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Linguistic Liberation

Pedantry has always been popular. For most of the history of the English language, trends have favored those with an eye for corrections, whether that’s on the level of snarky coffee mugs correcting “their” to “they’re” or the level of “Your entire pronunciation system is deviant, let me fix that for you!” (see: My Fair Lady). I don’t pretend to be a lifelong abstainer from this sort of behavior—in middle school, I ran an (in hindsight deeply embarrassing and irritating) account devoted to catching spelling errors. But I’ve learned that pedantry folds easily into prescriptivism, a deeply harmful, unscientific, and reactionary linguistic philosophy that ignores basic truths about language and its sociological relation to the modern world.

To define prescriptivism, and its greatly preferable analogue, descriptivism, take the idea of dictionaries. A prescriptivist would write a dictionary intended to tell us how words should be used, include only those the author deemed “proper English,” et cetera. In the words of Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper, prescriptivists are those who would claim that “the dictionary is some great guardian of the English language, that its job is to set boundaries of decorum around this profligate language.” And, to continue with Stamper, this is actually “not how dictionaries work at all.” Rather, they are descriptive—they show us language as people use it in reality, not hemmed in according to some obsolete set of arbitrary usage rules. Who cares if originally the word “literally” meant only “in a completely accurate way”? It is now used with incredible frequency to also have the meaning of “in effect, virtually,” so the dictionary records both, without judgment or opinion. And many of these commonly cited “rules” are generally irrelevant—nobody bothered to move prepositions away from the ends of their sentences until a seventeenth-century poet decided English ought to look more like Latin; even the literary giant Jane Austen used the word “ain’t” in her writings. As Stamper writes, “Standard English as presented by grammarians and pedants is a dialect that is based on a mostly fictional, static, and Platonic ideal of usage… it doesn’t preserve English so much as pickle it.” 

Descriptivism in the field of linguistics has a slightly broader implementation than just lexicography: it also has to do with the “white lab coat mindset.” That is, linguistics is a science, and it is seriously harmful to the pursuit of accurate research to impose onto findings our (often incorrect and biased) ideas of what “correct” language use is. 

With this in mind, we can analyze the harms of clinging to the archaisms of prescriptivism. Yes, it reflects a poor understanding of the nature of language change and of the purpose of recording linguistic information, but prescriptivism and related preconceptions about language also harm historically marginalized groups. 

Consider the example of gender-neutral pronouns, particularly the singular “they” and neopronouns like xe/xir/xirs or ze/hir/hirs. Prescriptivists tend to object to their usage with claims about grammatical correctness. But these are all entirely valid forms of reference; a descriptivist would argue that because they have extensively documented meaning and usage, including the use of the singular “they” going back to Shakespeare, they are perfectly acceptable. Neopronouns may not be historical, but they are no different than any other neologism or “artificial” word, many of which entered the language long ago and would never be considered off-limits now (brunch, laser, malware…). Moreover, it is quite revealing when one cares about relatively unimportant and obscure rules of grammar (which most people don’t follow in their everyday speech) more than one cares about allowing others to feel comfortable and have basic truths about themselves respected. Here, prescriptivism is a thin veneer for transphobia. Objections made to gender-neutral language on the basis of grammar are no different in effect than those made on the basis of explicit transphobia, so prescriptivism only compounds this form of oppression. 

Prescriptivist ideology also serves to bolster classist and racist perceptions. Dialects like African-American Vernacular English (AAVE), Spanglish, Appalachian English, and others, especially those spoken by the working class and/or people of color, have their own internal grammars and patterns, in the same way that more widely recognized dialects like British English do. (In this case, it is important to distinguish between the two senses of “grammar”—here, I refer not to the common interpretation of grammar as little rules about where to put a comma, but rather to the overall structure and functioning of a language, and what speakers of that language construct as meaningful phrases/sentences versus unintelligible ones.) AAVE is not “bad English” for using words like “ain’t,” structures like double negatives, and other differentiations from “Standard American English.” As UPenn linguist Taylor Jones says, AAVE, along with similar in-group dialects, “is entirely rule-bound… If you do not conform to the grammar of AAVE, the result is ungrammatical sentences in AAVE.” However, despite this fact, prescriptivists tend to let their opinions about “proper language use” shade their perceptions and treatment of speakers of these dialects. Or perhaps, they use “grammar” as an excuse to allow their already negative biases to come through. Chicken and egg, but the effects are certainly demonstrable. According to Taylor, “We have a long cultural history of assuming that whatever black people in America do is defective. Couple this with what seems to be a natural predilection toward thinking that however other people talk is wrong, and you’ve got a recipe for social and linguistic stigma…. There is absolutely nothing wrong with AAVE, but it is stigmatized for social and historical reasons, related to race, socioeconomic class, and prestige.” Prescriptivism allows for this perpetuation of racism and classism on a pseudo-scientific basis—when in actuality, the truly scientific attitude fostered by descriptivism would indicate that the opposite attitude is correct. 

The same principle often goes for the treatment of endangered languages. Colonialism contributes to a conceit that certain languages with very few speakers are “less advanced” or “less interesting for study” or “less sophisticated,” though in truth it would be very challenging to make an objective judgment in this regard without stooping to insidious prejudices about the “value” of different cultures. Anyone who buys into what is essentially the linguistic form of race science is, consciously or not, proliferating the problems with prescriptivist ways of thinking. The inverse is true as well: that anyone who engages in prescriptivism at a level less than full-on colonialism is part of the same beast that contributes to the normalization of larger-scale counterrevolutionary practices. The end result of allowing such treatment of endangered languages to continue is their eventual extinction, a terrible loss for both the communities that used to speak them and for our world’s overall cultural diversity. Thankfully, preservation of these languages is a more common topic of study and practice now, but the fact remains that the continued fostering of prescriptivism allows for disdainful attitudes towards minority languages and subsequently towards their speakers.

Linguistics ought to have a focus on societal consciousness, and it is not the only scientific discipline that sometimes lacks this attention. Descriptivism, however, allows us a lens through which to approach language while simultaneously having an awareness of the social forces operating behind the scenes, to be rigorous and therefore to remove both scientific and cultural bias. 

This is not a niche issue—we all come into contact with language every day of our lives. We all have a stake in the effects of the restrictiveness of prescriptivism, especially in an environment like Princeton where many of us are encountering people who speak in ways we’ve never heard before. Language is beautiful and liberatory and powerful when used freely. Let’s keep that in mind the next time we hear an unfamiliar dialect—in the words of linguist Gretchen McCulloch, “Not judging your grammar, just analyzing it.”

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