their own rebellions).

Language is also about style and American values of individualism, “popular culture” and consumerism. Again, culturally constructed divisions like the fluidity of black preaching, the supposedly hard-nosed criticism of big-city speech or the politeness of women represent both ideological constructs and language practices. Multiple media represent and participate in a continual recreation of American language and language practices. Hence, the phrase “Make my day” (from Clint Eastwood’s hard-edged cop in Dirty Harry) was recycled by Ronald Reagan as president, while the advertising slogan “Where’s the beef?” also appeared in political debates. Indeed, the ubiquity of English among 250 million speakers (as well as those who speak or “listen to” American products in other countries) has sustained music, literature, advertising, television and films as channels in which American English is continually reinvented and shared.

2. SOCIAL RELATIONSHIPS, THE COMMUNICATIVE STYLE AND THE LANGUAGE

‘Language can be a form of counter-history … Let

language shape the world. Let it break the faith of conventional re-creation.

Language lives in everything it touches and can be an agent of redemption, the

thing that delivers us, paradoxically, from history’s flat, thin, tight relentless

designs, its arrangement of stark pages and that allows us to find an uncon-

straining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate.’

DeLillo

Most Americans see themselves as open, frank, and fairly friendly. If you ask them a question, they will answer it. They have nothing to hide. They cannot understand why people from other countries should have any difficulty understanding them. Unless, of course, there are language problems.

But most foreigners do have trouble understanding Americans (understand here means having a reasonably accurate set of ideas for interpreting the behavior they see). Even if they have a good command of English, most foreigners have at least some difficulty understanding what the Americans they encounter are thinking and feeling. What ideas and attitudes underlie their actions? What motivates them? What makes them talk and act the way they do? What makes them tick?

Political Correctness

First, a few words about terms. According to Gary Althen and his book American Ways, for the past dozen years or so, Americans have been quite concerned with what has come to be called “political correctness.” The term means different things to different people, but in general it refers to the notion that speakers and writers should avoid any words or phrases that might be considered “insulting” or “demeaning” to anyone. For example, restaurant waitresses (as well as waiters) are now commonly referred to as “waitstaff” or “servers” to avoid the implication that people who serve restaurant customers are predominantly females in a lowly station. Many people with what were formerly called physical or mental handicaps now prefer to be called “differently abled .” Writers and speakers are encouraged to avoid the exclusive use of the word he in any passage that refers to members of both genders. The word foreign, used for decades to refer to people from one country who were temporarily in another, has been criticized for implying strangeness, or being out of place. People who consider themselves sensitive to the feelings of people from other countries urge the use of international in its place. So, “foreign students” has generally been replaced by “international students,” “foreign visitors” by “international visitors,” and so on. People who consider themselves sensitive to the feelings of citizens of the Western Hemisphere outside the United States of America argue that it is unacceptably arrogant for people in the United States to refer to themselves as “Americans.” Everyone from the Western Hemisphere is American, they say. People in the U.S. should refer to themselves as “U.S. Americans,” “U.S. citizens,” or some such term.