Read Online When in French by Lauren Collins - Free Book Online Page A

Perhaps they thought it obvious that English would prevail. Perhaps they were ambivalent about enshrining the tongue of their former oppressor in the foundational document of a nation that meant to overturn orthodoxies, welcoming men of varying origins.
    English, in some sense, meant the monarchy, an association that gave rise to a number of revolutionary schemes. In 1783, when Noah Webster issued his blue-backed speller, freeing his countrymen to spell
gaol
“jail” and drop the
u
in
honour
(
spunge
and
soop
, sadly, never caught on), American English itself was a novel language, a runaway strain. One magazine justified it as the inevitable outgrowth of the dry American climate, writing, “The result is apt to be that the pronunciation is not only distinct, but has a nasal twang, which our English friends declare to be even more unpleasant than their wheeziness can be to us.”
    Americans were bursting with ideas about what language could be. They saw it as a church or a parliament, another institution to remake. Benjamin Franklin wanted to reform the alphabet so that each letter indicated a single sound. He invented six new letters including
ish
(to indicate the
sh
sound) and
edth
(for the
th
of
this
). A letter he wrote to demonstrate the system brings to mind a proto–I Can Has Cheezburger:

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    T HE SOUND OF AMERICA at its inception would have been lilting, susurrating, singsong, guttural. J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French immigrant to New York, wrote in
Letters from an American Farmer
, his best-selling survey of revolutionary America, of “whole counties where not a word of English is spoken.” In 1794, a bill that would have mandated the translation of official documents into German failed in the House of Representatives by a single vote. Dutch dominated the Hudson Valley, where the courts struggled to find English speakers to serve on juries. As François Furstenberg writes in
When the United States Spoke French
, Philadelphia was overrun with refugees from the French Revolution. During the 1790s, sixty-five Frenchmen lived on Second Street alone, including a Berniaud (china merchant), a Dumoutet (goldsmith), a Morel (hairdresser and perfumer), a Duprot (dancing master), and a Chemerinot (pastry cook). At the orchestra, audiences demanded that musicians play “La Marseillaise” and “Ça ira,” leading AbigailAdams to complain, “French tunes have for a long time usurped an uncontrould sway.” In 1803, the Louisiana Purchase doubled the nation’s French-speaking population. Louisiana entered the union as a bilingual state. Its second governor, Jacques Villeré, conducted the entirety of his official business in his only language: French.
    Americans of the nineteenth century continued to accept linguistic pluralism as a fact of life. (Their tolerance notably did not extend to Native Americans, who were conscripted into English-only boarding schools, nor to slaves, whose masters forced them to speak English, while denying them the opportunity to learn to read and write.) During the Civil War, regiments such as New York’s Second Infantry recruited soldiers with German posters—“Vorwärts Marsch!”—and maintained German as their language of command. Even as nativism surged in the 1850s, with the arrival of greater numbers of Catholic immigrants, the chorus persisted. In 1880 there were 641 German newspapers in the United States. (Even Benjamin Franklin founded a German newspaper, which failed after two issues.) One of them,
Pennsylvanischer Staatsbote
, had been in 1776 the first publication to announce that the Declaration of Independence had been adopted. English speakers had to wait until the next day, when the document’s full text appeared in the
Philadelphia Evening Post
.
    Twenty-four million foreigners came to America between 1800 and 1924. They hailed from different places than