conuly

Mostly, because I think diversity is a Good Thing, and prescriptivism not only says "this is how you should speak" but also says "other ways of speaking are wrong/unintelligent", which does very bad things to linguistic diversity.

When my great-grandmother was alive, she spoke Walloon. Her parents spoke Walloon, and their parents. I'm told that if you left your village, you could understand the people in the next village. One town further and it's a little more difficult. Town after that, it's getting hard to understand people. By the time you're four or five towns away, it's a completely different language... but everybody could understand the people in the next town. My grandmother grew up understanding Walloon, but not speaking it. And now everybody speaks French, and it's the same througout the country, and very similar to the French spoken elsewhere.

I won't deny that the huge range in dialects made communication difficult, clearly a system like that only works when people hardly ever travel (my ancestors were living in the same town since before it got its charter, and that was over 1000 years ago), but it's still an amazing wealth of languages that we will never see again. We really won't see it again, out of, what, 5000 languages in the world, a huge percentage of them are counted as "endangered". The extinct list continues to grow.

Prescriptivist linguistics, as I see it, tends to hinge on two very ignorant assumptions. The first, that language never changes, and the second, that the prestigious dialect is inherantly the best dialect. It's not the best because it is prestigious, it's prestigious because it is the best. There is a third assumption, but that one is so obvious it's never spoken: everybody should speak the same way.

Of course, these assumptions don't hold up. Language DOES change, that is why it is so hard to understand Shakespeare -- he spoke a dialect that has been dead for a few hundred years. In another five hundred years, it may even be a separate language, and then people will come to their senses and start translating it. As for a dialect being "the best", it depends in what sense. People usually have a vague idea about clarity, or just "it sounds better", or "it's more complex... other forms are just attempts to speak correctly". None of those partial assumptions has any merit. I fail to see how a dialect where the reflexives go "myself, yourself, HIMself, ourselves, yourselves, THEMselves" is clearer (or more logical, another common idea) than one where the third person reflexives are hisself and theirselves. I do not believe that one can objectively claim that one dialect sounds better than another. As for complexity, that exists in all languages and dialects. AAVE, contrary to popular belief, has a complex way of conjugating the verb "to be", and includes a habitual, which mainstream dialects lack. Singaporean English, which is very different from most English dialects, has an emphatic word "lah", and a question marker which I forget. Words that exist as a form of punctuation, really. Too cool.

Of course, I already mentioned it, in a world of linguistic diversity, how do we communicate with one another? Do we get translators every time the dialects diverge far enough? Do we learn tens of languages, all of us? These are options, but very unpopular ones. The obvious solution is what is known as an interlingua, or an auxlang... a special language that everybody learns just to communicate with everybody else. You only have to take one language in school, but that is a passport around the world.

Traditionally, the language that filled this spot was Latin. This worked very well, so well that I wonder why people started inventing languages like Esperanto. Esperanto never took off, and now the de facto lingua franca is English... but there are complications.

The first is that English may, to some people, smack of imperialism, either from England or America (or, in the future, perhaps some other English-speaking nation). If English-speaking nations lose their influence, it seems likely that English will also lose its influence. Slowly, to be sure, since it's impressed pretty strongly in the world, but those middle years would be mildly chaotic as far as understanding everybody else.

The second is the one I already mentioned... language changes. There are two "educated" dialects of English... BSE and SAE. However, there are many hundreds of other dialects, some of which wildly diverge from the standards. And those two dialects have a number of oh-so-amusing differences. Aside from which, using a standard dialect of an existing, living language means that you're stuck with my big complaint: the attempt to beat out other dialects. *shudders dramatically*

Well, now we're stuck. Nobody uses Latin anymore, Esperanto is unpopular, English (which IS popular) has two major dialects, many not so major dialects, and is only going to be popular as long as the nations attatched to it have power.

The idea *I* have, which will never catch on, is to simplify English. Take our two major dialects, cut out all the irregularities, fix the spelling, modify the verb system, and the pronouns (we really need, at the very least, a second person singular/plural distinction), call it something dumb like "International English" and then, for the love of god, stop forcing everybody to sound alike unless they're speaking officially, in which case everybody acknowledges that this is completely an artificial construct.