Language: jump in!

One of my favorite ways to think about language is to compare it to jumping. This may seem strange, but I think it makes a lot of sense. After all, jumping is something that nearly all mature humans can do, provided we have the requisite body parts. And probably, no one taught you how to jump. They may have offered advice or demonstrated their own forms, but you basically learned how to push yourself into the air by observing other people do so and trying it out for yourself. From what we know about child language acquisition, this is roughly analogous to how babies learn to speak.

It's also true of language, as of jumping, that you don't need to mentally review every step of the process before you perform it. We don't typically run through a mental catalog of the muscles we'll need to flex, or the order in which we'll flex them, before launching ourselves off the ground. And we don't need to think about the rules of grammar before opening our mouths to speak. They come naturally, like jumping, and what results is a grammatical utterance just as surely as what happens when we jump is a jump.

You can, of course, think about jumping before you begin to move, and plan out exactly how you're going to do it. You can choose to move in a precise way, more planned out and self-aware than a normal jumping maneuver would require. Language is like that too. If you think about your words carefully before speaking, you can produce a more polished utterance just as surely as you can produce a more precise jump by thinking about the matter first. But an unreflective jump is just as authentic as one with thought before it -- by which I mean, no one would accuse jumping-without-planning of not being a true jump. I don't think anyone would even make the claim that planning out your jumps makes them objectively better than jumping without thinking first.

It is my contention that language is the same way. When we speak without thinking about it, our utterances do not always adhere to the standard notions of grammatical correctness. We speak in run-on sentences and dangling participles, in "misplaced" modifiers and all of the other things that would send an English teacher scurrying for the red pen. If we think carefully beforehand -- as we usually do when we write -- we can generally avoid these items, but they are very present in our unguarded speech. But, like a jump without thought behind it, I see no reason to consider such speech improper, incorrect, or in any way inferior to its more planned-out alternative.

The notions of grammar and grammaticality are still important to a descriptivist, of course, but here too a jumping metaphor can prove useful. For a linguistic descriptivist, investigating which utterances are grammatical and which are not is as pointless and frivolous as considering which jumps qualify as legitimate acts of jumping. We instead take as granted that anyone trying to jump produces a jump, and anyone trying to speak produces a grammatical utterance. The notion of grammar is used to analyze what all of the utterances have in common, just as a general description of jumping could be produced by observing many people's individual acts of it. But descriptivists do not believe that everything is grammatical, just as surely as no one would conclude that any possible motion is a jump. There are some things that simply no one would do when asked to jump, and there are just as many that no one would do when asked to speak.

And this is perhaps the best test of what is a legitimate instance of a particular kind of action. When someone is asked to jump, and attempts to jump, and considers what they have done to be a jump, we should surely accept that they have in fact jumped. And when someone is prompted to speak, and opens their mouth to speak, and considers what they have said to be a meaningful contribution to the conversation (and not just nonsense noises), we should just as surely accept that utterance as grammatical, whether they planned it all out in their head or not.

In the end, language is just like jumping. When we attempt to speak, we speak -- and what comes out is an utterly genuine act.

"Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open. " -- Albus Dumbledore

Aloha and alohomora, language hippogriffs! Tonight is the midnight release of the last Harry Potter movie, and I thought a Potter-themed Language Hippie post seemed in order. If you're not a Potterhead, don't turn away just yet -- I'll be focusing on those stories, yes, but I believe the conclusions I'll be drawing are not so limited in scope.

Language diversity and tolerance might not seem to immediately apply to the adventures of a young boy wizard, but I think the series can actually teach us a lot. Anyone who has both read the books and watched the movies has surely noticed some differences between the two. In addition to details that were changed in the transition from novel to film, there are also elements that were unspecified in the original stories and had to be filled in by the moviemakers: from the tune of the song the mermaids sing, to the way werewolves transform at the full moon, to the exact design of Voldemort's wand. Most likely, readers imagined such details quite differently in their own minds, before witnessing how they were presented on film. As a result, the story we watch is somewhat different from the one we had experienced before.

This, I believe, is a fairly obvious point that has probably occured to all of you before now. And it is my hope that you will also accept as noncontroversial my further claim, that the version of events and details presented in the Harry Potter movies is not the only legitimate one. That is, I hope you will not consider yourself to be incorrect in how you imagined the stories before, just because the filmmakers viewed and presented them differently. While their vision may have the original creator J.K. Rowling's seal of approval, and yours likely does not, that does not mean that your own version of the story is in any way misguided or wrong.

I mention all of this as set-up for my ultimate point, which is about the language of the Harry Potter books. This is another element of the novels that had to be filled in by the filmmakers, either with or without consultation by J.K. Rowling. (I am guessing the former, but I consider the matter to be ultimately moot.) Although Rowling's books are full of unusual character and creature names, magical spells, and so forth, she usually provides little indication beyond spelling as to how these words are to be pronounced. And so, when those words are spoken aloud in the movies -- or the audiobooks, for that matter -- the producers must decide on one interpretation, one vision, to present to the audience. And like any other detail, those pronunciations might not agree with how we imagined the world of Harry Potter ourselves.

I urge you, then, to not be swayed by how the movie characters pronounce J.K. Rowling's magical words, if you have always believed in your heart that they were said differently. If you think 'accio' should have a 'CH' sound and not a 'K', if you rhyme 'muggle' with 'frugal', or if you pronounce 'Voldemort' with a silent -t, don't be discouraged that the people in the movie franchise do things differently. Theirs is but one interpretation, one dialect, of the words J.K. Rowling has gifted to us. Your own is just as valid, and just as worthy of celebration.

Mischief managed.

Overthinking "old-school."

Earlier this week, the quite excellent website Overthinking It featured a guest post from Diana Barnes-Brown, applying the site's characteristic over-analysis to a recent commercial for clothing store T.J. Maxx. (Full post available on the website, here.) I usually enjoy Overthinking It's particular style of commentary, but I admit I was preparing to grit my teeth when I saw the opening line mention "the continual decline of the English language." This is one of those phrases that gets used a lot by opponents of language variation and change -- it implies that any new development in the language must be one for the worse, even though from an objective point of view, no form of a language is superior or inferior to any other form. Different, yes, but no better or worse.

Happily, my fears about Barnes-Brown's article were for the most part misplaced. Despite the provocative opening about the decline of English, she actually makes some insightful points about how language change operates.

Her main contention is that the T.J. Maxx commercial contains an unacceptable use of the word "old-school" to mean 'old-fashioned and lame' rather than 'retro and cool.' The exact line in question is, "I’m in T.J. Maxx all the time. I used to think it was old-school, but it’s not. I get this season’s designer clothes - and I still get to eat!” Barnes-Brown asserts, and I quite agree, that this is not the way the word "old-school" is typically used. It's hard to tell in this short sample exactly what the speaker means when she uses the word, but as Barnes-Brown points out, the ad does seem to have changed its connotation from positive to negative.

Barnes-Brown writes:

...while language and in particular semantics are dynamic, they aren’t dynamic in this way. Saying things incorrectly in a way people don’t generally say them isn’t being linguistically progressive, it’s just being ignorant. There’s a difference between a) meaning that evolves over time, as people slowly apply a word at the edges of its current meaning, and that usage gradually edges from rare to common and b) meaning that is confounded because you never knew the common or accurate usage in the first place. To vary from or build upon a linguistic or semantic convention, you first have to understand what it is you had to begin with.

I think there's a lot of truth to be found in these comments. I'm not quite as opposed to this new use of "old-school" as Barnes-Brown is, because it seems to me that all new uses of words have to start somewhere, and I don't agree that there is -- or should be -- a requirement that the new use be closely connected to an older one. (And since a television commercial for a national department store chain is a fairly major platform, it's even possible that T.J. Maxx will inspire many more people to start using the word in this way.) However, I completely agree with Barnes-Brown that there is a world of difference between the avoidance of prescriptivism on the one hand and what she calls "linguistic apologism", the unqualified acceptance of all forms, on the other.

There is a misconception at times that being against prescriptivism means not believing that language has rules, or believing that that any combination of words is as good as another. Instead, descriptivists hold that the rules of language are fluid: they exist and are semi-stable, but they are in no way permanent. Someone speaking in a way that goes against conventional rules or definitions is most likely a sign that the rules are in shift once more.

This is my one objection to Barnes-Brown's commentary: I think the definition of "old-school" could well be in a state of flux, either before or because of the clothing commercial. But in general, her position is a strong one that is worth repeating: being descriptivist does not mean that we have to accept as legitimate just any combination of words. Although all speakers are free to invent new words, definitions, or grammatical rules -- either consciously or not -- those that are just too far removed from existing conventions are unlikely to be picked up by other speakers and enter into the wider language. There is a certain stability that is essential for language if it is to remain an effective means of communication, and language-users seek to preserve that stability almost automatically by avoiding sudden radical changes to the system they know. As a result, the changes that occur in language are more likely to be slow and gradual, as Barnes-Brown observes.

Sudden changes are in fact all around us, in the speech of individuals. Human beings love to push at boundaries, and even if that's not what the scriptwriters at T.J. Maxx were intending to do, it is what their unusual use of "old-school" achieved. Most such radical changes, of course, do not last long beyond the first speaker to employ them. The descriptivist's job is to describe: to determine when changes have been picked up by a wider speech community, passing from individual idiosyncrasies to groupwide rules.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...

Happy Fourth of July, language hippies! Today in America, we celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, which symbolizes the start of our Revolutionary War against Britain and the birth of the United States as a country. We celebrate the nation and its founders, whose vision of America has survived 235 years to today. And we praise Thomas Jefferson in particular as the brilliant writer and thinker whose passionate words declared our nation's independence to the world.

Too often, it seems, we don't go back and look at those words (although anyone who wants to can do so here). But there are important lessons, both political and otherwise, that can be learned from a fresh review of the document. The signed version of Jefferson's declaration, in its final wording, begins as follows:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

It is immediately striking to any native speaker of English today that Jefferson does not write the same way that we would. This first sentence, which is certainly not atypical of Jefferson's writing style throughout the Declaration, is much longer than the sentences we are more used to reading. There are also several strange instances of capital letters, which nearly any grade school teacher would mark as incorrect. And I know that if I had written this first sentence of the Declaration, I would not have placed commas in every place that Jefferson has. By the common standards of today, the Declaration of Independence is riddled with such grammatical oddities.

How can we explain the fact that the Declaration would not escape the red pen of a twenty-first century editor? Jefferson, educated as a young man at the College of William and Mary, was by all accounts an incredibly brilliant individual. Was he never taught how to correctly craft an English sentence? Was he somehow ignorant as to the proper rules of grammar?

Obviously, this is not the case. Rather, the common standards of what is grammatical, what is acceptable, and what is proper in the English language have shifted from Jefferson's time to our own. This is what language does: it shifts, it mutates, and it is not the same from year to year or generation to generation. As a result, the grammatical sentences of someone else -- particularly of someone removed from us in time or space -- often strike us as unusual, and therefore incorrect. It is easy to forget the inherent mutability of language, and to claim that any unfamiliar patterns in the language must be "ungrammatical" as a result.

The rules of language can differ from one person to the next, whether that second person lived two hundred years ago or is alive and well down the street from the first. Today as we celebrate the birth of America through Thomas Jefferson's famous words, let us endeavor to remember this fact, and to accept as legitimate and worthy all of the speech of our fellow souls.

Some Thoughts on Prescriptivism

Welcome back to Language Hippie! In today's post, I'd like to talk a little bit more about linguistic prescriptivism, or the attitude of imposing a standard on the language of others. Although I do believe prescriptivism can have its uses, in this post I'll be focusing more on what I see as its downsides.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am not a prescriptivist myself. To the extent that descriptivism and prescriptivism are opposed -- and I don't believe they fully are -- I come down firmly on the side of linguistic description. As a scientist of language, I don't understand why anyone would throw out good data simply because it doesn't match our preconceptions. But that's what is being done nearly every time someone says, "It's not grammatical to..." No matter what behavior that person goes on to identify -- "split an infinitive", "end a sentence in a preposition", etc. -- he or she is presenting an argument that there are instances of language around that do not fit the rules of grammar.

For a linguist, that type of claim is troubling -- or at least, it should be. Linguists think of grammar as the set of internal rules in a speaker's head that cause his or her language to come out the way it does. As a simplified example, a linguist might say that there is a rule in the grammar of English that puts the article before the noun and not after it, so that we say, "The dog jumped" and not "Dog the jumped." Linguists do not all agree on exactly how these rules work, or how they are formed or stored in the mind, but most linguists would not argue with the claim that English speakers have some sort of subconscious knowledge that keeps them from putting the article last. (By subconscious, all I mean is that you do not need to pay attention or focus to avoid saying "Dog the jumped"; your inner grammar avoids that structure automatically.)

It’s important to note here that although descriptivism is often linked with a permissive attitude toward language, a descriptivist would have no problem with calling the sentence “Dog the jumped” ungrammatical. It is a kind of sentence that no fluent English speaker would naturally produce. There is nothing inherently wrong about its word order, of course, and many languages around the world do in fact put their articles after their nouns. But English never does, and a descriptivist should have no qualms about identifying this feature of the language.

The difference, then, between the prescriptivist and descriptivist outlook is not simply that the former is concerned with language following rules and the latter thinks that any combination of words is acceptable. The descriptivist is just as concerned as the other about how language follows rules. The difference again comes down to observation: what are people in the world actually saying, and how can we describe that behavior through grammatical rules? So whereas no one is lobbying for “Dog the jumped” to be considered an acceptable sentence, a descriptivist has no objection to a sentence such as, “Where did you get those from?” This sentence is produced naturally enough by most English speakers, and that makes a descriptivist value it as a piece of data. For a prescriptivist, however, the fact that the sentence ends in a preposition somehow renders it unacceptable, no matter who said it or who thinks it sounds just fine.

It should be obvious that the usual prescriptive claim starts out as a descriptive one. There is a reason that no one goes around printing in textbooks that the English article should go after the noun, because it is very clear that that is not how the language works. There are, however, a great many sentences that English speakers and writers produce that would support the claim that a sentence in this language can’t end in a preposition. Rather than say, “Where did you get those from?”, some speakers would ask, “From where did you get those?” And when we recite the American Pledge of Allegiance, we swear loyalty to the flag “and to the republic for which it stands”, not “and to the republic which it stands for.” Sentences such as these give credence to the notion that English prepositions don’t end clauses. Or, to put it another way, that rule accurately describes the linguistic behavior of those sentences.

The problem is that such a rule, which starts out as a pure description of how previous sentences have been produced, gets elevated over time to become an authority for how other sentences should be produced in the future -- or a damnation of sentences being spoken in the world today. A prescriptivist, in short, is someone who promotes the status quo of yesterday as the standard for today, ignoring the fact that today’s status quo is perfectly valid in its own right.

Perhaps this is a feature of the human condition: glorifying the way things were in the past and denouncing anything that strikes us as new and unusual. That’s a bigger issue than I’m prepared to tackle on this blog, however. What I’d like to come back to, instead, is why I think it’s bad science.

A linguist’s job, as I’ve mentioned before, is to accurately describe the evidence of speech and writing in the form of rules representing a speaker’s subconscious knowledge of language. This is a scientific process, and the scientific method involves the regular formation of hypotheses -- temporary conclusions that can be tested and refined with further data. It is a poor scientist who grows so attached to his hypothesis that he neglects to test it further, or who invents reasons to throw out any evidence that goes against her preconceptions. In the case of the prescriptivist, there is often a vicious cycle: an existing ‘rule’ of grammar is considered to be unbreakable, so anything that doesn’t fit the rule is labeled as ungrammatical -- meaning, of course, that those pieces of language cannot be considered as data, and only sentences which do not break the rule are actually tested against it. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which no further scientific progress is made.

There are other reasons to reject prescriptivism, too, that have nothing to do with science. As unscientific as it is to identify someone’s speech as ungrammatical, it is also quite hurtful -- for our language is a reflection of our identity, so how can we be anything but offended when someone tells us we are doing it wrong? In short, prescriptivism in language strikes me as both misguided and dangerous.

Welcome to Language Hippie!

Hello there! And welcome to Language Hippie, a new blog I have set up as a voice for language celebration and tolerance. I am a linguist, and a language descriptivist -- a fancy term that means I approach language as a subject to be observed and described, rather than as something out of control that needs to be tamed. Descriptivists like me are scientists, and we study the world as it already is. When it comes to language, that means that we don't use words like "improper" or "ungrammatical" to describe the things that people say on purpose. Instead, we just try to describe what was said, and speculate about why they said it -- the rules to people's internal grammar, so to speak.

Descriptivism's opposite is an approach known as prescriptivism, and it's how most people seem to view language. Prescriptivists are like doctors, prescribing what should and should not be done by their patient. Language prescriptivists tend to view language as a system of laws: there is a single right way of doing things, and anyone who doesn't follow the rules is speaking incorrectly. That's the view that foreign language instructors take, and with good reason. But a prescriptivist attitude is by definition a judgmental one, and it is unfortunately often a condescending and mocking one to boot.

And it is also very common in the world today. A Facebook group entitled "I judge you when you use poor grammar" currently boasts over 400,000 members, and a Google search for the phrase "I am a grammar nazi" yields 250,000 hits. If that last factoid doesn't strike you as odd, consider how rare it is to hear someone self-identify as a Nazi in any other context. The phrase "grammar nazi" likely came about due to the Nazi Party's reputation for extreme intolerance and rule-following, but it has been embraced as a label by many in the prescriptivist crowd. As anyone online is probably already aware, harshly judging other people's language is rather fashionable today.

It is this attitude that I wish to counter, in my own little corner of the internet. I am not here to judge your language -- I'm here to embrace it. A descriptivist birdwatcher doesn't yell at a penguin when the creature fails to fly; he adjusts his preconceptions (if necessary) of what being a bird entails. And if he's like me, he's fascinated by this new diversity he's discovered.

So welcome to the blog. If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions of future topics you'd like to see me cover, feel free to leave a reply. "Correct" spelling and grammar not required.