When does poor grammar become evolving language?
In: 1546
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.
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