SPOKEN ENGLISH IN AMERICA.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XXVII, Issue 10, 13 January 1893, Page 4

SPOKEN ENGLISH IN AMERICA.

New York Nation.

We presume there is no country in the world in which the classes that get a fair education in schools and colleges pay so little attention to the manner in which their children speak their mother tongue— that is, to correctness of accent, distinctness of enunciation, and grammatical collocation. The result is seen in a very remarkable degeneration of the spoken English, especially in ,New England, where the Euglish of the last genera'--} ! tion was, on the whole, taking the whole population together, probably the best in the world, while the English of this generation is to a sad degree slovenly, slangy, and indistinct ; that is, the syllables are slurred over and the open vowels closed as if through sheer laziness. We have seen illustrations of this in the difference between the English of a father and his son or grandson, which would be painful to anyone who looked on a \VLve and carefully guarded speech as one of tlie most precious of national inheritances. In many parts of the West this process of degeneration has gone so far that the English language has become a mere dialect, into which each individual introduces such varieties as he pleases.

Indeed, it may be said that as a rule the only persons who now pay any attention to pronunciation'and grammar and the choice of words in speaking are the ministers, and except from them, since the lyceum lecturers of the Phillips, Chapin, and Curtis sort have died out, the people in many parts of the country never hear what may be called pure spoken English. The bar has long given up any attempt to take care of the language. Some lawyers in this city talk slang and bad grammar purposely in court in order to " get solid with the jury, who never talk anything else. "We hay; been told recently by a gentleman brought up in the West, who was graduated from Yale College, that until he went to New Haven, a lad of seventeen, he had never heard pure English, and, on hearing it from th-;) Yale professors, it seemed to him a new and beautiful language, which he was delighted to think he understood. Parents seldom take any more pains to correct the solecisms and blunders of their children's speech than Dr Rice's teachers. We heard of a case lately where a teacher, having undertaken to give some drill in enunciation and intonation to a girl iv whom she was interested, was promptly stopped by a message from the child's mother, that " Mamie spoke well enough, : ' and she desired her to talk "whatever way she wanted to."

One reason, and perhaps the most potent, why Europeans take better care of their language than we do is that in all tho leading European countries correct speech and a good accent are, if not marks of a social position, powerful aids in climbing into one. The pains which Irish and Scotch barristers, seeking thenfortunes at the English bar, take to get rid of their brogue, would by most Americans be considered very ridiculous. So great a man as Lord Mansfield made it a subject of unwearied vigilance, and Lord Campbell says his Scotch origin was finally discoverable only through two or three words, which he never could master, one of them being solicitor, which he always made " soleecitcr." A man who " drops his h's" in English, or sticks them on improperly, has to be very able. or witty, or wise to escape social damnation. A man to De well received in what is considered " good society " has noc only to dress and use his knife and fork like a gentleman, but has to speak like a gentleman. His accent and gramniei' must indicate, whether truly or not. careful bringing up in a circle in which theso things "were considered of consequence. An English child's speech is watched as carefully as his morals or manners. The same thing is true of France, Germany, and Italy. The educated and -well-to-do classes in these countries are expected to look after their native tongue. It is one of their charges, for neglect of which they are punished by loss of social consideration. Here Aye have no such stimulus to orthoepy or good grammar. One hears every day men "who pride themselves on all sorts of social advantages, birth, education, clothes and money, and what not, talking like Southern " crackers ;" and girls •who think themselves the pink of fashion, gabbling in the tongue of cooks and housemaids. Liberty to talk in any way he pleases is, in fact, the birthright of the modern American child, and he uses it to , produce a jargon, half made up of slovenly prononnciation and half of street slang uttered with a loud, harsh, bar-room intonation. JNow that the country is beginning to pay some attention to the {esthetic side of life, the evil of bad language ought to be taken in hand by parents and teachers and dealt with promptly before they get into the linguistic condition which existed in even in Cicero's day, and exists to-day in Turkey, in "which, the literary language differs wholly from the spoken language, and the unlearned man has to work over a book as he would over a foreign

tongue.