We need to talk about language
Language lovers, writers, grammar-correctors... we need to talk.
In school, we were taught how to recognize an adjective from a noun. We learned when to use "there, their, and they're'' in a sentence. We had points deducted from our grammar quiz if we forgot to make a pronoun plural when talking about a group of people. These grammar rules were BURNED into our minds (well, some of our minds).
But when you think about the function of language, it's communication. When we speak or write or listen, the goal is to communicate with each other.
When a toddler says "hungry!", we don't correct them and say "I am hungry." We can infer what they are communicating, despite the improper grammar. The point is to communicate and understand.
When an adult writes or speaks using grammar that deviates from what we were taught in school, some of us feel the need to interject ourselves and correct their grammar. Maybe they don’t know the right way to use grammar and we want to help, or, more likely, they disagree with something we said, and in their rebuttal they used incorrect grammar, so we can point that mistake out in order to gently make fun of them in an argument and make ourselves feel better.
Either way, if we are able to “correct” someone’s grammar, it means we understood what they were trying to communicate, rendering that grammatical correction useless.
So why correct someone at all, when it only serves to make them feel bad?
You might argue that grammar is a way to regulate speech so that others can understand language. Fair point, and to an extent, yes, grammar helps us understand each other. BUT, grammar differs among dialects of the same language. This is true for English and other languages. What may be grammatically acceptable to one group of people, may sound completely wrong to another.
Take AAVE, for example: African American Vernacular English.
In popular culture, it is largely misunderstood, and thought of as "bad English," "ebonics" (originally coined in 1973 by someone with good intentions, from "ebony" and "phonics," but now starting to become a slur), "ghetto talk" (definitely a slur), and the "blaccent" (a portmanteau word of "black" and "accent") that NPR seems to like using.
Why do I say it's misunderstood? Because it is emphatically not bad English. It is a full-fledged dialect of English, just like, say, British English. It is entirely rule-bound -- meaning it has a very clear grammar which can be (and has been) described in great detail. It is not simply 'ungrammatical'. If you do not conform to the grammar of AAVE, the result is ungrammatical sentences in AAVE.
That said, its grammar is different than many other dialects of English.
Read more here.
So how did “proper grammar” get chosen? Why is one dialect favored over others?
It’s like Dan Brown said, those in power choose how history is written. “When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?’”
The history is longer and more complicated than I will go into here, but the point is the same: those in power chose which grammar would be “correct” and which dialects would be looked down on by those who valued proper grammar. Those choices were made based on social, political, and usually racist ideals.
We have a long cultural history of assuming that whatever black people in America do is defective. Couple this with what seems to be a natural predilection toward thinking that however other people talk is wrong, and you've got a recipe for social and linguistic stigma.
For instance, in 1996 the Oakland school board took the sensible step of trying to use AAVE as a bridge to teach AAVE-speaking children how to speak and write Standard American English. They also took the less sensible step of declaring AAVE a completely different language. This was wildly misrepresented in the media, leading to a storm of racist, self-congratulatory "ain't ain't a word" pedantry from both white people and older middle-class black people who do not speak the dialect. (author's note: ain't been a word...for over 300 years.)
Again, remember the point of language is to communicate. If an idea is communicated, language has served its purpose.
Unless you are some kind of genius linguist who knows the details and history of every dialect in the English language, you have no business claiming to know what correct vs. incorrect grammar is for someone else. And if you were a genius linguist, you would understand there are many types of correct grammar depending on the dialect, and therefore “correcting” someone’s grammar isn’t a thing.
Even if there were only one correct type of grammar, correcting someone only serves to make them feel bad, which makes communication more difficult. Correcting someone’s grammar harms communication, the exact opposite of what grammar-correctors claim to want.
Another common grammar hangup for those self-proclaimed langage lovers is the idea of singular “they” when referring to non-binary people or other individuals who use they/them/theirs pronouns, rather than she/her/hers or he/him/his.
“You can’t use ‘they’ because it sounds like you’re talking about a group of people!”
“It’s confusing because I was taught to use ‘she’ or ‘he’, not ‘they.’”
“It’s not proper English, that’s why I can’t respect it.”
These people often avoid the feeling of being uncomfortable with the idea of non-binary people, and instead focus on how improper grammar is the probem they have with respecting and using non-binary gender pronouns.
Only… it IS proper English use “they” as a singular pronoun. Even though we’ve established grammar is subjective based on dialect, I bring this up to further explain how language-correcting is usually based on fear, bigotry, or ignorance, not on what is actually historically correct or fact-based.
Here’s an example:
"The student needs to bring their backpack to school each day."
"They should come prepared with pencils and paper."
"A student should not wear a jacket if it isn't theirs."
We often use singular they/them when we don’t know the gender of someone, or when we want all people to see themselves in a sentence, rather than just one gender.
Here’s another example:
"Sandi took their dog to the vet."
"They bought new car tires yesterday."
"Those packages on the front porch are theirs."
Here, we use the same singular “they” technique as before when talking about the single student, but we instead talk about a specific person.
Non-binary people are those who don’t feel like they fit into either binary gender (boy or girl). These people don’t inherently feel like their bodies are wrong (as in, they may be happy with the sex/body they were born with) - but they don’t feel comfortable with the gender attached to it. As a refresher, sex is the physical body classification we get as babies, and gender is the social expectations placed on us because of our sex. I won’t go into this more here, but will in another article later, so stay tuned if you’re interested. Sex is a way to categorize bodies. Gender is a socialization.
Often, non-binary people use gender-neutral pronouns, because those pronouns best represent their identity and who they are. Using the pronouns someone wants is a small thing that makes a big difference to them.
You may think “'they' is plural, I still can’t get on board with using it!”
But, all major dictionaries, and language history agrees, singular “they” has existed in writing since at least the 1300s.
“Singular they has become the pronoun of choice to replace he and she in cases where the gender of the antecedent - the word the pronoun refers to - is unknown, irrelevant, or nonbinary, or where gender needs to be concealed. “ and “The Oxford English Dictionary traces singular they back to 1375, where it appears in the medieval romance William and the Werewolf.”
Not sure how to use they/them/theirs to refer to one person in everyday language? Here’s how.
In both cases, when looking at the history and use of AAVE, or the reluctance to use singular “they”, despite a long history of it being correct in the English language, we can clearly see the hang-up is more sociological and personal, rather than fact-based.
The purpose of language is to communicate, not to devalue cultural or social ideas that are unfamiliar to us.
So as a fellow writer and communicator, I say it’s time to leave these antiquated and misguided ideas about proper grammar behind us, and focus on what matters - communicating with each other in whatever way(s) work best.