In Defense of Linguistic Prescriptivism

Those of you who know me know that one of my biggest hobbies is linguistics. I'm not fluent in anything but English, but I regularly dabble in many different languages, trying to sort them out like fluid puzzles. It helps me realize how cloistered we unilingual (read: American) folks really are, especially when I see variations on the most basic parts of human syntax.

Like anything else, language is bombarded by various colorful and interesting opinions about how it should be used. You've heard some of them. Perhaps you think everyone who moves to your country should learn to speak your language, or perhaps you think it's wrong for the supermarket express lane to indicate its use for fifteen items or less rather than fewer.

I'm concerned with both of these issues, but my real beef is with the latter. After all, I could find enough well-informed people to nod their heads if I chose to rail about how closed-minded America is, and how much smarter we could become if we tried to become bi- or tri-lingual. What bothers me is how many well-informed and well-intentioned people condemn the practice of regulating grammar. The most prominent modern linguists divide their practice into two schools:

linguistic descriptivism - the method of studying language by observation and analysis, focusing on what people actually say and how their brains construct meaning

linguistic prescriptivism - the method of meddling with language in pursuit of better communication; for example, teaching that the double negative, "We don't have no milk," is less logical than a single negative, "We don't have any milk." (This example was actually the result of English scholars trying to standardize the many foreign influences that had worked their way into English grammar. They decided to condemn the double negative because, for lack of a better preference, it was inconsistent with classical Greek logic. Many world languages and recognized dialects of English, such as Ebonics, use it.)

Now, in all of the post-1950 books and all of the blogs I've read on the subject, descriptivism is the way to go. Actually, people can be quite nasty in their dislike of people who want to influence language by way of standardizing it (see Tom Scott or Steven Pinker). They have good reasons: everyone has, at some point, been leapt upon by a grammar Nazi who wasn't even part of the conversation. But beyond this, professional linguists and hobbyists are almost universal in their wish for language diversity. The fact that English, Mandarin, and Arabic are devouring endangered languages at a rate of one every three months is, to us, as great a tragedy as the loss of endangered species to habitat destruction. After all, language diversity is the best display of the potential range of human thought, without which we waste countless opportunities for creativity and understanding.

My friends, the direct opposite of this is standardization.

Yet it's possible to take all of this too far. Grammarians who speak about correct versus incorrect speech don't always have a reason beyond having learned a rule out of context in middle school, but it's worth listening to those who speak about useful speech. Whether or not I think it's correct to mention ten items or less, "fewer" is a word that creates additional associations in the brain. With scarcely any more effort, we become conscious of two ways in which quantity is divided. This is the kind of linguistic variation that speakers ought to pursue, and precisely what universal standard languages are beginning to weed out. My dream is not a limiting prescriptivism, by which immigrants must learn English and clods spend all their time worrying about the differences between "affect" and "effect," but a prescribed expansion of language. Let us create new terms and understandings! You don't even need institutional authority to do that, as any dialect could show you.

My formula for linguistic prescriptivism is a simple one, and these are its components:

1. Become proficient in at least two kinds of grammar. These don't necessarily need to be of two different languages. For example, you may have noticed that you write differently from the way you speak. This is especially true if you write a lot, or if you use tone significantly to express meaning. But if you're aiming not to be bilingual, but to examine your own English more closely, make sure you can find many potential deviations in the way you communicate.

2. Use standard grammar as a starting point. This point is where I'd like to draw the most ire from descriptivists. Communication affects individual thought, but its strength is tested better in group situations such as, for example, whether an entire community can understand each other. This is standard grammar. Descriptivists and I have it backwards; their logic implies that language is a piece of individual property which adjusts to fit group standards. Pinker supports this with his thesis that each infant creates language from scratch. But I prefer to think that language is a body of collective reasoning that each individual adjusts for himself. To me, this fits better with the examples of deaf individuals who, passing the adolescent window of rapid linguistic development, never develop the logical processes that neurologists associate with language. We all have to start from somewhere, and that place is the group of reasoning skills we get from hearing people communicating using rules that were decided before we were born.

3. Use your own reasoning to experiment. Do you think you can express yourself better? Do it! Here's an example: I think it's more efficient to refer to a hypothetical individual as someone of your own gender. Instead of "he or she," I say "he." If I were a woman, I'd say "she." That's nowhere in any English rule book I know, but it doesn't make me any harder to understand. And it's how language has always evolved.

4. Be respectful of other people's speech. You are never "right," and they are never "wrong." It can be counterproductive to tell someone that you speak better than he, when his rules make just as much sense to him as yours do to you. And if that ain't enough reason, courtesy is right.

5. Don't be afraid to talk about speech. I worry about descriptivists making the same mistake about "politically correct" fanatics: in taking the underdog's side, they refuse to speak objectively about any of the underdog's issues. In this case, people who think a certain dialect should be given higher esteem may refuse to hear any merits of the mother language, or even any valueless comparisons of the two. This is just a way for elitists to take the high road. Don't stifle communication! Act on a microscopic scale: talk to your friend about why you say "fewer" when he says "less," or vice versa. Don't do it to change him; do it to help the two of you understand each other better.

Please tell me your thoughts. This theory of mine is in its infancy, and still highly disorganized. I'd love to hear feedback from anyone, whether you think you know more or less than I do.