Attitudes to Language Change

Prescriptivists: Believe that language has to be accurate, right or wrong.

Descriptivists: Notice Language Change objectively.

Three metaphors used by prescriptivists to talk about language change are; the ‘damp spoon’ syndrome, the ‘crumbling castle’ view and the ‘infectious disease’ assumption.

• The ‘crumbling castle’ refers to how the English Language was once a magnificent castle but over the years it has crumbled away. Jean Aitchinson disagrees with this stating that as a language is constantly changing there could be no single point at which it was magnificent. “No year,” she said, “can be found when language achieved some peak of perfection.”

• The ‘damp spoon’ suggests that language change is due to laziness. Aitchinson disagrees again saying that, “The only truly lazy speech is drunken speech, where alcohol affects coordination, and English is not getting like drunken speech.”

• The ‘infectious disease’ suggests that ‘bad English’ is like a disease which is spread. Aitchinson says that this is technically correct but it is no disease.  Douglas Bush says that, “…the disease metaphor falls down… people pick up changes because they want to.”

There is an argument which suggests that the changes in our language are similar to the changes in our fashion. However a Guardian article by David Shariatmadari suggests that this is not the case. He explores the debated which language change creates, “Fashions come and go too, but it's hard to think of clothes that excite the same hot-under-the-collar debates.” He mentions the bad grammar award nominations which suggest that many still take a prescriptivist attitude to language. 

Bibliography:

David Shariatmadari. (6th Mary 2014). Is language like fashion, or the weather?. Available: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/06/language-fashion-weather-speak. Last accessed 29th Feb 2016.

Anthony Rea. Language Debates. Available: https://languagedebates.wordpress.com/tag/jean-aitchison/. Last accessed 29th Feb 2016.