American Speech-Trying to Remember

Readers of American Speech much earlier in their careers than I am are already embarking on, or are in the midst of, projects and research that will define the directions that the continued study of spoken American English will take between now and its 100th anniversary. I see the celebration of the 75th birthday of "our" journal with a backward glance--trying to remember where I was then and some of what associated with American Speech has occurred between then and now.

My teaching career began just 11 years after the first issue of American Speech. My undergraduate years in the early 1930s had exposed me to a course in the phonetics of American English, offered in a Department of Public Speaking (we'd call such "Rhetoric" today) at the City College of New York, during which we used the first edition of American Pronunciation (1924) by John S. Kenyon as our text. That book, despite the vast number of published texts on the phonetics of American speech since 1924, has continued to be issued by George Wahr Press in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The most recent, twelfth and expanded edition appeared in 1994; it was edited by Donald Lance and Stewart Kingsbury, and I reviewed it for Dictionaries (1998).

One of my graduate-study teachers at Teachers College of Columbia University was Jane Dorsey Zimmerman, a charter member of the American Speech and Hearing Association, who served as an assistant editor to her colleague W. Cabell Greet, who was the editor of American Speech from 1933 to 1952. My association with Greet became a personal one when fellow student Allan F. Hubbell and I were asked to join him on the pronunciation staff for the planned American College Dictionary (1947). (American College Dictionary was reissued and reedited through 1967, when it was replaced by the college edition of the Random House Dictionary of the English Language in 1968.) Hubbell later became president of the American Dialect Society in 1963 after serving as editor of American Speech from 1952 to 1961.

It does take a bit of reflection to recall that the study of American English--the use and forms of the language we speak--did not occur academically until near the middle of the twentieth century. Departments of English at the secondary, college, and university levels did review the details of English grammar as they were then analyzed. Kenyon did teach a course in the phonetics of the English language at Hiram College in the 1920s, but, as Harold Allen (1993) reports in his essay "American English Enters Academe," "not until 1952 was there published a book prepared for classroom use, Thomas Pyles' Words and Ways of American English, followed six years later by A. H. Marckwardt's American English" (3), and Thomas Knott believed, correctly, "that the first course to be designated American English' was the one he taught in the English Department (University of Michigan) in 1934-35" (4)!

As departments of speech or of rhetoric or of public speaking or of speech and hearing science or of linguistics were added to the curricula, particularly after World War II, our study and analysis of American speech broadened drastically--perhaps exploded would be more appropriate. The massive Linguistic Atlas project had begun in 1930 under Hans Kurath and numerous colleagues--a project that has yielded numerous studies of American dialects with others still in progress. In the 1960s, the plans for the Dictionary of American Regional English (1985-) began with the appointment of Fred Cassidy as editor. Three of the planned five DARE volumes are already on our shelves. Other areas of linguistic study of our language have ranged from the development of phonological theory to the advent and development of transformational grammar, sociolinguistics (the language variations of social groups), psycholinguistics (concerned with such areas as speech perception, the memory's effect on speech production, and language acquisition), cognitive linguistics (how our minds "handle&quot...