When does poor grammar become evolving language?
In: 1546
In the Isle of Man, our local, distinct language (a form of Gaelic, think of a mix of Welsh, Irish and Scottish, but unique) has been described by several linguistic experts to be a ‘dead language’, despite the fact that, having been suppressed by English rule for hundreds of years, in the last 30 years or so learning Manx has been taken up by a huge amount of both locals and people who have moved here wanting to get to know the culture better, and a lot of signage/place names/business names etc. these days is English/Manx bilingual. The reason they give for calling it a ‘dead language’ is that the Manx speakers argue amongst themselves about proper sentence construction, grammar and spelling of words etc, based on various, differing sources from hundreds of years ago, rather than allowing it to evolve as a language. I’ve worked as a graphic designer here for 30 years, and there was a time that you knew damn well that everything you were asked to produce with some Manx involved, you would get a complaint from a few people saying that ‘that’s an incorrect spelling of X’ or ‘you should have put X instead of Y’.
I know this is probably not particularly ELI5, but TLDR, language always evolves, the direction it takes will always annoy some, but at least it evolves. If we all spoke Middle English these days I wouldn’t be able to say GTFOOH you pedantic bastards!
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