BRAGG: So far in the adventure of English,
we've traced the story of the language
through its first thousand years,
from the 5th century
to its great flowering at the time of Shakespeare.
What began as a minor Germanic dialect
had comes to these shores with the Saxons,
endured invasion by Vikings
and 300 years of suppression by Norman French,
during which time English virtually went underground.
It had even toppled Latin
as the language of worship and philosophy,
and by the Elizabethan Age,
English completely dominated this sceptered isle.
But now, the English language was about to leave Britain.
In the next four programmes, we'll tell the story of the way
in which English became Britain's greatest export,
some would say gift, to the modern world
and how it became a global language.
We shall see how English travelled to India,
where it encountered scores of other more ancient languages,
including Sanskrit, which did much to mother our own tongue.
Yet even at the end of our imperial rule
in the mid 20th century,
English remains in India as a major unifying tongue.
We'll follow it to the West Indies,
where new English dialects have been spawned,
as rich and vigorous as the native ones
used by Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence.
And to Australia,
where once-exiled English now reaches back
to influence the youth of the mother country.
But first to the New World,
where 1 7th-century Puritan English
stubbornly beat off opposition
from native tongues and rival European powers
to become the language
of what was to grow into the greatest country on Earth,
America.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media
[Water lapping]
This was the new-found land.
To the first settlers' eyes,
this was a vast and, it seemed, empty space.
And yet it's because of their first determined steps
onto this soil nearly 400 years ago
that English would one day speak for America.
This is Plymouth Rock.
It's literally the foundation stone of modern America,
for this is the very spot where the Pilgrim Fathers landed
in New England in November 1 620.
They came on the Mayflower.
They were religious separatists,
and they were here to create a new community
where they could worship as they wished.
They bound themselves to an oath, the Mayflower Compact,
swearing to found a colony for the glory of God
and the advancement of the Christian faith.
They were, above all, people who lived by the Word of God
in English.
They came from a hard-line Puritan religious tradition
which had been persecuted and reviled.
They'd been tortured and murdered
for their faith in an English-language Bible,
and, to them, that Bible, that language, meant life itself.
They weren't the first people on the continent.
Native Americans had been here for 30,000 years,
and the woods and the plains rang
with the sounds of hundreds of their languages.
When the Pilgrim Fathers looked around them,
instead of a new Eden,
they saw what they described
as a hideous and desolate wilderness,
full of threat and danger.
MAN: And for the season, it was winter,
and they that know the winters of that country
know them to be sharp and violent
and subject to cruel and fierce storms,
dangerous to travel to known places,
much more to search an unknown coast.
Besides, what could they see but a desolate wilderness,
full of wild beasts and wild men?
And what multitudes there might be of them, they knew not.
BRAGG: They were cold, hungry, and prey to sickness.
Nearly half of the company of 1 44 died that first winter.
It wasn't going to be easy to turn their oath into reality
and to give English its toehold on the land.
The Pilgrim Fathers had one advantage, though.
They had come here to stay.
And they wanted their settlement to be English.
"New England" they were to call it,
but "True England" might have been more accurate.
Their first move was to build a settlement, re-created here.
Plimouth Plantation.
They lived in terror of the supposedly wild men
in the wilderness outside.
But before they could even do that,
they were to owe their survival to one of those wild men
and an extraordinary encounter with the English language.
MAN: And whilst we were busied hereabout, we were interrupted,
for there presented himself a savage,
which caused an alarm.
He very boldly came all alone up to the houses,
where we intercepted him, not suffering him to go in,
as undoubtedly he would, out of his boldness.
He saluted us in English and bade us welcome.
BRAGG: So, "welcome" was the first word spoken by a native
that the Pilgrim Fathers understood.
The man who had come out of the wilderness
had picked up some words from the English fishermen
who worked the coast.
Even more extraordinarily,
he was able to introduce them to Tisquantum,
or Squanto as he became known.
He is the most important man
in this chapter of the adventure of English.
He'd been kidnapped by English sailors 1 5 years before,
taken to London,
where he was trained to be a guide and interpreter
and learn English.
Then he managed to escape on a return visit.
To the colonists, it must have seemed like a miracle.
It was the most unlikely of all coincidences
that they should have settled
near the tribal home of the man who was almost certainly
the only English speaker for hundreds of miles around.
But for their extraordinary good fortune,
the whole history of America might have been very different.
For Squanto saved the colony and... who knows? ...
gave America the English language.
Squanto taught the settlers how to farm the unfamiliar land
and he got them through
that terrible, first New England winter.
It's almost certain that without him,
sickness and hunger would have wiped out the settlers.
Against all odds, the English colony had been saved
by an encounter with the English language.
The adventure had planted its roots in American soil.
The settlers had a new country,
full of new places and geographical features,
new animals and plants.
They needed words to describe them
and, occasionally, they turned to the native languages.
"Skunk" was derived from the local language,
and "squash", for the variety of pumpkin grown here.
"Squaw", meaning "young woman", was a local word,
as was "papoose", a young child.
And "wigwam" was another early borrowing
from the local languages.
But what's really remarkable
is not that these words did enter the English vocabulary,
but how few of them there were.
For centuries,
English had been borrowing words in their thousands,
from Latin, Danish, French,
and every other language it had come into contact with.
But here, faced with the richness of an entire continent,
the English borrowed words not in thousands, but in handfuls.
The writings of the Founding Fathers here
run to thousands of pages
but contain less than a dozen borrowed Indian words.
So why are there so few?
In a strange new country,
the English settlers may have taken great comfort
in making the objects around them at least sound familiar.
Look at the names they gave the local terrain.
Falmouth, Yarmouth,
Boston, Cambridge,
Billericay, Bedford, Taunton.
They were trying to re-create the English shires
in the American wilderness.
And perhaps there was desperation here
as well as determination.
But through language... their own...
they would survive, as they had in the old country.
So they put a wall between themselves and the native world.
In the end, we must conclude
that they were here to impose their habits
and their language on the land,
not to be changed by it.
Words... God's good English words...
were at the heart of the lives of the settlers here.
Improper speech was a crime.
Blasphemy, slander, cursing, lying, perjury,
railing, reviling, scolding, swearing,
threatening, treason, and defying authority
were all offences.
The colonists would try to control the language,
and this set the pattern for their teaching of English.
[Bell rings]
And as New England grew,
this was how they did it, with "The New England Primer".
CHILDREN: A... In Adam's fall, we sinned all.
B... Heaven to find, the Bible mind.
C... Christ crucified for sinners died.
D... The deluge drowned the Earth around.
BRAGG: From the very beginning,
Americans took immense care over the correct teaching of English.
It was taught well and in way that was highly religious,
and this set the tone as English spread.
It wasn't all going English's way though.
Other European powers were jostling for influence
in the New World.
Delaware, where a Swedish settlement had taken root,
was conquered in 1 655
by the Dutch admiral Peter Stuyvesant
and incorporated into the Dutch New Netherlands.
His base, New Amsterdam, was in turn conquered by the British
in 1 664 and renamed New York.
There was rivalry with the French, which turned into war.
When it finally ended in 1 7 63,
Britain was given sole claim to the east of the continent
and took a grip on the north in Canada.
Even the Spanish colony of Florida came under British rule.
But perhaps the real edge
that gave English a stronger presence
than the other European languages
came not through the gun, but through the ploughshare.
The Spanish, on the whole,
concentrated on sending armies and priests to the New World
and taking gold.
The French were interested in sending fur trappers
and trading with the natives.
It was only the English
who continued the spirit of the Pilgrim Fathers
and came to stay.
Persistence and sheer weight of numbers
eventually ensured that English, not Spanish, Dutch, or French,
would be the language heard from the Atlantic Coast
to the Appalachian Mountains.
But as English spread,
it also started to develop a character of its own,
to drift away from the language spoken in England.
There was already the beginnings
of the "tomaato/tomayto" problem.
In some cases, meanings shifted.
The English shop had become an American store.
"Lumber" meant "rubbish" in the old country.
To Americans, lumber was, and still is, cut timber.
And "haul" came to mean "to transport in a vehicle",
not, as in England, "to move by force".
American English was also developing its own sound.
The first settlers had come from various parts of England,
each with its own regional accent.
But no single accent dominated.
As they talked to each other,
the variety very quickly became a blend.
To this day, there's only
a tiny variation in accents across America
compared to Britain,
and the further west you go, the more true that becomes.
By the middle of the 1 8th century,
the absence of regional pronunciations and dialect words
was being noted approvingly by upper-class British visitors,
who regarded all such variations as vulgar.
In 1 7 64, Lord Gordon wrote,
"The propriety of language here surprised me much.
The English tongue being spoken by all ranks
in a degree of purity and perfection,
surpassing any but the polite part of London."
It's a sentiment that would be repeated again and again,
that the Americans didn't just speak good English.
They spoke it better than the English themselves.
It wasn't only where language was concerned
that the colonists began to stand up to the English.
Tension was growing between them and the Crown.
In 1 7 7 5, here on this bridge at Concord in Massachusetts,
7 5 American volunteers confronted 7 00 British troops.
[Gunshot]
One of them fired what has ever since been called,
with a touch of hyperbole,
"the shot heard round the world".
Revolution had begun.
A year later,
1 3 colonies declared their independence
and did so in perfect, what we might call classical, English.
MAN: We hold these truths to be self-evident,
that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty,
and the pursuit of Happiness.
BRAGG: John Adams,
who would become the second president of the United States,
wrote of a future
in which all Americans spoke the language equally well,
in which eloquence would be the way to high office
and no-one would be excluded
because their speech betrayed inferior origins.
It was the birth of a democratic ideal
that's still part of the American myth...
that anyone can become president
and everyone would have
a presidential vocabulary and accent.
This was no longer the King's English,
but perhaps the People's English.
And they wanted to set it in stone.
This is another foundation of America.
Not a rock, but a little blue book.
It was written
by a schoolteacher called Noah Webster.
Through the last years of the 1 8th century
and the 1 9th century,
it was sold in countless general stores like this one,
stacked among the tins of molasses and sacks of beans,
the snake oils, paraffin lamps, and shovels.
It soon became known as the "American Spelling Book",
or the "Blue Backed Speller".
It sold at 1 4 cents a copy,
and in its first hundred years, it sold 60 million copies...
more than any other book in American history
with the exception of the Bible.
This is one of the most influential books
in the history of English.
[Bell rings]
WOMAN: The first word is "academic".
The first sound is A-C.
- Ac. - Perfect.
The next part is "ah".
Ah.
D-E-M.
Dem.
- L-C. - Ic.
All together.
Academic.
Democratic.
D-E-M.
Dem.
BRAGG: The hundreds of words
and model sentences in Webster's book
have been repeated by millions of children
on countless occasions.
All together.
Democratic.
Very nice.
And the practice is thought
to have changed the sound of the language.
To this day, Americans tend to pronounce words
with a far more even emphasis than the English
and, in particular,
than the clipped vowels of the English aristocracy,
whose influence Webster wanted to oppose.
Where the English say "cemet'ry",
the Americans have "cemetery".
English "laborat'ry", American "laboratory".
But pronunciation wasn't all that he influenced.
It was from this book that America learned how to spell.
Correct spelling came to be seen as a standard of education
and civilisation throughout America,
and it still is today.
And the spelling bee became part of the life
of every town and village.
WOMAN: This morning we're going to start our spelling lesson
with practice for the spelling bee
that we're going to be doing.
The first word is "syllable".
Sometimes when you study words,
you might break them into syllable patterns.
BRAGG: Webster's book
standardised spelling across America,
and he also tried to improve
on inconsistent and illogical spellings.
The next word is "democracy".
D-E-M...
O...
C-R-Y.
Under Webster's system,
"honour", "colour",
and a score of similar words lost their "U".
Double letters were reduced to single ones,
like the "L" in "traveller" or the "G" in waggon.
"E-R" replaced "R-E" as the ending of "theatre" or "centre".
"Defence" with a "C" became "defense" with an "S".
"Axe" lost its "E".
- Ax. - A-X.
Perfect. I see you've all been doing your homework.
BRAGG: England had made the language,
but America had begun to claim its future.
By the 1 820s,
East Coast America was presenting itself confidently
as the guardian of English,
beating off vulgarity and fashion.
There was even a cheeky motion proposed
in the House of Representatives
to invite the sons of the English aristocracy
to come to America to learn how to speak properly.
Americans felt they'd kept the English language pure
for 200 years...
so pure that they were still using words
the English had dropped,
words like "greenhorn", "burly", "deft",
"scant", "talented", and "likely".
Americans still say "sick" to mean ill, not just nauseous.
They say "fall" meaning "autumn",
just as the English did once.
And when Americans say "I guess",
they're using a form of words
that would have been familiar to Chaucer... egess.
And they denied that they were changing the language.
When Webster published
his groundbreaking American dictionary in 1 828,
he claimed that it, this,
contained less than 50 terms that were new to the country.
Here was America claiming to preserve English
in all its past glories,
to have erected a barrier against change and corruption.
But they could no more exclude
these natural developments in the language
than the first colonists could hide behind their stockade
from the world beyond.
John Adams had predicted
that America would drive the English language
into a great future.
His vision was prophetic.
But the language would be very different
from the measured East Coast tones that Adams had known.
American English was going west and going wild.
In 1 804, the United States purchased
what was then called Louisiana from the French
for 3 cents an acre
and more than doubled the size of the country overnight.
And these lands were nothing less
than the whole American heartland...
the Great Plains and prairies drained by the Mississippi River
and its tributaries like the Missouri, Ohio, and Tennessee.
It stretched all the way from New Orleans in the south
to the Rocky Mountains
and what is today the Canadian border in the north.
Jefferson, the president, sent an expedition of 45 men,
under the leadership
of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark,
into the unknown interior
in search of a navigable river route to the West Coast.
Lewis and Clark's expedition
became one of the epic journeys in the history of exploration.
It started here, in St. Louis,
on the great junction
where the Mississippi and the Missouri Rivers
come together.
Lewis and Clark were Army-trained frontiersmen,
backwoods specialists,
and because Jefferson insisted on daily journals being kept,
their expedition was recorded,
not in the Puritan language of faith,
nor in Webster's urbane prose,
but in the practical language of the frontier.
And this is crucial, because it marks the beginning
not only of the opening of the continent,
but of the decline of the East Coast's grip
on American English.
MAN: We finished butchering the buffalo,
and on my return to camp,
I trod within a few inches of a rattlesnake
but fortunately escaped his bite.
We also passed another creek and a very bad rapid
which reached quite across the river.
A female elk and its fawn swam down through the waves,
which ran very high,
hence the name of Elk Rapids,
which we instantly gave this place.
Opposite to these rapids, there is a high bluff
and a little above on the larboard,
a small cottonwood bottom in which we found sufficient timber
for our fires and encampment.
BRAGG: These are words peculiar to America
or in a peculiarly American use.
In England, a creek is a tidal inlet.
In America, it's broadened its meaning
to cover all manner of streams.
Adjectives turn into nouns. Rapid into rapids.
And "bluff" was coined here to describe flat cliffs.
"Rattlesnake" was another
of those descriptive combinations of English words,
as was "cottonwood".
And "elk" is one of the words imported from England
and applied to a different beast.
"Buffalo", though, had been an English word
for over two centuries,
imported from a Portuguese book about China.
Lewis and Clark's journals include
not Webster's 50 words peculiar to America,
but over 2,000 of them.
Most are names of objects,
a great catalogue of flora and fauna
and man-made items that were new to English eyes.
Words like "hickory", "hominy", "maize", "moccasin",
"moose", "opossum", "pecan", "persimmon",
"toboggan" are derived from native languages,
as well as more obscure words like "kinnikinnick",
a mixture of leaves for smoking;
"pemmican", a preserved mixture of meat, fat, and berries;
and "tamarack", a kind of larch.
Others are English coinages
with descriptive properties of their own.
The whippoorwill, a bird named by the sound of its call;
or the mockingbird,
a name inspired by its habit of imitating other birds' songs.
And there are hundreds of names made
by combining existing English words,
from "black bear", "bluegrass", "bottomland",
"backtrack", "box alder", "brown thrush",
"buckeye", "bullfrog", "bald eagle", and "blue jay"
to "sapsucker", "snowberry", "snowshoe",
"sugar maple", "whistling swan", "timberland", "tumblebug",
"turkey buzzard", and "yellow jacket".
But this was just the beginning.
In the wake of Lewis and Clark,
the great rivers became America's superhighways.
Once, this keyside in St Louis, the gateway to the West,
bustled with scores of paddle steamers
taking new settlers to the new lands.
This was the hub of the frontier in the 1 830s and '40s.
The very word "immigrant" is an American invention.
Vast migrations of people
had never been a huge factor in the Old World,
but it was the defining experience of the new one.
And new settlers brought new linguistic energies.
The Pilgrim Fathers had come
primarily from the south and east of England.
But two centuries on,
Americans were as likely to come from Scotland,
escaping the aftermath of the Highland Clearances,
or from Ulster, often driven out by famine, high rents,
religious intolerance,
or simply looking for the chance to make a new and better life.
As many as half the population of Ulster crossed the Atlantic,
and many kept moving west.
They became a major part of the rich mix of people
who were creating a new American country
and a new American voice.
Scots and Irish brought new words and expressions
to America.
The Scottish verb "schoon", meaning to skim over water,
took to the sea as a new type of ship, the schooner.
The Irish donated the word "cabin"
to name the typical frontier dwelling.
They also brought "dead", as in dead straight.
And the similar use of "plumb" and "right"
came to America through use by both Scots and Irish,
as did the habit of sticking an "A" on the front of verbs,
like "a-going".
The old French presence, too,
is apparent everywhere along the Mississippi.
It's there in the place names from New Orleans,
Baton Rouge, and Lafayette in the south
to St. Louis, Cape Girardeau, and Belleville further north.
And towns ending in the French suffix "-ville" are everywhere.
Edwardsville, Greenville, Jacksonville, Clarksville.
The French gave us the name
of one of the great western institutions... the hotel.
America took a word the French had given
to a grand private house or a municipal building
and turned it into the name of a new invention...
a palace for all the people,
far grander in ambition than the inns and taverns
that offered rest to travellers in England.
And their clients were businessmen.
In 1 8th century England,
merchants had been described as businessmen.
But now the word took on its modern American meaning.
The mover and shaker in the worlds of finance
and expansion and opportunity.
The country was on the move and on the make.
The river teemed with poor migrants...
rednecks, who got their name
from the way their necks were burnt by the sun
as they bent to work in the fields.
Because they couldn't afford the steamboat fare,
they travelled on rafts,
which they steered with oars called riffs,
so they were known as the riffraff.
On board boats like this one,
richer travellers were, in turn, regarded as highfalutin
because of the high, fluted smokestacks
that carried soot and cinders well away from those passengers.
And also perhaps because of the stovepipe hats
those dudes wore.
They bestrode the Texas deck, the biggest on the boat.
Ready to play?
Gentlemen, this is five-card stud.
BRAGG: Gambling was a favourite activity
among the riverboat passengers.
"Pass the buck" and "The buck stops here"
both come from such card games.
The buck was a buckhorn-handled knife passed round
to show who was dealing.
And they're just the start of the phrases
that American gamblers gave to the language
in the middle of the 1 9th century.
I'm assuming you have an ace.
BRAGG: "Deal" became part of phrases like "square deal",
"new deal", "fair deal", "raw deal".
Dealer will take three.
BRAGG: "Big deal", "no big deal".
And raise it three.
BRAGG: "I'll raise your bid", "You bet", "Put up or shut up",
and "I'll call your bluff" were all first heard
round the card table.
I'll call you.
BRAGG: You have an ace up your sleeve, so you up the ante.
Someone throws in his hand, but you keep a poker face.
Now the chips are down.
But the cards are stacked against you.
Someone plays a wild card and scoops the jackpot.
- Pair of kings. - Nice.
Cheers.
Gambling and drinking spread across the West.
No surprise there.
This was a very different frontier
from the original one at Plimouth.
And nothing added more slang words and phrases
to the language than alcohol.
"Barroom" and "saloon" both entered the language,
soon followed by "bartender" and "Set 'em up!"
Measures like a snifter, a jigger, and a finger
all came from the bars of America.
And bootlegging comes from the practice
of hiding a flat bottle of whisky in the leg of a boot,
to be sold illegally to the natives.
And there were literally hundreds of terms for drunk.
Even before the Revolution,
Benjamin Franklin listed 229 of them minted in America,
including "He's casting up his accounts",
"His head is full of bees", "He sees the bears",
"He's cherry merry", "He's wamble-cropped",
"He's halfway to Concord",
"He's ate a toad and a half for breakfast",
"He's groatable", "He's globular",
"He's loose in the hilts", "He's intoxicated",
"He's juicy", "He clips the King's English",
"He sees two moons", "He's nimptopsical",
"He's oiled", "He's like a rat in trouble",
"He's double tongued", "He's trammeled",
"He's got the Indian vapours", "He's out of the way",
"He's very weary".
"Teetotal" was another word that came into the language
from the Irish settlers,
along with "speakeasy", "shillelah", and "smithereens",
"Yes, indeedy" and "No, sirree",
and later, of course, came "on the waggon".
Westward expansion had long been the cause of land disputes
between the settlers and the natives,
and once they left the great rivers for the waggon routes
like the Oregon and the Santa Fe Trails,
contact and often friction
between migrants and Indians increased.
Many of the Indian words
that had already come into English
reflected this antagonism.
"Scalp", a good old English noun,
had become a far more threatening verb
as early as 1 693.
"Tomahawk" was another early addition to the language.
So were "warpath", "war whoop", "war dance",
and "Long Knives", an Indian word for white man,
and "firewater", the term they gave to alcohol.
Phrases like "no can do" or "long time no see"
are literal translations from Indian languages.
The word "brave" to describe Indian warriors
was certainly inherited from the French.
And "buck", slang for a dollar, derives from buckskin,
the standard unit of trade between Europeans and Indians.
Conflict with the natives was just one of the hazards
faced by the people who went West.
Every one of them had an epic journey to tell
of the hardships imposed by distance and the weather.
Every one had carved a new life
out of a landscape made on a scale unknown in Europe.
They chose new American heroes for themselves,
through whose stories they could distil their own experiences.
And they chose them and told tales about them
on a grand scale.
The most famous of all straddled the gap
between fact and fiction... Davy Crockett.
He was, as we know from the song,
born on a mountaintop in Tennessee.
He was the son of a veteran of the Revolution.
He became a congressman, famous for his plain speaking,
and he died defending the Alamo in Texas in 1 836.
He was as American as they came.
And he became a legend, the king of the wild frontier,
the hero of a series of paperbound books
telling exaggerated stories about him.
This fictionalised Crockett was the first great exponent
of a style of speech as big as the country, called tall talk.
When he opened his mouth, he made the forest shake.
These is times that come upon us
like a whirlwind and an earthquake.
They are come like a catamount at full jump!
We are called upon to show our grit
like a ball of lightning again' a pine log,
to exterminate, mollify, and calumniate the foe,
pierce the heart of the enemy,
cram his pesky carcass full of thunder and lightning
like a stuffed sassidge,
and turtle him off with a red-hot poker.
And while the stars of Uncle Sam and the stripes of his country
wave triumphantly in the breeze,
where, where, where is the craven, low-lived,
chicken-bred, toad-hoppin', red-mounted,
bristle-headed mother's son of ye
who will not raise the beacon light of triumph,
snouse the citadel of the aggressor,
and squeeze ahead to liberty and glory?
Confidence bred ornate, baroque words.
Shebang, shindig, and slumgullion,
kerflop, kerbang, and kerthump.
An American need not simply leave hurriedly.
He could absquatulate or skedaddle.
He didn't just use something up. He exfluncitated it.
The language was hunky-dory, rambunctious, splendiferous.
Its vigour was in speech,
and that habit of coming up with vivid verbal images
has left us with many that figure in everyday talk.
It's not my funeral if you fly off the handle
because you have a chip on your shoulder and an axe to grind.
I won't sit on the fence and dodge the issue.
I won't fizzle out. I won't crack up.
No two ways about it,
I'll knuckle down and make the fur fly.
I'll go the whole hog and knock the spots out of you
and you'll be a goner.
You'll kick the bucket. So face the music.
You're barking up the wrong tree.
You won't get the drop on me.
I'm in cahoots with some people with the know-how.
Keep a stiff upper lip
and have the horse sense to pull up stakes, okay?
Within two generations of the opening of Louisiana,
the American language had been reborn.
No legislator sitting in a library
in one of the eastern states
could have hoped to arrest its exuberant progress.
It's a fact that the biggest author of the language is Anon.
This was the democratic language that Adams had foreseen,
but democracy meant
that everyone threw in their two cents' worth,
and the old conservative values
were trampled in the movement west.
And never quicker than when gold was discovered
in "them thar hills".
Gold fever brought tens of thousands of people
from the eastern states,
and their letters home were loaded with new words.
"Prospector" was one.
They wrote about how they'd "staked their claim",
about how they hoped that gold dust would "pan out"
of the water that they were sieving,
or they would "strike it lucky" or "strike it rich"
and produce a "bonanza",
which came from the Spanish word for "fair weather".
And for the first time, a surefire investment
became known colloquially as a gold mine.
And the gold rush gave us two words
that became far more famous in the 20th century.
When a certain Levi Strauss
started to make hard-wearing clothes for miners,
he used a cloth called jean fustian,
originally made in Genoa.
Levi's and jeans have been as American as stars and stripes
ever since.
[Railroad-crossing bell ringing]
That other envious souls used to try to pass themselves off
as the man who had such a simple but brilliant idea.
And so he developed the habit
of introducing himself to strangers
as "the real McCoy".
He gave the world a catchphrase, and he also gave it the cowboy.
English had known the word "cowboy" since the 1 8th century,
but now it took on a new currency and a new meaning.
McCoy's brainwave turned the cattle industry
into a licence to print money
and the cowboy into a national icon.
Cowboys had been working near the Mexican border for years,
picking up Spanish words which now drove north with them.
"Ranch" comes from the Spanish
as does "corral", where horses or cattle were penned.
Mustang, bronco, and the more humble burro;
the chaps, sombrero, and poncho they might wear;
the cinch that secured the saddle,
the lariat and the lasso they used to rope cattle;
the sierras, mesas, and canyons they rode across;
the cries of "Vamoose!" and "Pronto!"
the stampede that they feared,
and the rodeo where they drove the cattle together
all came from Spanish.
The language of the West
has become the standard idea of what American English is like,
completely overtaking the proper speech of the East.
And the man who is virtually
single-handedly responsible for this
was one of the greatest showmen and boosters of them all.
He was William F. Cody, Buffalo Bill,
and he chose to be buried here, on the hills above Denver,
where the Rockies rise steeply out of the Great Plains.
He turned the frontier experience
into an epic entertainment,
Buffalo Bill's Wild West.
The extravaganza featured live elk and buffalo,
real Indians attacking a stagecoach,
and Custer's Last Stand at Little Big Horn,
in which Buffalo Bill himself arrived on the scene
just too late to save the day.
[Gunshots]
It was nonsense,
and it was a smash across America and Europe for 30 years,
long after Indian resistance had ended
and the last buffalo herd had been massacred.
It created a vogue for the language of the West
and began a line of Western myth that kept that language alive
through countless books and films.
And the dreams of luxury and optimism
became an enduring fantasy of a Western El Dorado, an Eden,
somewhere over the rainbow, or at least the next county line.
It's all there in a little song about the hobos...
another good frontier word...
who rode the railways west
in search of their own American dream.
# In the Big Rock Candy Mountains #
# You never change your socks #
# And the little streams of alcohol #
# Come a-trickling down the rocks #
# The breakmen have to tip their hats #
# And the railroad bulls are blind #
# There's a lake of stew and a whisky, too #
# You can paddle all around 'em in a big canoe #
# In the Big Rock Candy Mountains #
But there was another group of Americans
who had never been invited to share that dream...
the black slave population of the South.
And they spoke about their experiences
in a very different language.
# I'll see you all this coming fall #
# In the Big Rock Candy Mountains #
This is Sullivan's Island,
a little patch of land in Charleston Harbor
off the coast of South Carolina.
It was the first taste of America
for hundreds of thousands of immigrants
in the 1 8th and 1 9th centuries.
But the immigrants who came through here
hadn't chosen the American dream of a better life.
They had been sold into slavery.
Sullivan's Island was a holding pen for imported slaves.
Between half and two-thirds of them entered America here
before being sold on, mainly to work on the cotton plantations.
There's no Statue of Liberty here, just this plaque,
erected in 1 999 to commemorate their arrival.
They came here from the countries of West Africa
and from plantations in the Caribbean.
Slaves who spoke different languages
were put together on the same sea voyage here
to stop them plotting together to seize control of the ship.
So on ship and on shore, there was a great babel of languages.
The slaves had to find a tongue
in which to talk to one another and to their masters.
It was English,
but English very heavily influenced
by African ways of talking.
[Speaking Gullah]
You take the Gullah and... and you have a spot of tea.
BRAGG: The language these people are talking is Gullah,
which has survived as a distinct variety of English
here around the South Carolina islands.
And walk up on the bank and say,
"What you doin' up on the bank there?"
BRAGG: It's thought by many people
to be the closest we can get to the kind of language
that would have been spoken by the slaves
in the 1 8th and early 1 9th centuries
and that this is the origin of modern Afro-American vernacular.
Get off about 50 feet off, and you all look over there.
And he goin' his boat, and he looked.
His boat done sank down.
He start hollering, "Hey! Help! Help!"
[Speaking indistinctly]
[Laughter]
We put together varying African words
along with Elizabethan English
and came out with something that sounded like...
So, sometimes people think maybe it's English,
and then they go "but not quite".
They were lbos, Mandinkas, Malinkes,
Yorubas, Golas, Kidze, Afiq, Mende
that were all kidnapped, captured,
and then isolated together on these islands
during enslavement.
Once the slaves reached the plantations,
they lived in cabins like these beside the main house.
Here, many words that came into Gullah
from African languages
have found their way into standard English.
Words such as "banana",
which comes from the Wolof language spoken in Senegal;
and "voodoo", traceable to an African word for "spirit"
in the language spoken by the Yoruba people.
Other African words which have entered standard English
include the animals zebra, gorilla, and chimpanzee;
the musical terms samba, mambo, banjo, and bongo;
and the food and plant names goober, meaning peanut,
yam and gumbo, meaning okra.
African compound words were translated,
giving English terms like "bad-mouth".
And "nitty-gritty" originated as a term for the grit
that accumulated in the bilges of slave ships.
As well as vocabulary,
Gullah employs some grammatical features
that differ from standard English.
WOMAN: If someone say...
Okay?
So, they're asking, "Are you going to do it?"
"I already did it.
And I did it a long time ago,"
essentially, is what you're saying.
"I bin dun do um. I dun dun do da."
You see?
So you ask someone, they say "I dun dun do da",
they mean they did it and they did it a long time ago
and "Why are you asking me again?" basically.
So there's a lot more going into it.
So, if someone says...
You see?
So it's like, "Well, you were going over there?"
"Yeah, I already went there,
but when I went, you weren't there,
but I was there.
But you're right. I wasn't there when you were there."
Phrases like these have a rich and economical expressiveness.
In other ways, Gullah and other black Englishes
have stripped down their grammar.
They drop verbs like "is",
use "don't" where standard English says "doesn't",
and omit the apostrophe and "S"
that standard English uses as a sign of ownership.
This kind of simplification is common
when languages meet and emerge as a new hybrid.
It's exactly what happened
when Saxons and Danes dealt with each other
in England in the 9th century
and changed English grammar forever.
But in this case,
the changes were mistakenly taken by many white observers
as evidence that black speakers just hadn't got the intelligence
to speak the language properly,
that they were simply trying and failing to copy white speech.
In fact, they were adding to the language.
Now listen ya.
You know, some people say they n'afrai' a ting.
But they always afrai'.
Like dat Brer Rabbit, dat boy know he ain't nuttin' to him.
You hear what I say?
Dat cutter was slow-motion,
and that Brer Rabbit just as slick as he wanna be.
BRAGG: And black speakers had their own tradition
of performances
that showed just how flexible and expressive
their language was.
They told stories, and they are still told today.
An' now hound come. "Woof, woof, woof, woof."
An' ol' hot tail Brer Rabbit, him take off lickety split.
BRAGG: Brer Rabbit is a direct descendant of animal tricksters
who feature in African folklore.
I say, "Brer Rabbit, you do tellin' a truth, butter cutter?"
He say, "Yessir, ma'am."
I say, "You lyin' ting, you lyin' ting.
Ain't no truth in ye. Ain't no truth in yer no way."
But folk tales weren't the only thing
that fuelled dreams of freedom.
With English, the slaves had learned Christianity.
White society thought it would teach obedience.
The Bible became as central to the lives of the slaves
as it had been to the first settlers in New England.
But the message they found in it wasn't obedience.
It was liberty.
Once again, the Bible in English became the book of freedom.
# Hear Jedus callin' #
# Who no wan' fo' go? #
# Hear Jedus callin' #
# Who no wan' fo' go? #
# An' he's callin' fo' us sinner #
# Who no wan' fo' go? #
# Oh, chil'en #
# Who no bet' fo' get ready #
# Jedus be comin' back #
# Who no wan' fo' go? #
# Steal away #
# Steal away fo' Jedus #
BRAGG: By the first decade of the 1 9th century,
the American states in the North had abolished slavery.
# Steal away home #
When the blacks of the South sang "Steal Away"
or "One More River to Cross" or "Bound for Canaan Land",
they were introducing new words and sounds into the language
and they were also singing not just about the next world
but about this one,
about the hope of escaping to the North and to freedom.
The chains of slavery were rusting.
And on the 1 2th of April, 1 861,
in the early hours of the morning,
shots were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor,
just behind me.
This was the start of the American Civil War,
which the North, of course, was to win.
Four years later, Confederate forces abandonned Charleston.
The Union Army marched in unopposed.
They freed the slaves.
# Glory, glory #
# Hallelujah #
The promise in the language of their spirituals
had come good for the black people of Charleston.
# Glory, glory #
The American Civil War gave us the phrase "Hold the fort".
And the first people to hear anything "on the grapevine"
were in the southern states,
where Army telegraph lines strung in the trees
became so knotted
that they were said to look like grapevines.
# Oh, you gotta ask the Lord's forgiveness #
There was plenty of resistance to the new order.
The Ku Klux Klan, who apparently derived their name
from the Greek word kuklos, meaning "circle",
were formed in the aftermath of the war.
They gave English the world "bulldozer",
originally a bull-dose, meaning a dose large enough for a bull.
It was a dose of whipping,
and it was administered to black people, often fatally.
Words like "bulldoze" are a savage reminder
that the end of the war
didn't bring the end of segregation and prejudice.
In theory, blacks and their language
were now free to mix with whites.
But in practice, it was only in the 20th century
that the mixing of vocabularies really began,
that, just like in the plantation houses,
white speakers started to ape black speech
and cool was born.
And that's a story for a later programme.
Even after the Civil war,
very few white people treated black language
with any interest or respect.
One who did was a man who had grown up on the Mississippi
and was fascinated by all of its talk... black and white.
Luckily for us, he was a genius.
When he made writing his profession,
he chose as his pen name
a call that he'd heard the riverboatmen use
to sound a depth of two fathoms,
Mark Twain.
And the river runs through Twain's greatest book,
"The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn".
It's set in the years before the Civil War,
and it's the story of a young boy
who escapes what he disdainfully calls
the civilising influence of his Aunt Sally.
Huck takes to the river on a raft,
in the company of an escaped slave called Jim.
In his introduction,
Twain told his readers that he'd taken great pains
to capture the different dialects of the river.
"A Southerner talks music," he once wrote.
And when he had Huck Finn describe life on the river,
he found its melody.
MAN: It's lovely to live on a raft.
We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars,
and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them
and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.
Jim allowed that they was made,
but I allowed that they happened.
I judged it would have took too long to make so many.
Jim said the moon could a laid them.
Well, that looked kind a reasonable,
so I didn't say nothing against it,
because I've seen a frog lay most as many.
We used to watch the stars that fell, too,
and see them streak down.
Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.
BRAGG: This is a new voice in the American record
that of the common man and the frontier.
English has come a long way
from the sober and sacred language
that the Puritans had first brought to New England.
It has changed its sound, and it has changed its character.
Words were no longer solely vehicles for God's truth.
They were also words that offended.
The East Coast wasn't yet ready to relinquish
its self-appointed role as guardian of the language.
Back here at Concord, the cradle of the Revolution,
the civilised Aunt Sallys who sat on the library committee
banned "Huckleberry Finn" for its vernacular language.
It was, they said, "couched in a rough, ignorant dialect"
and that there was "a systematic use of bad grammar
and an employment of inelegant expressions".
But though the library committee
might call Twain's language vulgar,
it couldn't ban the vigour of English
that had grown up away from the East Coast...
American English.
Huck's closing words defied their attempts to control it.
MAN: There ain't nothing more to write about
and I am rotten glad of it,
because if I'd a known what a trouble it was to make a book,
I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't a-going to no more.
But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory
ahead of the rest,
because Aunt Sally, she's going to adopt me
and civilise me and I can't stand it.
I been there before.
[Choir vocalizing]
BRAGG: And the vigour continued to increase
in the late 1 9th century.
New waves of immigrants flooded into America.
Germans, Italians, Greeks, Russians, Jews.
From all across Europe they came,
to a land that promised to give a new home
to the tired, poor, huddled masses
longing to breathe free.
To become American was their dream,
and for almost all of them,
that meant that they wanted their children
to speak the language of the new country.
They would power the adventure of English
into the 20th century.
Subtitling made possible by Acorn Media