4 Thinking about standards and “proper” grammar
1.4 Thinking about standards and “proper” grammar
In previous sections we learned that one of the goals of doing linguistics is to describe languages and dialects accurately without ranking any dialect as better than any other. This is actually a pretty radical goal, because of course language is a deeply human behavior, and therefore is deeply intertwined with human relationships and social categories. Relationships like teacher-student, doctor-patient, or customer-server, for example, all involve power relations that play a role in people’s expectations about language. Likewise, the communities that we belong to, whether they’re based on ethnicity, religion, profession, fandom, or any other social category, shape how we use language and how we expect others to use language. So when we’re studying language scientifically, we can’t separate the grammar from all the other social pieces.
So we’re striving for this radical goal of considering all languages and dialects as equally valid from a linguistic point of view, but we also have to acknowledge that people have attitudes and expectations that arise from social power dynamics, and these attitudes – whether positive and negative – lead to linguistic bias. Everyone, including linguists, has linguistic biases. We can’t help making judgments about people based on how they use language. But by learning to think about the relationship between language and power, we can gain metalinguistic awareness of our own linguistic biases, at the same time as we’re developing metalinguistic awareness of our grammars.
Here’s an example of a linguistic bias that’s really prevalent in Canada and the US. North Americans tend to perceive all the varieties of British English as having high prestige. They tend to assume that speakers of UK English are better educated and more intelligent than speakers of North American varieties of English — even for varieties that have low prestige in the United Kingdom. Someone who speaks a variety that’s stigmatized in the UK might arrive in Canada to find that everyone thinks their English is very fancy. Their English hasn’t changed, but people’s attitudes towards it have!
Language Standards and “Standard” Languages
Some ways of using language are associated with higher prestige. Because of colonialism, these are often the forms of language used by white people, by wealthier people, or by people who have received more formal education.
When people talk about the “standard” variety of a language, they usually mean the form that has been standardized, that is, the form that most closely matches the language used in dictionaries, textbooks, and high-status media. This standardization happens via social mechanisms of power. In France, for example, there’s an official government body, the Académie Française, that decides what counts as correct, standard French. In 2017, when they noticed more and more French writers including feminine nouns