Abstract:
Travelling in America in XIX century, a young representative of
the French aristocracy wrote an outstanding book “ Democracy in
America”. Our aim is to discuss the problem he stated in this book –
how American democracy modifies the English language and changes
the poetry .
Alexis de Tocqueville claimed that American English developed
through the process of modernizing the British language. Democracy
was oriented on practical aspects of speech whereas the aristocratic
Great Britain was inclined towards some ideal concept of language,
where the morphology was responsible for expressing the content.
Due to the influence of Spanish, which was considered to be the second
language in the USA, a linguistic context obtained the significant
function to form the sense of verbal expressions. It also increased
the emotional articulation of the words.
American democracy has been inclined to insert new words in
the language of a mother country, even if there was no necessity
for it. Through this innovation, the democratic nation showed the
advantage of practice before ideal theoretical constructions of the
aristocratic speech. That was the remarkable idea, which the young
author developed in one of the chapters of his book.
