"HOSTESS: …she speaks English perfectly!
NEPOMMUCK: Too perfectly. Can you shew me any English woman who speaks English as it should be spoken? Only foreigners who have been taught to speak it speak it well." — George Bernard Shaw, Pygmalion
Language, at the most fundamental level, is a system of signals capable of conveying meaning. Human language embodies the same process in that, per rather complex articulatory and auditory/visual mechanisms, we are capable of producing and interpreting signals all the while conveying meaning and accomplishing various communicative tasks. The accepted view within linguistics is that Language stems from (wo)man’s mental faculties. (For those concerned about grammar, the capital letter signifies a universal phenomenon, as opposed to a specific language, such as Swahili.) Noam Chomsky, the father of modern linguistics, maintains that the very ability to learn language is hard-wired into the human brain, which he terms Universal Grammar.
Just as with the word Language, there too exists a distinction between Grammar and grammar, in which the former references the universal human ability to produce Language, whereas the latter simply refers to the rules and formalism (and often stylistics) of a given language. The contrasts identified hitherto, namely between Language and language and Grammar and grammar, are absolutely essential to address a very pervasive and unfortunate phenomenon: the charge of "ungrammaticality."
"Don’t say ain’t because it’s poor grammar." "For someone who studies language, you have terrible grammar." "He speaks like someone who is very educated." "Never end a sentence with a preposition, it’s not proper."
These statements, which I am sure we have all encountered in some form or another, as well as the excerpt from Pygmalion, all evidence the extent to which our use of a given language is inherently social, and as such has distinct personal and political ramifications. Within Chomsky’s framework, an utterance is deemed grammatical if it stems from Universal Grammar. Hence, if I say "I ain’t got no shoes on" and also "On got shoes ain’t no I", it is explicitly clear which sentence is grammatical and which is not, as the structures in our brain predisposed to interpret language can process the first statement, but certainly not the second. Yet, those entrusted with "teaching" us English would grimace at the first sentence and would likely deem it ungrammatical, which identifies the crux of this issue.
Admittedly, the gold standard in education is the notion of a "standard language", and as such linguistic forms that deviate heavily are deemed ungrammatical. In English, as we do not have an official regulatory institution as many other languages do, it is absurd to allege the objective existence of "standard English", though we are plagued by style guides which deal almost exclusively with stylistics, not Grammar. Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker has shone light on this recently in his book "The Sense of Style," in which he dissects many issues of grammatical contention, such as split infinitives and clauses with prepositions at the end, demonstrating that these supposedly sacred grammar rules often stem from attempts by bishops and erstwhile nobility to force English to behave more like Latin.
So, even though it can be acknowledged that a written "standard" is helpful and somewhat effective, one must never forget that Language is not merely a writing system, as the beautifully complex phenomenon of human language cannot be reduced to words on a page and should not be constrained by arbitrary rules, which tend mainly to be applied with the most scrutiny to those in society with the least prestige.
Our linguistic utterances are an innate part of our humanity in that they emanate from within us and reflect our authentic self. While literature is certainly an art, we cannot deny that spontaneous language production is not also virtuous and as such should not be subjected to a stream of rules and constraints that are largely irrelevant to regulating human communication.
Hence I exhort you all to not cling fast to the "grammar" rules into which we have been indoctrinated, especially outside of the written standard, whose validity fades in spoken language. Rather, speak however is most natural to you.
Returning to Pygmalion, to answer Neppomuck’s question, any Englishwoman (and any woman for that matter) who speaks English is speaking English as it "should" be spoken. Speak up!
Jordan MacKenzie is a first-year linguistics master’s student. His column appears on Wednesdays.
