English isn't Broken

(Note: this article is about a Cracked top 5 list about "defects" in English that was shared on my Facebook wall. I'm not linking to it here, but you can find it with a little google-fu)

So I don't normally pay much attention to Cracked articles. I'm generally morally opposed to lists of this style that exist only to get easy page clicks for ad revenue. Cracked is especially guilty because they break up their 5 item list across two pages for no other reason than to double the number of potential page views they get from anyone reading through the list. It's shitty, but that's not what this blog is about. Let's talk about language!

First let's talk about the language in their title. The use of the word "defective" implies that English is somehow broken, that it's worse than other languages that don't share the "defects" in this list. This is of course ridiculous. There is no concept that any natural language can express that cannot be expressed in any other natural language; however, some languages may handle certain situations more gracefully than others. This is perhaps most easily illustrated with a concept called "lexical gaps", where a language lacks a word for something found in other languages. I'll write more about this another time, but for now, consider the word Gemütlichkeit in German. There's no word for this in English, so to express this concept of Gemütlichkeit, we might instead talk about a kind of coziness, warmth, and comfort felt when surrounded by friends, family, and good food and drink. We can express the same concept, but what takes one word in German, requires a whole sentence or more in English. Does this mean English is defective? No, it just means we have a different way of expressing the same ideas.

Saying "yes" to negative questions

With that out of the way, let's move on to their actual list. Number 5 probably should have been number one, as it's actually the most interesting. English, they rightly point out, has no real systematic way of contradicting a negative assertion. Here's what I mean by that. If someone asks you "you're not going to the movies with us tonight, right?" you are presented, as an English speaker, with a dilemma that almost always ends in having to clarify your answer further. Answering "no" is simple enough, and implies that you're not going to the movies. But if you say "yes", does that mean "yes, I am not going to the movies tonight" or "yes, contrary to your assumption, I am in fact going to the movies tonight"? You've no doubt found yourself in a similar situation before, having to use a whole sentence to express what is essentially a simple yes or no answer.

This is not a problem that is unique to English; however, many other languages have come up with a solution that lets speakers give a perfectly clear one word answer. Take German for example, which essentially has two "yes" words and a "no". For most questions, ja is used to answer in the affirmative and nein for the negative. There are variations on each of these in actual speech, just like you can say "yeah", "uh huh", "word", "yup" or any number of other things to mean "yes" in English; but they all essentially mean either ja or nein. Where German differs, however, is when answering a question like the one above. Du hast keine Allergien gegen Erdnüsse, oder? ('You're not allergic to peanuts, are you?') is an important question to answer properly if you are in fact allergic. This is where doch comes in. In German, to say "no, I'm not allergic", you would still just use nein, but for clarity's sake, if you want to say "yes, I am actually allergic, please don't kill me", you simply say doch, instead of ja. The word doch here means not only "yes" but also has the extra meaning of "contrary to your assertion...yes".

It's really handy; and as an English speaker, I will admit that when I first learned this about German, I could only think "wow! Why don't we do something like this?" Still, just because we don't have our own doch doesn't mean English is "defective", nor does it mean we are incapable of expressing the same meaning as doch. We just need a few more words than German does.

Confusing science words, or as those of us who can read call them: words

Number four on their list is "Our Language Is Full of Confusing Science Words". I was tempted just to write "read a damn book" for this section and leave it at that, but I won't. These "confusing science words" are just words of Latin or Greek origin because Latin and Greek were for centuries the lingua franca of European academia. If I may simplify things just a little, when you consider the history of the Liberal Arts in Europe, this just makes sense. Traditionally the Liberal Arts included grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (which until relatively recently, also included astrology). For centuries in Europe, consulting the greatest minds in each of these areas meant reading the works of classical thinkers like Cicero, Euclid, Aristotle, and others whose works were preserved in their own languages, namely Latin and Greek. These two languages were therefore a prerequisite for advanced study, and by the time universities began to spring up around Europe, everyone smart enough to be studying or working there already spoke Latin and Greek, so they became the de facto languages of the academic world.

What this item on their list is actually talking about is borrowing. Borrowing is when a language takes some linguistic unit from another language, usually a lexical item (this is loosely the same thing as what we'd generally think of as a "word", but can also include things like idioms where the whole phrase essentially acts like one big word). All languages do this, though some are more willing or resistant than others. Icelandic is notoriously resistant to borrowing, due in no small part to the pride Icelanders take in their language as part of their cultural identity. While nearly every other European language uses some variation of "telephone", which was constructed from Greek, Icelanders say sími, which literally means 'cord' or 'wire'. Similarly, they don't use the latinate "computer" but rather say tölva, which is a Portmanteaux (a combination of two words, like English "smog" = "smoke" + "fog") of the words "tala" ('number') and "völva" ('seeress'). English on the other hand, is about as willing to borrow as a language can get. Yes, we have a lot of words with Latin and Greek roots, and yes, this stems both from the aforementioned traditional European university culture as well as the Norman Invasion of 1066. You'll notice, for example, that we generally have two different words for animals depending on whether we mean the animal as food or the animal as a living creature (steer vs beef, chicken vs poultry, swine vs pork). This is because the Anglo-Saxon farmers working on the farms raising the animals called them by their Germanic names (e.g. swine), but when they were served to their Norman rulers as food, they used the Romance words (e.g. pork from Latin porcus 'pig').

Even though it shares similar origins with words Cracked mentioned like equine, I'm not so sure that pork really constitutes a "confusing science word" for most, but then again, I like to think people are generally a little smarter than that. Cracked clearly disagrees. What they also leave out are all the other borrowings we use all the time. I guess because they're not so easily grouped together with all the "confusing science words". Punch (the drink), pajamas, shampoo, toddy (as in hot toddy), cot, juggernaut, and bandana are all of Hindi or Urdu origin. Banjo, zombie, zebra, jumbo, gumbo, funk, and chimpanzee are all from Bantu. Aardvark is Dutch. Pet is Gaelic. Shiv is Romani. Algebra, alligator, and alcohol are all Arabic. Cravat (which depending on your age and where you're from, might be another word for necktie) is from an old German word that means 'Croat' because Croatian soldiers used to wear a distinctive scarf that became fashionable around Europe and eventually turned into what we now know as the necktie.

Yet I don't think anyone would consider any of these words "confusing". Languages have basically two options when they need to come up with a word for a new concept: make it up or let someone else do the hard work and just borrow a word from them. English just happens to lean pretty heavily towards the latter. Sometimes we even borrow words multiple times. Bodega and apothecary are the same word. We just borrowed one from Latin and the other from a much later form of Latin most people usually call Spanish. Or sometimes we'll even borrow words we already have in Germanic from other Germanic languages (Aardvark is cognate to earth-pork...a much better name if you ask me) like skirt, which is the same word as shirt, we just borrowed it from Scandinavian because...I don't know. Why not?

He, she, it, they

The next item on their list asserts that we don't have a gender neutral singular pronoun. In fact, we have two. For anything that doesn't have biological gender, there's it (although sometimes we impart gender where there isn't any, such as with ships, which are nearly always feminine). For anything that does have a gender, like say...people, there's they, as in if anyone needs a break, they should take one now. Now, Cracked points out that they is unacceptable to "grammar professionals", but ignoring for a moment how much I absolutely hate the mere idea of a "grammar professional" as a class of person, they're falling into a trap that so many people do when talking about language. They completely ignore the fact that we use different registers when communicating in different circumstances.

I'd wager that they is absolutely the gender neutral singular pronoun we all use in regular day to day speech (and as a "grammar professional"...barf...I can tell you it's absolutely fine to do so), but in more formal speech, we follow a different set of rules. This often means our tools for communication are more restricted, or at least different. In formal writing we can't use they for this purpose, just like we can't use fixin' to as a way to mark imminent future. This does not mean, however, that English doesn't have these structures. We're just picky about when we use them. There's actually a wonderful little rant by Stephen Fry about register and how important it is not to get too caught up in the minutiae of language when so often they really don't matter. Click here and turn up the volume. The man has a thoroughly pleasant voice.

Excuse me, ma'am

The next item on their list--"We Suck at Politely Addressing People"--does not apply to anyone from the South. No we don't have separate formal pronouns like German, or an incredibly elaborate system of honorifics like Japanese, but I've found that sir and ma'am get the job done quite nicely. Really...that's all I can say about this one. They're just wrong. For those of you who aren't from the South, well...bless your hearts, I'm not sure there's much to be done for you. You could always try to marry up if it's not too late.

Y'all, yins, you guys, yous guys

The last item on their list laments the lack of a distinctive second person plural pronoun in English. Again, this boils down to register. Basically every dialect of American English has a distinctive you plural. The South is well known for its use of y'all, while yins shows up in Pennsyltucky, and you guys finds much broader favor across the rest of the country. No, you would not use y'all in a formal essay (mostly because you shouldn't be using second person at all in a formal essay), but it's perfectly acceptable and downright useful in normal speech. Hell, Southern English has even gone so far as to differentiate between inclusive and exclusive you plural. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say I'm talking to a group of three people. I can address just two of them by saying y'all better be nice to your other group member. Then I can address them all by saying and all y'all need to put your names on the assignment. So I can use all y'all to explicitly address the entire group, while y'all can be any plural subset of the group (including the whole group). So you see, not only do we have these pronouns, but they're actually part of a relatively robust and complicated system. Even without them, it's almost always clear from context whether the person is addressing a group or a single person. Too often people talk about language in a vacuum, which is utter nonsense. Language is an intrinsic part of the human experience.

Maybe I should write something about register at some point, although this pretty well covers it. We just use different chunks of our language for different social situations. What pedants do is pretend that the language we use in everyday speech isn't part of the language because it's "improper". Well, it's nonstandard, but as I think I covered in my very first entry, no one speaks Standard English. No one. Not even your eighth grade English teacher who was so mean to you. It's silly to ignore all these other parts of our language just because they're not things we would say in a job interview. And if English doesn't even work the same way depending on your given social situation, it's pretty safe to assume that other languages are going to have different ways of expressing the same ideas. Sometimes they'll be able to do so much more efficiently, sometimes not. The evolution of languages is a messy thing, but my job would be dull as hell if it weren't, so I'm grateful. There's beauty in the different ways languages work. I'd never call any of it defective.

In short...don't read Cracked. It's terrible.

IDK my BFF Rose

So today I thought I’d talk about something that’s a little less controversial than it was just a few years ago: texting. More specifically I should say the sorts of modifications to the written language that tend to show up in texting and CMC (Computer Mediated Communication). As it turns out, not only is much of what we see in texting much older than the cell phone itself, but it can also provide some interesting insights into how Language works. Like many advances in communication before it, there was a great outcry initially at texting, the idea being that it heralded the downfall of our once great language. The same thing happened, believe it or not, with the printing press...and the telegraph, the telephone, and broadcasting. And don’t worry, it will most certainly happen again.

The main source I’ll be using for this entry is David Crystal’s Txting: the gr8 db8, along with a healthy dose of personal experience (not super scientific, I know). Despite the fact that Dr. Crystal clearly had way too much fun coming up with that title, the book itself, published in 2008, represents the first attempt to provide a general overview of the linguistic phenomenon that is texting and is a good read. Now since technology and all things related to technology move about a million times faster than the rest of us here on earth, there are times when this four year old book can show its age just a bit. He has a couple pages devoted to the consequences of texters being forced to use a number pad as opposed to a QWERTY keyboard...I imagine for most of us this is no longer a problem. You also don’t see the same prophecies of doom for the English language at the hand of SMS messaging the way you did even four years ago. We’ve all probably heard the story (which Crystal discusses in greater detail) about a student who turns in an essay written as if it were just one long text message, smiley faces and all; but this sort of story, whether it was ever true or not, doesn’t seem as newsworthy anymore with the rise in popularity among users of all ages of services like Twitter and mobile Facebook apps. Hell, the following is an actual text message I received from my 64 year old father just the other day:

At gate n atl waitn 2 bd on time 4 now

He’ll still tell you how he doesn’t understand tattoos, body piercings, or pretty much any music written after the early seventies, but texting it seems, has truly arrived...at least for him. In his short text we already have a lot to talk about. Perhaps most notable is his use of what are called logographs, single characters used to represent words, parts of words or even noises or actions. In this case we have n ‘in’, 2 ‘to’, and 4 ‘for’. Other languages, like Chinese, make regular use of logographs in their writing systems. In the same vein, but missing from my father’s text, are emoticons. These serve primarily to make up for the nonverbal elements of communication that are lost in text messaging (tone, facial expression, etc.), and they developed a little differently in the west than they did in East Asia. Western style emoticons are usually tilted on their sides, while those from East Asia are meant to be viewed head on:

West   East
:)        ^_^
:*(        -_-
:-@       ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (my personal favorite)

These nonstandard forms today might send our minds instantly to images of texting tweens, but they have been in use much longer. Remember the TV show Concentration? This type of puzzle is called a rebus, which comes from the Latin non verbis sed rebus ‘not with words but with things’. The earliest English reference that Crystal is able to find dates back to 1605, when William Camden wrote that people who “lackt wit to expresse their conceit in speech; did vse to depaint it out (as it were) in pictures, which they call Rebus’. People were hating this stuff when v was still a vowel! But it hasn’t gone anywhere and English is still a healthy, thriving language. Obviously Camden never watched Concentration...I loved that show.

Another striking characteristic of my father’s text message is the nonstandard spelling on several forms like waitn ‘waiting’ and bd ‘board’. Now you could argue that waitn was just phonetic spelling. After all, how many of us in casual speech actually say waiting? bd on the other hand, is quite a stretch, or at least it would be if it weren’t for the context. More importantly though, this, and indeed many such shortenings, show that people are intuitively aware of some basic information theory, namely that consonants convey much more information than vowels. Crystal gives the following example:

ths sntnc hsnt gt ny vwls.

i eee a o a ooa. [= this sentence hasn’t got any consonants].

One of those is incomprehensible, the other is relatively easy to decipher. It may come as no surprise then, that there are languages that simply don’t bother with vowels at all in their alphabets, like Hebrew for example. It’s only jarring for us because we’re used to seeing vowels in there, but often, as is the case with bd in my father’s text, context will fill in the gaps for us. The human brain is really fantastically good at that sort of thing.

That’s probably the least standardized way to leave out letters. I probably don’t have to tell you how common these next few are. Initialisms which includes alphabetisms like BBC, CDC, LSD, PCP, IOU, OD, DOA...sorry where were we? Right, this also includes acronyms, which is often used as a general term, but sometimes also restricted to abbreviations that are pronounced like words such as NATO, AWOL, ASAP and for some speakers lol (sometimes written lawl to reflect this) and ROFL (also seen as roffle, occasionally in the phrase roffle my waffle...I promise I’m not making that up). These sorts of abbreviations have been in use for ages. They save us valuable time by allowing us to quickly communicate a common phrase in a much shorter space. The only problem is that they are completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated. To illustrate this point, I’ve acquired the assistance of a good buddy of mine in the military, who has provided me with a few utterances that he swears make sense. To my knowledge none of the following is top secret, but honestly, who can tell?


(1) We're going to hit the SAM and ADA sites with LGB and JDAM munitions during a 4 minute SEAD window.

(2) Utilizing our FLIR pod, we'll be conducting NTISR along the main supply routes leading up to the FOB with the intent of locating and disabling IEDs.

Crazy huh? But with texting, now that it has definitely hit the mainstream, there’s less mystery to terms like lol, gf, brb, or g2g. While some still find it strange to hear these abbreviations in spoken conversation, we don’t bat an eye at BBC, AWOL, NaBisCo (the National Biscuit Company), flak (from Ger. Fliegerabwehrkanone 'flyer defense cannon') etc. And I think many of us can agree that WTF or FUBAR have less potential to offend than the longer forms.

How we text also says a great deal about us, just like our spoken language. I mentioned my father’s use of waitn earlier, which may tell us something about his pronunciation of the word. Likewise, it is common to see alternate spellings like wif or wiv ‘with’ in texts from speakers of British English. With the rise of Twitter and millions of tweets just begging to be analyzed, it should come as no surprise that there is a good deal of research being done on that particular corpus as well. And what is perhaps most alarming if you actually take the time to look, is how much remains unchanged in texts. My father’s text above contains eleven words, five of which are spelled according to convention. Earlier I mentioned ROFL being transcribed as roffle. Sure this is basically a nonce word, but it shows a firm grasp of English spelling conventions with its geminate consonant to mark the preceding short o and even a silent e at the end.

I’ve really only scratched the surface here with this blog entry. There’s so much more that can be said, and if you’re interested in this sort of thing, even as a non-linguist, I’d highly recommend Crystal’s book. The thing to remember is that generally speaking, texting is casual communication. Casual is almost always synonymous with nonstandard, which isn’t bad, just different. We all speak multiple Englishes; and just like our spoken dialect can tell others a lot about our personal identities, the way we text can do the same thing. So when you get an email at work from someone that looks like one big text message, well...in this day and age it could well have been written on a phone. But even if it wasn’t, don’t worry, they’re not going to destroy the English language. They just have a piss-poor sense of what sort of language is appropriate for work communication. So you have my permission to write a snooty email back. Just be sure you’re harping on them for the right reasons.

There hopefully shouldn’t be such a delay until the next entry. I’m going to start talking more about the sort of stuff I do, specifically language change. To do that we’re going to have to talk a little bit about the differences between letters and sounds and why at least in the case of English, they often don’t seem to line up.

Dialects, Idiolects, and the Standard

You don’t speak standard English. No matter how hard you try, you will always fall short of the standard; but don’t worry because no one else speaks it either. Often times the standard, or at least our perception of the standard, lags behind the reality of the language itself. Did you ever have a teacher tell you “never end a sentence with a preposition”? Why? Does anyone actually consistently speak that way? It reminds me of an old joke.

Guy goes to interview for a job at Harvard. Afterwards, he walks out and asks the first person he sees, “excuse me. Could you tell me where the restroom’s at?”

“Sir, at Harvard we do not end a sentence with a preposition,” replies the man.

“Fine. Can you tell me where the restroom’s at, asshole?”

Even great linguists don’t always follow these rules. In his 1921 Language: an Introduction to the Study of Speech, Edward Sapir wonders if the who/whom distinction will one day disappear entirely from English. In his discussion he provides several examples in which the standard whom is often replaced by nonstandard who:

“The man whom I referred to.”

“The man whom they referred to.”

“Whom are you looking at?”

“Whom did you see?”

Notice anything about three of the four examples above? They end in prepositions. Obviously the only conclusion we’re left with is that Edward Sapir was an English-hating fraud of a linguist. Or perhaps there’s a simpler, less sinister explanation: no one really speaks the standard. So what do we speak? Well if you think about it, no two people are going to speak the exact same version of a language. One of them is bound to know some word the other doesn’t, or favor a particular turn of phrase in situations that the other doesn’t, or perhaps have slightly different pronunciations for some words, etc. We all speak what is called an idiolect, the variety of a language that is unique to each individual. Unfortunately, cataloguing the billions of idiolects on the planet (remember anyone who speaks more than one language will have their own idiolect for each language) is an impossible task, to say nothing of the fact that it wouldn’t be particularly useful either. There is such a thing as too much data. So instead, we tend to focus one level up, on group tendencies. I am of course talking about something with which we are all familiar at some level or another: dialects.

There is perhaps no better reminder of the fact that we all speak some nonstandard variant of our language than the rich variety we see in dialects. Fortunately for American English, it’s easy enough for a layperson to appreciate the differences between various dialects because the vast majority of them are mutually intelligible. There are some languages where the differences between dialects are sometimes so stark that speakers of two different dialects cannot actually understand one another. German is a prime example of this. The extreme differences between dialects of a single language often beg the question “where do you draw the line between a dialect and a language?” The short answer is that it’s kind of arbitrary. There is a quote by an audience member at one of Max Weinreich’s lectures, often attributed to Weinreich himself, that you’ve probably heard before: a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot ‘a language is a dialect with an army and a navy’ (the original was Yiddish in case you’re wondering).

But hey, this is America, we all speak the same language. So if I told you I built up a wicked thirst from whippin’ shitties and needed to go to the bubbler before I fell out, you’d get all that right? Go here if you want an idea of just how differently we all speak. Each link on that page will take you to distribution maps for the various responses. If you need a little help decoding what I said earlier, take a look at numbers 77 and 103 (and I’ll just tell you that in some parts of the Midwest fall out is used in place of pass out). You can see that there are all sorts of differences that crop up, from simple phonological differences like in 15, to lexical (basically “word choice”) differences like in 105, to syntactic (basically “word order”) differences like the distribution of anymore in 54-57.

There aren’t a whole lot of people who don’t find dialects at least a little interesting. I’d imagine all of you have had discussions about the pronunciation of syrup (27) or aunt (1) at some point in your lives. For a lot of us, even though there’s a part of us that feels like we should be speaking “good” English, our dialectal features play a big role in our identity. How we pronounce things, or what words we use for certain concepts can mark us as being a member of a community. So why bother with a standard at all?

I had a professor in undergrad from North Carolina. Having moved to Pennsylvania for his job at Penn State, he realized with winter coming that he was going to need to be prepared. So he went to a local sporting goods store, looked around, and asked the man behind the counter if they sold toboggans. Puzzled, the man glanced over his shoulder to the wall behind him with twenty or thirty wooden sleds hanging off of it and then back at my professor. He thumbed over his shoulder and said “well...we’ve got those right there.”

“No, no, I’m sorry,” said my professor. “I mean the kind you wear on your head.” You see, in the area from which he comes in North Carolina, this use of toboggan to mean knit cap is a common occurrence. It is what linguists call a shibboleth, a linguistic feature that marks a speaker as being a member of a certain speech community. This comes from the book of Judges 12:5-6, which reads:

(5) The Gileadites captured the fords of the Jordan leading to Ephraim, and whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, “Let me cross over,” the men of Gilead asked him, “Are you an Ephraimite?” If he replied, “No,” (6) they said, “All right, say ‘Shibboleth.’” If he said, “Sibboleth,” because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.

While we’re a little less likely these days to kill someone for saying coke when referring to carbonated beverages in general, it does bring up the other side of the coin. Our dialects mark us as being members of a certain community, which can be a very positive thing and for many of us is not an insignificant part of our identities. But it can also sometimes inhibit understanding or even reflect poorly on us if we speak a less prestigious dialect. Most of us with fainter accents when meeting someone from another area of the country for the first time may be used to hearing something like “oh your accent’s not that strong.” Southerners often hear something just slightly different: “oh your accent’s not that bad.” Southern accents (and there are many more than one), are often perceived as being spoken by the less educated. So we may choose to play down our dialect features when in mixed company so as to provide greater intelligibility as with my professor, or to avoid stigmatization. Is it fair that some accents are viewed this way? Of course not, but it is reality. Very practically speaking, this is perhaps the most important reason to know the standard.

The standard allows us to navigate certain social situations while avoiding undesired complications. It is sometimes referred to as a “higher register”. The word “higher” there is problematic as it implies “better”, which I will repeat no doubt ad nauseam simply isn’t a legitimate value judgment to be making about language despite the fact that we all do it. That said, think of register as the variety of language you use based on the given situation. You’re more likely to speak a more standard version of English in a job interview than at home with your family. This is partly because you never know how your interviewer might perceive your native dialect, but also because, as Stephen Fry puts it here, you dress nicely for an interview, so it only makes sense that you would dress your language up as well. A three piece suit isn’t better than a t-shirt and jeans, but it is certainly perceived as more formal. It shows a willingness to put in effort. It shows you care. But at home or with friends, speaking very proper English may well get you made fun of just like wearing a tuxedo for a Friday night pub crawl is maybe not usually the best idea. So you slip into dialect because it allows you to more easily navigate that particular social situation.

I’ve been talking about dialects this whole time and have failed to mention what should hopefully be quite obvious by now. For many people, there is a clear stigma to the very word dialect, as it implies nonstandard, which for many people in turn implies wrongness. But for linguists, dialect is a completely neutral term. It is what it is. Dialects shift and change over time just as the standard is prone to change. This idea that languages have some inherent dignity that is violated by nonstandard usage is silly. The standard 1,000 years ago was much different than it is today, and the standard 1,000 years from now will no doubt be just as unrecognizable. It’s a curious thing about language, and perhaps it’s because it ties in so closely with our identity; but how many other areas can you think of where simply being able to use something makes people feel they are experts in its inner workings? I can drive a car, but I’d be a terrible mechanic. I wear clothes, but I couldn’t tell you how a pair of jeans is made. I can brown sausage, but I have no idea how the chemical process of denaturing that raw meat into something edible happens beyond “heat + magic = tasty food”.

That said, there is such a thing as being wrong. Linguists usually like to use other terms like “ungrammatical”, but you can screw up. People do make mistakes, but hopefully today’s entry has given you a little more appreciation for the fact that much of what we might tend to view as “wrong” is really just different and that it very much serves a purpose. As for what constitutes wrong for linguists and what contexts this sort of language shows up in...that’s probably best saved for another time.

---

PS: The type of survey I linked to above isn’t without its problems, such as number 42. Here we have a clear case of people confusing letters with sounds. I would bet a million dollars that not even half of those 38.93% of people who said they pronounce the g in strength actually do so, but we think we do because it’s written there. What that g really does is change the nature of the n (say “pander” and feel where your tongue is for that n. Now say “strong”. See how your tongue touches at a different spot?)...or at least that’s what it did historically. Now it just kind of sticks around to let us know that that’s what it did. We’ll talk more about phonology another time and maybe introduce the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), which is a way for linguists to transcribe words based on how they are actually pronounced with no regard for spelling. We can also talk about what English spelling tells us about a word and what it doesn’t.

I’m a linguist. I study Language. I know what that means, but whenever I meet someone new and they ask what I do, the answer “I’m a historical linguist” almost always gets the same response: “Oh...okay...” Hell, I come from a family of mathematicians, engineers, and doctors, so I’m pretty sure even they don’t really know what I’m doing with my life. So what do I mean when I say, “I’m a linguist”? More importantly what don’t I mean?

For starters, I most certainly do not sit at my computer posting on news stories and status updates about how awful it is when people type “their” when they really mean “they’re” or how “irregardless” is most certainly a sign that people just don’t have any respect for the English language anymore. In fact, I’d put money down that the people who get the most worked up about those things are the least likely to be linguists. Typos happen, just like you don’t always speak perfectly. We stutter, have false starts, use the wrong word, mispronounce things, and so on in our native language, which some of us have been speaking for quite a long time. “Irregardless” was first attested in writing in the early 1920s, which means it was presumably in use for some time before that. So if your argument is that it’s bad English because the word should be regardless and irregardless is some new bastardization of the word, well guess what? It’s older than you, and it’s older than a lot of other words that we use every day. And last I checked, English isn’t on fire.

I don’t care about commas. Allow me to let you in on a little secret: comma errors are not grammatical errors. Saying “We drove by that house blue yesterday” is a grammatical error. I’d wager you even felt it when you read that sentence. At their most vital, commas serve to distinguish between multiple readings of a string of text, one or more of which is presumably not intended, maybe even ungrammatical, but not necessarily. Take the Oxford comma (that comma right before “and” in a list of three or more things). A while back I saw this on several of my friends’ Facebook pages:

It’s kind of clever, and I chuckled. But when it comes right down to it, if someone sends you an email with the sentence “I had eggs, toast and orange juice” in it, is there any possible way you would actually assume the second interpretation? Or perhaps that this person believes you yourself to be toast and orange juice and is addressing you directly? If you said yes, I have news for you. You might be an idiot. Likewise, when someone uses irregardless in a sentence, you might cringe at the sound of it because you know it’s just not “correct”, but do you not know what they meant by it?

So what does a linguist do? Well, asking that question is sort of like asking what a doctor does, or an engineer. You’re likely to get as many different answers as linguists you ask. There are some who study how children acquire language(s), some who travel the world documenting languages that are in danger of dying out, and some who study how our brains handle non-native languages differently than our native tongue. There are computational linguists working on a systematic way to get a computer to understand the difference between “to cure cancer” and “to cure ham”. It seems simple enough on the surface, until you try to teach a machine to do it. Others study Phonology. We’re probably all pretty familiar with the phenomenon of monophthongization in Southern English—the way some southerners say something a little closer to Standard English “far” when they say the word “fire”—though I bet none of us call it that; but did you know that not all southerners do this the same way? In fact, you can tell roughly where someone is from based on the words that exhibit this trait. The list goes on and on. These areas also all overlap with one another, so God help you if you ever get the long answer to “what do you do?”

So what do I do? Well here’s the only slightly long answer. I’m a historical linguist, that is to say, I study the way Language changes over time. More specifically I study Germanic languages (English, Dutch, German, Middle High German, Old Norse, Old Saxon, etc.). My studies tend to be a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Part of what I do is look at the literary traditions of some of these languages. After all, there are only so many people out there taking the time to learn Old Saxon, so it would be a waste to do so and not be able to tell you what a fascinating piece of literature the Hêliand is and why. Sometimes I study the way word meaning changes over time. Did you know there actually used to be (and there still is for some speakers of British English) a distinction in meaning between will and shall? Will was used to describe definite events while shall was for predictions. Once that distinction was lost in American English, one of the two simply took over, and now we only use shall in very restricted contexts.

I also look at the way sounds have changed over the centuries and between languages. Why is it “laugh” and not “laff”? How come the English word tide sounds so much like the German Zeit (‘time’)? Indeed, why do so many German words look and sound similar to English ones? More surprisingly, why do we also see remarkably systematic similarities between such seemingly disparate languages as English, Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Irish, Armenian, Manx, Danish, Russian, Kurdish, Punjabi, Persian and Pashto just to name a few? It wasn’t until the late eighteenth century that scholars really began to notice just how many of us are connected through language. Sir William Jones in 1786 famously wrote of the relationship between some western European languages and Sanskrit:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source...”

That is to say, at some point in the far-flung past, all of these languages, which we today call the Indo-European languages, were just one language. And if all of these languages are connected, what does that say about the people who speak them (ignoring for a moment the complications of a postcolonial global society)? Kumbayah, dudes. We’re all, like, brothers and sisters, man. Let’s all sit around, listen to some tunes and all talk about how we all talk. You see, that’s it. That’s what linguists are really all about. If we could roll language up and smoke it we would. If you could freebase it, we’d be dead in a week. I’m not upset at all if you say disinterested when you mean uninterested or if you pronounce the words bed and bet the same way; but I am fascinated by the why. Why is Language the way it is? Where has it been? Where is it going? What does it say about us as individuals, groups and societies? Like all things worth studying, the deeper you delve into the material, the more questions you find. And in the end that’s really at the heart of what I do. I look for new questions and hope to find answers to some of the old ones along the way.

P.S. Fun fact: Kumbayah is Gullah, a Creole language spoken on the coast of my home state, South Carolina (Also GA and parts of FL). It, like many creoles, traces its genesis back to a period of great cruelty, human suffering and indignity, in this case slavery. But after the Civil War there were islands off the coast where land ownership was as high as 95% black. These tight knit communities helped preserve the language, which unfortunately is often seen, even at times by its own speakers, as “just bad English”. I myself always thought the song was a little silly growing up. What the heck is kumbayah and why are we so sure God wants to hear it so bad? It means ‘come by here’. If that "bad English" were lost to us, we'd not know that. That's one of the reasons any good linguist will tell you that there is no bad English, or bad language of any sort, at least not in that sense, only different.