The Language Declaration

On the Distinction Between Dialect and Language

The boundary between a dialect and a language has never been settled by linguists. It has been settled, in every recorded case, by institutions. A language is a dialect with an army, a navy, a literature, and an academy that says so. The transition is performative, not descriptive.

This is not a corruption of linguistic science. It is what linguistic science observes. Norwegian became a language when Norway declared it one. Afrikaans became a language when its speakers built the institutions to standardize and teach it. Modern Hebrew became a language when an academy was founded to make it one. The pattern is uniform.

American has, for two and a half centuries, been called a dialect of English by those who did not wish to grant it the standing of a language. The grounds offered have always been political. The grounds for elevating it are now also political, and they are sufficient.

On the Distinctiveness of American Speech

The case for American as a language is not made on a single feature but on the convergence of many. American differs from English in vocabulary, in syntax, in phonology, in prosody, in idiom, and in the rate and direction of its lexical innovation. These differences are not the residue of colonial drift; they are the product of two and a half centuries of independent development on a continent of unprecedented linguistic diversity.

The most distinctive features of spoken American — its rhythmic and improvisational character, the velocity of its slang renewal, the syntactic flexibility of its informal register, its capacity to generate national speech from local invention — are not evenly distributed across its speakers. They are disproportionately the contribution of Black American speech communities, whose linguistic creativity has been the engine of American distinctiveness from the colonial period to the present.

To recognize American as a language is, in part, to recognize this contribution as foundational rather than peripheral. A standard that erases it is a standard for English. A standard that includes it is a standard for American.

On Precedent

This declaration does not innovate. It completes a project begun by Noah Webster in 1789 and elaborated by H. L. Mencken in 1919. Both men argued, in their own registers, that American had become a language and required institutional standardization. Neither was completed in his lifetime. The work has waited.

The American case is older than any of these. It has waited only on the institutional act.

On the Method of Standardization

A standard imposed by decree is brittle. A standard adopted by use is durable. The English-speaking world has never had a single decreed standard for English; it has had dictionaries, style guides, and academies that competed for adoption. The American standard, if it is to be a standard at all, must be produced by the same process.

To this end, two methodological camps are hereby recognized as the legitimate poles of the standardization debate:

The Webster Camp, in the prescriptive tradition, holding that a standard exists to be taught and that the question is what American should be.

The Mencken Camp, in the descriptive tradition, holding that a standard exists to record actual usage and that the question is what American is.

Each camp will publish its position on the contested points of American usage. The American Language Academy will host the debate, certify the votes, and publish the resulting standard on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the Republic, on the Fourth of July, Two Thousand and Twenty-Six.