Languages, Legends, and American Dreams: The Emergence of English in Multilingual America, 1750-1850

Languages, Legends, and American Dreams concerns the development of an American language narrative in the formative years 1750-1850 - from the United States' emergence out of disparate colonies, to its expansion across the North American continent, to the approach of a Civil War that threatened its very existence.Articulated in multiple forms, the narrative links citizenship, patriotism, intelligence, and morality specifically with language use.In effect, the narrative's answer to the question “what is an American” is “someone who speaks English,” which ill-matches the repertoire not only of the colonial and early American periods but of all the eras since then.Like a self-replicating intellectual meme, the American language narrative produced copies of itself throughout the early days of the Republic and through these copies has continued to serve as a sociolinguistic template for processing multilingualism and language diversity in the United States. The book's issue is not simply wh