GeekGirlCon Blog

Grammar Ain’t All That

Written by GeekGirlCon Manager of Editorial Services Winter Downs.

Language is a fundamental part of being human; in fact linguist Steven Pinker argued in his book The Language Instinct that it’s an evolutionary instinct hard-wired into the brain, and that every three-year-old is a “grammatical genius.” People develop languages even when not taught to speak, which is how a group of Deaf children spontaneously invented Nicaraguan Sign Language in the 1970s and 80s. It’s not surprising that people get very invested in the language that they speak.

Like a lot of bookwormish people, I went through a phase–in my case, in my late teens–when I became preoccupied with “correct” language. As a writer, I thought that having impeccable spelling, grammar, punctuation, and syntax would make my prose better. Of course, getting hung up on all of that only made my writing stilted, painful both to read and to write.

Worse, I realized, by valuing “correctness” above all else I was doing my part to uphold a structure of oppression. The more I learned about the history of language, about who gets to define what is correct, and about whose speech is labeled incorrect, the more I wanted to wash my hands of that whole business.

Cultural Supremacy

You often see language used as a tool to enforce cultural norms, or the dominance of one culture over others. The most obvious form this takes in the modern-day US is the English-only movement, aimed mostly by white people at Latin@ and Asian immigrants. It’s not just their native languages that immigrants are expected to surrender at the border, but other cultural aspects that mark them as different from white Americans. I’ve been watching the new sitcom Fresh off the Boat, which touches on some of these themes. In the pilot, the protagonist, Eddie, has his name mangled by a teacher, and the other kids at school shun him because of the Chinese food he has in his lunchbox.

In past decades, it wasn’t just social pressure that dominant cultures used to suppress others. Native American children, starting in the 1860s, were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools where they were subjected to a horrific regime of abuse. They were punished for speaking their native tongues, and forced to assimilate Protestant American culture and ideology. These boarding schools reached their peak attendance in the 1970s, so they’re not exactly ancient history.

Bilingual road signs in Wales.
Image source: ITV

Some languages have been pushed to extinction, or to near-extinction. Cymraeg, the Welsh language, had at one point nearly died out thanks to English supremacy. When I was a kid living in England in the 1980s, the movement to revive the language had gained enough momentum to pass a couple of Acts of Parliament to get Cymraeg taught in schools, and to have bilingual road signs and government documentation throughout Wales.

I remember clearly the unease, even fear, that a lot of monolingual English-speakers had about the resurgence of the language. Specifically, English people complained about going into shops in Wales, when the locals would, according to them, switch to Cymraeg in order to have private conversations. Some of these English complainers said they didn’t even think (or care) that the locals were talking about them; the sheer fact of a conversation going on around them that they couldn’t understand was unpalatable.

From these complaints it’s obvious to me now that at least part of language supremacy is about being able to understand and control every conversation–which is just a hop, skip, and a jump to controlling people and political movements. But more on that later.

Racism

Cultural supremacy is closely tied to racism; you can see it in many of the examples I’ve already given. In the Americas, Black African people kidnapped as slaves also had their languages and cultures forcibly stripped from them, and were forbidden to learn to read and write.

In response, they developed their own new cultures and language traditions–creoles of French, English, and other European languages, or new vernaculars. African American Vernacular English (AAVE) (which used to be known as Ebonics, though no linguist uses that term) is commonly spoken by millions of Black Americans as a native tongue. Yet, since it’s not Standard American English, some people consider it ungrammatical, or even a sign of ignorance or stupidity. The fact is, AAVE has its own perfectly consistent grammatical structure, and most people who speak it will freely code-switch between AAVE and Standard American English, depending on which is more accepted in their current surroundings. Which means they speak two languages in their everyday life, constantly judging which to use in any given situation–quite the opposite of ignorance and stupidity.

Classism

Language is also used to define and curtail social classes. Perhaps the most codified version of this was the U (upper class) vs. non-U (middle class) division in early- to mid-20th century Britain. The middle class terms were intended to sound more refined than the upper class terms, representing the (often regarded as unseemly) social aspirations of the middle class. Today, these particular divisions aren’t quite so strictly delineated. Instead, certain modes of speech will mark someone as a chav, innit.

Even if someone uses standard English words, their accent can mark them out as lower class. In the US, people with Southern accents are coded as “hicks” or “rednecks”, and assumed to have certain beliefs and values.

It’s a luxury to be able to speak the most acceptable standard local variant of English, wherever you are. It requires education, access to books, and people to guide you in what is and is not acceptable. Everyone’s seen the old joke of someone getting seated at a place setting with three different sets of silverware, and not knowing which fork to use. Acceptable English is all about the same kinds of social norms, and if a parent doesn’t know them, their kids will likely never learn them. In this way, the classist (and racist) limitations imposed by language oppression are passed down through the generations.

Ableism

There are many types of disability that might affect someone’s fluency with language, whether written, or spoken, or both: hearing impairments, dyslexia, traumatic brain injury, autism, ADHD, and so on. English is a particularly tricky language because there are so many exceptions to the rules, which makes the burden of memorization even heavier on people with disabilities.

Misogyny

“Fetch”: it’s like slang, from… England. (Mean Girls)
Image source: Business 2 Community

Certain forms of speech are coded (usually inaccurately) as being specific to women, and then devalued or dismissed. Women are said to use uptalk more (a rising intonation at the end of a sentence), which some people think makes them sound questioning and uncertain. Women, especially young women, are blamed for using “like” as a filler in sentences, which apparently sounds vapid or unintelligent. In fact, both of these habits are common to English-speaking people of all genders, ages, and walks of life. It’s just that people tend to notice when women use these verbal signifiers.

Women are even claimed to talk more than men–and sometimes studies are invented or misinterpreted to give scientific legitimacy to this idea.

Transphobia & queerphobia

This is really the category that inspired me to write this post. When I recently began asking people to use ‘they’ as a pronoun for me, even some sympathetic people found grammar to be a sticking point. Mostly they agreed with me that English needs a gender-neutral pronoun, but when I presented one that I like to use, they ummed and ahhed, and wanted to make sure I knew how difficult it would be for them to make the mental adjustment.

Like other oppressed groups, LGBTQIA people have had to blaze their own linguistic trail, because the language simply did not exist to describe their experiences. The language gatekeepers claim that the words we use are “not words,” or “made-up words”–as if there’s any other kind. Some cisgender people get very upset about being called cis, because if there’s no word to describe someone whose gender identity matches the role they’ve been assigned, that status is seen as unmarked, neutral.

Sometimes the pushback comes in the form of concern trolling; “Why do you need to have a label?” people will ask. If they’d experienced the great wave of relief you can feel when you hear the word “bisexual” or “asexual” or “genderqueer” for the first time, and realize you’re not broken, you’re not alone, they’d understand why labels can be useful, and why it’s important to coin new terms when the existing ones don’t quite cut it.

Language as resistance

Being able to name oneself is one form of resistance to these structures of oppression–whether that’s a description, or a label, or a chosen personal name.

Another type of resistance is when oppressed groups invent their own language and codes to talk about identities and activities that are marginalized, or even illegal. Polari was a slang used from the 19th century (and possibly much earlier) until the mid-20th century in Britain by actors, circus performers, and people in the gay subculture to talk about their lives in coded terms. At a time when “homosexual acts” were criminalized, this was a means of survival.

Velvet Goldmine (1998) included a subtitled scene in which characters speak in Polari.

Oppressive people fear language they can’t control. They fear people being able to name and define their oppression, because that’s the first step to being able to fight back. They fear people organizing subversively right under their noses.

Time magazine recently included “feminist” on a list of words to ban, ostensibly because of overuse, but given that the rest of the list was full of Black slang terms like “bae”, “basic”, and “turnt”, and youth/internet slang like “sorry not sorry” and “I can’t even”, it seems more likely that these were words and concepts that the poll creators found threatening or worrying.

https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/561662414878281728

As I began to let go of the idea of “correctness” in language, I realized that I wasn’t just hurting people I care about with that attitude; I was hurting myself. I decided that what’s important for me is that language is a tool that should serve people, not the other way around. If words don’t adequately describe reality, invent more words. If adhering to linguistic norms is hurting people, abandon those norms.

I decided to embrace language in all its variety, which in linguistics is known as “descriptivism”–describing and observing language as people use it (as opposed to “prescriptivism”, which means determining a set of rules for how language “should” be used). Since then, I’d say I’ve become more considerate as a person–and a lot less stressed out about what I should and should not be doing.

If you’re interested in the more technical aspects of linguistics that I’ve touched on in this article, I highly recommend Language Log, a collaborative blog run by a group of Linguistics professors. The particular branch of linguistics that covers these topics is called Sociolinguistics–the study of how language affects, and is affected by, social and cultural norms.

Winter Downs
“Rock On!”