If language in a contract is ungrammatical, what happens? Do courts typically try to suss out what was originally meant? Do they treat it as void since, as written, it doesn’t have meaning? Does it depend heavily on the particulars of the case? Etc.
IANAL, but I would guess that it still holds if the meaning is understandable to the average competent speaker. What about dialects? If a contract is written in AAVE and says “If the customer don’t be paying $50 a month, the company will cut of the phone service, word.”, how could that be void? This sounds especially problematic in English speaking countries because there is no standard language regulator to adjudicate on grammar or vocabulary. I could possibly see a French-language court deferring to the Academie francaise or the Office quebecois de la langue francaise, but an Anglophone court? Who is the judge going to call for a ruling on past tense usage, your third grade teacher Mrs. Spinkle?
If the language was truly not intelligible (e.g. “Service nonchalant mother Ipswitch payment defenestration dude $39.95 golly on either side the river lie”), or the grammatical error made the contract vague/subject to multiple interpretations (e.g. “Customer pay $50 month”, which could mean $50 a month or could mean $50 for this month), I could potentially see the contract being ruled void.
IANAL, but…
IIRC, if the dispute pops up after a while, they also look to see what both sides seem to have accepted as the meaning of the agreement. you can’t say"I see it means only $50 for just one month" after you’ve paying $50/month for a year. You obviously seem to have agreed in the first place to the monthly fee…
Unless the contract is unambigously obvious - “$50 only first month” and you say “oops, I didn’t read it carefully until now.” But trying to change the terms after you both seem to be abiding by one understanding for a while, unless it’s obvious - may not fly.
In addition to what’s been said:
It’s possible that courts can use existing laws to help fill in gaps. Certain kinds of legal documents - like leases, partnership agreements, wills, product purchases under the UCC - have a body of law behind them that provide “defaults” that can apply when a legal document omits certain provisions or is unclear. In some cases, these laws can even override a written provision that wasn’t legal to have included.
Even if the courts decided that the entire document was meaningless, they’d still try to enforce whatever agreement the parties appeared to agree to. Verbal and implied contracts are messy, but they are frequently valid from a legal standpoint.