When does poor grammar become evolving language?
In: 1546
I already see ‘yeet’ accepted in general company, and I don’t think that is very many years old.
“Poor grammar” *is* evolving language. It’s evolving language as described by people who don’t understand that language evolves.
That said, you could describe grammatical mistakes made by non-native speakers as ‘poor grammar’, but I suspect that’s not what you’re referring to.
When there’s general acceptance that the “poor grammar” isn’t actually bad or incorrect. If a grammatical construction mostly gets confused stares or offers of correction, then it’s not (yet) language. If people seem to actually understand the speaker’s meaning and don’t perceive the grammar as “wrong,” then it’s just language.
For example, you likely didn’t bat an eye at the non-sentence or split infinitive I inserted into the above paragraph. Even though some pedants will/would say these are bad grammar, English speakers have largely come down against them. We’re all an active part of those debates. By all means correct people if you disagree with their English, but only do it if you think there’s some problem with clarity rather than just a deviation from “how it’s done.”
Kids in my country these days just speak street talk and can barely speak the normal language at all..
I was done when a friend of mine spelled blue as bleu, and when corrected said “who cares” and spelled it wrong again later…
I care you illiterate!
If one person says it, and nobody understands what they mean, then it’s bad grammar. If Millions of people say it and understand what each other means, it’s evolving language.
Is anybody really confused by “I wasn’t never there”?
If one person speaks in a weird way, that’s just them making a mistake.
If an entire subculture speaks in a weird way, then that’s a change in a dialect. We mostly think of regional dialects but they can be class based too.
Anyone who thinks that all language change is bad and wrong is an idiot, because the variety of language you speak only exists because your ancestors spoke “incorrectly” for long enough for it to stick. It’s inherently nonsense to claim that the way the language was when you learned it is correct, and that changes that happened before are fine but changes that happen afterwards are wrong.
The only reason we say “you” in a singular sense instead of “thou” was because people were speaking with “bad grammar” and ignored all the old pricks telling them they were wrong. Enough people did it and it stuck and that’s where we are now.
There’s no way you can draw an exact line between bad grammar and language change and so linguists don’t.
Most linguists won’t say anything about “bad grammar”, they’ll say “nonstandard” to avoid making any prescriptivist judgements, because there’s no way to be prescriptivist without being inconsistent.
It reminds me of when I lived in St. Vincent in the Caribbean. People just call the local pidgin “Dialect.” I’ve met people who can only speak Dialect and people who are essentially bilingual in Dialect and Standard English, inflected of course with a Vincentian accent. But Dialect is still not considered its own language and is treated like “improper English.” I lived there for over 2 years and still had difficulty understanding people. One specific example I can think of in English evolving into its own Caribbean language would be syntax of people saying, “Those people.”
In Dialect people there say, “De peoplo dem.”
I had a friend who told me of people learning “Proper English” saying, “The people them.”
I’m not a linguist, but I wish I had studied Linguistics because I find the evolution of languages like that fascinating.
*Please note* I am only speaking from my experiences living in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. I know there are numerous English pidgins like those in Jamaica and Belize as well as Singlish in Singapore, all equally fascinating to me.
When enough people use it.
This is actually the answer, dialect changes as the new usage comes to be adopted by enough people that it becomes the normal usage.
In the field of linguistics, there is no such thing as poor grammar. We study language from a scientific perspective to build models of how language works. If we have a certain grammatical rule, and we notice people breaking that rule, we don’t write them off as speaking wrong, we have to reformulate our understanding of the language to accommodate it. As scientists, we don’t throw out data because we don’t like it.
Labeling speech as incorrect rather than trying to figure out why it happens that way is just as nonsensical as an economist or sociologist encountering an unusual, unpredicted behavior and simply telling them they’re behaving wrong rather than investigating what they are doing and building a more complete, correct model of human behavior.
When the speakers and the grammatical rules conflict, it’s not the speakers who have a problem.
Language is simply verbalizations of concepts, as long as the idea you are trying to relate is understandable, then it isn’t an issue. Most modern languages are called living languages, because they are ever evolving, new words are created almost daily, and then when they reach a certain amount of usage and a high enough rate of adoption by the majority of that languages speakers, they get added to the dictionary and become words.
Poor grammar is really a hold over from the past, when people were divided into castes, and it was easy to distinguish someone that was learned because they spoke “properly,” while the poor and uneducated spoke improperly. The concept is mired in all sorts of classism and racism, but there are many who are just pendants and want the language to be precise.
Now, to answer your question directly, poor grammar becomes proper grammar if enough people use it that way, it’s like the fact that most people use the word good, instead of fine, well, okay, etc… We all should know that good is not something you are, but something you do, however it’s been used “incorrectly” for so long that most people don’t notice it’s “misuse” these days.
Now I’ve studied English for decades, and as much as certain members of the lexicographical society think some things are immutable and cannot be changed by simple misuse, the reality is that is exactly what happens. As an example, look at the word “Irregardless” which etymologically is nonsense, but has now been added to the dictionary meaning the same thing as regardless, because that’s how people use it. Same thing with “literally” so many people use it to mean figuratively, they added that definition to the word a while ago.
With the rate of technological development, necessitating new words, and the every expanding globalization, adding words from other languages to some new super language, it’s safe to say that in a hundred years most of us would not be able to converse in the way the majority of people converse. The idioms would all be different, well maybe a few would remain, but there would be a lot of new ones that were far more popular at the time. Grammar will have changed by then as well lending itself to the most efficient way to express oneself.
There’s a theory that language will get to a point that it’s so complex and cumbersome, that people will just start using it without regard to grammar and “historical” usages of words, so the language will simplify, then begin its journey to becoming a more complex and nuanced language, much like American English split from British English a few hundred years ago. It was mixed with a lot of German and French influence, but rather simplistic, over the proceeding years it has become more complex.
Latest Answers