Is English falling apart?

Is English falling apart, then, as some prescriptivists claimed in their efforts to help mend it? Well, the descriptivists’ answer is that English is indeed changing, as it must, but that such change is not debilitating. In fact, English is now changing in exactly the same ways that have contributed to making it the rich, flexible, and adaptable language so popular throughout the world today. Living languages must change, must adapt, must grow. Shakespeare could not have understood Chaucer without study, nor Chaucer the Beowulf poet. Whether change is good or bad is not the question, descriptivists say, for change is inevitable. The only languages no longer in flux are those no longer in use. The job of grammarians is to describe language as it exists in real use. This includes describing the positive and negative values attached to different ways of speaking.

Reprinted courtesy: Dr. Edward Finegan

Suggested Reading/Additional Resources

Andersson, Lars G., and Peter Trudgill. 1990. Bad language. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell

Baron, Dennis. 1994. Guide to home language repair. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.

Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal hygiene. London and New York: Routledge.

Finegan, Edward. 1980. Attitudes toward language usage. New York: Teachers College Press.

Milroy, James, and Lesley Milroy. 1991. Authority in language. London and New York: Routledge. 2nd edn.

Edward Finegan is professor of linguistics and law at the University of Southern California. He is author of Language: Its Structure and Use, 4th ed. (Thomson Wadsworth, 2004) and Attitudes toward English Usage (Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1980) and co-editor (with John R. Rickford) of Language in the USA (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He has written extensively on register and style variation in English and contributed chapters on grammar and usage in Britain and America to the Cambridge History of the English Language. His interests range across usage, attitudes toward language, and style variation; he also serves as an expert consultant in forensic linguistics.

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Sapir–Whorf hypothesis From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (SWH) states that there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. Although it has come to be known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, it rather was an axiom underlying the work of linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf.

Put simply, the hypothesis argues that the nature of a particular language influences the habitual thought of its speakers. Different patterns of language yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of representing the world perfectly with language, because it acknowledges that the mechanisms of any language affect its users. The hypothesis emerged in many formulations, some weak and some strong.

Contents [hide] 1 History 2 Experimental support 3 Criticism 4 Linguistic determinism 5 Fictional presence 6 Quotations 7 Computer parallel 8 References 9 See also 9.1 Topics 9.2 People 10 Further reading 11 External links