Merp merp merp. I have probably too many opinions on this right now.Because I’ve always been s

Merp merp merp. I have probably too many opinions on this right now.Because I’ve always been super-prescriptivist and probably elitist/standard-centric in my opinions of the language people use.But I’ve been listening to different series of linguistics lectures for the past month, and they’ve pointed out the fallacies in uber-prescriptivism in a way that has weirdly made me contemplate myself and my beliefs a lot.That it’s absurd to pretend that our language exists in a vacuum, and at one point there were perfect speakers of some perfect language - because that’s just not how it works. That speaking or pronouncing something differently than you expect it doesn’t make it incorrect or even inferior.And the idea that the whole popular concept of language is kind of bullshit and generally elitist. That we view things as ‘proper language’, when there really naturally is no standard dialect that’s better than others. That the way most of society treats Black English is offensive for many reasons, most especially that it’s viewed as uneducated because it systematically “makes mistakes in proper grammar”. Friends, let me tell you. This is dumb. In fact Black English is probably a more sensible dialect of Modern English given that most of the modifications it makes aim to systematize our rather irregular grammar (JUST LIKE MOST DEVELOPING LANGUAGES DO…) That saying “you is” shouldn’t carry such an absurd social stigma, considering that if we look at our grammar as a whole, that would fit much better into our paradigm than having identical second person forms in the singular and plural (not to mention the is/are not being consistently singular or plural). I dunno, I think there’s a big difference between using grammar improperly (like my pet peeve the subjunctive) and speaking a dialect that systematically differs from what we consider 'correct English’. And I think that we don’t appreciate that enough. That languages aren’t 'better’ than each other because they’re more complex or because they follow the patterns we expect them to because we’re for the most part socialized with European languages which really only encapsulates a small part of the amazing things language can be.That we dismiss “foreign languages” as weird or somehow abnormal, as if there’s some standard for normal language that ever existed, instead of looking at how amazingly diverse its forms can be. -- source link

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