The Internet may just be the most important innovation for terrifying prescriptivists in linguistic history. In one fell swoop, the supremacy of the editor was gone. Anyone can publish anything they like, and there’s nobody there to rejoin split infinitives or rearrange closing prepositions. Now that the floodgates have opened and unedited writing can reach a far wider audience than in recent centuries, it makes sense that we’d see significant language change. Combined with the generally less formal register of online communication, it’s no surprise that the English of the internet is a looser, more relaxed and flexible version of the language.
Predictably, we see the largest influence of internet culture in language through new vocabulary. Grammatically, however, the internet’s influence is more subtle.
An example of a recently popularized construction associated with the internet is ‘because noun’. For instance, ‘why’d you go to sleep so late?’ ‘Because Netflix.’ While this phrasing feels natural (though perhaps not to all), none of the definitions of ‘because’ support that usage. ‘Because’ is a ‘subordinating conjunction’ which means that is a type of word which must be followed by a clause, not just a single noun. There is a lot of current research being done on the shift ‘because’ is undergoing, so it’s not totally clear yet what is happening, but this is currently a prominent grammatical change in English. While the exact origins of the construction are unclear, it was thanks to the Internet that it gained popularity. The prepositional ‘because’ lends itself to forms of communication like memes and Tweets, in which brevity and often irony are essential, and ‘because noun’ conveys both. This sort of change in language is criticised because it strays from the ‘standard’, but language change has happened throughout the history of language. Stigmatization has always come with language change - as one dialect always has the most power, and the powerful dialect is almost always declared ‘correct’.
One of the most stigmatized varieties of English is AAVE (African American Vernacular English) which is a major dialect of English within the US that is spoken primarily by African Americans. The use of AAVE is highly stigmatized due to misconceptions about the dialect, and largely because of racist stigmatization of the speaker group. Because of a lack of understanding of the AAVE grammatical system, it is often referred to as ‘sloppy’ and ‘bad English’. While there are many interesting features to discuss, we’ll focus on one heavily stigmatized example for simplicity’s sake: the habitual ‘be’.
In AAVE, an unconjugated or unchanged ‘be’ is used to mark habitual or prolonged actions, like ‘She be running’. The SAE (‘Standard’ American English) version of a habitual tense is an unchanged verb like ‘She runs’. However, the AAVE use is often misunderstood to mean ‘She is running [right now]’ instead of the habitual meaning that is intended. This is likely part of the common misconception that AAVE speakers simply replace ‘is’ with ‘be’ in all tenses. However this is not so, and it doesn’t have the same meaning as simply replacing ‘is’ with ‘be’ either. AAVE uses the habitual ‘be’ systematically but because SAE doesn’t use it in the same way, this feature is misunderstood and heavily stigmatized. While many people look at this as ‘bad English’, it is in fact a grammatical feature of AAVE that SAE doesn’t have. Because of the political attitudes towards standardization, and the dialects that aren’t the standard of their language, we get stigmatizations like this towards linguistically correct varieties of language.
Standardization sounds complicated but it’s actually pretty simple. For a language variety to be considered a standard, it must fulfill a few things: it must be in large use by the population, be the dominant language variety of media, be used in legal paperwork and literary forms and there must be some form of institution dictating usage norms. To better understand, if the language variety is viewed as the official language of a population, it is most likely the standard. Without the previously mentioned criteria, a language variety is not going to be considered the standard, but a secondary variety or dialect of the language.
Standardization sounds complicated but it’s actually pretty simple. For a language variety to be considered a standard, it must fulfill a few things: it must be in large use by the population, be the dominant language variety of media, be used in legal paperwork and literary forms and there must be some form of institution dictating usage norms. To better understand, if the language variety is viewed as the official language of a population, it is most likely the standard. Without the previously mentioned criteria, a language variety is not going to be considered the standard, but a secondary variety or dialect of the language.
The existence of a standard dialect of a language creates a hierarchy within the dialects of that language. For those who use this ‘standard’, it is easy to see yourself as more educated and well-learned than a person who speaks a different variety of the language. In fact, those who don’t use the standard language are often seen as uneducated or of lower status in the world than those who speak the standard. This inequality is hard to overcome, because the belief that a standard is an educated language is ingrained in the belief of others. This creates a belief in many people that non-standard dialects are simply an incorrect version of the standard, when in fact they often use their own grammar structures and grammar rules not present in the ‘standard’ dialect.
The existence of standardization, and the subsequent stigmatization is not a new thing, and in fact is historically important to the development of English. The Norman Invasion of 1066 brought the French language into contact with what we call Old English. This not only brought French words into the language but also spellings. When the Norman scribes began writing the English words, they wrote the words based on the spellings that they were accustomed to. ‘Cwen’ became ‘queen’ and ‘h’ was replaced by ‘gh’ in words like ‘enough’ and ‘night’. As writings became more popular, these spellings began to be standardized into the language.
Another major event of the standardization of English was when William Caxton brought the first printing press to England in 1476 and began translating famous texts into English. The first known book printed was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Most of what Caxton printed was in English and his work as a translator, editor, and printer created more regularization of the language.
In many cases, printers used Latin and French spellings and words to standardize English, since the two languages were more prestigious and in that time often thought of as more civilized. Through looking at a brief history of these standardizations, we can see that those in power and those with access to the technological advances of the time were able to start these forms for the “standard” language, much like we see in today’s English. For example, the word ‘salmon’ historically didn’t have an ‘l’, but it was brought in to artificially create a relationship to the Latin word ‘salier’ in order to sound more prestigious.
The standardization of English has set certain spellings and, in the example discussed below, rules in place that no longer apply. For example, the word ‘goose’ has been present in English since Old English, since at least the year 1000 CE. When you have multiple of the animal, you pluralize the word ‘goose’ to the word ‘geese’. This is because it has what is called, by scholars of Old English, a root-consonant stem and is a plural nominative/accusative noun. Don’t know what this means? That’s fine, you don’t need to. Case was a system used in Old English, and transitioned out during early Middle English leaving behind remnants like ‘goose->geese’ and ‘foot->feet’. However, the word ‘moose’ doesn’t follow this old rule. That’s because it wasn’t introduced until the early 17th century, so it follows the current pluralization system of -s and -es instead.
Irregularities like this are the result of a complicated history, and are something that are often smoothed over and corrected by English language learners both as young children and as adults. However, because of ideas on what is ‘correct’, we choose to keep these artifacts as part of standardized language. In many cases if someone were to say ‘gooses’, or ‘meese’, they would be laughed at; even though they are following clear patterns. This is a case where stigmatization of straying from ‘standard’ English prevents language change, and these irregularities in our pluralization system will continue until that stigma surrounding the use of ‘standard’ English is loosened.
Another major event of the standardization of English was when William Caxton brought the first printing press to England in 1476 and began translating famous texts into English. The first known book printed was Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Most of what Caxton printed was in English and his work as a translator, editor, and printer created more regularization of the language.
In many cases, printers used Latin and French spellings and words to standardize English, since the two languages were more prestigious and in that time often thought of as more civilized. Through looking at a brief history of these standardizations, we can see that those in power and those with access to the technological advances of the time were able to start these forms for the “standard” language, much like we see in today’s English. For example, the word ‘salmon’ historically didn’t have an ‘l’, but it was brought in to artificially create a relationship to the Latin word ‘salier’ in order to sound more prestigious.
The standardization of English has set certain spellings and, in the example discussed below, rules in place that no longer apply. For example, the word ‘goose’ has been present in English since Old English, since at least the year 1000 CE. When you have multiple of the animal, you pluralize the word ‘goose’ to the word ‘geese’. This is because it has what is called, by scholars of Old English, a root-consonant stem and is a plural nominative/accusative noun. Don’t know what this means? That’s fine, you don’t need to. Case was a system used in Old English, and transitioned out during early Middle English leaving behind remnants like ‘goose->geese’ and ‘foot->feet’. However, the word ‘moose’ doesn’t follow this old rule. That’s because it wasn’t introduced until the early 17th century, so it follows the current pluralization system of -s and -es instead.
Irregularities like this are the result of a complicated history, and are something that are often smoothed over and corrected by English language learners both as young children and as adults. However, because of ideas on what is ‘correct’, we choose to keep these artifacts as part of standardized language. In many cases if someone were to say ‘gooses’, or ‘meese’, they would be laughed at; even though they are following clear patterns. This is a case where stigmatization of straying from ‘standard’ English prevents language change, and these irregularities in our pluralization system will continue until that stigma surrounding the use of ‘standard’ English is loosened.
There is a definite issue regarding standardization and stigmatization and because of which, there will always be those who cry foul at the evolution of language. Of course, new constructions both of dialects and of the standard are technically, “ungrammatical”. However, as elaborated elsewhere in this blog post, there is no real reason aside from adherence to tradition to discriminate against these linguistic changes. Grammar is a constantly shifting thing, with constructions unthinkable in 1800 being commonplace today. Grammatical change occurs naturally as a part of human language, and will continue to do so no matter how much we fight it. It’s hard to say what features will stay in English and what features will fade from use in the language, in whatever form it takes, centuries from now. However we can say with certainty that, as has been true since the beginning of English’s standardization, someone along the way will scream that the language is being ruined- while the language and it’s users continue to ignore prescriptivist screaming.
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