Origins of language prescriptivism

This article originally appeared in issue #5 of the Silly Linguistics magazine

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By Jelena Trbic

Language elitism is the belief that the extensive memorization and impeccable usage of grammar and spelling rules of its most common or most “highly valued” regional variety is an indicator of one’s intelligence and education. In addition to that, language elitists usually consider one regional variety of a language (the standard one) to be superior to other dialects, and therefore they label the speakers of dialects illiterate.

Even though I just used my own definition of language elitism, and not the dictionary one, I believe that anyone who has dealt with language and linguistics in their life has already met quite a handful of language elitists, or the members of the “language police”. And anyone who is even remotely interested in diving into the subject of language as an aspect of human existence and communication (and not as the aspect of learned knowledge per se) probably immediately sees flaws in the functioning and logic of a language elitist, regardless of their particular views or the language whose rules they so eagerly memorize word for word and spit out in every conversation.

I’m going to make an assumption that many of us who later became interested in the very core of the phenomenon of language once used to be pedantic about grammar, and I can’t blame them. But what most linguists and language enthusiasts can agree upon is that the language is a living, breathing entity that was born with modern humans, that grows with humans, and that still serves the function it served back when it first came to be, even though we standardised it to aid clarity and comprehension. We can’t even imagine ourselves without language, written or spoken. The foundation of our civilizations lies upon our ability to communicate ideas, plans, feelings and thoughts to one another. If we wish to grow, language grows with us. We can’t see it, but it happens. And just like with any other human activity that is so deeply carved into our being, we tried to define, describe and understand language through science: the field called linguistics.

Dictionaries and grammar books can be either prescriptive or descriptive. However, if language is a crucial element that enables humans to develop, and an element that develops with us, its growth should not be inhibited by pre-defined, monolithic and unyielding rules. Standard language is always prescriptive – it is a necessary evil that has its benefits such as facilitating cross-dialectal and cross country communication but also its downsides (like the gradual disappearance of certain dialects in favor of one that the standard was based upon).

The foundations of grammar and spelling of a standard language, and even the dictionary definitions of words, start as a description of a prestigious or widespread language variety of a community. What happens over time, if those rules and definitions aren’t changed along with the changes of the people’s natural speech patterns, their implementation becomes restrictive – the grammar and spelling guides start dictating how people should speak, instead of describing how they are speaking.

How Prescriptivism First Came to Be

This article will be a highly speculative one, seeing as how I am not an expert in linguistics, just a language student and a language enthusiast. Language elitism is one of the symptoms of prescriptivism. How did it first come to be? It might, in my humble opinion, all have to do with history.

Even though languages are as old as humanity, their standardization only happened very recently. Throughout history languages changed naturally. Let’s take Germanic languages, for example. When Rome fell at the hands of Germanic peoples in the fifth century, and a few centuries later the new Holy Roman Empire (HRE) was established, the language used in most of the old scripts preserved in monasteries in the HRE was in reality rather inconsistent and the spelling and grammar differed greatly from work to work and place to place, since the language hadn’t been standardized yet. Those people and their ways of speaking were still rather close and the common threads can be noticed in those old documents (that’s why we can still clump them together and call them all Old High German), but there were no common and accepted standard for how to write.

When the problem of translating the Bible for the common folk came up, people had to struggle with the issues inherent in standardisation. The oldest translations of the Bible into German, however, have problems. German wasn’t standardized, and the rules of grammar and spelling during the translation process were often taken directly from the Latin original. Sometimes people couldn’t work out a way to translate a given term into the local language and sometimes the prestige of the original meant people wanted to keep the term from the original.

The very first real attempt to tackle the standardization of German came in the sixteenth century with Martin Luther, who wanted to translate the Bible for the common folk in the Holy Roman Empire. The goal was to translate the Bible into something the common people could understand. The next stage in the standardization of German occurred in the nineteenth century with Jacob Grimm and his first comprehensive German dictionary and his establishment of German studies as a field of linguistics.

Using this standardised language was a learned skill, not a natural ability. The standardization of language and the invention of printing allowed more people access to written works. Literacy was available to the public and not reserved just for the upper crust. That’s why those rules of grammar and spelling are a necessary evil: without them, we would all write how we spoke but even in one region everyone would have their own system of writing even if their accents were the same. The danger is though that strict adherence to a standard makes people self conscious about their language abilities and smaller dialects get looked down on.

These problems could be the result of equating writing with language and speech being considered a lesser form of language and not representing the “true” language. But this is not to knock literacy. High literacy is a boon for society. It allows people to communicate across society and gives people access to the wisdom and stories of previous generations.

Luckily, opinions about language use are changing. Rules like “don’t split an infinitive” (which was never a feature of any English speaking community, but imposed from Latin) aren’t taught anymore. Education is now accepting the role that every day speech has in the lives of people. A child can read more books that use everyday language.

But the feeling of superiority some people have because they know some arcane rules persists among some people to this day. We should embrace diversity in language expression and not overencumber speakers with draconian and ill fitting rules that disrupt language learning and people’s appreciation of their own language.

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