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The American Language

An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States

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The American Language

By: H. L. Mencken
Narrated by: Rebecca H. Lee
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American author, scholar, and satirist H.L. Mencken wrote The American Language in 1919, intending to defend American speech from prescriptivist critics. "America itself is unutterably vulgar. But vulgarity, after all, means no more than a yielding to natural impulses in the face of conventional inhibitions, and that yielding to natural impulses is at the heart of all healthy language-making."

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Public Domain (P)2021 Rebecca H. Lee
Linguistics United States English Language Development

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