Book: The American Language

Overview and Aim
H. L. Mencken’s 1919 study argues that the speech of the United States has diverged so far from British models that it constitutes a distinct, self-confident language. He gathers evidence from newspapers, court transcripts, advertisements, popular songs, dialect writings, and everyday talk to show that American English is vigorous, inventive, democratic, and guided less by schoolroom rules than by the pressures of life in a sprawling republic.

Historical Drift and Independence
Mencken traces the break from British authority to political independence and to the practical demands of the frontier and the city. He shows that Americans preserved older English traits discarded in Britain, most famously the retention of r sounds, and at the same time innovated in every register from business to barroom. He repeatedly rebuts the charge that American is a bastardized English, arguing instead that change and variety are the life of the language, not its corruption.

Spelling and Pronunciation
A central exhibit is orthography. Mencken credits Noah Webster with systematizing an American norm: color against colour, center against centre, defense against defence, and plow against plough. He notes partial victories and lingering inconsistencies, but observes that newspapers and publishers largely consolidated the new spellings. Pronunciation likewise departs from British Received Pronunciation: rhotic speech predominates; lieutenant and schedule sound different; the h in herb often falls silent; and stress patterns vary. Mencken treats these not as vulgarities but as stable, home-grown habits.

Vocabulary and Word-Making
The book revels in American word-formation. Compounding, clipping, and easy verbing and nouning yield brisk coinages: skyscraper, gasoline, sidewalk, elevator, drugstore, joyride, highbrow, lowbrow, bunk, flivver, and movie. Political and business life spawn slogans and catchwords; journalism and advertising accelerate their spread. Mencken catalogs the American preference for directness and exaggeration, a taste for tall talk that produces superlatives and colorful metaphors, yet also a sharp sense for economy. He notes distinct transatlantic contrasts, petrol vs gasoline, lift vs elevator, lorry vs truck, as evidence for a separate lexical center of gravity.

Grammar and Usage
Mencken highlights native syntactic habits that school grammars often disparage. He defends gotten as a legitimate and useful form, records the American comfort with have as a full verb in Do you have…?, notes the flexibility of prepositions at sentence end, and treats the split infinitive as a non-issue. He frames these not as errors but as orderly developments and survivals, governed by intelligibility and convenience rather than imported rules.

Regional and Social Varieties
The study maps a landscape of dialects, New England, the South, the Midland, the West, each with phonetic quirks and stock expressions. It records mountain speech, the slang of cities, the argot of trades and politics. Mencken is alert to African American speech traditions and to the traffic between Black vernacular and general slang, while also acknowledging caricatures in popular writing. He regards such variation as proof of vitality rather than decay.

Foreign Influences and Names
American English is hospitable to immigrant tongues. German in the Middle West, Yiddish in the cities, and Spanish in the Southwest contribute words, intonations, and a comic-sardonic edge to urban slang. French legal terms persist; Native American languages supply a great stock of place names, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Chicago, Iowa, alongside productive suffixes and patterns. Mencken devotes special attention to personal and place naming, noting the ease with nicknames, initials, and respellings, and the swift Anglicizing of foreign surnames.

Authorities and Attitudes
Mencken engages philologists such as Whitney and Lounsbury, and salutes Webster and other reformers, but he is most animated when skewering schoolma’ams and British scolds. He dismantles prophecies that American would sink into chaos, showing instead a rough consensus enforced by print and habit. The traffic is two-way: British writers adopt Americanisms even as they ridicule them.

Tone and Legacy
Written in a polemical, anecdotal style, the book blends scholarship with showmanship to fix American English as both subject and emblem of national character: pragmatic, plural, and restless. Its catalog of spellings, pronunciations, idioms, and taboos became a foundation for later editions and supplements, and a durable defense of the right of Americans to speak and write in their own key.