"Languages for America": Race, Dialect, and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

I argue the process of institutionalizing linguistic stereotypes began as authors during the nineteenth century pursued ways of characterizing the voices of literary figures using nontraditional languages. Literary dialects became a method for visualizing perceived racial differences among various minority groups and influenced the stereotypes associated with each discourse community. In addition, several authors used dialects in literature to challenge these stereotypes and to create alternative narratives of the linguistic history of the United States. Consequently, this dissertation examines the development of a linguistic national consciousness as it evolved from the early national period to the first decade of the twentieth century. Authors such as Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Russell Lowell, Charles Godfrey Leland, Bret Harte, and Charles W. Chesnutt contributed to the growth of the American languages in significant ways. Brackenridge, for example, although considered one of the leading advocates of genocidal racism toward the treatment of Native Americans, used a number of dialects in Modern Chivalry, to capture the varieties of social discourse found on the American frontier during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Lowell, in The Biglow Papers, used a homespun Yankee dialect to question the political correctness of the US-Mexican War of 1847. After years of studying the social nature of languages such as Shelta and Romany, Leland created a dynamic German American immigrant named Hans Breitmann to question the correlation of languages with the essence of a person or ethnic group. Both Harte and Chesnutt used dialectal humor to illustrate the similarities and differences among minority cultures and mainstream society. Harte's Truthful James poems illuminated the racial tension between Caucasians and Asian Americans in the western frontier while Chesnutt's irony revealed the arbitrary nature of the color line that separated African Americans and white society at the turn of the twentieth century. Each of these authors used language to demonstrate that no single language, national identity, or racial stereotype could characterize the history of the American people. Dialect, as Walt Whitman said of language, is not "an abstract construction of the learn'd, or of dictionary-makers, but is something arising out of the work, needs, ties, joys, affections, tastes, of long generations of humanity, and has its bases broad and low, close to the ground." For Whitman and the authors in this study, language belonged to the people, and their choices to create linguistic change had a root cause in their desire to let it represent what they wanted to say and how they wanted to represent themselves