A riveting, one-of-a-kind anthology of the diversity, strangeness, and
power of American English that features a tremendous array of letters,
poems, memoir, jeremiads, stories, songs, documents, and more from
Sojourner Truth and Abraham Lincoln to Henry Roth and Zora Neale
Hurston, from George Carlin and James Baldwin to Richard Rodríguez and
Amy Tan, from Tony Kushner and Toni Morrison to Louise Erdrich and
Donald Trump.
This volume is a kind of people's history of English in the United
States, told by those who have transformed it: activists, teachers,
immigrants, journalists, nurses, poets, astronauts, dictionary makers,
actors, musicians, playwrights, preachers, Supreme Court Justices,
rappers, translators, singers, children's book authors, scientists,
politicians, foreigners, students, homemakers, lexicographers, scholars,
newspaper columnists, TV personalities, senators, novelists, technology
innovators, and a bunch of fanatics.
The quest is to understand how an imperial language like English, with
Germanic origins, whose spread resulted from the Norman conquest, came
to be an intrinsic component of the first and most influential
democratic experiment in the world. Edited by internationally renowned
cultural commentator and consultant for the OED Ilan Stavans, it is
organized chronologically and offers a banquet of letters, poems,
autobiographical reflections, op-eds, dictionary entries, stories,
songs, legislative documents, and other evidence of verbal mutation. It
addresses Ebonics, and Yinglish, Spanglish, and other linguistic
concoctions, including sci-fi inventions.
In pages in which the story is not only the what but the how, The
People's Tongue starts with samples of the English used by the settlers
in Plymouth Colony and it ends with President Donald Trump's tweets.
