Americana: Harpin' Boont in Boonville

The United States is a land of many languages, dialects, accents and vocabularies. English is not necessarily the first language of the American Indian or the Chinese American, the Spanish American or the American Jew, all of whom inherited ancient tongues. But apart from children's pig Latin and the pidgin English still employed occasionally in Hawaii, one of the oldest invented languages in the U.S. was devised and survives in the California hamlet of Boonville. TIME Correspondent Timothy Tyler visited there recently and tried to speak with the people. Here is his report.

The road had been hairpin turns through...

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