The People's Tongue

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. A regular op-ed contributor for various outlets, he will write op-eds in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. A WELL-CONNECTED EDITOR: Stavans can call on his many contacts in the media for reviews and endorsements. Potential blurbers include David Brooks, Bret Stephens, Jill Lapore, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Maxine Hong Kingston, Robert Pinsky, and Rita Dove. A CONVERSATION STARTER: THE PEOPLE’S TONGUEwill be a starting point for a national discussion on the American language and will appeal to countless organizations, cultural institutions, and media outlets.