Do You Speak American?

Start your own PBS Program Club with friends or family and talk about the things only people in your area say. Register your club at http://www.pbs.org/pbsprogramclub and receive a free starter gift package* to help kick-start the conversation.

*While supplies last.

There's more to a country's prowess than just the amount of land it possesses. Britain once boasted a huge empire, while the United States never did; yet now, for every one speaker of British English, there are four speakers of "American." Forces like the Internet, television and the film industry have done more to spread our way of speaking than any army or navy could, and today, American English is as much a global influence as this nation itself.

It is, however, an influence that continues to evolve. Migration, immigration, race, class, ethnicity and mass media all play a role in changing the sound of American. Nouns become verbs. Vowel pronunciation shifts. Slang becomes standard. And from New England to the West Coast, Michigan to Louisiana, Philadelphia to Appalachia, one dialect can be barely intelligible to speakers of another. So exactly how do we define American English? Is it the French-infused Cajun spoken on the bayou? The Chicano spoken on the streets of inner-city Los Angeles? The urban black language of hip-hop and rap? Surferdude? Valley Girl? Midwestern? And who decides which form is the most correct, the best?

Celebrated journalist and writer Robert MacNeil, in his first PBS documentary since leaving THE MACNEIL/LEHRER NEWSHOUR in October 1995, ponders these questions and poses new ones in the three-part DO YOU SPEAK AMERICAN?, a cross-country journey exploring the vibrancy, energy and flashpoints of the many ways Americans speak English, and the inextricable link between our language and broader cultural issues of race, gender, social standing and power. Airing on PBS Wednesday, January 5, 2005, the series follows MacNeil as he traverses the United States, conversing with characters from all walks of life in an effort to find out just what "American" sounds like. Along the way, he spotlights controversies like bilingualism, Ebonics and political correctness; asks whether or not the country has "dumbed down" the language too much; traces the history of regional dialects and looks at the ways they reflect local cultural identity; and explores the conclusions we draw about fellow Americans based on the way they speak.

In Michigan, Stanford University linguist John Baugh demonstrates an ongoing experiment in "linguistic profiling." He places three telephone calls to the same realtor regarding a rental apartment, using an African-American accent, a Latino accent and finally, his own, a neutral American accent. Often, he gets very different responses depending on the accent. Further emphasizing the danger of stereotyping based on accent or dialect is the story of three young men who, in 1979, were among only a handful of black students at the Martin Luther King Jr. School in an affluent suburb of Detroit. When they spoke the version of English they heard at home in the projects - African-American English - their teachers made the assumption that they were simply unintelligent and could not be educated. When their poor grades proved inconsistent with their high scores on standardized tests, the boys' mothers sued the school administration, with lawyer Ken Lewis arguing that the children had been discriminated against. Seventeen years later, that argument would serve as the backbone of the controversial 1996 Oakland, California, case in which educators deemed "Ebonics" - African-American English - a separate language.

Baugh maintains that discrimination like this is rooted in a lack of understanding. White Americans, he tells MacNeil, often assume African-Americans speak "bad" or "lazy" English, when in reality, their way of speaking links to the days of slavery. On the west coast of Africa, traders made sure that the slaves they penned up together spoke different languages and could not discuss or plan a revolt. In order to communicate with one another, the imprisoned slaves developed their own pidgin - a blend of their native African languages and the English they'd learned from the Americans. Remnants of this blend - dialects like Gullah and Geetchee - can still be heard in places like the islands off South Carolina's coast.

Spanish, too, is a tremendous part of "American," having arrived here via immigrants from Central and Latin America who flock to the cities and across the Mexican border. DO YOU SPEAK AMERICAN? visits the Texas town of El Cenizo, where Spanish has become the "official" language. In a Los Angeles park, MacNeil and linguist Carmen Fought listen in as teenage boys exhibit Latino accents and expressions, even though they don't actually speak Spanish. On Linda Blackburn's ranch in eastern Texas, authentic cowboys explain the Spanish roots of words like rodeo, bronco, stampede and corral.

In fact, the English spoken by some of the most iconic Americans is shaped by outside influences and still bears the marks left hundreds of years ago. New England lobstermen - and Bostonians as a whole - don't pronounce the "r" at the end of words like "father" because the early British colonists who first settled the area didn't. Even the uniquely American twang of North Carolina mountain men like the late, beloved storyteller Ray Hicks - caught on camera before his death in 2003 - has Scottish, Irish and German lineage. In Louisiana, Tante (Aunt) Sue, the owner of Fred's Lounge, speaks English with a Cajun accent and sounds much more French than southern.

"Outside influences" can take many forms. In New York, for instance, DO YOU SPEAK AMERICAN? explores the way hip-hop, rap and Instant Messaging have contributed new words and expressions to colloquial American. In Los Angeles, screenwriters Amy Heckerling (Clueless) and Winnie Holtzman (My So Called Life, Once and Again) are on hand to discuss Hollywood's impact on the language; further up the California coast, surfers and skaters "translate" the way they speak.

Countless factors shape and re-shape "American," but certain basic grammar principles remain constant. What is being done to ensure that students learn "classroom" English - vital to their success in the workplace - but maintain the rich culture of the languages they may hear and speak at home? In one segment of the film, MacNeil observes a teacher with a creative answer to that question - a mock "Jeopardy!" game in which the pupils must differentiate between the way they would say something at home and the way they would say it at school.

Ultimately, MacNeil and DO YOU SPEAK AMERICAN? assess the future of the American language. Are the colorful dialects that mirror America's make-up dying out? Is language something that should evolve with society or remain a constant? MacNeil sits down with scholars on both sides of the issue. John Simon, a theater critic for New York magazine, fears that Americans are increasingly flouting the rules of syntax and grammar, and in the process, sowing the seeds of the language's destruction. Jesse Sheidlower, principal North American editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, maintains that the infusion of new words makes our way of speech stronger, and that the country's inventiveness is the reason our version of English is the world's most influential.

Interspersed with these conversations are chats with leading scholars like Bill Labov, director of the Atlas of North American English, who believes that Philadelphia shaped American speech more than any other city. He also points out that despite homogenizing influences on language in America such as television, Americans from one region to another sound less alike than ever before. Other featured experts include John Fought, who has long studied Southern culture and country dialect; Guy Bailey and Patricia Cukor Avila, who research dialects of African Americans in Texas; the writer Kinky Friedman, a professional "Texan"; and Cliff Nass, a Stanford University professor with expertise in voice-activated technology.

© Copyright PBS 2008 | Privacy Policy