Attitudes to language
Studying language in a systematic, dispassionate way is surprisingly hard. Public debate about it slides all too often into name-calling and heated rhetoric. Since a language belongs to all who use it, almost everyone assumes a right to pronounce on how it should be handled — and when such views clash, tempers flare quickly. A quarrel over a tiny point of wording can erupt as readily as one over sweeping decisions about how language is taught.
On top of this, the way we speak and write is on constant display, so any departure from expected usage is easy to spot and to condemn. Hardly any corner of social life escapes this scrutiny: the judgements we form about a person's character, cleverness, standing in society, schooling and fitness for a job are all coloured, at least partly, by the language they produce. Little wonder that a careless attack on someone's speech can wound deeply, and that those delivering it are hurt in turn.
Put broadly, prescriptivism maintains that a single form of a language is inherently worth more than any competing form, and that this superior version ought to be spread across the whole community of speakers. Grammar and vocabulary are where the case is pressed most firmly, though pronunciation attracts frequent comment too. The form picked out for approval is usually some version of the standard written language — the sort met with in literature, or in the careful spoken style that echoes it most closely. Anyone keeping to it is said to handle the language properly, while whatever strays from it earns the label 'wrong'.
Every major language has been examined through this prescriptive lens, above all in the grammars and dictionaries produced during the eighteenth century. Three ambitions lay behind the work of those early grammarians. To begin with, they set out to codify their language's underlying principles, proving that an orderly system lay concealed beneath the apparent muddle of daily usage. They also hoped to furnish a means by which arguments over acceptable usage might be resolved. Finally, they meant to flag what struck them as widespread blunders, thereby 'improving' the tongue. Nothing conveys the commanding temper of the enterprise better than its reliance on grammatical 'rules': some usages were prescribed, others proscribed. No middle ground existed — a usage was either allowable or not — and the grammarian's job was less to log the choices on offer than to pass a verdict on them.
Attitudes of this kind have by no means vanished; they still feed a broad unease that standards ought to be defended. Ranged against them, though, is a rival outlook that troubles itself far less over standards than over what speakers genuinely do. Its guiding thought is that a grammarian is there to describe rather than to prescribe — to set down the sheer diversity of language as it stands, without shouldering the hopeless labour of ranking one variant above another or of halting the shifts a language undergoes. Champions of this stance appear as early as the closing decades of the eighteenth century: the grammarian Nathaniel Merrow, for one, held in his Companion to English Speech that 'the everyday practice of ordinary speakers is the first and only true measure of any language'. Such issues, he argued, cannot be settled by logic or legislation — and it is this outlook that underpins how linguists dissect grammar today.
Today the clash between 'descriptivists' and 'prescriptivists' has often hardened into caricature, with each camp sketching a distorted portrait of its rival. Those on the descriptive wing are cast as wholly indifferent to standards, since they treat every form of usage as equally legitimate. Those on the prescriptive wing, for their part, are brushed aside as unthinking servants of an inherited tradition. The quarrel has even been dressed in the vocabulary of politics, setting a radical liberalism against an elitist conservatism.
