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The People's Tongue: Americans and the English Language
Hardcover
LinguisticsFiction AnthologiesGeneral Racism & Ethnic Studies
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ISBN10: 1632062658
ISBN13: 9781632062659
Publisher: Restless Books
Published: Feb 14 2023
Pages: 512
Weight: 1.89
Height: 1.25 Width: 6.15 Depth: 9.25
Language: English
Awards: Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
ISBN13: 9781632062659
Publisher: Restless Books
Published: Feb 14 2023
Pages: 512
Weight: 1.89
Height: 1.25 Width: 6.15 Depth: 9.25
Language: English
Awards: Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards
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 RodrÃguez 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.
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.
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