Do You Speak American?

3 uses

So the census data do not provide evidence of a massive shift away from English acquisition, the first step in becoming assimilated.†

2 uses

But as Preston also found among these train passengers, Americans are ambivalent about all of this.†

2 uses

To the extent that amelioration is happening, it's quite a contrast with the prejudice of two generations ago.†

3 uses

Another anecdote involves a shift in the vowel in the word slaves to the vowel in leave.†

1 use

The so-called beatniks were the first to use weird as a term of approbation.†

1 use

The novelist Pat Gonroy taught school for a year on Daufuskie and described its fictional representation, Yamacraw, like this: The island is fringed with the green, undulating marshes of the southern coast; shrimp boats ply the waters around her and fishermen cast their lines along her bountiful shores.†

2 uses

"When you and I speak, our speech rhythms will begin to coincide in a process called alignment," he said.†

2 uses

Arnott's observation that not many teachers teach grammar nowadays is controversial but widely believed.†

4 uses

Voluminously and wittily, and animated by more than a little Anglophobia, Mencken demonstrated that our language began to diverge from the mother tongue almost as soon as the first colonists arrived in North America.†

1 use

"; "Banning English Divisive Measure"; "Hot in Any Language"; "Town's Ordinance a Step Backwards"; "Small Town News Can Grow Big and Ugly"; "Texas Town Makes Spanish Official, Stirs War of Words."†

1 use

An animatronic effigy waves its hands and rolls its eyes as it tells some of the folksy anecdotes Johnson would use to underline political points.†

2 uses

In another ("They put like this bandage stuff around it"), like served "to highlight the introduction of new entities into discourse."†

1 use

We wondered, only a little facetiously, whether American men weren't used to having females tell them how to drive.†

2 uses

Linguist John Baugh wrote that Labov's research, "The Logic of Non-standard English," "was the single most important article ever written that debunked the pervasive linguistic fallacies associated with cognitive-deficit hypotheses"—that is, the fallacy that speakers of Black English were somehow mentally backward.†

5 uses

But if our language stopped changing it would mean that American society had ceased to be dynamic, innovative, pulsing with life—that the great river had frozen up.†

5 uses

Labov's theory has been elaborated in the research of Stanford University linguist Penelope Eckert, who studied language changes originating among high-school students in a predominantly white suburb of Detroit.†

1 use

A child cannot be taught by anyone whose demeanor, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience and all that gives him sustenance and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be black, and in which he knows that he can never become white.†

5 uses

As in many political arguments, the rhetoric of the public figures in the language wars probably fires up the activists but must leave many people feeling somewhere in the middle.†

1 use

Besides its own ways of pronouncing Southern English, Texas talk has another unique characteristic: it glories in wild metaphors and exaggerated similes, with a dash of braggadocio.†

1 use

It is possible that Philadelphia shaped American speech more than any other city, because the "r" sound that so typifies American English migrated west from Philadelphia.†