A FAKE AN IMPOSTOR A ZESTYCHILLE

“SOUP soup break Relax… SOUP taste.”

Found this bowl In Andover, U.K.

you a bitch

Because language use is ubiquitous yet linguistics is not an area people are widely informed about, and those are the really risky areas for wide-reaching wrongheaded ideas being held and passed on… So it’s always worth repeating the linguistic, scientific truth that all language are of equal linguistic complexity. And all dialects obey an equally rigid and legit systems of internal grammar.

(NB: Grammar it’s worth pointing out, in the linguistic sense means ‘the rules that govern a language’, the maths of putting words together into sentences that convey specific meaning.

People use the word ‘grammar’ in a colloquial sense to mean something a bit different; a kind of prescriptive style guide. Things like ‘never end a sentence in a preposition’.

But when linguists say something is ‘grammatically codified’ it means that it is a language or dialect with its own consistent internal rules of use. The rules we all implicitly know about our native tongues that enable us to, without thinking, issue a sentence that conveys meaning perfectly even for an entirely novel concept.

For example, if I say “the bamblebrot rumpoled over the squadularion” you understand perfectly which words there are nouns, which the verb, and furthermore which party was the object and which the subject despite not having any of the key words your lexicon, because your internalised understanding of how English grammar works tells you.)

And the kind of magical thing about language due to the unique way the human brain ‘learns’ language it is that we codify extremely quickly. New dialects emerge with new speech communities or speech needs and become codified within a few years.

So you know wherever a community is speaking distinctively that is a dialect. And thus it is going to be a full, internally consistent, as-complex-and-rigidly-ruled-and-communicative-as-any-other dialect.

I go into this to stress the point that if you hear the point made ‘all languages are equal’ or ‘all dialects are valid’ it might sounds like a kind of liberal sop and one might not understand how fundamentally, scientifically true that is. There are no languages more primitive than any other, no dialects less complex than any other. They are all founded upon the principles of ‘universal grammar’ as theorised by Chomsky and since proven in field examples (like the Nicaraguan deaf children case, which is such a fascinating thing to read up on).

Some languages of course have been around longer than others and have certain things within their past that lends them surface qualities different from other languages. For instance, English is unusually rich in terms of its lexicon - we have a lot of different words for things - because of the particular history of the community of origin: a German-speaking island subsequently colonised by the French, essentially doubling up on the nation’s words for things.

But English, despite having existed a few hundred years in one form or another is literally and absolutely no more linguistically complex than, say, Light Warlpiri which is a language that first emerged amongst Aboriginal communities in Australia’s Northern Territory only in the early 2000s.

I talk about languages but all this applies to dialects too - because actually they’re the same thing. What is counted as a ‘language’ and what is a ‘dialect’ is an academic distinction base simply on the external factor of how mutually intelligible that system is with others. Whether you call something a language or a dialect, it follows the exact same mechanics of emergence, acquisition and use.

AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) is a dialect of the English language family. Dialects of English all share enough of the same grammar that they’re mutually intelligible, but they all have their own particular grammatical rules which set them apart from others and are the reason they’re considered a separate dialect at all. The examples above are some grammatical rules that appear in AAVE but not, for example, in Standard English.

To give another example, let’s take the dialect Southern American English. Part of that dialect’s grammar contains a ‘second person collective’, i.e. a distinct way to address ‘you as a group’ from ‘you as an individual’. Most dialects of English don’t have a distinct tense for that, though lots of other languages do (for example, Spanish). But Southern American English does have that grammatical rule - it has ‘y’all’ separate from ‘you’ and distinct rules governing which is employed.

Finally, it’s really easy to imagine that there is a central, pure form of a language and all other dialects are deviations from it. That sense is reinforced by the labelling. In America there is ‘Standard American English’. In Britain simply ‘Standard English’. These names name it sounds like this is the generic, unsullied form of English but that’s not true. These are just the prestigious forms of English, the forms that are privileged by external factors to do with society and politics. The people who speak SE are in power; the people in power speak SE. 

The point is that all language and all dialects employ equally complex, consistent, rigid, communicative rules internally as one another. There are no primitive, less complex, less ‘correct’ dialects.