Yes. There is a dialect of English known as Standard American English, and it’s generally the dialect of writing (in the United States), television, and, really, most of the media.
I specifically said that public education ought to teach SAE, since it’s a lot harder to be successful without a mastery of the dialect.
If you say so. I’d say you go on to demonstrate your true feelings quite clearly later on.
Only if you decide that a lot of the greatest writers in the history of the English language were “incorrect”. William Shakespeare didn’t go to college - perhaps that’s why he used so many “incorrect” forms, inventing words whole cloth. And then the foolish masses followed suit, using those words over and over until they became inextricably bound to our language! Goddamn plebes, fucking everything up.
It amazes me how the lens of history makes people forget things like this. Shakespeare was popular entertainment. He was closer to Joel Bruckheimer than Robert Altman. It so happens that he was singularly talented, and so his works have survived when many of his contemporaries’ didn’t. But his theaters were filled with just the sort of people you seem to despise. They were closer to the audience on Jerry Springer than the crowd at a Kubrick flick.
You’re talking here about expertise in a particular subject matter. How much expertise do you have in language? Are you a linguist? Are you even a writer? Actually, if you ask those who do possess expertise in the field - linguists - they’ll agree that this sort of prescriptivism is wrong. I’m a student of linguistics, and my own views are definitely informed by my studies.
Ironically, you’re advocating something quite opposite from seeing a lawyer about matters of law. You’re one of those people who thinks that speaking English and having a college degree makes one qualified to pass judgment on it. Hell, I have a body. Doesn’t that make me a doctor? Most “educated” people have virtually no understanding of linguistics, and with the decline in the popularity of the liberal arts education, frankly, most people have a depressing lack of knowledge of literature as well - even among the highly educated.
SAE is the medium of education. It’s not superior to other dialects; it simply happens to be the prestigious dialect in the United States. And what you need to understand is that the dialect (or, in many cases, the language) that assumes power is mostly the result of a historical accident. For instance, as the Reconquista took back bits of land in northern Spain from Muslim rule, several dialects (later to evolve into separate languages) emerged: in Galicia, Galego-Portuguese. In Asturias, Asturian. Around the city of Burgos, Castilian. In Aragon, Aragonese, and in Catalunya, Catalan. Each of these languages became the language of a small kingdom, but due to political history, Castile became culturally dominant (though it competed heavily with Catalunya for hundreds of years.) It’s only a historical accident that Castilian became the language of education in Spain, and yet today languages like Asturian and Aragonese are stigmatized as backwater, uneducated languages. Had Aragon’s command of the Mediterranean lasted, however, the situation today might be quite different, and Castilian might instead have ended up some obscure language tucked up in Spain’s north.
Similar things happened in France. Provençal, once the language of the troubadours and thus popular throughout Europe, faded in importance when the Francien-speakers in the north ended up with political control of France. Thus, the language now known as French has mostly displaced Provençal, and again, the latter is now considered a hick language.
Did the languages that lost so much prestige somehow change qualitatively? Why did the language that once entertained all of Europe fade away and become associated with ruralness and a lack of education? I offer these examples to demonstrate the fact that the dialect that happens to be associated with those in political power always seems to become the “educated” dialect; there is no objective basis for claiming one language is superior to another. It’s easier to see from the outside, since United Statesians are generally a little less emotionally invested in Spanish or French than in English, and I hope that these examples have demonstrated that linguistic prestige is fleeting and not connected to any particular qualities of the language or dialect in question.
So what about words with multiple accepted pronunciations? “Ah-mond” or “all-mond”? “Ap-pricot” or “ay-pricot”? What does it indicate about a speaker if they pronounce “Mary”, “merry”, and “marry” as homonyms (as is true in most of the United States) as opposed to using a separate vowel in each one? In some U.S. dialects, “writer” and “rider” are homonyms, but as a Michigander, my dialect has Canadian Raising, which means that they’re /rUI 4@r/ and /raI 4@r/, respectively, for me. Who’s wrong on this issue?
There’s tons of linguistic variation we accept without question. If you maintain that some dialectual variation is acceptable and some is not, how do you decide which “alternate” forms are okay? Who speaks correctly? I don’t know anyone who really speaks newscaster-style SAE in their everyday life.
So what makes you right? What is it about the forms you use that makes them superior to those used by speakers of other dialects? I’ve broken down several times why, for linguistic reasons, “nucular” is unremarkable alongside quite a few accepted standard forms. I’ve explained why I don’t think linguistic prescriptivism is justifiable. I’ve demonstrated just how arbitrary the chioce of “standard” can be. So what makes you right? I don’t care about your emotional reaction to hearing speakers of other dialects, and I’m not swayed by your histrionics regarding the “corruption” of your language. I’ve heard it all before, and I’ve amply demonstrated in previous posts that these “corruptions” soon become normal forms. Should we go back to saying “thrid”? Should we roll back the Great Vowel Shift (it’d actually do some good in making spellings more reasonable)? Did you know that the original word for “apron” was “napron”? Yep, this was an example of wrong cutting: “a napron” was misanalyzed by speakers as “an apron”. Same deal with “umpire”. Should we fix those?
If you’re claiming that one particular dialect is superior to others, why? What about your dialect makes it better than everyone else’s? Why is yours pure and precise, and others’ “corrupt”? What makes the correct forms correct? Why are the masses wrong? Didn’t the masses - those with “numbers on their side”, as you put it - create the English language? What, is the linguistic legacy of those barbaric Teutonic tribes the equivalent of a “fixer-upper” house - it needs folks like you to somehow restore its purity and dignity? Because for over a millenium, English survived a population that was almost universally illiterate. It survived enormous dialectual variation within England itself (and dialect variation on Britain still dwarves anything you’ll see in the United States.) How did it totter along all those years if its dignity and beauty are so fragile that a couple non-standard forms threaten to destroy it?
You used the word “corrupt”, which implies that there is a certain purity to English, though presumably only when it’s spoken by literate people with college degrees. This “purity” is pure fantasy, though. English survived being considered the rustic tongue of ignorant swineherds after the Normans conquered in 1066. Hell, the oldest piece of literature in the language is about some dude named Beowulf slaying monsters - Plato’s Republic it ain’t. There is no “pure” form of English, untouched by the hands of the illiterate, and there never was. There are the semi-artificial standard forms, most notoriously Received Pronunciation (the dialect of Britain’s aristocracy during the 19th century and most of the 20th), whose dialectual features truly were almost entirely artificial. There’s just nothing to corrupt, because there is no “basic” or “original” or “correct” form to corrupt. There’s just a lot of separate forms that exist alongside each other - as in the example of “ask” that I cited in an earlier post. “Ax” has existed as another pronunciation of the word for over a thousand years! And yet it’s still considered to be an illiterate corruption of the language. I don’t buy it.
People shouldn’t be shamed for the speech of their native community. Southerners shouldn’t be ridiculed for having southern accents. People from Washington state shouldn’t be ridiculed for pronouncing “Don” and “Dawn” with the same vowel (the phonemic distinction between those two vowels seems to be rapidly disappearing in North American English.) Black people who grow up speaking AAVE shouldn’t be ridiculed for it. That’s what I’m saying.
