Traveling the language trail

In the linguistic travelogue “Do You Speak American?,” airing tonight on PBS, Robert MacNeil (former host with Jim Lehrer of “The NewsHour”) investigates the modern adventures of our gloriously unruly tongue -- not merely what is said, but how it’s said, both the words we use and the way we shape them.

A sequel to his 1986 series “The Story of English,” it is a paean to “our rich diversity, the strong pull of local identity, the joys of jargon and slang” -- one of those invigorating airings of the American quilt that, avoiding questions of foreign policy and school prayer, inspires one to love his multifarious neighbors.

Organized as a continental road trip, from “over yonder” to “as if,” through “dropped Gs” and “intrusive Rs” and shifted vowels and “fronted oo’s” (the California-born vowel formation that turns “for sure” into “fer sher”), with MacNeil at the wheel of a series of rental cars, one of which can talk. It is a long but eminently smooth ride, whose prime-time-filling three hours merely skim the surface of a subject from which a thousand doctoral dissertations might bloom.

The former anchorman travels fields and forests, back roads and bayous, cities and towns -- from New York to Rabbit Hash, Ky., to the Texas village of El Cenizo, whose mayor in 1999 declared Spanish its official language -- listening to cowboys, fishermen, farmers, fiddlers, rappers, truckers, teenagers, surfers, skateboarders, a few minor celebrities and a passel of excitable linguists. We learn the many uses of “like” (it’s not just the new “um”), hear U.S. Marines attempt to discuss sexual sensitivity in the coed military, and are told that when the Volkswagen Beetle finally gets its voice, “It would be a very present, rich voice, almost certainly female, because of the nature of the curviness of the car, and a great deal of enthusiasm and energy, and, you know, not too flighty, because after all, it is a car.”

“England and America are two countries divided by the same language,” George Bernard Shaw noted, but America itself is divided by competing versions of English. “Do You Speak American?” works in part as pocket social history, touching on issues of slavery and immigration, of class and race and education. Black and “mainstream” English are actually getting further apart, notes MacNeil, and “the implications are pretty sobering. More separate languages mean more separate people.”

Starchy theater critic John Simon appears briefly as a voice of resistance -- the trajectory of American English is “unhealthy, poor, sad, depressing and probably fairly hopeless” -- but the prevailing impulse of the series is to celebrate: We are heading, says the host, “not into the sunset of our language, as some fear, but a continuous new dawn.”

English is a strong language, and a world language, precisely because it is flexible, because it accepts newcomers without prejudice -- all those huddled adverbs yearning to breathe free. It’s the way the country is supposed to work, gal durn it. Walt Whitman’s view -- “Our language is not an abstract construction of dictionary makers, but has its basis broad and low, close to the ground” -- strikes the dominant note.

In the life of the culture, history is on the side of the street, of variation and mutation. That’s where the fun is, and where beauty creeps in.

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‘Do You Speak American?’

Where: KCET

When: 8-11 tonight

Rating: TV-PG/L. Strong language.

Robert MacNeil...Reporter/Host

Executive producers, Susan L. Mills and Jody Sheff. Director, Willliam Cran. Writers, Robert MacNeil and William Cran.