Review

Professor Marckwardt describes the principal variations between the language of the United States and that of Great Britain, and within the United States itself, as to vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar.As the variations are described, they are accounted for in terms of processes observable in Anlerican linguistic and cultural history.The book attempts to present its material "in the light of a consistent interpretation centering about the fundamental relationship between language and culture."(vii) "Whole topics -such as immigrant English, slang, and technical vocabularies -have either been omitted entirely or touched upon very slightly because they seem to have only a minor bearing upon the principal thesis ... " (viii) There is a separate chapter devoted to names in American English and a concluding chapter on the future of English.Any ne,v book in this field suggests comparison to its outstanding predecessors -Krapp's The English Language in America, Mencken's The American Language, and Pyles's Words and Ways of .American English.The present book is, first of all, more concise than the earlier books in the field.Rather than presenting encyclop edic reference nlaterial in the Mencken manner, Marckwardt has selected his data carefully, with a view to illustrating his thesis as economically as possible.Only in Chapter 5, "Yankee Ingenuity and the Frontier Spirit," does one feel that the inherent interest of the examples has caused the author temporarily to lose sight of his principal purpose.Second, as is to be expected, the Marckwardt book is based on more recent scholarship than any of its predecessors and, therefore, supplements these earlier works in some respects and corrects mistakes in others.The most valuable supplement is Chapter 7, "Regional and Social Variations," which makes available to the general reader information previously contained only in highly specialized sources.There are, however, as will be indicated below, errors that need correction and questions

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