7 Things Meme: Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism

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As part of the 7 Things Meme, sandmantv asked me to write about Prescriptivism vs Descriptivism. But I really can't do any better than link to today's Slate article by Steven Pinker, which is an excellent debunking of common misunderstandings of these two viewpoints. It's long, but I highly recommend reading the whole first section (approximately the first

Comments

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What excellent questions. I wish I had answers. My knowledge of these issues is purely academic. It seems to me that, as a bare minimum, the first step is simply to understand the fact that no dialect is inherently better or worse than another. And specifically in the case of AAVE, it's important to understand that the differences between AAVE and SAE have nothing to do with laziness, stupidity, etc. They're perfectly valid variants, they're just non-standard.

Perhaps one concrete suggestion I can make (and this comes up with respect to all sorts of prescriptivist rules, not just standard vs non-standard dialects), is never to use the words "wrong" or "incorrect" when describing language. That's not just some sort of political correctness--the way people use and interpret those words in the context of language is often incoherent. I've written about this before: the summary is that any normative claims about language use need to be rooted in valid descriptive claims, and the way people often use terms like "wrong" blurs the distinction between normative and descriptive claims in a very problematic way.