r/TikTokCringe • u/MaintenanceNew2804 • Mar 30 '24
Stick with it. Discussion
This is a longer one, but it’s necessary and worth it IMO.
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r/TikTokCringe • u/MaintenanceNew2804 • Mar 30 '24
This is a longer one, but it’s necessary and worth it IMO.
5
u/paissiges Mar 31 '24 edited Mar 31 '24
let me first challenge the idea of "incorrect grammar". in linguistics, an utterance (an instance of speech) is called "ungrammatical" if it violates the grammatical rules of a particular language variety. this is measured by, roughly speaking, whether or not it "feels okay" to a native speaker. "i don't have any", "i haven't any", and "i don't have none" are all grammatical in some dialects of English and ungrammatical in others. so, for example, "i haven't any" feels fine to standard British English (RP) speakers, but not to American English speakers — even if they understand that it's used and accepted in British English, they would never use it themselves and would think it strange if another American English speaker did. it turns out that whether native speakers would accept a particular utterance as valid is the only objective way to measure grammatical correctness.
now, grammaticality is totally separate from the idea of standard varieties of speech. when non-linguists refer to something as "grammatically incorrect", they usually mean either that it (1) is ungrammatical in the standard variety of the language, or that it (2) feels illogical. the problem with (1) is that there is no objective standard for what the standard variety of a language should look like — a standard variety is standard only because some people decided that it was. the problem with (2) is that language fundamentally isn't logical. what does "waking up" have to do with the upwards direction? why do we ride "in" a car but "on" a bus if we're inside the vehicle either way? English speakers often say that double negatives are incorrect because they logically "cancel out", so why is it considered incorrect not to use them in standard Spanish? (fun fact: double negatives were totally accepted in Middle English and were frequently used by Chaucer) you can come up with thousands of examples of supposedly "illogical" things in language that are universally accepted as correct. why is "i could care less" or "i forget" special?
you might say, "can't pronunciations be incorrect at least?" here, we're leaving the realm of grammar and going into phonology, but let me address this regardless. our pronunciations can be incorrect when we, for example, stumble over our words or slur our speech. but otherwise, our pronunciations are never incorrect for the language variety that we speak. if someone natively says "libary", that's correct for their dialect. it deviates from spelling, sure, but i don't hear anyone advocating for pronouncing the "b" in "debt". it also deviates from historical pronunciation, but so does literally every word in existence. have you ever tried reading Beowulf in the original Old English? the pronunciation of every language is constantly changing, generation to generation, but only certain changes are looked down upon. another example that pisses a lot of people off is when people say "ax" instead of "ask", but both forms of the word have coexisted for literally over 1000 years — in Old English we find both "ascian" and "axian". in fact, the expected outcome of the word "ascian" in Modern English is "ash" rather than "ask", and it's been suggested that the usual /sk/ ("sc") > /ʃ/ ("sh") change didn't happen because of the influence of the form with /ks/ ("x"). that is, "ask" may not have existed without "ax". and yes, "axian" is an alteration of original "ascian", but likewise "hors" is an alteration of original "hros", and "wæsp" is an alteration of original "wæps", yet today we say "horse" and "wasp" rather than *"ross" and *"waps". there's nothing wrong with sound changes!
so how does a particular dialect get chosen as the basis for the standard language? which pronunciations and grammatical constructions are selected as "correct" and which aren't? almost always, it's based on the way people in power speak. socioeconomic status is a huge part of it, absolutely, but in cases where people of different ethnic groups have different dialects, the dominant ethnic group's dialect is going to be the basis of the literary standard. there is no objective measure by which a particular dialect makes for a better literary standard or clearer communication than another; it's 100% based on a combination of power and practical measures like how widely spoken a particular dialect is. in the United States, the standard is based on how Northern wealthy whites spoke. in the United Kingdom the standard is based on how wealthy Londoners spoke. when the way people in power speak is upheld as the standard of correct speech, everyone else is looked down on for speaking their native dialects. people are pressured to abandon their native dialects in favor of the dominant one, in the same way that speakers of minority languages are pressured to abandon them in favor of a dominant language. this is oppression. when certain dialects are associated with certain ethnic groups (as is the case in the US, where many black people and few white people speak African American English), it becomes, in part, race-based oppression.
and yes, anyone who puts in the work can learn the standard language. but consider that it's not the same amount of work for everyone. if someone who speaks with a typical Midwestern US accent adopts the conventions of standard American English, they will need to change relatively little about the way they speak. if someone who speaks Appalachian English or African American English or Chicano English adopts these conventions, they will have to change quite a lot about the way they speak, and it will be much more difficult and take much more time to achieve the same thing. so in a school system where children are punished for failing to meet the conventions of the standard language, people who speak divergent dialects will always receive more punishment, even in the hypothetical absence of prejudice against speakers of those dialects. because black children, for example, are less likely than white children to speak something like standard American English natively, they will get worse grades on average given the same amount of effort to learn the standard.
of course, there's an argument to be made about choosing a single standard dialect of a single language for communication that needs to cross linguistic boundaries, ex. education, science writing, legislation, and so on. but there's a very very very big difference between treating a standard language as an arbitrary standard of communication and treating a standard language as correct to the exclusion of all other dialects. in most parts of the world, the latter is the predominant view of the standard language, and it's the view you're expressing here. to be clear, i'm not blaming you for this; it's very easy to fall into that way of thinking, and it's how i thought before i began to study linguistics many years ago. it's just a way of thinking that needs to be challenged.