Ilan Stavans 
The People’s Tongue 
Americans and the English Language

Introduction: Language as Character, by Ilan Stavans

Chronology

Part I: Landing Mode

Anne Winthrop: “Letter to Adam Winthrop” (1581)

Robert Smith: from New England Primer (1687)

John Adams: “Proposal for an American Language Academy” (1780)

Thomas Jefferson: “Letter to John Waldo Monticello” (1813)

Noah Webster: preface to An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828)

Alexis de Tocqueville: from Democracy in America (1835)

Lydia Huntley Sigourney: “Indian Names” (1841)

Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet: from “On the Natural Languages of Signs II” (1848)

Sojourner Truth: “Ain’t I a Woman?” (1851)

Abraham Lincoln: “Gettysburg Address” (1863)

Bret Harte: “The Spelling Bee at Angels” (1878)

Mark Twain: from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

José da Fonseca and Pedro Carolino: from English as She Is Spoke (1884)

Walt Whitman: “Slang in America” (1885)

Emily Dickinson: Poem #236 (1886)

Richard Henry Pratt: from “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” (1892)

Simon Pokagon: “On Naming the Indians” (1897)

Paul Laurence Dunbar: “When Malindy Sings” (1903)

Ambrose Bierce: “Two Definitions” (1906)

Henry James: from The American Scene (1907)

Mary Antin: from The Promised Land (1912)

William L. Harding: “Babel Proclamation” (1918)

Theodore Roosevelt Jr.: “The Last Message” (1919)

Part II: Fly Me to the Moon

H. L. Mencken: “The Characters of American” (1919)

e e cummings: “next to of course god america i” (1926)

Thomas Wolfe: “Only the Dead Know Brooklyn” (1935)

Henry Roth: from Call It Sleep (1936)

Zora Neale Hurston: from Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Abel Meeropol and Billie Holiday: “Strange Fruit” (1939)

Abbott and Costello: “Who’s on First?” (1944)

Martin Minoru Iida: “Go for Broke” (1944)

Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz: “Ough” (1953)

William Faulkner: from “What’s the Good Word” (1958)

Dr. Seuss: from Green Eggs and Ham (1960)

Amiri Baraka: “Expressive Language” (1963)

Bob Dylan: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1963)

Dwight Mc Donald: from “The String Untuned” (1963)

Leo Rosten: from The Joys of Yiddish (1968)

George Carlin: “The Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” (1972)

Adrienne Rich “Transcendental Etude” (1978)

James Baldwin: “If Black English Isn’t a Language, Tell Me What Is? (1979)

Isaac Bashevis Singer: “On Translating My Books” (1979)

Sugarhill Gang: from “Rapper’s Delight” (1979)

E. B. White: Introduction to Oliver Strunk’s The Elements of Style (1979)

John Ashbery: “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” (1980)

Russell Hoban: from Riddley Walker (1980)

Samuel Ichiye Hayakawa: “Speech on Language Amendment” (1982)

Richard Rodríguez: “English, Sí” (1982)

Part III: The Ruckus of Polyphony

Gloria Anzaldúa: from “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” (1987)

Judith Ortiz Cofer: “Homework: Define Caliente” (1987)

Julia Álvarez: “Bilingual Sestina” (1990)

Amy Tan: “Mother Tongue” (1990)

Tony Kushner: from Angels in America (1991)

Toni Morrison: “Nobel Lecture” (1993)

Chang-Rae Lee: “Mute in an English-Only World” (1996)

Jamaica Kincaid: “In History” (1997)

Robert F. Panara: “On His Deafness” (1997)

Bill Clinton: “Memorandum on Plain Language in Government Writing” (1998)

Louise Erdrich: “Two Languages in Mind, but Just One in the Heart” (2000)

Joy Harjo: “A Map to the Next World” (2000)

David Foster Wallace: “Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars Over Usage” (2001)

Susan Sontag: “The World as India” (2002)

Ha Jin: from The Writer as Migrant (2008)

Ammon Shea: “The Keypad Solution” (2010)

Yusef Komunyakaa: “English” (2011)

Peter Sokolowski: “New Words and the Dictionary” (2012)

Jesse Sheidlower: “The Case for Profanity in Print” (2014)

Ilan Stavans: “In Defense of Spanglish” (2014)

Kendrick Lamar: “DNA” (2017)

Natalie Diaz “Manhattan is a Lenape Word” (2020)

Donald Trump: “CNN” (2021) 

Jhumpa Lahiri: “Lingua / Language” (2022)

John Mc Worther: “English as a Living Language—Period” (2022)

Permissions

Index