Are you the kind of person who dislikes being corrected on their language use or do you mainly correct others? Would you be irritated if someone were to use ‘you’re’ and ‘your’ incorrectly? If so, you would be considered a prescriptivist.
Nordquist (2018a) defines ‘prescriptivism’ as the belief or attitude that there is one language that is superior and should be constantly promoted, such as standard English. In other words, they promote the language that is deemed to be “correct”, in their opinion. Prescriptivists are also referred to as ‘grammar Nazis’ and the ‘language police’, and according to Hopper (2017) are commonly found in teaching jobs to “fill young minds with arbitrary grammatical anxiety”. As you can tell, prescriptivists tend to have negative connotations attached to them from the titles they are given. But is it really that important if an apostrophe was misplaced or any other punctuation in that matter?
For Heffer (2011, p. 31) the reason why punctuation and grammar matters is because it helps to avoid ambiguity and using them correctly will help readers understand the relation between sentences. For example, the rule for apostrophes is that they should be used to either indicate a missing letter in contractions (e.g. ‘can’t’) or before an ‘s’ at the end of nouns to indicate possession, but it should not be used when representing plurals (Heffer, 2011, p. 38).
However, Brown (2014) argues that the rules of grammar are outdated and therefore are off-putting to the younger generation when learning. I agree with Brown, because as a child I did not see the importance of grammar and even at 21 years of age I still do not fully understand the grammar rules. I used to dread the day we learnt about grammar in lessons. This may have been down to my grammar classes not being interesting and captivating enough!
Brown (2014) also states that one of the barriers to understanding grammar is the so-called ‘language war’ between prescriptivism and descriptivism. The debate between these two language sides may cause confusion on what is considered as correct grammar or any other form of language use. So what do the opponents of prescriptivism believe?
Descriptivists follow a “non-judgemental approach to language” as they tend to focus on how language is used and varies in both written and spoken discourse, including language change (Nordquist, 2018b). So, they avoid trying to control language but rather observe its changes and provide any explanations, by analysing those changes. Therefore, this approach allows linguists to analyse and identify all the changes, from grammar to pronunciation that are occurring in modern society, whereas deviation from standard English is “considered to be wrong, lazy, corrupt or ignorant” according to prescriptivism (Ritchie, 2013).
In this war of language, the relationship between Standard English and Non-Standard English are viewed differently. Clearly, the prescriptivists favour the standard forms of language, which means using standard grammar and sentence structure. Heffer (2010) even describes the debate pointless as “English grammar shouldn’t be a matter for debate. It has a coherent and logical structure and we should stick to it”. Thus, it demonstrates the strong feelings the prescriptivists have towards the standard form being the only variety that is necessary. It could be suggested that descriptivism favours non-standard forms of language, and a recognition that language has no fixed rules and is constantly changing. For instance new words are being created (Allen, 2014). The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has recently added around 650 new words, including the dog breed ‘puggle’ (Dent, 2019). A dictionary is often seen as a common example of a prescriptivist text as they provide guidance on the conventional spellings and meanings of words. However, the fact they are continually being updated with new words and changes in meanings, show the continually shifting nature of language. Should prescriptivists just accept that language will be constantly evolving?
Personally, the stance that I take in this war of language is neutral. I consider myself both a prescriptivist and descriptivist. I judge people’s language but not to the extent where I would be considered a ‘grammar Nazi’. However, in some certain contexts such as academic writing, Standard English should still be utilized, as there is agreement that correct grammar and punctuation contributes to a reader making sense of a piece of writing.
Which side will you take in this continual battle of language use?
ISOBEL MYCHAJLUK, English Language undergraduate, University of Chester, UK
References
Brown, J. (2014). Why grammar isn’t cool – and why that may be about to change. The Guardian.
Dent, J. (2019, March 19). New words in the OED: March 2019. OED Online.
Heffer, S. (2010). Simon Heffer: The Corrections. Daily Telegraph.
Nordquist, R. (2018a). Prescriptivism. ThoughtCo.
Nordquist, R. (2018b). Descriptivism in Language. ThoughtCo.
Language Debates 