Veteran journalist and former co-anchor of the Public Broadcasting Company’s MacNeil / Lehrer Newshour, Robert MacNeil discussed his new documentary, “Do You Speak American?” and the accompanying book of the same title last night at Kresge Auditorium.

In both works, MacNeil explores the diversity and ongoing linguistic transformation of American English.

The documentary follows MacNeil on a cross-country journey from Nova Scotia, Canada, to Seattle, Wash. as he pursues what he called a “living narrative” of American English. The purpose of the film, he said, is to examine the form of American English in light of the language’s growing importance. Today, American speakers influence the language as much as British speakers did in the past, he said.

Each clip of the documentary addressed a particular linguistic aspect, which MacNeil explained in commentary following the screening.

MacNeil related the growing informality of the English language to the broadcasting phenomenon, acknowledging that it has contributed to the increasing conversational tone of even political rhetoric.

“Broadcasting in many ways led to the democratization of English,” he said. “It can give the impression that we’re drowning in a new wave of nonstandard and ungrammatical English.”

Jeff Foxworthy, a Southern comedian featured in the documentary, said in the film that he sometimes bases his standup routine on the prejudices against the often nonstandard, ungrammatical Southern dialect.

MacNeil, however, said that according to recent census data, the Southern dialect is the fastest growing English dialect in the nation.

“Northern contempt for the Southern dialect grew into something more friendly,” MacNeil said. “We’ve become accustomed to hearing Southern accents in the government, with four recent presidents from the South. We have a president who, when he chooses to, ‘talks country’ like many Americans do.”

He pointed to the contrast between the language used by President George W. Bush and the more complicated phrasing used by Sen. John Kerry, a New Englander and 2004 presidential candidate.

“[Bush’s] mode of communication seems to be in tune with an important part of the American spirit,” MacNeil said.

The influence of Latino and African-American minority communities on American English also featured prominently in the documentary. In Los Angeles, the Chicano street dialect shows that the Spanish of Latino immigrants is not a threat to the English language any more so than German or Italian were in the past, MacNeil said.

“Census data shows that young Hispanics are becoming Anglophones by the second or third generation,” MacNeil said. “The fear of Spanish influence on the English language is often expressed as the justification for making English the official language of the United States.”

He added that linguistics experts fear that making English official would be grounds for discrimination.

Linguistic profiling already exists, Macneil said, targeting African-American and Latino accents. The other segment of the documentary set in Los Angeles portrays the Los Angeles Unified School District’s attempt to teach “mainstream American English” to elementary school children in a program called the Academic English Mastery Program.

MacNeil said that the segment reminded him of the national furor over Ebonics in the mid-1990s.

“I found a certain amount of latent racism in the coverage of that debate,” he said. “Both white and black journalists would call Ebonics ‘gibberish.’ It’s not — it’s intelligible, which means that it’s a dialect by itself.”

Freshman Laura Holmes, who attended the event as part of her Program in Writing and Rhetoric class, “The Rhetoric of Literacy,” said that she discovered some of her own misconceptions about various types of English.

“I thought the discussion was really interesting,” she said. “Growing up in the East Bay, a farming community with a mix of Caucasians and Hispanic migrant workers, I didn’t know that Chicano English was different from African-American English. It gave me a new perspective.”

Communications Prof. Cliff Nass, who appears in the film, said that mismatched voices create distrust in listeners.

For example, people trust those who have voices that match those “appropriate” to their age, gender or race. However, Education and Linguistics Prof. John Baugh said that as an African American, he was taught that the manner he spoke in dictated how the outside community would perceive him.

“If I’m perceived as more trustworthy when I’m speaking the vernacular from my old neighborhood, why the hell did I work so hard to learn mainstream American English?” Baugh said.

At the end of the event, moderator Gordon Earle, University manager in the public affairs administration, asked MacNeil if he, in fact, “spoke American.” MacNeil responded that anyone who lives in America and uses the English language speaks American.

“One reason for the slightly facetious title is that all of us speak American,” MacNeil said. “As [comedian] Steve Harvey said in the documentary, there’s so much diversity in America, and there’s so many ways to speak it.”

The event marked MacNeil’s 13th stop in his 15-city book tour that will end in the Bay Area.