May I begin by stating an advance disclaimer of any intent on my part to disparage the work of any preceding scholar, North American or otherwise, or to assert that the problems I am examining are in any way peculiar to this continent. If most of my examples are chosen from the English of the Western hemisphere, and particularly from the United States, the choice simply reflects my own inexperience. Reared in another culture, one might have cited analogous examples from Northern Chinese, Russian, Hindi, Indonesian, Burmese, or Arabic. In fact, Kloeke and Leopold respectively — to cite random examples — have commented on the social forces operating to produce present-day Afrikaans and mid-century West German; and the debates over the shape of standard Norwegian and standard Czech are matters of historical record, along with the milder discussions of the nature of standard Canadian English.