Appendices
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StandardsYou're in a creative writing class discussing short story writing, and you say
The instructor of the course corrects you: "'He or she has', not 'they have'." How do you feel about being corrected in this way? Do you think the instructor was justified?
Just as it is normal to evaluate the religious beliefs and practices
and the
family behavior of particular individuals within our culture,
it is also normal to evaluate the linguistic behavior of people.
We may treat some speech and writing patterns as acceptable or
unacceptable, superior or inferior, appropriate or inappropriate.
Attitudes such as these must be based on a
standard, some idea of what counts as desirable behavior.
People who are concerned with defining and maintaining linguistic
standards are
prescribing (rather
than describing) language.
Why a standardOne reason for a linguistic standard is that people within a community (for example, a nation) will be better able to understand one another if they agree on a set of words and a set of rules for pronunciation, spelling, and grammar. The process of defining the rules (and sometimes the set of words as well) is called standardization. Once a standard has been agreed on, it can be used in the media and taught in the schools.
Japan provides a good example of
this process of standardization and promulgation of the standard.
Children all over Japan, speaking widely divergent dialects of Japanese,
are all taught to speak and write Standard Japanese in school, and
radio and television announcers are all expected to be familiar with
the standard vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar.
If these announcers were to speak in the southern dialect of Kagoshima
or the northern dialect of Aomori, A related, though often unstated, goal of a standard may be to eliminate diversity, which may be perceived as a threat to national unity. Sometimes the diversity is reflected in different, though closely related, dialects, but sometimes it is reflected in completely different languages. It is one thing to teach a standard in the schools across a country. It is another to discourage people from speaking their local dialects or languages (for more on dialects and languages, see the next section). Sometimes the native speakers of the non-standard dialects or languages become willing participants in this process in their desire to be integrated into the society.
In Japan, for example, standardization sometimes had the effect of
eliminating diversity.
In the case of the Ryukyu Islands, the southernmost region of Japan, the
dialects that are spoken there are so different from the standard and from one another that
they are usually considered multiple languages rather than dialects of Japanese. Finally a (never stated and perhaps often unconscious) purpose of a standard may be to exclude certain groups from power. If the standard is based on the speech of one group, either from a particular region or a particular class, then this gives people in that group an advantage when it comes to jobs and ultimately power. | |||||
Standard languages
and politics
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Clearly language standardization is a political issue, and as such it is not really the business of linguists (though it is studied by sociologists interested in the social and political aspects of language). However, as linguists often become closely involved with the people whose languages they study, they may become advocates for these groups when their languages or their well-being are threatened because of the language policies of governments.
Other reasons are often stated for prescribing language, though these
may mask the ultimate political reasons.
These reasons include the supposed illogical or ambiguous nature of some
constructions used by people, and linguists have also sometimes
gotten involved in the debate in these cases because of their
expertise.
An example is the use of English they, them,
and their to
refer to a single person, usually of unknown or unspecified gender, as in
the example in the box above. Where standards come from
If we are to define a set of standards for a community, they have
to come from somewhere.
One possibility for the source
is from other languages, and,
strange though this may seem, standardizers have sometimes resorted to it.
Take the "split infinitive",
Only slightly less extreme is the attempt to impose patterns from
earlier in the history of the language onto present-day speakers.
An example of this is the distinction between the first consonant
in which and the first consonant in witch.
For most speakers of American English and the English of England, there
is no distinction, but there used to be (and there still is in some
dialects, for example in Irish English and Southern (US) English). | |||||
It ain't about good and bad language;
it's about class and education
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If the standards come instead from among the speakers of the modern language, the question is which speakers. Language usage varies both with region and with social group, so if we want to standardize, we need to choose a region or group. As noted above, there are sometimes political considerations involved. In many countries, standard usage comes from the speech and writing of well-educated or upper-class people from a particular region, though the regional origin of the standard is not so clear in the case of the United States. For example, the current English standard prefers you aren't to you ain't because the latter form, although common in regional dialects all over the English-speaking world, is associated with uneducated speakers. Actually this argument only holds today. The history is more complicated. Ain't was once used by upper-class speakers, but prescriptive grammarians who felt that it was somehow "lazy" or "illogical" succeeded in mostly obliterating it from upper-class speech in the English-speaking world. See this short history of ain't from the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (2000).
Another example is the pronunciation of pairs of words like
pin/pen and since/sense as the same. How standards are enforcedGiven reasons for creating a standard and agreement on what constitutes the standard, there is the question of how the standard patterns are to be spread through the population. The obvious venue for this is the schools, and in many countries considerable attention is devoted to making sure students are familiar with the standard language of their community. Much of this involves simply exposing students to examples of (mostly written) texts in the standard, and this often has the desired effect, at least in the writing of the students. Sometimes the teaching of the standard involves attempts to prevent or undo frequent non-standard patterns of usage. Here we are sometimes dealing with standards that don't correspond well to the usage of any native speakers of the language, including educated adults. For example, teachers may try to get their children to stop using "singular they". Not surprisingly, efforts like this are mostly futile; children are likely to find it impossible to change their grammar in a way that doesn't match what they hear around them. | |||||
Trying to teach grammar to native speakers
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Although their efforts rarely seem to have an effect on children's speaking,
in a limited way they may affect the children's written language.
This is at least possible when the "rule" amounts to the prohibition
of a particular form, for example, ain't.
When it is more complicated, the prescribing may backfire, leading
to behavior that is not what the prescribers had in mind.
An interesting example is the use of "subjective" pronouns
(I, he, we, etc.) vs. "objective" pronouns
(me, him, us, etc.) in English.
In an attempt to prevent usages such as him and me are friends,
teachers have created a situation in which many speakers now say
with he and I, instead of with him and me, not at all
in accordance with the original intention of the teachers.
This is an example of hypercorrection In summary, we've seen two sorts of usages that people try to enforce, usually attempting to prevent an "incorrect" form. In one situation, there is a form perceived as incorrect, such as ain't, that is characteristic of speakers of some dialects but not normally part of the speech or writing of speakers of the standard dialect. In another sort of situation, there is a form perceived as incorrect, such as "singular they", which is used by many or most of the speakers of the standard dialect as well as by speakers of other dialects. In this second sort of situation, there is often disagreement about what should count as the standard, and it is this kind of case where linguists sometimes become involved because of their interest and expertise in what people actually say or write. (My advice is not to get involved in one of these arguments. For some reason it often seems hard for people, at least for English speakers, to be rational about what counts as "correct" or "incorrect".) I have focused on English. For a brief history of English "usage", that is, the concern for what is right and what is wrong in standard English, see this passage by E. Ward Gilman from the 1989 edition of Webster's Dictionary of English Usage. Not surprisingly, there are similar discussions and debates concerning usage in some other languages, though this sort of concern does not appear to be at all universal. Other evaluation of languageSo far we have looked at attempts to enforce linguistic standards on people. But people, especially composition and creative writing teachers, are also involved in evaluations of language based on other kinds of criteria. One is appropriateness, discussed in the last section. Appropriateness is one aspect of language that we continue to learn as adolescents and adults, and it is often explicitly taught. For example, a student might be corrected for using a word or phrase perceived as too casual in certain contexts, say, be into in the sense of 'be interested in' in an essay. Or an employee might be corrected by a colleague for calling his boss "dude". Another important kind of evaluation concerns the effectiveness of language. A usage may be grammatical and appropriate to the context but still not accomplish the speaker's or writer's goal. For example, language may be needlessly ambiguous, as in the following example.
A composition teacher might criticize the student's use of it in this sentence; does it refer to the coconut or the screwdriver? Or a use of language may fail to accomplish a higher-level goal of the speaker or writer. Consider the following example at the beginning of an argument.
A teacher might find the writer's point trivial and obvious and suggest leaving it out. These are all legitimate reasons for evaluating language of course. While linguists and other language scientists are not in the business of evaluating people's language, they can be of help by studying what appropriateness is, what makes an expression interpretable by a hearer or reader, and how the parts of a text relate to one another. Problems |