Overview

"The story of how English became American--and how it became Southern, Bostonian, Californian, African American, Chicano, elite, working-class, urban, rural, and everything in between By the time of the Revolution, the English that Americans spoke was recognizably different from the British variety. Americans added dozens of new words to the language, either borrowed from Native Americans (raccoon, persimmon, caucus) or created from repurposed English (backwoods, cane brake, salt lick). Americans had their own pronunciations (bath rhymed with hat, not hot) and their own spelling (honor, not honour), not to mention a host of new expressions that grew out of the American landscape and culture (blaze a trail, back track, pull up stakes). Americans even invented their own slang, like stiff as a ringbolt to mean drunk. American English has continued to grow and change ever since. The United States of English tells the engrossing tale of how the American language evolved over four hundred years, explaining both how and why it changed and which parts of the ""mother tongue"" it preserved (I guess was heard in the British countryside long before it became a typical Americanism). Plentiful examples of the American vernacular, past and present, bring the language to life and make for an engaging as well as enlightening listen."

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Rosemarie Ostler is a freelance writer with a PhD in linguistics from the University of Washington. She is the author of five books about the history of American English and numerous articles on language-related topics. Her work has appeared in American History, the Saturday Evening Post, Christian Science Monitor, Time.com, Atlas Obscura, and the Writer, among others. Christa Lewis and her pseudonym Pippa Jayne have narrated 265 audiobooks between them. Christa is a conservatory trained actor with a smart and funny vibe who can also meet the moment in nonfiction thanks to a seventeen-year stint as a newsreader. Christa speaks accent-free German fluently and offers a variety of accents and dialects. Magically, there have been eight AudioFile Earphones Awards in nonfiction/biography and memoir, YA, and fiction-as well as a SOVAS Voice Arts Award, a Sultry Listeners Award, a Listeners Choice Award, and two Audie nominations.

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