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Authority in language: Investigating language prescription and standardisation
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 6, 2023
4.5
This was such an interesting read and I think a lot of people would benefit from it. It uncovers ideological judgements about language and speech that most people unconsciously perpetuate. Three important things I got from this:
1. the standards of written language (where there is no context and therefore meaning has to be clear) are often misapplied to the standards of spoken language, where there should be more flexibility because there is a social context to fill in the gaps.
2. a lot of the grammatical "rules" that are reinforced have only been invented in the past two centuries, especially the 18th c where people were obsessed with making English more like Latin!
e.g. the double negative ("I didn't do nothing") is condemned as "wrong" by teachers now, but Shakespeare often used it.
3. often non-standard languages actually allow for further linguistic nuance than the respected Standard English.
e.g. Northern Irish 'you'/'yous' allows for a plural second person which does not exist in modern Standard English.
This might not have been the most concise or well-written (whatever that means now I've been thinking about language judgements so much...) way of conveying the information. But it's the first of its kind that I've read, and I found it very eye-opening.
This was such an interesting read and I think a lot of people would benefit from it. It uncovers ideological judgements about language and speech that most people unconsciously perpetuate. Three important things I got from this:
1. the standards of written language (where there is no context and therefore meaning has to be clear) are often misapplied to the standards of spoken language, where there should be more flexibility because there is a social context to fill in the gaps.
2. a lot of the grammatical "rules" that are reinforced have only been invented in the past two centuries, especially the 18th c where people were obsessed with making English more like Latin!
e.g. the double negative ("I didn't do nothing") is condemned as "wrong" by teachers now, but Shakespeare often used it.
3. often non-standard languages actually allow for further linguistic nuance than the respected Standard English.
e.g. Northern Irish 'you'/'yous' allows for a plural second person which does not exist in modern Standard English.
This might not have been the most concise or well-written (whatever that means now I've been thinking about language judgements so much...) way of conveying the information. But it's the first of its kind that I've read, and I found it very eye-opening.
Displaying 1 of 1 review