I finally got around to finishing reading Ronald Wardhaugh’s Proper English: Myths and Misunderstandings about Language. Blackwell, 1999, p.163. [Mentioned here earlier.]
Posted by jim at August 20, 2005 09:44 AMWhatever a grammar of a language is, it is largely impervious to human intervention. That is, the really interesting rules and principles are so basic that we cannot do anything at all about them. What we can do is to try to influence some of the minor outcomes, for example, try to insist that people say I drank instead of I drunk or It’s I instead of It’s me. Essentially that is tinkering with matters of no linguistic importance. To elevate the study of grammar to the task of trying to bring about “correction” in such matters is to try to trivialize that study. These matters may be of social consequence and often are, but that is a social observation not a linguistic one, because I drunk and It’s me are linguistically on par with I drank and It’s I. Furthermore, it is an observation that tells us much about social organization and the function of trivia in such organization and nothing about the structure of language.
Whereas everyone who speaks a language draws on a grammar of that language, there are often local variations in some of its details. Many such differences are related to regional and social groupings of speakers of the language, giving us regional and social dialects. Linguistically, these differences are interesting because they enable us to see how different groups handle certain details of the grammar. No group can be said to handle such details “better” or “worse” than any other group. What we do observe, however, is that the solutions of one group may be more highly valued than those of other groups and deemed superior. Once again this is a social judgment not a linguistic one.