John McWhorter: Doing our own Thing

Reviewed by ANDREW ROSENHEIM

Of America's exports, perhaps the most influential is its language. The dominance of English grows apace in the world, and despite the retention of British English in many language schools, the bias is increasingly towards the American version.

This prejudice is fortified by the impact of America's cultural exports - television programmes, Hollywood movies and advertising for every brand from Coca-Cola to the Gap.

In his fascinating Doing Our Own Thing, Linguistics professor John McWhorter says this American linguistic hegemony is all the more remarkable because the language is so badly treated in its country of origin.

This may not surprise those familiar with the "Bushisms" of America's commander in chief, who as leader of the world's most powerful nation could still say without hesitation, "I know what it's like to put food on my family".

But this is not the "degradation of language and music" McWhorter has in mind. Presidential solecisms that make us wince or laugh do not concern him, and although his tone is one of lamentation, it is distinctly unstuffy.

What alarms him is a growing loss of traditional features and strengths in the written American language caused by infection from its spoken counterpart.

The decline of written speech is evidenced, for McWhorter, by a growing informality that robs it of distinctiveness and distinction.

He shows how an aspirational appreciation of formal conventions has disappeared from the written American landscape, dismissed as pompous and outmoded. Written language is increasingly talk-like and chatty, or wooden and banal.

The effect extends throughout all communications, from personal correspondence to political speeches once reprinted by newspapers.

McWhorter shows how Americans' new lack of belief in rhetoric means that speeches are no longer vehicles for the communication of ideas. Even Dwight Eisenhower, a professional soldier and not a politician, sounded like Demosthenes compared with George W. Bush.

And the few "orators" America has are inevitably preachers, whose expositions are spontaneous spoken outbursts. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, even Bill Clinton, speak from the heart, but rarely from the page.

The removal of formality shows its influence in literary genres, including poetry.

McWhorter says traditional practitioners are now confined to a ghetto, in which a poetry industry exists to serve the interests of poetry producers rather than consumers.

But there are effectively no consumers left, unless for the kind of plain-speech work of poets such as the American laureate Billy Collins, or spoken-word performers who are probably more rapsters than poets.

McWhorter's detailed account of the "oralisation" of English is generally persuasive and always entertainingly argued, but he is less convincing in his efforts to explain why it has happened.

He accepts only a minimal role for cinema, television and pop lyrics in the seepage of oral elements into the written language, but oddly sees the counter-culture of the 1960s as the key catalyst.


This is an arresting thesis, but it seems no more plausible than the impact of television, advertising, and "modern" education, with its unwillingness to teach writing skills.

There has also been the growing influence of an African-American culture that is decidedly oral rather than written - especially in its effect on popular music - although to his credit, McWhorter explores this influence at length.

Not all of this change strikes McWhorter as bad, though his two examples of its positive effect seem thin - he suggests that the arbiters of language correctness now play less of a role in our lives (how does this explain the success of Lynne Truss?) and that newcomers to English no longer find a baffling divide between its oral use and the formality of its written incarnation.

But though his own prose affects a chatty jauntiness, McWhorter's sympathies are clearly with the ornate and complex compositions of the past.

His examples reflect a wide-ranging knowledge of popular culture, and he is full of odd, illuminating facts - not least that human beings were speaking to each other in 150,000 BC, but began to write less than 6000 years ago.

- INDEPENDENT