I recently picked up a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace at Strand, not expecting to find a lengthy essay about language use and the dictionary inside! His essay "Authority and American Usage" is a humorous piece, but still has real substance.
I'm going to try to find a copy of the essay on the internet so that everyone can read it properly, but in the meantime, something interesting that Wallace brings up is the role of the dictionary in language. He explains that when Webster's Third endorsed the words "OK" and "ain't," there was uproar among many linguists, and the response of Webster editor Philip Gove was this: "A dictionary should be have no truck with artifical notions of correctness or superiority. It should be DESCRIPTIVE and not PRESCRIPTIVE" (caps added for emphasis). Then, Wallace explains that this led to linguistic conservatives being labeled as Prescriptivists and linguistic liberals as Descriptivists.
It's interesting to consider what camp you fall into. Should a dictionary should dictate the way people SHOULD speak, or do you think a dictionary should chronicle how people DO speak?
My response to the above question: If a dictionary does not document the way people DO speak, the language will not be able to evolve cohesively. That is, a divide between the way people do speak and the way they are supposed to speak would grow, and possibly lead to high and low forms of the language (Amy, remember the tapes we listened to about "H" and "L"?). If a dictionary does document the way people do speak, the language may evolve cohesively, but is that necessarily superior or inferior to the above option? I think it is superior, because if it ends up with the educated elite speaking the high version of the language and the rest speaking the low--and it typically would end this way, I believe--then the language difference is going to reinforce differences in social class and make for a stratified society that, eventually, won't even be able to communicate across classes.
I think this came up in Fluent once, but we never discussed it fully...so here's an opportunity now!
--Erica
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Erica,
Yes, yes, yes! I actually just got into a heated Spanish argument with my Berlitz instructor today about how Puerto Ricans speak "bad" Spanish... that is to say, "they use words that aren't in the dictionary and think they are real." Of course, dictionaries are DESCRIPTORS of a language (words and their usage) rather than prescriptive entities. And frankly, as Erin McKean discusses in the TED lecture we watched at the last Fluent meeting in June, the dictionary is a rather incomplete descriptor at that! Because, as she points out, USAGE is what makes words real, rather than arbitrary placement in a dictionary (it's also useful to keep in mind that there is no one such thing as THE dictionary so much as there are many dictionaries published by many separate companies... the closest thing any language has to a real standardized set of rules is, for example, L'Académie française, a linguistic governing body... not like French speakers on the street listen to the Academy anyway, though).
Erica, you're right to point out the relationship between these "unofficial" words and language evolution. I do see your point about social stratification that could result from only one class having command of the proper "real" (read: High) language (but let's be careful with the terms high and low, because I think they're meant to describe a diglossic situation, in which (as I understand it) the entire community has control of both languages but uses them for different functions). But I think more to the point, the dictionary can never really govern language or prevent it from evolving "cohesively" (even national academies like France's fail). And really, words like "OK" and "ain't" are part of a much larger process--the inevitable force of language change. These words aren't bad; they're just new and different. Generations before us would complain that the English we consider to be "proper" today is vile and atrocious. Language is in a constant state of flux, so anyone who seeks to isolate one form and preserve it as the "correct" one seems misguided to me. Not only do languages change, but they change differently in different places, which is why Puerto Rican Spanish sounds "off" to my instructor who speaks Colombian Spanish. These languages share a common parent (Spanish), but in time will eventually evolve into completely separate languages, the way French and Spanish diverged from Latin. Does that mean Latin is any more correct than French or Spanish? Or that French is any more correct than Spanish (and vice versa)? Of course not. They're just different!
--Amy
Yeah it's interesting, we actually spent a large amount of time learning about L'Académie and the overall development of the French language with Bilali this year..I'm just looking at one of her old powerpoints and am realizing a lot of what we learned is relevant to the idea of "bad" aspects of a language. French started as a language of the elite that eventually trickled down to the peasants after quite a bit of resistance..and in the 16th/17th century the "purisme" movement emphasized the notion of "un français châtié" - a refined French that forbade the inclusion of any foreign terms. However, by the time of the French revolution only 3 out of 25 million spoke actual French (as opposed to some sort of local patois). Robespierre then spearheaded "la terror linguistique", which did two things: 1, forbade the use of any patois, and 2, it cemented the close association between the French language and national political identity. The language you spoke was SO significant to social mobility that it's no surprise the French have tried to be strict about it. I also remember the standardization of French having something to do with calming the tensions between Catholics and Protestants...Anyway, it was Richelieu who created L'Academie. At the time it was created, rich French poets sat around in salons all day discussing the proper use of the language, so it was vaguely relevant to the times, but was always behind the times. They work notoriously slowly..and when they released the first dictionary in 1964 they purposefully did not include words related to the arts and sciences, only using words deemed appropriate for "des honnestes gens". SO the French have always been crazy.
Alison,
That's actually so interesting--and there's the language and identity question again.
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