Introduction

American Speech was born in 1925, in the middle of an era in North America comparable in many ways to the present. As a result of World War I, America's power became international, and Americans felt an energizing new identity, culturally and linguistically independent of colonial and migrant ties. The nation was experiencing an unprecedented economic boom. Opportunity to participate in the political process had been extended to women in 1922. The government experienced and survived scandal at the highest levels. In rapid succession, technological advances brought new and quicker forms of transportation and communication. By 1922, 15 million passenger cars were in use. Between 1920 and 1924, households with radios increased from 5,000 to 2.5 million. By 1924, the first tabloid, the New York Daily News, claimed the nation's largest newspaper circulation. By the end of the decade movies were drawing 90 million viewers a week.

But prosperity and developing communication did not eradicate old emotional prejudices. Then, as now, forces of social fragmentation and isolation that affect language were operating. In 1921 immigration was drastically restricted. Several states curtailed the use of immigrant languages in schools. In 1925, the year of the first issue of American Speech, 40,000 members of the Ku Klux Klan marched in Washington, D.C., and a schoolteacher in Tennessee was brought to trial for violating laws against teaching the theory of evolution. Racial segregation was the norm, and discrimination by race or religion was acceptable.

This was the milieu that generated the receptive audience for three editions of H. L. Mencken's The American Language (1919, 1921, 1923) in four years. By all accounts, it was Mencken who first proposed a journal devoted to the language of North America--a journal that is now completing 75 years of publication.

On 16 November 1924, Louise Pound wrote from Nebraska to the Williams and Wilkins Company of Baltimore, "I believe with H. L. Mencken that a journal of the LIVING language is needed. . . . Mr. Mencken tells me that I should be the editor. I'd like to help it START, to make sure that it gets away from the professorial formalism of the available existing journals. I'd not like to see its circle of readers and its sphere of usefulness narrowed. There are enough of the formal kind of philological journals, dealing mainly with the past, already."

Mencken and Pound enlisted the aid of Kemp Malone at Johns Hopkins and of Arthur Kennedy, Pound's former student, at Stanford. In the fall of 1925 American Speech became a reality. The three of them served as the Board of Editors for seven years, putting out 12 issues a year for the first two years and 6 issues a year for the next five.

American Speech appeared less than a year after the formation of the Linguistic Society of America and its journal, Language. In his essay in the inaugural issue of Language, "Why a Linguistic Society?" (1925) Leonard Bloomfield listed areas in need of study, including American English, "of which we only know that, both as to dialects and as to distribution of standard forms, it would present a complex and instructive picture, had we but the means and the equipment to study it" (4).

Seventy-five years later we have the means and the equipment that neither Bloomfield nor the founders of American Speech could have dreamed of--and also scholars trained in describing living language, an approach in its infancy in the 1920s. In the fall and winter issues of 2000, 65 short essays by members of the American Dialect Society illustrate the directions in which the study of living language in North America has developed and its prospects in the new millennium. Contributors represent a range of scholarly experience, from veteran atlas worker Virginia McDavid to graduate student Anne Marie Hamilton just completing fieldwork for her dissertation. Frederic Cassidy's essay stands first. American Speech is honored to publish in this anniversary issue the piece which he...