Proper English

I've always been a huge fan of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. I am thinking of him today as I read Dalton Conley's Honky about a white boy growing up in the projects of New York City. As the only white boy in his diverse childhood, his memoir has me thinking about language construction and how "proper" comes to be, especially in a quirky, plural society like our own.

Here's a quote that got me thinking, "While adults might speak only Spanish, or talk with a heavy drawl if they came from down South, our way of talking was like a layered cake; it had many distinctly rich flavors, but in our mouths they all got mixed up together. When we "snapped" on each other, little did we know we were using the same ironic lilt and intonation once employed in the Jewish shtetls of Central Euorpe. This Yiddish-like English had mixed with influences from southern Italians, Irish, and other immigrant groups to form the basic New Yorkese of the mid-twentieth century. We spoke with open vowels and dropped our rs: quater was quartah, and water was watah. To this European stew we added the Southern tendency to cut off the endings of some words - runnin', skippin', jumpin' - a habit that came northward with many blacks during the Great Migration. We also turned our ts into ds, as in, "Lemme get fiddy cents."

My thinking on this is that there may have once been a conception of proper English that was aligned with aristocracy from European, English elites, but in America, language has been a mutlicultural, hodgepodge of dialect for many generations. Voice, then, becomes the ability one has in expressing in the language of their home culture, school learning and willingness to communicate. Proper is a blending of all the dialects.

Yep.