While at dinner at my hotel, a gentleman who was seated opposite to me—he was one of the few stout men, I believe the only one, I saw in America—accosted me with the remark ‘that he could not believe what he understood me to say, that I had not yet been a month in the country, because’—for this was his reason—‘I spoke the language so well. Or if I am to believe it,’ he went on, ‘I suppose you had an American tutor to teach you our language.’ I assured him that he had understood me rightly, and that I had never had the advantage of the instruction he considered necessary, nor was there such a great difference between the language of America and that of England as to make Englishmen feel the need of American tutors. ‘That, sir,’ he replied, ‘is by no means in accordance with my experience. I have myself conversed with Englishmen, and found their language very unlike our own. They seldom know where to use and where not to use the initial H. And their language is full of ungrammatical and vulgar expressions, from which ours is entirely free.’ [Sidenote: _The Language of America._] This gentleman’s mistake can be easily explained; and the explanation will show that it is one into which an American may very possibly fall. It is a remarkable fact that the English spoken in America is not only very pure, but also is spoken with equal purity by all classes. This in some measure, of course, results from the success of their educational efforts, and from the fact which arises out of it that they are, almost to a man, a nation of readers. But not only is it the same language without vulgarisms, in the mouths of all classes, but it is the same language without any dialectical differences over the whole continent. The language in every man’s mouth is that of literature and of society; spoken at San Francisco just as it is spoken at New York, and on the Gulf of Mexico just as on the great lakes. It is even the language of the negroes in the towns. There is nothing resembling this in Europe, where every county, as in England, or every province and canton, has a different dialect. Of this the philological observer I was dining with was ignorant. He only knew that all Americans spoke uniformly one dialect. He naturally therefore supposed that all Englishmen must do the same; and as his acquaintance with Englishmen was confined to poor immigrants, he imagined that their dialect was the language of all Englishmen.