The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism [1 ed.] 9781003095125

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Linguistic Prescriptivism: An Evolving Field
1. What this Handbook Is About
2. The Changing View of Prescriptivism in Linguistics
3. The Growing Body of Research On Linguistic Prescriptivism
4. Structure of this Book
Notes
Part I Theoretical and Methodological Issues
1 Why Grammars Have to Be Normative – and Prescriptivists Have to Be Scientific
1. Normativity Versus Prescriptivism
2. Normative Grammars as Scientific Grammars
3. Inessential Faults of Prescriptive Works
3.1. Inaccurate Generalizations
3.2. Contemptuous Attitudes
3.3. Reformist Zeal
4. High-Quality Prescriptivism and Use of Evidence
5. Low-Quality Prescriptivism and Contempt for Facts
6. Conclusion
Notes
References
2 Verbal Hygiene
1. Introduction
2. The Origins of Verbal Hygiene
3. Verbal Hygiene and Prescriptivism
4. The Reception and Development of “Verbal Hygiene”
5. Contemporary Verbal Hygiene: Linguistic Authority in an Age of Culture Wars
6. Conclusion
References
3 Accent Bias
1. Introduction
2. Speech and Writing
3. Other Rationales for Accent Bias
3.1 Intrinsic Clarity
3.2 Intelligibility Is Enhanced By Familiarity
3.3 Pragmatism
3.4 Accent Mutability
3.5 Accent and Mispronunciation
3.6 Subjective Factors
3.7 Summary
4. Accent Bias in Britain
4.1 Labels Survey
4.2 Listening Study
4.2.1 Results
5. Discussion
6. Conclusions
References
4 Historiographical Methods
1. Introduction
2. The Eighteenth-Century English Grammars Database (ECEG)
2.1 Database Description
2.2 Doing Research With ECEG
3. The Eighteenth-Century English Phonology Database (ECEP)
3.1 Database Description
3.2 Doing Research With ECEP
4. The Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) Database
4.1 Database Description
4.2 Doing Research With HUGE
5. Outlook
Notes
References
5 Corpus-Based Approaches to Prescriptivism
1. Introduction
2. Yes, Prescriptivism Can Shape Language Usage
3. No, Prescriptivism Cannot Shape Language Usage
4. But Do Prescriptivists Actually Have a Point? The Corpus-Based Perspective
5. Conclusion
Notes
References
6 Prescription and Normativity in the Evolution of Inner-Circle Englishes
1. Introduction: Prescriptivism and the Evolution of Varietal Norms
2. Instruments of Codification: Prescriptivism and Normativity
3. Theoretical and Empirical Aspects of Prescriptivism
4. Australian and Canadian English as Comparable Inner-Circle Englishes
5. Investigation of Prescriptivism in AusE and CanE
6. Treatment of Selected Usage Items in AusE and CanE By Type of Prescription
6.1 A Standardizing Prescription: Spelling Variable -Ise/-Ize
6.2 A Stylistic Prescription: Gotten as Past Participle of Get
6.3 A Restorative Prescription: Phenomena as the Plural Form of Phenomenon
6.4 Politically Responsive Prescription 1: Recognition of “First Nations” in Capitalizing Indigenous
6.4 Politically Responsive Prescription 2: the Metric System and Its Terminology
7. Discussion of Findings
8. Conclusions
Notes
References
7 The Role of Prescriptivism in the Emergence of New Englishes
1. Introduction
2. Patterns of Diffusion: Authority Or Grassroots?
3. Norm-Oriented Attitudes and Debates
3.1. The Beginnings of an Awareness of World Englishes: the Prator–Kachru–Quirk Debate
3.2. Kachru’s ‘Circles’ and Norms
3.3. Norms in the “Dynamic Model”
3.4. “International English” and the ELF Enterprise
3.5. Error Or Emerging Feature?
4. Postcolonial Language Policies
4.1. Strategies of Dealing With the Former Colonial Language: Endoglossic, Endonormative, Or Exonormative?
4.2. Singapore: SGEM Vs Singlish?
4.3. India: Three Languages?
4.4. Nigeria
5. Conclusion
Note
References
8 Prescriptivism and National Identity: Sociohistorical Constructionism, Disciplinary Blindspots, and Standard Austrian German
1. Introduction: the Term ‘Language’
1.1 France 1789: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, Mais Linguistiquement Intolerant
1.2 Discursive Constructions of Identity: “Nations” as Imagined Communities
1.3 Weinreich’s Dictum and Haugen’s Sequence
2. The Making of Standard German
2.1 Eighteenth-Century Prescriptivists: Germany and Austria
2.2 Standard Austrian German and Standard German German
2.3 Gottschedian Prescriptivism and Popowitsch’s Descriptive Leanings
2.4 Franz Joseph’s Hesitation and Possible Negligence
2.5 Austrian Linguistic Resistance: Popowitsch, Grillparzer, Wittgenstein
2.6 Post-World War II to Present: Österreichisches Wörterbuch (Austrian Dictionary)
3. Problems in the Twenty-First Century: Prescriptive Sociolinguistics?
4. The Next Step: De-Hegemonization and De-Colonization
Notes
References
9 Standards With Pluricentric Languages: Who Sets Norms and Where
1 English and Spanish as Pluricentric Languages
2 English and Spanish in Contrast
2.1 The Spread of English
2.2 The Spread of Spanish
2.2.1 Spanish Overseas: Hispanophone America
2.2.2 Language in the Capitals
3 The Historical Rise of Standards of English and Spanish
3.1 The Codification of Standard British English
3.2 The Codification of Castilian Spanish
3.3 The Role of Language Academies
4 Voices in the Colonies
4.1 Noah Webster
4.2 Andrés Bello
5 Conclusion
Notes
References
Part II Contexts and Practices of Prescriptivism
10 Usage Guides as a Text Type
1. Introduction
2. Text Types: Grammars, Dictionaries, and Usage Guides
3. Characteristics of Usage Guides
4. Two Case Studies: Hall (1917) and Taggart (2010)
4.1 J. Lesslie Hall – Corpus Linguist Avant-La-Lettre
1.2. 4.2 Her Ladyship’s Norm of Correctness
5. Conclusion
Notes
References
11 English Prescriptivism in Higher Education Settings: Focus On Nordic Countries
1. Introduction
2. The Language Situation in the Nordic Countries
3. Higher Education the Nordic Countries
4. Materials
5. Whose English Is Good Enough?
6. What Do We Do With English? What About Our Language?
8. Conclusion
Notes
References
12 Prescriptivism in Education: From Language Ideologies to Listening Practices
1. The Perpetuity of Prescriptivism
2. Overview and Anchor Points
3. Conceptualising Prescriptivism in Education
4. Prescribing Language; Prescribing the Body
5. Class, Race and Prescriptivism in Education
6. Prescribing “Appropriateness”
7. The False Promises of Prescriptivism
8. Foundations of Prescriptivism in England’s Schools
9. Ideologies of Prescriptivism in Post-2010 Reforms
10. Post-2010 Mechanisms of Prescriptivism
11. Conclusion
Notes
References
13 Linguistic Prescriptivism as Social Prescription: The Case of Gender
1. Introduction
2. Delineating and Distinguishing Prescriptivism(s)
2.1 Prescriptivism as an Umbrella
2.2 Linguistic Prescription as a Mask for Other Prejudices
2.3 Are All Prescriptivisms Equal?
3. Gender Ideology as (And Expressed By) Prescriptivism
3.1 Change in Gender, Change in Language
3.2 Prescribing Gender
4. Descriptivism, Prescriptivism, and Linguistic Violence Within and Outside Linguistics
5. Summary
Notes
References
14 Grassroots Prescriptivism
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical Background
2.1 Prescriptivism: Top-Down, Bottom-Up and Beyond
2.2 Changing Authorities, Changing Publics
2.3 Digital Prescriptivism
2.3.1 Forms and Structures of Digital Prescriptivism
2.3.2 Topics and Targets of Digital Prescriptivism
3. Case Study: Reddit Imgur Thread
3.1 Data and Method
3.2 Pronunciation Variants of Imgur
3.3 Argumentation in the Comments
4. Discussion
4.1 Beyond the Prescriptive/descriptive Dichotomy
4.2 Online Community Building
5. Conclusion and Outlook
References
15 Prescription and Taboo: Australia’s Sensitivity Towards American Influence
1. Introduction
1.1 On Taboo and Taboos
2. Prescriptivism – a Matter of Taboo?
2.1 “Dirt Offends Against Order”
2.2 “Dirt Is in the Eye of the Beholder”
3. Americanization of Australian English
3.1 The Early Influx of Americanisms
3.2 The Later Influx of Americanisms
3.2.1 Spelling
3.2.2 Pronunciation
3.2.2 Lexicogrammatical Features
3.3 Demographics
4. What Matters Is How People Think
5. Conclusion – the Filthy Reality of Everyday Life
Notes
References
16 Copy Editors, (Not) All Alike
1. Introduction
1.1 Copy Editors and Proofreaders
1.2 Data Is/are
2. The Survey
3. The Stenton Corpus
3.1 The Manuscripts
3.2 The Authors
3.3 Context
3.4 Highlighting
4. The Six Extracts
5. Quantitative Analysis
5.1 An Overview of Highlighting and Editing Choices
5.2 Editing Patterns
5.3 Distribution Per Age and Variety
6. Qualitative Analysis
7. Respondent References
8. Conclusion
Notes
References
Part III Prescriptivism Across Languages and Cultures
17 Standard Language Ideology and Prescriptivism in the Arabic-Speaking World
1. Introduction
2. Arabic Standard Language Ideology
3. Standardizing Prescriptivism
3.1. Combating Colloquial Arabic
3.2. Rendering Colloquial Arabic Invisible
4. Stylistic Prescriptivism and the Arabic Grammatical Tradition
4.1. Style Guides
4.2. Case and Mood Inflection
5. Conclusion
Notes
References
18 Prescriptive Language Ideologies in Modern Hebrew
1. Introduction
2. Historical Background
3. Hebrew Notions of Standard Language
4. Modern Hebrew Prescriptive Discourse
5. Modern Hebrew Prescriptivism in Context
5.1 Prescriptivism and Nationality
5.2 Prescriptivism and Ethnic Identity
5.3 Prescriptivism and Gender
6. Conclusion
References
19 A Socio-Political and Historical Perspective of Linguistic Prescriptivism in Relation to the African Languages of Southern Africa
1. Introduction
2. Theoretical Aspects of Standardisation: Dialects, Varieties and Languages
3. African Languages and Pre-Colonial Southern Africa
4. The Emergence of Standard Languages in Southern Africa
5. The Development of Orthographies
6. The Standardisation of Vocabulary and Terminology
7. Cultural Prescription in African Languages
10. Language Prescriptivism and Lexicography
11. The Possible Future of Language Prescriptivism in Southern Africa
12. Conclusion
References
20 Prescriptivism in Greater China: Historical Trajectories and Contemporary Pluricentricity
1. Prescriptivism and Pluricentricity
2. Prescriptivism in Imperial China
3. Republican China
4. People’s Republic of China
5. Hong Kong
6. Macao
7. Taiwan
8. Singapore
9. Concluding Remarks
Notes
References
21 Prescriptivism and the English Language in Southeast Asia
1. Introduction
2. Prescriptivism and Approaches to World Englishes
2.1. The Three Circles Model
2.2. The Dynamic Model
2.3. English as a Lingua Franca
3. Prescriptivism in Southeast Asia: Case Studies
3.1. Thailand
3.2. Indonesia
3.3. Singapore and Malaysia
4. Native-Speakerism
5. Political Correctness
6. Language Prescriptivism as Language Management
7. Methodological Implications
8. Conclusion
Notes
References
22 Literary Norms in Russia: Past and Present
1. Introduction
2. The Relationship Between the Official Norm and Various Collective Norms
2.1. Definitions and Characteristics
2.2. Mutual Interplay of Norms
3. Outlining the History of Russian (Literary) Language
3.1. Historical Overview
3.2. Grammars and Dictionaries
3.3. The Origin and Development of the Cyrillic Alphabet and Orthography
3.4. The Soviet Period (1922–1991)
4. Standardization of Russian and the Battle for a Better Language After the Collapse of the Soviet Union
4.1. Significant Changes in the Linguistic Environment in the 1990s
4.2. Influx of Loanwords
4.3. Language Laws
4.4. Linguistic Consciousness
5. Russian Outside Russia
6. A Final Remark
Notes
References
23 Prescriptivism in Croatia
1. Introduction
2. A Short Historical Overview of Croatia’s Prescriptivism
3. Some of the Basic Characteristics of Croatian Prescriptivism
4. Prescriptivist Mono-Ideologies
4.1. Erasure and Apparent Descriptiveness
4.2. Ideology of Monocodia
4.3. Ideology of Monoglossia
4.4. Ideology of Monooriginy
4.5. Ideology of Monoverby
4.6. Ideology of Monosemonymy
4.7. Ideology of Monostylia
5. Conclusion
Notes
Prescriptivist Sources
References
24 Standardization, Prescriptivism and Diglossia: How Acceptable Is Normalized Breton to Native Speakers?
1. Introduction
1.1. Standardization and Prescriptivism
2. What Is “Breton”?
2.1. Institutions and Idioms
2.2 Paritary and Disparitary Registers
2.3 The Badumes
2.4 The Ecclesiastical Standard
2.5 The French Norm
3. From Ecclesiastical Standard to Prescriptive Standard
3.1 Toward a Secular Prescriptive Model
3.2 Breton Nationalism and Prescriptivism
3.3 The Triumph of the Peurunvan / NBSS Model
4. The Acceptability of NBSS to Native Speakers
4.1 A Preliminary Investigation
4.2 Supporting Evidence
5. Conclusion
Notes
References
25 Metaphor as a Manifestation of Prescriptivism: The Case of France and Quebec
1. Introduction
2. What Is Prescriptivism?
3. Development of Prescriptivism in France and Quebec
3.1. France
3.2. Quebec
4. Sources of Language Advice in French: Metalinguistic Texts
4.1. Metalinguistic “Language Advice” Texts in France
4.2. Metalinguistic “Language Advice” Texts in Quebec
4.3. Enacting Prescriptions in “Language Advice” Texts
5. Case Study
5.1. Sources of Data
5.2. Areas of Discussion
5.3. Imagery in Metalinguistic Texts
5.4. Images of Sickness and Health
Conclusion
Notes
References
26 Dutch Prescriptivism in a Historical-Sociolinguistic Perspective: Measuring the Effect of Institutionalized Prescriptivism
1. Introduction
2. Historical Prescriptivism: Institutionalization and Embedding
3. Changes in Dutch Historical Prescriptivism
4. Prescription and Language Use
5. Case Study: the Importance of Chronology
6. Conclusion
Notes
References
Afterword
1. The Global Perspective
2. The Digital Perspective
3. Evaluating the Variables
4. Evaluating Influence
References
Index

Citation preview

i

THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTIVISM

This Handbook provides a comprehensive and cutting-​edge overview of the field of linguistic prescriptivism. Mapping the current status quo of the field and marking its two-​decade transformation into a serious field of study within linguistics, this volume addresses both the value and the methods of studying prescriptivism. It covers: • Theoretical and methodological approaches –​from historical to experimental approaches and including corpus-​based methods and attitudes research; • Contexts in which prescriptive efforts can be both observed and studied –​including education, technology, the media, language planning and policies, and everyday grassroots practices; • Geographical contexts of prescriptivism –​featuring chapters on inner-​and outer-​circle Englishes, English as a Lingua Franca, as well as prescriptivism in the context of other world languages including minority and endangered languages. With contributions from an international line-​up of leading and rising-​star scholars in the field, The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism marks the evolution of linguistics as a fully self-​aware discipline and will be an indispensable guide for students and researchers in this area. Joan C. Beal is Emeritus Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield, UK. Morana Lukač is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in sociolinguistics at the University of Rostock, Germany. Robin Straaijer is an independent researcher of English language in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics Routledge Handbooks in Linguistics provide overviews of a whole subject area or sub-​discipline in linguistics, and survey the state of the discipline including emerging and cutting edge areas. Edited by leading scholars, these volumes include contributions from key academics from around the world and are essential reading for both advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students. The Routledge Handbook of Phonetics Edited by William F. Katz and Peter F. Assmann The Routledge Handbook of Vocabulary Studies Edited by Stuart Webb The Routledge Handbook of North American Languages Edited by Daniel Siddiqi, Michael Barrie, Carrie Gillon, Jason D. Haugen and Éric Mathieu The Routledge Handbook of Language and Science Edited by David R. Gruber and Lynda Walsh The Routledge Handbook of Language and Emotion Edited by Sonya E. Pritzker, Janina Fenigsen, and James M. Wilce The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact Edited by Evangelia Adamou and Yaron Matras The Routledge Handbook of Pidgin and Creole Languages Edited by Umberto Ansaldo and Miriam Meyerhoff The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics Edited by Xu Wen and John R. Taylor The Routledge Handbook of Theoretical and Experimental Sign Language Research Edited by Josep Quer, Roland Pfau, and Annika Herrmann The Routledge Handbook of Language and Persuasion Edited by Jeanne Fahnestock and Randy Allen Harris The Routledge Handbook of Semiosis and the Brain Edited by Adolfo M. García and Agustín Ibáñez The Routledge Handbook of Linguistic Prescriptivism Edited by Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač, and Robin Straaijer Further titles in this series can be found online at www.routle​dge.com/​ser​ies/​RHIL

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THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTIVISM

Edited by Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač and Robin Straaijer

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Designed cover image: Getty Images | borchee First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač and Robin Straaijer; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač and Robin Straaijer to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​55784-​3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​0-​367-​55786-​7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​003-​09512-​5 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/​9781003095125 Typeset in Bembo by Newgen Publishing UK

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations  List of contributors  Acknowledgements  Linguistic Prescriptivism: an evolving field  Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač, and Robin Straaijer PART I

Theoretical and methodological issues  Edited by Joan C. Beal 1 Why grammars have to be normative –​and prescriptivists have to be scientific  Geoffrey K. Pullum

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1

3

2 Verbal hygiene  Deborah Cameron

17

3 Accent bias  Dominic Watt, Erez Levon, and Christian Ilbury

31

4 Historiographical methods  Nuria Yáñez-​Bouza

54

5 Corpus-​based approaches to prescriptivism  Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Dieuwertje Bloemen

73

6 Prescription and normativity in the evolution of inner-​circle Englishes  Pam Peters

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Contents

7 The role of prescriptivism in the emergence of New Englishes  Edgar W. Schneider 8 Prescriptivism and national identity: Sociohistorical constructionism, disciplinary blindspots, and Standard Austrian German  Stefan Dollinger 9 Standards with pluricentric languages: Who sets norms and where  Raymond Hickey PART II

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121 140

Contexts and practices of prescriptivism  Edited by Robin Straaijer

157

10 Usage guides as a text type  Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade

159

11 English prescriptivism in higher education settings: Focus on Nordic countries  Elizabeth Peterson and Marika Hall

175

12 Prescriptivism in education: From language ideologies to listening practices  Ian Cushing and Julia Snell

194

13 Linguistic prescriptivism as social prescription: The case of gender  Evan D. Bradley

213

14 Grassroots prescriptivism  Morana Lukač and Theresa Heyd

227

15 Prescription and taboo: Australia’s sensitivity towards American influence 246 Kate Burridge 16 Copy editors, (not) all alike  Morana Lukač and Adrian Stenton

264

PART III

Prescriptivism across languages and cultures  Edited by Morana Lukač 17 Standard language ideology and prescriptivism in the Arabic-​speaking world  Andreas Hallberg vi

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Contents

18 Prescriptive language ideologies in Modern Hebrew  Roey J. Gafter and Uri Mor

304

19 A socio-​political and historical perspective of linguistic prescriptivism in relation to the African languages of Southern Africa  Russell H. Kaschula, Sebolelo Mokapela, Dion Nkomo, and Bulelwa Nosilela

321

20 Prescriptivism in Greater China: Historical trajectories and contemporary pluricentricity  Henning Klöter

338

21 Prescriptivism and the English language in Southeast Asia  Lionel Wee and Nora Samosir

355

22 Literary Norms in Russia: Past and present  Arto Mustajoki

368

23 Prescriptivism in Croatia  Anđel Starčević, Mate Kapović, and Daliborka Sarić

386

24 Standardization, prescriptivism and diglossia: How acceptable is normalized Breton to native speakers?  Gary D. Manchec German

405

25 Metaphor as a manifestation of prescriptivism: The case of France and Quebec  Olivia Walsh and Emma Humphries

427

26 Dutch prescriptivism in a historical-​sociolinguistic perspective: Measuring the effect of institutionalized prescriptivism  Eline Lismont, Gijsbert Rutten, and Rik Vosters

447

Afterword  David Crystal

464

Index 

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 3.1 Composite prestige +​pleasantness ratings given to written labels of 14 accents of English.  3.2 Non-​expert listeners’ employability ratings by listener age, pooled by accent.  3.3 Effects of expert content on non-​expert listeners’ employability ratings, pooled by accent and split by listener age and region.  3.4 The effect of familiarity on accent ratings for the General Northern English (GNE) audio samples.  3.5 The effect of similarity on accent ratings for the Estuary English (EE) audio samples.  3.6 Employability ratings given by non-​expert listeners divided according to “motivation to control a prejudiced response” (MCPR) scores, pooled by accent.  3.7 Accent evaluations for high-​and low-​quality expert answers as rated by lawyers and graduate recruiters.  5.1 Repeated measures correlation of disfluencies per 100 words and variable contexts per 100 words.  16.1 Percentage of highlighted data agreement across six extracts.  16.2 Percentage of proposed edits of data agreement.  20.1 Graphic variation in Chinese writing.  24.1 The bro/​pays, cultural and micro-​linguistic regions of Western Brittany.  24.2 The Breton dialectal regions according to Meynier 1976.  24.3 Four traditional dialect regions associated with the four bishoprics of Western Brittany, Tanguy & Lagrée 2002.  26.1 Prescriptions long a in closed syllables. 

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41 44 44 45 46 47 48 82 273 274 340 409 412 413 456

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List of illustrations

26.2 Usage long a in closed syllables.  26.3 Prescriptions verbal endings of d-​stem verbs.  26.4 Usage verbal endings of d-​stem verbs. 

456 458 458

Tables 6.1 Relative frequencies of gotten in US, British, Australian and Canadian English from NOW  6.2 Data on the use of phenomena from the Australian and Canadian components of NOW  6.3 Data on the capitalized form of Indigenous in the AusE and CanE components of NOW  6.4 Relative frequencies for metres and yards in NOW’s AusE and CanE corpora  9.1 Salient features of American Spanish  11.1 Population and languages in the Nordic countries  11.2 English language requirements/​equivalents for master’s degree programmes at Nordic Universities  14.1 Pronunciation variants of imager  14.2 Argumentation coding  16.1 Sociodemographics of the survey respondents  16.2 Clusters per predictor importance  16.3 Group 1 and Group 2 per age category  16.4 Group 1 and Group 2 per variety  17.1 Features of Arabic standardizing and stylistic prescriptivism  17.2 Incorrect vowel patterns according to al-​ʿAdnānī (1999)  17.3 Case and mood inflection in Standard Arabic  22.1 Features of official and collective norms.  24.1 Diglossic framework  25.1 Sources of language advice  25.2 Topics discussed by language column authors  25.3 Topics discussed in Le Courrier de Vaugelas 

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94 95 97 98 143 177 182 237 238 267 275 275 276 288 296 297 369 420 435 436 438

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CONTRIBUTORS

Joan C. Beal is Emeritus Professor of English Language at the University of Sheffield. Her interests are in the history of English since 1700 and in dialect and identity. Her publications include English in Modern Times 1700–​1975 (Arnold 2004) and An Introduction to Regional Englishes (EUP 2010). She organised the first conference on prescriptivism in 2003. Dieuwertje Bloemen holds BA and MA degrees from the KU Leuven. Her MA thesis investigated prescriptivist pressures in spoken English. Evan D. Bradley is Associate Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Penn State Brandywine. He received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Delaware and BA in cognitive science from Northwestern University. Dr. Bradley’s linguistic research explores psychosocial factors involved in language use and variation, especially how speakers’ individual attitudes and identities are negotiated and expressed through language. He also investigates cognitive and developmental aspects of speech and music perception. He has served on the Committee on LGBTQ+​Issues in Linguistics and chaired the Committee on Public Policy of the Linguistic Society of America. Kate Burridge is Professor of Linguistics at Monash University and Fellow of both the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Her main areas of research are language change (focus on changing vocabulary and grammar), the notion of linguistic taboo, the structure and history of English, popular perceptions of language (and fall-​out). She has authored or edited more than 25 books on different aspects of language and is a regular presenter of language segments on radio and TV. Deborah Cameron is Rupert Murdoch Professor of Language and Communication at the University of Oxford, UK, where she teaches in the Faculties of Linguistics and English. A sociolinguist and discourse analyst with research interests in language and gender, language ideologies and political discourse, she is the author of Verbal Hygiene (Routledge 1995) and the owner of the blog Language: a feminist guide. She has often contributed to radio programmes on linguistic subjects, and occasionally performs language-​themed stand-​ up comedy. x

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List of contributors

David Crystal is honorary professor of Linguistics at the University of Bangor and works from home in Holyhead, North Wales, as a writer and lecturer. He has published more than 100 books, many of which are directed at a wide readership. Those most closely concerned with linguistic prescriptivism are The Fight for English (2006) and his introduction and notes to the reprint of the first edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (2010). He has also been active in debates concerning the position of grammar in the national curriculum of England and Wales. Ian Cushing is Senior Lecturer in Critical Applied Linguistics at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. His research examines the crafting of inequality in schools, with a focus on how policies concerned with language are shaped by raciolinguistic ideologies. He collaborates closely with teachers, in the development of activist stances and practices for anti-​racist language education work in schools. His work has appeared in journals such as Language in Society, British Educational Research Journal, Critical Inquiry in Language Studies and Language Policy. His monograph, Standards, Stigma, Surveillance: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and England’s Schools, is published by Palgrave (2022). Stefan Dollinger is Professor of English Linguistics at UBC Vancouver, specializing in sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and dialectology. His monographs include Creating Canadian English: the Professor, the Mountaineer, and a National Variety of English (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which is a biography of the making of Canadian English. Recently, he has been exploring cross-​linguistic incompatibilities in The Pluricentricity Debate: On Austrian German and Other Germanic Standard Varieties (Routledge, 2019) and in his first general interest book in German Austrian German or German in Austria: Identities in the 21st Century, now in 3rd edition (new academic press, 2021). He is editor-​in-​chief of DCHP-​2, the second edition of A Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (UBC, 2017; www.dchp.ca/​dchp2). Roey J. Gafter is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Language at Ben-​Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. He is a sociolinguist whose work focuses on the use of linguistic resources in the construction of ethnic identities. His research explores socio-​phonetic variation in Hebrew, the Israeli construction of ethnic identity from a discourse analytic perspective, and contact between Hebrew and Arabic. He has published, inter alia, in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, Social Semiotics, and Linguistic Inquiry. Marika K. Hall received her PhD in Applied Linguistics from the Pennsylvania State University, where she has continued to teach to date. Her research primarily falls under the scope of language policy and planning, and her foci have been language policies in higher education, language education policies in primary and secondary education, as well as language policies in political and governmental contexts. Andreas Hallberg is Senior Lecturer of Arabic at the Department of Languages and Literatures, University of Gothenburg, where he teaches Standard and Syrian Arabic and linguistics. His research interests revolve around contemporary usages of Standard Arabic, in both speech and writing, with a preference for corpus linguistic methods. He has also published on the Arabic writing system and on the teaching of Arabic as a foreign language. He regularly writes on Arabic linguistics on his blog *Uppercase Alif*, where he also publishes teaching materials.

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Theresa Heyd is Chair of English Linguistics at Greifswald University. Her work is centered on sociolinguistics with a particular focus on mediated and mobile discourse. She has published on language ideologies in fields such as Global Englishes, spelling and punctuation, and first names. Her current interests are geared toward language in late-​modern publics, as well as posthuman and postdigital practices of language. Raymond Hickey is Adjunct Professor at the University of Limerick and former Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-​Essen. His research centres around varieties of English, especially Irish English, eighteenth-​century English, standardisation of English, language contact and areal linguistics, as well as sociolinguistic variation and change. Recent books are Listening to the Past, Audio Records of Accents of English. (Cambridge University Press, 2017), The Cambridge Handbook of Areal Linguistics. (Cambridge University Press, 2017), English in the German-​speaking World (Cambridge University Press, 2020), English in Multilingual South Africa (Cambridge University Press, 2020), Handbook of Language Contact (Wiley, 2020) and Sounds of English World-​Wide (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2023). Emma Humphries is currently a Research Fellow on the AHRC-​funded project “Foreign, indigenous and community languages in the devolved regions of the UK: policy and practice for growth”, led by Professor Janice Carruthers at Queen’s University Belfast. Emma completed her PhD in French sociolinguistics at the University of Nottingham and has previously held a position as the Research Project Manager of the AHRC-​funded “Promoting Language Policy” project, working with Professor Wendy Ayres-​Bennett at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests are in language policy and sociolinguistics, particularly language attitudes and ideologies. Christian Ilbury is Lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh. His work looks at digital culture and language variation and change, focusing in particular on the relationship between variation in offline and online interactions. He has also done research on language, politics and social class, with an emphasis on the sociolinguistics of gentrification and the effects of standard language ideologies on young people. Mate Kapović is Full Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb (Croatia). He is the editor of The Indo-​European Languages (Routledge, 2017). His areas of interests are sociolinguistics (primarily prescriptivism and language standardization), (Slavic and Indo-​European) historical linguistics, (South Western Slavic) dialectology and (Balto-​Slavic and Indo-​European) accentology. He has co-​authored the book Jeziku je svejedno (Language Could Care Less) (with Anđel Starčević and Daliborka Sarić, 2019, Sandorf), a critical overview of linguistic prescriptivism and an anatomy of prescriptivist practices in Croatia. Russell H. Kaschula is Professor in the Department of African Language Studies at the University of the Western Cape. He holds the Institutional Chair in Forensic Linguistics and Multilingualism. In 2021 he published a book with Routledge titled Languages, Identities and Intercultural Communication in South Africa and Beyond. He also co-​edited A Handbook on Legal Languages and the quest for Linguistic Equality in South Africa and Beyond (African SUN Press, 2021), as well as co-​editing a book titled Language and the Law. Global Perspectives in Forensic Linguistics from Africa and Beyond (African SUN Press, 2022). He is also series editor for the Handbooks on Language Planning in Africa Series (Brill).

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Henning Klöter (PhD, Leiden University, 2003) is Professor of Modern Chinese Languages and Literatures at the Institute of Asian and African Studies (IAAW), Humboldt-​Universität zu Berlin. He has previously held positions at the universities of Göttingen, Mainz, Bochum, and National Taiwan Normal University. His major publications are Written Taiwanese (2005) and The Language of the Sangleys: A Chinese Vernacular in Missionary Sources of the Seventeenth Century (2011). His current research is concerned with language planning, multilingualism, and language variation in China and Taiwan. Erez Levon is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Director of the Center for the Study of Language and Society at the University of Bern. Erez’s research focuses on how people produce and perceive socially meaningful patterns of variation in language. He is particularly interested in language and broader structures of social inequality, primarily in relation to gender, sexuality, social class and nation. He has conducted research on these topics in Israel, South Africa, the US and the UK. Eline Lismont is employed as a junior researcher at the Centre for Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. She is currently preparing a doctoral dissertation in the field of historical sociolinguistics, investigating the influence of prescriptivism on language use in Early and Late Modern Dutch (1550-​1850). Morana Lukač (PhD, Leiden University, 2018) is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at the University of Rostock. She has held positions at the Universities of Zadar, Leiden, and Greifswald. Her published books are Germany’s Recognition of Croatia and Slovenia (2013) and Grassroots prescriptivism (2018). Her work has focused on prescriptive efforts of lay speakers in the English language and metalinguistic debates in new media. She is currently investigating the language of trauma narratives. Gary D. Manchec German has published widely on Breton and English historical linguistics, dialectology and sociolinguistics. His first PhD (University of Western Brittany) was on his family’s southern Finistère Breton dialect. His second PhD (University of Calais-​Boulogne) focussed on Welsh language influence on the English of Wales in which he presented numerous parallels with the Bretonized French of Celtic Brittany. His Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches was on the sociolinguistics of Breton, Welsh and English (University of Poitiers). He has taught at George Mason University (Washington DC) as well as the Universities of Poitiers, Nantes and Western Brittany (Brest). He has been an emeritus professor of linguistics since 2018. Sebolelo Mokapela is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of African Language Studies at the University of the Western Cape. She teaches Translation, Literary and Cultural Studies, and Onomastics. She supervises MA and PhD students. She has a particular interest in literary translation, literary geography and discourse analysis. In 2018 she inaugurated the Pioneers of isiXhosa Literature Public Lecture series at UWC, which recognizes the contribution of early authors in the development of isiXhosa. She coauthored the Study & Master Izakhono Zobomi –​ Grade 3 Learners Book. She has been awarded the International 2022 IBBY Honour List for the translation of the first book written in /​nuu. Uri Mor is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Hebrew Language at Ben-​Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and an advisory member of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. In his research he focuses on Classical Hebrew and Aramaic on the one hand, and Modern Hebrew xiii

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and its emergence on the other. His work integrates linguistic, philological, and sociolinguistic methods in order to delineate different speech communities, contact situations, and corpora of Hebrew and Aramaic, and to explore the ties between language, nationality, normativity, geography, and culture. Arto Mustajoki is Professor Emeritus of University of Helsinki in the Russian language and was Senior Research Fellow in Higher School of Economics (Moscow) from 2019 to 2022. His research interests include contemporary Russian, linguistic theory, modeling of miscommunication, cross-​cultural communication, Russian mentality, and research ethics. He has published books and articles in English, Russian and Finnish. Mustajoki has been active in popularizing research (textbooks, teaching TV-​ programmes and computer programs for learning Russian, books for public, blogs, podcasts). He also has a long career in academic administration (University of Helsinki, Academy of Finland, Finnish Academy of Science and Letters). Dion Nkomo is an Associate Professor and NRF SARChI Chair for Intellectualisation of African Languages, Multilingualism and Education at Rhodes University. His areas of academic interest include language planning and policy, multilingualism, language teaching, lexicography, translation, terminology, and higher education studies. Prof. Nkomo is an NRF rated scholar, a postgraduate supervisor, an editor of Lexikos, the journal of the African Association for Lexicography (AFRILEX), and a member of various academic, professional bodies and research projects working on language and educational matters. Bulelwa Nosilela is the Head of the School of Languages and Literatures at Rhodes University in South Africa. Her research interests are orthography and second language teaching. Her research is mainly focused on an African Language –​isiXhosa and its intellectualisation. Pam Peters is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Emeritus Professor of Macquarie University. She was a member of the editorial committee of Macquarie Dictionary (1991–​2006), and Director of Macquarie University’s Dictionary Research Centre (2000–​ 2007). Her evidence-​ based research on English usage is published in her sole-​ authored Cambridge Guide to English Usage (CUP, 2004) and Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (CUP, 2007), and in the co-​edited Exploring the Ecology of World Englishes (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). She currently directs an international research project on Varieties of English in the Indo-​Pacific (VEIP) for the Union Academique Internationale. Elizabeth Peterson is a University Lecturer in the Department of Languages at the University of Helsinki. She conducts research on language contact and language attitudes, including attitudes and ideologies about English. She is the author of numerous articles on pragmatic borrowings from English into various languages and the 2019 monograph Making Sense of “Bad English”, and she has edited several volumes on language contact and English. The most current, English in the Nordic Countries, is expected to appear in 2023 from Routledge. Geoffrey K. Pullum is Professor Emeritus of general linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, and affiliate faculty in the Department of English at George Mason University. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Linguistic Society of America, and has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Academia Europaea. He publishes widely in linguistics, English grammar,

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and the philosophy of linguistics. His books include Linguistics: Why It Matters (2018) and A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar (with Rodney Huddleston and Brett Reynolds, 2021). Gijsbert Rutten is Professor of Historical Sociolinguistics of Dutch at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. His research focuses on the history of Dutch, language change, standardization, language ideologies and language contact. Recent publications include Language Planning as Nation Building: Ideology, Policy and Planning in the Netherlands, 1750–​ 1850 (Benjamins, 2019) and, with Rik Vosters, Revisiting Haugen: Historical-​Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Standardization, a special issue of Language Policy (2020). Nora Samosir has acted in more than 100 stage productions and also in films and on television. From 2005 to 2020, her two main areas of teaching in Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore were Voice Studies and Acting. From January 2021, Nora has been teaching Voice in the BA Acting and BA Musical Theatre programmes at Lasalle College of the Arts, Singapore. Her voice teaching includes speech phonology and varieties of English spoken in Singapore. She is also part of a Practice as Research duo called Wandering Women with Nidya Shanthini Manokara. Daliborka Sarić is Senior Lecturer at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb (Croatia). She teaches Portuguese grammar in the Department of Romance Languages and Literature. Her research interests are temporal and aspectual semantics, second language acquisition of tense-​aspect systems with a focus on adult Portuguese and Spanish learners, prescriptivism, and language myths and ideologies. She has co-​authored the book Jeziku je svejedno [Language Could Care Less, Sandorf, 2019] (with Anđel Starčević and Mate Kapović), a critical overview of linguistic prescriptivism and an anatomy of prescriptivist practices in Croatia. Edgar W. Schneider is Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Regensburg, Germany, and Senior Visiting Fellow at the National University of Singapore. He is an internationally renowned sociolinguist, known best for his “Dynamic Model” in World Englishes research (Postcolonial English, CUP, 2007). He has published many books (including English Around the World, CUP, 2nd ed. 2020) and articles, lectured on all continents, including many keynote lectures, and reviewed for many international universities, publishers, and institutions. He edited the journal English World-​Wide for many years and was President of the International Society for the Linguistics of English. Julia Snell is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Leeds. Her research explores the role of language in education from a sociolinguistic perspective. She has published on children’s language variation and class identities, language policing, dialogic pedagogy, and teacher professional development. She is co-​author (with Adam Lefstein) of Better than Best Practice: Developing Teaching and Learning through Dialogue and co-​editor (with Sarah Shaw and Fiona Copland) of Linguistic Ethnography: Interdisciplinary Explorations. Julia’s current Leverhulme funded research –​“Spoken Language, Standards and Inequality in Schools” –​investigates how teachers’ perceptions of pupils’ social background, language, and abilities influence classroom pedagogy. Anđel Starčević is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb (Croatia). His main research xv

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interests are language ideologies and prescriptivism, and Anglo-​Croatian language contact and immigrant bilingualism in Canada. He has co-​authored the book Jeziku je svejedno [Language Could Care Less, Sandorf, 2019] (with Mate Kapović and Daliborka Sarić), a critical overview of linguistic prescriptivism and an anatomy of prescriptivist practices in Croatia. Adrian Stenton is a PhD candidate at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics, and a (semi-​)retired copy editor, having spent several decades working on academic titles, mainly on English language and linguistics. He is also the compiler of the corpus of Professional English Editing Practices (PEEP) used in the chapter he co-​wrote with Morana Lukač. His PhD focuses on number agreement in the species noun phrase in English. Robin Straaijer is currently an independent researcher of English language in Amsterdam, and has been a lecturer and curriculum designer in the field of English academic writing. He was the architect of the Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) database of English usage guides and usage problems in the project “Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public”. His previously published work on early modern English grammars included Joseph Priestly, Grammarian (2011), and his more recent publications focus mainly on prescriptivism and usage guides. Benedikt Szmrecsanyi is Professor of Linguistics at KU Leuven. He studied English philology, political science, and economics at the University of Freiburg (Germany) and at Georgetown University (Washington DC). He holds MA (2002), PhD (2005), and Habilitation (2011) degrees from the University of Freiburg. Prior to coming to Leuven, he was a Lecturer in English Linguistics at the University of Manchester (UK). He has some 30 papers in international, peer-​reviewed journals, including, e.g., in Language, Language Variation and Change, the Journal of Linguistic Geography, the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, and English World-​Wide. Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade is Emeritus Professor at the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics with a chair in English sociohistorical linguistics. She is particularly interested in the final stages of the English standardisation process (Codification and Prescription), and has published widely on these topics, including The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivisim (OUP, 2011), the edited collection English Usage Guides: History, Advice, Attitudes (OUP, 2018), and most recently Describing Prescriptivism: Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English (Routledge, 2020). She is a member of the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). Rik Vosters is Associate Professor of Dutch linguistics and historical sociolinguistics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where he is the current head of the Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies. His research interests revolve around the areas of sociolinguistics, language variation and change, sociology of language, and language planning and policy, both from a historical and a contemporary perspective. He also coordinates an FWO-​funded research network on historical sociolinguistics, is an enthusiastic member of the Historical Sociolinguistics Network (HiSoN), and works as part of the editorial team of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics (De Gruyter Mouton). Olivia Walsh is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of Nottingham. Her research interests include language ideologies and attitudes in the French language, with a particular interest in linguistic purism in France and Quebec, standardisation and xvi

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prescriptivism in France and the French-​speaking world and, most recently, the French-​speaking community in the UK and the USA. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development and the Journal of French Language Studies, amongst other publications. Her most recent monograph is Linguistic Purism: Language Attitudes in France and Quebec (John Benjamins, 2016). Dominic Watt is Professor of Linguistics at the University of York. His research interests are in forensic linguistics and phonetics, sociophonetics, dialectology, language and identity, and accent discrimination. He is co-​editor of The Handbook of Dialectology (with Charles Boberg and John Nerbonne, Wiley, 2018) and Language and Identities (with Carmen Llamas, Edinburgh University Press, 2010), and co-​author of English Accents and Dialects (with Arthur Hughes and Peter Trudgill, Hodder, 2012). He is a collaborator of the Accent Bias in Britain research team (accentbiasbritain.org) and a variety of other initiatives focused on reducing language, dialect and accent bias and prejudice. Lionel Wee is a Provost’s Chair professor in the Department of English Language & Literature at the National University of Singapore. His research interests include language policy, social theory, and ideologies. He sits on the editorial boards of Applied Linguistics, Journal of Sociolinguistics, and English World-​Wide, among others. His books include Posthumanist World Englishes (2022), The Communicative Linguistic Landscape (2021), Language, Space and Cultural Play: Theorizing Affect in the Semiotic Landscape (2019, with Robbie Goh), and The Singlish Controversy: Language, Identity and Culture in a Globalizing World (2018). Nuria Yáñez-​Bouza is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Philology at the University of Vigo (Spain) and Honorary Research Fellow in English Language and Linguistics at the University of Manchester (UK). Her research interests lie in historical sociolinguistics with a focus on the eighteenth-​century grammar writing tradition (Grammar, Rhetoric and Usage in English: Preposition Placement 1500–​1900, 2015; The Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars Database), pronouncing dictionaries (The Eighteenth-​Century English Phonology Database) and letter-​writing practices (Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers). She has also been actively involved in the field of Digital Humanities with the compilation of multi-​register historical corpora and electronic historical databases.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are immensely grateful to Carol Percy and Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade for their help and support as members of our editorial board. Their wise advice and encouragement have been vital to the successful completion of this project. We also wish to thank the many anonymous reviewers whose constructive comments helped to hone the chapters. Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač and Robin Straaijer Plouguenast, Rostock and Amsterdam, 2022

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LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTIVISM An evolving field Joan C. Beal, Morana Lukač, and Robin Straaijer

1.  What this handbook is about Our goal in putting together this volume was to produce a widely usable handbook that provides a comprehensive, useful and accessible overview of the developing field of linguistic prescriptivism. The aim of the project is to provide an account of the current status quo of the field, mapping the hitherto relatively uncharted territory of prescriptivism and thus to mark its two-​decade transformation into a prolific field of study within linguistics. We have attempted a broad coverage in terms of not only theoretical and methodological approaches, but also institutional contexts in which prescriptive efforts can be both observed and studied, as well as geographical and historical breadth. To do this, we have attracted authors who were able to write chapters on prescriptivism in relation to specific languages, as well as on the treatment of linguistic prescriptivism in specific sub-​disciplines of linguistics. It has become apparent that linguistic description, perhaps particularly where language-​in-​ use is concerned, carries normative, even prescriptive implications by virtue of its authority. This means that in order to satisfy scientific requirements, linguistics as an academic discipline needs to able to reflect on its influence on the very phenomenon that it studies. In other words, the appearance of a handbook such as this further marks the evolution of linguistics into a fully self-​aware discipline. It is therefore our opinion that prescriptivism can no longer be a fringe topic in the description of language in society, but that it should be a necessary component of studies in this field. This necessity is illustrated by the fact that only Mesthrie et al.’s Introducing Sociolinguistics (2009) has seemed to consider prescriptivism as a necessary and obvious part of the study of language. However, the call to study prescriptivism had been sounded before by Cameron (2012/​1995), who argued that “verbal hygiene is deserving of serious study because … it is ‘there’ ” (p. 11). At the same time, this volume also aims to look ahead and even take a flight forward, not eschewing new developments and views within the field of prescriptivism studies, views which may yet be controversial among linguists and scholars in other areas of linguistics. We believe that this movement forward is necessary for the further acceptance and development of prescriptivism studies and linguistics more generally. As a part of this stance, it was our explicit intention to include voices and topics that have historically been overlooked. This has, among

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other things, led to consciously trying to move away from the Anglocentric focus of much of previous research on prescriptivism published in English, leading to the chapters in Part III “Prescriptivism across languages and cultures” (see also below). In addition, we wanted to include topics that bring forward marginalised communities, such as speakers of minority languages (e.g. Breton) and the LGBTQIA+​community. In this, we have endeavoured to give voice to academics from within the communities –​or (at the very least) their allies –​in which these topics are most relevant. Whereas we strove to gain access to other voices from understudied languages and social groups, many remain unrepresented, among them, for example, sign languages, which have, until recently, been largely absent from discussions in sociolinguistics. Although we had attempted to find authors to address these topics, to the best of our ability, we have only partially been successful. In charting out our discipline, we are thus aware of many gaps that remain and hope that the publication of this handbook serves as impetus for further change and widening debates, which would reflect the ongoing disciplinary transition away from the Eurocentric and other forms of bias (spoken languages over sign languages, majority groups over minority groups, languages of colonialism over languages of the colonised people) in both their overt and covert forms. In the following sections of this Introduction, we outline the history of prescriptivism as an area of linguistic research. We first briefly address the antipathy to prescriptivism voiced by theoretical linguists during most of the previous century, and then consider the role of language-​ ideological, historical and historiographical research in prompting a fresh look at prescriptivism. In addition, we chart the growth of prescriptivism studies in the twenty-​first century, address the kind of audience we envisage for this book, and introduce the streams of research covered in the main text of the handbook.

2.  The changing view of prescriptivism in linguistics Whereas the prescriptive approach to language goes back several centuries, the linguistic, scientific study of prescriptivism –​or more correctly, linguists’ antipathy towards performing such studies –​can logically only have started after modern descriptive linguistics had come to be established as a scientific discipline in its own right. This establishment of linguistics is widely agreed to have had its beginnings in the early twentieth century following the lectures of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–​1913) (Saussure et al., 1916). After the establishment of what descriptive linguistics is, we already quickly come across what appears to be the first mention of prescriptive grammar (Bryan, 1923), which was soon followed by the first overt contrast between descriptive and prescriptive approaches, voiced by Otto Jespersen ten years later1: The chief object in teaching grammar today ... would appear to be to give rules which must be obeyed if one wants to speak and write the language correctly—​rules which as often as not seem quite arbitrary. Of greater value, however, than this prescriptive grammar is a purely descriptive grammar which, instead of serving as a guide to what should be said or written, aims at finding out what is actually said and written by the speakers of the language investigated, and thus may lead to a scientific understanding of the rules followed instinctively by speakers and writer. Jespersen, 2006 [1933], p. 4 The adjectives “prescriptive” and “descriptive” have since remained closely connected to the field of linguistics, as is evident from the way that the OED mentions these specifically under

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the respective entries –​also noting the classic dichotomy just mentioned. To illustrate, the OED entry for “prescriptive” starts with the following definition: 1a. That prescribes or directs; giving definite, precise directions or instructions. In later use frequently spec.: that lays down rules of usage in language or grammar. In Linguistics, opposed to descriptive (see descriptive adj. 3b). OED, sv. “prescriptive” The OED entry for “descriptive” starts with a general definition: “2a. That describes the way something is, rather than expressing judgement, presenting ideals, prescribing rules, etc.; that describes something or someone in an objective and non-​judgemental way”. In addition, we also find multiple definitions that refer to language or linguistics, such as: “2b. spec. That describes the way language is used, without prescribing rules or referring to norms of correctness. Contrasted with prescriptive, normative. Sometimes overlapping with sense A. 3b.”, and the following two longer definitions: 2c. Philosophy and Linguistics. Designating that aspect of the meaning of an utterance which relates purely to the presentation of facts, rather than to the expression of attitudes, the effecting of an action, etc.; esp. in descriptive meaning. Also: of or relating to such meaning; (of a word or utterance) having (only) such meaning. Cf. emotive adj. 3, prescriptive adj. 1c, performative adj. 3b. Linguistics. Designating a branch of linguistics concerned with describing the structure of a language at a given time, without reference to other languages or other historical phases; of or relating to this branch of linguistics. Cf. synchronic adj., structural linguistics n. at structural adj. Compounds. Contrasted with historical and comparative linguistics, and also (especially in later use) with theoretical linguistics. Sometimes overlapping with sense A. 2b. OED, sv. “descriptive” The OED does provide an interesting point of nuance under the entry for “prescriptive” in one of the senses listed: “3. Arising from or recognized by long-​standing custom or usage; prescribed by custom. Now archaic”, providing something of a bridge between the prescriptive and the descriptive in terms of usage. Synchronic linguists’ attitudes towards the study of prescriptivism remained more or less unchanged throughout of the twentieth century. However, the critical study of historical prescriptivism goes back at least to the 1920s. As noted above, Bryan’s use of the term prescriptive with reference to eighteenth-​century grammarians predates the OED’s first citation of the word in this sense, which is the extract from Jespersen (1933) cited above. Bryan also published an account of George Campbell’s (1776) Philosophy of Rhetoric in a paper entitled “A Late Eighteenth-​Century Purist” (1926), which also made reference to Lowth, Priestley and Webster. Whilst Bryan uses his account of Campbell to “illustrate ... the futility of attempting to direct or restrain usage”, he ends by stating that his “collection of material has ... both curious interest and historic value” (1926, p. 370). The most influential of these early studies of eighteenth-​century prescriptivism was S. A. Leonard’s The Doctrine of Correctness in English Usage 1700–​1800 (1929). Leonard’s argument for the value of studying prescriptive texts is much stronger than Bryan’s, and resonates with the contributions in this volume:

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The business of the student of language is to take account of such prescriptions as facts of significance in his [sic] study, important facts like any other set of human feelings and notions manifest in norms of conduct and behavior. Leonard 1929/​1962, pp. 244–​245 Leonard’s study includes an appendix with notes on over 300 issues discussed by eighteenth-​ century writers on language, and, given the resources available to him at the time, refers to an impressive range of grammarians. Later scholars have taken issue with him on matters such as his failure to acknowledge the diverse backgrounds and motivations of eighteenth-​century grammarians (Beal et al., 2006), and the false dichotomy he creates between the ‘scientific’ approach of Priestley and the prescriptivism of his contemporaries (Hodson, 2006). They have also noted the influence of Leonard’s work on many twentieth-​century histories of English; Beal argues that Leonard’s influence led to the eighteenth century being defined as the age of correctness, “a period only fit to be trawled for instances of malpractice” (2004, p. 89). The problem was that many readers failed to look beyond Leonard’s account to examine the original texts. Pullum noted in 1974 that “Lowth in particular is more mentioned than read by the majority of grammarians today” (1974, p. 63) and his re-​evaluation of Lowth’s grammar in a major linguistics journal is a rare example from that period of an objective and balanced account of eighteenth-​century prescriptivism. It may not have been until well after the establishment of sociolinguistics and related sociological-​linguistic fields of inquiry such as critical discourse theory, that linguistics as a discipline more broadly was able to acquire the self-​awareness that is also required in those subfields of linguistics. Within sociolinguistics, Haugen (1966) laid the groundwork for a more pragmatic view of eighteenth-​century (and later) grammarians. He proposed four aspects of standardisation: selection of a norm, codification of form, elaboration of function and acceptance by the community. Codification was precisely what the eighteenth-​century grammarians were doing: in Haugen’s view, this was a necessary development in the standardisation of the language. Haugen’s model was to prove highly influential in sociolinguistics: Milroy and Milroy developed this further in their (1985) Authority in Language, a work which in turn had substantial impact in the field of language ideology. Milroy and Milroy note that “prescription becomes more intense after the language undergoes codification ... because speakers then have access to dictionaries and grammar-​books, which they regard as authorities” (2012 [1985], p. 22). In the Milroys’ view, what they term prescription is something that sociolinguists should study objectively as an important aspect of language ideology. In other fields, it was perhaps the need for the relatively new discipline of linguistics to be regarded and acknowledged as scientific that caused the concomitantly required descriptive character to become somewhat of a dogma. This may in turn have led to prescriptivism becoming somewhat of an academic taboo in linguistics, particularly in its more formal and structural subdisciplines. Although, as Hodson (2006) points out, there were some scholars2 in the second half of the twentieth century who challenged the monolithic view of eighteenth-​century grammars that was Leonard’s legacy, attitudes did not begin to change until the very end of the twentieth century –​for a large part with for example Deborah Cameron’s highly influential Verbal Hygiene, first published in 1995. Cameron’s account of verbal hygiene, a term that she coined, goes beyond earlier accounts of prescriptivism to include socially motivated constraints on linguistic usage involved in what was then termed ‘political correctness’ but is now, as Cameron explains in her chapter in this volume, often criticised as ‘wokeness’. For most of the twentieth century, as Cameron suggested, prescriptivism represented “the threatening Other, the forbidden” and argued that “[t]‌he linguist’s (often extreme) distaste for prescriptivism is ... an xxii

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ideologically non-​neutral one dependent on value judgements that are ‘highly resistant to rational examination’ ” (Cameron, 2012, p. 5). This resistance is evident in that Cameron’s ideas only found some wider purchase years later, in the early twenty-​first century. The change in attitudes towards prescriptivism started, not in sociolinguistics, but from scholars in historical linguistics /​history of linguistics, independently minded scholars, and from the careful study of the actual prescriptive texts such as grammars and various types of dictionaries. Slowly, the dogmatic distinction between linguistic prescriptivism and descriptivism became –​among a certain group of linguists –​“increasingly seen as artificial, reductive, and a hindrance to a complete and nuanced understanding of usage” (Straaijer, 2017). It was in fact one of the editors of this volume, Joan Beal, who –​referring to previous studies on eighteenth-​ century English grammars –​argued that “far from being uniformly “prescriptive” would be better described as occupying different points on a prescriptive–​descriptive continuum” (Beal, 2004, p. 90). This popularized the idea under historical linguistics, that the purely prescriptive and descriptive points of view are better seen as the end points of a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. Around the same time, Wolf Peter Klein problematised the relationship between descriptive and prescriptive approaches to language use even further by arguing, based on the history of German grammars, that there is in fact no purely descriptive linguistic practice (Klein, 2005). Klein also included a message for linguists, cautioning them that even descriptive work always possesses a non-​descriptive dimension, and that linguists who are aware of this will work in a way that is more reflective and truer to reality, than those who do not pay attention to these horizons of linguistic activity (Klein, 2005, p. 401).3 Klein’s warning seems to imply that not only can linguistics no longer ignore prescriptivism as a topic of inquiry if it is to be taken seriously as a self-​aware academic discipline, linguistics is in fact intrinsically and inescapably connected to prescriptivism. Nevertheless, despite these developments, there are still modern introductory textbooks on linguistics that question the value of studying prescriptivism,4 John Lyons’ Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics includes a section headed “linguistics is a descriptive, not a prescriptive science” in which Lyons writes “The linguist’s first task is to describe the way people actually speak (and write) their language, not to prescribe how they ought to speak and write. In other words, linguistics … is descriptive, not prescriptive (or normative)” (1968, p. 43). A very similar section can be found 33 years later in Justice (2001). The first chapter, entitled “What is Linguistics,” includes a section on “prescriptivism vs descriptivism”, in which Justice writes: “rather than prescribe to students how they should speak a language, linguistics is mainly concerned with describing how people actually speak” and “what you will soon see, hopefully, is that prescriptivism ignores reality” (2001, p. 5). We even find similar statements in one of the latest introductory textbooks to the history of English. In their chapter on late modern English, Hejná and Walkden (2022) write “[p]‌rescriptivism is in opposition to descriptivism”, and “[l]inguistic research as carried out in academia is descriptive, not prescriptive” (p. 62).

3.  The growing body of research on linguistic prescriptivism The growing interest in linguistic prescriptivism has been marked most notably by a recent proliferation of research on the topic, as well as by the organisation of six consecutive international conferences on prescriptivism during these first decades of this century.5 Several collections that comprehensively contrast case studies focusing on prescriptivism (first only with respect to English, and later also across other languages) arose from this series of international conferences on prescriptivism, and we will briefly discuss them here. The conferences (or colloquia, as the earlier ones were humbly called) started from a desire to explore alternative approaches to the xxiii

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study of English as well as the nature of prescriptivism in its own right. Whereas the conferences were initially largely embedded within English historical linguistics, their scope grew, as did the diversity of the approaches to the phenomenon. In the introduction to the proceedings from the 2003 colloquium “Histories of prescriptivism” at the University of Sheffield, the editors lamented that the linguistic view of the history of prescriptivism –​mainly exemplified by eighteenth-​century (English) grammars –​was deplorably “monolithic” (Beal et al., 2006, p. 1), and that it was this view that acted as a spur to the organisation of the colloquium. Their aim was to show alternative views on these historical texts. The editors also observed that “[d]‌espite the fact that during the course of the twentieth-​ century linguistics moved beyond structuralism, the view that linguistics should be a ‘scientific’ discipline untainted by ‘prescriptivism’ was to persist until challenged in the 1990s” (Beal et al., 2006, p. 1). A similar aim was expressed in the edited volume resulting from the 2006 colloquium “Perspectives on Prescriptivism” at the University of Catania in Ragusa (Italy). In the introduction, the editors express that they “wished to widen the different perspectives from which to look at linguistic prescriptivism”, as well as investigate “the attitude of 21st-​century scholars and language guardians” (Beal et al., 2008). The conferences then evolved to include interdisciplinary, cross-​cultural, and wider social perspectives, as well as extending their coverage to languages beyond English. Carol Percy and Mary Catherine Davidson’s volume, based on papers presented at the 2009 conference “Prescriptivism & Patriotism” at the University of Toronto (Canada), is an early example of broadening the study of prescriptivism. The editors articulate this new ambition in their introduction as follows: This collection ... introduces readers to approaches from a range of disciplines, periods and languages on the question of what constitute attitudes and norms in many frameworks of collective identity. International in scope and illustratively wide ranging in approach, contributions from scholars both specialist and interdisciplinary explore the roles of cross-​cultural contacts in shaping language norms, offer comparisons in language planning ..., track popular attitudes toward contact languages ... and trace the ideological forces at work. Percy & Davidson, 2012, p. 2 The volume deals with prescriptivism, norms and attitudes in the English language from several regions of the world from historical, contemporary and postcolonial perspectives; it includes references to other languages and introduces related topics of language policy and national identity. The 2013 Prescriptivism conference, held at the University of Leiden (The Netherlands) yielded two publications. The first was the special issue of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, edited by Robin Straaijer (Straaijer, 2016a), based on papers presented at the workshop “Attitudes to Prescriptivism”. As “[t]‌he workshop turned out to open up a wider avenue of investigation than expected”, Straaijer writes in the introduction, “[t]he resulting diversity is reflected by the articles in this special issue” (Straaijer, 2016b, p. 234). This special issue shows a very useful diversity, both in terms of the languages covered and the topics. It includes articles about a variety of languages: Catalan, English, French, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Shiwiar, a language spoken in Ecuador. In addition, it deals with a fairly wide range of topics: prescriptivism and journalism, nation building and national identity, language education, and the role of linguists in the practices and processes of prescriptivism in different societies with different historical hinterlands. xxiv

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The second publication, Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade and Carol Percy’s edited volume, includes papers presented at the actual conference the theme of which was “Prescription and Tradition in Language”. In 22 chapters, this volume highlights the variety of contexts in which prescriptivism and standardization can take place, and it includes Basque, Chinese, Dutch, French, Frisian, German, Icelandic, Lithuanian, Macedonian and Russian, as well as African languages spoken in the Gulf of Guinea. Its aim is similar to ours, in that –​across several sections (theoretical/​general, historical and modern) –​it sets out to crystallize “key interrelationships between standardization and prescription and between ideas and practices”, through a variety of “case studies across languages and cultures” (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade & Percy, 2017, p. 1). Don Chapman and Jacob D. Rawlins’ volume results from the 2017 conference “Value(s) and Language Prescriptivism” at Brigham Young University in Park City (Utah, USA). Implicitly referring to the preceding conferences, the editors explicitly frame their volume as the next chapter in an evolving and expanding line of inquiry into various aspects of linguistic prescriptivism, in that it “continues to examine social connections to language evaluation as a follow-​up to the examinations of nationalism, traditions and norms”, adding that the volume in particular focuses on values (Chapman & Rawlins, 2020, p. 2). One of the questions to be answered was “How do individuals frame language evaluation into their self-​perception, conduct and identity?” (Chapman & Rawlins, 2020, p. 1). With this question, the volume brings forward, once again, the notion that Cameron already introduced in 1995 in the first edition of Verbal Hygiene, namely that linguists should be interested in language evaluation since it is a part of language use. As we have noted, this is one of the main ideas that provided the impetus for the creation of the present handbook. The introduction by Chapman and Rawlins shows an interesting development with regard to the acceptance of the limitation of the prescriptive–​descriptive binary, which they describe as follows: One insight that is shared among nearly all the authors in this volume is that the binaries that characterize prescriptive discourse –​prescriptivism/​descriptivism, correct/​ incorrect, standard/​nonstandard –​are inadequate for investigating the complexity of the phenomenon. Chapman & Rawlins, 2020, p. 2 This comment seems to show that since the problematic nature of this binary was first brought forward, some 25 years earlier, this shortcoming is now much more widely accepted, at least among linguists. The theme of the 2021 Prescriptivism conference, held at the University of Vigo (Spain), was “Modelling Prescriptivism: Language, Literature, and Speech Communities”, illustrating the ever-​widening scope of prescriptivism studies. The edited volume of papers from this conference is still under production at the time of writing this introduction, but the conference presentations covered a range of languages and speech communities including Greek, Icelandic and several inner-​and outer-​circle varieties of English, as well as prescriptivism in various historical periods and contexts, from eighteenth-​century letter-​writing manuals and grammars to twenty-​first century dating websites. The theme of prescriptivism in literature was investigated in papers that concerned the representation of prescriptive attitudes in literature, and prescriptive constraints placed on authors by critics and copy editors. This wider range of topics is also reflected in the coverage of the present volume. While presenting wide-​ ranging and highly engaged and engaging scholarship, the publications mentioned here are not, however, comprehensive handbooks intended for university students or indeed anyone seeking an introduction to the field of linguistic prescriptivism. xxv

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The publications concerned offer more specific insights and are consequently perhaps better suited for specialists in the field or those with particular interests in the languages addressed in the collections.6 In spite of the current popularity of prescriptivism as a topic, no English language collection to date presents a serious overview of the field in theoretical, methodological, geographical and historical breadth, which is why we felt there was a need for this volume. Although we were not able to identify any overviews on linguistic prescriptivism in handbook or textbook format,7 the English language –​at least –​has been well covered in scholarship on prescriptivism (not least, as our list of works below shows, in other Routledge linguistics books series). According to Robin Straaijer’s entry on Linguistic Prescriptivism in Oxford Bibliographies (Straaijer, 2017), books on prescriptivism in the English language have largely focused on historical-​linguistic studies and studies on prescriptive genres (such as grammars, usage guides and dictionaries). A few have provided overviews that solely focus on prescriptivism, such as Anne Curzan’s Fixing English: Prescriptivism and Language History (Curzan, 2014) and Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade’s Describing Prescriptivism: Usage Guides and Usage Problems in British and American English (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 1019). The most renowned works in the field provide accounts of prescriptivism in the context of language standardization/​language ideology, including James and Lesley Milroy’s Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation (Milroy & Milroy, 2012 [1985]), or investigate it as a social phenomenon, as do Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene (Cameron, 2012 [1995]), Rosina Lippi-​Green’s English with an Accent (Lippi-​Green, 2012), Richard Watts’s Language Myths and the History of English (Watts, 2011) and Lynda Mugglestone’s “Talking Proper”: The Rise of accent as a Social Symbol (Mugglestone, 2007 [1995]). In other languages, the topic of prescriptivism has been included in monographs and several collections on standardizing attitudes to particular languages have been published recently. These include Anđel Starčević, Mate Kapović and Daliborka Sarić’s Jeziku je svejedno (“Language could care less”) (Starčević et al., 2019), Wendy Ayres-​Bennett and Magali Seijido’s Bon usage et variation sociolinguistique: perspectives diachroniques et traditions nationales (“Good usage and sociolinguistic variation, diachronic perspectives and national traditions”) (Ayres-​Bennett & Seijido, 2013), Vladimir Kozyrev and Valentina Černjak’s Современная языковая ситуация и речевая культура: учебное пособие (“Modern language situation and speech culture: Training materials”) (Kozyrev & Černjak, 2012), Regula Schmidlin’s Die Vielfalt des Deutschen, Standard und Variation (‘The diversity of German: standard and variation)’ (Schmidlin, 2011), and Jürgen Erfurt and Gabriele Budach’s Standardisation et destandardisation: le français et l’espagnol au XXe siècle (‘Standardisation and destandardisation: French and Spanish in the twentieth century’) (Erfurt & Budach, 2008). Although the number of works on prescriptivism in other languages attests to the topic’s popularity, the contents of these works are not as a rule accessible to English monolingual readers, or indeed anyone unable to read works in the languages concerned. Our aim is to present the most recent insights on the study of prescriptivism across linguistic contexts seeing that the field is continuously growing –​as the titles above illustrate –​within and beyond scholarship in and on English. Moreover, the topic of prescriptivism is relevant to a number of subfields with whose lines of research it often converges, including language policies, attitudinal studies in linguistics and sociology of language, as well as critical linguistics. By broadening the contexts of linguistic prescriptivism to include areas of study such as language policy and the sociology of language, we hope to attract interested readers from those fields and to promote interdisciplinary research on linguistic norms and prescriptions. In addition, by including languages that have traditionally not been the focus of analysis within this field of research, we xxvi

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aim to attract readers who may be interested in prescriptive efforts outside their well-​explored context, namely, highly standardised European languages. This broadening is important, not only for the obvious reason that these other languages deserve more study generally, but also because the role of linguists in processes of standardisation and prescription in these (national) languages is often different from what we are used to seeing in the languages that have traditionally received more attention.

4.  Structure of this book The structure of the handbook generally follows the pattern of other handbooks in this series, with the chapters thematically divided into three parts. Part I includes chapters on theoretical and methodological approaches to prescriptivism and on frameworks within which prescriptivism has been studied. The first two chapters, by Pullum and Cameron respectively, grapple with important theoretical and ideological issues. Pullum makes the distinction between normative and prescriptive approaches to language, arguing that linguistic description is inevitably and rightly normative, and that some “prescriptive” usage guides are based on empirical research. Cameron’s account of verbal hygiene, as in her (1995) book on the subject, presents an account which goes beyond ‘top-​down’ prescriptivism to include practices intended to avert discrimination, including discussion of the current culture wars concerning ‘wokeness’. Chapter 3, by Watt, Levon and Ilbury, deals with the problem of accent discrimination in the UK, providing an account of research which not only investigates this phenomenon but also presents solutions for the problem. Chapters 4 and 5 provide accounts of resources and methodologies for research on prescriptivism. Yáñez-​Bouza describes historiographical resources for the study of prescriptivism and gives detailed accounts of three historical databases and the research that has made use of them. Szmrecsanyi and Bloemen investigate corpus-​based approaches to prescriptivism, especially with a view to determining whether such research can prove or disprove the effect of prescriptive rules and recommendations on usage. Chapters 6 and 7 turn to prescriptivism in World Englishes. Peters considers prescriptivism in inner-​circle Englishes, focusing particularly on Australia and Canada, whilst Schneider discusses the role of prescriptivism in the emergence of New Englishes. Chapters 8 and 9, by Dollinger and Hickey respectively, provide accounts of pluricentrism and the debates and controversies concerning this. Hickey gives a comparative and contrastive account of prescriptivism in two pluricentric languages, English and Spanish, whilst Dollinger considers the influence of national identity on prescriptive attitudes and practices in the case of Austrian German. Part II explores contexts in which prescriptive efforts can be observed and studied. These chapters primarily intend to describe prescriptivism and prescriptivist attitudes, actions and norm-​setting in a variety of social contexts, and/​or revolving around particular themes. While the chapters in Part II do deal with different languages or language varieties, and include studies of genres of traditional prescriptivist literature, these are not the primary focus. The chapters in this part of the book should primarily be seen as dealing with prescriptivism as an aspect of psychological and social practices. As such, the chapters lean on the exploration of prescriptive and proscriptive ideologies, and prescriptivist attitudes, actions and norm-​setting, both of those that set or enforce these norms and those that are expected to adopt or challenge and resist them. The first chapter of Part II by Tieken-​Boon van Ostade explores what a usage guide is, including the history and development of the genre over its more than 200-​year history. She discusses the formal features of these publications –​how they compare to other types of linguistic publications such as grammars and style guides –​and looks at the people who write them. Chapters 11 and 12, by Peterson and Hall, and Cushing and Snell respectively, xxvii

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explore the effects and implications of prescriptive policies in different educational settings. Peterson and Hall investigate the language policies concerning English of universities in the Nordic countries of Europe by evaluating the official policy documents of these institutions to discover what varieties of English are valued and how the English proficiency of non-​native speakers from various territories is evaluated. Cushing and Snell look at prescriptive ideologies and practices at schools in the UK. They investigate the role of teachers in the guarding and policing of ideologically driven language policies. Focusing on marginalised speakers, they show that policies for the implementation of prescriptions for “standard English” in education are insufficiently self-​aware and uncritically disconnected from language users’ geographic origin, social class, or ethnic heritage, with far-​reaching consequences that go beyond language. In Chapter 13, Bradley investigates the norm-​setting force of the social and linguistic notions of binary gender. He finds that linguistic prescriptivism and judgements act as code for non-​linguistic ideologies, and that the acceptability of the gender-​neutral pronoun they in English is related to how gender is conceptualised and to the position of power –​or powerlessness –​of users. Chapters 14 and 15, by Lukač and Heyd, and Burridge respectively, both deal with the notion of grassroots prescriptivism, which looks at the bottom-​up, or what could be called distributed forms of enforcement of language norms. Lukač and Heyd illustrate the dynamic of digital grassroots prescriptivism with a study of the online metalinguistic discussions on the pronunciation of the internet coinage imgur on the platform Reddit. They conclude that users defend their opinions by referring to internalised forms of correctness, often based on orthological analogy, logic or the standard language ideology. Burridge investigates public attitudes towards the perceived influence of American English on Australian English and shows how the concept of taboo can help deconstruct prescriptive ideologies as well as better understand them and those who hold them. Having first-​hand experience in Australia with grassroots prescriptivism and resistance (even hostility) towards linguists’ mediation of knowledge around the subject of perceived Americanisation of Australian English, Burridge shows that people who practice grassroots prescriptivism (unconsciously) base their judgements on a notion of purity, and that language is a proxy for national or societal identity. Lastly, in Chapter 16, Lukač and Stenton investigate the practices of professional copy editors. They look beyond the stereotypical function of this vocational group as mere enforcers of stylesheets and creators of hyperstandardisation in published texts, and draw attention to the copy editor’s mediating role in the production of edited texts, specifically in academic discourse. They suggest that, rather than merely reducing variation and standardising texts, editors have various rationales for the variety in their editing practices. Part III focuses on the geographical contexts of prescriptivism. Although prescriptivism has been cast as a largely universal phenomenon (although admittedly one born out of Northern, Eurocentric sociolinguistic theoretical frameworks), much research in the field has been confined to English and occasionally other European languages. As already explained, our ambition was thus to broaden the geographical coverage of this handbook to reflect the differences that shape some of the many realities that exist across languages and cultures. Given the changing intellectual landscape and the repeated calls today for decolonialising the approaches to sociolinguistic analysis, our aim was to ponder and distinguish between different meanings and manifestations of prescriptivism. The terrain of research on prescriptivism is indeed changing, and exploring different expressions of it allows us to problematize and interpret the concept anew. Hallberg (Chapter 17) gives us insight into the diglossic context by exploring standard language ideology in the Arab-​speaking world. Gafter and Mor (Chapter 18) lay out the development of prescriptivism in Modern Hebrew, paying particular attention to the complexities involved in the Israeli prescriptive discourses. Kaschula, Mokapela, Nkomo and Nosilela (Chapter 19) trace the xxviii

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lineage of standardisation and prescriptive efforts in African languages in South Africa, giving insight into the country’s complex socio-​political and historical context beginning with the country as a colonial entity, through apartheid, up to today’s democracy. Klöter (Chapter 20) explores a pluricentric linguistic context and takes stock of five polities attempting to define and implement linguistic standards for Chinese, namely, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore and Taiwan. Wee and Samosir (Chapter 21) interrogate different theoretical models of World Englishes and their applicability to the study of prescriptivism in Southeast Asia. In examining the past and present literary norms in Russia, Mustajoki (Chapter 22) theorizes the tension between the notion of correctness promoted via prescriptive ideologies on the one hand and the ease of communication and readability on the other. Starčević, Kapović, and Sarić (Chapter 23) draw on their taxonomy of prescriptive ideologies to address the key characteristics of prescriptivism in Croatia. Manchec German (Chapter 24) showcases a new context in which prescriptivism can be studied with few, if any, predecessors in literature, by focusing on Breton, a severely endangered language spoken in West Brittany. The two final chapters demonstrate how the study of prescriptivism adapts to different data and their analysis. Walsh and Humphries (Chapter 25) provide an analysis of metaphors in metalinguistic texts taken from both French and Quebecois contexts. Finally, Lismont, Rutten and Vosters (Chapter 26) turn to address the rise and development of institutionalized prescriptivism in Dutch, quantitatively exploring the relationship between language norms and actual usage. All in all, discussing prescriptivism with nuance and self-​awareness is important, even if only so it allows us to more easily reconcile the different natures of our jobs as linguists and editors, and more easily justify our editorial choices to our contributors.

Notes 1 This extract from Jespersen is also the first citation for ‘prescriptive’ with reference to grammar in the OED. However, the first citation for ‘descriptive’ as an antonym to ‘prescriptive’ is much earlier. Whitney (1860–​63) in a paper about the phonetics of Sanskrit refers to “a phonetical science which delighted itself with subtleties, and of which the strong tendency was to grow from descriptive to prescriptive” (p. 394, cited www.oed.com sv descriptive). 2 Hodson cites Sugg (1964), Elledge (1967) and Azad (1989). Pullum (1974) is, of course another example of these intermittent voices crying in the wilderness. 3 The original German text reads as follows: ‘Wer weiß, dass sein deskriptives Tun immer auch eine nicht-​ deskriptive Dimension besitzt, wird reflektierter und realitätshaltiger arbeiten als derjenige, der diesen Horizont der sprachwissenschaftlichen Tätigkeit –​aus welchen Gründen auch immer –​unbeachtet lässt.’ (Klein, 2005, p. 401) 4 We were alerted to this somewhat surprising discovery when one of the editors (Robin Straaijer) peer reviewed a paper for the to-​be-​published volume, based on papers from the 2021 Prescriptivism conference “Modelling Prescriptivism: Language, Literature, and Speech Communities”, held at the University of Vigo (Spain). The (draft) text of that paper read as follows: ‘Textbooks … impress on students that there is really no room in linguistics to study prescriptivist rules because they “tend to focus on a small set of shibboleths” (Brown and Miller 2016: 16), are “elitist and socially divisive” (Radford 2020: 2), and have “little to do with the actual working of language” (Brinton 2000: 8).’ However, since the peer review was double-​blind, we are as yet unable to cite the source of this information. 5 The conferences were held in Sheffield (UK) in 2003, Ragusa (Italy) in 2006, Toronto (Canada) in 2009, Leiden (The Netherlands) in 2013, Park City (USA) in 2017, and Vigo (Spain) in 2021. 6 Nevertheless, they do jointly set the scene for the publication of the present handbook, which is perhaps unsurprising as their editors are largely united in this handbook’s editorial board. 7 There seems, however, to be a German-​language book that does something like this in Thomas Niehr, Jörg Killian and Jürgen Schiewe’s 52-​chapter edited volume Handbuch Sprachkritik (Niehr et al., 2020).

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References Ayres-​Bennett, W., & Seijido, M. (2013). Bon usage et variation sociolinguistique: Perspectives diachroniques et traditions nationales. ENS édition. Azad, Y. (1989). The government of tongues: Common usage and the “prescriptive” tradition 1650–​1800. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Oxford. Beal, J. C. (2004). English in modern times, 1700–​1945. Arnold. Beal, J. C., Hodson, J., Steadman-​Jones, R., & Percy, C. (2006). New Approaches to the Study of Later Modern English: Introduction. Historiographia Linguistica, 33(1/​2), 1–​9. https://​doi.org/​10.1075/​ hl.33.1-​2 Beal, J. C., Nocera, C., & Sturiale, M. (Eds.). (2008). Perspectives on prescriptivism. Peter Lang. Brinton, L. (2000). The structure of modern English: A linguistic introduction. John Benjamins. Brown, K., and Miller, J. (2016). A critical account of English syntax: Grammar, meaning, text. Edinburgh University Press. Bryan, W. F. (1923). Notes on the Founders of Prescriptive English Grammar. In Manly anniversary studies in language and literature (pp. 383–​393). Chicago University Press. Cameron, D. (2012). Verbal hygiene (new 1st ed.). Routledge. Chapman, D., & Rawlins, J. D. (Eds.). (2020). Language prescription: Values, ideologies and identity. Multilingual Matters. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English: Prescriptivism and language history. Cambridge University Press. Elledge, S. (1967). The naked science of language. In H. Anderson and J. S. Shea (Eds.), Studies in criticism and aesthetics 1660–​1800: Essays in honor of Samuel Holt Monk (266–​295). University of Minnesota Press. Erfurt, J., & Budach, G. (Eds.). (2008). Standardisation et destandardisation: Le francais et l’espagnol au XXe siecle. Lang. Haugen, E. (1966). Dialect, language, nation. American Anthropologist 68, 922–​935. Hejnà, M., & Walkden, G. (2022) A History of English. Language Science Press. Hodson, J. (2006). The problem of Joseph Priestley’s (1733–​1804) descriptivism. Historiographia Linguistica, 33(1–​2), 57–​84. Jespersen, O. (2006 [1933]). Essentials of English grammar. Routledge [George Allen & Unwin]. Justice, P. (2001). Relevant linguistics. CSLI Publications. Klein, W. P. (2005). Deskriptive statt präskriptiver Sprachwissenschaft!? [Descriptive instead of prescriptive linguistics!?]. Zeitschrift Für Germanistische Linguistik, 32(3), 376–​405. https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​ zfgl.2004.32.3.376 Kozyrev, V. A., & Černjak, V. D. (2012). Sovremennaja jazykovaja situacija i rečevaja kulʹtura: Učebnoe posobie. Izdat. Flinta. Leonard, S. A. (1929/​1962). The doctrine of correctness in English usage 1700–​1800. University of Wisconsin Press. Lippi-​Green, R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States (2nd ed). Routledge. Lyons, J. (1968) Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Mesthrie, R., Swann, J., Deumert, A., & Leap, W. L. (Eds.). (2009). Introducing sociolinguistics (2nd ed.). Edinburgh University Press. Milroy, J., & Milroy, L. (2012). Authority in language: Investigating standard English. Routledge. First edition 1985. Mugglestone, L. (2007). “Talking proper”: The rise of accent as social symbol (2nd updated edition). Oxford University Press. https://​dx.doi.org/​10.1093/​acp​rof:oso/​978019​9250​622.001.0001 Niehr, T., Kilian, J., & Schiewe, J. (Eds.). (2020). Handbuch Sprachkritik. J.B. Metzler. Percy, C., & Davidson, M. C. (Eds.). (2012). The languages of nation: Attitudes and norms. Multilingual Matters. Pullum, G. K. (1974). Lowth’s Grammar: A re-​evaluation. Linguistics 137, 63–​78. Radford, A. (2020) An introduction to English sentence structure. (2nd ed.) Cambridge University Press. [First published 2009.] Saussure, F. de, Bally, C., & Sechehaye, A. (1916). Cours de linguistique générale. Payot. Schmidlin, R. (2011). Die Vielfalt des Deutschen: Standard und Variation: Gebrauch, Einschätzung und Kodifizierung einer plurizentrischen Sprache. De Gruyter. https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​978311​0251​258 Starčević, A., Kapović, M., & Sarić, D. (2019). Jeziku je svejedno. Sandorf. https://​urn.nsk.hr/​ urn:nbn:hr:131:848​615

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Linguistic Prescriptivism: an evolving field Straaijer, R. (Ed.). (2016a). Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37 (3): Attitudes to prescriptivism. Straaijer, R. (2016b). Attitudes to prescriptivism: An introduction. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(3), 233–​242. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​01434​632.2015.1068​782 Straaijer, R. (2017). Linguistic prescriptivism (pp. 9780199772810–​0208) [Data set]. Oxford University Press. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​obo/​978019​9772​810-​0208 Sugg, R. S. Jr. (1964). The mood of eighteenth-​century English grammar. Philological Quqrterly, 43(2), 239–​252. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2019). Describing prescriptivism: Usage guides and usage problems in British and American English. Routledge. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I., & Percy, C. (Eds.). (2017). Prescription and Tradition in Language: Establishing Standards across Time and Space. Multilingual Matters. Watts, R. J. (2011). Language Myths and the History of English. Oxford University Press. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1093/​acp​rof:oso/​978019​5327​601.001.0001 Whitney, W. D. (1860–​63). The Atharva-​Veda Prâtiçâkhya or Çâunakîyâ Caturâdhyâyikâ. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 7, 333–​615.

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PART I

Theoretical and methodological issues

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1 WHY GRAMMARS HAVE TO BE NORMATIVE –​ AND PRESCRIPTIVISTS HAVE TO BE SCIENTIFIC Geoffrey K. Pullum*

1.  Normativity versus prescriptivism There is a century-​ old tradition among linguists of treating the terms “normative” and “prescriptive” as synonyms. For my purposes, this is unfortunate, because the two terms can be usefully employed to draw a significant distinction. There is a historical rationale for equating the two words, but I am not swimming entirely against the terminological current by separating them. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961, p. 1540) assigns the word “normative” four main senses, and they broadly correspond to the chronological stages of the word’s semantic development: 1 ‘of, relating to, or dealing with norms, their nature, or mode of discovery and existence’; 2 ‘explicating, inferring, or discovering a norm’; 3 ‘creating, prescribing, or imposing a norm’, as in a normative judgment; 4a ‘regulative, heuristic’, b ‘prescriptive, didactic’. I simply want to draw a sharp line between senses 1 and 4b, employing the word “normative” for the former (as in modern analytic philosophy) and “prescriptive” for the latter. A statement is normative if and only if it is concerned with the realm of values rather than facts: of what ought to be, rather than of what exists or happens. So, for example, ‘Torture is morally wrong’ is a normative statement: it speaks of what ought not to be done (whether or not it is) on pain of violating a moral standard. On the other hand, ‘Torture is proscribed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights’ is not itself normative. It just states a contingent fact about the content of a certain text.1 The distinction between normative and non-​normative statements applies just as well to statements of grammatical constraints.2 Suppose a grammar of English entails the statement that could be informally given as follows:

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-2

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A phrasal adjunct never separates a clause-​initial auxiliary verb from the following subject noun phrase. This can be read as saying merely that no phrasal adjunct ever is found between an initial auxiliary and a subject, thus entailing that *Was immediately afterward the policy abandoned? will never be encountered in corpora. If that were not very largely true for most texts, we would have to suspect there was something amiss with the statement, hence the grammar. Yet word processing mistakes do occur, and texts written inexpertly by foreigners are produced and published, and errors are missed by copy editors, and ungrammatical sentences are sometimes deliberately uttered, and so on. Occcasional exceptions may be encountered. However, the same statement can be read as saying that such placement of phrasal adjuncts is simply not permitted: that sentences violating it ought not to occur and should count as culpable grammatical errors. Note that the following sentence is quite different, in that it expresses a non-​normative statement: The grammar that I consulted includes a constraint forbidding phrasal adjuncts from immediately following clause-​initial auxiliary verbs. This simply makes a factual claim about the content of the particular grammar I consulted. It does not, of itself, define anything as incorrect, and does not pragmatically imply anything along those lines, unless further premises are supplied (e.g., that the indicated grammar should be trusted implicitly). Hanns Oertel (1901) may have been the first linguist to talk about ‘normative grammar’. He treats ‘didactic’ as a synonym of “normative” and contrasts it with what linguists of the scientific kind do. ‘Normative or didactic grammar sets up a certain standard as correct,’ he says (Oertel 1901, p. 87), and he goes on to discuss the matter of defining a standard variety of a language that can be taught to those who speak non-​standard dialects of it. Clearly he is talking about efforts to improve the speech of non-​standard dialect users, and contrasting normative grammars with scientific ones. Much literature has followed him. For example, every reference to ‘normative grammars’ that I could find in Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2017) appears to refer to grammars with an advisory and didactic mission. My practice in this chapter will be to refer to grammars of that sort as prescriptive, and to reserve the term normative for use in the philosophers’ sense. Leonard Bloomfield (1933, p. 7) puts Oertel’s opposition between the prescriptive and the scientific in more vivid terms, suggesting that evil authoritarians were actually lying in wait for an opportunity to oppress the people with the standards they were itching to impose: In the eighteenth century, the spread of education led many dialect-​speakers to learn the upper-​class forms of speech. This gave the authoritarians their chance: they wrote normative grammars, in which they often ignored actual usage in favor of speculative notions. Bloomfield’s project at the time was to establish and popularize a relatively new practice in the study of language: attempting to infer the grammar of a language from careful observation of the way its users actually behave when they use it, and on that basis construct a characterization of the state of the linguistic system. He notes –​correctly –​that some grammarians go beyond mere recommendation of favoured patterns of structure: they dismiss evidence from native-​ speaker usage entirely, and dream up aprioristic reasons for disapproving constructions; they 4

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offer conjectural explanatory suggestions based on logic; and with their ‘speculative notions’ they go so far as to propose linguistic reforms. This is all true, but I will argue later that it is not of central importance. It certainly has nothing to do with the normativity of systems of statements that aim simply to characterize the norms of a certain speech community at a given time. We can follow Oertel in calling these systems scientific grammars.

2.  Normative grammars as scientific grammars John Joseph (2020) argues at length against the notion that any scientific grammar can be truly non-​prescriptive. He claims that no matter how hard a linguist may strive to give a pure description of the syntax of a language, prescriptivism leaks in. For one thing, as soon as someone with the authority of a grammarian states that things are phrased in thus-​and-​such a way in a language, people who cannot claim such authority will take it to mean that things ought to be thus phrased. Joseph has a variety of concerns in his paper, more than I have space to discuss here (for example, he detects latent prescriptivism in the connotations of the term ‘deviant’ as informally used by linguists to mean ‘ungrammatical or unacceptable in some way’). I want to pick up just one of his points. He quotes a remark of mine (see Pullum 2004, p. 2) about the constraint that requires auxiliaries to precede the subject in declaratives with a preposed negative adjunct (At no time did he leave the room is grammatical and *At no time he left the room is not). I said: The claim being made is not that speakers of Standard English ou g h t to position tensed auxiliaries before subjects in clauses with a preposed negative adjunct; the claim is that they actually do position them thus (setting aside unintentional failures like typing or editing errors that sometimes prevent people from doing what they intended). I was arguing that a grammar entails things about how users (typically) behave, provided we allow for anomalous situations (like accidental word-​processing slips, or my having to type the asterisked example above). I now regret writing just ‘not’ instead of ‘not merely’, because I also want to defend a complementary statement. I want to say that the claim made by the cited constraints is not merely that speakers of Standard English do position tensed auxiliaries before subjects in clauses with a preposed negative adjunct, but that they actually ou g h t to position them thus, if they want to be taken as using English in a normal way. With the added ‘merely’, the two statements are compatible. Grammatical constraints can be interpreted in both ways: both as descriptions of what is (typically) found in corpora, and of what counts as correct and appropriate. Normativity in the philosopher’s sense is (contra Oertel) not antithetical to scientific grammar. Indeed, I would say a grammar that did not make clear what is a correctly formed sentence, and what is not, would be a grammar that does not do its job at all, and there is nothing very scientific about that. I am of course presupposing (e.g., when I write ‘typically’ above) that the relation between grammatical constraints and facts about observed speech acts is indirect. This will not be true in some areas of phonetics, sociolinguistics, or conversational analysis, but to study syntax we normally have to idealize or normalize the data. Depending on the purpose at hand, one might want to erase phenomena like coughs, stammers, and stumbles from records of speech, without denying that in real life they occur, or that they might even convey meaning. It might also be 5

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reasonable sometimes to ignore obviously bungled mid-​sentence changes of plan, restarts, or multiple occurrences of parenthetical you know when seeking evidence about normal sentence structure. Naturally, the appropriateness of specific idealizations is always a matter for debate and negotiation; investigators will differ on such decisions. One syntactician might decide to idealize spoken data by not even transcribing filled pauses such as ‘um’ and ‘er’, while another might hypothesize that these elements are located systematically in utterances and could be grammatically significant. It would depend on the project at hand. But humans are not functionally flawless; accidental speech errors (‘fluffs’, as actors call them) do occur. No matter where the linguist may draw the line in screening out errors, any codification of the linguistic patterns typically found among mature native speakers defines a norm: a standard that a linguistic expression might satisfy or might not.3 Somehow over the past century it became controversial to admit this. Bloomfield’s antipathy to normativity is connected to his logical-​positivist view that the linguist’s subject matter has to be the physical properties of utterance tokens; Chomsky’s rejection of normativity clearly stems from his espousal of the view that linguists are studying stable states of the electrochemical events in an individual human being’s mental activity, ultimately brain structure. The problem is that neither seem to be able to capture any sense in which a sentence might be truly described as correctly or incorrectly structured. If linguistic theorizing about relative clauses is really concerned just with the etiology of behavior leading to production of utterances that contain relative clauses (Bloomfield 1933), or with constant properties of brain states of a speaker capable of using or apprehending a relative clause (Chomsky 1965), then the distinction between what the grammar defines as well-​ formed and what the speaker does in particular circumstances is simply not drawn at all. And Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance is not the solution here: it merely posits one conjectural cognitive module in combat with another. It does not bear on the issue of what the grammar should properly call ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It is a crucial point, however, that the normativity of a grammatical constraint does not entail anything at all about what someone should do (or not do). A person who violates a constraint set forth as part of a linguist’s grammar has not thereby done something that they shouldn’t have done. Interestingly, Chomsky (1986, p. 241), despite explicitly believing that grammars are not normative, actually makes this point in the course of a lengthy argument against Kripke (1982), and gives the correct reason. For an arbitrary speaker Jones, says Chomsky (1986, p. 241), ‘The rules of Jones’s language ... entail nothing about what Jones ought to do (perhaps he should not observe the rules for one reason or another; they would still be his rules)’. Alan Millar (2004) elaborates at length on what is effectively this point. He draws exactly the distinction we need –​between (i) defining what is correct and (ii) advising people about what they should do. When a practice is governed by a certain ‘rule’ (or respects a certain constraint, as I would say), ‘participating in the practice makes one subject to that rule’ (pp. 168–​9); and if you are subject to it there is a certain sense in which you ought to obey it. But ‘rules’ (constraints) are not laws of physics: they can be ignored or broken. You ‘may participate in the practice and also flout the rules’. It is true that ‘participating in a practice incurs a commitment to following its governing rules and therefore to doing what the rules prescribe’: if you aim to be thought of as a participant in a practice and you don’t even follow its defining principles, you’re not even trying. However, crucially, ‘It does not follow that one ought to follow the rules’. Why not? Why is that not a self-​contradiction? Because ‘it might be that one ought instead to withdraw from the practice.’

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To apply this to the case of a linguistic prescription (though that is not Millar’s focus), consider the constraint that defines the so-​called ‘split infinitive’. Defining it with full rigour is not entirely straightforward (because of phenomena like verb phrase ellipsis and parenthetical interruptions), and the term is a misnomer (English does not have an infinitive verb form), but here we can simply say that the constraint forbids adjuncts from being linearly positioned between the infinitival marker to and the head verb of the infinitival complement that it introduces. The constraint draws a distinction between phrases that respect it (which are tacitly defined as well-​formed or “good”) and phrases that don’t (which the constraint defines as erroneous or “bad”). Yet nothing follows from it about what anyone should do. A syntactician might formulate the constraint against ‘split infinitives’ simply as a prerequisite for searching out sentences in literary works that violate it, exactly as George Curme did more than a century ago –​his compendious work Syntax cites large numbers of attested literary examples (Curme 1930, pp. 458–​467, esp. pp. 461–​465). Curme was concerned to defend the view that ‘split infinitives’ are natural, frequent, and useful in English writing, and have been attested over many centuries. In his view it was the people who urged avoidance who were making a mistake. You can always respect the constraint if you want to, and that may be useful in ensuring that your writing is not criticized by those who think ‘split infinitives’ are an error; but you can instead simply withdraw from the practice of writing English in a way that respects the constraint. Curme thought we should; he even asserts (p. 461) that ‘it is more characteristic of our most prominent authors’ rather than ‘the minor writers, who avoid it as they fear criticism’. Summarizing thus far, normative statements of constraints do not intrinsically imply any recommendation about the use of any construction, or about using the relevant language at all. Linguists hypothesize sets of grammatical constraints in order to characterize phenomena accurately. If that is done well, people inclined toward supplying prescriptive advice may be better placed to consider how people should be advised to use the language; but stating the constraints is not to be equated with advising people to respect them.

3.  Inessential faults of prescriptive works What separates descriptive from prescriptive writers on language inheres solely, I would argue, in mission and motivation. And the mission of helping others to use their language in ways that will be perceived more positively by others is unquestionably a noble one. However, we need to clear away three side issues that obscure the mission. Prescriptivist works have long been condemned –​sometimes rightly, sometimes excessively –​for (i) inaccuracy, (ii) snobbery, and (iii) revisionism. I want to consider each of these and argue that none of them are intrinsic or crucial to the prescriptive approach.

3.1.  Inaccurate generalizations Linguists have pointed out glaring mismatches between stipulations concerning ‘proper grammar’ and generalizations about normal usage by users of English. And, of course, the property of stating untruths about syntax cannot be regarded as a good point in a recommendatory or advisory book. A publisher is not going to want a dust jacket blurb saying ‘This book promulgates invented edicts that experienced users don’t comply with and never did’. Conceivably there is profit in having more edicts to list: more to state means longer and more expensive books. But false statements won’t be selling points after they are spotted as

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fictive. The general public is credulous on matters of grammar, and hoary old compilations of nonsense still sell quite well, but publishers should keep in mind the danger that readers could wise up and start laughing at discredited grammar books rather than at the purported errors they enumerate.

3.2.  Contemptuous attitudes The snobbish, bossy, petulant, and contemptuous attitudes displayed by some prescriptivists are a striking feature of the genre. The level of scorn and deprecation is sometimes quite astonishing. Simon Heffer (2010, 2014) exemplifies this about as well as anyone. Heffer calls familiar expressions ‘simply illiterate’ (2014, 263) or ‘sickening’ (2014, p. 371), and openly acknowledges that he prefers to ignore what the evidence of other writers’ usage suggests. Such talk has a long history. Several decades before Heffer we had John Simon calling a speaker with non-​standard verb inflection ‘an illiterate ignoramus who neither knew nor cared to know better’ (Simon 1981, p. 147).4 And a century before him we had Richard Grant White (1822–​1885) opining that using preventative rather than preventive to mean ‘tending or intended to prevent’ should be considered evidence ‘of an utter want of education, and of a low grade of intelligence’ (R. G. White 1870, p. 229). Users of preventative up to that point had included Daniel Defoe and George Washington, as pointed out by Gilman (1989, p. 770); but it’s doubtful that White’s word rage would have been much influenced if he had known about such distinguished users of the word: in a sense, the evidence that even notable people were using words or phrases he hated was the very thing he was angry about. Angry deprecation of this sort, common though it is, and closely linked to the social function of prescriptivist ideology though it may be, is not intrinsic or necessary to the advisory writer’s craft. Just as a good teacher does not treat students with contempt, prescriptive usage guides do not need to impute culpability, failure, illiteracy, or dim-​wittedness to those who decline to regulate their usage by its standard. There is a big difference between classifying a construction as ungrammatical or ‘not Standard English’ and calling it an ‘abomination’ and condemning its users as ignorant fools. Rhetoric of the latter sort only gives prescriptivist advice-​mongers a bad name.

3.3.  Reformist zeal A bigger problem with prescriptive works is that they sometimes reveal a yearning to fix the language up and make it neater than it was before. Perhaps the clearest case is the strange reform effort launched by Henry Fowler and his brother Frank in The King’s English (Fowler and Fowler 1906, pp. 75–​85) when they decided to recommend that wh-​words should cease to be used in one type of relative clause. The Fowlers distinguish ‘defining’ relative clauses from ‘non-​ defining’ ones. Since ‘defining’ relatives by no means always define or restrict, Huddleston and Pullum (2002, henceforth CGEL) call them integrated relatives: they are fully integral to the syntax of the sentence and not separated off by commas. CGEL calls the ‘non-​defining’ ones supplementary relatives: they express loosely connected optional supplements to the sense of the sentence and are always flanked by commas. The Fowlers admit that it would be ‘excusable’ to see that and wh-​words as being in free variation in integrated relatives, since ‘it is not easy to draw any distinction’ between the two that is ‘consistently supported by usage’ (p. 80); but they nonetheless propose that the language should be cleaned up in this regard. They suggest that (i) supplementary relatives should never be introduced with that, and (ii) integrated relative clauses should never be introduced by wh-​words. 8

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A century ago it was by no means clear that supplementary relatives could not be introduced by that: the Fowlers found many examples that conflict with their proposed edict. In contemporary English, though, supplementary that-​relatives are extremely rare (see Pullum 2005 for informal discussion of one modern attestation), and might reasonably be treated as sporadic errors. However, the second half of the Fowlers’ claim, banning wh-​words from introducing integrated (‘defining’) relatives, was an outlandish claim back then and remains so today. (It seems to have been forgotten in the subsequent years that the Fowlers propose banning not just which but also who from integrated relatives: no one in recent decades ever took seriously the idea that the man who would be king is grammatically questionable.) The Fowlers promptly acknowledge that their position would be impossible to implement in full generality: relative which ‘can, and sometimes must, be used …in defining clauses’ (p. 80); so they give an amazingly permissive codicil, saying that who or which ‘should not be used in defining clauses except when custom, euphony, or convenience is decidedly against the use of ‘that’ ’ (p. 82). That is, a wh word in an integrated relative clause should be allowed if (i) people regularly use it, or (ii) it sounds nicer, or (iii) it seems convenient! They go on to list the exceptions in detail. They hold that Who is it who talks about moral geography? should be corrected to Who is it that talks about moral geography?, but otherwise drop their objection to who in defining relatives because that with human antecedents ‘has in fact come to look archaic’ (p. 83). They also acknowledge an unavoidable exception in cases where a preposition precedes the relative word; so they propose correcting only the second which in the sentence It is the little threads of which the inner substance of the nerves is composed which subserve sensation: they claim (p. 83) it should be It is the little threads of which the inner substance of the nerves is composed that subserve sensation. Obviously the first which has to remain: *the little threads of that the inner substance of the nerves is composed is plainly ungrammatical. A further exception involves human-​denoting genitive NP determiners. They note that relative that ‘has no possessive case’ (p. 84), so in order to avoid ??the man that I found the hat of, which is distinctly ungainly, we cannot use an inflected genitive (*the man that’s hat I found); it has to be a wh relative, the man whose hat I found.5 Yet another exception is aesthetically motivated: ‘Euphony demands that “that that” should become “that which” ’ (p. 84):??You should avoid that that annoys you does not sound good, and You should avoid that which annoys you is much preferred. One further exception is allowed: ‘awkwardness’ results from using that ‘when the relative is widely separated from its antecedent’ (p. 84). Their case is now in ruins, as they effectively admit: ‘It may seem to the reader that a rule with so many exceptions is not worth observing’ (p. 85). Of their three remarkably feeble defenses to any such challenge, the third is ‘that if we are to be at the expense of maintaining two different relatives, we may as well give each of them different work to do’ (ibid.), which makes it fully clear that no established grammatical generalization or agreed convention of usage is being described here; the Fowlers are proposing a reform, and justifying it by saying it will give that and the relative wh words ‘different work to do’. Their unmotivated and much-​violated restriction has little significance even for them; they say (p. 85): ‘In the following subsections we shall not often allude to the distinction here laid down’, and they note that ‘The reader will find that our rules are quite as often violated as observed’. That last remark was certainly correct. The original Elements of Style by William Strunk (1918) said nothing about disallowing wh-​words in integrated relatives. It was only 40 years later when E. B. White revised Strunk to create Strunk and White (1959) that the Fowlers’ 9

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stipulation was added. And as Jan Freeman (2005) discovered, White then went back over Strunk’s prose taking out all the occurrences of which that introduced defining relatives –​ surreptitiously altering the record to suggest that Strunk had agreed with him (see Pullum 2010a for more discussion). For half a century the Fowlers’ proposal was largely ignored. President Roosevelt’s 1941 speech calling December 7th ‘a date which will live in infamy’ was not a grammar slip. Down to the present day the natural usage of most writers confirms that integrated relative clauses can be either that-​relatives or wh-​relatives. But slowly the Fowlers’ reform achieved considerable influence among copy editors in America (though hardly at all in Britain). It never really caught on at the grass-​roots level, but conservative usage manuals and professional copy editors in the USA came to believe that it had, or should, and worked to enforce it. Their activities continually warp the published record, nudging professionally published English toward the Fowlers’ goal. Hinrichs et al. (2005) describe a very clever experiment to measure the extent of their success. It is based on looking not just at frequencies of which and that relatives in different texts, but at the correlation with obedience to other prescriptivist edicts. For example, they find that as the ratio of active to passive clauses goes up over the decades (suggesting compliance with the familiar prescriptive injunction to eschew passives), the ratio of which to that introducing defining relative clauses goes down. The which-​hunters are winning. I regard language-​improvement projects like the Fowlers’ as time-​wasting silliness: the goal of trying to get people to write better prose would be much better approached through an honest account of the way experienced speakers use the contemporary language, rather than an imaginary way it could be if some aesthetic tidying-​up project were implemented. And yet in a sense this is a side issue. All three of the tendencies just referred to –​inaccuracy, snobbishness, and revisionism –​can be separated from the prescriptive project itself. Factual hallucination, elitist contempt, and reformist dreams are not necessary concomitants of works with a prescriptive motivation. And once we put all three of those aside, it becomes clear that prescriptive works can be very useful to anyone who produces writing that is intended for others to read.

4.  High-​quality prescriptivism and use of evidence Prescriptive works vary a lot. It would be a mistake to typecast the entire community of usage advisers as head-​in-​the-​sand ignoramuses who ignore facts. In particular, generative grammarians should be careful not to cast such aspersions, since over the past six decades they have notoriously tended to use their own intuitions about their native language as their primary or even sole source of data, dismissing the opinions of laypeople about sentence structure as worthless and unfounded superstitions. A closer look at the practice of responsible prescriptivists reveals them as having more respect for empirical data than many syntactic theorists display. As an example, consider the treatment of the controversial adverb hopefully in the 5th edition of Garner’s Modern English Usage (Garner 2022, pp. 552–​553). It begins with a factual survey of the two uses –​the manner adjunct use (CGEL, pp. 670ff) in It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive and the modal adjunct use (CGEL, pp. 767ff) in Hopefully we won’t need the bear spray. Modal adjuncts are a subspecies of what traditional grammars call ‘sentence adverbs’; they qualify the way in which the content of a clause relates to truth or epistemic basis. Adverbs commonly used as modal adjuncts include clearly, conceivably, necessarily, obviously, possibly, thankfully, etc. Garner observes that attested usage shows the modal adjunct use ‘is now a part of AmE’, and then he turns to the empirical issue of acceptability. He notes (p. 553) that although 10

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many people think the modal adjunct use should be ‘declared … utterly irreproachable’, there is a significant amount of dissent: To test the idea, I put out a Twitter poll in October 2020 asking people whether hopefully in its common uses (a) is wholly unobjectionable, or (b) retains a little bad odor. With 823 votes tallied, some 42% answered (b). I had predicted that the number would be less than 5%. So resistance to the word remains more durable than one might think. Now, I am not suggesting that it is solid social-​scientific practice for an influential reference book author to ask his Twitter followers what they think. Garner’s followers are a self-​selected population that is almost certainly biased quite heavily in the direction of conservative ideas about Standard English, and they are addressing a point of controversy that carries the baggage of half a century’s prejudices and puristic finger-​wagging, which many of them would know about. Nonetheless, he does at least check his opinions against those of other speakers. Theoretical syntacticians do relatively little of that. Garner’s conclusion is that the adverb itself now has a bad odour clinging to it: though the controversy has subsided, hopefully ‘remains a skunked term’. He gives fair advice for a cautious writer who wants a quiet life, a modicum of respect, and minimum exposure to grammatical criticism or ridicule: you should ‘avoid it in all senses if you’re concerned with your credibility: if you use it in the traditional way, many readers will think it odd; if you use it in the newish way, a few readers will tacitly tut-​tut you’ (p. 553). As a secondary descriptive check on actual occurrence, Garner (ibid.) then gives corpus data from the Google N-​gram Viewer. Comparing the frequency of I hope it won’t and Hopefully it won’t in recent print sources, he finds that the ratio is 7 to 1 in favour of the former. Hopefully is not yet the default was to express ‘It is my hope that.’ The furore over hopefully that broke out in the mid 1960s was a strange and irrational moral panic. Gilman (1989, pp. 512–​513) summarizes the history: instances of the modal adjunct use were commonplace at least from 1930 onward, but then the frequency exhibited ‘a considerable increase beginning in 1964’ (despite the appearance of two 1964 usage handbooks that noted the construction disapprovingly); criticism started to appear in New York magazines and newspapers in 1965; and by the following year the objections were crystallized in Follett’s influential Modern American Usage (Follett 1966, revised for publication by Jacques Barzun after Follett’s death in 1963). Within twenty years former opponents were recanting, which suggests Garner’s advice is too cautious. But Garner can hardly be faulted on his employment of empirical methods: eliciting opinions through surveys; tabulating respondents’ votes; comparing corpus frequencies; reporting ordinary lay users’ disquiet (including its disagreement with his own views); and providing hard data confirming a numerical bias. It is almost unheard of for a theoretical syntactician to do anything like collecting 823 informants’ judgements before deciding on the well-​formedness of a sentence or construction. I can think of only one marginal exception, and it was really a study of ongoing syntactic change: Maling and Sigurjónsdóttir (2002) obtained judgments from 1731 Icelandic schoolchildren, amounting to an astonishing 45% of the entire country’s birth cohort for 1984, plus 205 adults, to end up with usable answers from a total of 1895 speakers. They confirmed that a new impersonal syntactic construction had emerged, rejected by adult speakers and prescriptive authorities but fully acceptable to children. But their paper is an outlier within theoretical and descriptive linguistics. Garner is generally far more reponsive to empirical facts than most syntactic theorists, with their casual attitude toward rival intuitions. 11

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The compilers of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (see e.g. American Heritage 1996b, esp. xii–​xiv and xxvi–​xxx) use methods broadly comparable to Garner’s. The dictionary’s editorial staff makes use of a regularly repopulated Usage Panel of between 100 and 200 people with some claim to be prestige speakers of the language: writers, editors, journalists, professors, attorneys, judges, diplomats, legislators, and others. A companion volume to the dictionary, The American Heritage Book of English Usage (1996a, 105), observed that only 44% of the 1968 panel approved of the modal adjunct use of hopefully, and by 1986 a panel whose other judgements showed they were less conservative had nonetheless turned further against it during its period of notoriety, showing only 27% support. The editors conclude by expressing the belief that what bothers the panel ‘is not the use of hopefully as a sentence adverb per se’, but rather, that ‘hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth.’ Though the literati were beginning to concede by the mid-​1980s that the modal use was here to stay, non-​ specialists had decided that the word itself was skunked. It is an interesting empirical question whether objections to the modal use have indeed triggered an avoidance of the manner use (as in The dog waited hopefully beside me as I was cutting up the meat). I would conjecture that it wouldn’t (hopefully with the meaning ‘in an optimistic manner’ seems so basic, inoffensive, and well established). Garner seems to assume that the manner sense has started to die out. But be that as it may; what I’m drawing attention to here is merely that both Garner and the American Heritage team conduct surveys and pay attention to quantitative data –​practices that are characteristic of responsible social science but not of typical practice in theoretical syntax. Descriptive linguists and prescriptive usage writers are not rivals within a unitary study of the English language; they represent two different cultures. And use of empirical methods is not what distinguishes between them.

5.  Low-​quality prescriptivism and contempt for facts At this point readers acquainted with some of my earlier work might begin to wonder whether this is really me, or some other Geoff Pullum. Do my supportive remarks about prescriptivists and my apparently relativist recognition of different cultures signal a retrenchment? For am I not the same Geoff Pullum who summarized the contribution of that much-​loved booklet The Elements of Style as ‘50 years of stupid grammar advice’ (Pullum 2009)? Did I not once suggest that usage manual consumers seemed to be masochists (Pullum 2017)? I am indeed that same Pullum. And no, I have not changed my mind. I acknowledged in the previous section that those whose language study has an advisory rather than descriptive motivation often pay plenty of attention to empirical facts. That does not excuse or pardon the sort of prescriptive usage advisers who ignore every kind of data, offer no reasoned analysis, and support their recommendations with nothing but personal prejudice and snobbery. Consider E. B. White on the modal adjunct use of hopefully. He came late to the party, having apparently not noticed the rise of the modal construction between the 1930s and the 1950s. Strunk’s original booklet Elements of Style (Strunk 1918) had said not a word about the adverb in question. The first edition of E. B. White’s revision of it (Strunk & White 1959) similarly made no mention of it. The issue came to White’s attention some time in the middle 1960s: he grumbled about it in The New Yorker (27 March 1965; see Gilman 1989, pp. 512). So in the 1972 edition of his revision of Strunk’s book (Strunk and White 1972, pp. 42–​3) he added this:

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Hopefully. This once-​useful adverb meaning “with hope” has been distorted and is now widely used to mean “I hope” or “it is to be hoped.” Such use is not merely wrong, it is silly. To say, “Hopefully I’ll leave on the noon plane” is nonsense. Do you mean you’ll leave on the noon plane in a hopeful frame of mind? Or do you mean you hope you’ll leave on the noon plane? Whichever you mean, you haven’t said it clearly. Although the word in its new, free-​floating capacity may be pleasurable and even useful to many, it offends the ear of many others, who do not like to see words dulled or eroded, particularly when the erosion leads to ambiguity, softness, or nonsense. It is hard to square White’s reputation as a fine writer with this chaotic stream of abuse. What exactly is his charge against modal hopefully? In 121 words he alleges distortion, silliness, nonsensicality, obscurity, novelty, free-​ floatingness, pleasurableness, offensiveness, bluntness, erosion, ambiguity, softness, and (as he runs out of new charges and begins to repeat himself) nonsense again. He raves like a drunken preacher, ignoring both Strunk’s slogan ‘Omit needless words’ and his own ‘Do not overwrite’. Boiling mad, spluttering with indignation, he fails to hit on any coherent rationale for the ban he advocates. The adverb was ‘once useful’, he claims, as if its usefulness is now gone (why would a new discourse function not make it even more useful?). It introduces ambiguity, he charges –​as if absence of lexical ambiguity had ever been a characteristic of English. He has nothing to say about the two closely parallel uses of clearly (it’s a manner adjunct in They were unable to see the sign clearly and a modal one in Clearly they were unable to see the sign). White’s unhinged emotional ranting deserves the abuse I have heaped on it. And of course his bad advice is not limited to the modal use of hopefully: see Pullum (2010a) for a critical discussion of many other misleading claims and flatly wrong advice in The Elements of Style. The original version of the book is more than a century old now, and the White revision is long past its 60th anniversary. It should not have been allowed to dominate writing advice in America’s colleges and universities for so long. Others among the ranks of the worst prescriptivists sin just as gravely. Many explicit examples can be found in Heffer (2010, 2014; see Pullum 2010b for a review of the former). Heffer straightforwardly announces that the fact of a construction’s being ‘greatly favoured’ in popular usage ‘is no reason to use it’, because ‘Rules in language are made by logic, not by a democratic vote’ (2014, p. 263). You would have to be strikingly ignorant of both grammar and logic to believe that; and you would also have to accept a total severance of the link between what the grammar of English should say and what native-​speaker users of English typically do. Heffer also represents personal whims as facts of grammar (therefore, under his view, facts of logic). Heffer (2014) claims grammatical incorrectness for fully grammatical sentences such as these: They each went to London. (p. 125) The three of them no longer speak to each other. (p. 125) He accidentally walked into a lamp-​post. (p. 178) She is now the chair of her department. (p. 264) I did the job single-​handed. (p. 325) Scientists warn that an eruption is imminent. (p. 372) He holds that the modal verb can has only the dynamic physical-​ability meaning, not the epistemic one (It is not known whether there can be an odd perfect number) or the deontic one (You can

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use my car if you want). In fact he claims explicitly that if anyone capable of voluntary motion asks ‘Can I kiss you?’, the only correct answer is ‘Yes’ (2014, p. 72). These claims are frankly absurd. Pullum (2017) argues that the consumers of usage manuals like Heffer’s act like masochists, yearning to be disciplined for their grammatical sins. Let me offer just one reminder of the sort of thing that paper was talking about. Louis Menand, a Harvard literature professor, complained in a New Yorker book review that the grammar chapter in the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style failed to include a ban on genitive antecedents for pronouns. Arnold Zwicky wrote to Menand pointing out that the putative constraint (a total fiction, apparently due to Follett 1966) was repeatedly violated in Menand’s own writing: like any normal writer, Menand uses such phrases as the city’s name for itself, or Emerson’s reaction when Holmes showed him the essay. Half a dozen such cases were easily found in a few of the opening pages of one of his own books (The Metaphysical Club, Menand 2001), and all that Menand could say when Zwicky exhibited them to him was that he submitted himself to arbitrary grammatical dictats like a man forcing himself to take a cold shower, despite believing that the principles governing usage ‘are fundamentally arbitrary, and thus sometimes feel as if they exist only to trip up even the most careful writer’. Cold showers, and arbitrary edicts whose only point is to trip writers up: it is a bleak picture. Menand sees the principles governing normal usage as arbitrary restraints on his natural inclinations, designed to catch him out. He obeys the restraints solely as a kind of hair-​shirt regimen. No, I do not retract my earlier condemnations of delusional prescriptive manuals or their gullible and apparently punishment-​addicted customers. Writers like Simon Heffer, John Simon, and E. B. White exercise a baleful influence on the study of the English language. Saying that is not the same as condemning the whole prescriptivist project: the careful work some usage specialists have done on the limits of acceptability for educated Standard English speakers serves a real purpose. In that respect, the tendency of modern linguists to decry the efforts of prescriptivist writers sight unseen has created a putative rivalry that serves no good purpose. It encourages the counterposed stereotypes under which usage advice writers are depicted as blinkered fools or malign elitists (Bloomfield’s ‘authoritarians’ who ‘ignored actual usage in favor of speculative notions’: 1933, p. 7), while linguists are caricatured as anything-​goes liberals who believe there are no grammatical restraints at all (one piece about linguists reprinted in Simon 1981 is entitled ‘Playing Tennis Without a Net’). The community of scholars studying English grammar is not well served by being divided into two hostile factions constantly caricaturing and insulting each other.

6. Conclusion I have argued for a clear distinction between normativity (a property that statements have when they are about what ought to be rather than what is) and prescriptivism (an enterprise involving advice concerning how a language should best be used). I claim that if grammars are to draw a distinction between what is grammatically correct and what is not, they cannot be entirely non-​ normative descriptive theories, whether concerned with physical patterns in concrete utterance tokens (Bloomfield 1933) or electrochemical phenomena in the brain (Chomsky 1965); they must have an irreducibly normative aspect. It is sad that so many of the books on grammar and usage available to the general public are little more than undisciplined and evidence-​free collections of personal peeves and prejudices. I have argued that works of that kind are to be distinguished from both evidence-​ based grammars, aiming simply to characterize the sentence structures characteristic of a language, and 14

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evidence-​based prescriptive manuals, which aim to present reasoned advice on how to use the language in ways that will be well regarded. Both have their own integrity and sensible purpose.

Notes * An early draft of this chapter benefited from the comments of two anonymous referees. Their comments led to a thorough rewriting. Later my Edinburgh colleague John Joseph, to whom I am very grateful, was kind enough to read the rewritten version carefully and provide many incisive and challenging comments. Other useful comments leading to what I hope are improvements in the text were provided by Joan Beal and Brett Reynolds. Remaining errors are solely mine. 1 It is true that if someone uttered the sentence one might infer pragmatically that they were condemning torture, or claiming it is morally unacceptable. But that would be in virtue of the assumption that the UDHR itself has morally significant force. The sentence does not actually say that you should not torture people. The inference would be a pragmatic one, relating to what the relevance of citing the UDHR might be in the circumstances at hand. 2 Considerable conceptual confusion attends nearly all of the literature that talks about ‘rules’. In particular, none of the uses made of the term ‘rule’ in generative grammar can be regarded as denoting anything like rules in the everyday sense, such as the rules of etiquette, driving regulations, legal jurisdiction, or parliamentary procedure. Discussing this topic in full here would constitute an inappropriately technical digression; the interested reader can get some sense of what I mean by consulting Pullum (2013). Suffice it to say that I will refer to grammars as consisting of constraints, by which I mean declarative statements about the structure of clauses. I avoid the word ‘rule’ altogether; it appears in this chapter only in direct quotations. 3 Linguists who are more sociologically inclined may regard the view I take here as too far removed from issues of community, mutual recognition, interpersonal attitudes, and social stratification. I do not have space to develop a more sociolinguistic alternative view –​one that might accord more with the views of Joseph (2020); but see Brennan et al. (2013) for a treatment that grounds norms in attitudes making the members of a community accountable to each other. 4 It is perhaps not irrelevant that John Simon (1925–​2019) was an ethnic Hungarian from Vojvodina in Serbia for whom English was a fourth language. It is not uncommon to find educated people who were originally speakers of other languages purveying fierce and angry prescriptive opinions. Indeed, native speakers may often feel the same way. They see the time they invested as like a monetary investment being threatened by inflation: having devoted all that time to learning fine points of grammar, they are furious to see others getting away with ignoring them. 5 The Fowlers almost spot an important truth here: they observe that relative that ‘has no possessive case, and cannot take a preposition before it’ (p. 92), but miss the obvious conclusion: that is not a pronoun at all. Traditional grammarians have all wrongly taken it to be a pronoun, but CGEL categorizes it as a subordinator (traditionally ‘subordinating conjunction’) comparable to interrogative whether. It then follows immediately that it cannot take the genitive ’s suffix or function as complement of a preposition.

References American Heritage (1996a). The American Heritage book of English usage. Houghton Mifflin. American Heritage (1996b). The American Heritage dictionary of the English language. (3rd ed.). Houghton Mifflin. Bloomfield, L. (1933). Language. Henry Holt. Brennan, G., Eriksson, L., Goodin, R., & Southwood, N. (2013). Explaining norms. Oxford University Press. Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: Its origins, nature, and use. Praeger. Curme, G. O. (1930). Syntax. (Vol. 3 of A grammar of the English language.) D.C. Heath. Follett, W. (1966). Modern American usage. (Completed and edited by J. Barzun.) Hill & Wang. Fowler, H. W. & Fowler, F. G. (1906). The King’s English. Clarendon Press. Freeman, J. (2005). Frankenstrunk. Boston Sunday Globe, 23 October. Original source online at www.bos​ ton.com/​news/​globe/​ideas/​artic​les/​2005/​10/​23/​franke​nstr​unk later republished at http://​throw​gram​ marf​romt​hetr​ain.blogs​pot.com/​2016/​07/​frankenstrunk-​birth-​of-​monste.html

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Geoffrey K. Pullum Garner, B. (2022). Garner’s modern English usage (5th ed.). Oxford University Press. Gilman, E. W. (Ed.). (1989). Merriam-​Webster’s dictionary of English usage. Merriam-​Webster. Heffer, S. (2010) Strictly English: The correct way to write …and why it matters. Random House. Heffer, S. (2014). Simply English: An A to Z of avoidable errors. Random House. Hinrichs, L., Szmrecsanyi, B., & Bohmann, A. (2015). Which-​hunting and the Standard English relative clause. Language 91(4), 806–​836. Huddleston, R. & Pullum, G. K. (2002). The Cambridge grammar of the English language (referenced as CGEL). Cambridge University Press. Joseph, J. E. (2020) Is/​ought: Hume’s guillotine, linguistics and standards of language. In D. Chapman & J. D. Rawlins (Eds.), Language prescription: Values, ideologies and identity, 15–​31. Multilingual Matters. Kripke, S. (1982). Wittgenstein on rules and private language: An elementary exposition. Harvard University Press. Maling, J., & Sigurjónsdóttir, S. (2002). The new impersonal construction in Icelandic. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 5(1), 97–​142. Menand, L. (2001) The metaphysical club: A story of ideas in America. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Millar, A. (2004). Understanding people: Normativity and rationalizing explanation. Oxford University Press. Oertel, H. (1901). Lectures on the study of language. Scribner. Facsimile archived online at https://​arch​ive. org/​deta​ils/​lectur​eson​stud​y01o​ertg​oog/​page/​n4/​mode/​2up Pullum, G. K. (2004). Ideology, power, and linguistic theory. Paper presented to the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, PA, 30 December. Online at http://​www.lel.ed.ac. uk/​∼gpullum/​MLA2004.pdf Pullum, G. K. (2005). An ivory-​billed relative clause. Language Log, December 1, 2005. Online at http://​ itre.cis.upenn.edu/​~myl/​lang​uage​log/​archi​ves/​002​681.html Pullum, G. K. (2009). 50 years of stupid grammar advice. The Chronicle of Higher Education 55 (32), 17 April 2009, Chronicle Review section, B15. Pullum, G. K. (2010a). The land of the free and The Elements of Style. English Today 102 (26, no. 2, June 2010), 34–​44. Pullum, G. K. (2010b). These ‘rules’ are already broken. Review of Heffer (2010). Times Higher Education 1,973 (11 November 2010), 56. Pullum, G. K. (2013). The central question in comparative syntactic metatheory. Mind and Language 28:4, 492–​521. Pullum, G. K. (2017). The usage game: catering to perverts. In Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides: History, advice, attitudes (pp. 177–​196). Oxford University Press. Simon, J. (1981). Paradigms lost: Reflections on literacy and its decline. Penguin. Strunk, W. (1918). Elements of style. Privately published 1918, republished 1919 at the Press of W. F. Humphrey, Geneva, NY, as The elements of style (43 pp). Text republished online at www.bartl​eby. com/​141 Strunk, W. & White, E. B. (1959). The elements of style by William Strunk, Jr., with revisions, an introduction, and a chapter on writing by E. B. White (1st edition). Macmillan. Strunk, W. & White, E. B. (1972). The elements of style by William Strunk, Jr., with revisions, an introduction, and a chapter on writing by E. B. White (2nd edition). Macmillan. Tieken-​ Boon van Ostade, I. (Ed.). (2017). English usage guides: History, advice, attitudes. Oxford University Press. Webster’s third new international dictionary (1961). Merriam-​Webster. White, R. G. (1870). Words and their uses, past and present: A study of the English language. Sheldon & Co.

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2 VERBAL HYGIENE Deborah Cameron

1. Introduction This chapter discusses a concept and a term which I was responsible for introducing to the field, and that presents me with certain challenges –​in particular, the challenge of relinquishing ownership. As all linguists and language historians know, the meaning of a term is not defined exclusively and forever by the intentions of its original coiner: once it has entered the discourse of a community its interpretation becomes a collective rather than an individual matter. Nevertheless, I will begin this chapter by discussing the originally intended meaning of verbal hygiene, how it relates to the topic of prescriptivism as explored in this handbook, and what led me to want to introduce it; I then consider what others have made of it and done with it since its introduction. I will then explore some recent and current trends in verbal hygiene, asking what these may have to tell us about continuity and change in the concerns that animate the practices encompassed by the term.

2.  The origins of verbal hygiene It seems unlikely that the English phrase verbal hygiene had never been uttered or written by anyone before, but its use in the sense and for the purposes discussed in this chapter dates from the mid-​1990s, when I used it first in a journal article (Cameron 1994) and shortly thereafter as the title of a book (Cameron 1995). In the article I explained that I was using it as an umbrella term for “a diverse set of activities linked by the idea that some ways of using language are functionally, aesthetically, or morally preferable to others” (Cameron 1994, p. 383). The introduction to the book offered a more succinct definition: “practices … born of an urge to improve or ‘clean up’ language” (Cameron 1995, p. 1). If “hygiene” as a general term refers to practices undertaken in an effort to maintain bodily health and ward off the threat of disease, “verbal hygiene” means practices undertaken in an effort to maintain the perceived health of a language, and to contain or reverse linguistic tendencies which are perceived as unhealthy. The breadth of this definition reflects the heterogeneity of the practices it seeks to characterize, and of the concerns which motivate those practices. Among the concerns that have recurrently inspired verbal hygiene we could list not only anxieties about declining standards of literacy and “correctness”, but also alarm about the threat posed to a language’s health by DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-3

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foreign influences, by obfuscatory jargon and Orwellian Newspeak, or by incivility in public discourse. There are also verbal hygiene practices which are motivated by loftier ideals, such as the invention of supposedly universal languages like Esperanto, or the campaign (waged for years by a group that called itself the International Society for General Semantics) to improve the quality of thought among English-​speakers by abolishing the copular verb be. The motivation in these cases has less to do with countering a specific threat than with applying human ingenuity to overcome what are seen as the inherent limitations of natural languages, and so bring human verbal communication closer to some imagined ideal state. As the examples just listed illustrate (though the list is far from exhaustive), ideas about what makes language ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’ are not only varied but highly contested: campaigns to suppress minority languages or regional dialects coexist with campaigns to promote them, and discourse decrying linguistic innovations is countered by discourse defending or celebrating them. These contests do not only reflect the existence of differing views about language itself: in many cases it is clear that they also have a nonlinguistic dimension, attempting to impose order on language as a surrogate for imposing order on the world. As I wrote in the introduction to Verbal Hygiene, Verbal hygiene is a double discourse, one that needs to be read in two frameworks simultaneously. To say that verbal hygiene debates just play out ‘deeper’ social conflicts in the arena of language is to overlook those features of verbal hygiene that are grounded in specifically linguistic attitudes and beliefs … . Conversely, to deny that ideas about language are recruited very often to non-​linguistic concerns is to miss most of what gives meaning to any particular verbal hygiene debate. Cameron 1995, p. 11 This point about doubleness was perhaps most clearly illustrated in the chapter of Verbal Hygiene that analysed a then-​recent (1980s) debate on the place English grammar teaching should occupy in a new curriculum for schools in England and Wales. The debate pitted traditionalists who wanted grammar to be taught explicitly and formally using traditional teaching methods (rote memorization, drills, etc.), against progressive educators who either opposed formal grammar teaching or else argued for an approach based on descriptivist principles. The conflict between these two camps undoubtedly reflected their differing beliefs about language, but it also reflected their even more starkly divergent views on questions of discipline and social order, which the traditionalists connected directly to the issue of grammar-​teaching. That connection was made overtly, for instance, in a 1985 BBC radio interview where the Conservative politician Norman Tebbit explained that If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy at school … all these things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards there’s no imperative to stay out of crime. qtd Cameron 1995, p. 94 Tebbit here constructs a ‘slippery slope’ argument, whereby a disregard for proper verbal hygiene (‘good English is no better than bad English’) goes along with a cavalier attitude to personal hygiene (‘people turn up filthy at school’) and the eventual consequence is a breakdown in social and moral hygiene (‘no imperative to stay out of crime’). The implication is that by teaching children the rules that distinguish good from bad English schools will be inculcating 18

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a more general respect for all the laws, rules, norms, and standards on which a well-​ordered society depends. In my analysis of this and other contributions to the debate I argued that grammar functioned as the metaphorical correlate of certain social and political values –​order, standards, respect for authority and obedience to rules. That was why the traditionalists became so obsessed with an issue which in the larger scheme of things (the introduction of a new national school curriculum for all subjects) was a relatively minor detail. If grammar had not been accorded this symbolic meaning, the question of what and how to teach schoolchildren about the structure of the English language would probably have been seen in the same way as questions about how best to teach arithmetic or science –​as a technical problem to be resolved by experts. But when the traditionalists seized on grammar as a metaphor, they were not just making a completely arbitrary connection. They were trading on everyday folk understandings of language –​what it is, how it works, and what makes it “good” or “bad”. At an even more basic level, the rhetoric of the traditionalists harnessed the everyday folk understanding that language can legitimately be discussed using evaluative terms like good/​bad and right/​wrong. That underlines another important element of the original definition of verbal hygiene: all the practices that fall into that category, from correcting “bad” grammar to inventing whole new languages, arise from the impulse to make value judgments on language. More exactly, verbal hygiene comes into being when people act on their judgment of some aspect of language as a problem in need of remediation: though they do not always move from judgment to action, there is no action which is not preceded by judgment. In Verbal Hygiene I argued that this capacity for making judgments on language is not just incidental, but fundamental to the enterprise of human verbal communication: Because language-​using is paradigmatically a social, public act, talking (and writing and signing) must be carried on with reference to norms, which may themselves become the subject of overt comment and debate. In our everyday interactions we take this for granted; and necessarily so, for without recourse to such ordinary metalinguistic practices as correcting slips of the tongue, asking what someone meant by something and disputing their usage of particular words, the enterprise of communicating would be even more fraught with difficulty than it already is. [More elaborate] forms of verbal hygiene may seem … remote from ordinary metalinguistic practices; but they are built on the same foundation. Cameron 1995, p. 2 I was not, of course, suggesting that any of the specific verbal hygiene practices discussed in the book were fundamental to the enterprise of human verbal communication: clearly humans communicated for millennia without the aid of grammatical drills, style manuals, or etiquette guides, and many still do. My point was rather that humans cannot be prevented from putting their basic abilities to other, less basic uses (consider, for instance, the relationship between our basic physical abilities and the elaborate enterprise of competitive sport). For me it followed that verbal hygiene itself is ineradicable; and since (on that view) it is futile to exhort language-​users to refrain from engaging in it, criticism might do better to focus less on the idea that making value judgments is inherently bad or wrong, and more on the nature, logic and quality of the judgments being made in any given case. This view of language and value was at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy of linguistics. In the next section I will explore this divergence further by considering the relationship between my concept of verbal hygiene and the more familiar concept of prescriptivism. 19

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3.  Verbal hygiene and prescriptivism The term “verbal hygiene” was not intended to be a synonym for prescriptivism. I regarded prescriptivism, in the sense that term is most commonly used (to name an attitude or approach reflecting what Milroy and Milroy (2012) call “the ideology of standardization”, and/​or the practices in which that ideology is instantiated –​for instance, codifying rules for standard usage, teaching them to learners, editing text in accordance with them, correcting or complaining about deviations from them) as only one form of verbal hygiene. It is, to be sure, a very widespread and culturally salient form; but verbal hygiene as I envisioned it encompassed a much broader range of evaluative metalinguistic practices. Here it might be objected that I am defining prescriptivism too narrowly: while the practices I put under the heading of verbal hygiene are not all concerned with the codification and promotion of a standardized language variety, they are nevertheless prescriptive in the sense that they attempt to impose a particular set of norms dictating how languages should or should not be used. That is as true of, say, a campaign for plain English, spelling reform or the elimination of the copula as it is of the national school curriculum mentioned above. I do not disagree: if prescriptivism is taken to mean any kind of norm-​making or norm-​enforcement in relation to language, then there is no difference between it and what I label verbal hygiene. But in my view there are reasons to resist the conflation of the two terms. One reason has to do with the common understanding that prescriptivism is concerned with the promotion of elite linguistic norms (especially though not only those concerned with correctness in grammar, orthography and pronunciation), which are disseminated mainly (though again, not only) through institutions (e.g., via the teaching of standard language norms in education systems, and the strict enforcement of those norms in most published writing). Arguably there is some utility in having a term that does not immediately call up this prototype, and can be used to direct attention to other normative metalinguistic practices which may be non-​or anti-​elitist (e.g. the promotion of plain language, gender-​inclusive language or nonstandard dialect), and which are often pursued without institutional support (though as I discuss further below, there may be questions about where particular practices should be located in relation to that distinction, and the answers may change over time). A second reason not to conflate verbal hygiene and prescriptivism, which was particularly salient to me when I introduced the term, is the existence of an influential verbal hygiene discourse that is explicitly opposed to prescriptivism on scientific grounds. This discourse has its home in the academic discipline of linguistics, whose practitioners not only apply the principle that linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive in their own academic/​scientific work, they also have a tradition of criticising the prescriptive judgments made by nonlinguists in popular books like Robert J. Hall’s (1950) Leave Your Language Alone! The imperative form of that title leaves no doubt of its status as a prescription, but since what Hall wants to prescribe is a retreat from prescribing, it would be confusing to label his work “prescriptive”. Yet the expert anti-​ prescriptivism it exemplifies is undoubtedly a form of verbal hygiene: it is simply animated by a different set of judgments on what makes language “good” or “bad”. Typically, linguists writing for lay audiences present prescriptivism as “bad” because the norms it seeks to impose are in linguistic terms arbitrary, and their enforcement interferes –​or at least, attempts to interfere –​with what is “natural” in language-​use and language change. A good example of this line of argument can be found in Steven Pinker’s bestselling popular book The Language Instinct. “Imagine”, the chapter on prescriptivism begins, “that you are watching a nature documentary”: 20

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The video shows the usual gorgeous footage of animals in their natural habitats. But the voiceover reports some troubling facts. Dolphins do not execute their swimming strokes properly. White-​crowned sparrows carelessly debase their calls. Chickadees’ nests are incorrectly constructed, pandas hold bamboo in the wrong paw, the song of the humpback whale contains several well-​known errors, and monkeys’ cries have been in a state of chaos and degeneration for hundreds of years. Pinker 1995, p. 382 This imaginary voiceover is absurd because it insists on judging the natural behaviour of the animals mentioned in ways we recognise as inappropriate or inapplicable: this is presented as a category error. But arguably it is Pinker who errs by implying that it is similarly inappropriate to make judgments on human linguistic communication. The human language instinct he argues for appears to include, as I noted earlier, the capacity to make (and potentially to act on) judgments about one’s own and others’ use of language. Though the judgments made in specific cases may be inappropriate or absurd, the general practice of evaluating language is not, from this point of view, “unnatural”: it is part of human communication as we know it, and as such something descriptive linguistics ought to be interested in giving an account of.

4.  The reception and development of “verbal hygiene” Since 1995 there has been a significant growth of scholarly interest in prescriptivism (the existence of this handbook is one sign of that). Of course, there is a much longer tradition of serious scholarship on the topic, particularly scholarship dealing with language standardization from a historical perspective. But today there is more recognition than there was 25 years ago of the relevance of prescriptivism to a broader range of questions about language, society, and history. Fruitful connections have been made between linguistics and linguistic anthropology, whose concepts of “language ideology” (Silverstein 1979; Irvine 1989; Schieffelin, Woolard and Kroskrity 1998) and “enregisterment” (Agha 2007) have been widely adopted in sociolinguistic and historical work on language standardization (see e.g. Milroy & Milroy 2012). There is also considerable theoretical overlap between work on language ideologies and verbal hygiene, as I noted in a new preface to the second edition of Verbal Hygiene (Cameron 2012). Language ideology, like verbal hygiene, encompasses a broader range of phenomena than prescriptivism in the prototypical sense of the term; one commonly-​cited definition, taken from Judith Irvine’s work –​“the cultural system of ideas about social and linguistic relationships, together with their loading of moral and political interests” (Irvine 1989, p. 255) –​captures the “doubleness” discussed in the previous section: the idea that language ideologies/​verbal hygiene practices are both about language and about nonlinguistic, moral, social, and/​or political concerns. This raises the question of what, if anything, is distinctive about verbal hygiene as a concept. In this section I will address that question by considering what has been said about and done with the concept by others since its original introduction. If you search online for definitions of verbal hygiene it quickly becomes evident that some users of the term do take it as simply a synonym for prescriptivism, or occasionally the slightly broader ‘prescriptivism and purism’. There is clearly a tendency to associate it more with the conservative and elitist normative practices which linguists are trained to view critically, and less with the (equally normative) practices which express more egalitarian attitudes, or which simply do not fit the conservative vs progressive frame. This is not in the spirit of the original argument, which stressed that, in itself, verbal hygiene is neither good or bad –​it can only be evaluated case by case –​and that consequently it is not illogical or hypocritical to defend 21

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some instances of verbal hygiene while resisting or opposing others. But as I observed at the beginning of this chapter, the originator of a term does not get to control the way it is used and interpreted when it enters the discourse of a community. The negative overtones “verbal hygiene” has acquired for some members of the community that uses it might suggest that there is still resistance to seeing normative practices as part of what language-​using entails, rather than as an “unnatural” and authoritarian imposition. Other scholars, however, have taken up the original argument and applied it in research which, in addition to extending the range of cases that have been approached from this perspective, has refined our theoretical understanding of verbal hygiene and opened up new questions about it. One study of this kind, undertaken by the linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis (2015), examined the verbal hygiene practised in Math Corps, a summer enrichment programme which aims to raise attainment in mathematics among public school students in Detroit. What is referred to by participants in the programme as “the Math Corps way” involves, among other things, the systematic use of a mathematical register of English which differs from that used in most school classrooms. Certain expressions (e.g. “improper fraction”, “reduce”) are proscribed, while others (e.g. “fraction greater than one”, “simplify”) are prescribed. Students learn to read numbers “in English”: for instance, what appears in writing as “6.3” should be rendered orally as “six and three tenths” rather than “six point three”. What motivates these norms is the belief that “better” ways of talking about mathematics will lead to better mathematical reasoning (e.g., substituting simplify for reduce in the context of working with fractions avoids the misleading implication that, say, 1/​5 is a smaller quantity than 2/​10; preferring “six and three tenths” to “six point three” shifts attention from the surface notation to the underlying meaning). “Verbal hygiene”, Chrisomalis summarises (2015, p. 65), “is seen by Math Corps staff … as a tool for creating ‘cognitive hygiene’ ”. He also observes that the commitment of the staff to verbal hygiene is domain-​specific, applying only to the register of math talk; in this educational context the use of African American English, the nonstandard variety most students speak outside the classroom, is not treated as an infraction or a matter for negative comment. Chrisomalis begins from the understanding that verbal hygiene, in itself, is neither inherently good nor inherently bad: since as a general phenomenon it is inevitable, the assessment of it requires us to consider what value it might have in specific instances. In the Math Corps case, though Chrisomalis is evidently not convinced by the cognitive rationale explicitly advanced for it, he suggests that verbal hygiene might be valuable for social reasons: the adoption of a mathematical language which is both distinctive (different from the one used in schools) and discursively linked to the prestige values of rationality and logic builds solidarity and confidence among participants (many of them economically disadvantaged African Americans who have struggled with mathematics in school). Their use of this language marks both their identities as knowledgeable students and their membership of a close-​knit, supportive group. This connection with identity-​construction and group bonding is an aspect of verbal hygiene which was somewhat under-​explored in my own case-​studies, though there is clearly much to be said about it, and it is relevant to one of the central questions posed in Verbal Hygiene, how to explain the strength of the emotional investment many people have in seemingly arbitrary or trivial linguistic norms. Other studies have also shown that participating in normative metalinguistic practices can be a way of performing “expert” or “educated” identities: an example is Mary Bucholtz’s (2001) study of the “superstandard” English used by nerds, whose overt prescriptivism displays their orientation to the value of intelligence as opposed to the coolness valued by non-​nerd peers. The ethnographic methods used by Chrisomalis and Bucholtz are particularly well-​suited to investigating this function of verbal hygiene in detail; they are also 22

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revealing about the actual mechanisms whereby norms are circulated, enforced (or resisted) and made meaningful through peer-​to-​peer interaction in a specific local context. But the strategic deployment of verbal hygiene discourse in performances of identity and difference has also been investigated in other ways, many of them facilitated by the rapid development of digital media since the mid-​1990s. Carmen Ebner (2018) used an online questionnaire to investigate the construction of identity through the expression of beliefs about good and bad English. Ksenija Bogetić (2016) analysed metalinguistic comments in a sample of teenage personal blogs, finding that many of the writers in her sample defied the stereotype of their generation as, in Naomi Baron’s (2008) term, “linguistic whateverists”, unconcerned with traditional notions of correctness and decorum: many displayed a strongly positive attitude to prescriptive norms, mastery of which they evidently regarded as valuable cultural capital. This view was quite frequently expressed in statements about the writer’s dating preferences, e.g. “Has to be smart to some point, I hate bad grammar and spelling”; “ ‘proper grammar and spelling is a definite plus”; “ ‘I would like to find someone that knows how to properly use grammar and punctuation” (Bogetić 2016, p. 260). The work discussed above has helped to fill a gap which was noted in some reviews of Verbal Hygiene. Though the book argued that verbal hygiene was a pervasive, everyday practice with “bottom up” as well as “top down” manifestations, the case-​studies were predominantly of the top-​down variety, and relied heavily on expert writing or media commentary as sources of evidence. Before the advent of Web 2.0 researchers could not easily access the kind of data analysed by Bogetić, but it is a rich resource for students of verbal hygiene today. Ethnographic work like Chrisomalis’s Math Corps study also enriches our understanding by paying close attention both to how verbal hygiene is practised in particular contexts and what it accomplishes for participants –​which may be different from what it was designed to accomplish or is believed to accomplish. The concept of verbal hygiene has also been taken up in work that contributes more directly to the scholarly literature on prescriptivism, taking its cue from the proposal that “instead of asking ‘should we prescribe’ … [we should] pose searching questions about who prescribes for whom, what they prescribe, how and for what purposes” (Cameron 1995, p. 11). Research along these lines has focused variously on the role of particular institutions and how they justify their norm-​making activities (e.g. Paffey 2007 on the Spanish language academy), the relationship between linguistic and other norms (e.g. Cushing 2021 on the way the prescriptive language policies enforced in some London schools are tied to practices of bodily discipline), or the effects of normative practices on language use and language change (Curzan 2014). Anne Curzan’s book Fixing English (2014) is an ambitious and wide-​ranging response to the challenge I mentioned in connection with the anti-​prescriptivist tradition in linguistics: as well as setting out explicitly to give a descriptive account of prescriptivism, it also takes up the question of whether linguists have a responsibility to engage with the evaluative concerns of lay language-​users, and whether such engagement would improve the quality of public debates about language. When Verbal Hygiene was first published, linguists’ responses to the second question in particular tended to be sceptical. James Milroy, for instance, wrote (1997, p. 166) that “perhaps it is an effect of old age, but, sadly, I’m pessimistic about the possibility of an informed debate taking place in the foreseeable future”. Curzan is less pessimistic. She argues that linguists can facilitate more productive conversations if they are willing to “highlight the common ground on which we stand, clarify the terms we use, and offer pragmatic paths to realistic goals” (2014, p. 171). The goal she suggests in this case is a “linguistically-​informed prescriptivism” that acknowledges the value of standardized varieties and formal styles without at the same time delegitimizing nonstandard and informal ones. 23

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This argument may have gained more traction among linguists since the 1990s: for instance, in the same year that Fixing English appeared, Steven Pinker published The Sense of Style, which might be described as a linguistically informed alternative to traditional works of guidance on written style (Pinker 2014). By contrast with the comments quoted earlier from The Language Instinct, this book appears to acknowledge that it is both possible and legitimate to make value-​ judgments on the quality of writing (though there is always scope for discussion and disagreement about the criteria such judgments are based on). Another development which may have helped to increase both the public understanding of linguistics and linguists’ awareness of what matters to non-​linguists is the growth, online, of forms of writing (a well-​known example is the blog Language Log) in which linguists not only address but also interact with a wider public –​ and do so in a relatively informal way which discourages distance and condescension. But while I still believe that a more informed public discourse on language is possible, I have become, like Milroy, more pessimistic about the extent to which it is achievable. For me as for him, this may in part be an effect of age, and the associated awareness of how often the same debates recur and how little the arguments change. But it also reflects the theoretical conception of verbal hygiene as a “double discourse” in which concerns about language symbolize other concerns of a social, political, or moral nature. Those nonlinguistic concerns are even less tractable than the linguistic ones. Where an investment in some kind of verbal hygiene is also an investment in a particular form of identity, or in deeply held beliefs about the proper ordering of society, that investment is unlikely to be lessened by arguments that only address the linguistic issue. That does not mean, however, that verbal hygiene is unchanging. I have argued that it will always exist in some form, but precisely because people invest in it for reasons which are not exclusively linguistic, the specific forms it takes even in a single society are liable to change over time. Though some of its preoccupations are remarkably stable and persistent (e.g., the traditional prescriptivist concern with correct usage, which is found in virtually all modern literate societies, and anxieties about language linked to nationalist political ideologies, which are as old as nationalism itself), the arguments and practices in which they are expressed evolve in tandem with changing attitudes and/​or social conditions. It is also possible for the preoccupations themselves to change. Issues which were once highly salient may become much less so over time, and issues which were once peripheral may become more central in both discourse and practice. One striking example is the steady decline, in secular Western societies, of the many, varied and in some cases very stringent verbal hygiene practices that once regulated the use of obscene, profane, and blasphemous language, and the corresponding rise of practices which target prejudiced and discriminatory language or ‘hate speech’. I use the word ‘corresponding’ here because this change could be seen as a redirection of similar moral judgments to a different set of objects. A case which supports this view of it is the changing treatment of offensive language in British broadcasting. The current British broadcast media regulator Ofcom issues regular and detailed guidance on the acceptability of specific words and expressions (it also considers in what contexts and at what times of day they are or are not acceptable), which is based in part on evidence collected through systematic surveys of a sample of viewers and listeners. Recent surveys have consistently shown that most respondents now regard discriminatory terms (e.g., racist and homophobic slurs) as more offensive, and a higher priority for regulation, than swearing or profanity, and Ofcom’s instructions to broadcasters reflect that finding (Ofcom/​ Ipsos MORI 2016). This is only one example of what I take to be a significant trend in recent/​ current verbal hygiene (particularly though not only in western Anglophone societies), and in the next section I will examine it in more detail. I am interested in it not only for what it tells us about the preoccupations of contemporary verbal hygiene, but also because of the larger 24

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questions it raises about the nature and workings of linguistic authority in the conditions of the twenty-​first century.

5.  Contemporary verbal hygiene: linguistic authority in an age of culture wars Anne Curzan treats prescriptivism, as I did in 1995, as a subcategory of verbal hygiene: for her “prescriptivism” denotes specifically those varieties of verbal hygiene which are not just cases of individual or “bottom-​up” norm-​making, but have “the cultural and social power that comes with institutionalized authority” (Curzan 2014, p. 16). However, while this definition includes the obvious or prototypical cases discussed above (codifying, teaching, and enforcing the norms of a standardized language variety), it is not limited to them. Rather Curzan (2014, p. 17) lists four main subtypes of prescriptivism: “promoting standardization, differentiating style, restoring older usage, and reforming language in socially or politically responsive ways”. It is the last of these subtypes I want to focus on in this discussion. It is of interest for two reasons: one is the increasing salience in verbal hygiene discourse of overtly political concerns, while the other has to do with what is implied by Curzan’s inclusion of these concerns under the heading of prescriptivism as she defines it, i.e, the regulation of language by institutions. The verbal hygiene project of “reforming language in socially and politically responsive ways” has only recently been able to harness “the cultural and social power that comes with institutional authority”. Historically most examples fell into the non-​institutional or ‘bottom up’ category, where alternative norms are promoted by individuals or grassroots activists, without the support –​and sometimes with the active opposition –​of mainstream authorities. However, I think Curzan is right to suggest that prescription with a social or political agenda has increasingly moved into the “top down”, institutionalized category. In my view this is one of the most significant verbal hygiene trends of recent decades (at least in the most privileged parts of the Anglosphere –​an important caveat which I will return to below), and it raises, as I noted earlier, more general questions about the way linguistic authority now operates. As a concrete example we could take a form of “politically responsive prescriptivism” that Curzan discusses in some detail, the promotion of non-​sexist or gender-​neutral language by English-​speaking feminists from the 1970s on. One key issue which was addressed under this heading –​the avoidance of masculine generic pronouns –​already had a long history of being discussed both by earlier feminists and by others who considered the absence of a third-​person singular epicene form in English to be a flaw in the language (Baron 2020). This had remained, however, a matter of either individual or grassroots concern: though many proposals were made to fill the gap with an invented form, none of these inventions were seriously taken up by gatekeepers in education, publishing, or journalism. Meanwhile, the epicene form that was already in widespread use –​singular they –​was proscribed as ‘ungrammatical’. Curzan shows that 1970s feminists’ efforts to harness the authority of institutional gatekeepers for the purpose of countering sexism were somewhat successful, in that the strict prescription of he as a generic in style guides, writing handbooks and so on was relaxed. But while influential style guides during this period (e.g. the Associated Press guide for journalism and the style guides published by the APA, MLA and Chicago for academic writing) acknowledged the generic masculine as a problem, they generally recommended using avoidance strategies, such as recasting whole sentences in the plural or the passive, rather than replacing he with other pronoun forms; most expressed distaste for the ‘cumbersome’ disjunct form ‘he or she’, and judged singular they completely unacceptable. 25

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More recently, however, they has acquired a new function as a specific pronoun referring to an individual who prefers it to he or she (commonly though not invariably because they identify as nonbinary). In his history of the English epicene pronoun debate, What’s Your Pronoun?, Dennis Baron (2020) demonstrates that this usage of they, originally adopted and promoted within activist circles, was rapidly accepted by institutional gatekeepers, including some which still reject the use of they for generic/​indefinite reference. The 2017 edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, for instance, says of the indefinite form that “Chicago recommends avoiding its use”, but then goes on: “When referring specifically to a person who does not identify with a gender-​specific pronoun, however … .a person’s stated preference … should be respected” (quoted in Baron 2020, p. 170). Arguably this difference in the reception of similar proposals made 50 years apart speaks to a shift over time in attitudes to this kind of verbal hygiene, which is in turn related to larger cultural changes. One of those changes is the increased moral weight accorded to questions of identity and diversity, and in the linguistic sphere, therefore, to the norm of avoiding language which excludes or appears to invalidate the self-​defined identities of individuals who belong to marginalized groups. This may explain why some authorities still feel able to proscribe generic/​ indefinite they, referring to a hypothetical person, while prescribing they in cases where a particular individual has specified an identity-​based preference for it. But the rapid uptake of this new convention also reflects a change in the way linguistic institutions exercise authority. They have become, in a sense, more permeable –​more open to external pressure, and more willing to defer to other kinds of expertise in particular domains of language-​use. This permeability is perhaps most visible in the development of quasi-​ symbiotic relationships between media producers and political activists. Today many larger political organizations produce resources to help media professionals report on certain issues or groups in an informed and socially responsible way, and this usually includes specific guidance on language-​use. The US LGBTQ+​organisation GLAAD, for instance, produces a media reference guide which is now in its tenth edition (GLAAD 2016), much of which is devoted to issues of terminology –​what particular terms mean, which should be used in reporting and which should be avoided. The kind of authority GLAAD represents –​that of the community insider –​is one that media producers have become more receptive to. Part of the explanation for this increased receptiveness is the increased acceptance in society generally of the moral argument for respecting insiders’ linguistic preferences. But in the digital era, when communication between media producers and consumers is very much a two-​way street, and when audience engagement is important for generating advertising revenue, there is also commercial pressure on producers to be seen to be responsive to the concerns of diverse audiences. Even the most august linguistic authorities are not exempt from this kind of pressure. In 2019, the UK-​based feminist Maria Beatrice Giovanardi started a petition calling on the lexicographers at Oxford University Press to revise the entry for woman in the general-​purpose Oxford Dictionary, on the grounds that it was offensively sexist. Though aware that other dictionaries exhibited similar biases (see Giovanardi 2019), she chose to target Oxford because of its status not just as a market leader, but as an icon of linguistic authority. Her petition went on to attract 30,000 signatures and –​perhaps more importantly –​international media coverage. This attention forced Oxford to respond, and a revised entry was released in 2020. In the twenty-​first century even a single individual can mount an effective campaign by harnessing the power of digital media: though dictionaries have been targets for political lobbying in the past, it was not possible to do this on the same scale, or with the same global visibility, that digital media have enabled. Like the media producers mentioned above, the publishers of

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dictionaries have had to become more responsive. In that connection it is interesting to compare Oxford’s response to the 2019 petition with its response in 2016 when similar criticisms of sexist bias were made in a series of viral tweets (Flood 2016). On that occasion the initial response was to make a dismissive joke; but when that drew further criticism an apology was issued (first on Twitter, then in a more formal press statement) along with a commitment to review the offending entry. This illustrates the role social media now play in holding authorities to account, and also the fact that institutions in this new landscape cannot easily ignore demands for more accountability. The appearance of non-​responsiveness or dismissiveness can do them reputational damage –​and the greater their perceived authority, the more they have to lose. These developments might prompt questions about the location, or the distribution, of linguistic authority in the twenty-​ first century. Though Curzan’s distinction between institutionalized prescriptivism and non-​institutionalized forms of verbal hygiene is still valid and useful, the relationship between the two may be changing: it is no longer self-​evident that the institutionalized forms of authority have all the cultural and social power. As well as being used to hold institutional authorities to account, as in the Oxford Dictionaries case, social media are increasingly influential in setting the grassroots verbal hygiene agenda: they are hotbeds of peer-​to-​peer language policing, and sites of passionate argument about emerging issues (such as linguistic manifestations of “cultural appropriation” –​e.g., whether it is acceptable for anyone who is not a native American to refer to having a “spirit animal”). Though many of these issues are not currently addressed in mainstream sources, the possibility cannot be discounted that they will in future be incorporated (as, for instance, the nonbinary pronoun issue has been) through a combination of activist pressure and the increased openness of gatekeeping institutions to both advice and descriptive evidence from a wider range of sources. We could visualize this process as a loop, whereby non-​institutionalized verbal hygiene practices generate new community norms which are then taken up by institutions and fed back to the wider language-​using community as authoritative guidance. This is not a completely novel phenomenon, but the developments discussed above may be making a difference to the way it works –​for instance, how likely it is that innovations produced by grassroots verbal hygienists will be incorporated rather than ignored, mocked, or denounced by mainstream linguistic authorities, and how long it takes to complete the loop. It should not however be thought that politically motivated verbal hygiene campaigns are the exclusive province of radical or progressive activists. The issues I have focused on in this section, concerning gender and its linguistic representation, are currently highly salient in many places around the world because they feature in what are now commonly referred to as “culture wars” (Hunter 1991), meaning political conflicts which are structured by ideological commitments rather than economic and other social divisions. Verbal hygiene is often an integral part of this kind of conflict, since a contest between opposing worldviews will also tend to entail a contest between different ways of naming and framing the world. The 1990s debate on “political correctness” (discussed in Cameron 1995) was centrally about language, and the same is true of the current, not dissimilar debate on so-​called “wokeness”. Gender issues (which this time around encompass not only the older feminist concern with the social position of women, as exemplified by Maria Beatrice Giovanardi’s petition, but also the emergence of new gender identity categories outside the man/​woman binary, as exemplified by the case of nonbinary they) have returned to the forefront of progressive verbal hygiene; consequently they have also become a significant preoccupation for conservative or “anti-​woke” verbal hygienists. As the earlier discussion illustrates, in Britain and the US (and other privileged parts of the Anglosphere like Canada and Australasia), institutional authorities have tended, for various

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reasons, to respond either positively or neutrally to recent innovations in the area of gendered language. The media take advice from organizations like GLAAD; influential style guides recommend respecting individual preferences for singular they; legislatures, including both the UK Parliament (Bailey 2020) and the US Congress (Gillespie 2021), have adopted policies on “gender neutral drafting”. In some other parts of the world, however, authorities with norm-​ enforcing power have aligned themselves with conservative resistance to innovation. In France, for instance, the gender inclusive style of writing known as écriture inclusive has attracted not only the predictable opposition of the French Academy, but enough political opposition that since 2017 three attempts have been made to introduce legislation prohibiting its use, and it has recently been banned in schools (Piser 2021). The arguments made against it in France tend to be linguistic and nationalistic (e.g., it is cumbersome and confusing for learners, or it is destroying the nation’s linguistic heritage and threatening its position at the centre of the francophone world), but it is clear that the opposition is also motivated by conservative hostility to progressive gender and sexual politics. In Brazil, another place where there has been concerted opposition to new gender-​neutral forms (e.g. nouns and adjectives which replace the standard Portuguese gender-​markers -​o and -​a with -​x, as in alunxs, ‘students’), that hostility is expressed more openly: the -​x forms have been denounced as part of a ‘gay marxist agenda’ (Borba 2019). In Brazil, too, legislation has been used to curtail official uses of neutral variants. The institutions that produce dictionaries, grammars, language textbooks and style guides are bound to be drawn into culture war debates like the one about gendered language, because adjudicating on the merits of competing norms is an integral part of their function. And as we have seen, there is more and more interaction between the institutions of linguistic authority and the non-​institutional or grassroots forms of verbal hygiene whose norms they are called on to adjudicate. Some of this is mutually desired (e.g., when media outlets consult grassroots organizations on questions of terminology, or when Ofcom surveys the public about offensive language on TV), and some of it is essentially forced on institutions (e.g., by social media campaigns or controversies which attract the attention of the mainstream media). This increased attention may be leading, as I suggested earlier, to the more rapid institutional uptake of new and emerging norms. We might wonder, though, whether the attention now given to debates of this kind indicates widespread public concern about them, or whether they are largely of interest to an elite vanguard of the highly politicized and the Extremely Online. In 2021 a group of researchers from the Policy Institute at King’s College London reported the findings of a study investigating the UK public’s understanding of “culture war” discourse (Duffy et al. 2021). The study confirmed that there had been a steep rise in media coverage which used both the term “culture war” itself, and the terminology of particular debates that are generally put under that heading (e.g. “woke”, “cancel culture”, “cultural appropriation”, “microaggression”). But in the sample of people the researchers questioned (over two thousand respondents selected to reflect the social make-​up of the UK population) there were many who said they were unfamiliar with these terms: in answer to the question “if someone described you as woke would you consider it a compliment or an insult”, nearly 40 percent answered “I don’t know what it means”. When respondents were asked what they thought of as “culture war” issues, none of them mentioned language. One thing this might suggest is that we still know relatively little about either the linguistic preoccupations which are most salient in many people’s everyday lives, or the kinds of institutionalized authority they find relevant to their concerns. That does not, however, undermine the argument that politically responsive prescriptivism is now an important influence on public language, and potentially therefore on the process of historical change in standardized written varieties. 28

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6. Conclusion The concept of verbal hygiene was introduced in the 1990s to draw attention both to the ubiquity in all human societies of normative metalinguistic discourse and practice, and to the way its preoccupations are shaped both by linguistic considerations (such as the desire to make communication more efficient) and by the nonlinguistic concerns of a particular time and place. In complex literate societies the basic human impulse to make value judgments on language use typically produces, among other things, the elaborate, institutionalized forms of prescriptivism which are the central focus of this handbook. In line with that focus, this chapter has explored certain aspects of the relationship between institutionalized prescriptivism and other kinds of verbal hygiene, especially those which are animated by overtly political concerns. Although the practices discussed here are not completely new, I have suggested that their current manifestations show the influence of recent developments such as the advent of new digital media and the increased salience of “culture war” politics. I have also suggested that in some settings these developments may be altering the traditional distribution of linguistic authority, in that prescriptive institutions have become more receptive, and/​or have come under more pressure to respond to, the concerns expressed in non-​institutionalized verbal hygiene discourse. It is important, however, not to over-​emphasize change while under-​emphasizing continuity. Research on verbal hygiene since 1995 suggests that the prototypical form of institutionalized prescriptivism, which is centrally concerned with norms of correctness in (standard) grammar, orthography, and pronunciation, has maintained its authority, and its preoccupations have remained highly salient in non-​institutional verbal hygiene discourse (e.g. the teenage metalinguistic discourse analysed by Bogetić (2016)), despite earlier predictions that these concerns would become less relevant for the “digital natives” of the twenty-​first century. Arguably those predictions gave too little weight to the range of motivations which may lead people to invest in particular linguistic norms: they are not just deferring to authority, tradition or convention for their own sakes, but staking claims to identity and differentiating themselves from others. That is also, in part, what people are doing when they challenge authority, tradition, or convention in the overtly politicized ways discussed above; yet it remains striking that they so often want this challenge to be acknowledged and responded to by the relevant prescriptive authorities. Clearly, it matters to them what appears in a dictionary or a style guide: the institutions of linguistic authority cannot simply be bypassed. That is also a reason for historically and socially informed linguistic scholarship to take prescriptivism and verbal hygiene seriously.

References Agha, A. (2007). Language and social relations. Cambridge University Press. Bailey, D. (2020, January 10). Breaking down gender stereotypes in legal writing. Civil Service. https://​civil​ serv​ice.blog.gov.uk/​2020/​01/​10 Baron, D. (2020). What’s your pronoun? Beyond he and she. Liveright. Baron, N. S. (2008). Always on: Language in an online and mobile world. Oxford University Press. Bogetić, K. (2016). Metalinguistic comments in teenage personal blogs: bringing youth voices to studies of youth, language and technology. Text & Talk 36(3), 245–​268. Borba, R. (2019). Gendered politics of enmity: language ideologies and social polarization in Brazil. Gender & Language 13(4), 423–​448. Bucholtz, M. (2001). The whiteness of nerds: superstandard English and racial markedness. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 11(1), 84–​100. Cameron, D. (1994). Verbal hygiene for women: linguistics misapplied? Applied Linguistics 15(4), 382–​98. Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal hygiene. Routledge.

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Deborah Cameron Cameron D. (2012). Verbal hygiene (2nd ed.). Routledge. Chrisomalis, S. (2015). What’s so improper about fractions? Prescriptivism and language socialization at Math Corps. Language in Society 44(1), 63–​85. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English: Prescriptivism and language history. Cambridge University Press. Cushing, I. (2021). Language, discipline and “teaching like a champion”. British Educational Research Journal 47(1), 21–​43. Duffy, B., Hewlett, K., Murkin, G., Benson, R., Hesketh, R., Page, B., Skinner, G., & Gottfried, G. (2021). Culture wars in the UK: How the public understand the debate. Policy Institute, King’s College London. www.kcl.ac.uk/​pol​icy-​instit​ute/​ass​ets/​cult​ure-​wars-​in-​the-​uk-​how-​the-​pub​lic-​und​erst​and-​ the-​deb​ate.pdf Ebner, C. (2018). “Sloppy speech is like sloppy dress”: Folk attitudes to nonstandard British English. In R. Bassiouney (Ed.), Identities and dialect performance: A study of communities and dialects (pp. 125–​140). Routledge. Flood, Alison. (2016, January 25). Sexism row prompts Oxford Dictionaries to review language used in dictionaries. Guardian. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​books/​2016/​jan/​25/​oxf​ord-​dic​tion​ary-​rev​iew-​sex​ist-​ langu​age-​rabid-​femin​ist-​gen​der Gillespie, C. (2021, January 7). US House of Representatives will soon start using gender-​neutral language. Simplemost.com. www.sim​plem​ost.com/​congr​ess-​will-​soon-​start-​using-​gen​der-​neut​ral-​langu​age Giovanardi, M. B. (2019). Have you ever Googled ‘woman’? Medium.com. https://​mbgio​vana​rdi.med​ium. com/​have-​you-​ever-​goog​led-​woman-​sex​ist-​oxf​ord-​63afb​87ee​731 GLAAD. (2016). Media reference guide, 10th ed. www.glaad.org/​sites/​defa​ult/​files/​glaad-​media-​refere​nce-​ guide-​tenth-​edit​ion.pdf Hall, R. (1950). Leave your language alone! Anchor Books. Hunter, J. D. (1991). Culture wars: the struggle to define America. Basic Books. Ipsos MORI/​Ofcom. (2016). Attitudes to potentially offensive language and gestures on TV and radio. https://​www.ofcom.org.uk/​_​_​d​ata/​ass​ets/​pdf_​f​i le/​0023/​91625/​Ofcom​QRG-​AOC.pdf Irvine, J. (1989). When talk isn’t cheap: language and political economy. American Ethnologist 16(2), 248–​267. Milroy, J. (1997). Reply to Deborah Cameron on Verbal hygiene. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 1(1), 165–​166. Milroy, J. & Milroy, L. (2012). Authority in language (4th ed.). Routledge. Paffey, D. (2007). Policing the Spanish language debate: verbal hygiene and the Spanish Academy. Language Policy 6, 313–​332. Pinker, S. (1995). The Language instinct: The new science of language and mind. Penguin Books. Pinker, S. (2014). The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. Penguin Books. Piser, K. (2021, July 4). Aux Armes, Citoyen.nes! Foreign Policy. https://​foreig​npol​icy.com/​2020/​07/​04/​ fra​nce-​gen​der-​langu​age-​ecrit​ure-​inclus​ive-​aux-​armes-​cit​oyen​nes/​ Schieffelin, B., Woolard, K., & Kroskrity, P. (Eds.). (1998). Language ideologies: Practice and theory. Oxford University Press. Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In R. Cline, W. Hanks, & C. Hofbauer (Eds.), The elements: A parasession on linguistic units and levels (pp. 193–​247). Chicago Linguistic Society.

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3 ACCENT BIAS Dominic Watt, Erez Levon, and Christian Ilbury

1. Introduction Linguistic prescriptivism is rooted in the notion that there are in language certain sorts of usages which are good, correct, accurate, beautiful, refined, prestigious, approved by a higher authority, or indeed all these things simultaneously. Other usages, by contrast, possess no such qualities. In some language communities, beliefs of this kind are so pervasive that people seem easily persuaded that they are both self-​evidently and eternally true. In many cases the ideology is licensed by religious doctrine or by origin myths (e.g. Eco, 1993; Stewart, 2000; The Week 2019). Similar touchstones underpin the wide acceptance of claims that some modes of pronunciation –​i.e., accents –​of a language are simply better than the rest, and that the superior ones should therefore be accorded preferential treatment at the expense of less worthy ones. Consequently, hierarchies of accents emerge, with the most prestigious accents occupying the top tier, and those which markedly diverge from them being consigned to the bottom of the pile (Curzan, 2014; Straaijer, 2016). A preference for one accent over others is termed accent bias. Tendencies of this kind may be unconscious on the listener’s part, and as we shall see, numerous reasons lie behind why people are biased towards or against different accents. They may find it easy to articulate some of these reasons, while others may be harder to put into words. It is probably true to say that accent bias is universal, at least in language communities that are large enough for accent variation to be present. Speakers of a language will tend simply to like certain accents more than others, and that in itself could be thought harmless enough. However, it is easy for that bias to come to influence people’s behaviour, such that speakers’ accents might cause hearers to perceive the speakers differentially –​as more or less intelligent, trustworthy, or attractive, for example. Those perceptions, no matter how unfounded, may then lead listeners to behave differently not just towards the speaker they are hearing but also towards anyone else who speaks with the same or a similar accent. Now we can start to talk of accent prejudice or discrimination; the term accentism is also popular (Hegarty, 2020; Roessel et al., 2020). These attitudes can then come to be shared more widely. The role of parents, caregivers, siblings, and peers is vitally important in disseminating positive and negative associations with different outgroups and the accents that distinguish them from ingroup members (Ryan et al., 1984; Lukač, 2018). The media play a critical part, too: many listeners will have DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-4

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the opportunity to hear certain accents only via films, television, radio, and music. If these accents are used as shorthand for positive and negative character traits, audience members will come to connect those accents closely with moral virtues on the one hand, and character flaws on the other. Reliance on stereotypes is a staple of storytelling, and the use of accents as shorthand for bundles of personality traits –​English West Country accents for honesty and simplicity, for instance, or Russian ones for duplicity and ruthlessness –​pervades the entertainment industry (Lippi-​Green, 2012; Dragojevic et al., 2016). These stereotypes have great durability. They function as cognitive shortcuts that help us to successfully navigate the social world around us, facilitating quick decisions about other people without needing to devote time to evaluating every individual case. Stereotypes survive, it would appear, by dint of their usefulness in this regard, even if most of the time they are not borne out in reality (Tajfel, 1969, 1981; Oakes et al., 1994; Kotzur et al., 2020; Jing-​Schmidt, 2021; Tileagă et al., 2022). A major dimension in the way that accents feed into, and feed from, stereotypes is that of “correctness” or “propriety”. In Anglophone countries, for instance, there is a popular belief that some people speak proper, correct English, while others –​perhaps the majority –​do not. Those who speak properly are believed to possess other desirable traits such as industriousness, intelligence, general competence, and even superior personal hygiene (Giles, 1970; Dragojevic et al., 2021), while users of “improper” English are frequently seen to be lacking in self-​control, ignorant of important social conventions, and predisposed to moral turpitude and criminality (Dixon et al., 2002; Reid et al., 2012; Paver et al., 2021). There are close parallels in other areas of the language besides pronunciation, of course. The use of dialect grammar and lexis is often highly stigmatised (e.g. Chapman, 2019; McDermott, 2019; Bell-​Baker, 2020), such that it makes sense to talk of dialectism as well as accentism. For reasons of space, however, it is only the second of these phenomena that we will focus upon in the present chapter. As suggested earlier, the view that pronunciations should formally be divided into a “good” class and a very much larger “bad” one is to many people so commonsensical that they presume it to be true of all languages past and present. However, as is explored in other chapters in this volume, it is an idea that only reached full maturity in the modern period (Holmberg, 1964; Beal, 2002). It surprises many modern British English speakers to learn that members of the political elite during the Victorian era, such as the Prime Ministers Sir Robert Peel and William Gladstone, spoke with provincial accents (Blake, 1969). Institutionally sanctioned standardised pronunciations set down in dictionaries, grammars, and elocution manuals were not fixed until fairly recent periods in the histories of major languages such as English (Beal, 2018; Beal et al., 2008; Mugglestone, 1995; Watts, 2000; Chapman & Rawlins, 2021). But the popularity of these works firmly underwrote the idea that pronunciations and other aspects of language behaviour could be deemed correct or incorrect, or “accurate” versus “inaccurate”, to the extent that they matched with the standardised forms set out in the reference books. Non-​ standardness, in other words, became synonymous with inferior language. We have inherited these beliefs more or less intact. To descriptive linguists it goes without saying that the choice of forms which are favoured or disfavoured has been dictated not by linguistic criteria but by historical happenstance, geographical hegemony, class elitism, the capriciousness of peevish language mavens, and the socio-​economically aspirant. Well before Saussure’s time it was recognised that the link between strings of speech sounds and the objects and concepts they denote was a largely arbitrary one (Dingemanse et al., 2015). The phonetic string [bʌn] to refer to an item of baked goods cannot plausibly be argued to be closer to the essence of the object, or more “accurate” a label, than is

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[bʊn] or any other name for the item. Yet for great numbers of non-​linguists the suggestion that one form would be as good as any other is so contrary to the normative beliefs about language they acquired early in life that their reactions to the arbitrariness argument are typically ones of puzzlement, scepticism, or even open scorn. Via appeals to concepts such as “logic”, “common knowledge”, and “common sense”, as well as to higher authorities, they may find themselves defending the position that there is only one correct, “true” name for some object, and only one proper pronunciation of that name. If the dictionary supports this contention, the trump card has been played and the argument is over. The perceived authority of written sources such as dictionaries is often invoked in discussions of pronunciation among non-​linguists. So too is the way words are conventionally spelled, since dictionaries also function as arbiters of correctness in written language. While it might seem strange to devote a section of a chapter on accent bias to the written forms of words, we cannot ignore this factor when seeking to understand how non-​linguists rationalise their views about the relative virtues of one accent over another (and it is their overtly as well as their covertly expressed attitudes we are interested in, this being a volume about linguistic prescriptivism). We turn to the issue of spelling in the next section, before considering other rationales used to excuse accent bias and discrimination by members of the general public.

2.  Speech and writing In highly literate societies where a standard alphabetic orthography is the norm, and in which written language is generally held in higher esteem than spoken language (Olson, 1980), it is easy to see why the belief persists that standardised pronunciations are especially intimately linked to standardised spellings. If there is an approved standard written form for all the “official” words in the language, it surely follows that these would somehow map in a direct way onto the standard pronunciation. Since the lines between how we pronounce words and how we write them are often so blurred when we learn how to do the latter, particularly since the introduction of the phonics method for teaching English orthography (Austin, 2020), it is not at all surprising that in the minds of so many English speakers there exists no clear or obvious distinction between speech sounds and alphabetic letters. Good diction, we are assured, means “pronouncing all the letters in a word”. Dropping letters is a careless and lazy habit, and anyone wishing to make a good impression on others and thereby to succeed in life should be sure to avoid doing so. (Dropping certain letters, at any rate; speakers of the prestigious non-​rhotic British accent Received Pronunciation (RP) tend not to consider the omission of an overt /​r/​ in words like “farm” or “north” to be “dropping a sound”; the same holds for in “hour”, “honest”, “heir”, “historical”, and sometimes “hotel”. In words like “sword” and “knight” the acceptability of “silent letters” is never queried either). It testifies to the apparent naturalness of this equation of sounds and letters that the fact that they are objectively very different things appears, rather strangely, not to occur to many people. But conceiving of speech as though it were a sequence of letters spoken aloud, where the most correct pronunciation is the one matching most closely with the standard written forms of a word, seems an unusually powerful and durable buttress for prescriptivist views of language. In the next section we consider a number of other justifications put forward in support of prescriptive attitudes towards accents of British English. Although our focus is on English in the United Kingdom because the data we present in later sections are derived from the Accent Bias in Britain (ABB) project, the same general arguments will be recognisable to readers based in other parts of the English-​speaking world, as well as those in other language communities

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where standard accents and dialects are highly prized while non-​standard ones are downgraded and stigmatised.

3.  Other rationales for accent bias A number of common counterarguments in defence of the status quo are offered in rebuttal to linguists’ claims that standard pronunciations are not inherently superior to others, but are arbitrarily selected. We will focus on several of these in turn, beginning with criteria which rely on “cognitive” analysis (objective, conscious reflection on the properties of an entity or phenomenon towards which the respondent has an attitude) and ending with factors which fall at the more “affective” end of the spectrum, i.e. are more indicative of the respondent’s subjective, perhaps automatic, emotive reaction towards the object/​phenomenon in question (Llamas et al., 2016; Rosseel & Grondelaers, 2019).

3.1  Intrinsic clarity We are regularly told that standard accents like RP are intrinsically “clearer”, and therefore more intelligible to listeners. The argument rests on the supposition that standard accents are characterised by more careful and precise articulation, giving each sound (or letter) its full value. This is done without running sounds into one another or omitting them, habits which are often described as “swallowing” sounds, especially where they occur at word endings. RP is often described informally as “cut-​glass” and “clipped”, implying that speech sounds have sharp, abrupt edges which speakers of this accent consistently produce. It also implies that connected speech processes, for example the coalescent assimilation of /​t/​and /​j/​to [tʃ] at the beginning of ‘tune’ or the elision of /​t/​in a phrase like ‘best friend’, occur less frequently. Teachers and learners of English as a second language are often quick to endorse RP for these reasons, lending weight to the idea that RP is optimised to occupy the ‘perceptual high ground’ among varieties of English (for an empirical approach to this proposal, see Pinet et al., 2015). The choice of RP for radio broadcasting by the British Broadcasting Corporation in the early 1920s was purportedly motivated by considerations of clarity, although given its status as the accent of the rich, powerful, educated elite it seems unlikely that the BBC ever seriously contemplated assigning the role to any other accent. RP is seen as the accent of choice for theatrical productions by many actors and producers because, allegedly, it is the best accent in which to project one’s voice in an auditorium without need for artificial amplification. This special property, we are led to believe, is the result of RP being produced as far towards the front of the mouth as possible, unlike other accents of British English (see e.g. Rodenburg, (1998, 107), who gushingly proclaims RP’s articulatory postures to be “athletic, energized and useful as a work-​out”).

3.2  Intelligibility is enhanced by familiarity A second argument, staying with RP as our example, is that standard pronunciations are more intelligible because we are all so familiar with them. Even if RP has only ever been spoken by a small minority of the UK population, it nevertheless enjoys a disproportionate amount of airtime in the broadcast media, in part as the legacy of the BBC’s decision at the Corporation’s foundation to appoint native or adoptive RP speakers in favour of speakers of other accents, and also just as a result of attitudes, shaped by standard language ideologies, that are shared by directors and controllers of media organisations. Standard accents like 34

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RP consequently have had the greatest domestic and international reach, which is argued to make them particularly suitable as the medium of communication where intelligibility is crucially important. This last point is difficult to gainsay. Competing standardised systems exist in many other areas of life –​in the domain of weights and measures, for instance –​but opting to use the system with the widest geographical currency (for example expressing distances in kilometres rather than miles) is generally agreed to be best practice in the international context. This is not the problem here, however. The problem is when we make a shortcut to connect the first and second arguments discussed above: that is, standard accents should be used as widely as possible because they are intrinsically clearer and more intelligible than non-​standard accents. On this view, familiarity is only a secondary consideration: RP is clearer than other accents whether the listener has heard it before or not. This argument is easier to make if, as we saw earlier, the case can be made that RP is closer to the written form of English than any other variety can claim to be. A non-​native speaker who can read the language will, it is asserted, simply have an easier time with RP, in which all of the letters –​or all of the relevant non-​silent ones –​are supposedly crisply pronounced.

3.3 Pragmatism A third argument is more basic. In essence, it goes that we live in the real world, and that it is an imperfect and unfair one. For all that some well-​meaning individuals might wish the situation to be different, the fact is that most people are content to go along with the establishment view because “it works”. We face bigger problems than worrying about whether some people are advantaged relative to others because of the way they speak. Those who complain about being disadvantaged by accent prejudice are chided, or derided, for being excessively sensitive, humourless “snowflakes” or “crybabies”, and are advised either to grow a thicker skin, or to stop complaining and take action to improve their situation. By way of illustration, consider the comments posted on the website of the Daily Mail Online, a right-​wing UK newspaper, in response to a 2020 article about accent-​based prejudice at Durham University in the northeast of England: Don’t worry about your northern accent tell them to kiss your a## if that’s all you’ve got to be worried about good god snowflakes or wat!! Why will it be any bit difficult for anyone who speaks English to learn to alter their way of speaking English that will be pleasant to the ear and more understandable by one and all? Sticks and stones. I get teased about my accent but who cares. Oh dear. Grow a pair, guys. I went to a Northern polytechnic as they were back in the day & was ribbed continually for being a “posh southerner”, even though I grew up on a council estate. It’s all about your response, laugh along & they move along… Well you could take elocution lessons. all is normal, we all get it, us zommerset folk are called carrot crunchers, snowflakes seem to run the media now, why is this news I was born in London brought up in Newcastle, worked with “southerners” and many more from different parts of the country and everyone took the mick from everyone’s accents was great fun but that was in construction in the 80s /​90s not unis or today’s snowflakes lot, grow some and give it back and stop whinging far worse things happening these days 35

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Grow up lady, most people love accents; most people like holidays, most people like chips. But not everyone loves everything. If you find this tough, then Gawd help you when you go out into to real World to earn a living. Durham students from the North claim they are being ‘constantly mocked’ for their local accents by southerners and face a ‘toxic culture’ at university (Mail Online, 21 October 2020, www.dailym​ail.co.uk/​news/ arti​cle-​8862​591/​Dur​ham-​stude​nts-​North-​claim-​con​stan​tly-​moc​ked.html) Among those who think that the problem is being exaggerated it is in fact not uncommon to come across flat denial that the discrimination that may stem from accent prejudice even exists. It is said by some commentators just to be the latest faddish invention of “woke liberals” with victimhood complexes. Alternatively, they may suggest there is a conspiracy afoot, whereby legitimate criticism of others’ speech patterns is being stifled by intellectuals and elitists peddling an authoritarian leftist, even Marxist, political agenda (see e.g. reader’s comments on Aldersley, 2018). Individuals who are targeted for criticism on grounds of accent are regularly advised that there is a simple solution to the problem, which is to change how they speak. The belief that accent is mutable, unlike triggers of social prejudice like skin colour, is clearly a powerful one.

3.4  Accent mutability The idea that the problem of accent-​based discrimination can be made to disappear if people would just make an effort to change their speech habits is the fourth in our list of arguments used to excuse societal and institutional bias in favour of standard accents. The supposed mutability of one’s accent is often portrayed as a “magic bullet” with the added virtue of being completely cost-​free, unlike other trappings of wealth and success (of course, there are any number of elocutionists touting accent reduction services, and numerous self-​help books on the market; examples are Adams & Chapman, 2009; James & Smith, 2018; McKinney, 2019). It is true that adults can successfully disguise their original regional or social accents given a sufficiently high level of motivation, or perhaps coercion if the necessary motivation is lacking. However, the skill does not seem to come very naturally to some would-​be standard accent users, and the burden is naturally heaviest on those whose accents diverge most markedly from the target accent. It is very difficult to know, for instance, which words belong in which lexical sets if learners must acquire a phonemic contrast that does not exist in their native accents. For instance, if speakers of a variety of English spoken in Northern England wish to adopt RP they must acquire a knowledge of which words take /​ʌ/​and which ones /​ʊ/​, since this contrast (the ‘foot ~strut split’; Wells, 1982) is absent from their home variety. The fear of getting things wrong means that speakers may be reluctant to attempt to try to use in public what they have learned. There is a risk that allowing even small markers of social or geographical origin to manifest in one’s speech may allow others to deduce that the standard accent is inauthentic. Standard-​accent adopters may be wary of inviting commentary, mockery, or even ostracism, that may follow from allowing the mask to slip even slightly. They may also feel that attempting to ‘reduce’ their native accents, or to disguise them altogether, is a betrayal of their roots and identity, and of the values of their family and friends. Standard accents are not always held in high esteem by users of non-​standard accents, who may associate the standard form with negative traits like snobbery, emotional coldness, humourlessness, self-​ interest, and deceitfulness. They are therefore caught between a rock and a hard place: on the one hand they may feel their prospects are being hindered by an accent that is redolent of low 36

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status, disadvantage, poverty, unculturedness, and poor education, but on the other they may be shunned by members of their home community, who feel that standard accent adopters consider themselves to be above their peers, and that the home community “wasn’t good enough for them” (Trudgill, 2008; Fabricius, forthcoming).

3.5  Accent and mispronunciation A further point worth noting is that some advocates of prescriptive attitudes towards standard and non-​standard accents will attempt to distinguish between accent and pronunciation: there are accents, according to this argument, and then there is mispronunciation, and the two should not be confused for one another. They may on the one hand speak positively about accent variation, saying that regional accents are something to be treasured at the same time as proclaiming that mispronunciation and sloppy diction cannot be tolerated. If it so happens that a pronunciation the listener does not approve of should be used by a speaker of an accent in which that feature regularly occurs (for example TH-​fronting, or the use of [n]‌rather than [ŋ] in words ending in the suffix), that pronunciation may be castigated as careless and lazy speech, and is deemed not to be part of the accent. The latter feature, [n] for /​ŋ/​, was the target of sniping by Lord Digby Jones about the speech of the British sports commentator Alex Scott during the 2020/​21 Olympic Games. Although in standard British English pronunciation no /​ɡ/​ is pronounced at the end of -​final words, Jones proclaimed that, “Not sounding a g at the end of a word is wrong; period. It’s not a question of class, it’s not a question of accent, it’s a question of poor elocution. Don’t let it spoil your otherwise excellent performance.” [@Digbylj, Twitter, 31 July 2021]. Thousands of online commentators weighed in to echo Jones’s views, arguing that Scott’s pronunciation habits made her sound unprofessional and unclear to listeners. Additionally, many of Scott’s fiercest critics argued that her accent made life harder for non-​native speakers of English and for people with hearing difficulties, such as the elderly. She was reproved for allowing her speech patterns to be driven by fashion through her use of “street affectations” or “gangster” pronunciations, as well as being accused of ignorance and incompetence, and of generally talking in a careless, sloppy, and unattractive way. The fact that she had been selected by the BBC naturally drew the ire of commentators who expected the Corporation to favour presenters with “decent diction”, rather than being led by tokenistic “box ticking” (Scott is a gay woman of colour from a working-​class background). But many simply opined that they didn’t like the sound of her speech. Subjective judgements that rely on aesthetic preference are the last category on our list.

3.6  Subjective factors Subjective preference based entirely on a listener’s aesthetic reaction to an accent is a major determining factor in how accent hierarchies are built. Listeners often cannot really explain what lies behind these judgements; they may say the accent “just sounds nice”, is “melodious”, “musical” or “colourful”, or conversely that it is “harsh”,“ugly”, “rough”, or “grating”. It seems probable that the listeners’ motivations for ascribing labels of this sort to accents are not separable from the cognitive factors described earlier: listeners may say they find an accent pleasant to listen to because they perceive it to be clearly enunciated and free of “errors”. They may have positive associations with the area in which the accent is spoken, and/​or with the people who live there. Generally speaking, and as we shall see below, accents which are positively evaluated for pleasantness tend to be those spoken in areas which are perceived to be 37

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affluent (e.g. Oxford, UK), or in attractive rural areas (e.g. Ireland, Scotland). Those which are rated low on aesthetic grounds tend to be those spoken in provincial (post-​)industrial cities, which are associated with poverty, crime, urban blight, and other social ills (e.g. Birmingham or Liverpool, UK). It is no great surprise that RP and other standard pronunciations are often described as “clean”, with obvious implications for their non-​standard counterparts. We must also remember that positive and negative attitudes towards accents may also stem from associations with the listener’s own home area. In many cases, people will report finding the accent of their home area particularly unattractive, unpleasant or ill-​formed, exemplifying the adage that familiarity breeds contempt (Hitchens, 2010). On the other hand, listeners may report cherishing the sound of an accent they associate with their childhood days, for example the non-​standard accent of a grandparent, even if they might also describe the accent as sounding ill-​educated or “wrong”. This helps to explain why a listener’s own local accent is often rated highly in accent preference polls of the sort described in Section 4.1, below. By extension, other non-​standard varieties may seem to embody solidarity traits such as warmth, friendliness, and sense of humour, qualities for which standard varieties tend to be rated low. Accent accommodation among speakers of different non-​standard accents, who often unconsciously converge on one another’s speech patterns in response to a perception of social affinity, can be taken as evidence of a bias towards non-​standard accents in opposition to standard ones (Giles & Smith, 1979).

3.7 Summary Accent perceptions, and the evaluative judgements that underpin them, are a composite of cognitive and affective attitudes supplied in large part by prevailing prescriptivist ideologies and supplemented by personal experiences which may lead listeners to rationalise their biases in slightly different ways from one another. But generally, as the perceptual dialectologist Dennis Preston and his colleagues have shown (e.g. Preston, 1993, 2018; Clopper, 2021), the mental model of language adhered to by linguistically untrained members of the public –​ and possibly many trained linguists as well –​is one in which standard accents of a language like English sit at the pinnacle of a hierarchy, endorsed and protected by authorities such as lexicographers, grammarians, and other language experts. Arrayed below it are the many non-​ standard accents –​traditional rural ones, newer urban ones, those of ethnic minorities –​which are mocked or vilified for their inaccuracy and ugliness, or perhaps celebrated but never taken very seriously. The existence of multiple standard accents of English in various parts of the Anglophone world means that the rather black-​and-​white picture outlined in earlier sections is actually more nuanced. In the UK, Standard Scottish English and educated Welsh and Irish English are deemed appropriate for serious broadcasting, for instance, and Standard US and Canadian English are recognised as credible alternative accents, even if many British people are more than willing to voice strong negative opinions about North American English’s perceived shortcomings (Murphy, 2018). Certain non-​standard varieties which are phonologically close to the standard accent –​for example Estuary English (Altendorf, 2017) –​are considered more correct, and therefore more acceptable, than are others in the kinds of contexts in which standard accents are highly favoured. The professional occupations are contexts of this sort. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we will examine an elite occupational sector in which a speaker’s accent appears to be thought particularly important: the legal profession. The influence of the supposed connection between a job applicant’s accent and his/​her perceived intelligence and competence has major implications in a field which relies so centrally on language (Gibbons, 38

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2003), making the legal sector an ideal testing ground for experimental work exploring the real-​world impact of accent bias.

4.  Accent bias in Britain British (or at least English) society is renowned for being stratified by socio-​economic class status, a key signal of which is accent (Jones, 2011; Savage, 2015; Friedman & Laurison, 2020). The elite professions –​medicine, finance, certain echelons of the media and the military, and the law –​have long tended to be the preserve of people from the ranks of the affluent upper-​ middle and upper classes, who correspondingly tend to speak using standard accents owing to family background or to the education they have received, or both. In these occupations there continues to be some pressure to “sound the part”, ostensibly because they critically rely upon clear and unambiguous communication both in speech and writing. In a culture where articulate, precise diction is essentially synonymous with Received Pronunciation, it follows that speaking with that accent is highly advantageous. Well-​qualified applicants who do not speak with standard accents may therefore face barriers to professional and social mobility (Ashley et al., 2015; Major & Machin, 2018). Because accent –​unlike ethnicity, age, gender, sexuality, disability, etc. –​is not a protected characteristic under the provisions of the UK Equality Act (2010), it is lawful for employers to discriminate against job applicants on grounds of accent. A 2006 report by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (Ozbilgin, 2006) revealed that 76% of the employers surveyed said that they discriminated against candidates on the basis of accent, while only a small fraction (3%) acknowledged accent as a protected category. The Accent Bias in Britain (ABB) project (Levon et al., 2017–​2021) sought to investigate the extent to which accent bias and discrimination might influence patterns of recruitment in the UK legal sector, as recruiters in this professional domain have long been reputed to favour applicants who, on top of having the requisite qualifications, also exhibit a desirable package of “talent” and other soft skills which are believed to make them more employable (Kinder, 2021). Along with hard-​to-​define qualities such as “confidence”, “polish” and “poise”, recruiters are ready to admit that possessing a standard accent, especially RP, is considered not just appropriate but actually close to being a requirement. Ashley et al. (2015, 46) quote an interviewee representing one of the ten “elite firms” in accountancy or law that they surveyed: [I recruited somebody] ... she’s short of polish. We need to talk about the way that she articulates, the way that she, first, chooses words and, second, the way she pronounces them. It will need, you know … it will need some polish because whilst I may look at the substance, you know, I’ve got a lot of clients and a lot of colleagues who are very focused on the personal presentation and appearance side of it. (L_​Q_​6) The views expressed by this participant are, it appears, only too typical, and anecdotal evidence of them abounds (e.g. Shaw, 2021). Kinder (2021) recalls her law lecturer informing the class that his London training firm had advised that people in his position “didn’t have accents”, and notes that when she entered practice very few of my peers spoke with accents and those that did would make a conscious effort to neutralise them. I too adopted this approach. As my career has progressed, I have found that I am not alone in these experiences. I have learned of individuals being told they would not obtain a training contract without elocution lessons. 39

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I have even seen elocution lessons being advertised online as ‘essential’ for northern graduates looking to work in London. Kinder, 2021 ABB took an experimental approach to the question of whether a speaker’s accent would affect how “employable” an applicant for a position in a prestigious law firm was deemed to be. Listeners with and without legal training or experience of recruiting in the legal sector were asked to listen to short speech samples and to rate the speaker on a range of traits. As our interest was in accent rather than other linguistic factors (use of non-​standard grammar, for instance, or use of hesitation markers, discourse markers, etc.), it was therefore necessary to carefully control the lexical content of the samples. The study employed a matched guise technique using recordings of actors reading scripted mock job interview answers in as natural a way as possible. Five accents –​RP, Estuary English, Multicultural London English, “General Northern English”, and Urban West Yorkshire English (UWYE) –​were chosen to be representative of standardness (RP) vs non-​standardness (the other accents), geography (northern vs southern England), and to some extent ethnicity (Multicultural London English; Fox & Torgersen, 2018). General Northern English is defined as a levelled “pan-​regional standard accent associated with middle-​class speakers” (Strycharczuk et al., 2020, 1). It is close to RP in most respects but contains features which make it recognisably from the north of England, if no more precisely than that. The imaginary interview was for a position as a trainee solicitor in a corporate law firm. For realism, the answers were scripted by non-​academic lawyers with experience in recruitment in the legal sphere. The recordings were embedded in a Qualtrics survey taken by a demographically balanced panel of over 1000 listeners recruited via Research Now, who rated the samples in response to a number of questions concerning the speaker’s perceived employability. We examine the results of this survey further in Section 4.2, below.

4.1  Labels survey To provide a context for the listening experiment, an initial calibration survey was carried out to check whether any significant changes to accent attitudes in the UK had taken place since the last major survey was conducted (Bishop et al., 2005; also Coupland & Bishop, 2007). It involved asking a representative sample of the UK population to rate a list of 38 written accent labels according to their perceived prestige and pleasantness, on a 1–​7 scale where 1 was low. Thirty-​four of the chosen labels were the same as those used by Bishop et al. (2005), who themselves partly replicated the study by Giles (1970). The additions came about by replacing ‘London’ with ‘Cockney’, ‘Estuary English’, ‘Multicultural London English’ and ‘Essex’, and ‘Asian’ with ‘Chinese-​accented’ and ‘Indian-​accented’. For the ABB study the text “(i.e., ‘Received Pronunciation’)” was added to the label “A standard accent of English”, for clarification purposes. Selected results of this survey are shown in Figure 3.1, which compares the composite scores for prestige and pleasantness for a 14-​strong subset of the labels –​these being the labels in common with those used by Giles (1970), allowing for full comparison over a 50-​year timespan –​arranged in descending order of scores for the 2019 (ABB) data. In each case the most and least positively rated accents are RP and Birmingham, respectively. However, in the 2019 data the overall rating for RP is lower than in the previous two surveys, and the Birmingham rating is higher, producing a curve with a shallower slope. The next three lowest-​rated accents (Afro-​Caribbean, Indian, Liverpool) are similarly less negatively 40

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6 5 4 3 2

n ot ti Am sh er So ic ut an he rn Iri sh G er m an W W el es sh tC ou nt M ry an c Af h es ro -C t ar er ib be an In di an Li ve rp Bi oo rm l in gh am

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Figure 3.1  Composite prestige +​pleasantness ratings given to written labels of 14 accents of English (N=​827; age range 18–​79), by year of data collection. Source: 1969 =​Giles (1970); 2004 =​Bishop, Coupland & Garrett (2005); 2019 =​Accent Bias Britain study (Sharma, Levon & Ye 2021).

evaluated in the 2019 data. Another feature of note is the higher ratings for French and German accents than was observed in the 2004 data, bringing the pattern back into line with what Giles found. The “non-​nativeness” of an accent is not necessarily viewed as an obstacle to it seeming relatively prestigious and/​or pleasant-​sounding. We see too that the consistently high ratings for “Own Accent” reveal that respondents have positive associations with their own speech patterns, perhaps because they speak a standard variety, or because they evaluate their own non-​ standard variety more highly than other non-​standard ones. It should also be noted that the range of scores from high to low is actually quite narrow relative to the breadth of the 1–​7 scale: even the lowest score (3.2, Birmingham, 2004) is not far below the midpoint of 4. If RP is excluded, the scores all fall in a band with a width of just one quarter of the available range (1.5/​6). The non-​standard accents are therefore not rated very differently from one another. In the 2019 data the entire range of scores for all the accents covers only around a third of the scale, and they cluster closely around the mean (1969 =​3.9; 2004 =​3.5; 2019 =​3.91). Nevertheless, the hierarchy of accents represented in Figure 3.1, and in the data for the full set of 38 accents more generally, reveals that the overall picture in 2019 recapitulates what was found by Giles half a century earlier. RP may no longer stand head and shoulders above the other accents, but the gap between it and the next most favoured accent is still by far the largest that occurs between any other adjacent pair of accents among the subset of 14. These preferences are evidently very stable across time.

4.2  Listening study Having established that the accent hierarchy reported by earlier studies is stably present in the perceptual linguistic landscape in the UK, we move now to examine listeners’ opinions in a 41

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context in which they had been led to believe that the speaker was an appropriately qualified interviewee for a job in the legal sector (specifically, as a trainee solicitor in a major corporate law firm, for which a three-​year law degree plus completion of a one-​year professional legal practice course would be a requirement). As mentioned earlier, we chose five English accents which represent various dimensions –​standardness, geography, ethnicity –​known to be important in accent evaluation. Sharma et al. (2019) and Levon et al. (2020, 2021) provide details of the methodology used to design and elicit the test utterances, so it is described only in brief here. Scripted answers drafted in standard English by legal professionals with recruitment experience were read aloud by actors who were native speakers of the respective accents, in as spontaneous-​sounding a way as possible. Only male actors were used, so as to avoid the effect of gender on the appraisal of the candidate. To control the lexical content, the actors were instructed to avoid improvising, even by producing unscripted hesitation markers. The answers were purported to be responses to questions designed to be typical of interviews for legal positions, and were classed as either “technical” or “general”. Providing adequate answers to the first type of questions would require specialised legal knowledge, while the second set concerned more general professional skills. Each of the technical “expert” answers, furthermore, had “better” and “worse” versions, where their relative quality had been verified by a panel of 25 lawyers unconnected to the project. For the sake of realism, the answers judged to be relatively inferior were still both factually accurate and plausibly good for a viable candidate for the position. An example pair of answers is shown below. Question: Explain the difference between contract and tort. Candidate A (higher-​quality answer): Contract and tort are both private law. The main difference is that people voluntarily enter into contracts, but that’s not relevant in tort. Torts are civil wrongs. One of the most common torts is negligence. If you’re texting while driving and you hit a person, you may have been negligent. There was no previous agreement between you and that person, but that’s not needed for him to sue you in tort. In contrast to this, existing contracts will affect whether someone can sue in contract law. Candidate B (lower-​quality answer): Contract law involves laws that deal with contracts between people, and tort law is where someone does something wrong. You can of course do something wrong in contract law as well, but that involves breach of contract law rather than tort law. In our training we covered contract law first, and then tort law, and compared and contrasted cases. There are many similarities across the cases, but also distinct sets of principles in the different situations, as only one involves contract agreements. As before, the listener panel was drawn from a cross-​section of the UK population (N=​1048; age range 18–​79). The sample, which was recruited by the market research firm Research Now, was balanced by participants’ region, age, and gender. Participants with experience of legal recruitment were not excluded, since they were few in number, and in any case individuals with legal training are as much part of the general population as are members of any other occupational group. The experiments used a between-​subjects design with pseudo-​randomised audio stimuli, such that each participant heard two versions of each accent and no mock answer or speaker

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more than once. Using a 10-​point Likert scale, the listeners were asked to rate each answer in response to the following questions: a. How would you rate the overall quality of the candidate’s answer? b. Does the candidate’s answer show expert knowledge? c. In your opinion, how likely is it that the candidate will succeed as a lawyer? d. Is the candidate somebody that you personally would like to work with? e. How would you rate the candidate overall? Participants provided relevant demographic information (region of residence, age, gender, etc.) and rated themselves for their “motivation to control a prejudiced response” (MCPR; Dunton & Fazio, 1997). As the name suggests, MCPR is “an individual difference measure that reflects a respondent’s desire to appear nonprejudiced to others and/​or their distaste for prejudicial behavior” and is “independent of actually maintaining prejudiced beliefs; it refers to an individual’s motivation to engage in more deliberative, as opposed to more automatic, processing as a way of avoiding potentially prejudiced reactions.” (Levon et al., 2021, 373–​374). Participants would assign themselves a score from 1 to 6 in response to five questions such as ‘When speaking to a person from a different social background, it’s important to me that they do not think I’m prejudiced.’

4.2.1 Results Because the results for the individual questions (a)–​(e) listed in the preceding section are tightly correlated, they are for our present purposes collapsed into a single composite score that we label “employability”. The data exhibit some similar accent biases to those observed in the label study discussed above, though the differences between the accents were smaller. Listener age appears to play a significant role, whereby older listeners assign lower ratings to younger ones, a trend which is clearly visible in Figure 3.2. Figure 3.2 reveals that the speakers of all five accents are rated less positively by people aged 40 and above than is the case among the younger respondents. The same age threshold appears to be the point at which listeners started to rate the two working-​class London area accents, Estuary English (EE) and Multicultural London English (MLE), lower than the other three accents. The youngest age group did not rate the accents significantly differently from one another, which might imply a change over time. However, this same pattern was found by Coupland & Bishop (2007), suggesting that attitudes towards accents, even standard ones like RP, start to become somewhat more negative as people enter the workforce and otherwise increase in age. In Figure 3.3 we can see a clear and consistent distinction between the overall ratings for the “expert answers” versus the “non-​expert answers” per accent, and when the respondents are split by region (South/​Midlands/​North) and by age (younger versus older). With only one exception –​Estuary English as rated by younger northern listeners –​every accent is rated higher when the content of the answer implies technical knowledge of the law, in spite of almost all of the listeners lacking such a background themselves. Across the picture, EE is rated lower than the other accents, though MLE is also assigned low ratings in the non-​expert condition. For the older listeners in the south of England the differences in the expert and non-​expert answer scores for RP and the two southern accents EE and MLE are unusually wide ones, as evidenced by the statistically significant differences denoted by the boxes and asterisks in

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Figure 3.2  Non-​expert listeners’ employability ratings by listener age, pooled by accent. Source: Levon et al. 2021.

Figure 3.3  Effects of expert content on non-​expert listeners’ employability ratings, pooled by accent and split by listener age and region (Model Predicted Values; Levon et al. 2021). Boxes and asterisks indicate a significant difference between RP and a given accent in that condition.

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Figure 3.3. Older midland listeners also downgrade the non-​expert MLE answers relative to their RP counterparts to a significant degree. No parallel effect is observed among older northern listeners, among whom the responses to RP and MLE, and indeed to the other three accents, are more positive in general. It might be argued that the older southerners’ high ratings for RP at the expense of EE and MLE is an indication of a tendency for these listeners simply to be less tolerant of non-​standard accents than their northern counterparts, but in the present case that apparently only applies to southern non-​standard accents. Why might they view the answers spoken in these more local accents less favourably? We might speculate that the explanation could be partly to do with the level of exposure listeners have had to these accents: listeners in the south are on balance likely to have heard more EE and MLE than ones in the north have, and older southerners have had more opportunity to develop negative opinions about these accents than their younger, perhaps more liberal-​minded, counterparts. To explore the effects of accent exposure on the ratings of the different speakers, we also asked participants a series of questions designed to measure their familiarity with and exposure to the different accents, and the similarity of the accent to their own. Participants were first asked to respond to the question ‘how familiar are you with this person’s accent?’. Broadly speaking, and perhaps unexpectedly in view of the patterns observed in Figure 3.3, the more familiar respondents were with the accent the higher the rating they gave (see Figure 3.4 for an example). However, the strength of this effect varied with accent, with “familiarity” having a significant effect on the ratings of all accents except MLE. To assess the accuracy of these judgements, we also asked listeners to identify where they thought the speaker was from by selecting from a list of 14 different areas comprised of cities (e.g., “London”, “Birmingham”) and broader regions (e.g., “South East”, “North West”). Regions were then grouped into “high” and “low” accuracy categories. This allowed us to test whether respondents who indicated that they were familiar with an accent were also accurate in identifying the regional background of the speaker. As could perhaps be expected, those who

10.0

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Figure 3.4  The effect of familiarity on accent ratings for the General Northern English (GNE) audio samples. 1 =​not at all familiar, 6 =​very familiar.

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10.0

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Figure 3.5  The effect of similarity on accent ratings for the Estuary English (EE) audio samples. 1 =​completely disagree, 5 =​completely agree.

reported being familiar with a given accent were also highly accurate in identifying the speaker’s regional background. For instance, 70.3 per cent of those who claimed to be very familiar with MLE correctly identified that the speaker was from an “accurate” region (i.e., London or South East). This is in contrast to those who reported being very unfamiliar with the accent, with only 19.5 per cent of these respondents accurately identifying the speaker’s background. We also measured the effect of accent similarity on the ratings by asking participants to respond to the statement “the speaker’s accent is similar to mine” by indicating their response on a 5-​point scale from “completely disagree” to “completely agree”. Our findings show that the more similar the heard accent was to the respondent’s own, the higher the assigned rating (see Figure 3.5 for an example). In statistical models, similarity is shown to be a significant effect for all accents except RP. This effect is particularly marked for MLE, suggesting that it may be similarity –​not familiarity –​that is important in the positive evaluation of this accent. To gauge the effects of social exposure on accent ratings, we asked listeners to respond to the statement “in my life, I’ve spent a lot of time interacting with people from this city/​region”. Unlike familiarity and similarity, the effect of accent exposure had much less influence on the accent ratings. While there was an overall tendency for those who frequently interacted with speakers of a given accent to rate that accent more highly, this effect was not significant for any of the accents. Turning next to the results for listeners who reported a strong motivation to control a prejudiced response (MCPR), we observe higher employability ratings for the speakers of all five accents than those given by listeners who rated themselves low for MCPR. RP is rated highly by both groups, and as before the two non-​standard London-​area accents are rated lowest. Accent prejudice is apparently still present among those who consider themselves highly motivated to treat others fairly and equally, then, although its negative effects on how the accents are rated –​individually and overall –​are smaller than is the case for the low-​MCPR group, as evidenced by the shallower upper slopes in Figure 3.6. 46

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Figure 3.6  Employability ratings given by non-​expert listeners divided according to “motivation to control a prejudiced response” (MCPR) scores, pooled by accent (Model Predicted Scores; Levon et al. 2021). Boxes and asterisks indicate a significant difference between RP and a given accent in that condition.

Thus, while Figures 3.2 and 3.3 reveal that listener age and region are variables which stratify bias, Figures 3.5 and 3.6 suggest that MCPR and expertise can be seen as factors that could potentially mitigate it (see further Levon et al., 2021). Finally, we consider the effect of having specialist knowledge of the legal profession. It seems likely that experience in the area will influence answer ratings, and so to test this hypothesis a group of 61 listeners composed of lawyers and graduate recruiters in leading UK-​based international law firms were asked to complete a mock hiring exercise. As noted above, this group was presented with versions of the two “expert” answers which were designed to be of higher and lower quality, though in fact the difference between the two types was rather subtle, and unlike the non-​expert listener group task the answer quality difference was incorporated as an experimental variable. The intention here was to see whether these expert listeners would respond in a way that indicated they had distinguished between the two types of answers regardless of the speaker’s accent. The results (Figure 3.7) show that the employability scores were markedly higher for the high-​quality answers than they were for the low-​quality answers, indicating that our legally experienced listeners evaluated the answers in line with our expectations. Furthermore, the differences between the five accents are rather small; the accent effect is not statistically significant. The highest employability ratings are assigned to the northern English accents GNE and UWYE, and more particularly UWYE if the low-​quality answer ratings are also taken into account. The two non-​standard southeastern accents attract ratings which are comparable to those for RP, and indeed the low-​quality answers for EE and MLE score higher than RP does. This pattern is surprising, in view of the results we presented in earlier sections: RP does not stand out here as the most favoured accent. To this extent, it appears that our legal professionals

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Figure 3.7  Accent evaluations for high-​and low-​quality expert answers as rated by lawyers and graduate recruiters (Levon et al. 2020, p. 19).

are not susceptible to the sort of accent bias that seems to influence the responses to the accent label task (Section 4.1) and the listening task undertaken by the non-​experts. They can apparently bypass the effects of the speaker’s accent and evaluate the answers on their own merits, exactly as we would hope. On the other hand, it might be argued that the expert listeners’ expectations of RP speakers are qualitatively different from those they have of speakers of the other accents. Having an RP accent is often thought to be synonymous with having no accent. And given the extent of the accent’s penetration in the legal profession and its association there with the “best” education, the expert listeners might be evaluating the RP speakers somewhat less forgivingly than they do, say, the UWYE or MLE speakers, as though having an RP accent means the speaker “ought to” stand head and shoulders above the competition. Equally, the lack of evidence of any obvious advantage of being an RP speaker in these data might reflect positive attitudes among the expert listeners towards these accents, since northern English varieties tend to be associated with character traits which may be thought desirable in new recruits, such as honesty and friendliness. When designing unconscious bias training materials for professional recruiters it is worth remembering that ostensibly advantageous traits could, under some circumstances, serve to work against a candidate’s interests. Viewed in the round, however, the ABB results offer little reason to doubt that having an RP accent continues to carry considerable social capital when touting one’s talents in the corporate law job market.

5. Discussion The results of the ABB study indicate that long-​standing patterns of accent bias are still present in UK society, and they imply that these may serve to limit the opportunities for well-​ qualified applicants to access the elite professions. There are nevertheless encouraging signs that recruiters can suppress the potentially prejudicial effects of these biases when it counts, i.e. when evaluating job applicants in terms of their suitability for a particular role in a particular 48

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organisation. It may be that trends in human resources management practices –​for example, the near-​ubiquity of unconscious bias training and the emphasis placed on equality and diversity issues in modern professional workplaces –​are having a virtuous effect, designed as they are to foster a culture of fairer, more egalitarian treatment of others through problematising the links between behaviours such as accent and traits like competence and intelligence. It would be naïve, however, to conclude that speakers of non-​standard accents will never experience accent-​based prejudice in occupations like corporate law just because they are treated equitably at the recruitment stage. They might find themselves to be the target of microaggressions, overt mockery, or criticism relating to their accents (Kinder, 2021), assigned fewer client-​facing roles, or repeatedly passed over for promotion. One of the goals of the ABB project was to evaluate the effectiveness of a range of interventions designed to alert recruiters and other personnel working in human resources departments to the potential harm caused by unconscious bias leading to discriminatory practices in the workplace. The results of this element of the project show that simply raising people’s awareness of the existence of accent bias, and its capacity to influence employers’ decision-​making, is the most effective way to address the issue. The ABB team has also been involved in a move to lobby the UK government to consider adding accent to the list of protected characteristics in the Equality Act of 2010, alongside gender, age, sexual orientation, disability, and so on (Bi, 2021). It is hoped that the situation discussed earlier, whereby three-​quarters of the employers surveyed by the CIPD (2006) admitted to accent-​based discrimination, will eventually be remedied in law. No doubt, though, many of the justifications for accent bias/​prejudice that were discussed in Sections 2 and 3 will be aired when the matter is tabled for debate in parliament. The fact that such a law is currently being passed by the French government (Assemblée Nationale 2019) is a positive sign that conservative attitudes towards language may be changing in France, and it is not inconceivable that other countries may soon opt to follow suit. Whether these developments will have any sway across the English Channel remains to be seen.

6. Conclusions Accent bias is one of a wide range of social biases that influence the ways in which we see one another, and in itself it is not a harmful phenomenon. It is when bias becomes entrenched as enacted prejudice that measures to counteract discriminatory behaviour become appropriate. In workplaces these measures may take the form of simple awareness-​raising and the preparation of best practice guidelines for employers and employees, or new articles incorporated explicitly into anti-​discrimination legislation if there is sufficient political will to view accent as a characteristic deserving of protection. None of these initiatives is likely to succeed unless the prescriptivist assumptions that underlie public attitudes towards accent variation are challenged. In the UK English context, as we have seen, the links between correctness and standardness in speech are extremely durable, resting as they do on ideas of relative intrinsic clarity, the non-​arbitrariness of linguistic forms, conformance with conventions of the written language, accent familiarity, institutional endorsement, individual motivation for self-​improvement, a false dichotomy between accent and mispronunciation, and ineffable aesthetic factors. Accent prescriptivism has robust defences on many fronts, and it will require sustained effort and argumentation on the part of sociolinguists to change hearts and minds on the matter. Finding ways to reduce the effects of this particular obstacle to social mobility, one which unfairly frustrates so many highly capable people from realising their potential in the elite professions, should be viewed as a priority among sociolinguists who wish their research to have a palpable impact on wider society. 49

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To achieve this goal, new strategies are going to be needed. Changing anti-​discrimination legislation (Bi, 2021) may yield the results we are looking for, in relatively short order. But if requests for accent to be added to the list of protected characteristics are rejected, other tactics will need to be deployed. Efforts to bring the general public round to a more open-​ minded way of thinking about accent have, for the past half-​century or more, only rarely met with success. Articles in recently founded scholarly periodicals such as the Journal of Language and Discrimination are of course a vitally important element of such a campaign, but they are unlikely to reach the right people in sufficient numbers. The same is true of fair and balanced language-​focussed radio and TV programmes such as the BBC’s Word of Mouth or Fry’s English Delight, or publications for a general readership such as Babel magazine (babelzine.co.uk) and books like Murphy (2018). Packaging academic studies for popular consumption is a fraught business at the best of times, however. The scorn and dismissiveness of many of the comments posted in response to Cole et al. (2022), for instance, are all too typical. Progress might be made if sociolinguists would provide public audiences with more convincing evidence that could loosen the tight associative bonds between standardness, correctness, and clarity. So long as the links between these qualities are seen as commonsensical and self-​ evident, linguists stand to gain little ground. One possible solution might be taking better advantage of social media sites such as YouTube; charismatic professional presenters such as Tom Scott (tomscott.com) –​who has a degree in linguistics from the University of York and who has released several well-​researched videos about language-​related topics, including accent –​wield considerable influence. Scott has millions of subscribers, who are mainly young, and his videos have had over a billion views in total. We can learn too from celebrity scientists such as Alice Roberts, Brian Cox, and David Attenborough, whose accessible and engaging presentation styles have raised public awareness of issues that might once have seemed too dry, technical, or ‘worthy’ to be suitable for prime-​time television. Seeking greater exposure in the press, tied in with efforts to step up pressure on content commissioners to consider TV/​ internet documentaries about sociolinguistic matters, may be a productive path to pursue. Market research in the form of public surveys and focus group discussions would establish how much appetite there might be for content of this kind. Combating accent-​based discrimination will provide the latest generation of sociolinguists with innumerable challenges, for certain, but it is hard to think of a more valuable way of applying their training in the subject.

References Adams, J. & Chapman, J. (2009). Say goodbye to your southern accent: A do-​it-​yourself guide to changing the way you speak. Language Success Press. Aldersley, M. (2018). Zut alor! French MP calls for mockery of accents to be made ILLEGAL. Mail Online, 19 October 2018. Online resource: < www.dailym​ail.co.uk/​news/​arti​cle-​6295​959/​Zut-​alor-​ Fre​nch-​MP-​calls-​mock​ery-​acce​nts-​ILLE​GAL.html>, accessed 18 September 2021. Altendorf, U. (2017). Estuary English. In A. Bergs & L.J. Brinton (Eds.). The history of English (Vol. 5, pp. 169–​186). de Gruyter Mouton. Ashley, L., Duberley, J., Sommerlad, H., & Scholarios, D. (2015). A qualitative evaluation of non-​ ­educational barriers to the elite professions. London Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission. Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Assemblée Nationale (2019). Proposition de loi visant à promouvoir la France des accents (no. 2473). Online resource: < www.assemb​lee-​nation​ale.fr/​dyn/​15/​tex​tes/​l15b2​473_​prop​osit​ion-​loi>, accessed 18 September 2021. Austin, R. (2020). Teaching early reading: The phonics debate. In V. Bower (Ed.). Debates in primary education (­chapter 7). Routledge.

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Accent bias Beal, J.C. (2002). English pronunciation in the eighteenth century: Thomas Spence’s ‘Grand Repository of the English Language’. Oxford University Press. Beal, J.C. (2018). ‘Back to the future’: The ‘new prescriptivism’ in twenty-​first-​century Britain. E-​rea (Revue électronique d’études sur le monde anglophone) 15.2. Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Beal, J.C., Nocera, C., & Sturiale, M. (2008, eds.). Perspectives on prescriptivism. Peter Lang. Bell-​Baker, A. (2020). Linguistic justice: Black language, literacy, identity, and pedagogy. Routledge. Bi, S. (2021). Equality Act 12 years on. Equality Act Review, https://www.equalityactreview.co.uk/_files/ ugd/d09f8e_15d1a29e31594f5f82edd9c6e11c52ec.pdf. Bishop, H., Coupland, N., & Garrett, P. (2005). Conceptual accent evaluation: Thirty years of accent prejudice in the UK. Acta Linguistica Hafniensia 37(1), 131–​154. Blake, R. (1969). Disraeli and Gladstone. Cambridge University Press. Chapman, D. (2019). “Splendidly prejudiced”: Words for disapproval in English usage guides. In B. Bös & C. Claridge (Eds.). Norms and Conventions in the History of English (pp. 29–​48). John Benjamins. Chapman, D., & Rawlins, J.D. (2020). Language prescription: Values, ideologies and identity. De Gruyter Mouton. Clopper, C. (2021). Perception of dialect variation. In J. Pardo, L.C. Nygaard, R.E. Remez, & D.B. Pisoni (Eds.). The handbook of speech perception (2nd ed., pp. 335–​364). Wiley Blackwell. Cole, A., Jeffries, E., & Patrick, P.L. (2022). Ask or aks? How linguistic prejudice perpetuates inequality. The Conversation, 11 March 2022. Online resource: https://​thec​onve​rsat​ion.com/​ask-​or-​aks-​how-​lin​ guis​tic-​prejud​ice-​perp​etua​tes-​ine​qual​ity-​175​839 Coupland, N., & Bishop, H. (2007). Ideologised values for British accents. Journal of Sociolinguistics 11, 74–​93. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English: Prescriptivism and language history. Cambridge University Press. Dingemanse, M., Blasi, D.E., Lupyan, G., Christiansen, M.H., & Monaghan, P. (2015). Arbitrariness, iconicity and systematicity in language. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 19(10), 603–​615. Dixon, J.A., Mahoney, B., & Cocks, R. (2002). Accents of guilt? Effects of regional accent, race, and crime type on attributions of guilt. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 21(2), 162–​168. Dragojevic, M., Fasoli, F., Cramer, J., & Rakić, T. (2021). Toward a century of language attitudes research: Looking back and moving forward. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 40(1), 60–​79. Dragojevic, M., Mastro, D., Giles, H., & Sink, A. (2016). Silencing nonstandard speakers: A content analysis of accent portrayals on American primetime television. Language in Society 45(1), 59–​85. Dunton, B.C., & Fazio, R.H. (1997). An individual difference measure of motivation to control prejudiced reactions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 23(3), 316–​326. Eco, U. (1993). The search for the perfect language, trans. J. Fentress. Blackwell. Fabricius, A. (forthcoming). The history of received pronunciation. In R. Hickey (Ed.). The new Cambridge history of the English language (Vol. 4: Varieties of English in Britain, Ireland and Europe). Cambridge University Press. Fox, S., & Torgersen, E.N. (2018). Language change and innovation in London: Multicultural London English. In N. Braber & S. Jansen (Eds.). Sociolinguistics in England (pp. 189–​213). Palgrave Macmillan. Friedman, S., & Laurison, D. (2020). The class ceiling: Why it pays to be privileged. Policy Press. Gibbons, J. (2003). Forensic linguistics: An introduction to language in the justice system. Blackwell. Giles, H. (1970). Evaluative reactions to accents. Educational Review 22(3), 211–​227. Giles, H., & Smith, P.M. (1979). Accommodation theory: Optimal levels of convergence. In H. Giles & R.N. St. Clair (Eds.). Language and social psychology (pp. 45–​65). Blackwell. Hegarty, P. (2020). Strangers and states: Situating accentism in a world of nations. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 39(1), 172–​179. Hitchens, C. (2010, 3 July). The narcissism of small differences. National Post. Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Holmberg, B. (1964). On the concept of standard English and the history of modern English pronunciation. Gleerup. James, L., & Smith, O. (2018). Get rid of your accent for beginners: The English speech training manual (audiobook). Olga Smith BATCS Global. Jing-​Schmidt, Z. (2021). Metonymy: Mental simplism and our best and worst instincts. Cognitive Linguistic Studies 8(1), 133–​151. Jones, O. (2011). Chavs: The demonization of the working class. Verso Books.

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Dominic Watt, Erez Levon, and Christian Ilbury Kinder, A. (2021, February 9). Accent bias in the law. The Law Society Gazette. Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Kotzur, P.F., Veit, S., Namyslo, A., Holthausen, M.-​A., Wagner, U., & Yemane, R. (2020). ‘Society thinks they are cold and/​or incompetent, but I do not’: Stereotype content ratings depend on instructions and the social group’s location in the stereotype content space. British Journal of Social Psychology 59(4), 1018–​1042. Levon, E., Sharma, D., & Watt, D. (2017–​2020). Accent bias and fair access in Britain, UK Economic and Social Research Council, grant ref: ES/​P007767/​1. Online resource: www.accent​bias​brit​ain.org. Levon, E., Sharma, D., Watt, D., & Perry, C. (2020). Attitudes to Accents in Britain and Implications for Fair Access. Accent Bias in Britain (ABB) project report, ESRC ES/​P007767/​1. Online resource: https://​ accent​bias​brit​ain.org/​wp-​cont​ent/​uplo​ads/​2020/​03/​Acc​ent-​Bias-​Brit​ain-​Rep​ort-​2020.pdf Levon, E., Sharma, D., Watt, D., Cardoso, A., & Ye, Y. (2021). Accent bias and perceptions of professional competence in England. Journal of English Linguistics 49(4), 355–​388. Lippi-​Green, R. (2012). English with an accent: Language, ideology and discrimination in the United States (2nd edn.). Routledge. Llamas, C., Watt, D., & MacFarlane, A. (2016). Estimating the relative sociolinguistic salience of segmental variables in a dialect boundary zone. Frontiers in Psychology 7, 1163. Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Lukač, M. (2018). Grassroots prescriptivism. PhD thesis, University of Leiden. Online resource: , accessed 21 September 2021. Major, L.E., & Machin, S. (2018). Social mobility: And its enemies. Pelican. McDermott, P. (2019). From ridicule to legitimacy? ‘Contested languages’ and devolved language planning. Current Issues in Language Planning 20(2), 121–​139. McKinney, R. (2019). Here’s how to do accent modification: A manual for speech-​language pathologists. Plural Publishing. Mugglestone, L. (1995). Talking proper: The rise of accent as social symbol. Oxford University Press. Murphy, L. (2018). The prodigal tongue: The love-​hate relationship between American and British English. Oneworld Publications. Oakes, P.J., Haslam, S.A., & Turner, J.C. (1994). Stereotyping and social reality. Blackwell. Olson, D.R. (1980). On the language and authority of textbooks. Journal of Communication 30(1), 186–​196. Ozbilgin, M. (2006). Diversity in business: How much progress have employers made? First findings. Online resource: , accessed 20 May 2022. Paver, A., Wright, D., & Braber, N. (2021, August). Accent judgements for social traits and criminal behaviours: Ratings and implications [paper presentation]. Annual conference of the International Association for Forensic Phonetics and Acoustics, Marburg, Germany. Pinet, M., Gan, Y., Evans, B.G., & Iverson, P. (2015, August). Intelligibility of British English accents in noise for second-​language learners [paper presentation]. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Glasgow, Scotland, UK, paper 433. Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Preston, D. (1993). The uses of folk linguistics. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 3(2), 181–​259. Preston, D. (2018). Perceptual dialectology. In C. Boberg, J. Nerbonne & D. Watt (Eds.). The handbook of dialectology (pp. 177–​203). Wiley Blackwell. Reid, S.A., Zhang, J., Anderson, G.L., Gasiorek, J., Bonilla, D., & Peinado, S. (2012). Parasite primes make foreign-​accented English sound more distant to people who are disgusted by pathogens (but not by sex or morality). Evolution and Human Behavior 33(5), 471–​478. Rodenburg, P. (1998). The actor speaks: Voice and the performer. Bloomsbury 3PL. Roessel, J., Schoel, C., & Stahlberg, D. (2020). Modern notions of accent-​ism: Findings, conceptualizations, and implications for interventions and research on nonnative accents. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 39(1), 87–​111. Rosseel, L., & Grondelaers, S. (2019). Implicitness and experimental methods in language variation research. Linguistics Vanguard 5(s1), 20180005. Ryan, E.B., Hewstone, M., & Giles, H. (1984). Language and intergroup attitudes. In J.R. Eiser (Ed.). Attitudinal judgment. Springer. Savage, M. (2015). Social class in the 21st century. Pelican.

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Accent bias Sharma, D., Levon, E., Watt, D., Ye, Y., & Cardoso, A. (2019). Methods for the study of accent bias and access to elite professions. Journal of Language and Discrimination 4, 150–​172. Sharma, D., Levon, E., & Ye, Y. (2021). 50 years of British accent bias: Stability and lifespan change in attitudes to accents. English World-​Wide, 43(2), 135–​166. Shaw, D. (2021, 8 September). CEO secrets: The bra boss busting stereotypes. BBC News. Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Stewart, D.J. (2000). Understanding the Quran in English: Notes on translation, form, and prophetic typology. In Z. Ibrahim, N. Kassabgy & S. Aydelott (Eds.). Diversity in language: Contrastive studies in English and Arabic theoretical and applied linguistics (pp. 31–​48). The American University in Cairo Press. Straaijer, R. (2016). Attitudes to prescriptivism: An introduction. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 37(3), 233–​242. Strycharczuk, P., López-​Ibáñez, M., Brown, G., & Leemann, A. (2020). General northern English: Exploring regional variation in the north of England with machine learning. Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence: Language and Computation 3(48). DOI: 10.3389/​frai.2020.00048. Tajfel, H. (1969). Cognitive aspects of prejudice. Social Issues 25(4), 79–​97. Tajfel, H. (1981). Human groups and social categories: Studies in social psychology. Cambridge University Press. The Week (2019, 13 December). Old wounds: A look at history as ‘Sanskrit vs Tamil’ debate revives in Parliament. The Week, Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Tileagă, C., Augoustinos, M., & Durrheim, K. (2022). The Routledge international handbook of discrimination, prejudice and stereotyping. Routledge. Trudgill, P. (2008). The historical sociolinguistics of elite accent change: On why RP is not disappearing. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia: International Review of English Studies 44, 1–​12. UK Equality Act (2010). Online resource: , accessed 18 September 2021. Watts, R.J. (2000). Mythical strands in the ideology of prescriptivism. In L. Wright (Ed.). The development of standard English 1300–​1800: Theories, descriptions, conflicts (pp. 29–​48). Cambridge University Press. Wells, J.C. (1982). Accents of English (3 vols.). Cambridge University Press.

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4 HISTORIOGRAPHICAL METHODS Nuria Yáñez-​Bouza

1. Introduction1 Broadly speaking, evidence sources for the study of prescriptivism can be divided into usage evidence –​the actual language usage of individual speakers or speech communities –​and precept evidence –​the norms (prescriptive or otherwise) codified in works on language. New perspectives have emerged in the field of normative linguistics since the early 1990s, both theoretically and methodologically. For instance, a great deal of research has been conducted in order to (re)assess the influence of precept on usage,2 thereby demonstrating the importance of a good interpretation and a good understanding of the social, cultural, historical, and linguistic context in which the precept evidence was produced. This chapter, however, draws attention to the sources that document the norms and, in particular, to the historiographical methods that have facilitated the study of the primary sources which have served as instruments of codification, prescription, and prescriptivism in the history of the English language from the eighteenth century to the present day. Yáñez-​Bouza (2022) describes the diversity of methodological approaches as seven major thematic strands, namely (1) individual sources, (2) discourse communities and communities of practice, (3) normative writing tradition, (4) precept corpora, (5) bibliographies and short-​title catalogues, (6) text and digital collections, and (7) historical databases. It is the last strand that is the focus here, with a view to illustrating their value for quantitative and qualitative research. As recent developments, these databases combine some of the traditional strands with new technologies; notably, one of their principal advantages is that they can be updated, enhanced, and enlarged at any time. In particular, this chapter is concerned with three historical databases that cover the three main genres in the field: grammars, with the Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars database (Section 2), pronouncing dictionaries, with the Eighteenth-​Century English Phonology database (Section 3), and usage guides, with the Hyper Usage Guide of English database (Section 4). For each database, I first describe its contents and tools, and then survey several case studies which address a variety of research areas to which they have contributed and to which they can contribute further; cross-​references to the thematic strands mentioned above will be interspersed to signal the rich contribution of the historical databases to the field. The chapter closes with a summary and some notes for future research.

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2. The Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars database (ECEG) 2.1  Database description The Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars database (ECEG) is an electronic database which compiles annotated bibliographic information of eighteenth-​century grammars of English written between 1700 and 1800, enhanced with biographical background on the writers therein.3 The current version includes 323 items by 275 authors, 223 of which have been identified. The use of the term “English grammar” in ECEG refers to a work which (i) discusses the parts of speech and, except in a few elementary works, syntax too; (ii) is written in English, including those which appear in polyglot grammars when it is evident that the purpose is to teach English; (iii) is written by native speakers, with the exception of a small number of “naturalized English speakers” consistently documented in the literature (Sundby et al., 1991, p. 15); and (iv) is printed in the British Isles and, to a lesser extent, the American colonies, again with the exception of a couple of foreign places which were consistently quoted in earlier bibliographic sources. The database includes stand-​alone grammar books as well as subsidiary grammars attached to other types of work, like dictionaries, spelling books, or letter-​ writing manuals. The metadata have been gathered in a systematic way from four types of source published between 1903 and 2011: bibliographies (Strand IV); collections, facsimiles, and reprints (Strand VI); scholarly works (Strand III); and databases and indexes with biographical information. Each item in the database has been coded in the fullest detail possible in 21 different fields (and further sub-​classifications), thematically grouped in three major categories: Grammars, Authors, Sources. The metadata, described in the paragraphs that follow, are freely available online via two interfaces, Browse and Search, and search results can be downloaded in .csv or .json file format. GRAMMARS. Title, in full. Year of publication of the first or earliest edition recorded. The tab Editions documents all the editions and reprints cited in the literature, including the year of publication, the number of the edition, the place of printing, and a brief description (e.g. corrected, enlarged, under a new title, etc.); this amounts to 1,435 different editions/​reprints in total. The annotation of the contents of the grammar is coded in five fields. Type of Work, that is, distinct English grammar books and eight other types such as dictionaries, spelling books, rhetoric/​elocution treatises, or letter-​writing manuals. Divisions of Grammar lists the principal constituents of ‘grammar’, preserving the terminology used in the original source. Subsidiary Contents encompasses punctuation, figurative syntax, examples of bad English, etc. And Target Audience is subdivided into Age, Gender, Instruction, and Specific Purpose. The tab Imprint displays another five fields, which are of particular interest to researchers in the field of book history and book trade: Place of Printing; Printers; Booksellers; Price, that is, of the specific imprint of the item consulted; and Physical Description, in terms of size and page numbers. AUTHORS. Biographical information is documented in five fields: Name (surname, forename) features 223 identified authors of the total 275 writers; Gender; Place of Birth; Occupation, including seven major categories, each comprising a range of jobs (education, politics, religion, etc.); and Biographical Details, such as significant dates in an author’s life, marriage, education, and clarifications about authorship. Recording the place of residence and geographical movements of authors can shed more light on research areas like social networks and discourse communities.

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REFERENCES. The database also notes the particular Holding Libraries of the edition consulted, as well as the Reference Sources from which the information documented in the database has been drawn, including digital collections and facsimile reprint series that provide access to the original materials. The field Comments offers a diversity of observations made by the compilers of the database, such as clarifications about the item annotated, cross-​references to other works/​authors, and amendments to the literature consulted. The notes in this field also reveal the compilers’ scrutiny in discerning series of editions/​reprints of the same grammar and similar but not identical works; they have also traced instances of plagiarism and piracy. ECEG was compiled to facilitate research among the growing research community in the field of normative linguistics and eighteenth-​century grammaticography during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The diversity of the bio-​bibliographic metadata serves primarily as a reference tool for the individual scholar to select a body of sources which would then be consulted and investigated; as already pointed out, ECEG is a practical search engine which “offers the possibility of performing focused searches” (Rodríguez-​Álvarez, 2018, p. 102). Furthermore, the analysis of the descriptive data contained in it can also be the object of study in itself, this with a view to shedding more light on grammar-writing practices in the context of codification and prescription at the macro and micro levels (Yáñez-​Bouza, 2015a; Yáñez-​Bouza & Rodríguez-​ Gil, 2013). In what follows a review is offered of some of the work which has been conducted with data retrieved from ECEG, flagging its interdisciplinary design.

2.2  Doing research with ECEG The metadata recorded in ECEG have contributed to new research on various fronts, qualitatively and quantitatively. First, the systematic categorisation in the Contents section of the database offers fresh insights into the senses of the term grammar in eighteenth-​century grammaticography in three ways: with regard to grammar endorsing primary constituents such as etymology, syntax, orthography, orthoepy, prosody; with regard to subsidiary contents worth including in a grammar book (e.g. figurative syntax, punctuation); and with regard to the diversity of works to which a brief grammar was commonly appended (see Yáñez-​Bouza, 2015a). ECEG thus allows us to complete the account of the “elastic” nature of grammar and to build further on Michael’s (1970) earlier typology (Strand III). The compilation of first editions and subsequent imprints has corroborated general trends reported previously in the literature on the unprecedented growth in grammar production during the second half of the eighteenth century; but such a conclusion can now be drawn on a larger set of sources (cf. Michael, 1970, p. 277; Sundby et al., 1991, p. 14; Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2008, p. 106). Furthermore, ECEG enables the contextualisation of the publication of grammar books in the history of book printing in the British Isles. For instance, Yáñez-​Bouza (2012) has identified two critical peaks in productivity: a first salient increase in the 1730s, which seems to have gone unnoticed in the literature on grammar writing, and a second peak in the mid-​1770s. Both decades have been singled out by book historians as crucial turning points with important repercussions for the dissemination of provincial printing in terms of numbers and locations. ECEG thus yields insights into when and to what extent provincial towns may have contributed as channels for the dissemination of grammars during the cardinal stage of codification. The biographical details recorded in ECEG have revealed interesting patterns. Yáñez-​ Bouza (2011a) maps the origins and whereabouts of grammar writers based on their place 56

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of birth, again little discussed in the literature, and on their place of residence, also largely unexplored; the latter might have shaped their attitudes and led them to write a grammar with a more or less prescriptive approach. The separate coding for the authors’ place of birth and the grammars’ place of printing has also helped to identify Scottish codifiers as a community with common goals and with a shared repertoire (Strand II). Yáñez-​Bouza (2011b) observes that Scottish writers share a predominantly negative attitude towards preposition stranding (discourse community) and, at the same time, their shared repertoire conveys a stronger critical approach and is also more closely related to the canons of rhetoric than that of English grammar writers (community of practice); in this study, the categorisation of the sources was vital in unveiling the role of the canons of rhetoric in the standardisation of preposition stranding in particular. Another rich database field is Subsidiary Contents. This again is a largely underexplored area, but one that calls for further study in order to complete the account of the eighteenth-​ century normative tradition: what else, beyond the rules of grammar, was considered worth including in a grammar book towards improving the linguistic competence and politeness of target readers, and that would also serve to increase the value and use of these books (e.g. Michael, 1970, pp. 195–​197; Yáñez-​Bouza, 2015 pp. 928–​936). Domínguez-​Rodríguez (2016) draws attention to abbreviations and reveals that about 20 per cent of the sources in ECEG include a list of abbreviations and that these lists are complemented with authorial notes on correct usage in more than a third of cases, in line with the normative tone of the century. The author also highlights the importance of this subsidiary content in sociolinguistic terms, notably for matters of style and letter writing. Rodríguez-​Álvarez (2017, 2018) shows how the annotation of subsidiary content coded as “Origins of English language/​of languages” has helped to identify grammars containing historical sketches of the English language which can then be compared with historical notes appended to dictionaries. For her part, Rodríguez-​Álvarez (2016) selects sources which contain directions for reading and contextualises the role of this kind of supplementary material in the elocution movement of eighteenth-​century Britain: it confirms the importance of reading aloud in school instruction and further reveals that the directions for reading in school-​grammars “did not derive, strictly speaking, from the elocution guides, but are rather a parallel product aimed at a younger audience” (2016, p. 126). Another example of how ECEG can help to establish connections between the tradition of grammar writing and the elocution movement is found in Beal (2013), who plots the diachronic development of the emphasis given to pronunciation and elocution in grammar books with subsidiary contents coded as “elocution” or “exercises on pronunciation”, comments on “pronunciation”, and the division of grammar “orthoepy”. Beal shows that many late eighteenth-​century grammarians still regarded “orthography” –​in the broad contemporary sense endorsing letters of the alphabet as well as the sounds which each letter could represent –​ “as an integral component of ‘grammar’ ” (2013, p. 175). ECEG has led to innovative research that connects grammars and lexical dictionaries by examining “dictionary grammars”, which, according to Tyrkkö (2013), had not yet been discussed as a distinct group of texts within the broader category of prescriptive writing. Based on the 30 items documented in the database, this study illustrates the importance of appending rules of grammar in the lexicographical tradition, since not having one “could be seen as a shortcoming by potential customers” (2013, p. 189). Tyrkkö also offers a description of the structure and contents of dictionary grammars by closely scrutinising the original sources and the additional information provided in the database; findings are particularly revealing for instances of piracy and plagiarism. Given that grammars also became a staple part of letter-​writing manuals during the eighteenth century in the context of polite cultural practices, the metadata coded in ECEG have been adopted as reference for 57

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the study of grammar norms in letter writing, including observations on textual networks (see Yáñez-​Bouza, in progress). ECEG has been used for the compilation of precept corpora which are then contrasted with usage corpora (Strand IV). Thus, Yáñez-​Bouza has conducted research on the feature of preposition stranding, drawing metadata from a body of 285 works and 148 authors (Yáñez-​ Bouza, 2015b); her study on double object constructions is based on 99 items from ECEG (Yáñez-​Bouza, 2016b), and for the analysis of the apostrophe she retrieved metadata from 22 distinct grammar books printed in England (Yáñez-​Bouza, 2017a). Thanks to the expanded approach to ‘grammar’ adopted in ECEG, Yáñez-​Bouza (2008a) also identified a broad variety of topics in relation to which preposition stranding was discussed in eighteenth-​century works, themes shared by a number of writers who did not necessarily know (of) each other, such as “transposed” prepositions or “the harmony of the period” (Strand II). The same body of sources retrieved from ECEG was explored à la Sundby et al. (1991) in Yáñez-​Bouza (2008b; 2015b, pp. 65–​82), whereby an extensive inventory of epithets endorsing evaluative judgements was distinguished so as to cover not only negative but also positive and neutral nuances. The bio-​bibliographic data in this historical database has led to the close scrutiny of individual sources (Strand I) in Navest and Sairio (2013) and Percy (2013). The former provides a fresh account of An Easy Introduction to the English Language (1745), published by, and often attributed to, John Newbery, addressing matters such as the intended readership and the history of the publication of the work, drawing a comparison with James Greenwood’s popular grammar books (1711, 1737), also documented in ECEG, and establishing an intriguing connection with Eliza Haywood and The Female Spectator. Percy (2013) makes use of the database to help contextualise the writing of The Young Ladies Guide to the Knowledge of the English Tongue (1715) in terms of contents, readership, and authorship, in comparison with contemporary grammars and spelling books. Finally, ECEG stands as a core bibliographic resource for the research conducted under the auspices of the project The Paratext in Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars: Language and Society (Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria), the findings of which have contributed to the field of paratext and to the understanding of eighteenth-​century grammarians as a discourse community (Strand III). For instance, Rodríguez-​Álvarez and Rodríguez-​Gil (2013) look into common ideological and formal strategies employed in the prefaces to British grammars written for schools (e.g. methodologies, a book’s scope, persuasive strategies), and Domínguez-​ Rodríguez and Rodríguez-​Álvarez (2015) explore textual and interpersonal metacomments in the same kind of sources. For the study of the genre structure of prefaces, Fernández-​Martínez (2016) selects mixed and institutional instruction in grammars by English authors, while Fernández-​Martínez (2014) focusses on school-​g rammars written by English ‘female’ authors for the analysis of their critical voice in exercising authority and producing a persuasive effect on the reader. Domínguez-​Rodríguez (2017) is concerned with grammars written specifically for children in order to trace comments on authors, authorities, and other acknowledged sources that would endorse the book with an air of reliability and validity for teachers and young learners. Furthermore, Yáñez-​Bouza and Rodríguez-​Gil (2016; see also Yáñez-​Bouza, 2017b) have built a text corpus of title-​pages of 147 grammar books printed in England (ca. 10,000 words), and these data then enabled a pragmalinguistic analysis of the lexical strategies employed on the title-​page as “[a]‌‘text community’ (the author, the publisher, the printer) with a shared objective: to persuade prospective readers to purchase the grammar book in question” (Yáñez-​Bouza & Rodríguez-​Gil, 2016, p. 386) (Strand II). For instance, the authors here identified key structural/​layout elements, prescriptive nuances on the lexicon selected, prominent teaching methods, and variety of credentials for the authors to signal authority. 58

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3. The Eighteenth-​Century English Phonology database (ECEP) 3.1  Database description The Eighteenth-​Century English Phonology database (ECEP) is an online database designed for the study of linguistic prescriptivism and historical phonology, which allows users to investigate the social, regional, and lexical distribution of phonological variants in eighteenth-​century English.4 The current version features 11 pronouncing dictionaries written in the second half of the eighteenth century by 10 different authors, and it incorporates phonological evidence in the form of IPA transcriptions for ca. 17,600 records categorised across 27 lexical sets for vowels and five lexical sets for consonants. Designed as a sister to ECEG, ECEP compiles in a systematic way bibliographic metadata about the primary sources and biographical information about their writers. These are (in chronological order) James Buchanan (1757), William Johnston (1764), William Kenrick (1773), William Perry (1775), Thomas Spence (1775), Thomas Sheridan (1780), John Burn (21786), William Scott (1786), John Walker (1791), Stephen Jones (21797), and Stephen Jones (31798). Parallel to the growth of grammar writing, the eighteenth century also witnessed an upsurge in works on elocution, especially during the second half of the century, the heyday of codification and of the rise of prescription. Yet, the field lacked a searchable digital resource comparable to those available in other disciplines (see e.g. Yáñez-​Bouza, 2020, pp. 475–​480). ECEP aims to redress this gap in research materials by offering a tool which enables ‘a comprehensive survey’ of sound variation and change in eighteenth-​century pronunciation, and which caters for the demands of the ‘phonological turn’ observed in Late Modern English studies since the early 2000s (see e.g. Yáñez-​Bouza, 2020, p. 477). The richness of the direct evidence found in such descriptions is of interest to phonologists, dialectologists, and language variationists, in that the eighteenth century is a key period of transition laying the ground for ‘Received Pronunciation’ which would develop in the following centuries (Beal, 2020), and thus deserves to be fully explored. Like ECEG, ECEP is designed as a relational database and lays out the data in 30 different fields across three main categories: Phonology, Work, Author. The contents are freely available online via two interfaces, Browse and Search, and it offers a download function in .csv file format. The web application allows for individual and combined searches, and lexical items can be searched in the entire dataset or in individual works. The compilation of the bio-​ bibliographic details mirrors the methodology described for ECEG in Section 2.1. The fields are as follows: WORKS. Type of Work, Title, Year of Publication (of the edition consulted), Place of Publication, Edition (first edition consulted), Editions (for each subsequent edition/​reprint identified: Year, Number of Edition, Place of Publication, Description), Price, Physical Description (of the item consulted), Target Audience (categorised according to five parameters: Age, Gender, Social Class, Instruction, Specific Purpose), References (from the literature), and Notes (by the compilers). Information from the imprint can be retrieved from the Title field. Additionally, ECEP contains the field Paratext, which lists prefatory material such as grammar sections and introductory notes. AUTHORS. Name, Life Dates, Gender, Social Class, Place of Birth, Occupation (with further categorisation), Works by this Author in ECEP, Biography (e.g. place of residence, other works by this author, etc.). For the compilation of phonology data, ECEP takes Wells’s list of Standard Lexical Sets for the vowel system in present-​day varieties of English as its reference (1982, pp. 118–​120, 127–​168), 59

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and adds to these five supplementary lexical sets of consonants constructed by the database compilers. The use of Wells’s lexical (sub)sets and their associated example words is standard practice in studies of present-​day phonological variation and change and has also been used extensively in historical phonology research. Thus, by retaining the structure of sets and subsets, the data in ECEP can shed new light on whether major distinctions between accent systems in modern English have precursors in the variation attested across the selected eighteenth-​century data sources. Likewise, including the full range of Wells’s example words allows for the detection of differences in lexical distribution between the primary sources, and also between these and the present-​day accents described by Wells. The database fields concerning phonology data in ECEP are: PHONOLOGY. Lexical Set, Lexical Subset, Example Word, IPA Transcription, IPA Variant, Example Word Frequency, Metalinguistic Comments, Metalinguistic Attitude, Metalinguistic Label, Notes (by the compilers). There are 24 lexical sets for stressed vowels and three lexical sets for unstressed vowels: c loth , dre ss, foot, kit, lot, strut, trap (for short vowels); bath , f le e c e, f orc e, g oo se, north , nur se, palm, start, thoug ht (for long vowels); c h oi c e, c ure, face, goat, mouth , near, pri c e, square (for diphthongs); comma, lette r, happy (for unstressed vowels); together they are distributed across 61 subsets. The consonant lexical sets are five, categorised in 10 subsets and 204 example words: the sets deuc e, f eature, and sure address the processes of yod-​coalescence and yod-​dropping; the lexical set h e i r relates to the presence or absence of word-​initial /​h/​; and the lexical set whale is concerned with the pronunciation of ‘wh’ (/​ʍ/​~/​w/​~/​h/​). In all, ECEP provides phonological evidence of eighteenth-​century English for 1,599 example words in each dictionary and a total of 17,589 individual lexical example words. The database incorporates Unicode IPA transcriptions for the relevant segment of each word given as an example of its lexical set or subset. This was necessary because the notation systems used by eighteenth-​century authors were often idiosyncratic and difficult to interpret. The compilers converted the descriptions provided by the authors in the dictionary entries and in the prefatory material to their works, so that ECEP reflects the inventory of categorically distinct sounds in the way that the eighteenth-​century elocutionists document them, avoiding second-​guessing issues of a phonetic nature. Most dictionary entries provide a single pronunciation for the example word in question; when variation is noted by the authors, the variant sounds are also coded in the field IPA Variant. In addition, if authors elaborate further on a context in which there is variation, the passage is recorded in the field Metalinguistic Comments (e.g. difference in meaning, stress patterns, style, or register). If the remarks convey normative attitudes towards either variant, this is further annotated in the fields Attitudes (positive, negative, neutral) and Labels (e.g. ‘vulgar’, ‘improper’). Having authorial metalinguistic discourse concerning variation and/​or change is essential as a means of avoiding phonetic misinterpretations of historical data (cf. Trapateau, 2017). Furthermore, since word frequency may be an influential factor in the choice of variants or in the development of sound changes such as those arising through lexical diffusion, ECEP includes a frequency list with an estimated frequency rate of the lexical item in eighteenth-​century British English, based on the text corpus ARCHER. It should be noted that while ECEP records evidence of variation between the ‘received’ speech of London and of the equivalent in provincial centres such as Edinburgh and Newcastle, it is not intended to be a fully documented database of dialectal pronunciation.

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The potential of ECEP to inform explorations of phonetic and phonological changes has been shown in a number of studies carried out both during and after the database compilation process, as well as in parallel research drawing comparisons between various sources documented in the database itself (see Strand IV). A summary of this is provided in Section 3.2.

3.2  Doing research with ECEP In research conducted during the early stages of compilation of the database, Beal and Sen (2014) investigate the pronunciation of ‘wh’ (/​hw/​~/​w/​~/​h/​) represented in 50 example words of the lexical set whale as documented in nine of the 11 pronouncing dictionaries, data which would then be revisited and fully annotated in ECEP (see Yáñez-​Bouza et al., 2018, pp. 215–​218). The authors acknowledge that, despite the small size of their dataset, the “orderly approach to the data” (p. 218) in ECEP enables them to posit accounts for many of the patterns identified. Tracing the geographical and chronological distribution of the variants has singled out three main trends, such as the London authors’ preference for /​hw/​over /​w/​to avoid the proscribed feature h-​dropping, and Buchanan’s preference for /​hw/​, which contrasts with the preference for /​w/​by two other Scottish authors and may be related to the early date of publication of Buchanan’s dictionary. Contemporary commentary completes the account with observations on which variant is preferred. Besides, the diversity of the example words points to certain lexically based patterns, such as sensitivity to contrast meaning and stress. The case study of yod-​coalescence and yod-​dropping in Beal et al. (2020) is also illustrative of how ECEP can inspire scholars to revisit and enhance earlier investigations (see Beal & Sen, 2015; Yáñez-​ Bouza et al., 2018, pp. 218–​221). The authors present a thorough examination of the lexical sets de uce, feature, and sure with ECEP as the core source, taking into consideration the annotations of the linguistic data transcribed as well as the biographical information about the authors of the dictionaries. The combination of both types of data enables fresh observations on internal motivations for variation and change (stress, phoneme type, word position) and also on external motivations (prescriptive, geographical, social). For instance, the chronological spread of the sources across a 50-​year period has proved relevant for the detection of three stages in the development of yod-​coalescence: it was less common in the earlier sources, it reached a peak with Thomas Sheridan (1780), and then declined again in later sources. Geographical distribution sheds light here in two ways: on the one hand, it singles out a clear pattern in the absence or near-​absence of yod-​coalescence in Scottish authors, which can be interpreted as a precursor to the present-​day distribution reported in Wells (1982, p. 412); on the other, it shows no evidence of the contemporary view that Sheridan’s high level of yod-​coalescence was an Irishism. Another example of significant findings can be found in metalinguistic comments and normative attitudes, which convey abundant evidence of the stigmatisation of yod-​dropping in all contexts and of yod-​coalescence in stressed syllables. Besides, the inclusion of frequency rates for each example word in contemporary British usage helps to pinpoint a few interesting patterns of lexical diffusion, e.g. that high-​frequency words tend to resist change in stressed-​ syllable yod-​coalescence of /​s/​. Hickey (2020) consulted ECEP as a source of “essential information on vowel realisations in specific phonetic contexts for a large number of authors” (2020, p. 545). He looks into both quantity and quality in the transcriptions of the lexical sets trap, bath, palm, and start (with additional observations from the cloth set) and does so in the context of prescriptivism and evidence for sound change. For instance, it is observed that prescriptivists’ statements are not the same across the board and can be ambiguous but “they do serve to shed light on the state

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of flux characteristic of the system of low vowels in late eighteenth-​century English” (2020, p. 565). ECEP thus helps to trace a possible chronology for the changes that must have taken place between the late eighteenth century and the early twentieth century. Beal (2020) also finds evidence in ECEP for the contribution of eighteenth-​century pronouncing dictionaries in shaping what came to be known as ‘Received Pronunciation’, based on the lexical sets face (subset c) and choice (subsets a, b, c): the annotated transcriptions demonstrate the variability at the time, and the metalinguistic comments on variants reveal the criteria used by authors to select the one sound that should be established as the standard. For her part, Mallo-​Alfonso (2017) resorts to ECEP for the study of standard pronunciation in long vowels covering the lexical sets bath, fleece, force, goose, north, nurse, palm, start, thought, and with a focus in the work of a particular author, William Perry (1775). The systematic transcription in ECEP for such a wide array of individual items (688 example words across 11 dictionaries) brings to light the great range of variability in the dictionary of this Scottish author. In addition to the above case studies which address the themes of codification and prescription explicitly, the manifold annotation of the linguistic data in ECEP has contributed to complement earlier work in historical phonology in general. Thus, Beal and Condorelli (2014) examine the cloth lexical set (subsets a and b) based on data from eight of the 11 dictionaries that are now part of ECEP and these reveal diatopic as well as diachronic variation; for instance, there is a clear trend towards a decline in long variants, especially after Thomas Sheridan’s (1780) publication, and ‘northern’ authors seem to be advanced in this respect, or one might argue that lengthening did not in fact occur in the north of England or in Scotland (2014, p. 25). The linguistic evidence gathered in Yáñez-​Bouza’s (2016c) examination of the reflexes associated with the Great Vowel Shift (to use the traditional term) –​2,728 example words for the lexical sets pri c e, f le ec e, fac e, mouth , g oo se, goat –​allows for fresh insights into the stages of development and into the wide-​ranging variability for each of these vowel sets; for instance, while dictionaries show a clear preference for diphthongisation in p ri c e and mouth , the former set shows five variant pronunciations, and the latter 10. In Trapateau (2020) the interest lies in the role played by frequency in the lexical diffusion of bath lengthening, which Trapateau concludes has little influence on the diffusion of this sound change. However, the annotated data in ECEP for bath , palm, thou g h t (209 example words) and other sources allow for a deeper analysis at a time when the change was still in progress and, thus, Trapateau offers a reconstruction of the relative chronology of the spread of long /​a/​to each phonetic environment in the bath words, taking into consideration phonetic analogy and isolated lead words. Likewise, scrutiny of the linguistic data and metadata collected in ECEP has enabled new reports on the parallel development of two consonant sound changes: the loss of rhoticity in the start lexical set and the nur se merger. Dann (2016) observes that both of these respond to a general trend of changes which were geographically diffused from London across the country, and lexically diffused from the highest frequency words to the least. Dann also highlights the value of the database to widen the scope of the study of the nur se set as it includes transcriptions beyond the traditionally reported pronunciations of , , and words. Finally, the annotations in ECEP have facilitated new research that connects the historical phonology of English and Scots. Maguire (2020) makes use of the database as an enriching supplement to the From Inglis to Scots (FITS) database and other Early Modern English sources in order to trace the appearance of owld-​type spellings and their pronunciation in Scots. The linguistic variation coded in ECEP for the lexical sets goat and mouth , the metalinguistic commentary, and the geographical background of writers who were orthoepists, provide critical evidence that the owld pronunciations were a feature of some early forms of Standard English. 62

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4. The Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) database 4.1  Database description Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE; Straaijer, 2014) is a historical database of selected usage guides and usage problems from 1770 to 2010, compiled under the auspices of the project Bridging the Unbridgeable: Linguists, Prescriptivists and the General Public for the study of linguistic prescriptivism from a sociolinguistic perspective, “to investigate English usage in general and the usage guide as a prescriptive genre in particular” (Straaijer, 2015, p. 1). It features 77 usage guides, 123 usage problems, and 6,330 entries overall, and provides metalinguistic commentaries on the usage problems, biographical background about writers/​editors, bibliographic metadata about the guides, and references from the literature. Working on the belief that usage guides are the product of the prescriptivism stage of standardisation which is still much alive in the late twentieth and twenty-​first century, HUGE has been created for the interest of linguists, educators, language professionals, and the general public (Straaijer, 2015, p. 3; Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020a, pp. 7–​9).5 Drawing primarily on Weiner’s description, usage guides in HUGE are understood as manuals which “give advice on questions of divided usage or on usage which is considered incorrect” (Weiner, 1988, p. 173); which deal with ‘tiny fragments’ of various aspects of language, from spelling and pronunciation to lexis and grammar; which contain sociolinguistic commentaries; and which are written for linguistically insecure native speakers and advanced learners (see Tieken-​Boon van Ostade 2017, p. 28; 2020a, p. 43). Usage problems are considered “social constructs that are brought about by optional variability across time and that are explained and justified by social, historical, logical and aesthetic arguments” (Ebner, 2018a, p. 215; also Ebner, 2017, pp. 5–​7). The main selection criterion for the compilation of HUGE is that the usage guide should address grammatical items (though not necessarily exclusively), and thus the majority of the usage problems documented are of a grammatical kind (113/​123), with just a few semantic/​lexical problems and one on spelling included, in that these are pervasive or salient in some way. The collection of sources aims to include well-​ known writers, a fair representation of linguists and women, and the items had to be available electronically or in a suitable format to be scanned. Like ECEG and ECEP, HUGE has been designed as a relational database, structured in five main tables: Usage Guide, Usage Problem, Entry, Persons, and Secondary References. The tool is freely available online upon registration, with full or limited access depending on the copyright of the materials searched for. Users can browse or search its contents, with individual or combined queries. Query results can be exported in .csv and .xml format, and can be printed directly or saved in a PDF file. The fields are as follows: USAGE GUIDE. Title, Year, Original Year (for editions other than the first one), Edition (first edition in most cases), Impression (description of the edition), Author, Editor, Place (of Publication), Publisher, Language Variety, Organisation (alphabetically or by topic). USAGE PROBLEM. Tags, Problem Term, Description, Example. ENTRY. Usage Guide, Usage Problem, Page, Text. PERSONS. Last Name, First Name, Nationality, Occupation. SECONDARY REFERENCE. Title, Year, Edition, In Title (e.g. article in a book or journal), Volume, Issue, Author, Editor, Place, Publisher, Download Link.

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The database spans the period from 1770, with the publication of Robert Baker’s Reflections on the English Language, to 2010, the year before the start of the project. Of the 77 guides, two belong to the eighteenth century, eight to the nineteenth century, and the rest represent each decade of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries. This wide diachronic coverage facilitates new research on the development of usage guides as text type as well as of the treatment of the selected usage problems along the prescriptive-​descriptive continuum. It can also shed more light on the ideology of prescriptivism as a stage in the standardisation process. Sometimes usage guides have both an author and an editor, hence the two separate fields. This, together with other bibliographic information recording the publication history of the usage guides, can lead to intriguing insights into the role of major publishing houses catering for the general public’s linguistic insecurity. The field Language Variety relates to the variety described by the usage guide, which has been classified according to the place of publication. HUGE is concerned with British and American English only (38 items each, plus one that is both), but the database could in theory be expanded to consider other main varieties such as Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand English (Straaijer, 2015, p. 6). The field Problem Term includes the name by which the problem is commonly known (e.g. split infinitive), while the field Tags indicates the nature of the usage problem on the linguistic and metalinguistic level (e.g. adjective, pronoun; morphology, semantics). An Entry refers to the text fragment in the usage guide which discusses that particular usage problem, and sometimes an entry refers to more than one usage problem. This is a powerful feature for full-​text searches in order to study the metalanguage in describing usage problems. The Persons section records information about the writers and editors of usage guides as well as the authors of the secondary references cited in the database. The classification by occupation can reveal differences in guides written by linguists and language professionals, or between these groups and other backgrounds. The research carried out by the Bridging the Unbridgeable team takes a threefold approach: usage problems in the usage guides (primarily based on HUGE), attitudes to language from the general public (usage surveys, interviews, letters to the editor, etc.), and text usage corpora (e.g. COCA, BNC). A survey of work with HUGE follows in Section 4.2.

4.2  Doing research with HUGE Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2020a) presents a wide-​ranging study of usage guides as a “typical product” of the new stage of standardisation prescriptivism (2020a, p. 217), addressing its birth in the 1770s and its development along the descriptive-​prescriptive continuum since, including its growth in popularity and publication in the late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries (see also Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2010). The study contextualises the publication of this type of text also as a commodity for the community of writers and for the community of publishers (Strand II), and discusses five case studies of ‘pet linguistic peeves’ in British and American sources, namely could of, likely, the placement of only, flat adverbs, and try and (Strand IV). The evolution of the genre is examined further in Straaijer (2018a), first, by comparing it with related types of text on language advice and, secondly, by identifying changes in the nineteenth (e.g. format, ‘polemic’ nature), early twentieth (e.g. maturity with Fowler, 1926), and late twentieth and early twenty-​first centuries (professionalisation and entertainment). As noted, the writers of usage guides are perceived of as a community, despite the long timespan from the late eighteenth to the early twenty-​first centuries (Strand II). Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2020a, pp. 69–​98) describes the writers of the usage handbooks in the database with regard to their credentials as language experts and to their motivations for publishing. She also explores the proliferation of this genre and the role of publishers in promoting it (2020a, 64

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pp. 99–​104; also Tieken-​Boon van Ostade 2017, pp. 285–​288). Parallel to the study of shared metadiscourse in normative grammars and pronouncing dictionaries, Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2020a, pp. 149–​180) surveys the metalinguistic commentary in usage guides in comparison with the language of participants in present-​day surveys and of Harper’s Dictionary panellists; this provides evidence of a tradition of disapproval over time. This relates to Chapman’s (2019) inventory of terms of disapproval in nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century usage guides, for instance terms emphasising correctness and social judgements. Kostadinova (2018a) focusses on the shared discourse employed with regard to the non-​literal use of literally in a body of 70 American usage guides published from 1847 to 2014, half of which are drawn from HUGE, and observes a conservative approach to variation and ongoing change on the part of writers, with a tendency to express strong negative attitudes. Lukač (2018a) explores shared rules and shared metadiscourse in printed usage guides, old and new, and in language blogs written in the 2010s: a close examination of the 10 most popular usage problems reveals close similarities, and this lends support to the claim that language blogs are a continuation of the usage guide tradition. We can also note the use of HUGE in order to trace textual connections between normative grammarians and usage guide writers, as Fens-​de Zeeuw (2018) illustrates with regard to the explicit mention of Lindley Murray and Robert Lowth. HUGE has been taken as a reference point for the study of individual usage guides and writers (Strand I). For instance, Straaijer (2016) explores the editions of the Dictionary of Modern English Usage, which affords us the opportunity to trace changes in usage advice from the early twentieth to the early twenty-​first centuries. Fowler’s third edition by Robert Burchfield (1996) is examined in Straaijer (2017) for, as he puts it, “it was generally perceived as a descriptive take on a classic prescriptivist work” (2017, p. 186). In Straaijer (2018b), the author turns to Bryan A. Garner, a prominent figure in the American usage guide tradition, and examines the development of his methodology and descriptive-​prescriptive approach to usage problems in relation to Fowler’s editions; he argues that Garner “is modelling himself and his work on Fowler” (2018b, p. 39). Since HUGE deliberately aims at including women writers, these have also received close attention. For instance, Kostadinova examines the work by Josephine Turck Baker (1910/​1938) in the early American usage guide tradition and her conclusions point to “a slightly different picture” from the account in previous work (2018b, pp. 172, 179–​184). In the British tradition, Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2020b) reviews Caroline Taggart (2010), finding fault in the author’s ipse dixit approach and identifying those whose language is stigmatised and traditionally marginalised in this prescriptive genre, such as sports commentators, estate agents, shoppers, and television presenters (see also Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, this volume). The fact that the number of American and British sources in HUGE is balanced benefits the study of both traditions separately as well as contrastively. Ebner (2017) conducts a thorough analysis of 14 usage problems in the British tradition, including less than, double negatives, Latinate plurals, flat adverbs, the use(s) of like, and dangling participles. Her qualitative survey in 39 guides illustrates not only when a particular disputed usage comes to be regarded as problematical, but also whether and how metalinguistic commentary changes over time. Along the same lines, Ebner (2018b) examines five usage problems (split infinitive, between you and I, differently than, the dangling participle, non-​literal use of literally) in 33 British guides (1770–​2010) and correlates the judgements therein with diachronic change in the range of acceptability from Mittins et al.’s (1970) attitudes to language survey and the attitudes survey collected by Ebner in 2014–​2015. For her part, Yáñez-​Bouza (2017c) resorts to HUGE as a suitable resource to supplement her historical analysis of the apostrophe in eighteenth-​century normative grammars and late twentieth-​century usage (cf. Yáñez-​Bouza, 2017a in Section 2.2); for instance, the 65

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metadata drawn from the usage guides help to refine the categorisation of the treatment of the apostrophe. The tradition of usage guides in America is extensively studied in Kostadinova’s work. Her doctoral thesis (2018c) provides a historical account of both attitudes and usage from 1847 (the date of the first American usage guide) to 2010 with regard to six disputed usage items in 281 entries (ain’t, the discourse particle like, non-​literal literally, negative concord, pronouns in coordinated phrases, the split infinitive). The primary sources are explored in terms of the coverage of the selected language features, their treatment in the usage guides, the metalanguage, and the dimensions of usage. Thus the metadata in HUGE give Kostadinova the opportunity to observe that “prescriptive attitudes as instantiated in the American usage guide tradition are not, as has often been suggested, entirely divorced from the facts of actual language usage”, and that “the twentieth century is indeed the period of the prescription stage in American English” (2018c, pp. 247–​250). Three of these disputed usages –​ain’t, the discourse particle like, non-​literal literally –​are also discussed in Kostadinova (2018d), based on the examination of 60 American usage guides for the period 1847–​2014, 38 of which are drawn from HUGE. The evidence collected suggests that while strong negative attitudes are conveyed in the metadiscourse on the three features, each is treated differently in sociolinguistic terms, with nuances associated with a lack of education, lack of knowledge of the meaning of the word, or informality and casualness. The wide diachronic coverage of the database is also of value in identifying how usage guide writers react to current and ongoing changes in language (cf. Anderwald’s (2012) approach to normative grammars). The latter point is further emphasised in Kostadinova (2018a) with regard to the semantic shift in the meaning of literally, and Kostadinova (2020) with regard to the split infinitive. On the one hand, Kostadinova concludes that writers of usage guides are conservative in reacting to change in the use of non-​literal literally, and that their proscriptions seem to have no effect, since usage has in fact increased (corpus-​based data) and attitudes show general acceptability (survey-​based data), especially among younger speakers. On the other, the entries on split infinitive reveal a change towards acceptability in the second half of the twentieth century, with the prescription against this feature “losing ground and becoming less stringent” (2020, pp. 111–​112). Research based on HUGE has also shed new light on the similarities and/​or differences between the tradition in British and American publications. For instance, Tieken-​Boon van Ostade and Kostadinova (2015) ran a full-​text search for sources discussing the usage problem have went (vs have gone) and the bibliographic metadata reveal that 11 of the 12 hits belong to usage guides printed in America, although the matter was first raised in the British work by Baker (1770). Tieken-​Boon van Ostade and Ebner’s (2017) study of four usage problems brings to light further interesting patterns: the placement of only is an old chestnut in both traditions, with both showing a trend towards prescriptive rather than proscriptive attitudes after the 1950s; the dangling participle is a relatively new usage problem in both American and British sources and both show a predominant negative attitude; usage guides in the two traditions become less critical also towards the split infinitive, but this change is appreciated slightly earlier in American usage guides; and the use of try and (for try to) is mostly discussed in American publications, which in turn show a more proscriptive attitude than British sources. In Tieken-​Boon van Ostade’s (2020a, pp. 105–​148) analysis of five ‘pet peeves’ (see above) it is shown that, overall, usage guides do not as a rule become more descriptive, either in America or in England. Flat adverbs are further discussed in Lukač (2018b) and Lukač and Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2019). The metadata in HUGE suggest that thusly is uniformly condemned, but that as a usage problem thusly is more entrenched in the American tradition. Concern about quicker/​more quickly is raised more often in British sources, but both American and British 66

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guides point to stylistic differences here. Register and style are also features signalled in the two traditions regarding go slow/​slowly, but some British guides characterise this usage as American English. In another case study, the full-​text search tool in HUGE facilitates the identification of regional and diachronic differences with regard to the treatment of irregular verbs in usage guides, as discussed in Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2019). HUGE has also been taken as the reference source for research on “grassroots prescriptivism”, as it provides a canon of prescriptive advice with which to compare online usage guidance in very recent platforms such as language blogs/​podcasts and Wikipedia Talk pages (Lukač, 2018c). For example, the qualitative examination of the metalinguistic commentary in the Grammar Girl points to a continuation of the tradition with shared rules and shared metadiscourse (top 10 most common usage problems), despite the change in the medium, and thus language blogs can be seen as part of the umbrella genre of language advice, which Lukač (2018c) has labelled ‘Usage Guide 2.0’ (see also Lukač, 2018a). At the same time, the lexico-​ semantic analysis of the Wikipedia entries shows that usage guides tend to be more narrative and personal in style, whereas the Wikipedia entries tend to be more referential, citing other sources, and also tend to include linguistically related lexical items.

5. Outlook In the study of codification, prescription, and prescriptivism, questions as to where the normative rules come from, what the nature of the norms is, and who wrote or created such precepts have been examined from various perspectives theoretically and methodologically. Regarding the latter, the study of the normative tradition has greatly benefited from the rapid developments in the field of corpus linguistics and the digital humanities, which have facilitated access to primary sources in digital form and have also provided us with new technologies for compiling and annotating data, as well as for making data and metadata available at the user-​end; this is in parallel with, or as a complement to, corpus-​based studies (Szmrecsany & Bloemen, this volume; Yáñez-​Bouza 2016a), experimental methods, and attitude research (Watt, Levon, & Ilbury, this volume). Among the diverse methodological approaches that have emerged in this context, historical databases combine data and metadata which are systematically compiled, with the added value of being freely available via user-​friendly interfaces; another advantage is that they can be updated, enhanced, and enlarged at any time. This chapter has described three resources for the study of codification, prescription, and prescriptivism in English with regard to grammars (Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars database), pronouncing dictionaries (Eighteenth-​Century English Phonology database), and usages guides (Hyper Usage Guide of English database). It is hoped that the description of their compilation procedures and contents will inspire the development of similar resources for the study of linguistic prescriptivism in other languages. Research institutes and library units are increasingly expanding their digital humanities resources at a rapid pace and historical databases are relatively low cost for them. From a research perspective, the review of case studies based on these historical databases has illustrated the wide-​ranging areas of investigation in which they have been applied, and there is scope for further investigation in these as well as in new fields. For instance, ECEG includes metadata for more female authors than those studied in the early days of the field (Strand I and Strand II), it contains a variety of American sources for comparative studies with English and/​or Scottish items (Strand II), and it also offers notes on plagiarism practices across sources/​authors. Regarding ECEP, many lexical sets remain unexplored systematically, and previous work could be revisited in order to provide a fuller empirical account. In relation to usage guides, there is a wealth of avenues to exploit the usage problems documented in HUGE in depth and, besides, 67

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this resource opens an attractive path for research in comparative studies between precepts laid out in usage guides and those in grammar books. In addition to their value as research tools, these three historical databases can be used in teaching historical (socio)linguistics at undergraduate and postgraduate level. As Wallis (2020) points out with regard to ECEP, databases like these are “a valuable intermediary between students/​teachers and the source material” (2020, p. 592), thanks, for instance, to the documentation of metalinguistic commentary, and thus find themselves in line with the ‘pedagogical turn’ in recent courses on Linguistics as a means for students to gain insights into how historical resources are designed and compiled from historical primary sources.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Xunta de Galicia, Axudas para a Consolidación e Estruturación de Grupos de Referencia Competitiva (GRC, grant no. ED431C2021/​52) for generous financial support. 2 See Yáñez-​Bouza (2016a) on studies concerning the eighteenth century and Anderwald (2012, 2019) on measuring the success of prescriptivism and nineteenth-​century language change. 3 ECEG was first made publicly available at the University of Manchester from 2010 to 2016. Since 2019 ECEG has been hosted by the Institute of Analysis and Textual Applications (IATEXT), Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, following a smooth migration to a completely new web platform and a remodelling of the initial design. Yáñez-​Bouza & Rodríguez-​Gil (2013; cf. Rodríguez-​Gil & Yáñez-​Bouza, 2009) provide a full description of the database contents, sources, compilation, and web interface. 4 ECEP was compiled during the years 2013–​2016 with technical support from the Humanities Research Institute, The University of Sheffield, which hosts the web-​based application. It was first made publicly available in 2016 and a slightly updated version was released in November 2020. Yáñez-​Bouza et al. (2018) and Yáñez-​Bouza (2020) offer a full description of the database contents, web interface, and its place in the context of historical phonology. At the time of writing, work is underway to enlarge the database with a new consonant set. 5 HUGE was compiled from 2011 to 2014 and was released in the year of its completion (Straaijer, 2014). Straaijer (2015) presents a manual with details of its contents and of the web interface, and Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2020a, pp. 56–​57, 222–​223) provides the complete list of usage guides and usage problems collected. On understanding the usage guide in the context of the project, and the criteria for the selection of sources, see Straaijer (2018a) and Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2020a, pp. 38–​68).

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Nuria Yáñez-Bouza Lukač, M. (2018a). From usage guides to language blogs. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides. History, advice, attitudes (pp. 107–​125). Oxford University Press. Lukač, M. (2018b). What is the difference between thus and thusly? E-​rea, 15(2). https://​doi.org/​10.4000/​ erea.6152 Lukač, M. (2018c). Grassroots prescriptivism. LOT. Lukač, M., & Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2019). Attitudes to flat adverbs and English usage advice. In S. Jansen & L. Siebers (Eds.), Processes of change. Studies in late modern and present-​day English (pp. 159–​ 182). John Benjamins. Maguire, W. (2020). The origins of owld in Scots. English Language and Linguistics, 24(3), 569–​589. Mallo-​Alfonso, M. (2017). Phonology in eighteenth-​century English dictionaries: Variation and change in long vowels [Unpublished master’s dissertation, Universidade de Vigo]. Michael, I. (1970). English grammatical categories and the tradition to 1800. Cambridge University Press. Mittins, W. H., Salu, M., Edminson, M., & Coyne, S. (1970). Attitudes to English usage. An enquiry by the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne. Institute of Education English Research Group. Oxford University Press. Navest, K., & Sairio, A. (2013). John Newbery’s An Easy Introduction to the English Language (1745): Audience, origin, and the question of authorship. Transactions of the Philological Society, 111(2), 242–​278. Percy, C. (2013). J. Matlock’s Young Ladies Guide to the Knowledge of the English Tongue (1715): Contextualising the first grammar of English for ladies. Transactions of the Philological Society, 111(2), 223–​241. Rodríguez-​Álvarez, A. (2016). “ ‘Tis not so easy a matter to read well”: Directions for reading aloud in eighteenth-​century English grammars. Moderna Språk, 110(2), 105–​132. Rodríguez-​ Álvarez, A. (2017). An approach to the historical sketches of the English language in eighteenth-​century grammars of English. Language & History, 60(2), 79–​94. Rodríguez-​Álvarez, A. (2018). Cataloguing the first histories of the English language written from the late 16th to the end of the 18th century. Historiographia Linguistica, 45(1–​2), 99–​132. Rodríguez-​Álvarez, A., & Rodríguez-​Gil, M. E. (2013). Common topics in eighteenth-​century prefaces to English school grammars: An application of the ECEG database. Transactions of the Philological Society, 111(2), 202–​222. Rodríguez-​Gil, M. E., & Yáñez-​Bouza, N. (2009). ECEG-​database: A bio-​bibliographic approach to the study of eighteenth-​century English grammars. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade & W. van der Wurff (Eds.), Current issues in Late Modern English (pp. 141–​170). Peter Lang. Straaijer, R. (2014). Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE). http://​huge.ullet.net/​ Straaijer, R. (2015). The Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) database User Manual. Leiden. https://​ brid​g ing​theu​nbri​dgea​ble.com/​hug​edb/​huge-​user-​man​ual/​ (version 20150218). Straaijer, R. (2016). Time for a new (but not ‘New’) Fowler. Review. English Today, 32(2), 57–​61. Straaijer, R. (2017). A perspective on prescriptivism: Language in reviews of The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade & C. Percy (Eds.), Prescription and tradition in language establishing standards across time and space (pp. 185–​201). Multilingual Matters. Straaijer, R. (2018a). The usage guide: Evolution of a genre. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides. History, advice, attitudes (pp. 11–​29). Oxford University Press. Straaijer, R. (2018b). Modern English usage from Britain to America: Bryan Garner follows Henry Fowler from A Dictionary of Modern American English Usage to Garner’s Modern English Usage. English Today, 34(4), 39–​47. Sundby, B., Bjørge, A. K., & Haugland, K. E. (1991). A dictionary of English normative grammar 1700–​1800. John Benjamins. Taggart, C. (2010). Her ladyship’s guide to the Queen’s English. National Trust. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2008). The 1760s: Grammars, grammarians and the booksellers. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), Grammars, grammarians and grammar-​writing in eighteenth-​century England (pp. 101–​124). De Gruyter Mouton. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2010). The usage guide: Its birth and popularity. English Today, 26(2), 14–​23. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2017). Perspectives on standardization: From codification to prescriptivism. In L. J. Brinton (Ed.), English historical linguistics. Approaches and perspectives (pp. 276–​302). Cambridge University Press. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2019). Usage guides and the age of prescriptivism. In B. Bös & C. Claridge (Eds.), Norms and conventions in the history of English (pp. 7–​28). John Benjamins.

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Nuria Yáñez-Bouza Yáñez-​Bouza, N. (In progress). Norms and usage in letter-​writing manuals in the long eighteenth century. Research strand in the project Unlocking the Mary Hamilton Papers. www.mar​yham​ilto​npap​ers.alc.man​ ches​ter.ac.uk/​ Yañez-​Bouza, N., Beal, J. C., Sen, R., & Wallis, C. (2018). ‘Proper’ pro-​nun-​∫ha-​∫hun in eighteenth-​ century English: ECEP as a new tool for the study of historical phonology and dialectology. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 33(1), 203–​227. Yáñez-​Bouza, N., & Rodríguez-​Gil, M. E. (2013). The ECEG database. Transactions of the Philological Society, 111(2), 143–​164. Yáñez-​Bouza, N., & Rodríguez-​Gil, M. E. (2016). The title-​page in eighteenth-​century grammar books. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 52(4), 369–​392.

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5 CORPUS-​BASED APPROACHES TO PRESCRIPTIVISM Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Dieuwertje Bloemen

1. Introduction Students of prescriptivism often strive to evaluate the success of prescriptivist recommendations (do language users actually listen?). Professional linguists have also sought to assess the facticity of prescriptivist conceptions of how language works or should work (is it really true that getting rid of variation makes life easier for language users?). To accomplish these goals, going empirical and examining actual language usage –​and, possibly, changes in language usage over time –​is indispensable. One of the methodologies in the linguistic toolbox that is specialized in doing exactly this sort of thing is known as corpus linguistics. Corpus linguistics draws on one or more usage corpora –​defined as bodies of “naturally occurring language” (McEnery et al. 2006, p. 4) –​for the sake of conducting some sort of linguistic analysis. Thus, the advantage of relying on corpora to put prescriptivist recommendations and convictions to the test is that corpora provide direct access to usage data. The disadvantage, particularly when we want to test the success of prescriptivist recommendations, is that linking any patterns we see in corpus data to prescriptions or proscriptions is ultimately subject to interpretation. This is because corpora do not provide explicit information about why speakers or writers use particular linguistic patterns. Clever triangulation with other usage facts or data sources, such as precept corpora (parlance of Auer 2006, p. 34: collections of grammars that systematically document prescriptivist recommendations), is necessary to empirically evaluate the presence or absence of a link between prescriptivism and usage. That said, in the best-​case scenario, all that we can obtain with the help of corpus methodologies is correlations. Causality is more difficult to establish, and requires interpretation of the correlations: do prescriptivist recommendations shape language usage, or does language usage shape prescriptivist recommendations? The question of whether prescriptivist recommendations can have an influence on actual language usage is a matter of current debate in the literature, and we will conclude that while the jury is still out on the extent to which prescriptivist recommendations can shape usage, there is a tendency toward scepticism about the success of prescriptivism in recent and empirically sophisticated corpus-​based research. Therefore, in Sections 2 and 3, we review a representative collection of reasonably recent corpus-​based studies that address the question of whether precepts can shape language usage. We hasten to add that there is a large body of corpus-​based literature that casually invokes prescriptivism on the interpretational plane; conversely, much DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-6

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work primarily dedicated to the study of prescriptivism reports corpus examples and patterns to some extent. This is why we take the liberty to restrict attention in this chapter to work that takes a sufficiently empirical and rigorous approach to bridging the gap between corpus analysis and the analysis of pre-​and proscriptions. Section 2 will specifically review corpus-​based studies that conclude that prescriptivism can (at least to some extent) have an impact on usage, while Section 3 turns to a discussion of corpus-​based research that fails to obtain a substantial correlation between the prescriptivist recommendations and actual usage patterns. In Section 4, we move on to a discussion of what corpora have to say about a recurrent theme in prescriptivist discourse: that variation is messy and inconvenient, and that a particular syntactic or semantic function should be associated with one form and one form only (and vice versa). As we shall see, corpus-​based evidence suggests that language variation does not actually seem to inconvenience language users. Section 5, then, offers some concluding remarks.

2.  Yes, prescriptivism can shape language usage So, the corpus-​ linguistic literature provides conflicting evidence, or conflicting interpretations of corpus data, as to the question of whether prescription can affect language use. This section will review representative studies that conclude from corpus study that prescriptivist recommendations can in fact shape language usage. Langer (2000) (for related work, see also Langer 2001) is concerned with the tun-​periphrasis (‘do’-​periphrasis), as in (1), in varieties of German. (1) Das täte mich schon interessieren. ‘This I would find interesting’ Exemplification from Langer 2000, p. 289 The construction is attested in present-​day non-​standard varieties of German, but is fairly absent from, and in fact proscribed in, Modern Standard German, where (1) would be paraphrased as Das würde mich schon interessieren, thus without the tun-​periphrasis. What can diachrony tell us about the history of this proscription? To address this question, Langer examines a usage corpus of 127 Early New High German texts drawn from the Heidelberger Korpus, in which the texts cover a number of regional dialects and various text types. Analysis shows that the tun-​periphrasis was fairly widespread in earlier (written) varieties of German: the construction occurs in 30 to 40 per cent of the texts, and there are no clear differences in terms of regional dialect, text type, or diachrony (Langer 2000, p. 314). Analysis of a parallel precept corpus covering the Early New High German period reveals that, starting in the sixteenth century, language mavens tended to consider the tun-​periphrasis useless (particularly in poetry) because it was said to not contribute semantic meaning to an utterance. In later periods –​starting in the eighteenth century –​the construction was not only considered useless semantically but also a feature of lower-​class speech and/​or of regional dialect speech. Therefore, after carefully discussing the reason why the disappearance of the tun-​periphrasis could not have been a change from below, Langer (2000) reckons that the absence of the tun-​periphrasis from Modern Standard German is due to a change from above, fueled by negative prescriptivist commentary and the stigmatization of the construction. In summary, the tun-​periphrasis is a construction that was denied access to Standard German thanks to prescriptivist activities by language mavens: usage of the tun-​periphrasis was at first considered bad poetry, then bad formal German, and then bad German, in general (Langer 2000, p. 314).

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Gustafsson (2002) investigates variant past participle forms of the English irregular verb to write – ​writ, writt, wrote (as in (2)), wrott, and written (which is now the standard form) –​in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the standard paradigm was in the process of being fixed. (2) Fanny is to come and spend some time here in the Winter; [...]. You would be astonish’d to know in what a manner she is courted, and almost adored by all the Wits –​[...]. Mrs. Montagu, who holds herself up in the Clouds, has wrote her two letters [...], and wherever she goes, she is follow’d and address’d as if she was Pope. Exemplification from Gustafsson 2002; source of the original quotation: Hutton 1905, 46 Usage data come from a custom-​compiled corpus of personal letters written in the period. The precept corpus covers 25 prescriptive grammars published between 1653 and 1788. Analysis of the usage corpus reveals that usage at the time was in flux, that there was variation galore, and that today’s standard form written was overall not the majority variant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, especially not in the earlier data, although –​crucially –​its market share increased from 14 to 28 per cent in the time period under study. At the same time, the vast majority of grammars surveyed prioritized the form written. From this prioritization and the concurrent frequency increase of written in the usage data, Gustafsson (2002) concludes that the eventual establishment of the form written in standard English is, to a large extent, due to prescriptivist interference. Two features in the grammar of English take center stage in Auer & Gonzalez-​Diaz (2005), namely, the subjunctive, and the double comparative. Both features are studied on the basis of usage corpora covering the Early and Late Modern English period –​specifically, the Helsinki Corpus (Rissanen et al., 1993) and A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (Biber et al., 1994). Matching precept corpora cover 27 grammars for the subjunctive, and some 18 grammars for double comparatives. As to the subjunctive, here we are actually dealing with a linguistic variable covering three variant forms: the inflectional subjunctive (3a) versus the periphrastic subjunctive (3b) versus the indicative form (3c). The study restricts attention to the occurrences of these forms in adverbial clauses introduced by selected conjunctions, such as if. (3)  a.  … if God be infinite in power b.  If a trunk should divide itself c.  if it is not their own fault Exemplification from Auer & Gonzalez-​Diaz 2005, p. 322 Analysis of the precept corpus reveals that eighteenth-​century prescriptive grammarians were aware of the overall decline of the inflectional subjunctive (which was well under way in Late Modern English), that they worried about the usage of the indicative form, and that they linked the inflectional subjunctive with higher education levels and better social positions. In the usage corpus, we see an overall decrease of the inflectional subjunctive, and a concurrent rise of the indicative form. With regard to double comparatives, as in (4), grammar writers were generally hostile toward double comparatives. In the usage corpus, this hostility is matched by a generally low frequency of the construction.

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(4)  Patients who have hypotension can expect longer, more healthier lives Exemplification from Auer & Gonzalez-​Diaz 2005, p. 325 Actually, double comparatives disappeared from usage before the seventeenth century, long before prescriptivists could have had any impact on usage. Against this backdrop, the study concludes that “prescriptivism is a factor to take into account when considering the progression of the inflectional subjunctive; by contrast, in the case of the double comparative, it can only be considered a mere reinforcing factor of a process that was set in motion much earlier” (Auer & Gonzalez-​Diaz 2005, p. 336). In summary, then, Auer & Gonzalez-​Diaz conclude that prescriptivism can shape usage to some extent. However, its influence cannot be properly evaluated without bearing in mind preceding changes in usage. In English, we also see variation between what is called “preposition stranding”, i.e. end-​ placed prepositions, as in (5a), and constructions where the preposition precedes the head, as in (5b). (5)  a.  That tiny hole is the place which the mouse escaped from b.  That tiny hole is the place from which the mouse escaped. Exemplification from Yáñez-​Bouza 2006 While we know that preposition stranding is widespread in informal and/​ or colloquial English, stigmatization of preposition stranding in more formal speaking and writing styles is customary in prescriptive grammars and style guides. In fact, this stigmatization may be one of the best-​known proscriptions in English. To explore the history of this stigmatization, Yáñez-​Bouza (2006) (for related work, see also Yáñez-​Bouza 2015) investigates usage of, and attitudes towards, preposition stranding in the eighteenth century. Her precept corpus covers 285 works by 149 different prescriptive grammarians from 1700 to 1800. What emerges from an investigation of this precept corpus is that many grammar writers proscribe preposition stranding primarily because the construction has no equivalent in the grammar of Latin, and because so-​called prepositions should, by virtue of the etymology of the label, precede noun phrases, not follow them. In addition, the prescriptivist literature surveyed by Yáñez-​Bouza (2006) fosters a generally “anti-​variationist” (see also Sundby 1998, p. 476) attitude against the availability of different ways of placing prepositions. Yáñez-​Bouza (2006) then matches these sentiments with a usage corpus covering six formal and informal eighteenth-​century English prose genres drawn from the Century of Prose Corpus (Milic 1995). An analysis of the usage corpus reveals that the frequency of preposition stranding declined substantially between 1680–​1740 and 1740–​1780. Yáñez-​Bouza (2006) argues that this frequency decline coincides with a change in writing styles in the middle of the eighteenth century, involving an abandonment of conversational writing styles and a greater orientation toward “correct” and “polite” English as codified in prescriptive grammars. On this basis, Yáñez-​Bouza (2006) concludes that prescriptivism clearly impacted written usage in the eighteenth century, and that the decline of preposition stranding in written English during the eighteenth century is a change from above, fueled by prescriptivism.

3.  No, prescriptivism cannot shape language usage Recall now that the issue of whether prescription can shape language use is a debated one in corpus linguistics circles. In this section, we summarize corpus-​based research that concludes that prescriptivist advice is, on the whole, fairly ineffective. 76

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Poplack and Dion (2009) undertook a study of constructions expressing future temporal reference in spoken Canadian French, in which we find robust variability between the synthetic future (as in (6a)), the periphrastic future (as in (6b)), and the futurate present (as in (6c)). (6)  a.  Ça ira peut-​être mieux demain. ‘Maybe it will go better tomorrow.’ b.  Tu sais, on va vous fusiller, demain matin, à cinq heures. ‘You know, we are going to shoot you tomorrow morning at 5 o’clock.’ c.  Aujourd’hui on mange du boeuf, demain on mange du lard. ‘Today we eat beef, tomorrow we eat lard.’ Exemplification and translations from Poplack & Dion 2009, p. 558 French, as the authors note, is a particularly interesting language to study for students of prescriptivism because French is a highly codified language with a long prescriptivist tradition (Poplack & Dion 2009, p. 558). Probably due to this tradition, the idea that the variants in (6) are different ways of saying the same thing (to use the parlance of Labov 1972, p. 188) has not been sitting well with both prescriptive and descriptive grammarians, who have been busy trying to assign particular functions or meanings to particular variants. This negative attitude toward variability is referred to by the authors as the “doctrine of form–​function symmetry” (Poplack & Dion 2009, p. 557). Poplack and Dion (2009) is different from other studies reviewed so far because it compares prescriptivist recommendations to usage in spoken (not written) language. Furthermore, the focus in Poplack and Dion (2009) is not so much on text frequencies (how often do people use particular forms?) but on the conditions and contexts in which speakers use particular forms. In other words, the study uses the variationist methodology in the spirit of, e.g., Labov (1982). Like the other studies reviewed so far, Poplack and Dion (2009) investigate a precept corpus and a usage corpus. The precept corpus is the Recueil historique des grammaires du français (RHGF), which covers prescriptive discourse over five centuries (CE 1530 to present) in 163 grammars of French. As to usage, Poplack and Dion rely on two corpora: The Ottawa-​ Hull French Corpus (Poplack 1989), which covers contemporary spoken French; and the Récits du français québécois d’autrefois (Poplack & St-​Amand 2007), a corpus of audio recordings made in the 1940s and 1950s. Between them, these two usage corpora cover spontaneous speech over an apparent-​time span of more than a century (given that the speakers in the Récits du français québécois d’autrefois were born in the latter half of the nineteenth century). Analysis of the precept corpus reveals that while the existence of different future markers is often acknowledged, most grammars deny that these markers are actually different ways of saying the same thing. That is, it is denied that the future markers are paraphrasable or interchangeable, contrary to variationist evidence (see e.g. Poplack & Turpin 1999). The strategy of denial that is of particular interest to the study is that of assigning each variant a particular function of meaning. It turns out that prescriptive grammars are not particularly consistent in attributing specific functions or readings to certain future markers –​there is, in fact, a lot of variability between grammars. The complementary analysis of the usage corpus then proceeds as follows: Poplack and Dion (2009) use the variationist methodology to carefully define the variable context, to retrieve relevant future marker tokens from the corpus material, and to subsequently annotate these tokens for a number of contexts/​readings, inspired by recommendations in the prescriptive literature: polarity (negative vs affirmative), speech style (more formal vs less formal), adverbial specification (present vs absent), and temporal distance (distal vs proximal). A multivariate analysis of the resulting dataset shows that polarity is overall the strongest factor, in that the synthetic future is strongly preferred in negative contexts, while temporal distance is the 77

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weakest factor. Of note, polarity is not even mentioned as a relevant factor in the majority of prescriptive grammars. In summary, not only have prescriptive recommendations about future temporal reference in French not had an impact on spoken usage, but they are also actually quite unrelated to what is going on in spoken language: Systematic comparison of grammatical treatments with actual speaker behavior shows virtually no correspondence between the motivations offered in the literature and those constraining actual variant choice. Prescriptive efforts to explain variability, by ascribing to each variant form a dedicated reading or context of use, have had no effect on speech, which is shown to be governed by a powerful set of tacit variable constraints. These in turn are unacknowledged by the grammatical tradition. The result is a great and growing disconnect between the variable rules governing speech and the normative dictates that underlie the notion of the standard. Poplack & Dion 2009, p. 557 Also using the variationist methodology, Hinrichs et al. (2015) investigate variation between the relativizers which, that and zero in restrictive relative clauses after inanimate antecedents in late twentieth-​century written-​edited-​published British and American English. The relevant variability is exemplified in (7): (7)  a.  This is the house that Jack built. b.  This is the house which Jack built. c.  This is the house _​_​_​Jack built. Exemplification from Hinrichs et al. 2015, p. 808 The study’s point of departure is that relative that has been reported to be on the rise at the expense of relative which in the second half of the twentieth century, potentially thanks to various style guides prescribing that and proscribing which in restrictive relative clauses. These frequency shifts Hinrichs et al. also observe in their usage corpus: the Brown family of corpora (Hinrichs et al., 2010), which cover 1960s and 1990s English, with the shift being particularly pronounced in American English texts. But is prescriptivism really the root cause for these usage changes? The complication is that that is also known to be more widespread in informal and colloquial English, so the frequency expansion of relative that could also be attributed to the ongoing colloquialization of the norms of written English (see Mair 2006, p. 88 for discussion). Therefore, the study endeavours to test whether prescriptivism or colloquialization is responsible for the observable frequency shifts. Now, one notable difference between Hinrichs et al. (2015) and other studies we have reviewed in this chapter so far is that Hinrichs et al. do not use a precept corpus as such to link frequency shifts to prescriptivism. Instead, the study uses multivariate variationist techniques to model variation between relativizers as a function of language internal predictors (e.g. relative clause length), stylistic predictors (e.g. genre) and –​ crucially –​the rate with which individual writers also comply with other recommendations from the prescriptivist literature (e.g. avoidance of stranded prepositions, avoidance of passive constructions). The goal is to determine the extent to which choice of relative that correlates with uptake of other precepts. The reasoning is that if the that-​shift is a prescriptivism-​fuelled change, writers who avoid which would also comply with other canonical precepts (no passives, no stranding, etc.). Results indicate, however, that writers who avoid relative which do not also consistently comply with other normative rules: yes, which-​avoiders are also passive-​avoiders

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(consistent with the prescriptivism account), but on the other hand which-​avoidance does not correlate with the avoidance of preposition stranding. These findings lead Hinrichs et al. (2015) to argue that writers act according to a dominant logic of (in)formality; as we saw, relative that, although prescribed by prescriptive recommendation, also happens to be more colloquial/​ informal compared to bookish which. Likewise, passive constructions have a formal feel to them, while preposition stranding is a feature of the vernacular. So, it makes sense that writers who prefer informal/​colloquial relative that also avoid passive constructions but do not disfavour preposition stranding. In conclusion, then, Hinrichs et al. (2015, p. 806) argue that the rise of relative that in written English is a case of “institutionally backed colloquialization-​ cum-​Americanization”: we are primarily dealing with a colloquialization phenomenon led by American English, but one where the colloquial variant also happens to be prescribed by style guides. In a paper entitled “Empirically Charting the Success of Prescriptivism”, Anderwald (2018) conducts three case studies on morphosyntactic changes in nineteenth-​century English (for related work using broadly the same methodology, see also Anderwald 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013, 2014, 2016). Anderwald’s point of departure is that the nineteenth century is an interesting period to investigate since, compared to earlier periods, relatively few changes occurred, and relative stability is often suspected to be due to stabilizing and/​or conservative prescriptivist activities (Anderwald 2018, p. 89). Anderwald’s research design is the customary one in the corpus-​based prescriptivism-​versus-​usage literature: a precept corpus is pitted against various usage corpora. The precept corpus is a collection of 258 nineteenth-​century grammars (CNG for short), both British and American, and published between 1800 and 1900. To investigate usage, Anderwald relies on the publicly accessible Corpus of Historical American English (Davies 2012). The morphosyntax phenomena and/​or changes subject to study include the rise of the progressive passive, as in (8); and the rise of the get-​passive, as in (9). (8)  the bridge is being built Exemplification from Anderwald 2018, p. 93 (9)  the house got built Exemplification from Anderwald 2018, p. 90 In the nineteenth century, the progressive passive competed against the passival (as in the bridge was building), while the get-​passive competed, as it still does, with passive constructions involving auxiliary be (as in I was caught in the rain). To make a long story short, according to the precept corpus, both the progressive passive and the get-​passive tended to be proscribed by nineteenth-​century grammars. This, however, did not stop their spread according to usage data provided by the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA for short) (but see below). The third feature under study concerns regularization of past tense inflections of the verbs leap (leapt versus leaped) and plead (pled versus pleaded). Here, the story is slightly more complicated: according to usage data, the verb leap attested an increase in regular past tense forms in the nineteenth century, but a marked increase of irregular past tense forms in the twentieth century; as to the verb plead, the irregular past tense form pled is extremely rare in usage data. These usage patterns match to some extent prescriptivist recommendations. But even so, it remains unclear according to Anderwald (2018) whether usage follows recommendations or recommendations follow usage. In summary, based on these case studies, Anderwald’s short answer to the question of whether prescription had an effect on the phenomena under study is

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rather “No” (Anderwald 2018, p. 103). At the same time, it has to be conceded that sometimes there are some effects, which tend to be “text-​type specific, short in duration, small in scale, and reversible” (Anderwald 2018, p. 88).

4.  But do prescriptivists actually have a point? The corpus-​based perspective As we have seen in many of the studies reviewed thus far, the generalization is that prescriptivist recommendations are generally anti-​variationist (see, e.g., Sundby 1998, p. 476; Yáñez-​ Bouza 2006 for discussion). This is another way of saying that variation between different ways of saying the same thing is either denied, or if it cannot be denied, particular variants are proscribed. Alternatively, an attempt is made to assign specific functions or readings to certain variants. This is what Poplack and Dion (2009, p. 557) call “the doctrine of form–​function symmetry”.1 To illustrate, let us revisit variation between which and that as restrictive relativizers in English, the phenomenon investigated in the study by Hinrichs et al. (2015), which we reviewed in Section 3. This alternation in the grammar of English is fairly old –​the King James Bible, for example, attests robust variability between which and that. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, prescriptive grammarians noticed this variability, beginning with the Englishman Henry Fowler in 1926 (Fowler & Crystal 2009, p. 634–​638), and started to proscribe which in restrictive (also known as ‘defining’) relative clauses. The rationale is, presumably, that because which is the only option in non-​restrictive standard English relative clauses, that should –​by virtue of symmetry –​be the only option in restrictive relative clauses. This so-​called which-​hunting rule (see e.g. Bohmann & Schultz 2011 for discussion) is codified in Strunk and White’s (1999) influential style guide The Elements of Style (see Pullum 2009, 2010 for critical reviews) as follows: The use of which for that is common in written and spoken language (“Let us now go even unto Bethlehem, and see this thing which is come to pass.”). [...] But it would be a convenience to all if these two pronouns were used with precision. Careful writers, watchful for small conveniences, go which-​hunting, remove the defining whiches, and by so doing improve their work. Strunk & White 1999, p. 59; emphases ours So, the message is that grammatical variation (in this case, variation between relative which and that) is imprecise, inconvenient, and suboptimal. And crucially, this is a testable claim. Is it really the case that grammatical variation inconveniences language users? This is the question that Gardner et al. (2021) seek to address, utilizing a corpus-​based research design and restricting attention to language production (as opposed to comprehension). Gardner et al. (2021) reckon that if synonymy avoidance is a design feature of human language, then grammatical variation should indeed be suboptimal; and this suboptimality in turn can be measured by checking if variation contexts attract production difficulties. Gardner et al. (2021) stress that beyond prescriptive rhetoric about “convenience” and “precision”, it is indeed conceivable that grammatical variation may trigger production difficulties. The reason is not because choosing is difficult per se (after all, using language always entails plenty of choice-​ making). Rather, we know that grammatical variation is typically conditioned probabilistically by numerous contextual constraints (e.g., constituent length, animacy, information status, and so on). Thus before language users can make a choice, they need to check the linguistic 80

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context for these various constraints. It is plausible that this extra cognitive work indeed increases production difficulties. Production difficulties are operationalized by Gardner et al. (2021) as being proportional to the extent to which production triggers disfluencies. Two kinds of disfluencies are considered: overt disfluencies, i.e., filled pauses, which are transcribed as um and uh in corpus material; and silence, i.e. unfilled pauses (>130 ms) in the speech stream between words and utterances. The interpretation is that utterances with more filled or unfilled pauses are considered to have been harder to produce, consistent with the literature on disfluencies (see, e.g., Christodoulides 2016; Merlo & Mansur 2004; Grézause 2017). In this spirit Gardner et al. (2021) retrieve disfluencies from a subset of the Switchboard corpus of US American English (Godfrey et al., 1992), a resource covering relatively spontaneous telephone conversations from the early 1990s. The subset under investigation specifically covers young female speakers (born in or after 1960) from the South Midland dialect area (285 transcripts/​conversations, 34 speakers). This restriction is designed to control for known sex, age, and regional patterns (Wieling et al. 2016). Note that young South Midland females constitute one of the largest demographic categories in the Switchboard corpus of US American English. Switchboard is richly annotated, among other things, for disfluencies. Along with disfluencies, Gardner et al. (2021) also retrieve grammatical variation contexts, i.e. sites where speakers demonstrably (according to the variationist literature) had the choice between using different grammatical ways of saying the same thing (Labov 1972, p. 188). In this endeavour, they rely on a list of 20 major grammatical alternations in mainstream North American English, including e.g., the variation between relativizer which and that but also other well-​known grammatical variables. Consider (10), which is an authentic example of co-​occurring variation contexts and disfluencies: (10) Well, um, um, um, I think that uh once we get the house refinanced, we’re gonna probably try to take our free tickets and either go to Cancun or do the little uh trip to Ca-​Southern California and then on up to (592ms) Utah. Switchboard F/​SM/​born 1961 In the conversational turn in (10), we find five filled pauses (three ums and two uhs), and one unfilled pause lasting 592 ms. Also, there are in all three grammatical variation contexts: a complementizer omission/​retention context (I think that once we get the house refinanced vs I think _​_​_​once we get the house refinanced) (see e.g. Tagliamonte & Smith 2005); a future marker variation context (we’re gonna probably try to take our free tickets vs we will probably try to take our free tickets) (see e.g. Cacoullos & Walker 2009); and a try complementation context (we’re gonna probably try to take our free tickets vs either we’re gonna probably try and take our free tickets or we’re gonna probably try taking our free tickets) (see e.g. Lind 1983). The crucial question is: do turns or texts with more grammatical variation contexts attract more disfluencies than texts with fewer grammatical variation contexts? Now, if believers in the doctrine of form–​function symmetry had a point in arguing that variability is inconvenient and messy, then grammatical variation contexts should indeed attract disfluencies. However, the sophisticated analysis that Gardner et al. (2021) report indicates otherwise: there is in fact no such attraction. For expository reasons, in what follows, we simplify their analysis by re-​analysing the dataset using a more straightforward repeated measures correlation analysis.2 This technique determines the overall within-​ individual relationship among paired measures assessed on two or more occasions, keeping in mind that the dataset 81

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Figure 5.1  Repeated measures correlation of disfluencies per 100 words and variable contexts per 100 words. Dots represent individual speakers per conversation. Lines represent regression lines for individual speakers across multiple conversations. Left: correlation between filled pauses and grammatical variation contexts; right: correlation between the total length of unfilled pauses (silence) and grammatical variation contexts.

includes speakers taking part in multiple conversations in the Switchboard corpus. In the plots in Figure 5.1, the dots represent individual speakers per conversation. The lines represent regression lines for individual speakers across multiple conversations and thus indicate how speakers produce more or less disfluencies in function of the number of grammatical variation contexts in the conversation that they are currently engaging in. Again, given the doctrine of form–​function symmetry we would expect that speakers show more disfluencies if the ongoing discourse is richer in grammatical variation contexts. But in the left plot in Figure 5.1, which shows the values for filled pauses, we see that speakers show fewer disfluencies in conversations with more grammatical variation contexts: the individual regression lines are sloping downward, and the overall correlation coefficient quantifying the relationship between filled pauses and grammatical variation contexts is negative and marginally statistically significant. The right plot in Figure 5.1 illustrates the relationship between unfilled pauses (silence) and grammatical variation contexts. Here, the regression lines are sloping upwards ever so slightly in the direction that we would expect given the doctrine of form–​function symmetry, but we note that the overall correlation coefficient is very close to 0 (which indicates a very weak to non-​existing relationship) and, importantly, not statistically significant. The take-​home message is that there is no evidence whatsoever that higher frequencies of grammatical variation contexts correlate positively with disfluencies, as they should if variation was indeed inconvenient, as prescriptivists imply. As Gardner et al. (2021) show, zooming in on the level of individual conversational turns, controlling for lexical complexities, and factoring in turn duration (both via mixed-​effects regression analysis and conditional random forest modelling) and so on complicates the analysis but does not change the basic story: grammatical variation does not appear to be particularly difficult for language users, and any increases in cognitive load caused by choice are likely to offset by various benefits that having grammatical choices affords, such as managing information density and optimizing rhythmic structure (see Gardner et al. 2021, pp. 29–​30 for discussion).

5. Conclusion Our review of the literature on correlations between prescriptivist recommendations and usage patterns in naturalistic corpus data has shown that the jury is still out on whether prescriptivism 82

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can shape usage: some analyses find that prescription has influenced usage (Section 2), while other studies fail to obtain substantial effects, or even any effect at all (Section 3). There appears to be a tendency, however, that (probably thanks to increased empirical sophistication) more recent research is more sceptical about the success of prescriptivism than less recent research. The mainstream position in recent years is perhaps best epitomized by what Anderwald (2018,p. 89) considers a reasonable compromise position: prescriptivist activities are not a roaring success on the whole, but they may have subtle effects here and there: in particular registers, in written language (but not in spoken language), or in certain time periods. As always, more corpus-​ based research is clearly needed to further investigate the conditions under which prescriptivist recommendation may have an effect. In particular, we need more research on effects on spoken language usage. Except for Poplack and Dion (2009) and Gardner et al. (2021), the studies reviewed in this contribution all deal with written language. The plausible hypothesis is that spoken language is even more resistant to prescriptivist pressures than written language, but it would be helpful to be able to confirm or deny this by scrutinizing actual usage data. But even if their advice is not always heeded, are prescriptivists in principle correct to warn that variation between different ways of saying the same thing is inconvenient and suboptimal? The corpus evidence we have reviewed in Section 4 indicates that this warning does not have a factual basis: grammatical variation does not make speech more disfluent, and therefore does not inconvenience speakers. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that grammatical variation also does not inconvenience writers when they produce text. Of course, the evidence we discussed concerns primarily language production, and it is in principle conceivable (though perhaps unlikely) that variation does complicate comprehension after all. Future research, corpus-​based or experimental, may want to investigate the extent to which the doctrine of form–​function symmetry (Poplack & Dion 2009, p. 557), so dear to prescriptivists and language mavens, does or does not find legitimation in comprehension data.

Notes 1 It can be argued that the doctrine of form–​function symmetry to some extent also informs thinking in theoretical linguistics: consider, e.g., the Principle of Isomorphism asserted by Haiman (1980, p. 516: “[T]‌he commonly accepted axiom that no true synonyms exist, i.e. that different forms must have different meanings”), or the principle of No Synonymy introduced by Goldberg (1995, p. 67: “[I]f two constructions are syntactically distinct, they must be semantically or pragmatically distinct”). 2 The analysis was conducted using the rmcorr package in R (Bakdash & Marusich 2018).

References Anderwald, L. (2011). Norm vs variation in British English irregular verbs: the case of past tense sang vs sung. English Language and Linguistics 15(01), 85–​112. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S13606​7431​0000​298. Anderwald, L. (2012a). Clumsy, awkward or having a peculiar propriety? Prescriptive judgements and language change in the 19th century. Language Sciences 34(1), 28–​53. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.lang​ sci.2011.06.002. Anderwald, L. (2012b). Variable Past-​Tense Forms in Nineteenth-​Century American English: Linking Normative Grammars and Language Change. American Speech 87(3), 257–​293. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1215/​00031​283-​1958​327. Anderwald, L. (2013). Natural language change or prescriptive influence?: Throve, dove, pled, drug and snuck in 19th-​century American English. English World-​Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 34(2), 146–​176. https://​doi.org/​10.1075/​eww.34.2.02and. Anderwald, L. (2014). Measuring the success of prescriptivism: quantitative grammaticography, corpus linguistics and the progressive passive. English Language and Linguistics 18(1), 1–​21. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1017/​S13606​7431​3000​257.

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Benedikt Szmrecsanyi and Dieuwertje Bloemen Anderwald, L. (2016). Language between description and prescription: Verbs and verb categories in nineteenth-​ century grammars of English. Oxford University Press. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​acp​rof:oso/​978019​0270​ 674.001.0001. Anderwald, L. (2018). Empirically charting the success of prescriptivism: Some case studies of nineteenth-​ century English. In C. Suhr, T. Nevalainen, & I. Taavitsainen (Eds.), From data to evidence in English language research (pp. 88–​108). Brill. https://​doi.org/​10.1163/​978900​4390​652_​005. Auer, A. (2006). Precept and practice: The influence of prescriptivism on the English subjunctive. In C. Dalton-​Puffer, D. Kastovsky & H. Schendl (Eds.), Syntax, style and grammatical norms: English from 1500–​2000 (pp. 33–​53). Lang. Auer, A., & Gonzalez-​Diaz, V. (2005). Eighteenth-​century prescriptivism in English: A re-​evaluation of its effects on actual language usage. Multilingua, 24(4), 317–​341. Bakdash, J. Z., & Marusich, L. R. (2018). Rmcorr: Repeated Measures Correlation. https://​CRAN.R-​ proj​ect.org/​pack​age=​r mc​orr. Biber, D., Finegan, E., & Atkinson, D. (1994). ARCHER and its challenges: compiling and exploring A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers. In U. Fries, G. Tottie, & P. Schneider (Eds.), Creating and using English language corpora: papers from the Fourteenth International Conference on English Language Research and Computerized Corpora (pp. 1–​13). Rodopi. Bohmann, A., & Schultz P. (2011). Sacred that and wicked which: Prescriptivism and change in the use of English relativizers. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Annual Symposium About Language and Society–​ Austin. http://​stud​ento​rgs.ute​xas.edu/​salsa/​proc​eedi​ngs/​2011/​09TL​F54-​Boh​mann​Schu​ltz.pdf. (29 March, 2013). Cacoullos, R. T., & Walker, J. A. (2009). The Present of the English Future: Grammatical Variation and Collocations in Discourse. Language, 85(2), 321–​354. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​lan.0.0110. Christodoulides, G. 2016. Effects of cognitive load on speech production and perception [Doctoral thesis, Université catholique de Louvain]. Davies, M. (2012). Expanding horizons in historical linguistics with the 400-​million word Corpus of Historical American English. Corpora, 7(2). 121–​157. https://​doi.org/​10.3366/​cor.2012.0024. Fowler, H. W., & Crystal, D. (2009). A dictionary of modern English usage. Oxford University Press. Gardner, M. H., Uffing, E., Van Vaeck, N., & Szmrecsanyi, B. (2021). Variation isn’t that hard: Morphosyntactic choice does not predict production difficulty. PLOS ONE, 16(6), e0252602. https://​doi.org/​10.1371/​jour​nal.pone.0252​602. Godfrey, J. J, Holliman, E. C., & McDaniel, J. (1992). SWITCHBOARD: telephone speech corpus for research and development. In IEEE International Conference on Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP-​92 (Vol. 1, pp. 517–​520). Inst. of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. Goldberg, A. E. (1995). Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. University of Chicago Press. Grézause, E. Le. (2017). Um and Uh, and the expression of stance in conversational speech [Doctoral dissertation, University of Washington]. Gustafsson Oldireva, L. (2002). Variation in usage and grammars: the past participle forms of write in English 1680–​1790. Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics, 2. www.let.lei​denu​niv.nl/​ hsl_​shl/​Oldir​eva%20G.htm. Haiman, J. (1980). The Iconicity of Grammar: Isomorphism and Motivation. Language, 56(3), 515. https://​doi.org/​10.2307/​414​448. Hinrichs, L., Smith, N., & Waibel, B. (2010). Manual of information for the part-​of-​speech-​tagged, post-​ edited ‘Brown’corpora. ICAME Journal, 34, 189–​231. Hinrichs, L., Szmrecsanyi, B., & Bohmann, A. (2015). Which-​hunting and the Standard English relative clause. Language, 91(4), 806–​836. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​lan.2015.0062. Hutton, W. H. (Ed.). (1905). Budford papers being letters of Samuel Crisp to his sister at Budford; and other studies of a century (1745–​1845). Archibald Constable. Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic patterns. University of Philadelphia Press. Labov, W. (1982). Building on empirical foundations. In W. Lehmann & Y.Malkiel (Eds.), Perspectives on Historical Linguistics (pp. 17–​92). Benjamins. Langer, N. (2000). Zur Verbreitung der tun-​ Periphrase im Frühneuhochdeutschen. Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik, 67(3), 287–​316. Langer, N. (2001). Linguistic purism in action: How auxiliary tun was stigmatized in Early New High German. Walter de Gruyter.

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Corpus-based approaches to prescriptivism Lind, Å. (1983). The variant forms try and/​try to. English Studies, 64(6), 550–​563. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1080/​001383​8830​8598​291. Mair, C. (2006). Twentieth-​century English: History, variation, and standardization. Cambridge University Press. McEnery, T., Xiao, R., & Tono, Y. (2006). Corpus-​based language studies: An advanced resource book. Routledge. Merlo, S., & Mansur, L. L. (2004). Descriptive discourse. Journal of Communication Disorders, 37(6), 489–​ 503. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.jcom​dis.2004.03.002. Milic, L. T. (1995). The Century of Prose Corpus: A half-​million word historical data base. Computers and the Humanities, 29(5), 327–​337. Poplack, S. (1989). The care and handling of a mega-​corpus. In R. Fasold & D. Schiffrin (Eds.), Language change and variation (pp. 411–​451). John Benjamins. Poplack, S., & Dion, N. (2009). Prescription vs. praxis: The evolution of future temporal reference in French. Language, 85(3), 557–​587. Poplack, S., & St-​Amand, A. (2007). A real-​time window on 19th-​century vernacular French: The Récits du français québécois d’autrefois. Language in Society, 36(05). https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S00474​0450​ 7070​662. Poplack, S., & Turpin, D. (1999). Does the Futur have a future in (Canadian) French? Probus, 11(1). https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​prbs.1999.11.1.133. Pullum, G. K. (2009). 50 years of stupid grammar advice. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 55(32). Pullum, G. K. (2010). The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style. English Today 26(02), 34–​44. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S02660​7841​0000​076. Rissanen, M., Kytö, M., & Palander-​Collin, M. (Eds.). (1993). Early English in the computer age: Explorations through the Helsinki corpus, Topics in English Linguistics 11). De Gruyter Mouton. Strunk, W., & White, E. B. (1999). The Elements of Style (4th ed.) Longman. Sundby, B. (1998). Syntactic variation in the context of normative grammar. In M. Rydén, I. Tieken-​ Boon van Ostade, & M. Kytö (Eds.), A reader in Early Modern English, pp. 475–​484. Peter Lang. Tagliamonte, S., & Smith, J. (2005). No momentary fancy! The zero ‘complementizer’ in English dialects. English Language and Linguistics, 9(2), 289–​309. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S13606​7430​5001​644. Wieling, M., Grieve, J., Bouma, G .Fruehwald, J., Coleman, J., & Liberman, M. (2016). Variation and change in the use of hesitation markers in Germanic languages. Language Dynamics and Change, 6(2), 199–​234. https://​doi.org/​10.1163/​22105​832-​00602​001. Yáñez-​Bouza, N. (2006). Prescriptivism and preposition stranding in eighteenth-​century prose. Historical Sociolinguistics and Sociohistorical Linguistics, 6. www.let.lei​denu​niv.nl/​hsl_​shl/​prep​osit​ion%20st​rand​ ing.htm. Yáñez-​Bouza, N. 2015. Grammar, rhetoric and usage in English: preposition placement 1500–​1900. Cambridge University Press.

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6 PRESCRIPTION AND NORMATIVITY IN THE EVOLUTION OF INNER-​C IRCLE ENGLISHES Pam Peters

1.  Introduction: prescriptivism and the evolution of varietal norms In the evolution of world Englishes, the forces of prescription and normative discourse1 are constantly in play with the living norms of language usage. The input variety arriving with each wave of colonial settlers adapts itself to the changed regional, social, and cultural contexts of its use. Established social structures are modified in colonial societies with their mixed and constantly changing populations of immigrants with different social, dialectal, and language backgrounds. The interplay among varieties of English in the new linguistic habitat results in dialect levelling (Trudgill, 1986). Contact with languages other than English can be a further factor in developing the settlers’ variety of English (Denis & D’Arcy, 2018). While all these factors impact on the norms of speaking and writing for inner-​circle Englishes,2 the first generations of settlers and immigrants naturally maintain a sense of the norms and standards (Peters, 2020) of the matrilect they bring from the home country, which prevails in the exonormative phase3 of the new regional variety. Prescriptive notions about “correct” usage would thus be rooted in the home variety for settlers aware of and challenged by somewhat different norms evolving in the new regional habitat. While these new varietal features are becoming “nativised” (in the sense of becoming embedded in the postcolonial society and culture), the settlers’ descendants may still defer to the standards and prescriptions of their matrilect, before there are published references on their regional variety, such as dictionaries, usage guides, and grammars, as instruments of codification (Schneider, 2007, pp. 52, 56). Once these references are published, the variety and its norms and regional features may be better represented and endorsed, depending on the type of instrument, its size, and authorship (Peters, 2021b). In principle the variety is now endonormative, i.e. deferring to its own norms. Yet the editors of dictionaries and authors of usage books may be disinclined to recognize ongoing variation in usage, including new regional norms (see below, Section 2). They may be unaware of linguistic differences between younger and older people, or may disallow them by selectivity or explicit proscription. Institutional needs, such as those of publishing houses in constraining variation to ensure editorial consistency, and those of educational authorities to 86

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teach the “standard” language (Cameron, 1995), tend to hinder the acceptance of new regional norms, and help to maintain matrilectal patterns of usage. Public anxiety about the security of “standard English” (Honey, 1997) can continue in the final phase of varietal evolution (differentiation), as new social or ethnic varieties develop alongside from the “mainstream” variety (Leitner, 2004). Those who advocate acceptance of language variation and change may be confronted with fierce opposition from conservative forces, as was linguist Jean Aitchison with her 1996 Reith Lectures The Language Web on the BBC (Aitchison, 1997). Prescriptivism is a continuous phenomenon in the evolution of settler varieties of English and the formation of their notional standard forms. The dominance of first-​language speakers of English, as in Australia and Canada (Denis & Darcy, 2018), empowers them to critique the emerging norms. The availability of regional dictionaries and usage guides during the endonormative phase of varieties of English —​with or without prescriptivism -​-​may not put an end to contestation over the norms of usage (Peters, 2017). Normative statements made in dictionaries and usage guides may be ad hoc generalizations or based on linguistic evidence. This chapter compares the prescriptive elements in contemporary Australian and Canadian instruments of codification for the same variables, to explore the relationship between prescriptivism and the ongoing norms of usage in their respective language habitats.

2.  Instruments of codification: prescriptivism and normativity Though instruments of codification (style manuals,4 usage guides, dictionaries) are all associated with endonormativity by articulating the linguistic norms of a regional variety, some are inherently more prescriptive than others, by virtue of their function and/​or form. The most specifically prescriptive are the style manuals associated with publishing houses, which are used to provide consistent spellings and punctuation practices on selected points of variability for all its publications. They mandate a single spelling where there are common alternatives, as with -​or/​-​our and -​ize/​-​ise, by means of normative or prescriptively worded statements.5 Style manuals that are regularly updated in successive editions are likely to have more sustained influence. When these “house” style manuals are widely used by other publishing houses, their selections become prescriptions by default for the editorial profession across the range of local publishing, and they can generate hyperstandardization (Cameron, 1995, pp. 47–​50). In some few cases, a style manual originating in house style becomes the reference for a discipline world-​wide (Howell, 1983, pp. 57–​8). The Chicago Manual is one such, though it embraces alternative style conventions from a spectrum of the humanities, and its advice is often more descriptive than prescriptive, recognizing diversity in style practices. As vehicles of prescriptivism, usage guides are by nature much more varied, depending on the authorial stance (Algeo, 1991), and their willingness to take account of the norms of current usage (Peters & Young, 1997). Internally they may be somewhat inconsistent. Even Fowler, whose prescriptions from Modern English Usage (1926) are still invoked by some, was himself occasionally descriptive, as in his measured treatment of which v. that, -​ise v. -​ize, and -​or v. -​ our in relation to their actual usage. Garner in Modern American Usage (2016, p. xliv) declares himself a “descriptive prescriptivist”, although the ad hoc judgements of acceptability in his “language change index” are in the ipse dixit tradition,6 without reference to other authorities or normative evidence of actual usage. The outstanding pioneer of a fully descriptive usage guide is Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Gilman, 1989). It examines the history of usage prescriptions in the light of citations that illustrate alternative expressions in play over time, and uses them to temper conventional prescriptions. Since then, usage guides with a similarly descriptive stance, such as the Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage (1997) and the Cambridge 87

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Guide to English Usage (Peters, 2004), have made use of large computerized databases (corpora) of contemporary English writing and speaking, to describe the current norms and inform their advice on usage. But usage guides are always selective as to which elements of current usage are treated, and do not aim to be comprehensive in their coverage of the lexicon like dictionaries. Dictionaries in principle offer much greater scope for articulating the linguistic features of regional variation. But this potential is always relative to their size: a small printed general dictionary can only include a subset of the total vocabulary in circulation, and is unlikely to list alternative forms of a given word. Smaller dictionaries have less room to present emerging uses of words in additional definitions, and so the contents are normative by selection. The absence of (regional) alternatives can be taken by dictionary readers as indicating that they don’t exist and should be shunned –​whatever the dictionary’s size. When major institutions such as government, education and law refer to the dictionary for settling language issues, they lend it prescriptive force in relation to what is included, and proscriptive force in relation to whatever is excluded. Apart from the limitations of size, the first generation of regional English dictionaries for inner-​circle Englishes were published by exogenous publishers who typically used a pre-​existing wordlist as the matrix for the regional dictionary, and added a quota of regional words to support its claim to be regional (Peters, 2021b). While regional lexicographers may have been involved in compiling these additions, they were rarely invited to revise the whole wordlist to take account of variations in local usage. Dictionaries are constrained in their coverage of linguistic norms by their conventional formats. A single headword is always the point of entry, and though an alternative spelling may be recognized, the first spelling is naturally understood by readers as normative usage (Straaijer, 2015, p. 234). Dictionary formalism is thus inherently normative in prioritizing a particular form, which may or may not be supported by evidence of usage. Many large desk dictionaries, e.g. the Oxford Dictionary of English (Stevenson, 2010), add brief “usage notes” here and there on what they regard as points of contention, to provide editorial comment on them. Often they are cautionary, using generalized prescriptive or normative statements, though they sometimes provide quantitative information on current usage trends to help readers make informed decisions. Apart from these occasional comments, the dictionary’s editorial stance is pervasive, in its selection of headwords and policy on recognizing alternatives. Despite the association of these “instruments of codification” with the endonormativity of inner-​circle Englishes, all are constrained by their forms and functions in the extent to which they represent the emerging norms of the regional variety. Instead they embody more and/​ or less explicit forms of prescriptivism. They nevertheless serve to symbolize the identity and partial independence of the regional variety from the input variety (Schneider, 2007, p. 48).

3.  Theoretical and empirical aspects of prescriptivism Theoretical approaches to prescriptivism have developed relatively recently, focusing on the phenomenology of prescriptivism and public attitudes to language prescriptions. They foreground the sociological aspects of usage reception and commentary among the general public, as in Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene (1995), discussing pervasive social attitudes that support prescriptive stances on language in education and the publishing industry. This seminal work was extended sociolinguistically by Curzan (2014), with closer analysis of the different types of prescription (institutional and individual), as well as the metadiscourses they are embedded in. Curzan identifies four different prescriptive functions: standardising, restorative, stylistic, politically driven, and shows that politically driven prescriptions are most likely to have an impact on actual usage. The interplay between prescriptivism and the media (“in, for, and by the media”) and its role in maintaining prescribed usage is explored by several contributors to 88

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Straaijer’s (2015) special issue of the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. In his introduction he flags the importance of attitudes in prescriptivism, since they are “normative statements about the social order” rather than individual expressions of likes and dislikes. Other researchers in the Dutch HUGE project ‘Bridging the unbridgeable’ (2011–​2016)7 put the spotlight on ‘grass roots‘support for prescriptivism. People’s opinions and convictions about language, expressed in letters to newspaper editors and complaints to broadcasting authorities (Gill, 2017, Lukač, 2018), probably help to maintain the prescriptive momentum in the community. Research on prescriptivism relating to English usage has brought to light regional divergences, and differences in the spectrum of attitudes expressed. A study of the judgements of 34 American and British usage guides from the second half of the twentieth century found a wide range of attitudes to individual prescriptions from positive to negative among the US writers (Peters & Young, 1997). Whereas the attitudes expressed in their UK counterparts clustered across the middle of the scale, though skewed towards the negative. Generational differences in attitudes to usage within the UK were found by Mittins et al. (1970, p. 18–​20) in a survey of attitudes held by more than 450 teacher trainees, English teachers, university lecturers, examiners in English, and other professionals in industry, public relations, administration, aged between 21 and 65+​. They found that the proportion of prescriptive responses was typically higher for the examiners, lecturers and teachers, and relatively more frequent among older respondents, suggesting that they tend to be more ‘censorious’ about language. This age-​related finding was partially replicated by Ebner (2018) on two of three variable items she presents, suggesting that the age factor may be item-​specific. She also tested the responses on 111 informants, categorized as students, teachers and non-​educationalists. The third group she treated as her “public” respondents, to find that they were highly prescriptive on two of three items presented, again signaling variability in relation to the individual item. It should be said that her “public” was more heterogenous than the other two. This problem is also inherent in identifying the three major groups who engage with prescriptivism as linguists, prescriptivists and the public, as Straaijer (2015, p. 237) acknowledges. It is likewise problematic to assume that linguists are necessarily ‘anti-​purist’ (Osthus, 2016, pp. 339–​340), as has been highlighted by Cameron’s (1995) work. Clearly there are subcultures among linguists as well as any English-​ speaking community. The efficacy of normative and prescriptive statements on language usage has been increasingly tested in empirical research based on large computer databases (corpora) of historical and current English. These studies have shown that few prescriptions have lasting effects on English language history, e.g. in use of the inflected subjunctive (Auer & Gonzales-​Diaz, 2005), the morphology of irregular verbs (Anderwald, 2016), or use of the accusative pronoun with the -​ing gerund-​participle (Peters, 2021a). Fowler’s (1926) prescriptive attempts to dissuade British readers from using the mandative subjunctive began to lose their impact after World War II, probably because it had remained in use in the US (Gowers, 1973). Regional divergences have also come to the surface in the choice between which v. that as relative pronouns, where Fowler (1926, p. 635) provided semi-​prescriptive advice and a normative comment.8 Here American editors have tended to respond to prescriptively to his comments, resulting in “which”-​hunting (Hinrichs et al., 2015). British editors meanwhile seem to have taken heed of Fowler’s more normative comment, and continue to use which as a stylistic option. Divergent responses in different English-​speaking countries to a single focus of prescriptivism help to dilute its overall impact, and foster alternative norms of usage in regional contexts. In her typology of prescriptivism, Curzan (2014) showed that politically driven prescriptions are most likely to be endorsed and widely implemented, because they are socially embedded 89

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and impact on English-​speaking communities at large. The other three types she identifies are those that relate to (i) stylistic elements of discourse, or represent preferences for (ii) language standardization or (iii) maintaining/​restoring conservative forms of expression. These are specialized concerns for more literate people –​and may be matters of indifference for others, thus less likely to be absorbed into common usage. The relative efficacy of Curzan’s four types of prescriptivism invites empirical research, and with large corpora of twenty-​first century English can be carried out on more than one regional variety. It allows us to compare regional usage norms in relation to the same types of prescriptions, and to factor in the regional attitudes embedded in their respective instruments of codification.

4.  Australian and Canadian English as comparable inner-​circle Englishes Focusing on Australian English (AusE) and Canadian English (CanE) allows us to investigate the phenomenology of prescriptivism and its take-​up in two geographically distanced inner-​ circle Englishes, at comparable stages of development in Schneider’s evolutionary model. Both varieties attained their endonormativity in the first half of last century (Canada in the 1920s, Australia in the 1940s) in Schneider’s reckoning. They are roughly equal in terms of instruments of codification published since then, having multiple dictionaries, alternative style manuals, and updated editions of usage guides. Their respective traditions of publishing reference books on their own variety of English are typical of settler Englishes as opposed to indigenized postcolonial Englishes (Peters, 2021b). Australia and Canada are similar in their vast continental spread between two oceans. But large areas of both are uninhabitable, in the northern, western and central deserts of Australia, and the cold deserts of northern Canada. In both countries the main populations are concentrated in the south: in the southern cities and on the east coast of Australia, and the southern regions of Canada, close to the border with the US. Canada has thus been exposed to American English (AmE) much longer and more continuously than Australia. For Australians, AmE influence has been more remote, across the Pacific Ocean, though intensified through WWII alliances and the post-​war ANZUS treaty (1951). The large distances between isolated centres of population in both countries and their unique environments are reflected in regionalized vocabulary, as compiled in the Canadian Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English (Pratt, 1988), and in a paperback series of glossaries of regional Australianisms.9 In their demographics, Australia and Canada have similar-​ sized English-​ speaking populations: c. 26 m. in Australia; c. 27 m. in Canada, as of 2021. But their language ecologies are markedly different in so far as English is the dominant and only official language in Australia, whereas Canada is officially bilingual across all provinces. In fact English-​speakers make up more than 90% of the population in Canadian provinces other than Quebec (where they are just 14%), and New Brunswick (67%), according to Canadian Government statistics. But the bilingual habitat has probably tended to frame the use of English contrastively rather than as a variety in its own right. It would explain the diffidence of some Canadian commentators about acknowledging their variety as such (Lilles, 2000), though the first comprehensive dictionary of Canadian English was published in 1998. Since then, the status of CanE has become more widely recognized (Dollinger, 2019), arguably empowered by publication of the second edition of the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (2017). In their relationship to American and British English, Canada and Australia show similar complexities. British English (BrE) was the major input variety for both, though it ceased to be a prevailing influence in the later twentieth century. For AusE it was largely submerged during its endonormative phase following World War II, as Australia affirmed its cultural independence 90

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from Great Britain (Peters 2019, pp. 215–​216). Britain’s membership of the European Union from 1973 to 2020 underscored Australia’s sense of detachment from the mother country. Recent research on AusE show that despite its deep BrE heritage and formal adherence to British spellings (Goncalves et al. 2018), American words and morphosyntactic elements are readily absorbed under the radar (Burridge & Peters 2020). Meanwhile Canada’s long exposure to AmE as its cross-​border neighbour has naturally resulted in the take-​up of many AmE elements of usage. Yet Canadians citizens’ antipathy to US foreign policy can result in abrupt shifts away from using American spellings (Heffernan et al. 2010), with appeals to ‘Canadian spelling’ despite the somewhat contested norms of what counts as Canadian English (below Section 6.1). Heffernan et al. also found that such periodic changes in Canadian spelling practice (2010, p. 18) made little difference to the maintenance of American spellings in the long run. These individual factors in the evolution of AusE and CanE, as well as the complexity of political and strategic relations with AmE and BrE, may be expected to impact on public attitudes and language usage. In what follows we will undertake three lines of investigation on the interplay between prescriptivism and usage: (1) how prescriptivism in relation to AusE and CanE is exercised in their respective instruments of codification (2) how comparable the prescriptive advice and normative discourse on AusE and CanE is in their twenty-​first century dictionaries, style manuals and usage guides (3) what relationship there is between prescriptivism and their ongoing patterns of usage

5.  Investigation of prescriptivism in AusE and CanE The following research focuses on five usage variables noted in Australian and Canadian dictionaries, style manuals, and usage guides. They correspond to the four types of prescriptivism noted in Curzan (2014): standardizing, stylistic, restorative, and politically responsive, with the fourth type represented by two different kinds of variable. This allows us to explore and compare the impacts of these differently motivated types of prescriptivism in each country, and their relative influence on comparably evolved inner-​circle settler Englishes. The Australian and Canadian reference works consulted on their prescriptive and normative statements are as follows: dictionaries: • AusE Macquarie Dictionary, 5th ed. (2009) • CanE Canadian Oxford Dictionary, 2nd ed. (2004) style manuals: • AusE Style manual for authors, editors and printers, 6th ed. (2002) • CanE Editing Canadian English, 2nd ed. (2000) usage guides: • AusE Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (2007) • CanE Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage, 2nd ed. (2007) All these publications are from the first decade of the twenty-​first century, thus recent enough to be referred to by Australian and Canadian writers and editors in the following decade to guide their usage. Empirical data used as evidence of the current norms of AusE and CanE 91

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are drawn from the News of the World (NOW) corpus, compiled by Mark Davies at Brigham Young University and accessible at . The NOW collection is a multi-​ billion-​word “monitor” corpus of data, compiled continuously from online news sources from 2010, representing 20 varieties of English world-​wide. The data for this study was extracted in mid-​June 2021, when the AusE corpus consisted of 899,448,620 words, and the CanE of 1,469,186,239 words.

6.  Treatment of selected usage items in AusE and CanE by type of prescription 6.1  A standardizing prescription: spelling variable -​ise/​-​ize The recommendations for AusE and CanE contrast with each other on whether to use -​ise or -​ize in all three instruments of codification. Their respective dictionaries use the preferred form as the headword for all verbs10 belonging to the set, whether they are established loanwords with classical roots, or latter-​day English formations (Calle-​Martin 2021). So the Canadian Oxford Dictionary foregrounds aggrandize, itemize etc. at their individual entries, where the Macquarie Dictionary has aggrandise, itemise. Both dictionaries note the other spelling while playing it down. Macquarie lists it at the end of the entry as “Also aggrandize”; whereas the Canadian Oxford Dictionary has a schematic note following the -​ize headword at the start of each entry: “(also esp. Brit. -​ise)”. Both dictionaries offer more extensive treatment of their preferred suffix at its own entry. The entry for the –​ise suffix in the Macquarie Dictionary includes a usage note on the American–​British difference as well as the normative statement: “Current Australian usage clearly favours consistent use of -​ise”. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary at the -​ize entry adds a string of examples and supporting detail on the etymology of the suffix through French from Late Latin and Greek. It adds a usage note to say that using -​ize is a “long-​standing Canadian practice” following former British practice11 –​as if to deflect the idea that CanE is simply following American practice. The Australian and Canadian style manuals also take up opposite positions on the -​ise/​-​ize variable. The Australian Government Style Manual has consistently recommended using -​ise from its first edition (1966) to the latest sixth (2002). There it draws attention to the fact that -​ise is the preferred spelling in both the Macquarie and the Australian Oxford Dictionary.12 Its large-​scale adoption in Australia across almost all kinds of publishing (Peters 2014) makes it a remarkable example of hyperstandardization (Cameron 1995). By contrast, -​ise endings are “extremely rare in Canadian usage”, according to Editing Canadian English (Editors Association of Canada, 2000, p. 2), apart from exceptions such as advertise, comprise, despise, exercise where the -​ise belongs to the stem. Thus both manuals avoid actually prescribing their respective spellings. Instead they make normative statements, invoking other authorities, or the norms of local usage, to support their recommendations. The Australian and Canadian usage guides are generally descriptive rather than prescriptive, and both go out of their way to provide balanced advice to readers. The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (2007, p. 430) says it is possible to use either -​ise or -​ize, but that in Australia the use of -​ise considerably outnumbers –​ize, and it offers some corpus data and other contextual information to profile the status of the two variants. While the commentary is normative, there is linguistic evidence to support it. The parallel comment in the Oxford Guide to Canadian English (2007, p. 335) is simply normative: “like Americans, Canadians tend to choose -​ize,” and “either spelling is usually considered correct”. But the Canadian guide spells out the fact that BrE preference for –​ise is “an innovation rather than a long-​standing spelling 92

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tradition”. In fact it dates from the late 1960s, as shown in Calle-​Martin’s (2021, p. 4) longitudinal data from the British National Corpus. The contrasting preferences in AusE and CanE for -​ise and -​ize have been confirmed in research in various kinds of online data. The Australian preference for -​ise seems to have intensified from the later twentieth century into the twenty-​first, beyond that of BrE, based on evidence from Google (2013) in Peters’s research (2014, pp. 591–​593). Research using the GloWbE (Global Web-​based English) corpus13 (Calle-​Martin 2021, pp. 7–​8) showed the overall commitment of Australian and Canadian writers to -​ise and -​ize respectively, although individual bloggers in Australia are less committed to it than the institutionally managed websites. Additional online evidence comes from Twitter, in Goncalves et al.’s (2018) study that compared the polarization of data from Australia, Canada and other countries in their use of key American words and spellings.14 They found that Australian spelling norms stood very close to those of the United Kingdom, whereas those of Canadians were only slightly so. With the -​ise/​-​ize variable, we have seen strong convergence in the regional style manual and dictionary on the locally preferred spelling, and normative descriptions/​statements in their respective usage guides. Their preferences are strongly aligned with the norms of -​ise/​-​ize usage for AusE and CanE found in independent online sources, and this strength of usage on countless -​ise/​-​ize words would help to reinforce the contrasting preference in each country. Although the reference books do not resort to explicit prescriptivism, the outcome for this variable is remarkable standardization (hyperstandardization) in each case. Even more remarkable is the fact that the AusE endorsement of the BrE -​ise spelling gathered strength through the later twentieth century, when Australians were increasingly distanced from Britain. And that Canadians’ endorsement of the American -​ize spelling remains strong, despite their periodic estrangement over US foreign policy (Heffernan et al., 2010).

6.2  A stylistic prescription: gotten as past participle of get The use of gotten for the past participle is recorded since Late Middle English, while got emerged a little later during the sixteenth century, amid scores of other dialectal forms (Oxford English Dictionary (OED) online). Gotten was pronounced “obsolete” by Lindley Murray (1795), and his opinion was echoed by later grammarians and usage writers.15 Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926, pp. 217) took issue with gotten on stylistic grounds –​as “archaic and affected” when used in prose composition –​though he knew it was “holding its ground in AmE.” A century later the OED online (2021) still notes it as “chiefly U.S.” This normative statement no longer holds, since gotten continues in Scottish English, and there’s ample evidence of its use elsewhere, especially in CanE, and also in AusE and BrE, as we shall see. The OED does draw attention to the fact that some uses of get/​got/​gotten are “colloquial”, noting the speech-​like style of some of the numerous citations for gotten. Dictionary labels referencing spoken usage are stylistic warnings to writers to avoid using it in unsuitable contexts. Neither of the style manuals for AusE and CanE comment on the use of gotten. Perhaps this is because verb inflections are not usually mentioned in them, though the Canadian editing manual provides an extensive list of the variable spellings in five different Canadian dictionaries. It may also be that gotten is a fully naturalized element of CanE (as the data in Table 6.1 below suggest), and doesn’t require any stylistic comment or warning. The fact that there is no mention of gotten in the Australian editing manual, may again reflect that it would be out of scope. Dictionary references to gotten in Australia and Canada draw attention to its regional identity. The Australian Macquarie Dictionary presents it at the start of the entry for get as the secondary past participle with the note “Chiefly US”,16 as if cautioning readers against its authenticity for 93

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Pam Peters Table 6.1  Relative frequencies of gotten in US, British, Australian and Canadian English from NOW

GOTTEN

GOTTEN

AmE raw no.

rate per million words

BrE raw no.

rate per million words

140,024

34.9

10,982

7.4

AusE raw no.

rate per million words

CanE raw no.

rate per million words

2782

18.8

4287

31.8

AusE use, and perhaps channelling a certain antipathy for AmE. But in a final usage note at the end of the entry, the Macquarie Dictionary adds a brief normative statement: that gotten is gaining currency in AusE, especially in speech. Thus the issue in using gotten is its colloquial flavour, i.e. its stylistic rather than regional unsuitability. In the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, gotten is simply listed at the entry for get as the alternative past participle to got, whereas at its own entry it is noted as “N. Amer. past part. of GET”. It is as established in CanE as AmE. The AusE and CanE usage guides both provide finer contextual detail on the use of gotten in their respective varieties. An elicitation survey reported in the Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage found generational differences: that users of gotten were very likely to be under 45 years. This suggests that it is a language change in progress in Australia. In the Oxford Guide to Canadian English the use of gotten is noted as being common in every type of writing except academic prose, apparently because of it being censured by some British-​influenced usage guides, which academics “have taken to heart” (p. 269). This makes for a persistent stylistic divide in CanE, but one which hardly impacts on the widespread use of gotten in everyday CanE, reflected in the NOW data shown in the table above. Relativized data (per million) from the NOW corpus (columns 3 and 5) show that gotten’s level of usage per million words is highest in AmE, and its use in CanE is not far behind. Its frequency in contemporary AusE is not negligible, and there are signs of its use in British news media. So how far does the current usage of gotten in AusE and CanE align with the commentary on it in their respective language reference books? The established use of gotten in CanE, and its growing use in AusE both suggest the limits of stylistic prescriptivism –​whether it invokes the presumed informality of gotten, or its Americanness. Despite the British legacy in AusE, younger Australian adults do not consistently share their elders’ general disenchantment with AmE style (Burridge & Peters, 2020). The cautionary label (“Chiefly US”) in the Macquarie Dictionary doesn’t deter Australian writers of news content from using it. And for Canadian writers it is legitimate as North American usage. Neither its residual “Americanness” nor its claimed informality are halting the take-​up of gotten in CanE or AusE.

6.3  A restorative prescription: phenomena as the plural form of phenomenon The English Renaissance was the conduit for a stream of classical words of Latin or Greek origin to become part of the English wordstock. With them came their classical morphology, and for nouns the plural inflections of their grammatical class. Many classical nouns have since acquired English plural endings in general use. Their classical plurals have some active use in the life sciences (Peters, 2001), but have otherwise been conserved through formal codification in language references, and academic writing.17 This foregrounds the strict singular/​plural distinction between phenomenon and phenomena, and resists the extended use of the plural form as a singular noun, in agreement with singular verbs and pronouns. The style manuals deal selectively with the plurals of classical loan words. The Australian Style Manual focuses on the plurals of Latin loanwords and how data, bacteria, etc. can take on 94

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a collective or singular meaning in English usage. It notes in passing that the same applies to the Greek loanword criteria, and to phenomena. Editing Canadian English (Editors Association of Canada, 2000, p. 8) focuses on a set of four Latin loanwords with both Latin and English plurals (e.g. formulae/​formulas), which may be associated respectively with technical or general writing. The dictionaries’ treatment of how phenomena as a plural form can be used as a singular is limited. In the Macquarie Dictionary the main entry for phenomenon simply gives the plural as phenomena. But there is also separate entry for phenomena with a usage note commenting on “some evidence of it being used as a singular as well as a plural noun … but this usage is considered widely to be nonstandard.” The latter comment is ambivalent: accepting the impulse to maintain or restore the classical standard despite the counterevidence of its use in AusE. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary treatment of phenomena is directly in line with classical Greek. It is acknowledged at the start of the entry for phenomenon as “n.pl. phenomena” without further comment. At the separate entry for phenomena it is simply noted as “pl. of phenomenon”. Both usage guides offer more descriptive comments on the use of phenomena as a singular form. The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage underscores the paradox that phenomena is always presented as standard plural in dictionaries, whereas their usage notes indicate a twentieth century tendency to use it in the singular, albeit rare in edited writing. The Oxford Guide to Canadian Usage notes that phenomena is often used as a singular in speech, and occasionally found in edited prose. But its formal conclusion is like that of the dictionary entries: the normative statement that phenomena is “not recognized as a singular”. The implication is that writers should not depart from the convention that phenomena is a plural form, and this must be restored and conserved in contemporary writing. Compare these rather conservative views on the use of phenomena as a singular noun with the evidence of its use in twenty-​first century news writing from the Australian and Canadian data from NOW in Table 6.2 below. It shows two aspects of the use of phenomena in AusE and CanE: how often it is used in each subcorpus, and relatively (by the per million words rate, columns 3 and 6). But the percentages in columns 4 and 7 show how often phenomena is construed as a singular word in “manual” inspections of samples of 200 corpus citations. The percentages reflect instances where phenomena is construed as a singular entity, as when preceded by a or this, or the followed by a singular verb or pronoun agreeing with it. For example: El Nino ... is the phenomena that causes the east coast of Australia to undergo hotter and drier weather. The NOW data show that phenomena is more used overall in AusE than CanE (by the per million words rate in columns 3 and 6), and more often as a countable singular –​more than twice the rate of CanE (columns 4 and 7). The question then is whether this might reflect the level or kinds of prescriptivism found in their respective references on usage. As we have seen, the treatment of phenomena in the two Canadian references that mention it is strictly formal, in line with traditional Latin grammar. The formal position is underscored in the Canadian Table 6.2  Data on the use of phenomena from the Australian and Canadian components of NOW

PHENOMENA

CanE corpus, 1489 b. words

rate per million words

% singular use per 100 citations

AusE corpus, 899 b. words

rate per % singular million words use per 100 citations

2768

1.9

7%

2190

2.4

95

16.5%

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Pam Peters

usage guide with the generalized warning that phenomena is “not recognized as a singular”. This uncompromising position aligns with the low level of singular uses of phenomena in the Canadian NOW data –​suggesting it is a relatively effective prescription in CanE. The more frequent occurrences of phenomena as a singular noun in the AusE data correlates with its less constrained treatment in all three Australian references, and their recognition of singular/​ plural variation in its use. The Australian commentary is more pluralistic, more descriptively normative in acknowledging singular use of phenomena in Australian and other Englishes, while noting negative attitudes to it. They invite individual discretion on the issue, instead of framing it prescriptively.

6.4  Politically responsive prescription 1: recognition of “First Nations” in capitalizing Indigenous A world-​wide movement since 2000 to raise the status and public awareness of the original inhabitants of colonial countries has prompted the practice of using an initial capital letter on words referring to them. Within individual countries such as Australia and Canada, the status and needs of Aboriginal people have been increasingly recognized since the 1970s, but Canadian government policy is more advanced than Australia’s on many fronts. Canada’s First Nations are constitutionally recognized, and are directly represented in parliament, neither of which has yet happened for Australian Aboriginal people18 (Parliament of Australia 1998). Yet in both countries, the recent practice of capitalizing Indigenous reflects the need to recognize the ongoing nationhood of their respective “First Nations”. The Australian Government Style Manual (Snooks and Co., 2002) spells out the need to give initial capitals to all references to the “peoples of Australia, Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander and Indigenous”. This formal prescription thus has the weight of government behind it. By contrast, the Canadian style manual (Editors Association of Canada, 2000) is the voice of its editorial profession, and it presents it as a ‘tricky’ issue on which local authorities diverge, some recommending the use of initial caps for words like Indigenous and Aboriginal, others opting for lower case. In the Australian Macquarie Dictionary (2009) there are separate entries for lowercased indigenous, used to refer to plants, animals and peoples of a particular region, and for Indigenous with capital letter, referring to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The Canadian Oxford lists indigenous only in lower case, for referring generally to the people born in a region, and when concerned more particularly with the “aboriginal inhabitants of a region”. It does however capitalize Aboriginal at its own entry, especially in reference to Australian Aboriginal people. The regional usage guides differ also in that the Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage (2007) has no entry for Indigenous, although the entry for Aboriginal and Aborigine makes it very clear that those other words for the original inhabitants should be capitalized. The Oxford Guide to Canadian Usage (2007) is more specific, stating in its entry for indigenous: “it is now recommended that Indigenous be capitalized when referring to Aboriginal people”. This suggests that advice on capitalizing Indigenous has changed in both countries since the early 2000s. It is therefore of great interest to see if this is reflected in current news reporting in their respective NOW corpora. The ratio of capitalized to lower-​case instances of Indigenous used to refer to Aboriginal inhabitants was again checked “manually” in samples of 200 citations. The NOW data shows that Indigenous is very often capitalized in AusE and CanE, though used proportionally more in CanE in relation to the overall corpus (columns 3 and 6). The ratio of capitalized to non-​capitalized forms is also rather higher in CanE (columns 4 and 7), 96

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Prescription and normativity in inner-circle Englishes Table 6.3  Data on the capitalized form of Indigenous in the AusE and CanE components of NOW

1

INDIGENOUS

AusE corpus, rate per 899 b. words million words

% capitalized per 100 citations

CanE corpus, rate per 1.489 b. words million words

% capitalized per 100 citations

73,822

81.5%

184,984

94.%

82.1

125.9

despite the uneven commitment to it around 2000. The commitment to it has strengthened in AusE since 2002, with more specific treatment in the Macquarie Dictionary (2009). Yet the greater use of capitalized Indigenous in this NOW data probably reflects greater support for better recognition of the ‘First Nations’ in both countries. In Australia it was underscored by Prime Minister Rudd’s formal apology (2008) to Indigenous Australians, especially the “stolen generations”. The now regular capitalization of Indigenous is underlaid by broadly supportive community sentiment in relation to the First Nations people –​much like the public endorsement of the need to replace sexist language discussed by Curzan (2014). It thus illustrates a politically responsive type of prescriptivism, rather than the effectiveness of instruments of codification in implementing a symbolic orthographic change.

6.4  Politically responsive prescription 2: the metric system and its terminology The introduction of a metric system began in both Australia and Canada in the 1970s. In Australia the system was rolled out over five years with support for industry to adjust their products, and for educational institutions to adapt their teaching materials. Conversion tables were widely available to acquaint citizens with the SI units,19 road signage changed from miles to kilometres, and human dimensions from feet/​inches to centimetres. In Canada the rollout of the metric system proceeded more slowly, and it is still incomplete because of the difficulty of reconciling Canada’s use of metric measures with the continued use in the US of the imperial system across the border. Canadians live with two systems of measurement: the metric system is taught in schools and used in educational publishing as well as the sciences and many industries. In everyday life they use kilometres for distance, Celsius for temperatures, kilogram/​litres for packaged foods, drugs, household products. But a mix of measurement systems continues in lumber, construction, and manufacturing industries (Editors Association of Canada, 2000, pp. 118–​119). The style manuals of both countries help to document the new metric system. The Australian Government Style Manual presents an overview of the International System of Units (Système International d’Unitées) with details on its base and derived units. It includes as an Appendix a conversion table of showing imperial units and their SI equivalents for reference. But there is no suggestion that conversions need to be shown regularly, as is underscored in Editing Canadian English (Editors Association of Canada, 2000). It details the SI system and the traditional/​ imperial system of weights and measures to allow both soft and hard conversions (p. 131), underscoring the duality of the Canadian system. The Australian Macquarie Dictionary includes an encyclopedic entry for the metric system and its prefixes, and individual entries for all the SI units. In cases where the spelling is subject to BrE and AmE differences, e.g. litre, the AmE spelling is given at the end of the entry as “Also US liter”. The Canadian Oxford provides regular lexicographic entries for metric system and all SI terms, and similarly notes the alternative spelling with each term “(esp. US liter)”, but at the 97

98

Pam Peters Table 6.4  Relative frequencies for metres and yards in NOW’s AusE and CanE corpora

METRES YARDS

AusE

rate per million words

Can E

rate per million words

59,334 26,757

65.9 29.7

62,032 73,583

42.2 50.1

start of the entry. The units of the metric system are laid out in a series of tables in an Appendix, along with the standard imperial/​American units, and conversions between them. Both offer substantial support for implementing the metric system. The Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage has a longish entry on metrication and the metric system: what it consists of, and details on how SI units and their symbols are to be written. In the Oxford Canadian English Usage, there is no general discussion of the issue, but the units of the metric system and some comments on their use can be found in an Appendix. We may expect Canada’s dual system of measurement, and Australia’s now standard metric system to be reflected in the relative frequencies of metric and imperial terms in the NOW corpus. The terms for intermediate distances (metres, yards) are used in Table 6.4 as proxy for the two systems. As expected, the AusE data show much greater use of metres (compare the per million words rate) as its dominant measure of length. The lower rate for metres in CanE data reflects it being part of the more recently introduced measurement system, and one of two supported by the government. Reciprocal data can be seen for yards, which is more frequent than metres in CanE, reflecting its continuing use generally and in some sectors of industry. Yards is much less frequent in AusE where it is no longer a standard measure, though it survives especially in news reporting of sports such as rugby, tennis, and golf, where imperial measures remain standard terminology. The high rate per million of the metric term and low usage of the imperial one reflect the impacts of the institutionally mandated change in Australia’s national measurement system. The similar rates per million for the two in CanE represent its accommodation of parallel systems of measurement in Canada. This “politically responsive” language shift in the terms and accompanying measures is supported in Australia at all levels of government and in industry, education, and the professions. This institutionalization of the metric system owes very little to the fact that its details are presented in all Australia’s instruments of codification.

7.  Discussion of findings The case studies reported in Section 6 have explored how prescriptivism may be expressed in the dictionaries, usage guides and style manuals of two inner-​circle Englishes in their late evolutionary phase. None of the four types of prescription involved the use of obligatory forms of modality (e.g. should, must), and we found few references to “(non)standard” and “correct” usage. Instead, prescriptivism was exercised indirectly, through restrictive labels and statements to cue the reader on the regional and stylistic implications of their usage choices. Regional labels such as “Chiefly US” used in Australian references suggest that such usage is out of place in Australia, while “esp. Br” in Canadian references reminds local writers and editors that they would be espousing exonormative usage. Labels such as “colloquial” or “mostly found in unedited writing” are red flags on expressions that writers and editors of formal prose should avoid. Both make the usage issue a matter of style rather than correctness or adhering to a notional standard. Yet by prompting writers to consider how appropriate an expression is for

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their context of communication, they cast a shadow over its usability at large. Prescriptivism is thus more a matter of raising inhibitions about a particular usage than simply trying to prohibit or proscribe it. Normative statements on the level of usage and attitudes to it are also indirectly prescriptive, as in “rarely found in edited writing” and “widely considered nonstandard”. The likely impact of such wordings in dictionary usage notes and usage guide entries is to constrain usage choices. What surprises is how rarely such normative statements are supported by evidence of current usage. The lack of evidence results in some indeterminate comments, as in the “tricky” issue for Canadian editors of whether to capitalize Indigenous or not (Editing Canadian English). Normative statements mostly represent editorial opinion, and may not be in touch with prevailing usage in the variety concerned. The conventional “chiefly US” label in Australian dictionaries is not necessarily grounded in local reality, as we have seen with gotten. Corpus evidence from NOW shows it is establishing itself in written material in AusE –​apart from being embedded in CanE. Where AusE and CanE diverge in their contemporary norms of usage, as in using phenomena as a singular noun, they align with the more descriptive account of the issue in AusE references and its prescriptive treatment in the CanE sources. The evidence supplied by the NOW data suggests that the grammar of phenomena is indeed changing in AusE, but not yet in CanE. Differences between AusE and CanE usage are in some cases grounded in their respective geopolitical contexts, rather than resulting from the efficacy of prescriptivism in their respective references. This is clearly the case with use of metric terminology and the metric system, where the change was uniformly implemented with government support in Australia –​and without the confounding factor of sharing a long border with the US, which has inhibited Canada’s ability to go fully metric. But in formulating policy in recognizing its Indigenous peoples, Canada has led the way, and the NOW statistics suggest that Australia is less well advanced in that direction. The power of government in standardizing language norms can also be seen in the case of -​ize/​-​ise. Australian use of -​ise has been mandated for more than 50 years in the Australian Government Style Manual. Yet the Canadian use of -​ize is at least as well entrenched, as shown in data from the GloWbE corpus (Calle-​Martin, 2021). For Canadians, the fact that -​ize is deemed “North American” (rather than US usage) underwrites their use of it.

8. Conclusions Though AusE and CanE have much in common in evolutionary terms, their varietal preferences diverge to a greater or lesser extent on most of the items investigated. Their respective positions are represented in their instruments of codification, and broadly reflected in the NOW data as their current norms of everyday written usage. Yet the two “politically responsive” exemplars (#4 and #5) owe their entrenched usage to being mandated by their respective governments or cultural authorities, rather than their treatment in the regional instruments of codification. The entrenchment of -​ise in AusE and -​ize in CanE (#1) is in both cases helped by the fact that the regional spelling is instantiated in countless verbs in their respective dictionaries, and is reinforced by regular encounters with representative verbs in everyday texts. Thus people’s exposure to usage of the standard suffix ensures its propagation –​arguably more than any explicit prescriptivism in their instruments of codification. By contrast, gotten as past participle (Section 2) and phenomena as a singular noun (Section 3) have few analogues, and in the latter case are susceptible to prescriptivism, as seen in Section 6 above. Yet the language shifts that they represent in AusE are recognized in normative comments grounded in evidence, which

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seem to dilute the impact of traditional prescriptions. In such cases it is regional usage itself rather than prescriptivism that prevails.

Notes 1 The OED (online 2021) defines normative as “constitute(ing) or serv(ing) as a norm or standard”. On the distinction to be made between norms and standards, see Peters (2020). 2 The term “inner circle” Englishes comes from Kachru’s concentric circles model of World English (1982), in which the innermost of the three circles includes those which originate in colonial settler varieties, such as American, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand English. 3 See Schneider (2007) for the five phases of dialect evolution: introduction, exonormative stabilization, nativization, endonormative stabilization, differentiation. 4 Style manuals are not mentioned by Schneider (2007) as one of the instruments of codification for a regional variety, but they serve as such when published for a given variety, e.g. for Australian or Canadian English. 5 Normative statements are those that say “Canadians/​Australians prefer X”: those prescriptively worded use modal verbs such as “should” or imperatives to indicate which of the alternatives re to be used. 6 In C18 Latin: “he himself said/​declared it”, i.e. the self-​appointed language expert as a commentator on (Peters & Young 1997). 7 See the special issue of English Today, edited by Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2018) 8 Fowler (1926, p. 635, col. 1) “If writers would agree to regard that as the defining relative pronoun, & which as the non-​defining, there would be much gain both in lucidity & in ease. Some there are who follow this principle now; but it would be idle to pretend that it is the practice either of most or the best writers”. 9 Including Words from the West (Brooks & Ritchie, 1994), Tassie Terms (Brooks & Ritchie, 1995), Voices of Queensland (Robinson, 2001). 10 The corresponding spelling (-​ iza/​-​isa) is used in the related abstract nouns, .e.g. itemization/​ itemisation. 11 The full statement is: “The vast majority of Canadians who do use the -​ize spellings are therefore following, not American practice, but former British practice and long-​standing Canadian practice”. (Barber, 2004). 12 The Australian Oxford Dictionary (1999) and its successors changed to prioritize the -​ise spellings from 1991. 13 The GloWbE corpus contains online data from websites and blogs from 20 inner-​and outer-​circle Englishes. 14 Goncalves et al.’s (2018) set of American spellings included -​or/​-​our, -​l-​/​-​ll-​-​, -​er/​re, -​yze/​-​yse, -​se/​-​ ce variation though not -​ize/​-​ise. 15 See Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (Gilman, 1989). 16 Echoing the dictionary note used in the Oxford English Dictionary online. 17 On the conservation of data as a plural form, see Peters, 2018. 18 This is still the position for Australian Aboriginal peoples in 2021. 19 These are the standard metric units of the Système International d’Unitées (International System of Units)

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Pam Peters Peters, P. (2017 [2012]). Standard British English. In A. Bergs, & L. Brinton (Eds.), English Historical Linguistics (Vol. 2). De Gruyter. Peters, P. (2018). The lexicography of English usage: describing usage variation and change. In I. Tieken-​ Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides: History, advice, attitudes (pp. 31–​49). Oxford University Press. Peters, P. (2019). The codification of Australian English. In L. Willoughby &H. Manns (Eds), Australian English reimagined: Structure, features and development (pp. 210–​223). Routledge. Peters, P. (2020). Norms and standards in World Englishes. In Schreier, D., Hundt, M., & Schneider, E. (Eds.), Handbook of World Englishes (pp. 587–​608). Cambridge University Press. Peters, P. (2021a). Prescription and description. In B. Aarts, A. McMahon, & L. Hinrichs (Eds.), Handbook of English Linguistics, 2nd ed (pp. 615–​636). Wiley Blackwell. Peters, P. (2021b). Pluricentricity and codification in world English. In. Perez, D., Hundt, M., Kabatek, J., & Schreier, D. (Eds.) English and Spanish: World languages in interaction (pp. 139–​162). Cambridge University Press. Peters, P., & Young, W. (1997). English grammar and the lexicography of usage. Journal of English Linguistics 25(4), 315–​331. Pratt, T. (Ed.). (1988). Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English. University of Toronto Press. Robinson, J. (Ed.). (2001). Voices of Queensland. Oxford University Press. Schneider, E. (2007). World Englishes. Cambridge University Press. Snooks and Co. (Eds.). (2002). Style manual for authors, editors and printers, 6th ed. John Wiley. Stevenson, A. (2010). Oxford dictionary of English, 2nd ed. Oxford University Press. Straaijer, R. (2015). Attitudes to prescriptivism: an introduction. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(3), 233–​242. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. ((2018). Prescriptivism. English Today, 34(4), 3–​4. Trudgill, P. (1986). Dialects in Contact. Blackwell.

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7 THE ROLE OF PRESCRIPTIVISM IN THE EMERGENCE OF NEW ENGLISHES Edgar W. Schneider

1. Introduction As is well known, English is the world’s leading global language nowadays. It is the main tool of globalization for transnational contacts and organizations but also a language deeply rooted and adopted for internal purposes in many nations. Mainly as an outcome of centuries of colonial history, English has grown to be the official, co-​official or main language in about a hundred countries around the globe, mostly in Asia and Africa but also in the Caribbean and around the Pacific Rim; well-​known cases in point are India, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines (almost the only instance of American, not British, colonization), Kenya, Uganda, Nigeria, Ghana, Namibia, and many more (for a map of countries in which English plays a special internal role, see Schneider, 2020, p. 64). Over the last four decades the field of World Englishes, investigating the properties and socio-​political settings of these varieties, has grown into a vibrant sub-​discipline of English linguistics (see Schneider, 2020; Schreier et al., 2020; and many more introductions and handbooks). By establishing colonies around the globe, the British strove for political power and economic profits, but in doing so they obviously also exported important components of their socio-​political and cultural systems, including social hierarchies and the means of symbolizing them. A core component of the symbolic representation and manifestation of power relationships has been the choice and use of specific language forms, both at home and overseas. Consequently, it may be assumed that questions of norms of linguistic correctness and pronouncements of prescriptive attitudes have played a role in these countries as well. However, little research has been conducted on the interrelationship between prescriptive attitudes and language varieties, and next to none, to my knowledge, on postcolonial countries in which English is spoken as a second language (ESL). Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2018), a recent survey of prescriptive attitudes as also held by laypersons, labelled “grassroots prescriptivism” (Lukač, 2018), shows in some papers that prescriptivism has been stronger in American than in British English but otherwise does not look into interrelationships with varieties of English. Peters (2020) discusses the notions of “standard” and “norm(s)” in World Englishes and argues that both are inherently ambiguous and dependent upon their sociolinguistic contexts.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-8

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This chapter offers a survey and discussion of prescriptive positions and norm-​oriented thinking in the emergence of new varieties of English in many different (mostly ESL) countries. It starts out with a survey of the Empire’s political strategy of disseminating power and, consequently, access to education and the English language through select scholastic transmission (but supplemented by spread in lower-​class, grassroots contexts as well). Section 3 will focus on discussions of acceptable norms and the role of norm orientations in the growth of the discipline and in the main theoretical frameworks which have accounted for the emergence of World Englishes. Section 4 will then zoom in to three relevant, interesting, and partly typical case studies –​the explicitly prescriptive “Speak Good English Movement” in Singapore, the status of English in India’s language policy, and the norm orientation in Nigeria’s language education system. It is worth noting at the outset that, as is characteristic of a young scholarly field, terminology has not been firmly agreed upon, including labels for and classifications of the varieties in question. Disregarding terms such as ‘global English’, used primarily for commercial courses and in the business world but with unclear specification (but cf. Fang & Widodo, 2020, with the plural form), in linguistics essentially three core terms have been adopted and have come to be established with slightly varying semantic implications. The earliest generalizing term was ‘New Englishes’ (Pride, 1982; Platt et al., 1984) –​used widely initially but then criticized for embodying a western, postcolonial perspective (since many of the varieties in question have been in existence for centuries and are ‘new’ only as objects of western scholarly investigation; English in India, for instance, is older than English in the United States). When it is still in use, it tends to designate specifically the African and Asian second-​language (L2) varieties in former colonies (what Kachru, 1985 called the “Outer Circle”). In contrast, the term ‘Postcolonial Englishes’ as used by Schneider (2007), for instance, highlights the roots of such varieties in colonial expansion and activity, including settler migration. This term, unlike the former, would be taken to include the varieties of settler colonies such as Australia and New Zealand, and also North America (covered in separate chapters and sections in Schneider, 2007). Finally, the term ‘World Englishes’, originally associated with Kachru’s school, has emerged as the most comprehensive and neutral label for both the young research discipline and the entire set of varieties of English around the globe –​with an obvious focus on the L2 ‘Outer Circle’ varieties but including the increasingly important, visible and stabilizing foreign-​language (‘Expanding Circle’) forms (like Chinese or Dutch English) and also regional, social, and ethnic varieties of native-​language forms of English (including, of course, Australian English etc., alongside American English, and also, for many authors and scholars, dialects of British English). Similarly, in the present chapter the focus will be predominantly on the L2 types of ‘New Englishes’ but it will include sideways glances on first-​language (L1) postcolonial varieties.

2.  Patterns of diffusion: authority or grassroots? Research on World Englishes has tended to focus on formal styles and educated manifestations of the language. As a strong indication of this orientation, take the definition of the sampling target of the “International Corpus of English” project (Greenbaum, 1996; www.ice-​corp​ora. uzh.ch/​en.html), which explicitly targeted and collected “educated” speakers and written language forms. The reason for this orientation is the fact that the dissemination of English into colonies operated primarily through the education system, and access to English used to correlate with access to higher education. Early colonial agents who dealt with local representatives were primarily high-​ranking administrators, merchants, missionaries, and military officers, though they clearly also had lower-​ranking representatives of the Empire as support staff. 104

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English around the globe has been accused of being a “killer language” by some linguists (Phillipson 1992; Gutiérrez Estrada & Schecter 2018; cf. Gambhir 2022: 515–​516), contributing to the eradication of local languages through language shift. However, this was not the language policy of the Empire; in fact, English language competence was deliberately withheld from the masses (Brutt-​Griffler, 2002), and access to learning the language was offered only to a select stratum of high-​ranking locals who were perceived as prospective co-​administrators, local leaders but serving the interest of the Empire. An early manifestation of this line of thinking can be found in Macaulay’s well-​known ‘minute’ of 1835, a document in which he argued in favour of giving access to English education to local leaders in India with the goal of forming “a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern –​a class of persons, Indians in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinion, in morals and in intellect” (quoted from Kachru, 1983, p. 22). This “sandwiching” procedure became typical of Britain’s colonization strategy (unlike other colonial powers such as France), and it was later explicitly labelled “indirect rule” by Lord Lugard, governor of the colony of Nigeria in the early twentieth century. Educational institutions were thus established explicitly for higher-​ranking locals, who were thus culturally and linguistically anglicized to a certain extent. For example, in Malaysia in the 1920s the Malay College of Kuala Kangsar (known as MCKK) was established, a boarding school reserved for the sons of Malay rulers and those of noble birth which nurtured civil servants and top administrators (Asmah, 2000, p. 13); in the same vein as late as in 1947 a matching girls’ school, the MGC, was founded in Kuala Lumpur to educate suitable matches as partners for the local elite. These institutions essentially offered an immersion experience in English and guaranteed long-​lasting effects, including the perpetuation of both indigenous and British social hierarchies, through the medium of education and access to (good) English. Consequently, in postcolonial countries and settings prescriptive attitudes and emphasis on linguistic norms were fostered by these colonial policies (and, of course, the desire of locals in power to preserve their superior status for themselves and their offspring). The Empire’s policy changed in the mid-​twentieth century, when after India’s independence it was realized that sustained good future relationships with the former colonies, formally manifested in the construct of the “Commonwealth of Nations”, would be enhanced by wider roots of the English language and culture amongst local populations. However, the selective association between the ability to speak good English and socio-​political power was often upheld, indirectly or even deliberately, by local “elites” in some, especially authoritarian, postcolonial countries, so prescriptive attitudes to English have survived and even been strengthened. For example, in Ken Saro-​Wiwa’s moving novel Sozaboy from Nigeria the government representative coming to the protagonist’s village to make official proclamations is said to speak what the locals perceive as “Fine fine English. Big big words. Grammar.” (Saro-​Wiwa, 1985, p. 46) to symbolize and manifest his power and status (even though he is perfectly well able to speak the local language to make himself understood). Standard English is thus appropriated, and a prescriptive attitude is instrumentalized as a tool to preserve social power. Most New Englishes are thus products of scholastic transmission in elitist contexts, with access to English, associated with higher education, largely constrained to those in power, so prescriptive attitudes (as in the Nigerian case) are also tools in social power struggles. On the other hand, recent developments have seen and recent scholarship has recognized the growth of “grassroots” Englishes, characterized by instrumentally motivated natural acquisition of English disregarding norms and prescriptive thinking (Schneider, 2016a). This perspective represents the opposite to a prescriptive attitude, as it were –​but precisely for this reason it deserves to be mentioned here. In many countries and contexts a minimal, smattering knowledge of English guarantees access to relatively better-​paid jobs and thus a better life, typically through the ability 105

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to interact with foreign visitors, e.g. as guides, drivers or hotel agents dealing with businesspeople or tourists (see Schneider, 2016a and, for a broader documentation, Meierkord & Schneider, 2021). Norm considerations and issues of linguistic correctness, let alone decorum, are totally irrelevant and disregarded in such circumstances; the main point, and essentially the only one that counts, is the ability to communicate and to bring one’s message across. There is definitely a world in which prescriptivism plays no role at all.

3.  Norm-​oriented attitudes and debates 3.1.  The beginnings of an awareness of World Englishes: the Prator–​Kachru–​Quirk debate In fact, the field of ‘World Englishes’ started out with a fierce debate around (and against) a monolithic Anglo-​ centric view of what constitute norms of correctness in English. Conservatives held that only a single, authoritative standard (i.e., British English) could serve as a teaching norm all around the globe, while others suggested that different, changing settings of English called for the recognition of local varieties and non-​native norms. A remarkably early voicing of the “progressive” position came from the founding father of functional linguistics, M. A. K. Halliday, who stated that “English is no longer the possession of the British, or even of the British and the Americans, but an international language [… which] exists in an increasingly large number of different varieties”; and he argued that the role of British English as the only linguistic model was “no longer accepted by the majority” in “West Africa, in the West Indies, and in Pakistan and India” (Halliday et al., 1964, p. 293). Against such a view, and expressing “arch-​conservative views” driven by “anxiety generated by the fear” of losing “control of the English language” on the side of some British linguists (Saraceni, 2010, p. 31), Prator (1968) published a polemical paper arguing that only “mother-​tongue” forms and not putatively unstable second-​language forms such as Indian English could constitute pedagogical models. In one of his earliest influential papers, Braj Kachru (1976) countered this by offering “a strong and clear statement against linguistic purism, ethnocentrism and monoculturalism” (Saraceni, 2010, p. 32), and accusing the purist position of “heresy”. Using his native Indian English as an exemplar case, he showed that second-​language varieties played an important role in their respective sociolinguistic ecologies, and argued for the need for these “Third World varieties” (1976, p. 236) to be recognized. Later he developed his widely received and most influential framework suggesting the ‘Three Circles’ of English (see Section 3.2). Another instantiation of essentially the same debate followed when Randolph Quirk, who in earlier publications had recognized the existence of global varieties of English and had voiced more liberal positions, set out to defend “native-​speaker” norms and the primacy of “Standard”, i.e. British, English only (1990), arguing explicitly that non-​native varieties could not be “institutionalized” and that only “institutionalized” and “native” varieties, notably British and American English, could serve as standards in pedagogy. Defending what then came to be known as “liberation linguistics”, Kachru (1991) countered Quirk’s arguments as sociolinguistically unreal and explicitly advocated a “recognition of the ‘desirability of non-​native norms’ ” (p. 5). In academic and (applied) linguistic circles this exchange of papers in English Today in the early 1990s appears to mark the swan song of such conservative, purist, and monolithic positions, in Saraceni’s words “the defeat of the purist and vehemently conservative stance” which “sealed the academic victory of the many Englishes over one English” (2010, p. 40). Not so in language pedagogy, however, and also in the countries concerned. To the present 106

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day British Standard English is the prescribed target of language education in some postcolonial countries (e.g. in Nigeria –​see below, Section 4.3), although in reality for the majority of the population this seems an utterly unrealistic goal. A recent collective volume edited by Fang & Widodo (2020) can be taken to showcase such attitudes: While the contributors all wish to promote more liberal attitudes it is perfectly clear that they do so against the backdrop of an unquestioned underlying assumption that only native British and American English constitute adequate teaching norms and that the question of whether localized accents and forms could be tolerated counts as highly debatable.

3.2.  Kachru’s ‘circles’ and norms After engaging in the anti-​Prator debate, “Kachru began what could be termed the ‘World Englishes’ school of thought, which would take further the liberal stance … and develop it into a complex and comprehensive sociolinguistic model of English in the world, with important pedagogical implications” (Saraceni, 2010, p. 32), characterized by an emphasis on “inclusivity and pluricentricity” (Bolton, 2006, p. 240). In 1985, he published the earliest well-​known version of his ‘Three Circles’ model, distinguishing the ‘Inner Circle’ of mainly native-​speaking countries, the ‘Outer Circle’ in which English is a strong additional language with nation-​ internal functions (typically postcolonial countries), and the ‘Expanding Circle’, where English is used as a foreign language and not historically grounded but typically also growing in importance (Kachru, 1985, pp. 12–​14). Importantly for the pedagogical perspective, in the same paper Kachru (1985, pp. 16–​17) also connected these variety types to linguistic norms. He suggested regarding the Inner Circle varieties as “norm-​providing”, considered as ideal models of English, the Outer Circle as “norm-​developing”, in the process of moving towards norms of their own, and the Expanding Circle as “norm-​dependent”, relying on Inner Circle norms. This distinction and association generated awareness for the need to recognize the sociolinguistic realities in the plurality of Englishes, and it contributed substantially to the emancipation of these emerging varieties. Still, in practically all countries in question the tension between conservative, prescriptive, and exonormative attitudes and more liberal positions has remained extant to the present day.

3.3.  Norms in the “Dynamic Model” The “Dynamic Model” (DM) is a theoretical framework intended to account for the evolution of Postcolonial Englishes in a uniform, overarching perspective. Its most widely received manifestations are a Language article (Schneider, 2003) and, most comprehensively, in great detail, and with applications to 17 countries, a monograph (Schneider, 2007). Since then it has been summarized many times, accepted and presupposed widely, and applied to other contexts and tested (and mostly confirmed) in several studies. It has been labelled “ground-​ breaking” (Seoane & Suárez-​Gómez, 2016, p. 4), and it is fair to say that it has become the most widely accepted theoretical framework to explain the history of postcolonial varieties. Schneider (2014) summarizes the first decade of its reception. Informed by theories of language contact, linguistic evolution, accommodation, and identity formation, the DM claims that a fundamentally uniform sociohistorical development has shaped language evolution and linguistic attitudes in former colonies. This process has been experienced and can be viewed from two complementary perspectives, that of the erstwhile indigenous population, who in being colonized lost authority over their land and became exploited, and that of the settlers and their descendants, who came to foreign lands as colonizers 107

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and migrants. The model’s core idea is that in the long run, over centuries, physical and social co-​existence forged a process of social approximation and integration, which found symbolic linguistic expression in the emergence and increasing acceptance of a new, indigenized language variety. Colonial agents and settlers came to colonies as occupants, socially distant from the local populations, though the distance diminished in the course of time, and in British colonies representatives of the leading strata of the indigenous population tended to be admitted to an English education and were thus anglicized and instrumentalized. Acquisition of English by the locals through ongoing linguistic interactions produced newly emerging indigenous contact dialects of English. In the course of time, typically after realizing that the colony was no longer perceived as really important and worthy of support and serious investment of resources on the side of the “mother country”, the distance between the resident descendants of settlers and the indigenous population came to be diminished, and the two population strands were increasingly intertwined. In the long run, typically after independence and in a deliberate process of nation-​building, a new, trans-​ethnic sense of local identity emerged and used to find one symbolic manifestation in a new, local variety of English –​which tended to be adopted and accepted increasingly. The DM subdivides this process into five consecutive (though partially overlapping) stages: foundation (with settlers and their English arriving in a new land), exonormative stabilization (in a firmly established colony fully dependent upon and oriented towards the mother country), nativization (when power relationships become more fragile and linguistic integration and accommodation proceeds), endonormative stabilization (when after independence a young nation is occupied with achieving national unity and stability, and a national language or shared, relatively homogeneous national language variety, is one of the tools in this process), and differentiation (when after national stability and identity having been achieved the population in a young nation directs their attention increasingly towards nation-​ internal group or ethnic identities, symbolized by new dialect features). In each phase a characteristic, unilaterally dependent sequence of causal factors and components can be identified and has been described: The external political setting of a region determines the relationships and identity definitions of the social groups involved, which in turn shapes the sociolinguistic communicative conditions (of usage, contact, and attitudes) –​and these, ultimately, are decisive for how linguistic forms emerge and get adopted. Norm orientations, and, consequently, more or less explicitly expressed prescriptive attitudes, figure prominently in some components of the DM, to varying extents in different phases and with alternative perspectives. Phrased most concisely, the DM observes (and predicts) a re-​ orientation from an exonormative towards an endonormative attitude in the course of time, as characteristically associated with these developments, for instance in the wake of nation-​ building. Essentially, there are three phases and perspectives which specifically have to do with issues of norms and prescriptivism. While in the initial settlement stage linguistic concerns were reduced to securing bare communication, during the second phase of exonormative stabilization, in a stable colonial setting, linguistic norms, just like social norms, may be taken to have existed. Rules of conduct and standards of socially acceptable behaviour, including linguistic performance, were taken over from and shared with the ‘mother country’ Britain (mostly), without being questioned. Colonies served specific purposes in the interest of the centre (like trading desirable goods and agricultural exploitation, providing arable land for settlers, securing naval routes, etc.), and it may be assumed that the attention of colonial agents was directed to the performance of these activities, with little attention devoted to linguistic decorum, but to the extent that norms played a role they clearly were those inherited from “home”. The transfer of these norms to the local leadership was achieved and secured by the (partial) cultural and linguistic 108

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Anglicization offered to these people in the colonial educational institutions and in the context of the “indirect rule” doctrine mentioned above –​so these norms and value associations were inadvertently taken over and further perpetuated by indigenous speakers. The linguistic norm of correctness was conservative and unreflected, standard English as written or produced as a model by high-​ranking educated representatives of the Empire. Norms from home were simply perpetuated. I am not aware of any specific linguistic evidence, but there are statements indicating the continuation of British lines of thinking and patterns of living overseas. In New Zealand, for instance, settlers explicitly stated their intention “to make a new Britain in the South Pacific”, and “to make New Zealand as British as possible”; a settler’s wife wrote that she enjoyed “everything about me [being] so English and homelike” (Gordon et al., 2004, p. 63). While in growing bilingualism some language contact effects and transfer processes occur earlier as well and contribute to the gradual growth of localized forms of English, phase 3, nativization, in particular marks a vibrant transition period, with old certainties and social identity alignments being weakened (often because the ties between the motherland and the colony become evidently looser, leading towards independence). This results in an increasingly intense inter-​ethnic contact and, consequently, in language contact and ‘structural nativization’ gaining in momentum. Obviously, with the loss of old political ties and dependencies cultural, including linguistic, orientations become weaker and simply less important, so many speakers grow increasingly tolerant towards local linguistic innovations, though in times of transformation this is probably not an issue of primary importance. However, in changing societies there is always a clash between innovators and conservative forces –​for many members psychologically loosening ties with the mother country seems unthinkable. A conventionally established manifestation of this type of attitude is what has been called the “complaint tradition” (Milroy & Milroy, 1985), with conservative, typically upper-​class gatekeepers lamenting falling standards of usage, including contact influences from indigenous languages, which they perceive as corruptions. Traces of such attitudes can be found in many different cultures and countries. We have rich documentation from New Zealand, for instance: there is talk of “faulty methods of production [which ...] have uglified the young colonial’s voice” (from 1910, Gordon & Abell, 1990, p. 30) or “this objectionable colonial dialect” (from 1912, Gordon 1998, p. 66). Gordon & Deverson summarize this as follows: “Emerging colonial accents were felt to be a threat to good English, and much fruitless effort was expended in attempting to eradicate them, in New Zealand and elsewhere” (1998, p. 108). In Hong Kong a “decline in local English standards” (W. McGurn in Far Eastern Economic Review, 21 March 1996; quoted from Bolton & Lim, 2000, p. 433) or “the problem of poor English standards” (a bank representative, quoted from Evans, 2000, p. 193) are commented on; similarly, in Singapore there is “a fear of falling standards” (Rubdy, 2001, p. 345), and in India we get statements like “the standard of English has been declining at an alarming rate” (Krishnamurty, 1990, p. 21) or “steady decline of English” (Indian scholars, quoted by Bailey, 1996). In South Africa “a grave decline in standards of English” in entrance examinations (Lanham, 1982, p. 329) was observed, just like “falling standards” of English in Nigeria (Mazrui & Mazrui, 1996, p. 281; Jowitt, 2019, pp. 15–​16, 24–​28). The most explicit and most interesting application case of prescriptive attitudes to postcolonial Englishes manifests itself in the context of phase 4, endonormative stabilization, the claim that in the long run such varieties will develop and accept linguistic norms of their own (cf. Peters, 2020, pp. 588–​589). Typically, this follows political independence, since a young nation needs to be able and entitled to decide such matters, including language and education policy, on their own, and it is also typically associated with a process of explicit nation-​building that such a nation must go through in order to decide on her identity and basic tenets. Hence, 109

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developing and projecting a new national identity, a cultural self-​reliance independent of earlier political ties, is decisive in this process. And this attitude tends to find a symbolic representation in linguistic usage and decisions on required or acceptable norms. For example, a widely held attitude in New Zealand is described by Gordon & Deverson (1998, p. 108) as follows: “In language now we can and must go alone, creating our own standards.” For Singapore, Tan (2016) shows how indigenous phraseological and structural choices get stabilized in speech and writing. However, endonormative stabilization in itself is a complex process and phenomenon, and there has been a tendency in the literature to oversimplify it and exaggerate its importance. Following Schneider (2007, pp. 48–​52) it is a composite of several constituent components, including awareness and acceptance of the existence of a new variety, emphasis on its homogeneity, codification, and its use in literary creativity. The first step, obviously, is for people to notice that their own way of speaking English is distinct, somewhat different from that of others. The issue of acceptance depends very much upon who accepts a norm, and for what purpose. Informally and for themselves, speakers of a young variety tend to show a certain amount of pleasure and even pride in this. For instance, Wee (2014, pp. 131–​134) observes that Singaporeans abroad recognize each other by their accents and clearly display a positive attitude to that fact. However, acceptance in formal contexts tends to be an entirely different matter, and there is also a difference between accepting accents and grammatical innovations. Politicians, conservatives in a society (who are usually those in power) and gatekeepers in educational institutions tend to resist tendencies to accept new language forms, and may keep showing traces of the complaint tradition, so in many postcolonial countries either explicitly still British English or some mythic “standard” or “international” English are projected as norms of correctness in educational institutions or in formal public contexts. Similarly, the concept of linguistic homogeneity is an interesting one in such contexts but one difficult to get a realistic grasp of. It is widely observed that in young nations there is quite some emphasis on observed linguistic homogeneity, sometimes perceived as remarkably strong. However, on closer inspection it will be found that this is a topos, an identity-​driven discourse convention fuelled by a young nation’s desire to imagine “national singularity and homogeneity” (Wodak et al., 1999, p. 4). In reality, practically no society is linguistically fully homogeneous, and in young postcolonial nations it is likely that ethnic and social speech differences will persist to a certain extent. Most likely, accommodation and focusing processes and steps towards increasing linguistic homogeneity in some sub-​systems and for some linguistic forms will be found side by side with forms associated with persistent, if decreasing, ethnic or social distinctions. To some extent the widely found emphasis on linguistic uniformity tends to be a discourse construct. Codification clearly is a component which is closely associated with prescriptive attitudes, since dictionaries and grammars provide authority and dignity to forms recorded in them and allow common speakers to refer to them. Authoritative and summarizing grammatical descriptions of properties of new varieties are rare, and tend to be known and influential within the confines of the world of linguistics –​these are studies and descriptions of features and feature systems for the specialist (e.g. Hundt, 1998 for New Zealand, Lim, 2004 for Singapore). For the wider public, style guides are more noticeable, including some (rare) regional ones, such as Peters (1998) for Australian English, explicitly meant to be built upon linguistic usage and not to be prescriptive, though the very notion of linguistic guidance invites prescriptive and norm-​oriented thinking. Dictionaries are revered reference tools, and indigenized words are perspicuous, so it is not a surprise that for quite a number of postcolonial varieties dictionaries of various kinds and sizes, from rather informal word collections to major scholarly national 110

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dictionaries, have been compiled (for a recent survey, see Lambert, 2020). Some of these dictionaries are widely known in their respective countries and thus contribute to endonormative prescriptive attitudes, and in certain cases dictionaries are known to have contributed substantially to the stabilization of national linguistic identities. The best-​known case in point is clearly Australia’s Macquarie Dictionary, which after its publication (Delbridge et al., 1981) was received widely and became a hallmark of Australia’s identity, boosting an awareness of the distinct and established character of Australian English. Explicit dictionaries of Canadian English, notably, the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles, have had a similar, though less consistent, effect, as traced most recently in a monograph by Dollinger (2019). In many postcolonial nations there is a huge discrepancy between linguists’ discussions and analyses on the one hand and educators’ and gatekeepers’ orientations, which tend to be much more conservative, on the other (see the case studies in the next section). Another interesting example of the same tension and debate is the case of the status of Jamaica’s English-​derived creole, locally known as ‘Patwa’ or ‘patois’. For many years now there has been a powerful political initiative in Jamaica, driven strongly by local linguists such as Hubert Devonish, to admit Patwa as an official language, with evident consequences for the education system. Patwa is spoken natively by the majority of the population and is increasingly widely used and visible in public, in the media and also in politicians’ speeches, for instance. The initiative has been gaining momentum –​in 2019 a petition was launched to the government by the Jamaican Language Unit of the University of the West Indies to make “Jamaican” an official language, to stop disadvantaging those without access to English education. But even after many years of lobbyism and academic support, so far the proposal has not yet gained formal acceptance. There is a strong element of resistance against such an acceptance, “a very vocal anti-​creole element in the society” (Roberts, 1988, p. 22).

3.4.  “International English” and the ELF enterprise The notion of “English as an International Language”, sometimes abbreviated as ‘EIL’, keeps re-​surfacing in writings on the subject as a possible transnational language norm, but in my view it lacks an accurate definition, let alone a descriptive substantiation as to which features or properties are constitutive of it (or not). In the same year as Kachru’s response to Prator, Smith published a very liberally-​minded paper in which he suggested that “English belongs to the world” as “an international auxiliary language” used in very many countries, and he suggested its “name should be EIAL (English as an International Auxiliary Language)” (1976, p. 39). Time and again the label EIL has been used, sometimes also in book titles, but it remains controversial. Very loosely it seems to imply a linguistic norm that is neither British nor American but somehow globally shared. I think it has primarily retained its liberation association as a defining property: referring to EIL seems to be a strategy to avoid undesired external (“Inner Circle”) norm obligations, more of a negative definition than one filled with substance. Somehow, in my view, this characterizes very many (related) discussions of language pedagogy in the field of “Applied Linguistics” as well. This is a huge discipline with many conferences, presentations and publications on teaching strategies and pedagogical tools and tricks, but mostly in a fairly abstract fashion. To put it a bit pointedly, in many pedagogical debates across Asia and Africa there appears to be a lot of talk on how to teach but very little on what to teach. For about two decades the “World Englishes” enterprise has been supplemented by scholarly attention devoted to “English as a Lingua Franca” (ELF) as a rapidly growing subfield (which in my view substantially has branched off from World Englishes; Schneider, 2016b) 111

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with textbooks and a Journal of English as a Lingua Franca (since 2012). Certainly this is a most welcome development, given that interactions in English between speakers with different linguistic backgrounds, ELF in practice, constitute a huge fraction of uses of English on a global scale today. However, in the evolution of this subfield I sense some similarities to Applied Linguistics and EIL studies as just described. Not infrequently, promoting the importance of ELF also seems a strategy to justify a departure from exonormative orientations (which I find perfectly welcome but not in need of justification, in fact) without precisely filling alternative strategies (or, perhaps more importantly, teaching targets) with life.

3.5.  Error or emerging feature? For the conservative defenders of Standard British English in the debates mentioned above, localized usage patterns were simply “deviation from the standard language” (Quirk, 1990, p. 8), and in language pedagogy “error analysis” and the notion of “error” have figured prominently. In contrast, the process of “structural nativization” in young varieties entails that they will be acquiring distinctive properties of their own, features which become established in a new variety in the course of time and become characteristic elements. By way of an example, in East African English pick with a human object is known to be used transitively without the particle up (he picked her), and can be able is a widely used phrase in Kenyan English (Schneider, 2007, pp. 83, 86). Similarly, in South Asian Englishes, notably in India, the complex transitive complementation pattern with an “intrusive” as is used with a much wider range of verbs (e.g. commonly with call) than in, say, British English, yielding, for example, The temple is called as Rang-​Mahal (Lange, 2016). Are such types of usage “wrong”, do they constitute “errors” or “mistakes”, or do they represent established properties of different, in this case young, varieties, similar to American English gotten as opposed to British got? And who decides? Applied linguists have often discussed criteria that distinguish an “error” from an “emerging feature” in New Englishes. Obviously, there is a transition period during which a phenomenon that initially appears as an innovation, only occasionally, starts spreading and being used more widely –​but when is the point when a variant usage type becomes a distinguishing feature? Clearly, conventionalization of usage is a decisive property: a distinct feature of a new variety must be used regularly, somewhat frequently, there, by a wide range of speakers in natural contexts. Then, prescriptive thinking kicks in, since a status as a feature of a variety implies that it needs to be accepted as such, presumably also in teaching environments. For a feature to be accepted as an element of a local standard clearly a sociolinguistic association plays a role: it should be commonly used (also) by educated indigenous speakers in formal situations. But unavoidably a need for ‘acceptance’ implies considering questions of power and authority: Who accepts, who is entitled to state acceptance? In practice, a broad consensus on the side of many speakers should suffice –​but I suspect for many local speakers of English such a decision will not be an important issue, or one worth thinking about, and many will tend to simply stick to rules acquired from authorities during their own education. And those in power –​gatekeepers, teachers, high-​ranking officers in a ministry of education, even parents –​tend to be conservative in their attitudes and to reject innovations outright. Linguists have commonly discussed such questions, but their impact in a society tends to be very limited. Some have attempted to tackle the issue empirically. For example, Buregeya (2006) tested the acceptability of 26 putative features of Kenyan English by a large number of language students by asking them to correct errors in sentences in a questionnaire, and he considered features which were not detected or corrected by 60 per cent or more of the subjects as accepted properties of Kenyan English. But this still does not imply that these patterns were accepted in the Kenyan school system. 112

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A volume edited by Mukherjee & Hundt (2011) explored the boundaries between learner forms and properties of second-​language varieties more systematically. It identifies quite a number of structural similarities (and also differences) between English as produced by learners and by second-​language users, and some authors make explicit proposals on where to draw the line between errors and “conventionalized innovations”. Most explicitly, Van Rooy (2011), distinguishing between the creation and the diffusion of new forms, suggests grammatical stability and acceptability as decisive criteria. But again, such arguments do not have any serious impact on teaching practices and guidelines on correctness as stated by authorities in the education systems of most countries where English is used as a second language.

4.  Postcolonial language policies 4.1.  Strategies of dealing with the former colonial language: endoglossic, endonormative, or exonormative? Interestingly enough, after decolonization very few nations decided in favour of an endoglossic language policy, i.e. to develop an indigenous language into a new national language (cases in point being Tanzania, Malaysia, and the Philippines, but in all these nations English has remained strong). In most cases English has been retained, often as an official or co-​official language (see the map in Schneider, 2020, p. 64). One strong reason for such a decision was certainly the fact that the systems of administration, higher education, higher jurisdiction, and others, were established as relying on it and were essentially kept running as such; others were its ethnic neutrality in typically multi-​ethnic young nations (e.g. in Singapore or Nigeria) or its utilitarian value as a tool of access to western business, science and knowledge. The DM claims and predicts that the linguistic evolution in postcolonial nations with English as a national language is directed towards endonormativity, and it has been claimed that some such nations have already reached the stage of endonormative stabilization (e.g. Borlongan, 2016 for The Philippines; cf. Peters, 2020, p. 599–​602). I believe there are essentially two reasons for this built-​in directionality. One is political and symbolic: languages are closely associated with and symbols of nationhood (Wodak et al., 1999), and a young national identity will tend to accept their own way of speaking as such a symbol of nationhood. The other one is purely practical –​the retention of social class distinctions in the interest of those in power. I suspect it is not too far-​fetched to speculate that a strongly prescriptive exonormative orientation in language education is indirectly associated with a huge differential of wealth and power that prevails in many developing nations. Many of these varieties are spoken in multilingual nations and are ultimately products of second-​language acquisition and possibly language shift, most likely marked by transfer features from indigenous languages on the levels of pronunciation and lexis, and possibly also grammar. An exonormative variety such as British English as target of education will be difficult to achieve for a majority of local speakers, and positing it is thus likely to generate frustration and a cognitive discrepancy between reality and goal. Access to higher education (including, for instance, the opportunity to study at a British university), and thus to the ability to speak “good English”, in many such nations is a social privilege, available only or mainly to those in power and their offspring, so maintaining exonormative orientations and standards is indirectly also a means of perpetuating social inequalities and hierarchies in a society. Hence in many postcolonial nations we tend to find strong conservative forces and also a deeply engrained conservative attitude in matters linguistic –​local varieties of English are mostly branded as “corrupted” and “mistaken” and are simply to be avoided. Whether or 113

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to what extent this is due to real respect for the exonormative orientation, the former colonial variety as the only correct one associated with native speaker status, is difficult to say. The following three sections offer interesting case studies of prescriptive attitudes and practices from three postcolonial countries –​Singapore, India, and Nigeria.

4.2.  Singapore: SGEM vs Singlish? The most straightforward political manifestation of prescriptive attitudes in a country with a “New English” spoken is Singapore’s “Speak Good English Movement” (SGEM), a government campaign launched in 2000 intended to encourage Singaporeans to speak English grammatically correctly and in an internationally intelligible way (cf. Peters, 2020, pp. 603–​604 on the use of the notion ‘good English’ in Singapore). Since then the campaign has been rolled out with annually varying themes through media and various kinds of activities. Indirectly, SGEM has always been seen as an attempt at negatively branding and eradicating the popular local colloquial variety known as ‘Singlish’. The tension between these two varieties and attitudes towards them needs to be seen in the light of Singapore’s language policy in education. After independence in 1965 Singapore’s government, led by the nation’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew, successfully implemented a culturally and economically inspired bilingual language policy with four official languages. Since then in the school system all children acquire English as a “first language”, meant to secure the nation’s economic prosperity through intense international connections, and one of the other official languages (Mandarin Chinese, Malay, or Tamil) as a so-​called “second language mother tongue”, intended to secure the Asian cultural roots of the major ethnic population groups in this multi-​ethnic island state. In principle, this policy has been considered successful, and more than 50 years later Singapore is an Asian nation state which is proud of its tolerant multiculturalism and multilingualism –​but practically run strongly in English. By now more than half of all children in Singapore grow up with English as their main family language, so new, non-​western types of native speakers can be recognized and investigated (Buschfeld, 2019). It is questionable to what extent the intention of strengthening cultural roots through “mother tongue” education has been successful. For example, for the Chinese majority of the population Mandarin was explicitly promoted (in a similar “Speak Mandarin Campaign”), while what the older generation of Chinese Singaporeans really have spoken are strongly so-​called Chinese dialects like Hokkien, Teochow, Hakka, Hainanese, or Cantonese. What really has been growing very strongly and what many Singaporeans consider their cultural bond and “a symbol of social identity and cohesion” (Rubdy, 2001, p. 341) is Singlish –​an English-​derived contact dialect marked by Sinitic influence on its syntax, many distinctive discourse particles (like the well-​known lah), and many lexical loans from indigenous languages and dialects, used indiscriminately of a speaker’s ethnic background. Singapore’s government has always perceived Singlish as merely a corrupted form of English marked by mistakes, and as a danger to the international intelligibility of Singaporeans and hence the nation’s huge economic success, in the words of the nation’s founding father Lee Kuan Yew “a handicap that could stifle the nation’s economic development” (Bokhorst-​Heng, 2005, p. 185). SGEM is the outcome and manifestation of this attitude, a rare instantiation of a long-​term, state-​run explicitly prescriptive policy. But, interestingly enough, this seems one of the rare cases (or the only one?) in which the government’s desire and power to steer their citizens’ behaviour and thinking have largely failed. In most spheres of life Singapore represents a very special case of a steered democracy, sometimes called a “nanny state”, with the government (re-​elected from the same party with huge majorities since the beginning) persistently guiding the people on how to behave through an endless series of campaigns and, of course, 114

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also legal measures of implementation, like drastic punishments for minor and major offences.1 In society this seems to work well, but as to language behaviour the government simply has not been successful. For 20 years now Singaporeans have been bombarded by instructions on how and why to use English properly and “correctly” –​but, except among a small fraction of conservative supporters of this campaign, Singlish remains immensely popular and widely used in informal contexts. Many Singaporeans see it as a national bond and a symbol of their shared identity in the young nation, and they love it, play with it, use it, and perform it in specific circumstances. And, as a consequence, there are even signs of the government giving in at least a bit, with the latest rounds of SGEM trying to appear less “preachy” and a bit more tolerant. Ang (2019) observes that “the movement has largely been perceived by Singaporeans as pedantic, preachy and even anti-​Singlish”, so now the movement’s chairman concedes that the “Speak Good English website states that the committee recognises Singlish as a cultural marker for many Singaporeans”. Hence the “Singlish controversy” has been raging amongst language observers, commentators, teachers, and linguists for many decades (Rubdy, 2001; Wee, 2018). Bokhorst-​Heng (2005) teases out the various arguments pro and contra Singlish. A solution to the tension is offered by Alsagoff’s “cultural orientation” model (2010), which argues that standard English servers Singapore’s important “globalist orientation” while Singlish is a main expression of a “localist orientation”, “associated with informality, familiarity, equality, membership in a community, and socio-​cultural capital” (pp. 345–​346). However, this concept still implies a fairly strong binary dichotomy and the need for choice; against such a narrow perspective Leimgruber (2013) presents the notion of indexicality of individual features rather than a choice between distinct, holistic codes as effective in Singaporean linguistic choices. When zooming in more closely, things are even more complicated, however. In a thorough and comprehensive monograph, Wee (2018) argues that Singlish has been the subject of political ideologies and has been commodified, also as a sign of Singaporean-​ness in international migration and interaction. He argues that the widely asked question which underlies the controversy, whether Singlish constitutes either an asset or a liability to Singaporeans, fails to recognize the multiplicity of issues and also dimensions of linguistic usage. He shows that Singlish is “at the center of a socio-​political controversy that is symptomatic of the anxieties and concerns that revolve around language, culture and identity in the context of rapid globalization” (Wee, 2018, p. 5) but ultimately implies that the concept of Singlish as a bounded linguistic entity is too static and essentialist, projected by the needs of different language ideologies.

4.3.  India: three languages? English in India is the oldest of all postcolonial varieties, and arguably (exact figures are unknown) the one with the largest speaker numbers globally (given the magnitude of the population, estimates for speaker numbers of English are in the hundreds of millions). Similar to elsewhere, the Raj perpetuated the English class structure and assigned privileges like access to education and English to those of superior ranks –​a state of affairs which to some extent holds to the present day. India’s language policy built upon multilingualism, and originally had intended to remove English from its prestigious role as the language of governance and higher social affairs. India’s constitution accepted English as a co-​official language only for a transition period, but in the “Official Languages Act” of 1967 this period was extended indeterminately, with the proclaimed goal still being the “three-​language formula”, trilingualism in Hindi, a southern Dravidian language, and English. It didn’t work out, however, mostly due to tensions between 115

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northern and southern regions and cultures within India and the unwillingness of Indians from one region to invest into acquiring the other’s language –​and this has left English in the compromise position of an interethnic lead language to the present day. However, English in India still strongly bears the mark of its class-​related roots. While English is spreading “at the grassroots” as well (Schneider, 2016a, 2021, p. 118), largely disregarding issues of norms of correctness, knowledge of standard English is strongly associated with social class and access to formal education. “Even though English is mostly no longer framed as a colonial imposition, it sparks ambivalent attitudes: students coming up from rural colleges to metropolitan universities acutely feel the class and caste connotations attached to lingering on the wrong end of the cline of proficiency. English is a highly prized commodity” (Lange, 2020, p. 247). Whether there is “a single set of norms … converging to a more homogeneous standard”, especially on the level of pronunciation, seems questionable at this point, although a tendency towards homogenization becomes evident (Wiltshire, 2021, p. 1). In the education system British English used to be the model until the late twentieth century; it is only for the last fifty years or so that “a more local English model”, backed by increasingly positive attitudes toward local ways of speaking English, has been suggested alongside persistent conservative orientations (Wiltshire, 2021, pp. 7–​12).

4.4. Nigeria English is Nigeria’s “unofficial official” language (Jowitt, 2019, p. 11): it is not explicitly mentioned as such in the country’s constitution but clearly fulfils that role in all formal and political domains; its role is “pervasive and indispensable” (Jowitt, 2019, p. 11). The precise status and the norms of English in Nigeria are highly controversial. As in some other postcolonial African countries, British English and Received Pronunciation continue to be the prescribed and expected targets of language education for many gatekeepers. For example, Udofot states: “British English (Received Pronunciation) continues to be the prescribed textbook variety across all levels of the Nigerian educational system. However, in reality, a nativized Nigerian variety of English that is quite different from the target British variety is used and taught by Nigerian teachers in many schools” (2011, p. 19). For the majority of the population the prescribed speech target seems an utterly unrealistic goal; most speakers have a recognizably African accent, and local varieties of English tend to be characterized by substantial adjustments (such as a reduced set of vowel phonemes; see Schneider, 2020, p. 213). Jowitt (2019) distinguishes “accepters” and “rejecters” of localized linguistic forms and innovations. Rejecters, he states, “many (but not all) of whom belong to the older generation, but who are often still influential, uphold an ‘exoglossic’ or ‘exonormative’ Standard (invariably Standard British English) as the model for usage in Nigeria” (Jowitt, 2019, p. 25). Jowitt argues that the complication partly arises from an ambiguity embedded in the word “standard”, which, with a capital S, denotes a correct, prescribable norm to follow, while with a lower-​case initial ‘s’ it simply refers to what is commonly used and normal in a community (p. 25). He adds a general statement which is important in the present context (and by implication certainly applies beyond Nigeria as well): The contrast and tension between rejecters and accepters of Nigerian English correlates to a high degree with the familiar contrast of prescriptive and descriptive approaches … Those who reject Nigerian English are almost inevitably prescriptivists, because if they are teachers of English their concern is to maintain standards of ‘correct’ usage and adherence to … rules, which they consider Nigerian English to threaten. 116

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Nevertheless, the accepters … may have an ultimate prescriptive agenda [by desiring to describe a Nigerian variety to be used prescriptively in schools and colleges]. Jowitt, 2019, p. 26 Obviously, the distinction between errors and variants (and the debate about that distinction) addressed in Section 3.5 applies here as well (Jowitt 2019, pp. 27–​28). The cleavage between conservative, prescriptive and more liberal, accepting attitudes appears to be both rooted in and associated with a wider social differential. Pidgin English is extremely widespread in West Africa, with speaker number estimates in Nigeria alone being in the many tens of millions (or even more), and it has occasionally been suggested as a good candidate for national language status, since it is both widely known and ethnically neutral and African in origin. But Pidgin remains strongly stigmatized, and access to “good” or “standard” English comes with education only, so prescriptivism indirectly serves the interest of maintaining established social class differences and perpetuating power stratifications in society. Consider Saro-​Wiwa’s explicit reference to government officials’ use of standard English quoted above as an example.

5. Conclusion Is the presence of prescriptive attitudes principally different between countries where New Englishes are spoken and those with established “metropolitan” varieties? Not fundamentally, but perhaps in some postcolonial countries it seems more pointed. English may be associated with modernity, western technology, and success in the international business world, so a good performance in English may be viewed from a rather pragmatic, utilitarian perspective, as is the case in Singapore. At the same time, access to standard language performance essentially tends to be associated with a struggle about power, with access to higher education and thus to “good English” being restricted to wealthy and politically dominant strata in society and their offspring. Being able to define what is considered right or wrong thus constitutes a privilege and can be instrumentalized in the interest of those in power in a society. To put it pointedly: a prescriptive attitude serves a society’s upper strata; the poor cannot afford it. One interesting and reasonable reaction to such constellations might be the adoption of what Wee (2018, chap. 3) aptly calls “linguistic chutzpah” illustrated by Singapore’s “Speak Good Singlish Movement”, a deliberate and explicit, somewhat ironic reaction to SGEM. It copies but ridicules SGEM, turning its arguments around, adopting a decidedly anti-​ authoritarian stance that is quite untypical of Singapore in general: “For years, the government has been tormenting us, almost desperately begging us, to stop using Singlish. For years, Singaporeans have collectively flipped a middle finger back.” (Anonymous, 2019). Wee argues that in the absence of traditional sources of authority (like locally accepted grammars or dictionaries), speakers need to make metalinguistic choices and ideological decisions of their own, thus establishing new stances which may be conflicting with those of established linguistic authorities. They do –​but in general in ESL countries this is still the exception rather than the rule. Many countries and speakers have deeply internalized prescriptive voices, and others are struggling.

Note 1 It is a well-​established pun that Singapore is a “fine” city; and its level of crime and punishment are extremely low by international standards.

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8 PRESCRIPTIVISM AND NATIONAL IDENTITY Sociohistorical constructionism, disciplinary blindspots, and Standard Austrian German Stefan Dollinger

1.  Introduction: the term ‘language’ What speakers understand by the term “language” has changed considerably over time, and particularly so as a result of the concept of “national languages”, which has gained prominence since early modern times (see, e.g., Van Rooy, 2020; Haugen, 1966). When we use the term language to refer, for instance, to English, German, or Czech, we do so with ideological baggage from the nineteenth-​century nationalist and colonialist rule book. Prescriptivists and descriptivists alike have played important roles in the endeavour of turning linguistic varieties into national languages. This chapter conceives of language, that is standard languages, as socio-​ politically constructed entities, not as given artefacts. As John Joseph puts it: “languages themselves are constructed out of the practices of speech and writing, and the beliefs (or ‘ideologies’) of those doing the speaking and writing” (2006, p. 3). Such constructions and transformations never happen neutrally, fully democratically, or without winners and losers. As we will see, these transformations are often, if not always, the result of ideological battles, the preferences of (often just a few) stakeholders and the complicity of linguists, philologists, and anthropologists in the creation of “languages with names” (Piller, 2017, p. 51) and the matching of language with national culture. Surprisingly though, linguists may take over these terms with their implied hierarchy of legitimacy. This legitimacy is, however, attained by assigning the linguistic variety of a subset of speakers a particular name but not others: German not Yiddish (though extremely closely related varieties, written in a different script, but in many cases nearly mutually intelligible) or Luxembourgish not German (structurally also more often mutually intelligible than not). With Chinese it is, for equally political reasons, the complete opposite (it is considered one language, hence one name), while the Spanish and Portuguese worked hard to claim their national languages as very different from one another (in linguistic terms, they are anything but that) and from domestic varieties such as Catalan or Galician in Spain (see also Walsh & Humphries, this volume and Hickey, this volume). For her own field of intercultural communication, Piller takes a stance that sociohistorical linguists ought to remind themselves: “If … scholarship is to DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-9

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be more than the reproduction of nation-​language stereotypes, it will need to stop treating a specific language as a given” (2017, p. 50). This short-​cut way of talking about “languages with names” is the result of prescriptive efforts, or a combination of descriptive and prescriptive practices that were socio-​politically informed. In such a manner, Norwegian was carved out of the Danish base that it came from and the Swedish dialects close to it in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (though that base continues, more or less, as Bokmål in Norway), Czechoslovakian reverted back into Czech and Slovak most recently by decree on 1 January 1993, when the country was peacefully divided, very much in contrast to the Croatian and Serbian split around the same time. Until about World War II, a sociohistorical perspective on language was a mainstay in the then relatively young field of linguistics (see, e.g. Jespersen, 1922, 1946; Weinreich, 1953; Haugen, 1966), a focus that was lost in the following expansion period and that was only re-​established in the late 1990s (e.g. Joseph, 2006; Millar, 2005; Wright, 2004). Recent years have seen increased interest in sociohistorical approaches and with it a focus on the study of prescriptivism (e.g. Beal, 2004; Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2010; Curzan, 2014; Auer et al., 2015; Percy & Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2017; Chapman & Rawlins, 2020). These studies have produced highly interesting results, yet it is striking to see that a neo-​positivist stance continues to be widespread. With ‘neo-​positivist’ I refer to the belief that data is considered as unquestionably objective and that with ‘data alone’ one will be able to produce linguistically relevant findings (see Muhr, 2020 for a discussion of one striking case). This is, of course, problematic, as socio-​cultural perspectives are built into our way of talking about “languages with names”. While important in their own right, neo-​positivist approaches that limit themselves to linguistic behaviour –​e.g. assessments whether prescriptive rule X was successful by studying texts following the rule’s publication –​tend to diminish the language-​political angle of linguistic behaviour –​something Haugen, Jespersen, and Max Weinreich were keenly aware of and Pierre Bourdieu made a central aspect of his approach to languages that is determined by the linguistic marketplace (2015 [1982]). The present chapter sketches, for the non-​dominant standard variety of Austrian German, the repercussions of the way eighteenth-​century prescriptivists conceptualized the language ‘German’. This chapter is a meta-​level discussion: it will feature no linguistic data, though it will put different types of conceptualizations of linguistic standards at its centre. The distinction between prescriptivism and descriptivism will be taken with a grain of salt, i.e. an awareness of the fuzzy boundaries of the dichotomy. What may have been intended, for instance, as a descriptive account can easily be used as a prescriptive rule and vice versa. Instead, much like Curzan (2014), I argue that we generally need more awareness of prescriptive elements in linguistics and philology, which are themselves built on disciplinary presuppositions. I will arrive at Curzan’s conclusion –​the embrace of prescriptive processes as a central part of language change and thus of linguistics –​from a different angle. In this chapter, I begin with some background information on the French Revolution and its linguistically heavy-​handed approach that helped establish present-​day conceptualizations of language more generally. After this brief account from eighteenth-​century France, I will look at the imagined character of the concept of “nation” and its discursive construction, considering the power of an “imagined” national community (Anderson 2006), which is, I argue, something linguists need to consider in their theories. What I call “Weinreich’s Dictum” (from 1945; Dollinger 2021a, p. 44) and “Haugen’s Sequence” (Haugen, 1966) help us understand the connections between language and culture and language and imagined national culture. The main part of the chapter is dedicated to the sociohistorical constraints operative in the making of German, and the disciplinary resistance against the acceptance of an Austrian standard of 122

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German, which is ongoing to this day. Before this backdrop, I aim to show that disciplinary boundaries in linguistics and philology today may create conditions that are to the disadvantage of the speakers of non-​dominant varieties. I argue that, as a result of the social functions of the term “German” around 1800 and the foundation of a discipline to study that language, academic reflection may, as Bourdieu argues, actually create the conditions it sets out to study. This “theory effect”, as Bourdieu calls it, is important in sociolinguistic inquiry, as it is the “effect of the postulation of principles of social stratification, which enables the stratification in the first place by way of the postulation of said principles” (Bourdieu 2015, p. 136, my translation). In the case of German, this theory effect is the “pan-​German” angle, i.e. all speakers of German are considered, on some level, as German.

1.1  France 1789: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, mais linguistiquement intolerant France plays a special role in the application of the idea of “one language, one nation”, the connection of which has since become “an important ideologeme” (Eugen Lemberg, qtd in Coulmas, 1985, p. 41). The time between 1789 and the second half of the nineteenth century was crucial for the connection of language and nation, so that by the early nineteenth century philology was seen as a precursor to nationalism: “There is not a new nation in Europe which has not been preceded by fifty to eighty years of philology and archeological studies” (Fournol, 1931, qtd in Fishman, 1972, p.45). How “natural” are the phenomena that we perceive today as languages? Florian Coulmas has an answer to this conundrum. Summarizing the situation at the time of the French Revolution, he makes the case that declaring French –​the dialect of Île-​de-​France in central Paris –​the language of France in toto was an ideologically motivated move aimed at creating a nation. Since the foundation of the Académie française in 1635 great efforts had been made to make French the dominant language of France, yet a study that was commissioned in 1793 by the [French] National Assembly under the lead of Abbé Grégoire showed that only three million of the 26 million inhabitants of France were fluent speakers of Standard French, i.e. the dialect of Îsle-​de-​France Bourhis, 1982, p. 37 quoted in Coulmas, 1985, p. 30, my translation With less than 12 per cent of speakers after a century and a half of dedicated language planning, the decision to focus solely on Île-​de-​France-​French must be considered undemocratic, not just by today’s standards. Yet this approach –​“you are French therefore you speak French” –​is so powerful that it has become entrenched as unquestioned common sense that even academic inquiry is not immune to. In the 1790s, the revolutionary Bertrand Barère testified to the Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety (Comité de salut public) in relation to language, showing the black-​and-​white monolingual approach that the French Revolution promoted in its goal to overthrow the old regime: Federalism and superstition speak Breton, emigration and hate of the republic speak German, counter-​revolution Italian and fanatism Basque. Let’s destroy these instruments of damage and confusion. Brunot, 1927, p. IX/​1:181, my translation Given that such attitudes have not yet been fully replaced by multilingual policies in most of Europe’s and North America’s education systems, the underpinnings of this particular mind set 123

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are readily seen. The guise of monolingualism, one language, one nation, has become an academic background template in front of which other knowledge creation unfolds. As David Gramling, in his incisive account of monolingualism, summarizes From its initial, ideational forms in the seventeenth century, monolingualism has grown into a structure capable of producing its own kind of literatures, citizens, competencies, translingual compliance protocols, and indeed also corresponding ideas about the proper conduct of multilingualism. Gramling, 2016, p. 211 The basic insight behind the above quotation has been available in the literature for some time now, for which the work of Max Weinreich and Einar Haugen stands out as exemplary. Their research traditions, however, have paradoxically been backgrounded and play a rather minor role in today’s introductions to linguistics (but see Joseph et al., 2020).

1.2  Discursive constructions of identity: “nations” as imagined communities Discursive constructions of national identities have been studied extensively over the past decade or two, including longitudinal panel studies by Wodak et al. (1998, 2009) and De Cillia et al. (2020). A key notion is applied by Benedict Anderson about the nature of communities: As “all communities larger than primordial villages and face-​to-​face contact (and perhaps even these) are imagined”, Anderson argues that communities need to “be distinguished, not by their falsity/​genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (Anderson, 2006, p. 6). This means that, at least by Anderson’s definition, historical discourse analysis ought to play a central role in the study of linguistic identities and would complement the study of prescriptivism, which is usually focussed on the origin and uptake of proscriptions in grammarians’ writings, which represent a more limited kind of discourse, though an important one (e.g. Yáñez-​Bouza, 2015 on preposition placement in English or Havinga, 2018 on the demise of domestic features of German in eighteenth century written texts from Austria). The empirical study of language behaviour and the effects of prescriptive rules, as in Yáñez-​ Bouza (2015) and Havinga (2018), offer important background information but they cannot address the identity angle of particular distributions. One can argue, however, that behaviour and the adoption of prescriptive rules is secondary to speakers’ attitudes, which are more fruitfully studied with discourse analytical frameworks. When De Cillia and Ransmayr (2019, p. 167) show, for instance, that school teachers in Austria consider 12.9 per cent of Austrian German terms and 49.1 per cent German German terms in essay writing as marked in one way or another, we obtain good data on the prescriptive rules of the teachers but not of their motivations. Such data is offered by discourse analysis. For Austria, Wodak et al. find the following remarkable results, complementing the behavioural data in important ways: 1. while the notion of “Austrian identity” is prevalent, the term of “Austrian nation” is used much less frequently (Wodak et al., 2009, pp. 188, 190). 2. “there is not one Austrian identity, but” […] “constructs of identity are formed depending on context, and are influenced by factors such as social status, party political affiliation, regional and/​or ethnic origin, and so on”. (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 188) 3. “The primary linguistic level of identification [in Austria], however, would be the dialect or ‘everyday’ colloquial language [Umgangssprache]”. (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 188)

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4. “only a very small number of respondents could be expected to be aware of an independent Austrian variety of German” (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 188) 5. Yet “a unified national German language was regarded (even by members of the minorities) as absolutely necessary even if there were few who believed that competence in the German language should be a criterion for the granting of [Austrian] citizenship” (Wodak et al., 2009, p. 190). Point 1 is a result of the historical entanglement of Austria with German identity, as Austria was the leader of the German states for nearly half a millennium before ceding leadership to Prussia in a comparatively recent move (War of 1866). Point 2 refers to the multicultural and multilingual character of Austria that has been historically, in contrast to Germany, more diverse with often long historical ties to non-​German speaking communities. Points 3 to 5 address the key issue with German, Austria’s dominant language, as important for identity purposes on the non-​standard level –​a feature shared with German-​speaking Switzerland. As traditional Austrian dialects are, however, linguistically closer to the Austrian Standard, an Austrian Standard German has developed though has not yet reached its full potential, which is reflected in finding #4, as academic German Studies (note: not Austrian Studies) remain rather sceptical of the concept. While Austrian identity is indexed in non-​standard varieties, it is less perceived as being signalled in Standard Austrian German. It is in this area, the conceptualization of the standard, that present-​day German Studies implicitly appears to be harking back to mid-​ nineteenth-​century, pre-​1866 constructions of German identity by working with an implied “One-​Standard-​German Axiom” (Dollinger 2019, pp. 14 & passim). German linguistics seems to be unwittingly engaged, via Bourdieu’s theory effect, in prescriptive approaches that are presented as thorough and “realistic” descriptions (Elspaß et al., 2017, p. 71; Elspaß, 2020).

1.3  Weinreich’s dictum and Haugen’s sequence Max Weinreich’s dictum of “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy” –​uttered in Yiddish by an anonymous lecture attendee at one of Weinreich’s talks at Columbia University (Dollinger, 2021a, p. 43–​44) –​captures well the socio-​political dimension of the term “language”. If we think about the underpinnings of Weinreich’s (attendee’s) statement, literally as well as figuratively, it epitomizes the “language with a name” label that Piller uses, which is to consider first and foremost the social dimension. Approaches that disregard the social may claim to offer a “real [tatsächlich]” (Elspaß et al., 2013 p. 60) or “realistic [realistisch]” (Elspaß, et al., 2017, p. 71) assessment of the variety, but will not be more than an attempt to reduce a social phenomenon –​standard languages and varieties –​to something that is more easily counted (see Dollinger, 2019, pp. 62–​76). What elevates a given dialect to be more equal than others, socially speaking, is usually a country-​specific set of institutions. These institutions, often education and administration units, subsequently implement and shape this standard variety in all their spheres of influence. It is important to keep in mind, however, that without a territorially specific authority, for instance school boards, often on the level of countries’ governmental bodies, dissemination would be difficult. This influence is guaranteed by the monopolies of the state, i.e. a country and its institutions, expressed by Weinreich’s metaphor of “army and navy”, which are at the very base of how speakers have come to think about countries. The resulting “language with a name” is, as Piller points out, “a powerful ingredient in the cultural politics” (2017, p. 51), including state-​owned constructionism, reflection and discourse about a given state or country. Those

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who control the discourse control how varieties are being viewed –​whether as languages, or merely as dialects, control access to a key linguistic resource in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense of a linguistic marketplace (Bourdieu, 2015 [1982]). Weinreich’s dictum, however, does not figure very prominently in sociolinguistics today as a discipline that has not taken much of an interest in standard varieties more generally –​other than as an abstract reference point –​while producing a great deal of insight on non-​standard speech. Einar Haugen, Norwegian-​American academic, is the second scholar of interest. Studying the making of Norwegian when on a research stay in Norway in the 1950s, Haugen captured his experience, filtered through his sociolinguistic and socio-​political lens (Haugen 1966,1972 [1964]). The template I call “Haugen’s Sequence” offers a model with predictive force in four stages for how to create a language, by which he meant a standard variety (after Haugen, 1972 [1964], p. 507): 1) Selection of a variety 2) Codification in dictionaries and –​optional –​grammars 3) Elaboration of function, filling of (lexical and other) gaps 4) Acceptance by key stakeholders, the population at large (“Haugen’s Sequence”) Haugen’s Sequence shows what it takes to elevate any variety to a standard language. What is missing in a given variety –​such as, often, vocabulary, as in late sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​ century English (in stage 3) –​is preceded by codification efforts (in dictionaries –​sometimes also in grammars) (stage 2). Codification is for Milroy & Milroy (1999, pp. 22–​23) a catalyst for more prescriptive scrutiny, a kind of trigger for heightened awareness going forward. Stages 2 and 3 might be reversed or go hand-​in-​hand before finally (stage 4) the variety is accepted by the speakers as standard –​at least by and large. What are today often democratic decisions used to be dependent on only a handful of key stakeholders, historically included people (usually men) of letters, or state-​sanctioned language academies, or self-​proclaimed bodies such as leading dictionaries –​Oxford for British English, Merriam-​Wester for American English, or Duden for German, but also in the form of government-​appointed committees such as the German language Orthographic Counsel (Rechtschreibrat). These institutions, then, become language-​political players in their own right, whether they want it or not. Codification is often used synonymously with prescriptivism and is often conflated with purism (cf Hickey, 2012). Ayers-​Bennett advocates a distinction between the two terms based, among others, on “codification” being “a neutral term, which refers to the production of grammars, dictionaries and other metalinguistic works” and may result in the production of either descriptive or prescriptive works (2020, p. 187). “Prescriptivism”, however, has no such neutrality to it and is the expression of subjective preference often in contradiction to majority usage. In the next section I aim to highlight the prescriptive element in the codification of German, yet from a societal, macro-​level perspective rather than a micro-​level, author-​based approach.

2.  The making of Standard German From around 1300 to 1806, the Habsburg dynasty led the German-​speaking small states and fiefdoms in what was called the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (HRE). Linguistically, German was first standardized in not one, but two equally accepted standards. These were the Austrian Imperial Standard (Gemeindeutsch) and the East Central German Standard (Ostmitteldeutsch). The latter, which by the 1750s had come to be considered as more 126

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“elegant” and “suitable” than the former, was used in the 1770s by Maria-​Theresia, Austrian Empress and leader of the HRE, for her introduction of compulsory schooling. After the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, the cause to unite the German-​speaking states politically gained momentum, for which the role of a unified German language and culture was instrumental. At that time, though, large parts of the HRE lands were multilingual, especially in what was then Austria-​Hungary, with German being one language, though a privileged one, among several ones, while Latin held out as the ultimate language of prestige and learning and French had significant functions in circles of nobility. Prussia, one of the German states, would become more and more powerful, eventually beating Austria in 1866 in what originally used to be called the German–​German War (later German–​Austrian War). This caused Prussia to be seen as the new, more vibrant leader of the German states, which soon accepted Prussia’s leading role, if at times begrudgingly. By 1871 the Prussian leader Otto von Bismarck had united many German states, including the large Bavaria, into what he then called in an apparent misnomer ‘Deutschland’. The problem was that the most important single German state for more than half a millennium, Austria, was not part of the unification process. It is at this point, the unification of Germany without the then powerful Austria, that the ongoing sociolinguistic problems with the language “German” began.

2.1  Eighteenth-​century prescriptivists: Germany and Austria What is considered the classical period of German literature of Goethe and Schiller must be understood in the context of the French Revolution and the oppression of Europe’s nations by Napoleon. In this long conflict, the fight for a national identity of all speakers of German varieties –​with fuzzy boundaries –​takes a special place. Two philologists, Johann Christoph Adelung, whose dictionary from 1774–​86 became a key German lexicographical reference and Johann Christoph Gottsched, who became the foremost grammarian (Mattheier, 2003, p. 226), managed to lastingly influence the German standard variety. There can be no question that the work of Adelung and Gottsched was meant to –​ philologically –​construct a “German” national identity. As the traditional literary history by De Boor & Newald puts it: “through a comprehensive German dictionary, Johann Christoph Adelung partook in the creation of a national awareness in German literature” (1957, VI/​1, p. 145, my translation). From Leipzig, then the centre of the German book trade, Gottsched was able to consolidate the basic presuppositions of New High German writing and extend its zone of influence in opposition with Zurich in the southwest and, more peacefully, in the southeast [Austria] of the German language area. De Boor & Newald, 1967, V, p. 483, my translation Before long, even Zurich succumbed to the pressure. Gottsched’s selection of a variety, in Haugen’s Sequence stage 1, was inspired by his belief that the best Mundart the “best non-​ standard dialect”, was the dialect of Meißen, Saxony, which Luther had used as the base for his bible translation. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries “were dominated by an on-​ going conflict between these two standard norms” (Mattheier, 2003, p. 218), a conflict that East Central German would win. This line of thought works well with Havinga’s finding that East Central German influence was already traceable in Austria in the 1740s (Mattheier, 2003, p. 227), possibly as a result of Johann Balthasar von Antesperger’s grammar from 1747 (Mattheier, 2003, p. 227), which would replace the Austrian Imperial Standard. 127

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Maria-​Theresia’s choice of the East Central German standard would further the likelihood of political unification, as one can point to the already implemented prestige standard of the states that ought to be unified. Once more, we can see that the choice of a variety is profoundly socio-​political in the creation of phenomena we call “languages”. De Boor & Newald’s literary history allows us to assess the presuppositions of the field of ‘Germanistik’ more directly. In today’s writings, by contrast, a pan-​German bias remains more subtle and implicit by virtue of the disciplinary assumptions of what constitutes German (see Dollinger, 2019 for such analysis and, interestingly, Langer’s 2021 critique and Dollinger’s 2021b response). Writing on the Austrian-​Viennese tradition in the eighteenth century, De Boor & Newald are clear in the teleological interpretation of prescriptive efforts, concluding their chapter with the following statement: But not for long could the new era be stopped in Austria, the star of Weimar [Goethe and the classic writers] was on the rise and its rays were to enlighten Grillparzer and Stifter [two eminent Austrian writers] De Boor & Newald, 1967, VI/​1, p. 409, my translation Using Schneider’s terms (2007; this volume), this exonormative domination –​domination from abroad –​was to become a reality in the nineteenth century, when the standard variety of German was entangled, from the beginning, with a pan-​German, then deutsch-​nationalist ideology and, later in the twentieth century, for some time with national-​socialist (nazi) world views (Ardelt, 1972).

2.2  Standard Austrian German and Standard German German The eighteenth century is important as it laid the foundations for present-​day concepts of Standard German: what “counts” as German and what does not. What stands out with hindsight during the reign of Empress Maria-​Theresia (reigned 1740–​1780) are the war with Prussia over the traditionally Austrian territory of Silesia, the rapid rise of Prussia –​which would be leading Germany during its nineteenth-​century unification process without Austria –​and the fight for a commonly accepted standard of written German based on East Central German –​ Saxon –​norms. Maria-​Theresia’s school reforms from the 1770s would follow this standard at the expense of the Austrian Imperial Standard (Gemeindeutsch). Ignaz von Felbiger is the central figure, who implemented the new, Prussian standard in Austria’s schoolbooks at Maria-​ Theresia’s behest. Felbiger hailed from Silesia, which had in 1742 fallen to Prussia, giving Felbiger’s home province a 30-​year head start in “Prussianization”. His expertise was fully relied on, as he commissioned, or wrote, the textbooks to Prussian (=​East Central German) standards. At the time of publication of Gottsched’s Deutsche Sprachkunst in 1748, however, it was far from clear whether Gottsched, who was by then known for his reform of theatrical texts and style (De Boor & Newald, 1967, V, p. 488), would be able to exert much influence on either of the two standards. Key stakeholders of the Austrian elite, such as Joseph von Sonnenfels (1733–​ 1817), though, were impressed with the East Central German standard and Sonnenfels would influence with his “taste reform the literary developments in a role as ‘Austrian Gottsched’ ” in Vienna (De Boor & Newald, 1967, VI/​1, p. 403). The first Viennese literary society was founded in the 1760s by “older followers of Gottsched’s” (De Boor & Newald, 1967, V, p. 403, my translation), which gave the exonormative influence a solid foothold in Vienna’s academic circles. 128

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2.3  Gottschedian prescriptivism and Popowitsch’s descriptive leanings The adoption of the East Central German standard in Austria therefore seems to have been the result of a good deal of social engineering. While Johann Christoph Gottsched (1700–​1766) was the Literaturpapst, i.e. the leading literary critic of his day (Mattheier, 2003, p. 226), he was hardly an objective grammarian. This is most clearly seen in contrast with Johann Siegmund Valentin Popowitsch (1705–​1774). Popowitsch grew up in Styria, Austria, in a bilingual Slovenian-​German household (Slovenian name Janez Žiga Valentin Popovič), learning German “from his parents”, though referring to himself as “not German by birth” (Havinga, 2018, p. 67, also Wiesinger, 2015, p. 51), which would render him an Austrian Slovene. Popowitsch, who held the inaugural chair for German at the University of Vienna as of late 1753, was originally a follower of Gottsched’s but would soon learn that individual interests trump more equitable, reasoned, or democratic decisions in standardization matters. Prior to 1741, when working as a private tutor, Popowitsch discussed his linguistic research by correspondence with the famous Gottsched, the Leipzig professor. Gottsched “advised him [Popowitsch] against publishing a grammar” (Havinga, 2018, p. 67), on account of the dangers of having no first-​hand experience with the most prestigious kind of German used in Saxony. Though Gottsched claimed that all necessary titles were already at hand (according to Popowitsch 1750, qtd in Havinga, 2018, p. 68), he would publish his own grammar (Deutsche Sprachkunst) only in 1748 –​seven years after dissuading Popowitsch from writing one. This led to Popowitsch’s public break with Gottsched and his accusing Gottsched for having “thwarted” Popowitsch’s grammar, which would eventually be published in 1754. Popowitsch, nevertheless, became the first professor of German philology at the University of Vienna, where he worked until retirement from his post due to ill health in 1766. His The Most Necessary Elements of German Grammar, Published for Use in Austrian Schools (Popowitsch, 1754) shows an “interest in ‘dialects’ and the linguistic varieties used by ‘simple’ and ‘uneducated’ people [which] was incomprehensible” to many of his compatriots, including Gottsched. Popowitsch constructs Vienna as a multilingual epicentre that is “poised to make the German language known not only to its neighbours but as far as the Orient” (Popowitsch, 1754, p. 10, my translation), proposing a different kind of German standard. Popowitsch’s “ear with the people” led him to propose a standard that was closer to the vernacular than the one proposed by Gottsched, who “invisibilises all Upper German forms … by not mentioning them at all” (Havinga, 2018, p. 66). The dispute with Gottsched further escalated following the publication of Popowitsch’s grammar, which was initially quite popular (Wiesinger, 2015, p. 57–​ 58), causing Gottsched’s followers to lobby against the publication. Eventually, Popowitsch’s grammar would not be adopted in Austrian schools. In 1766, Popowitsch’s successor, Heinrich von Engelschall, lost no time to immediately replace Popowitsch’s (1754) German Grammar with Gottsched’s Sprachkunst (Havinga, 2018, p. 68). Despite massive Gottschedian resistance, however, Popowitsch’s “grammar has had a big influence in Austria and Bohemia, indirectly also on the budding Czech grammar” (Von Polenz, 1994, p. 163) and it is exemplary for a “theme which runs through the largest German” reference works, “that of the relationship between the perceived unity of the German language and the perceived diversity of its regional varieties” (Considine, 2017, p. 120). Popowitsch was, perhaps like some would consider Noah Webster a century later, more modern in adopting a more descriptive stance than his peers. To this day members of the academic tradition in Vienna stress, however, that they do not consider Popowitsch a founder of their department for “reasons of definition” of the field (Wiesinger & Steinbach 2001, p. 13). This is an inexplicable exclusion. 129

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In hindsight, we can see the immense power of prescriptivism: it can be stated that the air of fashion, the idea that East Central German was more elegant, more dynamic, in short, carried more prestige –​factors that were bestowed onto the language as a result of Prussian military and economic successes –​loaded the dice in its favour. Popowitsch’s grammar, mirroring the speech of the language more closely than Gottsched’s “exonormative” kind of German, was doomed to fail with little institutional support, and with it failed Popowitsch’s idea of creating a standard koiné that would combine elements from all dialects –​a very modern, democratic approach –​from today’s perspective.

2.4  Franz Joseph’s hesitation and possible negligence Despite a century of exonormative domination following Popowitsch’s retirement, Austrian features of German would not diminish silently as they would be largely preserved in the spoken language. The written language, however, was becoming more and more uniform since Felbiger’s days of school reform in Austria. The upset of the German–​Austrian War of 1866 was substantial, as there would be –​in violation of the principle of “one language, one nation” –​ not one but two German states: one called Germany, in which national culture was rooted in the German language, and the other Austria, in which German was the dominant language of administration, military, and the arts, but in which German was only one language in a multilingual empire under Habsburg rule. The difference can be seen to this day, for instance, in the linguistic uptake and tolerance of loanwords in Standard Austrian German in contrast to other German-​speaking countries (Ebner, 2019, p. 32). Clyne (1995, pp. 31–​32) considers this tendency a part of Austrian imperial –​and later republican –​identity constructions, as a legacy of a multilingual empire (more recently, see Lenz et al., 2021, p. 78, who suggest that a specific use of geben in Austrian Standard German may derive from Czech–​German language contact). The consequences of 1866 were not readily admitted in all places. Above all, Emperor Franz Joseph I, who reigned from 1848 to 1916, failed to see the danger to his Empire from pan-​German ideas. Friedrich Heer shows that Franz Joseph either did not muster the courage, was unwilling, or was too naïve (2001, pp. 211–​261) to take decisive action to protect Austrian identities in the onslaught of pan-​German students’ and pupils’ movements. These movements, which were monolingual German and based on ideologies of one Reich, one Kaiser, one Country, became increasingly influential from the 1860s. In 1888, for instance, the Emperor ignored urgent recommendations by his own Minister of Education for decisive action against these student groups, Burschenschaften, of which 81 of 235 in Vienna were deutsch-​nationalist and thus against the Austrian state (Heer, 2001, pp. 273). These student Burschenschaften, dissatisfied with the multilingual make-​up of the monarchy, were promoting unification with Germany instead, undermining all things Austrian. They still exist today and are, at times, paradoxically still supported with Austrian government funding (e.g. Stacher, 2022). Two orthographic conferences on German, one in 1876 between Austria and Germany (the latter led by Prussia) and a second one in 1901, which included Switzerland (Mattheier, 2003, p. 228), were important developments. They offered a set of some 90 orthographic rules for all German-​speaking nations. In 1880, Konrad Duden was the first to capitalize on the 1876 rule book, which made his private publishing house –​Duden –​the dominant force on the German language market. The Orthographic Conferences, however, were weighed in Germany’s favour, with Germany, to this day, holding at least 50 per cent of the vote. Austria, however, maintained its own word-​list dictionary (an orthographic dictionary that featured no definitions but was

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meant to aid the printers in their task) even after the second Orthographical Conference, which became a basis for Austria’s endonormative Austrian Dictionary (Österreichisches Wörterbuch) after World War II, when disassociation from Germany became a top-​priority concept. In the nineteenth century, however, Duden dictionaries and Prussian ways of writing became the preferred norm. After World War I, all political parties in the new dwarf republic of Deutsch-​Österrreich –​the German-​speaking parts of the monarchy without South Tyrol (which Italy demanded as war spoils) –​would support unification with Germany, yet there is evidence that not all major opinions were reflected in the national parliament (see Dollinger, 2023, pp. 217–18). This unification was forbidden by the Entente, forcing the renaming of Deutsch-​Österreich (German-​Austria) into Österreich (Austria). All this shows a history that must be read in connection with the socio-​political situation of a disintegrating empire.

2.5  Austrian linguistic resistance: Popowitsch, Grillparzer, Wittgenstein Linguistic-​cultural domination from Prussia has always been met with resistance in Austria, which, however, has seen ebbs and flows over the decades and centuries. We have seen Popowitsch’s opposition to Gottsched and the former’s advocacy for the inclusion of Austrian German in the creation of a Standard German compromise variety for all German-​speaking nations. Popowitsch’s approach of a kind of standard koiné, taking bits and pieces from every German dialect failed, however. Franz Grillparzer, Austria’s most acclaimed nineteenth century dramatist, was very critical of the northern German influence in Austria. So much so that some scholars pose the question whether Grillparzer actually spoke German and not some other kind of Upper West Germanic variety (Scheichl, 1996). The acceptance of the new East Central German standard, which was “essentially a cultural artefact”, was a “puzzling” development that “provided a focus for nationalist aspirations in the nineteenth century” (Durrell, 2002, p. 99), as outlined in the previous section. Another critic of note was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who worked for a while as an elementary school teacher. In this capacity, Wittgenstein published a school dictionary for Austrian elementary schools in 1926, which would be his second (after the highly influential Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus) and last published book. Wittgenstein’s dictionary’s express goal was to elevate Standard Austrian German to the same level as Standard German German, as is made explicit in a letter that was intended as the dictionary’s preface, though it was not printed with the alphabetical part. Wittgenstein considers the dictionary’s first design principle as follows: In das Wörterbuch sollen nur solche, aber alle solche Wörter aufgenommen werden, die österreichischen Volksschülern geläufig sind. Also auch viele gute deutsche Wörter nicht, die in Oesterreich ungebräulich sind; The dictionary should include only words, but all such words, that are known to Austrian elementary students. Therefore it excludes many a good German word that is unusual in Austria (my translation) Wittgenstein, 1925, unpublished Geleitwort ‘preface‘, p. 3 Note that this striking confirmation of the autonomy of Austrian German falls in the period after World War I, in which all political parties promoted unification with Germany. Despite the political circumstances not having been in favour of autonomy then, Wittgenstein shows that Austrian German remained an entity to be reckoned with, even under these dire circumstances.

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2.6  Post-​World War II to present: Österreichisches Wörterbuch (Austrian Dictionary) Only after World War II would Austrian German be foregrounded, in a move against the intense criticism of deutsch-​nationalists and former nazi supporters,1 but also Austrian and German literati. Krassnigg (1958, p. 156) summarizes that the critics called the Österreichisches Wörterbuch (ÖWB) –​ Austrian Dictionary –​a “superfluous, sign-​of-​the-​times, offensive” project that was geared against “Gesamtdeutschtum” –​pan-​German-​ness –​highlighting the key problem of holding on to one German nation. Symbolic action in opposition to Germany would become important capital in negotiations for Austrian independence after World War II, which was achieved in 1955. One such action, for instance, was Austrian protest against the adoption of the melody of Joseph Haydn’s Kaiser-​Hymn as the German National Anthem in 1946, because its melody used to be Austria’s Imperial Anthem (original wording, from 1797: “God save, God protect, our Kaiser, our Franz”, German wording: “Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles”). The Austrian Government officially protested this move, which was ignored, at a time when it was already holding its own open competition for a new Austrian anthem (won by Paula Preradovic’s Land der Berge lyrics) (Dollinger, 2021a, pp. 168–​169). Austria was not alone in disassociating itself from Germany. At about the same time, the Grand-​Duchy of Luxembourg took renewed and this time decisive strides to codify its formerly German dialects into a national language –​Luxembourgish –​by creating a koiné of the four German dialect areas in the country (Gilles, 2000, p. 202–​208; 2019). The most decisive and permanent move towards endonormativity for Standard Austrian German, however, was initiated in 1947 by the minister of education, Felix Hurdes. Hurdes, who hailed from South Tyrol (annexed by Italy after World War I) and had been in the Austrian resistance, supported the creation of the Österreichisches Wörterbuch which was, after extensive consultations, presented to the public in late 1951 (Ammon, 1995; Dollinger, 2021a, pp. 120–​ 134). The ÖWB became an instant bestseller and would go on to sell 1.5 million copies –​despite heavy criticism –​before it would be put on the free school-​book plan in the early 1970s. Today, it has sold more than 7 million copies. It is at this important juncture where the predisposition of academic German Studies becomes apparent. In 1979, in a first substantial enlargement and revision, the ÖWB would mark words that were not common in Austria more prevalently than before by prefixing “un-​ Austrian” words with an asterisk. The pushback from German Studies, which until then had ignored the dictionary, was not long in the making, and the ÖWB was suddenly critiqued for going against the one German standard that was controlled in Germany. The ÖWB has seen immense expansion since. Since its 1990 edition it has been comparable in scope with Duden’s most popular dictionary, the yellow Rechtschreibduden, while implementing a pluricentric approach to German. What does Germanistik, institutionalized German Studies, say about this? The gist is that the German language area is conceptionally still treated as one geographical region (e.g. Elspaß, 2020) and therefore in much the same way as when Walther Mitzka in Marburg approached it in 1939. Both schools, from the 1930s and the 2010s, share a common hegemonic concept of German, with German Standard German on top. Today, variants enregistered as Austrian are invisibilized by a requirement for “absolute” variants, i.e. variants must be categorically separated by region (e.g. Dollinger, 2019, pp. 67–​72, 2021a, pp. 59–​62). In the light of an average of 85 per cent of Austrians (De Cillia & Ransmayr, 2019, Abb. 36) who see “more than one standard” in the German language, this approach seems to be set against the speakers of non-​dominant varieties or at least it puts non-​dominant standards at a considerable disadvantage. When one 132

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German standard is taken as a given, yet for conceptualization(s) of a “standard in Austria” “numerous pieces of the puzzle” are still “to be found and put together” (Koppensteiner & Lenz, 2020, p. 48), the very question of the existence of an Austrian standard sets the tone for debate. As a consequence of this neglect of issues of central concern to Austrian identity constructions, Muhr calls for a stand-​alone “Austriazistik” (Muhr, 2021), which is nothing less than the separation of Austrian Studies from German Studies and its re-​founding as a stand-​ alone discipline.

3.  Problems in the twenty-​first century: prescriptive sociolinguistics? We have seen that language is not a neutral term. It is a socio-​politically constructed prestige term that may be used to suppress or support varieties. What is particularly striking is that today we may be dealing with a (German) linguistics that inadvertently enforces a theory effect in Bourdieu’s sense. By working with the notion of “Standard German” (e.g. Lenz et al., 2019) or by demanding unattainable criteria for national varieties (e.g. Elspaß, 2020),2 potential standard forms in Austria are subsumed as lesser forms. In other words, the constraints of the field of ‘Germanistik’ are not questioned, while findings are interpreted in a discipline-​affirming way that mirror, though with descriptive tools, the outcome of an early nineteenth-​century prescriptivist era. An example can be seen in present-​day attitudinal studies that are interpreted without recourse to linguistic insecurity (Preston, 2013), which is considered a key feature in non-​dominant settings, such as Austria (Dollinger, 2021a, pp. 76–​77, 2019, pp. 78–​84). While admitting that “there are decisive perceptual differences between Austrian and German results”, this school argues that they indicate … a focus shifting away from competing (German speaking) country-​specific conceptualizations of “pure High German” on to different and highly heterogeneous dimensions of “standard in Austria” Koppensteiner & Lenz, 2020, pp. 74 In other words, if the standard in Austria is “heterogeneous” it is also implied that it is not much of a standard. With Bourdieu’s theory effect we can see how this attestation, first claimed in Herrgen (2015) as the “de-​nationalization” of German, has by now become a trope of its own in Germanistik, as this discourse is creating the conditions it purports to study; conditions that are compatible with the traditional, pan-​German, presuppositions of German Studies. A very different approach would be to acknowledge the linguistic insecurity that Austrian German speakers are usually subject to, which would best be remedied via school instruction that takes full recourse to Standard Austrian German, an approach that is at present under-​ applied (De Cillia, 2015, p. 163). There should be little surprise about the under-​utilization of Standard Austrian German, as schoolteachers are educated by the same university departments that have –​historically –​not focussed on Standard Austrian German and now seem eager to declare an end to national standard varieties in German. For example, Koppensteiner & Lenz (2020, pp. 49) study standard language ideologies in Austria from the background of an implied Standard German German, applying, apparently unwittingly, a much higher benchmark to Austrian German than for other standard varieties, including the historical German single standard; Elspaß & Niehaus (2014, pp. 50) proclaim subjectively, without any benchmark, that the national standards as too similar with the dominant varieties. The key problem seems to lie in essentializing language names and discipline boundaries, both of which are socially constructed. This process shows how purported descriptive work 133

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can be used in ways that are quite analogous to prescriptive approaches that helped establish the notion of a single standard German language to begin with. Awareness of social inequities of language varieties and an openness to their reduction via applied linguistic interventions might be reasonably expected from sociolinguistics. We see, however, subjective assessments of what counts as “enough” difference between standard varieties and what not. For instance, Elspaß and Niehaus’ (2014, p. 50) belittle the difference between Standard Austrian German and Standard German,3 and fail to acknowledge that 85 per cent of speakers, on average, see German as a language with more than one standard variety (De Cillia & Ransmayr, 2019, Abb 36), one of which is Standard Austrian German, though speakers may be unfamiliar with the terminology. I therefore suggest, in the same vein as Curzan (2014), that we take prescriptive ideas and attitudes seriously as active components in the way we do sociolinguistics, and not consider them as merely historical or extra-​disciplinary phenomena. I propose three fail-​safes elsewhere (Dollinger, 2019, pp. 109–​113) that would, if not prevent, at least make much more difficult the inadvertent essentializing of language names in sociolinguistics. The fail-​safes are, firstly, the horizontal reading of the uniformitarian hypothesis, meaning that if one set of varieties, e.g. Englishes, is treated in one way as national varieties, we must not treat another set (“German”) differently without very compelling reasons. Secondly, the use of falsifiable theory against data, in this case pluricentric theory (Clyne, 1995), with a-​priori predictions that can be falsified (or not), would prevent mere description with unexpressed theories, and, thirdly, sociolinguists must trust the speakers even when it comes to standard varieties, as speakers’ attitudes might shatter notions of “objective” data. In this light, John Joseph drives home the previous point: when the “expert” is an outsider to the culture under study, there is an important sense in which every insider to the culture is an expert in it, and the outsider is their student. The outsider may not see it that way –​it would after all put him or her in the inferior position. Joseph, 2006, p. 26 This presupposes, of course, that speakers are informed of phenomena such as how languages come about –​by social convention –​and that linguistic insecurity, if left unaddressed, works against speakers’ own interests, with such interest being a standard that is close to their own vernaculars.

4.  The next step: de-​hegemonization and de-​colonization In this day and age of decolonization and dehegemonization, linguistic disciplines need to consider disciplinary-​inherent biases of long standing. I hope to have shown that prescriptive ideas are more central in our ways of conducting language study than may meet the eye. What the discussion above suggests is that hegemonic prescriptive perspectives remain part of linguists’ perspectives of languages today, though on a rather macro-​style level, while in micro-​linguistic perspectives we are painstakingly descriptive. This suggests a theory effect, perhaps a kind of linguistic science habitus, to use another of Bourdieu’s terms, which shows the long reach of the mid-​nineteenth-​century concept of nation. We now see statements by sociolinguists or sociohistorical linguists (e.g. Elspaß & Niehaus, 2014; Herrgen, 2015; or Lenz et al., 2019), that a given amount of difference “hardly makes a variety”, that national varieties “denationalize” based on weak data or who seem to avoid the concept of Standard Austrian German in their work on Austrian German almost entirely –​which they 134

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call “German in Austria”. Some take the nineteenth-​century outcomes at heart, accepting as “undisputed” that “especially variants that are common in large areas of Germany dominate” our concepts of standard (Dürscheid & Elspaß, 2015, p. 565).4 Germanists’ theoretical underpinnings such as these seem ill-​suited to produce much benefit for Austrian German speakers –​for instance, in reducing their linguistic insecurity and elevating their linguistic self-​esteem. By using frameworks that are too coarse or benchmarks that are too rigid, such as variant A must only occur in one country to “count” as a variant typical of that country (Elspaß, et al., 2017, p. 72), linguists seem to apply a sociologically and culturally insensitive lens, a lens that would render any variety null and void that was not reified and essentialized by way of a language name (Dollinger, 2019, pp. 67–​74). “Standard Languages are socially determined”, Jespersen proclaimed a long time ago (1946, p. 73, italics in the original). Since 85 per cent of Austrians perceive of an Austrian standard (De Cillia & Ransmayr, 2019, Abb. 36), the message of a dynamic multi-​standard German, as paradoxical as it may sound, appears to have been lost in some contemporary approaches. That the full implementation of an Austrian standard would itself have ideological underpinnings is, of course, self-​evident, but it stands to reason that diversification is a natural process, channelled via the human-​made reference points that we call standard varieties. Considering that “the cultivated German written language emerged as a unifying bond of everything that is German” since 1871 (Mattheier, 2003, p. 236), an apparent academic bias against Standard Austrian German is evident. The development of an Austrian identity must be considered a problem before this social backdrop and questions of language and identity ought to be brought back into descriptive approaches of German today, whose default interpretations tend to reconfirm the historical pan-​German (großdeutsch) underpinnings of the discipline. There seems to be an insistence on a strict separation of ‘lay’ and ‘linguist’ data, continuing the negative interest that Germanistik has upheld, with occasional exceptions, for Standard Austrian German. “The necessity to differentiate linguistic and lay levels of data … as always” (Koppensteiner & Lenz, 2020, n. 22) creates an unfortunate dichotomy of the uninformed speaker vs the true expert, which would need to be challenged, also for the sake of public outreach (see Lotter, 2022). Is it not the task of the sociolinguist to work with the speakers rather than against them, which means that the reduction of linguistic insecurity and feelings of inferiority would be an implied outcome? Linguistic insecurity, however, seems to be rather enshrined in the question whether “heterogenous ascriptions with regard to a concept of ‘standard in Austria’ are the reality in Austria” (Lotter, 2022, p. 60), while at the same time the dominant German standard of German is not questioned, let alone in comparable manner. It is taken as a-​priori, suggesting that Bourdieu’s theory effect, in form of One-​Standard-​German Axiom (Dollinger, 2019, p. 14) has had a bearing on how German is modelled, implicitly, as a single-​standard language. While Wodak and colleagues’ (2009) finding #5 shows that a “unified national German language” is considered important by Austrian residents, we can today see a conceptualization of “nation” that is rather different from early twentieth century concepts.5 In the light of Austrian national awareness, the “unified national German language” would be Standard Austrian German. An approach that is rooted in description, that embraces attitudinal angles and linguistic insecurity alike might result in a form of standardizing prescriptivism (Curzan, 2014) that ought to be granted to non-​dominant varieties such as Austrian German. Half a century ago, Lämmert (1967, p. 34) asked “when will the Germans bid farewell to a language theory that has been disproven politically in 1866, though they have continued to use it for another century [to Lämmert’s day] to create or negate political boundaries as needed”.6 The practice is reminiscent of current data-​driven approaches that are blind to the state border. 135

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It seems important to remind linguists that Petersen’s (1924, p. 415) claim of “our language” being “the last joint property of all Germans” (“unsere Sprache, dem letzten Gemeinbesitz der Deutschen”) is prescriptive in nature and ought to be constrained, for the next century, to Germany only; there should be no room for pan-​German (großdeutsch) perspectives in the name of linguistic science, which would mean breaking with a long-​standing, field-​defining practice and, perhaps, giving Popowitsch, the first University of Vienna professor of German rhetoric, his due.

Notes 1 Wiesinger & Steinbach’s history of the Department of German at the University of Vienna states that with the exception of the two professors “waren alle weiteren mehr oder minder mit den Nationalsozialisten verbunden und Mitglieder der NSDAP” (2001: 216) (all others were more or less connected with the national socialists and members of the NSDAP). Birkhan (2003, p. 187) writes that apart from perhaps one teacher, “all Alt-​Germanists”, a field in charge of dialectology at the time, were members of the NSDAP party. 2 In neo-​positivist fashion, Elspaß (2020, p. 66) declares that “in none of the cases presented in this section could a variant be identified as a specific national variant (Germanism, Austrianism, or Helvetism)”, as he demands categorical differences between the national varieties. 3 “less than two per cent of variation in standard German lexis and pronunciation and even less variation in grammar does hardly make a ‘variety’ ” 4 “dass insbesondere großräumig in Deutschland verbreitete Varianten häufig dominieren, ist unbestritten“ (Dürscheid & Elspaß, 2015 p. 565). 5 The vast majority of Austrians consider themselves as belonging to an Austrian nation, not to a German nation –​consistently so since the 1970s. For 2019, 86 per cent of respondents consider themselves as “a members of the Austrian nation” (Bruckmüller & Diem, 2019, p. 82). 6 “Wann –​fragt man sich –​werden die Deutschen einer Sprachtheorie entsagen, die sie politisch bereits 1866 widerlegten, mit der sie aber danach noch ein Jahrhundert lang fortfuhren, politische Grenzen je nach Bedarf zu zementieren oder zu negieren?”

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Stefan Dollinger Heer, F. (2001). Der Kampf um die österreichische Identität. 3rd. ed. Böhlau. Herrgen, J. (2015). Entnationalisierung des Standards. Eine perzeptionslinguistische Untersuchung zur deutschen Standardsprache in Deutschland, Österreich und der Schweiz. In Lenz & Glauninger (Eds.), pp. 139–​164. Hickey, R. (2012). Standard English and standards of English. In R. Hickey (Ed.), Standards of English: Codified varieties around the world (pp. 1–​33). Cambridge University Press. Jespersen, O. (1922). Language: Its nature, development and origin. Allen & Unwin. Jespersen, O. (1946). Mankind, nation and individual from a linguistic point of view. Allen & Unwin. Joseph, J. E. (2006). Language and politics. Edinburgh University Press. Joseph, J. E., Rutten G., & Vosters, R. (2020). Dialect, language & nation: 50 years on. Language Policy, 19, 161–​182 Koppensteiner, W., & Lenz, A. (2020). Tracing a standard language in Austria using methodological microvariations of verbal and matched guise technique. Linguistik Online, 102(2), 47–​82. Krassnigg, A. (1958). Das österreichische wörterbuch. Muttersprache, 68, 155–​157. Lämmert, E. (1967). Germanistik –​eine deutsche Wissenschaft. In Germanistik –​eine deutsche Wissenschaft: Beiträge von Eberhard Lämmert, Walther Killy, Karl Otto Conrady und Peter v. Polenz (pp. 7–​42). Suhrkamp. Langer, N. (2021). Review of Dollinger (2019). Zeitschrift für Rezensionen der Germanistischen Sprachwissenschaft. www.degruy​ter.com/​docum​ent/​doi/​10.1515/​zrs-​2020-​2060/​html (18 July 2021). Lenz, A. N., Breuer, L., Fingerhuth, M., Wittibschlager, A., & Seltmann, M. (2019). Exploring syntactic variation by means of “Language Production Experiments”: methods from and analyses on German in Austria. Journal of Linguistic Geography, 7, 63–​81. Lenz, A. N., Fleißner, F., Kim, A., & Newerkla, S. 2021. G ive as a Put verb in German –​a case of German–​Czech language contact? Journal of Linguistic Geography 8, 67–​81. Lenz, A. N., & Glauninger, M. (2015). Standarddeutsch im 21. Jahrhundert: Theoretische und Empirische Ansätze mit einem Fokus auf Österreich. V&R unipress. Lotter, W. (2022, 13 August). Scheinheilige Debatte über Ghostwriter. Der Standard, www.ders​tand​ard.at/​ story/​200013​8249​646/​schein​heil​ige-​deba​tte-​ueber-​ghos​twri​ter Mattheier, K. (2003). German. In A. Deumert, & W. Vandenbussche (Eds.), Germanic standardizations: Past to present (pp. 211–​244). Benjamins. Millar, R. M. (2005). Language, Nation and Power: An Introduction. Palgrave Macmillan. Milroy, J., and L. Milroy (1999). Authority in language: Investigating standard English. 3rd ed. Routledge. Muhr, R. (2020). Pluriareality in sociolinguistics: A comprehensive overview of key ideas and a critique of linguistic data used. In R. Muhr & J. Thomas (Eds.), Pluricentric Theory beyond Dominance and Non-​ dominance (pp. 9–​78). PCL-​Press. Muhr, R. (2021). Überlegungen zur Errichtung einer eigenständigen Austriazistik. Zeitschrift für Deutsche Philologie 139(Sonderheft), 125–​46. Percy C. & Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. M. (Eds.). (2017). Prescription and tradition: Establishing standards across time and space. Multilingual Matters. Petersen, J. (1924). Literaturwissenschaft und Deutschkunde. Zeitschrift für Deutschkunde, 38(6), 404–​415. Piller, I. (2017). Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Cambridge University Press. Popowitsch, J. S. V. (1754). Die nothwendigsten Anfgangsgründe der Teutschen Sprachkunst zum Gebrauche der Österreichischen Schulen herausgegeben. Zwei Brüder Grundt. Preston, D. (2013). Linguistic insecurity forty years later. Journal of English Linguistics, 41(4), 304–​331. Scheichl, S. P. (1996). Konnte Grillparzer deutsch? Gedanken zu einer Geschichte der deutschen Literatursprache in Österreich seit 1800. Jahrbuch der Grillparzer Gesellschaft, 3(19), 147–​169. Schneider, E. W. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge University Press. Stacher, P. (2022, 20 July). “Burschentag” in Wels: Subvention sorgt für Ärger. Kurier, https://​kur​ier. at/​chro​nik/​ober​oest​erre​ich/​burs​chen​tag-​in-​wels-​sub​vent​ion-​sorgt-​fuer-​aer​ger/​402082​021, 15 Aug. 2022) Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. M. (2010). The Bishop’s Grammar: Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism. Oxford University Press. Van Rooy, R. (2020). Language or dialect? The history of a conceptual pair. Oxford University Press. Von Polenz, P. (1994). Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. de Gruyter. Weinreich, U. (1953). Languages in contact. Mouton. Wiesinger, P. (2015). Johann Siegmund Valentin Popwitsch als Professor für Deutsch Sprache und Wohlredenheit an der Universität Wien 1754–​1766, Jahrbuch für Internationale Germanistik, 47(2), 45–​70.

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Prescriptivism and national identity Wiesinger, P. & Steinbach, D. (2001). 150 Jahre Germanistik in Wien: Außeruniversitäre Frühgermanistik und Universitätsgermanistik. Edition Praesens. Wittgenstein. L. (1925). Geleitwort zum Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, unpublished preface, dated 22.4.1925. http://​wit​tgen​stei​nsou​rce.org/​WFV/​Ts-​205_​f (28 Feb. 2022) Wittgenstein, L. (1926). Wörterbuch für Volks-​und Bürgerschulen. Vienna: Hölder-​Pichler-​Tempsky. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, H., & Liebhart, K. (2009). The discursive construction of national identity. (2nd ed. Trans. A. Hirsch, R. Mitten, and J. W. Unger). Edinburgh University Press. Wodak, R., De Cillia, R., Reisigl, M., Liebhart, K., Hofstätter, K., & Kargl, M. (1998). Zur diskursiven Konstruktion nationaler Identität. Suhrkamp. Wright, S. (2004). Language policy and language planning: From nationalism to globalisation. Palgrave Macmillan. Yáñez-​Bouza, N. (2015). Grammar, rhetoric and usage in English: Preposition placement 1500–​1900. Cambridge University Press.

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9 STANDARDS WITH PLURICENTRIC LANGUAGES Who sets norms and where Raymond Hickey

1  English and Spanish as pluricentric languages The colonial period for several western European countries lasted from approximately 1500 to the early twentieth century and resulted in forms of language from these countries being taken to a number of overseas1 locations. The two former colonial languages which are most widely spoken outside Europe are English and Spanish and these can be found in many countries in different parts of the world (see Leitner, 1992 and Thompson, 1992 respectively). Because some of the countries where English and Spanish are spoken represent regional centres in a linguistic sense, they deserve the label ‘pluricentric languages’ (Clyne, 1992a). Such regional centres have forms of language which act as an orientation for other countries around them and which tend to dominate linguistically. Such regional centres of pluricentric languages have a unifying effect within the centres, through the sharing of linguistic norms; but these also separate regions from each other and lead to further diversification of languages (Clyne, 1992b, p. 1). In addition to such regional norms there is also the multi-​faceted relationship with the standards in the European countries which provided the initial linguistic input during the colonial period. Regional centres are usually larger countries stemming from previous colonial territories. Examples in the hispanophone world are Mexico for Central America (Thompson, 1992, p. 46) or Argentina for South America (Lipski, 2012; Hidalgo, 2016; Quesada Pacheco, 2010). In the anglophone world the main overseas centres are the USA for North America, South Africa for southern Africa, possibly India for South Asia as well as Australia and New Zealand for those islands in the South Pacific with a British colonial background (Peters, 2009; Hoffmann et al., 2011). All these countries developed regional norms of English which vary from southern standard British English and from each other due to a variety of factors to be discussed presently. Major forms of pluricentric languages are generally codified as national standards (Haugen, 2003 [1966]), for instance, American English in North America which has a long tradition of lexical and grammatical codification beginning with Noah Webster (see Section 4.1 below). Codification2 can be explicit, when there are printed works such as dictionaries, grammars, and usage guides outlining the nature of a standard. But codification can also be implicit, where there is no such printed material available but native speakers recognise intuitively what belongs 140

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to their form of language and what does not. New Zealand English can serve as an example here: native speakers are aware of the sound system of this variety of English as are others who gravitate towards it and who adhere to the linguistic norms which apply in New Zealand English, e.g. in pronunciation, even though this has not been codified explicitly in the form of reference works on New Zealand English for the general public. The standards for pluricentric languages arose first in the source countries in Europe (England and Spain respectively) through complex processes of selection and codification, different in each case but with significant parallels. Just how this phenomenon panned out depends on a variety of factors and, of course, it is a dynamic and ongoing process (Pillière et al., 2018) at the overseas locations of all pluricentric languages. Most important were cultural attitudes towards standard language and the function it played, and continues to play, in the societies in question. In this respect the English-​and Spanish-​speaking worlds show developments which are rendered more distinct by contrasting them. Both languages spread overseas with national standards arising during the later colonial period (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) through a process of supraregionalisation (Hickey, 2012) by which varieties associated with education and higher social position lost strongly local features and came to function as non-​stigmatised, publicly accepted varieties across the countries in question in their entirety. Furthermore, political independence may well be associated with distinct varieties of the original colonial language, as was the case in North America just after the United States were founded in the late eighteenth century, see Section 4.1 below. The situation in the hispanophone world was different as the struggle for independence from Spain did not involve the wish to forge a specifically local form of Spanish. Rather, Castilian Spanish was favoured, and prescriptive authors insisted on a strict adherence to it (see Section 4.2 below).3 This chapter will focus on the factors and forces which were instrumental in the rise of codified varieties throughout the anglophone and hispanophone worlds. By comparing these two spheres the study will hopefully throw light on the processes of norm formation with pluricentric languages. It should be noted that in the current chapter the term ‘prescriptivism’ does not refer to the often arbitrary censure of specific language structures as laid out in usage guides, for instance (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2019). Rather the chapter is concerned with which standard of language is regarded as a role model for those countries in which a pluricentric language is spoken and how such norms came to be accepted. Of course, prescriptivism plays a role here, but less in the application of linguistic norms within speech communities and more in the historical process by which such norms became established as models to be followed for official public usage. It is this latter development which forms the focus of the chapter.

2  English and Spanish in contrast In both the English and Spanish cases the relationship of overseas varieties and their standards to that of the colonial source country was key and to some extent still is. However, varieties of English and Spanish differ in this respect: the function of a norm-​providing model, an “exonormative standard” in the terminology of Schneider (2007), in the postcolonial nations with a British or Spanish background varies and scrutinising this function can yield both linguistic and cultural insights. In the Spanish-​speaking world (Mar-​Molinero, 1997) the situation is marked by the dominance of standard Castilian Spanish (Spanish castellano), at least in its written form, which has persisted throughout the history of Spain’s former colonies (Kamen, 2002). In the spoken language there are differences between forms of Spanish found in all hispanophone countries

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(Moreno Fernández, 1993), particularly in Mexico and Argentina, the largest of the former colonies of Spain. All levels of language4 are sensitive to any judgements of standardisation, though when the concern is with the written form of language, grammar and vocabulary are the two main levels affected. Pronunciation is the level of language which shows greatest variation, as the aspects that characterise it, the realisation of vowels and consonants, rhythm, intonation, and stress, are all more scalar in nature compared to the more binary divisions found in syntax and lexis. In addition, pronunciation is available for immediate sociolinguistic assessment by speakers, and hence it can be used to gauge the relative vernacularity or standardness of their speech. Both Spain and England were involved in the early colonial enterprise, with Spain beginning in the late fifteenth century and England in the early seventeenth century. Both countries established many overseas settlements in which transported forms of their respective languages continued to develop. Among the European languages they provide the clearest examples of geographical diversification which in time led to the rise of regional centres with their own norms of language use.5 In the course of this development new centres evolved, at locations some considerable distance from the historical source country for each language.

2.1  The spread of English The spread of English beyond the British Isles began in the early seventeenth century, at the start of the English colonial period, and lasted until the early twentieth century (Hickey, 2004). In the three centuries of this period varieties of English, mainly from England, Scotland, and Ireland, were taken to locations in both the northern and the southern hemispheres. This transportation was temporally staggered, with the northern half of the globe being settled from approximately 1600 onwards and the southern half from about 1800 onwards. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the varieties at the overseas locations began to move away from their original forms in the British Isles and new developments in these varieties set in (Schneider, 2003, 2007). At first supraregional forms (Hickey, 2012b) arose and out of these new, codified national standards of English (Hickey, 2012a) developed across the anglophone world, forms which are divorced from standard English in England today. In the northern hemisphere these developments were clearly to be seen in the United States, and somewhat later in Canada, and in the southern hemisphere in South Africa (Bekker, 2012), Australia (Burridge, 2010) and New Zealand (Bauer, 1999). At all the overseas locations, the continuation and mixture of settler English from various parts of the British Isles, contact with Indigenous groups as well as later waves of emigration have been instrumental in the emergence of distinct profiles for their varieties of English.

2.2  The spread of Spanish At the beginning of the 1490s Isabella I of Castile granted support to a project by an Italian living in Spain, Cristoforo Colombo (Spanish: Cristóbal Colón), who wished to sail across the Atlantic in search of a shorter trade route to Asia. Columbus’ arrival in the Caribbean6 in 1492 marked the rediscovery of the New World by Europeans and initiated the period of early European colonialism known as the Age of Discovery (Spanish: Era de los Descubrimientos), in which the major maritime powers of Europe became the key players (Kamen, 2002). The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) was an agreement by which all lands in South America were divided between Spain and Portugal. The treaty made provision for the establishment of

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so-​called governments which were assigned to individual explorers (Spanish: conquistadores), e.g. La Gobernación de Nueva Andalucía (later termed la Gobernación del Río de la Plata y del Paraguay) which was formed in 1534 for Pedro de Mendoza and covered present-​day Paraguay, Uruguay, and the upper half of Argentina.7 Spanish became the official language in the new countries which arose out of these colonies in South America (Rivarola, 1990).8 The early Spanish presence in the Caribbean ensured their rule over the Greater Antilles. This led to varieties of Caribbean Spanish being spoken in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. Spanish bases were also established in Panama and the Caribbean coast of Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico along with part of the Pacific coast of Mexico (Lipski, 2012, p. 3). Later developments led to the loss of Spanish possessions in the Caribbean: Jamaica was taken by the English in 1655, Hispaniola was divided after the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) with the French occupying the western third of the island (later to become Haiti at the beginning of the nineteenth century). Cuba and Puerto Rico (along with the Philippines and Guam) were ceded to the United States by the Treaty of Paris concluded after the Spanish-​American War in 1898. The Philippines was the only Spanish colony in Asia, established in 1542 after Spain asserted its claim over Portugal. Apart from the Spanish-​lexifier creole Chabacano (Sippola, 2020), Spanish in the Philippines (Quilis, 1995) has all but disappeared.

2.2.1  Spanish overseas: hispanophone America A major difference in the distribution of English and Spanish in the world is that overseas forms of Spanish are nearly all located in Central and South America in a continuous chain of countries from Mexico in the north to Chile and Argentina in the south (Sippola, 2021). The only exceptions to this are the hispanophone islands of the Caribbean, which are close to Central America, and Equitorial Guinea, an outlier on the west coast of central Africa. The geographical spread of anglophone countries is much more diverse, a fact which renders the English in these countries less amenable to direct comparison. American Spanish is strongly reminiscent of southern Peninsular Spanish, that of Andalusia (Rivarola, 2005), as can be seen in the set of phonological features given in Table 9.1.9 These features are those put forward by proponents of the “Out of Andalusia” hypothesis for American Spanish, named after the large province (autonomous community) in the south of Spain. This hypothesis assumes that southern varieties of Spanish were transported to the New World in the early colonial period and that these determined the trajectories along which the overseas varieties were later to develop. However, whether the parallels are coincidental or related is a matter of debate, see Noll (2021) for a critical assessment of the hypothesis. In the list in Table 9.1 it is evident that features 1 to 4 all involve consonant weakening and/​or loss (Lipski, 2012, pp. 5–​7) and are subject to considerable sociolinguistic variation both in southern Peninsular Spanish Table 9.1  Salient features of American Spanish 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 7) 8)

Lenition of word-​final /​-​s/​ Reduction of /​x/​to /​h/​or zero Affricate simplification: /​ʧ/​to /​ʃ/​ Loss of intervocalic/​final /​d/​and liquids Occurrence of seseo (no distinction of /​s/​and /​θ/​) L /​R variation Velarisation of word-​final /​n/​

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and American Spanish where such weakening is traditionally most pronounced (Hualde, 2005, pp. 28). In general, the more vernacular varieties show the greatest degree of weakening, the less vernacular forms approximating increasingly towards the supraregional varieties of the countries in question, though geographical considerations are also relevant here. Apart from the above phonetic features, there are also grammatical features which vary. Chief of these is probably the pervasive phenomenon of voseo [bo/​seo] in Latin America.10 This refers to the personal pronoun vos being used instead of tú for the second person singular (the latter is known as tuteo (tu/​teo)). Large parts of Central and South America are voseante ‘vos-​ using’, but the regions are not necessarily coterminous with state boundaries. While Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Argentina are entirely voseante, Venezuela is only so in the northwest corner of the country and in Colombia a complex picture of its geographical distribution is evident. In Chile voseo is present in vernacular speech but standardising pressures have led to tuteo being the unmarked, unstigmatised form. In Argentina, on the contrary, vos has replaced tú entirely. It is used supraregionally in all registers of Argentinian Spanish and does not carry any stigma and hence is not the object of prescriptive censure.

2.2.2  Language in the capitals In many South American countries, as in others with large capital cities, the influence of central urban varieties on the rest of a country is considerable. Colombia and Venezuela provide good examples of this. In Colombia, the capital Bogotá is located in the Andes and so the retention of a distinction between [λ] and [j]‌, strong consonantism which disfavours lenition, as well as the assibilation of /​ɾ, r/​has status in the country due to the prestige of speech in the capital. In Venezuela, on the other hand, the capital Caracas is on the coast and has many typically Caribbean features with widespread /​s/​-​lenition and [λ] –​[j] syncretism. Because of the status of language in the capital these features also prevail in the mountainous interior of Venezuela, contrary to the usual sound patterning of Andean Spanish.

3  The historical rise of standards of English and Spanish 3.1  The codification of Standard British English When discussing the rise of standard English one must distinguish between the notion of ‘standard’ and the actual term ‘standard’. The earliest reference to ‘southern or standard English’ in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1836. However, the notion of ‘standard’ existed before that and is essentially an eighteenth-​century development. It is true that there was a fifteenth-​century Chancery Standard (Fisher 1996, pp. 36–​64), but this was a register-​specific variety of written English used for court and legal documents11 and should not be interpreted in the modern sense of standard which is a variety propagated by education, codified in reference books and favoured by supraregional speakers in a society. Something similar to the chancery standard also existed in late medieval Spain: Under Alfonso X (Alfonso el Sabio ‘Alfonso the Wise’, 1221–​1284), after the many military victories of the early thirteenth century, the domains of usage for Castilian were expanded and the term castellano derecho ‘correct Castilian’ (Fernández-​Ordóñez, 2005) was used for publicly accepted usage in the language. Standard English, in the sense of a codified variety laid out in reference works, arose in the eighteenth century (Hickey, 2010). There are many reasons why it should have arisen then. True, there were precursors to the eighteenth-​century notion of standard, e.g. John Hart (d. 1574) in An Orthographie of English (1569) offered a reformed spelling of English so that “the 144

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rude countrie Englishman” can speak the language “as the best sort use to speak it”. George Puttenham (d. 1590) in The arte of English poesie commented that “After a speech is fully fashioned to the common vnderstanding, & accepted by consent of a whole countrey & nation, it is called a language”. He then stated that in his view the prime form of this language was “the vsuall speech of the Court and that of London and the shires lying about London within lx. myles and not much aboue”. Such comments show that, already by the end of the sixteenth century, the conception was prevalent that English was the language of the entire country of England and that its lead variety derived from the language of the established classes in the capital. About a century later, Christopher Cooper in his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae (1685) stated that he regarded London speech as “the best dialect”, the “most pure and correct”. These comments are significant as they firmly acknowledge the prestigious status of English in the capital. However, Cooper does not show the later judgmental dismissal of varieties outside of London and appears to have been tolerant of variation, consider his remark that “Everyone pronounceth them [words] as himself pleases”. The crystallisation of standard English as a concept in the eighteenth century had at least an intellectual and a social dimension. On an intellectual level one finds authors during the Augustan Age –​the early eighteenth century comprising the reigns of Queen Anne (1702–​ 1714) and King George I (1714–​1727) –​who showed a distinct concern with “fixing” the English language. Linguistically conservative writers, most notably Jonathan Swift (1667–​1745), were keen to stem change in English and appealed to language use in the past. The notion of “fixing” English is a key aspect of the emerging standard, though one which does not correspond to reality, namely immutability. Later in the eighteenth century, reconciling recommendations for the supposedly unchanging standard with the recognition that this in itself displayed variation was a difficulty for writers like Thomas Sheridan (1719–​1788) and John Walker (1732–​1807), see the discussions in many word entries in their dictionaries (Sheridan, 1780 and Walker, 1791) and the study by Pouillon (2018). Apart from literary authors, there were others for whom the ‘fixing’ of English was a practical concern. The eighteenth century is a period in which a large number of grammars appeared, mostly for practical purposes, i.e. for use in education, often private education. It was also the period in which women wrote many such works (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2010; Percy, 2010) and these grammars do not concern themselves with variation but with imparting knowledge about a unified form of the language. The social dimension to eighteenth-​century notions of standard English concerns attitudes to language use and the increasing concern of an incipient middle-​class (then termed the ‘middling orders’, Rogers, 2002) with the linguistic expression of their social status. This dimension is most clearly visible in the works on pronunciation from this time. The practice of elocution acquired a new meaning, not just the art of successful public speaking and oratory, but the technique of speaking with a non-​regional, quasi-​standard accent (Smart, 1842). A significant market for works on this topic arose in the mid-​eighteenth century and authors like Thomas Sheridan were responsible for both stimulating this market, by generating linguistic insecurity, and then supplying the market with works with which to alleviate this very insecurity (Hickey, 2009). These eighteenth-​century developments are central to the judgmental attitudes towards non-​standard speech which arose then and which fed directly into the nineteenth-​century Victorian condemnation of regional and local accents. In the words of Norman Fairclough: Standard English was regarded as correct English, and other social dialects were stigmatised not only in terms of correctness but also in terms which indirectly reflected 145

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on the lifestyles, morality and so forth of their speakers, the emergent working class of capitalised society: they were vulgar, slovenly, low, barbarous, and so forth. Fairclough, 2001, p. 48, emphasis in original The opprobrium attached to non-​standard accents was initially felt by those outside England, first and foremost the Irish, but also the Scots, and to a much lesser extent the Americans (Cooley, 1992). However, it was quickly extended to the regions of England outside the Home Counties, the north, the southwest, etc. The standard became more and more characterised by its non-​regional character. The divorcing of preferred public usage from regionality and local identity meant that the emerging standard was an essentially non-​regional form of English. Hence favouring this incipient standard in public, educated usage meant that the regional accents were condemned accordingly: “a strong provincial accent ... destroys all idea of elegance” (William Roscoe in Mugglestone, 2003, p. 43). This notion was prevalent throughout the nineteenth century and was stated in no uncertain terms, consider the following quotation: “It is the business of educated people to speak so that no-​one may be able to tell in what county their childhood was passed” (Burrell, 1891, p. 24). In fact the more the standard became an instrument of social inclusion or exclusion the more it lost its geographical basis in the southeast of England. By the early nineteenth century the standard was being defined as a form of speech which is characterised by the lack of just this regional basis. Consider the remarks of Benjamin Smart in Walker Remodelled (1836) “The common standard dialect is that in which all marks of a particular place and residence are lost, and nothing appears to indicate any other habit of intercourse than with the well-​ bred and well-​informed, wherever they be found”. Even clearer is the programmatic nature of works such as Smart’s A Practical Grammar of English Pronunciation (1810) which has a long subtitle beginning “on plain and recognized principles, calculated to assist in removing every objectionable peculiarity of utterance arising from either foreign, provincial, or vulgar habits, or from a defective use of the organs of speech”. The goal here is not far from what contemporary sociolinguists regard a standard to be “an idea in the mind rather than a reality –​a set of abstract norms to which actual usage will conform to a greater or lesser extent” (Milroy & Milroy, 1999, p. 23). With this notion of standard also came the idea of its inherent value. The standard was “good” and all forms of non-​standard speech were “bad”. From then onwards remarks on standard and non-​standard use of language became evaluative as many sociolinguists have remarked, e.g. “The belief in the existence of some ‘inherently good’ variety of their language is one of the most deeply held tenets of public ideology in most Western countries. Yet a cursory inspection of the facts will reveal that these standard varieties are nothing more than the social dialect of the dominant class” (Guy, 2011, p. 162). Identifying speakers as those of the desirable social class or not, as the case may be, is often done through a relatively small set of features which would mark someone as within or outside this class if the wrong realisation was used in speech. Among such features for the key period of the codification of English, the eighteenth century, was double negation, as in He didn’t think nothing of her opinion (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2008), and sentence final placement of prepositions, as in A matter they are constantly talking about (Yáñez-​Bouza, 2008).12 Such features became stigmatised in the late modern period of English, indeed a source of shame (Beal, 2008, p. 23–​25) for the speakers whose speech contained such features. In England the regulation of the standard, as well as in all former colonies, bar South Africa, was and is not done by an academy. Rather it came to be the prerogative of large publishing houses, such as Oxford University Press which is the publisher of the largest English language 146

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dictionary and of a host of reference works both for native speakers and learners of English. This is an obvious contrast to the Romance language countries where academies are part and parcel of cultural life. This is true not only of the Real Academia Española referred to in this chapter, but also, for example, of the Académie française in Paris, France (founded in 1635) and the Accademia della Crusca in Florence, Italy (founded in 1583) which act as guardians of the languages of these respective countries.

3.2  The codification of Castilian Spanish Spain evinces a heterogenous linguistic landscape (Zamora Vicente, 1979, García de Diego, 1978) in which, during its early modern history, one variety began to dominate public life and be recognised as the national official language, and ultimately, came to be spoken throughout Spain by speakers not using the local vernacular of their region. The name of this standard, castellano, derives from the noun Castilla, which occurs today in the names of two large autonomous communities, Castilla-​La Mancha and Castilla y León, the former to the south, southeast and the latter north, northeast of Madrid, the city now within the Comunidad de Madrid. Historically, there was a region Castilla la Nueva (roughly covering the area of present-​day Comunidad de Madrid and Castilla-​La Mancha, but without the province of Albacete) and Castilla la Vieja (roughly covering the area of Castilla y León along with Cantabria and La Rioja).13 The issue of labels reveals the ideologically fraught nature of a standard for Spanish. The language is called español, when the most general label is required, but the term castellano is preferred by many who do not speak the variety which arose historically in the Castilian area in the centre of the country with the capital Madrid. Furthermore, the label castellano avoids the suggested connection of the adjective español with the noun España ‘Spain’. In the codification of Castilian Spanish several milestones can be recognised. Certainly, the reign of Alfonso X was key to the written elaboration of the language which, along with the fan-​like spread of the language southwards, increased its geographical distribution in the Iberian peninsula. The next milestone was probably the publication of a grammar in 1492 by the Seville scholar Antonio de Nebrija and published in Salamanca (Pountain, 2012, p. 51). Neither its title, Gramática de la lengua castellana “A grammar of the Castilian language”, nor its contents, contain any reference to a standard of Spanish.14 Nonetheless, this grammar was key to the standardisation of Spanish. The morphology and very largely the orthography, is the same as that of Castilian Spanish today. This grammar was also published before the seminal works of Spanish literature. However, Golden Age literature does show many variant forms which do not conform to the Nebrijan Castilian standard (Rico, 1978). But with the establishment of the Real Academia Española, the codified norms of Castilian were made explicit based on principles of language use first formulated by Nebrija. Several works on language appeared during the following century, first Nebrija’s own Reglas de ortografía (Rules of orthography, 1517). Other authors followed, e.g. Juan de Valdés with his Diálogo de la Lengua (Dialogue on the language, 1535). Prescriptive attitudes soon evolved in this context, much as in eighteenth-​century England, as did concerns with written style, consider the titles of the following two works Andrés Flórez Arte para bien leer y escribir (The art of reading and writing well, 1552) and Martín Cordero La manera de escribir en castellano (The manner of writing in Castilian, 1556).15 Similar to authors writing in England somewhat later, further works with almost identical titles appeared, e.g. Cristóbal de Villalón, Gramática castellana (Castilian grammar, 1558) and Gonzalo Correas, Ortografía castellana (Castilian orthography, 1630). The latter author also produced the Arte de la lengua castellana (written 1625; 147

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Alarcos García 1954), which describes a great deal of diatopic and diastratic variation in early seventeenth-​century Spanish. For the status of an official language, approval through usage by major writers is often seen as desirable. In Spain this happened in such a way as to strengthen the prestige of Castilian Spanish. The early zenith of Spanish literature was reached in the writings of Miguel de Cervantes (1547–​1616), above all in his novel Don Quixote; he was writing almost a century after Nebrija’s grammar had appeared. Cervantes was born in Alcalá de Henares just northeast of Madrid and was a native speaker of Castilian Spanish. This meant that by the early seventeenth century the position of Castilian Spanish in the scholarly and literary world was unassailable. The situation in England was quite different. The codification of English took place some time after the death of the greatest English author. Furthermore, Shakespeare was from west-​ central England (Warwickshire) and did not speak the dialect of London natively, although he lived in that city as an adult. Indeed, the codification of English in the eighteenth century received an early impetus from the desire of English authors of the Augustan Age (see above), to fix the language and render it immutable, precisely because they had realised that it had changed considerably since the time of Shakespeare. This situation is in sharp contrast to that with Castilian Spanish which had been codified by the sixteenth century. The development of standard Castilian Spanish began in the late fifteenth century, at a time when considerations of standardness in English had hardly begun to be part of public discourse. This means that at the time when the Latin American varieties were acquiring their individual profiles, a written standard for Castlian Spanish had already been established and was automatically accepted as the norm of written usage.

3.3  The role of language academies A further factor favouring the undisputed role of Castilian Spanish as the standard variety was the establishment in Madrid in 1713 of the Real Academia Española ‘Royal Spanish Academy’ where it is still situated (Zamora Vicente, 2015). In the course of the eighteenth century the academy published both a dictionary, the Diccionario de la lengua española (Dictionary of the Spanish language, 1780, 23rd edition, 2014) and a Gramática de la lengua española (Grammar of the Spanish language, 1771). The latter was revised on a number of occasions, the last but one being in 1931. The most recent edition, called Nueva gramática de la lengua española (New grammar of the Spanish language, 2009–​2011), is billed as una obra consensuada por todas las academias de la lengua y otorga una destacada atención a los usos del español en las distintas áreas lingüísticas (a work which has been jointly agreed by all the language academies and which pays prominent attention to the ways Spanish is used in the various linguistic areas).16 This conciliatory tone towards varieties across the hispanophone world is in keeping with the recent, more inclusive attitude of the academy, see the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas (Panhispanic dictionary of doubtful matters, 2005). The Real Academia Española is mirrored in Latin America by national language academies. The earliest of these was founded in Colombia in 1871, the Academia Colombiana de la Lengua (Colombian Language Academy) with others, like Mexico, Venezuela, and Peru quickly following suit. Argentina was slow to establish their academy of letters, the Academia Argentina de Letras was founded in 1931, perhaps reflecting the relative linguistic independence of this country vis à vis Spain. There are even such academies in the Philippines (1924) and the United States (1973), countries which are not officially Spanish-​speaking (Quilis, 1995; Ramírez, 1992). To increase cooperation among the various academies and for the maintenance of language standards across the hispanophone world an Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española 148

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(Association of Spanish Language Academies) was founded in Mexico in 1951 and holds conferences every four or five years at different locations. The latest versions of the dictionary and grammar, just mentioned, have been published in the name of the Asociación de Academias and not just in that of the Madrid-​based Real Academia Española. These reference works are taken as guidelines for written Spanish, in its morphosyntax and lexis, across the hispanophone world.

4  Voices in the colonies 4.1  Noah Webster In the late colonial period (eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) there were authors writing on their respective languages (English and Spanish), both in the source countries and in overseas locations, concerning themselves with language matters. Here there are distinct differences between anglophone and hispanophone authors. The major English-​speaking author on language matters in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, outside England, is Noah Webster (1758–​1843), who is renowned as an American lexicographer (his name is synonymous with American lexicography in the present-​day United States and many dictionaries bear his name). After taking part in the American Revolutionary War Webster worked as a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut. His reputation as a major scholar was established with the appearance of his A Grammatical Institute of the English Language (three parts, 1783–​85), which had the telling subtitle comprising an easy, concise, and systematic method of education, designed for the use of English schools in America. The first part of this work, The Elementary Spelling Book, gave the impulse for a specifically American spelling of English which contrasted with British practice. Most, but not all of Webster’s suggestions were later adopted and became standard in the United States. His lexicographical work includes the Compendious Dictionary (1806) which was followed by his major work, The American Dictionary of the English Language (1812) which contained some 70,000 words, 12,000 of which had not been listed before. Webster revised his dictionary several times even at late as 1840. For the present study the essential aspect of Webster’s work is that he strove to make American English as distinct from British English as possible and saw in the former variety the linguistic embodiment of American difference and independence, which he regarded as more democratic and morally responsible than any model from Britain. In an Appendix to his Dissertations on the English Language of 1789 Webster states clearly that his intention was to render American spelling different from English: “But a capital advantage of this reform in these states would be, that it would make a difference between the English orthography and the American” (1789, p. 397). His motivation in this enterprise is clearly political: Besides this, a national language is a band of national union. Every engine should be employed to render the people of this country national; to call their attachments home to their own country; and to inspire them with the pride of national character … . Let us then seize the present moment, and establish a national language, as well as a national government. Webster 1789, pp. 397, 406 Webster’s initiative for a distinctive form of written American English was most successful through his spelling book, originally entitled The American Spelling Book in 1786 and from 1829 The Elementary Spelling Book. It was known colloquially as the Blue-​Backed Speller and was the work which had the greatest influence on a broad public in the United States. 149

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4.2 Andrés Bello The first major author on language matters in nineteenth-​century Latin America is Andrés Bello López (1781–​1865). He was born in Caracas and after studying arts continued to live in his home city, where he published and translated works concerning Venezuela. After a stint in England he moved to Chile, accepting a post in the administration of that country and later founding the University of Chile. In the present context he is best known for the lengthy Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos (Castilian grammar intended for use by Americans; the label ‘Americans’ refers here to Spanish-​speaking inhabitants of the Americas). The grammar was published in Santiago de Chile in 1847 and recognised as the first Latin American grammar of Spanish. Several revisions of the grammar were published subsequently, the seventh from the year 1864 being the last which Bello saw in print. Later significant versions were produced by the Colombian author Rufino José Cuervo (1844–​1911), another major figure in nineteenth-​century Latin American language studies. Cuervo and other linguists of his time followed Bello’s line regarding the role of Peninsular Spanish in Latin America (Pountain, 2012, 2016). There could hardly be a greater contrast in attitude and work than that of Webster and Bello. The latter was concerned with instructing his fellow Latin Americans in the use of standard Spanish, la lengua castellana (the Castilian language) and this stance was accepted in both the country where he was born (Venezuela) and that where he later lived (Chile). Furthermore, his work was granted the seal of approval at the end of his life: as a recognition for his services to Castilian Spanish Bello was made a corresponding member of the Real Academia Española in 1861. The argument in his prologue was that with the political fragmentation of Spanish-​speaking America into different nations, there was the risk of linguistic fragmentation akin to that experienced by Latin on the break-​up of the Roman Empire. Hence adopting the Peninsular standard was actually a way of uniting Latin Americans as he stresses in his grammar. No tengo la pretensión de escribir para los castellanos. Mis lecciones se dirigen a mis hermanos, los habitantes de Hispano-​América. Juzgo importante la conservación de la lengua de nuestros padres en su posible pureza, como un medio providencial de comunicación y un vínculo de fraternidad entre las varias naciones de origen español derramadas sobre los dos continentes. It is not my intention to write for the Castilians. My lessons are addressed to my brothers, the inhabitants of Spanish-​America. I consider it important to preserve the language of our forefathers in its greatest purity, as a providential means of communication and a bond of brotherhood between the different nations of Spanish origin spread over the two continents. Bello, 1995 [1847], p. 54; my translation Bello’s standpoint was accepted in the Latin American countries, which achieved independence during the nineteenth century, so that there was no apparent wish to achieve an independent form of Spanish contrasting with Castilian Spanish. This stance towards, in large parts, a single standard for Spanish in Latin America rests on the sense of community across the Spanish-​ speaking world and serves to strengthen this very sense, producing a truly transnational feeling of linguistic unity among the geographically contiguous countries of Latin America.

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The belief in unity of the language is also strengthened by the relative uniformity of the spelling system for all national varieties of Spanish.17 This spelling is furthermore highly consistent with the almost one-​to-​one correspondence between sounds and graphemes in Spanish. A very small number of inconsistencies exist, e.g. the spelling system has not been adjusted to account for the syncretism of and as [ʝ]. Furthermore, the graphemes on the one hand and and (before front vowels) on the other, have been retained because they are distinguished, indicating /​s/​and /​θ/​respectively in Castilian, though not in Latin America (Jones and Pountain, 2013, p. 391).

5 Conclusion When comparing the transnational languages English and Spanish one can determine several key differences in terms of what standard is viewed as the model to be followed in public usage. When viewing what norm is preferred for written language one can see that in the former colonies of Central and South America it is Castilian Spanish which is favoured (Zamora Salamanca, 1987; Rivarola, 1990). In the English-​speaking world the matter is more complex. In North America, English in the United States is dominant, having developed its own profile over the past two centuries or more not least due to the conscious efforts of Noah Webster. This dominance has affected countries in close proximity to the United States, notably Canada which has increasingly moved away from British English towards American English, as well as Jamaica and the Bahamas (Hackert, 2016, 2022) which have been affected by the geographical closeness to the United States. It is true that British English functioned as a model-​providing variety for many countries in their early phases, e.g. in many countries of South and Southeast Asia as well as in Australia and New Zealand. But there was no active promotion of standard British English (Fabricius and Mortensen, 2013) in a vein similar to that of Castilian Spanish in Latin America where the unity of the language has always been stressed (Mar-​Molinero, 2008) and where prescriptive guardians appeal to Castilian Spanish and use it as a yardstick of correctness. These differences are largely cultural: in the anglophone world there is no state-​sanctioned authority in language with the status of the Real Academia Española and there never has been, so it is hard to imagine that any such authority would be accepted as the arbitrator of correctness across the English-​speaking world. And there certainly is not an association of similar organisations to coordinate codified varieties across the anglophone world, unlike the situation in the Spanish-​ speaking world with the Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española (Association of Spanish Language Academies). However, global tendencies of the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries have not left the hispanophone world untouched. In recent years there have been attempts to agree on what has been termed Neutral Spanish (español neutro), or indeed Universal, Global, or International Spanish. The motivation for this is often pragmatic: institutions and companies who service the entire hispanophone world would prefer a single form of the language. Some ways have been found to avoid the obvious distinctions between Latin and Peninsular Spanish, e.g. the use of equipo ‘computer’ as a neutral word rather than the Latin American computador(a) versus Peninsular Spanish ordenador (Pountain, 1999). At least for written Spanish, agreement can probably be reached. However, for pronunciation, individual national differences, no matter how major or minor these might be, will still remain in both the anglophone and hispanophone worlds, given that the expression of national and regional identity via pronunciation is an essential characteristic of transnational languages.

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Notes 1 The term “overseas” is used here, as in variety studies in general, to refer to forms of European languages which developed outside Europe, i.e. in the colonies which were founded in the New World, the Southern Hemisphere, Asia, or the Pacific, which were overseas during the colonial period as they required long sea journeys to be reached. 2 For further discussion and differentiation of this term, see Hickey (2012b). 3 It is a curious fact that the allegiance to Castilian Spanish within Spain itself varies considerably. Speakers of Basque, Catalan, and Galician, for instance, do not identify primarily with standard Spanish. 4 Pragmatics varies greatly across the anglophone and hispanophone worlds but there has never been an attempt to codify pragmatics anywhere, either in the historical source country or any of the overseas locations. Nonetheless, there have been a few investigations of the pragmatics of pluricentric languages, under the label of “variational pragmatics”, see Schneider and Barron (2008). 5 The pluricentric language that most resembles English and Spanish today would be Arabic, which has a host of nationally distinct varieties along with Classical Arabic, used for religious purposes, and Standard Arabic, found in written official usage. The two remaining pluricentric Romance languages, French and Portuguese, have two numerically major varieties each, European French and Quebec French on the one hand and European and Brazilian Portuguese on the other, with both languages surviving in diglossic situations in former colonies such as Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia for French and the African countries Angola and Mozambique for Portuguese. 6 The inaccurate but popular term “West Indies” for the Caribbean stems from the original wish to discover a short route to India. Later the term “Indies” became lexicalised in the sense of “overseas colony”, e.g. the Dutch East Indies, which later formed present-​day Indonesia, and the Spanish East Indies, las Indias orientales españolas, which included the Philippines and a number of island groups in the western Pacific, such as the Mariana Islands and the Caroline Islands. 7 The Portuguese acquired a large section of northeast South America, which became the core of modern Brazil. Apart from the Spanish and Portuguese presence in Latin America the only other European powers represented on the mainland were in the Guyanas on the northern coast of South America: 1) British Guyana (1796; Guyana, independent since 1966), 2) Dutch Guyana (1667; Suriname, independent since 1975) and 3) French Guiana (1814 with the Treaty of Paris). 8 In Africa, Equitorial Guinea does not have its own standard variety of Spanish. With the demise of Spanish in the Philippines (bar the creolised forms grouped together as Chabacano, Sippola 2020) there is no location in Asia in which Spanish has survived as a national variety. 9 For varieties of English around the world no such short list of features could be given as overseas forms of English vary to a much greater degree. 10 See de Granda (1994), Escobar (2001), Klee & Caravedo (2006), and Paradi (2001), as well as many of the contributions in Potowski and Cameron (2007), Roca and Jensen (1996) and Silva Corvalán (1995). Lipski (2012, pp. 12–​19) provides a concise overview. 11 See Wright (2020) for treatments of this “older”, non-​prescriptive notion of standard. 12 Some of these features became stigmatised in the late modern period of English, such as double negation, indeed a source of shame (Beal, 2008, pp. 23–​25) for the speakers whose speech contained such features; nonetheless they have survived in many vernacular forms of English, especially in Britain and Ireland. Other features lost their character as indexes of non-​standard speech, e.g. sentence-​final prepositions.. 13 In the late Middle Ages the name Crown of Castile was given to the entire area east of Portugal and west of Aragón. With the union of the Crown of Castile and the Crown of Aragón in the fifteenth century an area geographically similar to modern Spain emerged. 14 Nebrija was aware that this form of Spanish was that used in the court and the preferred variety for official usage; indeed he presented a copy of his grammar to Isabella of Castile. In the dedication of this work he states that language is the compañera del imperio “companion of the empire”, a strong reason for favouring Castilian, the language of the then queen. 15 Not all these authors were in agreement with Nebrija’s grammar. Juan de Valdés, for example, continuously criticises his grammarian predecessor. 16 At the same time a companion work for spelling, Ortografía de la lengua española (Orthography of the Spanish language, 2010, first edition, 1741), was published. 17 Mexican Spanish is a small exception here with the use of for /​x/​and for /​ks/​in formal vocabulary, e.g. examen /​eksamen/​(Jones and Pountain, 2013, p. 391).

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Standards with pluricentric languages Ramírez, A. G. (1992). El español de los Estados Unidos, el lenguaje de los hispanos. Mapfre. Rico, F. (1978). Nebrija frente a los bárbaros. [Nebrija against the barbarians] Prensa Universitaria Salamanca. Rivarola, J. L. (1990). La formación lingüística de Hispanoamérica. [The linguistic formation of Hispanoamérica] Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. Rivarola, J. L. (2005). Sobre los orígenes y la evolución del español de América [On the origins and evolution of Spanish in America]. In V. Noll, K. Zimmermann, & I. Neumann-​Holzschuh (Eds.). (2005). El español en América: Aspectos teóricos, particularidades, contactos. [Spanish in America: theoretical aspects, features, contacts] (pp. 33–​48). Vervuert. Roca, A., & Jensen, J. B. (Eds.). (1996). Spanish in contact: issues in bilingualism. Cascadilla Press. Rogers, N. (2002). The middling orders. In H. T. Dickinson (Ed.), A companion to eighteenth-​century Britain (pp. 172–​182). Blackwell. Schneider, E. W. (2003). The dynamics of New Englishes: from identity construction to dialect birth. Language 79(2), 233–​281. Schneider, E. W. (2007). Postcolonial English: varieties around the world. Cambridge University Press. Schneider, K. P., & Barron, A. (Eds.). (2008). Variational pragmatics: a focus on regional varieties in pluricentric languages. John Benjamins. Sheridan, T. (1780). A general dictionary of the English language, 2 vols. The Scolar Press, 1967. Silva Corvalán, C. (Ed.). (1995). Spanish in four continents: studies in language contact and bilingualism. Georgetown University Press. Sippola, E. (2020). Contact and Spanish in the Pacific. In R. Hickey (Ed.), The handbook of language contact (pp. 453–​468). Wiley Blackwell. Sippola, E. (2021). Colonialism and new language varieties in the Americas. In D. M. Perez, & E. Sippola (Eds.), Postcolonial language varieties in the Americas. (pp. 1–​16). de Gruyter Mouton. Smart, B. H. (1810). A practical grammar of English pronunciation. Smart, B. H. (1836). Walker remodelled: a new critical pronouncing dictionary of the English language. T. Cadell. Smart, B. H. (1842). The practice of elocution. Fourth edition. Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. Sturiale, M., Beal, J. C., & Nocera, C. (Eds.). (2008). Perspectives on prescriptivism. Peter Lang. Thompson, R. W. (1992). Spanish as a pluricentric language. In Clyne (Ed.), pp. 45–​70. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2008). The codifiers and the history of multiple negation in English, or, why were eighteenth-​century grammarians so obsessed with double negation’. In M. Sturiale, J. C. Beal, & C. Nocera (Eds.), pp. 197–​214. Tieken Boon van Ostade, I. (2010). Eighteenth-​century women and their norms of correctness. In R. Hickey (Ed.), Eighteenth-​century English: ideology and change. (pp. 59–​72). Cambridge University Press. Tieken Boon van Ostade, I. (2019). Describing prescriptivism: usage guides and usage problems in British and American English. Routledge. Walker, J. (1791). A critical pronouncing dictionary of the English language. Reprinted by The Scolar Press (1969). Webster, N. (1789). An essay on the necessity, advantages, and practicality of reforming the mode of spelling and of rendering the orthography of words correspondent to pronunciation. In Dissertations on the English language: with notes, historical and critical, to which is added, by way of appendix, an essay on a reformed mode of spelling, with Dr. Franklin’s arguments on that subject. (pp. 391, 393–​398, 405–​406). Isaiah Thomas and Company. Wright, L. (2008). Social attitudes towards Londoners front-​glide insertion after velar consonants and before front vowels. In M . Sturiale, J. C. Beal, & C. Nocera (Eds.), pp. 215–​236. Wright, L. (Ed.). (2020). The multilingual origins of standard English. de Gruyter Mouton. Yáñez-​Bouza, N. (2008). To end or not to end a sentence with a preposition: an eighteenth-​century debate. In M . Sturiale, J. C. Beal, & C. Nocera (Eds.), pp. 237–​264. Zamora Salamanca, F. J. (1987). The standardization of the national variants of Spanish: problems and goals of a language policy in the Spanish-​speaking countries. In W. Bahner, J. Schildt, & D. Viehweger (Eds.). Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Congress of Linguists. (pp. 1681–​1685). Akademie Verlag. Zamora Vicente, A. (1979). Dialectología Española. [Spanish dialectology], Second, enlarged edition. Editorial Gredos. Zamora Vicente, A. (2015 [1999]) . La Real Academia Española. [The Royal Spanish Academy] Real Academia Española-​Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson.

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PART II

Contexts and practices of prescriptivism

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10 USAGE GUIDES AS A TEXT TYPE Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade*

1. Introduction Towards the end of the final episode of the British thriller series Roadkill (Eaton et al., 2020), broadcast on UK television in October 2020, in the US in November 2020, and in The Netherlands in January 2021, a barrister critises a junior colleague for using who instead of whom: “Told by who? By whom. By whom is English if you want to be a lawyer”.1 Why would she do so? Though the only non-​subject position in which whom would strictly speaking still be required today is when it follows a preposition, Pullum (2018, p. 195) considers insisting on correct usage in a context like the Roadkill dialogue as something that is only done by sadists. The situation in the episode confirms that the senior lawyer’s reason for her comment is not linguistic in nature: she is deeply frustrated over a lost case and takes it out on the colleague she holds responsible for this by criticising his language use, suggesting that he is not a good lawyer because he makes grammatical mistakes. That a character in this series was made to resort to a controversial language issue to make this point indicates that linguistic correctness is still an issue in British society today. Highly educated people like lawyers are evidently expected to use what is considered to be correct grammar, no matter how outdated a particular rule may be. Pullum calls the who/​whom issue a shibboleth (2018, p. 194), since it allegedly identifies people unfamiliar with its correct usage as uneducated. There are many other such items in the English language, and they are routinely dealt with in usage guides: language advice manuals that inform their users about what is right and wrong in –​usually written –​language. English usage guides originated during the late eighteenth century, and are a typical product of the Age of Prescriptivism (for further discussion, see Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2019, 2020). They are still regularly published as books today, despite the fact that usage advice may easily be found online (Lukač, 2018). And who/​whom has been treated as a usage problem from the earliest days of the genre onwards. What, then, are usage guides exactly, what kind of usage problems do they include, and why? Why are they so popular, and what makes them into a distinctive text type? These are questions that I will address in this chapter, and I will do so by focusing on two very different usage guides that were produced nearly a hundred years apart in the US and in the UK, respectively: J. Lesslie Hall’s English Usage (1917) and Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010). I will illustrate their very different approaches to providing usage advice with two usage problems, the split infinitive (to boldly go where no man has gone DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-12

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before, taken from the trailer of the popular television series Star Trek) and the dangling participle (pulling the trigger, the gun went off, the example used in the usage survey by Mittins et al. 1970). Both features have been well studied, and I selected the first issue because its usage has become so common that it no longer needs to be considered a usage problem today (Lukač, 2018, p. 186; Kostadinova, 2020, pp. 111–​112), and the second because it is still widely considered to be one (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade & Ebner, 2017; Ebner, 2018a, p. 147). But first I will discuss usage guides as a text type.

2.  Text types: grammars, dictionaries, and usage guides In an overview of text types in the history of English, Görlach (2004, pp. 24–​88) lists around 2000 items, some of which are easily identifiable, like letters (though with many sub-​types) and cooking-​recipes, but also a Valentine (card) and a contract. But while grammars and dictionaries are included in Görlach’s list, usage guides are not. The term itself is not new, but it is first used to describe manuals providing usage advice systematically by Weiner (1988). Weiner himself had published a usage guide, and he wrote the article for a Festschrift for Robert Burchfield, who had just engaged on the revision of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1926) (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, p. 14). Alternative terms for usage guides, such as “usage handbook” or “usage manual”, are not included in Görlach’s inventory either. Görlach does mention “style-​books”, with a second meaning “manual of house style” (2004, p. 79), a sense we also find in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED, s.v. style, n. C2). But style-​books, or style guides as they are frequently called, differ from usage guides in that they are usually written for specific institutions, such as the BBC or the CIA, or newspapers, such as The Guardian. In such contexts, the use of style guides is obligatory, while usage guides tend to be only optionally consulted by people seeking advice on correct language use. This has important implications for the question of the effect of usage guides on language variation and change. Usage guides have been around since 1770, when Robert Baker published his highly unusual Reflections on the English Language –​unusual, because (by his own admission) he was unfamiliar with Samuel Johnson’s famous Dictionary of the English Language (1755) or Robert Lowth’s equally famous English grammar (1762) (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, pp. 27–​29); these authoritative publications would have provided essential information for his book if he had had access to them. Baker’s source of inspiration was a much earlier French publication, Claude Favre de Vaugelas’s Remarques sur la langue françoise, published for the Academie française in 1647. Not knowing of a comparable work for English, Baker wrote in the preface, he “flatter[ed] [him]self that [his] Performance may be of some use” (1770, p. iii), and many later writers of usage guides were to write similarly: well-​known British ones like H. W. Fowler and Sir Ernest Gowers and Americans like William Strunk and E. B. White, and more recently, Bryan Garner. Görlach defines text types as “specific linguistic pattern[s]‌in which formal/​ structural characteristics have been conventionalized in a specific culture for certain well-​defined and standardized uses of language” (2004, p. 105), adding that users are generally able to identify them and refer to them by a specific name, e.g. a telegram or a sermon. All this applies to usage guides as well, which are neither grammars nor dictionaries even though they do include lexical and grammatical material (Busse & Schröder, 2009). Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926) illustrates this: both its title and its physical appearance, which is identical to early copies of the Concise Dictionary of the English Language (1911), would suggest that the work is a dictionary. Its contents are, moreover, arranged alphabetically, as in dictionaries. The book itself, however, merely provides usage advice rather than defining the items included, as a dictionary would do; a preface which could have explained its purpose is lacking. Busse and Schröder 160

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aptly describe usage guides as “integrative all-​in-​one reference work[s] written for educated lay people that bridge the traditional divide between a grammar and a dictionary” (2009, p. 72), thus highlighting their function (they are reference works), their intended audience (educated lay people) and their contents (grammatical and lexical). As reference works, the main function of usage guides is to provide advice about usage, and this advice can be proscriptive (do not use the split infinitive), prescriptive (use whom in object position or after a preposition) or even descriptive, explaining patterns of usage and leaving the decision to the reader without imposing a particular preference for different variants. Crystal (2000), for instance, having noted that the Star Trek line “To boldly go is rhythmically very neat”, mainly tries to create awareness that “this is a sensitive area of English usage”, and that “it would be sensible to be cautious” when using it (1984, pp. 24–​31). This example shows that usage advice may also be a mixture of different approaches, here descriptive and in effect proscriptive; as various studies of the subject have shown, this is quite often the case (e.g. Ebner, 2017; Kostadinova, 2018; Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020). Like Busse and Schröder, Straaijer (2018, p. 13) defines the phenomenon of the usage guide by showing that there is overlap between usage guides and grammars, and dictionaries, but also with style guides, writing guides, and popular writing on language; style guides, he rightly suggests, are most comparable. As a term, we find “usage guide” mentioned in the OED not in a separate entry, but under compounds (s.v. usage, n., Compounds C2), as with “style-​books” (see above). The earliest quotation illustrating the term in the OED, from 1951, is from an American journal published by the National Council for Teachers of English, so “usage guide” may well be American in origin, being introduced into a British context by Weiner in the late 1980s in his article called “On editing a usage guide” (see above; emphasis added in bold, here and throughout). For all that, usage guides made their appearance in the US about eighty years after they originated in England in 1770; Seth T. Hurd’s Grammatical Corrector (1847) was possibly the first of its kind (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, pp. 31–​33). They have continued to thrive in both countries, and are also published in other English-​speaking countries such as Australia, Canada, India, and South Africa; and as other chapters in this volume will show, it is not of course an exclusively English text type. As a productive and widely acknowledged player in the field of English prescriptivism that has been around for a considerable amount of time, the usage guide merits inclusion in Görlach’s overview of historical English text types, but also as an independent entry in the OED, much like other related and unrelated compounds, such as user friendliness, usual suspects, and the like.

3.  Characteristics of usage guides External and internal characteristics of usage guides are closely connected, and in Describing Prescriptivism (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020) I have treated them from a sociolinguistic perspective, taking into consideration authorship, form, context, publication history, intended audience, contents and presentation. Drawing on a database constructed for the purpose of doing research on usage guides and usage problems (Straaijer, 2014), I analysed usage guides similar to how I previously studied eighteenth-​century grammars; studying the nature and reception of the well-​known and influential grammar by Robert Lowth, for instance, it was possible to understand how and why the work is frequently misunderstood by modern linguists (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2011). Such an approach, as we will see, will prove valuable for the study of individual usage guides as well. The database used for the present chapter is called Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) (Straaijer, 2014), and it is freely available (password protected) (see also Yáñez-​Bouza, this 161

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volume). It comprises 77 selected usage guides, British and American, published between 1770 and 2010, and 123 usage problems taken from the vast number of usage problems in existence. Usage problems are linguistic features that show variable usage, but if their variation calls for criticism, they become examples of contested usage and thus theoretically come in for inclusion in a usage guide. Since people tend to have varying opinions about linguistic correctness, no two usage guide writers or, indeed, linguists agree as to how many usage problems are (cf. Chapman, 2021). Ilson (1985) argues that for a language feature to be considered a usage problem it should be in use (“actual occurrence”), it should be fairly widespread, and it should be possible to discuss it “without giving offence” (cf. Ilson’s “examples of smut”) (1985, pp. 166–​ 167). For all that, there is a certain amount of consensus, both among usage guide writers and the general public, as to what a usage problem is. The ones already referred to, who/​whom, the split infinitive and the dangling participle, are all part of what Mair (2006, p. 18) calls “a body of folk-​linguistic knowledge” about what constitutes linguistic correctness, and of what other linguists have called the “prescriptive canon” (Vorlat, 1996); this is why they were included in the HUGE database, along with many others. Several of these have been analysed in studies by Straaijer (2018), Ebner (2017, 2018a, 2018b), Kostadinova (2018, 2020), Lukač (2018), myself (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020) and others, but many of them are still awaiting analysis. Usage guides may be voluminous or small, and they may be arranged alphabetically (like a dictionary) or topically (like a textbook), so that they can be used as reference works or even as course books. In terms of size, the most comprehensive usage guides in HUGE are Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989), Pam Peters’ Cambridge Guide to English Usage (2004) and Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd ed., 2009), reissued as Garner’s Modern English Usage in 2016 (5th ed., 2023). Coverage may be effected in different ways, by listing individual entries of e.g. foreign plurals (visa, media), or by discussing such plurals under a general entry, producing different degrees of comprehensiveness accordingly (cf. Straaijer, 2018, pp. 27–​29), as well as differing practical usefulness for the reader. Examples of slim volumes are Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, with its third edition (1979) counting only 92 pages, and Gowers’s Plain Words (1948), with 94 pages. Relative size, however, may stand in inverse proportion to success, for these two usage guides are among the most popular ever published. While Strunk and White had its origin in a textbook produced by William Strunk in 1918 for students at Cornell University and subsequently became the most widely read English usage guide ever published (Pullum, 2010, p. 34), Gowers’ Plain Words was conceived as a manual for civil servants. Proving immediately popular among the general public as well, it was reissued as Complete Plain Words in 1954, and continued to sell so well that a fourth revised edition was published in 2014. If American college students and British civil servants were the intended audiences of these two manuals, the interested general public, Busse and Schröder’s “educated lay people”, is described by R.W. Burchfield in his third edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (1996) as comprising “a judge, a colonel, and a retired curator of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum” (p. vii). Linguists do not tend to consult usage guides, but they do analyse their contents (e.g. Chapman, 2010, 2021). And some of them also write usage guides. David Crystal and Pam Peters are examples of this, as is R. L. Trask (Mind the Gaffe, 2001), and so in effect was J. Lesslie Hall, as I will argue below. Weiner not only wrote about usage guides, as discussed above, he also produced one himself (1983); he is a lexicographer, just like the compilers of Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage. Most usage guide writers, however, are non-​linguists: journalists, travel writers, textbook writers, editors, and language teachers. Some are even professional writers of advice literature, with usage guides being only one type of books they produce. Examples are Dianna Booher, with Good Grief, Good Grammar (1988), and Laurie Rozakis, 162

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whose Comma Sutra came out in 2005. Wikipedia describes Booher as a “communication expert” who wrote “46 books on business and personal development topics”, and Rozakis as “a writer of the Complete Idiot’s books and an expert on writing, grammar, usage, test preparation, and coaching writers” (Wikipedia, s.v. Dianna Booher; Laurie Rozakis). Their books illustrate an interesting difference between British and American usage guides: the titles of American publications are usually more flippant than British ones, aiming for a commercial appeal among potential buyers, at the same time disguising what is actually a more serious topic than the titles suggest. A British exception to this tendency is Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), whose author, Caroline Taggart, is likewise a professional writer of advice manuals, and whose book is written in a playful tone (see below). But what most writers have in common, whether British or American, is their age: generally, usage guides are written by older writers. From the 77 usage guide writers in the HUGE database whose ages I was able to ascertain, 21 fell in the age range 46–​60 and 14 in that of 61–​80: four of them were in their seventies when their usage guides came out; the eldest in the group, Nathan Mager, was 80 at the time (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, pp. 76–​77). Usage guides are thus typically a non-​specialist product (with important exceptions), and are published largely by elderly, presumably more linguistically experienced, writers. In this respect, and despite overlapping with them, they differ significantly from grammars and dictionaries. Baker’s Reflections on the English Language (1770) includes 127 rules that deal primarily with lexical and grammatical features. According to Weiner, the contents of usage guides is “as broad as the English language, covering spelling, punctuation, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexis, and involving sociolinguistic considerations” (1988, p. 173). Below, I will focus on two grammatical features, the split infinitive and the dangling participle, but examples from other linguistic categories are easy to find. The HUGE database includes, for instance, -​ise/​ize (spelling), the comma splice (punctuation) and the non-​literal use of literally (lexis). Burchfield’s guidebook for the BBC, The Spoken Word (1981), presents a five-​page list of items calling for pronunciation advice at the time, such aristocrat (not aristocrat) and secretary (not secetree or secetairee) (1981, p. 11–​16). Rules in usage guides often have the same format, and Vorlat already describes Baker’s rules as being “typically structured as follows: spoken or written English frequently has structure a […, which] is wrong, and ought to be replaced by structure b” (2001, p. 392). The injunction “ought to be” serves to condemn and correct a particular usage: doing a full-​text search for the phrase in the HUGE database produced 123 hits in 42 usage guides, from 1770 down to 2010 –​though not Hall (1917) or Taggart (2010). As will be shown below, their respective approaches to the subject were somewhat different from that of other usage guides I studied. The frustrated lawyer cited at the beginning of this chapter suggests that the use of who for whom is “not English”: this epithet, along with comparable phrases like “not good English”, “bad English” and many others, is likewise typically found in usage guides. This kind of proscriptive metalanguage has been found since the beginning of the normative grammar tradition in the eighteenth century (Sundby et al., 1991, p. 44−53), and is even used by the general public when condemning particular usages (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, pp. 161–​168). As I argue in Describing Prescriptivism (2020), there has been a continuous tradition since the early days of prescriptivism that links not only the two text types (grammars and usage guides), but also the metalanguage found in these text types; how popular views about language correctness are phrased, moreover, shows particular similarity with many usage guides as well. Usage guides are a marketable commodity: they continue to appear even though usage advice is readily available online. Whether they are actually used is a different question, but consulting the general public on what their favourite usage guide was produced the following results: the second edition of Fowler’s Modern English Usage (Gowers, 1965), Gowers’s Complete 163

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Plain Words (1954), Partridge (1947 or a later edition), Vallins (1951 or 1953), and, as expected, Strunk and White (1959 or later) –​all of them well-​known usage guides (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, p. 55). Some informants even possessed multiple usage guides. It is linguistic insecurity which tends to make people continue to acquire newly published usage guides, especially those written by well-​known writers. Simon Heffer’s Strictly English (2010) is a good example of this: my overview of some of the most popular recent usage guides (carried out with the help of Nielsen BookScan) showed that with more than 27,000 copies sold at the time I was completing my book, Heffer’s was selling best of all, despite strong criticism of the book by David Crystal in The New Statesman (2010, October 11) and by Geoffrey Pullum in Times Higher Education (2010, November 11). This illustrates a serious gap between the interests of linguists, whose aim is to describe language use, and the general public, who want to benefit from clear usage advice, now matter how uncritical it proves to be. I will return to this in my discussion of Caroline Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English below.

4.  Two case studies: Hall (1917) and Taggart (2010) Because the two usage guides selected as case studies for this chapter were published nearly a century apart, one would expect the earlier one to be more pre-​or proscriptive and the later one more descriptive, in line with the rise of linguistics as a discipline since the late nineteenth century. As a science, linguistics takes a strictly descriptive approach to language, as introductions to the subject unfailingly point out (Cameron, 1995, p. 5). But the development of usage guides was less straightforward than that. Descriptive approaches to usage are indeed increasingly found, as Peters (2006) writes when she describes developments in the usage guide tradition. She argues that in the course of time, usage guides became less dependent on their authors’ ipse dixit pronouncements,2 and that their usage advice became more objective thanks to an increasing focus on actual usage through consultation of linguistic corpora or by conducting usage surveys (as she did herself for her own usage guide, Peters 2004). But as my own research has shown, this is not what happened across the board: the old pre-​and proscriptive approach never disappeared and continues to be found alongside usage guides that take a descriptive approach along the lines described by Peters. But even early on in the tradition we can see writers who took a strictly descriptive approach. The two usage guides discussed here show how the two strands of usage guide writing exist side by side, and will thus illustrate that the development from pre-​and proscription to description in the tradition has not been a straightforward process: while J. Lesslie Hall’s English Usage: Studies in the History and Uses of English Words and Phrases (1917) demonstrates what we might now regard in some sense as a corpus linguistic approach to the question of what is correct usage, Caroline Taggart, in Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010), adopts the persona of “her Ladyship” in order to impose a norm of correctness on her readers. This norm of correctness has no basis in actual linguistic analysis, as with Hall’s approach, but in a tradition of a conservative ideology of what linguistic correctness entails. Many of Taggart’s views on correctness in language use thus have their roots in the earliest days of the usage guide tradition. Hall, on the other hand, contextualises usage data by presenting earlier discussions of the features in question, and he leaves it to the reader to decide what alternatives to adopt. I will illustrate each respective approach by focusing on two usage problems, the split infinitive and the dangling participle, and showing how these issues are treated by the writers concerned. Doing so helps explain why Hall’s usage guide, though the more strictly linguistic one, was never reprinted while Taggart’s was, even if not very often.

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4.1  J. Lesslie Hall –​corpus linguist avant-​la-​lettre Little detailed biographical information is available on J. Lesslie Hall: he has no entry in the American National Biography (online edition), and Wikipedia provides only some general information about his life and career. His life dates, 1856–​1928, show that as a usage guide writer he fits well into the category of typical authors of the text type: Hall was in his early sixties when English Usage came out (1917). The book’s title page describes him as “Prof e s s or of th e Engl ish languag e and lite rature i n the Col le g e of Wi l l i am and Mary, t ran slator of Beow ulf, and of Judith, Ph oe ni x and oth e r Ang lo -​S axon p oe ms; auth or of ‘ O ld Eng li sh i dy ls,’ ‘ Hal f -​h our s i n South e rn h i story,’ etc.”, though the preface reads that he taught “usage” as well (Hall, 1917, p. 5). There, we also learn that his literary interests were not confined to Old English, because he notes that for the purpose of writing the usage guide he read “more than seventy-​five thousand pages of English and American literature, … [including] the works of scholars and linguists whose usage I thought worth recording and citing” (1917, p. 5–​6). An Internet search produced a picture of Hall in the possession of the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, dated 1920–​1921, which shows him surrounded by a large group of women, members of the J. Lesslie Hall Literary Society.3 Hall’s literary reputation was such that a professional society was named after him. But what about his linguistic reputation? His usage guide was never reprinted, so it was not very popular. Algeo, however, calls it a “pioneering” work, “which began the modern subgenre of reports on usage” (1991, p. 52), by which he means the rise of the usage survey. Kostadinova (2018, p. 60) indeed notes that Hall (1917) was one of the sources of a usage survey carried out by Marckwardt and Walcott (1938); it was likewise consulted for Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage (1989), while it is also referred to by Mittins et al. in their survey-​based Attitudes of English Usage (1970). Hall’s English Usage thus did not go wholly unnoticed, though more as a scholarly study than as a usage guide, and in a later publication, Algeo commends the work for giving “fact rather than unsupported advice” (1994, p. 107). As for its contents, the usage guide contains 140 usage problems, presented in alphabetical order; 95 of them deal with grammar, 43 with lexical issues and two with spelling. The HUGE database includes 37 of them. Looking at two of Hall’s usage problems, the split infinitive and the dangling participle, will illustrate his approach to usage, which is described in great detail in the preface. There, Hall explains that his usage guide is “historical rather than polemic” (cf. the early stages of the usage guide tradition, discussed by Straaijer, 2018), and he describes his approach as being usage based, finding support for this in some twenty writers on the subject before him (1917, pp. 26; 12–​23). Rather than advising his readers on the correctness of a particular linguistic feature, he writes, “[e]‌vidence pro and con will be given, the opinions of the best grammars, rhetorics and dictionaries cited, and the reader left to draw his own conclusions” (1917, p. 23). To present a basis in actual (if historically oriented) usage, Hall continues, “[a]‌bout two hundred authors, either ‘reputable’ or eminent will be cited or quoted”, though without restricting himself to famous writers like Tennyson, Lord Macaulay, Addison or Shakespeare, because, he explains, “the language is not made only by these but by stars of lesser magnitude, by men and women of culture and refinement who have contributed to literature in a less distinguished degree, such as editors of our best literary journals, prominent teachers, scholars, preachers –​ many of whom have a genius for idiom and are competent to criticize the great authors” (1917, pp. 23–​24). Hall’s historical corpus of usage includes sources ranging from Chaucer and Wycliffe to what were contemporary authors in his day: T. R. Lounsbury (whose Standard

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of Usage in English, from 1908, was also a major source of inspiration for Hall’s own book, and who is cited many times, both as an authority and for his language use) and J.F. Genung (Outlines of Rhetoric, 1900), but also Robert Browning (1812–​1889). For just over half the usage problems in his book (74/​140), Hall provides lists of authors with numbers of instances attested. The longest list comprises references to as many as 150 authors: whose with neuter antecedents. The next most elaborately supported items are that as a non-​restrictive relative (115 authors), misplaced relative clauses (103) and sick(ness) (102), all of them high-​frequency items in his corpus. Low-​frequency items include the use of editorial as a noun (4) and of mutual in the sense of “common” rather than “reciprocal” (4). Of these items, only editorial is no longer listed as a usage problem in modern usage guides, which demonstrates that the prescriptive canon (see Section 3) is not fixed across time: usage problems come and go. At the same time, there are usage problems –​and editorial may be one of them –​that are what Chapman (2010, p. 141) calls “one-​offs”, items of disputed usage that feature only in single usage guides. For the split infinitive (1917, pp. 266–​271) Hall mentions 34 authors with 74 instances, ranging from Wycliffe (1330–​1384) and Pecock (c.1395–​c.1461) to e.g. H. W. Mabie (1846–​1916). The list comprises 17 English writers, 5 Scottish and one Irish, 10 Americans and one author who was either Australian or British (Mrs Humphry Ward). Five of these authors are women: Mrs Gaskell, George Eliot, Katherine Lee Bates, Ella W. Wilcox and Mrs H. Ward, which confirms that Hall was not above considering the language of female writers as contributing to notions of linguistic correctness. But the most striking author in the list is Robert Browning, who has the most instances to his name by far: 23 in all (the other authors are usually cited for single instances, and never for more than five). Browning’s unusual position in the list as “the greatest offender” drew Hall’s attention, too. Instances from Browning’s hand, he writes, have been attested since 1835. “Shall we then adopt and push this locution?,” Hall wonders. Having presented an account of views “pro and con” the split infinitive and surveying his corpus data, he notes that his 72 instances (I counted 74) are not in fact very many in the light of his “wide course of reading covering a period of five hundred years” (1917, p. 270). For all that, he notes that the split infinitive “is spreading in the daily and weekly papers, and in the colloquial English of the intelligent classes”, concluding that it “is neither an innovation nor a vulgarism, but a rarity in pure literature” (1917, pp. 270–​271). But what about Browning’s unusual position in Hall’s historical account of the construction? And can Hall’s findings be replicated? To test this, I searched Browning’s Complete Poetic and Dramatic Works using the edition in Project Gutenberg published by Scudder (1895). The edition may well have been available to Hall, though it seems unlikely, given its size (over 800,000 words), that Hall read it entirely for the purpose of compiling his corpus of instances. Having analysed the text with the help of the freely available concordancing program AntConc (search term “to”, and all items subsequently checked manually), I identified as many as sixty instances, such as To painfully begin the world once more and To quietly next day at crow of cock Cut. To test whether Browning used split infinitives merely as a poetic device –​in poetry, unusual word order is not exceptional –​I analysed his letters as well. For this, too, I drew on a publication in Project Gutenberg, Volume 1 of The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–​1846 (Browning, 1900). My search yielded five instances (such as to rather occupy myself with watching you). The edition includes 140 letters from Robert to Elizabeth, and 141 from her to him, but all five instances were found in Robert’s letters. Comprising 80,771 words, this means a relative frequency of one instance per 16,154 words, which is only slightly lower than that in his poetic and dramatic language: one in 13,786 words. We may thus conclude that the split infinitive is a regular feature of Browning’s language, only slightly more so in his poetry and drama than in his private informal usage. 166

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Relatively frequent though his usage evidently is compared to that of Hall’s other writers, it is also striking that he used it so frequently to begin with, since the split infinitive, when it was first criticized in 1834 in the New-​England Magazine, was associated with “uneducated persons” and, it seems, American usage (Bailey, 1996, p. 248). Browning’s letters, as far as I analysed them, date from only ten years later. It would therefore be interesting to look further into his language to find out whether it contains more idiosyncratic usages. Suffice it to say in the context of this chapter that Hall included instances from Browning for 15 other usage problems (but never with such a high frequency as for the split infinitive) and that a search in the HUGE database produced eight more usage guides that mention Browning, though in all cases with reference to single usage problems only and at times to his wife’s usage instead. If Browning’s use of the split infinitive was remarkable, so, therefore, is Hall’s interest in Browning’s language. In contrast to Hall’s treatment of the split infinitive, Browning is only mentioned once for the dangling participle, referred to by Hall as “misrelated participle” or by the more common grammatical term “gerund” (1917, p. 165–​172).4 The most frequently cited authors in Hall’s list here are Poe (18), Hawthorne (16), and Shakespeare and Thackeray (13 each). As a usage problem, the dangling participle was new at the time: Hall (1917) is only the second usage guide in the HUGE database that deals with it, following The King’s English (Fowler & Fowler, 1906). Hall, however, never refers to Fowler in his book, so this is not where he picked the item up. But the dangling participle continues to be found in many usage guides subsequently, occurring in 49 out of the 77 usage guides in HUGE altogether, down to Fogarty (2008) and Heffer, Lamb, and Taggart (all 2010). Its usage, according to Hall, goes back to Mandeville and Chaucer, so to fourteenth-​century English, and he cites “authorities” from Hugh Latimer (1487–​1555) onwards, 68 of them altogether. His list of authors includes three women, Jane Austen, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot, all of them English novelists. The greater majority of the authors cited are English (40), eighteen are American and ten Scottish. Hall notes that the dang­ling participle “is condemned in practically all the best textbooks on grammar and rhetoric” (1917, p. 166), by which he means textbooks on rhetoric and composition, but also Henry Sweet’s well-​known authoritative New English Grammar (1891). In spite of the best writers using the dangling participle, Hall nevertheless does “not argu[e]‌for the use of this construction”, believing that “the rhetorics and the grammars are right in their criticism” (1917, p. 170). The only test, he concludes, is clarity. In HUGE, Hall’s usage guide is classified as American, on the basis of the book’s place of publication (Chicago) as well as the author’s nationality. But given the division between American and British (English, Scottish, Irish) authorities cited in the book, with the American authors in both cases occupying a minority (10/​34 for the split infinitive and 18/​68 for the dangling participle), the question arises as to whether this is justified. Hall twice refers to “the King’s English”, once when noting that pedants are “absolutely unreliable in matters of usage” and “often ‘murder the King’s English’ in trying to save it” (1917, p. 22) and the second time when summing up “a distinguished list of murderers of the English language”; these were cited by a source he consulted on the dangling participle. Generally, though, Hall carefully distinguishes between what he found in the extensive list of American and English sources that make up his corpus. He thus notes that firstly does not appear in his American sources (1917, p. 208) or that for editorial as a noun, claimed to be an Americanism by his sources, he did not find any evidence to the contrary. Of the passive progressive, as in The house is building, he says that it “is used more by English than by American writers” (1917, p. 223). All these pronouncements are based on solid evidence, drawn from what looks like a very careful analysis of a large amount of “English and American literature”. Hall’s English Usage is therefore neither American nor British in its orientation. But nor is it merely a usage guide: it is in effect a linguistic study that 167

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is based on an analysis of a usage corpus, and that provides usage advice for those taking the trouble to read it to that end. In this respect, to vary on Busse and Schröder’s characterisation of the usage guide, Hall’s English Usage may be called a two-​in-​one publication. As a linguistic study, it did leave its trace on later publications, but as a usage guide it was not successful, the reason being its strictly linguistic (descriptive) rather than practical approach (pre/​proscriptive), which would have had a greater appeal to the general public.

1.2.  4.2 Her Ladyship’s norm of correctness5 The approach Caroline Taggart (b. 1954) adopted when writing her usage guide is quite different from Hall’s, and this reflects directly on her treatment of the two usage problems selected for illustration purposes. Though she refers to several sources in the bibliography of Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010) –​including two style guides and one usage guide, i.e. Sayce (2006) –​she largely proceeded from an ipse dixit perspective on what is considered linguistically correct and what is not. Taggart’s case shows that, in contrast to common practice with other usage guides, she gave a voice to a supposed linguistic authority referred to as “Her Ladyship” rather than presenting a descriptive perspective on usage as a basis for her linguistic advice. For this, Taggart was inspired by Nancy Mitford’s Noblesse Oblige (1956), as shown in the interview reproduced in Describing Prescriptivism (2020, p. 230). Mitford’s book includes an article by A. S. C. Ross which introduces the distinction “U and non-​U”, a term that differentiates between Upper-​class and non-​Upper-​class or allegedly incorrect, improper usage (OED, s.v. non-​U, adj. and n.). Her Ladyship, in other words, is invoked as a guardian of linguistic correctness, a persona through which Taggart is able to make linguistic pronouncements that allegedly do not reflect her own points of view. Her Ladyship, Taggart explains in the Introduction, is a person of a certain age and a certain level of education. She is also, undoubtedly, of a certain class, although she claims that this is far less important now than it used to be. She admits to being a snob, but she is more a linguistic snob than a social one. She speaks a language that, for the purpose of this book, is called “Elegant English”. Taggart 2010, p. 6 Age, as well as education, but also social class are invoked as credentials that are meant to assert Her Ladyship’s linguistic authority. And Elegant English is what she is consequently expected to promote, which Taggart describes as the opposite of “pretentious”, “vulgar”, “ugly”, and “inaccurate … language” (2010, p. 7). Though Taggart claims that Her Ladyship is only a linguistic snob and not a social one, we will see that in the usage guide the two are very closely connected. But we first will look at who Caroline Taggart is. www.carolinetaggart.co.uk is a highly informative –​if rather sugary –​website where we can read about Taggart’s personal background, her work and her publications. Her former activities include a job in publishing and editing, primarily of non-​fiction books, but during the noughties she became a writer of books on topics that were expected to appeal to the general public. Since then, she has proved extremely prolific as a writer, having published at the time of writing this chapter as many as 28 books in fifteen years. Fifteen of these one way or another deal with language, and include titles like The Book of English Place Names (2011), 500 Words You Should Know (2014) and Kicking the Bucket at the Drop of the Hat (2016), but there are also two usage guides, My Grammar and I (or Should that Be ‘Me’?) (2009, with J. A. Wines) and Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English (2010). Being mostly priced below £10, her books 168

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are very affordable, and each title has a link on the website that takes interested buyers directly to Amazon.co.uk. What is immediately striking in Taggart’s list of publications is that Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English is now part of an attractive –​but again rather sugary –​set of Her Ladyship’s Guides, on how to run one’s home (2012), the British season (2013), the art of conversation (2016), and general good manners (Her Ladyship’s Guide to Greeting the Queen, 2016). Originally, Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English was published by The National Trust, and when it had just come out, it could be found in the shops of English country houses. Apparently, the usage guide became a source of inspiration for the other Her Ladyship’s Guide books, and it was subsequently reissued as part of the set but by a different publisher (Batsford). The set’s format suggest that the books are particularly targeted at women, which testifies to clever marketing of the usage guide from a linguistic perspective: women, as we know from studies within the field of sociolinguistics (cf. e.g. Ebner 2017), tend to focus on standard language use (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, p. 3). The links to the Amazon website, moreover, allow us to analyse its “Customer review” facility: these suggest that Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English did much better than any of the other books in the set (that is, if these reviews can be taken as indicative of the popularity of a particular book), and that it received a relatively high (though not the highest) rating: 71 per cent of the 91 reviews produced a rating of five stars at the time I wrote this chapter. Her other usage guide, My Grammar and I (or Should that Be ‘Me’?) (2009), however, appears to have sold considerably better, though its overall rating was lower (493 ratings, with 63% awarding the book five stars). While her earlier usage guide received some attention in the press when it came out, Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English was, as far as I know, never reviewed, nor did it ever receive any critical attention from linguists, unlike Simon Heffer’s Strictly English, which came out in the same year (but see Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2021). Her Ladyship’s Guide’s intended audience is described in the introduction as well. “[T]‌here is no shame,” Taggart begins, “in coming from the north of England and very little in coming from North America or the Antipodes,” adding that “many native speakers of English, whatever their social and geographical origins, feel uncomfortable with their own language –​for the simple reason that they have never been taught its rules” (2010, p. 7). While the first part of this statement would be interpreted by sociolinguists as linguistically condescending and hence problematical, the latter part represents a serious problem that has received general recognition since the publication of Deborah Cameron’s Verbal Hygiene (1995). In the UK, during the 1960s and 1970s, English grammar was taken out of the school curriculum, consequently producing a so-​called “grammarless” generation no longer familiar with simple grammatical concepts like prepositions, auxiliaries, or conjunctions (Keith, 1990; Ebner, 2017; Beal, 2018). In a survey from 2012 among readers of the Bridging the Unbridgeable blog (https://​brid​g ing​ theu​nbri​dgea​ble.com/​), asking them to comment on the acceptability of three sentences with different types of usage problems, several informants commented on this very issue. One of them, a 35-​year-​old teacher, wrote: I’d argue that scrapping the systematic teaching of grammar in UK state schools in the 1970s was the beginning of the end, and there’s no way we can ever recover from that ... my generation onward have essentially learned English by ear, and in my view the sample sentence in question is a prime example of that. As quoted in Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, p. 132 It is this general feeling of linguistic insecurity caused by the lack of formal teaching of the subject which led to a peak in the production of usage guides during the 1980s and 1990s and 169

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beyond, catering for the need for linguistic guidance for people who felt insecure about their language use (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, p. 51). This is indeed why Trask published his usage guide, he explains in Mind the Gaffe (2001, pp. 1–​2), and Taggart similarly caters for an audience that “has never been taught [the] rules” of their own language (2010, p. 7). The difference between them, though, is that Trask was a linguist and that Taggart is not. Interviewing Taggart for Describing Prescriptivism, I asked about her selection principles for the book. These, she explained, had been “very personal –​I basically wrote about the things that amused or annoyed me”. In addition, she consulted “several more serious and comprehensive guides to English and chose examples (of ‘confusibles’ [sic], for example) that appealed to me”. But she also drew on conversations with “friends, many of whom came up with examples of expressions or confusions that annoyed them” (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, p. 230). Selection principles for usage problems are not as a rule made explicit; Steven Pinker, for instance, does not explain either why he selected the one hundred usage problems that make up his final chapter of The Sense of Style (2014). Comparing them with those found in a selection of other usage guides, including Taggart’s, showed that they largely comprise so-​called old chestnuts, usage problems that are part of the prescriptive canon for English (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, pp. 107–​108). In Taggart’s case, these old chestnuts make up about ten per cent of the items in her book. A large section is taken up by what are headed “Confusables”. These include generally acknowledged usage problems like affect/​effect and some that are extremely popular today, especially in online language forums: their/​there/​they’re and whose/​who’s (Vriesendorp, 2016). But some of them, like caviar/​caveat or prevaricate/​procrastinate, seem rather far-​fetched as usage problems, and may simply have emerged in discussions between Taggart and her friends. From a usage guide perspective, such instances are examples of Chapman’s “one-​offs” (see above). Interestingly, the list also includes the pair prescribe/​proscribe: prescribe Taggart explains as something a doctor does, while proscribe means “to condemn, prohibit or exile” (2010, p. 116). While doctors are not subjected to linguistic criticism in Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English, other groups of speakers are, and targeting specific user groups, too, is part of Taggart’s approach. Three such groups are of particular interest: sports commentators, estate agents, and television presenters, and they are linked to specific usage problems: the flat adverb (Federer is serving beautiful rather beautifully), the use of yourselves instead of you (I’d be delighted to show it to yourselves), and these ones/​those ones rather than simply these or those (these two ones here) (2010, pp. 52, 56, 57) . Identifying particular usages or usage problems with specific groups of speakers is not uncommon, with probably the best-​known example being the greengrocer’s apostrophe. Another example is what Walker (2008) calls “the footballer’s perfect”, as in he’s hardly touched the goalkeeper (for he hardly …), but while Walker’s account is a linguistic study of a changing usage, references to misplaced or absent apostrophes have had the effect of stigmatising a particular group of people (Beal, 2010). Such instances are, however, extremely widespread, as the interactive website of the Apostrophe Protection Society amply illustrates (www.apo​stro​ phe.org.uk/​). The same applies to Taggart’s identification of specific usages linked with certain groups of users, who are marginalised as a result. “A lesser person than Her Ladyship might have screamed” upon hearing someone say these ones or those ones, she comments (2010, p. 57), and by similarly singling out particular features as examples of linguistic “Inelegance”, such as the double negative, quotative like –​described as a “distressing colloquialism” (2010, p. 76) –​ or of in could of and should of which “should never, ever be used” as an auxiliary verb, she only succeeds in making people more insecure about their language use. This is quite the opposite of what she wishes to achieve with her book, but it is a direct consequence of the approach she adopted. By putting her language advice into the mouth of a member of the highest social 170

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classes, “Her Ladyship”, Taggart perpetuates the old social class ideology by which standard English is associated with the highest social classes and non-​standard usage with the members of the lowest regions of society. How does Taggart deal with the split infinitive and the dangling participle? On neither does she have a great deal to say, unlike Hall (1917), nor does she link usage with particular socio-​economic or other groups of users. Given the fact that the widespread acceptance of split infinitives “does not necessarily mean that the usage debate has ended”, as Ebner (2018b, p. 230) puts it, it is remarkable that Taggart expresses considerable tolerance on this issue particularly in the light of her conservative stance on matters of linguistic correctness. About the split infinitive she merely notes that choosing “to scrupulously avoid [sic] splitting an infinitive and thereby produc[ing] a clumsy sentence is to take pedantry too far” (2010, p. 38). Clarity of expression, she argues, is “far more important than eighteenth-​century edicts”. In thus linking the split infinitive back to the eighteenth century, however, she mistakenly blames the origin of this usage problem to the normative grammarians of that period, whereas the split infinitive, as discussed above, did not come in for criticism until the 1830s. In this she perpetuates the popular misconception commonly found among usage guide writers that normative grammarians like Lowth are to be blamed for many of the items that make up the prescriptive canon today (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, pp. 26–​27). As for the dangling participle –​a term she dislikes because it might “provoke unseemly mirth” (2010, p. 58) –​ Taggart carefully explains why it should be avoided (“the subject of the participial phrase [needs to be] the same as the subject of the main clause”), illustrating her point with what appear to be made-​up examples. Her treatment of this usage problem is clear and uncontroversial, and, like her explanation of the split infinitive, is a good example of the kind of usage advice that her readers might be looking for. They might even appreciate the sexual innuendo in her explanation of why she prefers the term “misrelated participles”.

5. Conclusion Usage guides are a peculiar text type within the English language, primarily because it appears that anyone may write one. Baker (1770), the first one attested within the tradition, was a hack writer; H. W. Fowler (1926), probably the most iconic of usage guide writers, was a teacher and writer; Garner (2023) is a lawyer, Heffer (2010) a journalist, and Crystal (1984) and Trask (2001) are linguists. How do Hall (1917) and Taggart (2010) fit in here? J. Lesslie Hall, as described above, was an Anglo-​Saxonist, but an analysis of his usage guide shows an approach that is more typical of linguists. He based his English Usage on extensive corpus analysis and illustrates his discussions of usage problems with reference to actual usage from late Middle English onwards. His approach is strictly descriptive, and thus fits the requirements of linguistics as an academic discipline. His usage advice consists of letting his readers decide for themselves what they would prefer to adopt or not. This may well be why his book was not successful as a usage guide. Linguists, however, did know how to appreciate his work, and even some of the more scholarly usage guides refer to his work in their own treatment of usage problems. Searching Webster’s Dictionary (1989) for references to Hall (1917) in its entries in the HUGE database (104 altogether) produced as many as eighteen hits. Interestingly, and within a year of its publication, Strunk, refers to Hall’s book in his introductory chapter to The Elements of Style (1918, p. 1). as well.6 Taggart (2010), however, takes a strongly pre-​and proscriptive approach to usage, adopting the point of view that correct usage is that employed by the highest social classes in Britain today, epitomised by her adopted persona, Her Ladyship. This approach to the treatment of usage problems is thus still prevalent today, but as the figures cited above for Heffer 171

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(2010) demonstrate, there is an inverse relationship between the linguistic criticism works like his evoke and their popularity among the general public. This is also evident in the continued popularity in the US of Strunk and White (1959 and later), despite Pullum’s strong and well-​ justified linguistic criticism of the book. To return to the opening passage of this chapter, where one senior lawyer corrects a much younger colleague for making a grammatical mistake: on the face of it, the critiscim is motivated by social-​class differences. If you do not know the difference between who and whom, you haven’t been educated properly, and you do not have the right to call yourself a lawyer. The characters, however, are impersonated by two actors of colour, the senior lawyer by Pippa Bennett-​Warner and the junior one by Danny Ashok. To the audience, this might raise the question of ethnicity in the ability to use English properly, too. This issue unexpectedly came up in one of the attitude surveys conducted for Describing Prescriptivism referred to above: some of the British participants attributed certain perceived errors in usage to the language of non-​native speakers, by which they may well have meant people with a migration background. Whether this is indeed the case or not is worth investigating further, and it will be interesting to see whether usage guides will eventually respond to such stigmatising attitudes. There is at least one precedent of this in the history of the text type (Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2015): one of the earliest American usage guides, the anonymous Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence (1856), warns Irish immigrants against using the Irish variant of the p ri c e vowel to avoid becoming the object of the then prevalent anti-​immigrant hostility. The above-​ mentioned survey comments were not particularly outspoken, but it was clear enough where the respondents wished to lay the blame.

Notes * With grateful acknowledgement to the constructive comments from two anonymous reviewers of this chapter. 1 See also www.imdb.com/​title/​tt1​0846​250/​. 2 Ipse dixit is Latin for “he himself said it”, and the OED defines the term as “[a]‌n unproved assertion resting on the bare authority of some speaker” (s.v. ipse dixit, n. a). It is an approach that characterised the early usage guides. 3 See https://​librar ​ies.wm.edu/​um/​arch​ive/​women/​cf.swem.wm.edu/​exhib​its/​women/​less​lie.html (accessed February 2021). 4 The term “dangling participle” is first cited by the OED for the year 1909, illustrated from Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language (s.v. dangling, adj. Draft additions 1993, b. Grammar); it may therefore be of American English origin. 5 This section is partly based on Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2021). 6 Thanks to Robin Straaijer for bringing this to my attention.

References Note: the following list includes only titles of publications that have been referenced in the chapter. Additional bibliographical information, on usage guides in particular, may be retrieved from HUGE. Algeo, J. (1991). The best of the genre: review of Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage, 1989. English Today 7(2), 52−55. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S02660​7840​0005​551. Algeo, J. (1994). Pan-​Atlantic usage guidance. In G. D. Little & M. Montgomery (Eds.), Centennial usage studies. American Dialect Society 78 (pp. 101–​107). University of Alabama Press. Anonymous (1856). Five hundred mistakes of daily occurrence in speaking, pronouncing and writing the English language, corrected. Daniel Burgess & Co. Bailey, R. W. (1996). Nineteenth-​century English. The University of Michigan Press. Baker, R. (1770). Reflections on the English language, in the nature of Vaugelas’s reflections on the French. J. Bell.

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Usage guides as a text type Beal, J. C. (2010). The grocer’s apostrophe: Popular prescriptivism in the 21st century. English Today 26(2), 57−64. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S02660​7841​0000​09X. Beal, J. C. (2018). “Back to the future”: The “new prescriptivism” in twenty-​first-​century Britain. e-​Rea 15(2). https://​journ​als.open​edit​ion.org/​erea/​6090. Browning, R. (1900). The letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett 1845–​1846 (Vol. 1). Smith, Elder & Co. Burchfield, R. W. (1981). The spoken word: A BBC guide. British Broadcasting Corporation. Burchfield, R. W. (1996). Fowler’s modern English usage (rev. 3rd ed., reissued 2004). Oxford University Press. Busse, U., & Schröder, A. (2009). Fowler’s Modern English Usage at the interface of lexis and grammar. In U. Römer & R. Schulze (Eds.), Exploring the Lexis-​Grammar Interface (pp. 69–​87). John Benjamins. https://​doi.org/​10.1075/​scl.35.06bus. Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal hygiene. Routledge. Chapman, D. (2010). Bad ideas in the history of English usage. In R. Cloutier, A. M. Hamilton-​ Brehm, & W. A. Kretzschmar (Eds.), Studies in the history of the English language V: Variation and change in English grammar and lexicon (pp. 141–​160). De Gruyter. https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​978311​ 0220​339.1.141. Chapman, D. (2021, September 25). “Not just a few dozen trouble spots”: tallying the rules in English usage guides [Plenary conference presentation]. Modelling Prescriptivism: Language, Literature, and Speech Communities, Vigo, Spain. Crystal, D. (1984). Who cares about English usage? (2nd ed., 2000). Penguin Books. Crystal, D. (2010, October 11). Do as I say, not as I do: review of Strictly English: The correct way to write … and why it matters, by Simon Heffer. New Statesman, 51. Eaton, R., Faber, G., Hare, D. Keillor, M., Pybus, M., Richer, L. (Executive producers). (2020). Roadkill [TV series]. The Forge; British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (for); Masterpiece (co-​ produced with). Ebner, C. (2017). Proper English usage: a sociolinguistic investigation of usage attitudes in British English. LOT. Ebner, C. (2018a). Attitudes to British usage. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides: history, advice, attitudes (pp. 137−154). Oxford University Press. Ebner, C. (2018b). Concepts of correctness and acceptability in British English: exploring attitudes of lay people. In L. Pillière, W. Andrieu, V. Kerfelec, & D. Lewis, Standardising English: norms and margins in the history of the English language (pp. 213–​233). Cambridge University Press. Fowler, H. W. (1926). A dictionary of modern English usage. Oxford University Press. Fowler, H. W. and F.G. Fowler (1911). The Concise Oxford Dictionary. Adapted by H. W. and F. G. Fowler from The Oxford Dictionary. Clarendon Press. Garner, B. (2023). Garner’s Modern American Usage. 5th ed. Oxford University Press. Görlach, M. (2004). Text types and the history of English. De Gruyter Mouton. Hall, J. L. (1917). English usage: studies in the history and uses of English words and phrases. Scott, Foresman and Company. Heffer, S. (2010). Strictly English: The correct way to write ... and why it matters. Random House Books. Ilson, R. F. (1985). Usage problems in British and American English. In S. Greenbaum (Ed.), The English language today (pp. 166–​182). Pergamon Press. Keith, G. (1990). Language study at Key Stage 3. In R. Carter (Ed.), Knowledge about language and the curriculum: the LINC Reader (pp. 69–​103). Hodder & Stoughton. Kostadinova, V. (2018). Language prescriptivism: attitudes to usage and actual usage in American English. Leiden University Scholarly Publications. https://​hdl.han​dle.net/​1887/​68226. Kostadinova, V. (2020). Examining the split infinitive: prescriptivism as a constraint in language variation and change. In D. Chapman and J. D. Rawlins (Eds.), Language prescription: values, ideologies and identity (pp. 95–​120). Multilingual Matters. Lukač, M. (2018). Grassroots prescriptivism. LOT. Mair, C. (2006). Twentieth-​century English: history, variation, and standardization. Cambridge University Press. Marckwardt, A. H., & Walcott, F. G. (1938). Facts about current English usage. Appleton-​Century-​Crofts. Mittins, W. H., Salu, M., Edminson, M., & Coyne, S. (1970). Attitudes to English usage. Oxford University Press. OED: Oxford English Dictionary Online. www.oed.com. Peters, P. (2004). The Cambridge guide to English usage. Cambridge University Press.

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Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade Peters, P. (2006). English usage: prescription and description. In B. Aarts & A. McMahon (Eds.), The ­handbook of English linguistics (pp. 759–​780). Blackwell. https://​doi.org/​10.1002/​978047​0753​002.ch32. Pinker, S. (2014). The sense of style: The thinking person’s guide to writing in the 21st century. Allen Lane. Pullum, G. (2010, November 11). These “rules” are already broken. Times higher education, 1,973, 56. www.lel.ed.ac.uk/​~gpul​lum/​Rev​iewO​fHef​f er.pdf. Pullum, G. (2018). The usage game: catering to perverts. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides: history, advice, attitudes (pp. 177−196). Oxford University Press. Rozakis, L. (2005) Comma Sutra: Position yourself for success with good grammar. Adams Media. Ross, A. S. C. (1956). U and non-​U: An essay in sociological linguistics. In N. Mitford (Ed.), Noblesse oblige (pp. 9−32). Penguin. Sayce, K. (2006). What not to write: A guide to the dos and don’ts of good English. Words at Work. Scudder, H. E. (1895). The complete poetic and dramatic works of Robert Browning. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. Straaijer, R. (2014). Hyper usage guide of English (HUGE) database. Leiden University Centre for Linguistics. (http://​huge.ullet.net). Straaijer, R. (2018). The usage guide: evolution of a genre. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides: history, advice, attitudes (pp. 11−29). Oxford University Press. Strunk, W. (1918). Elements of style. Privately published 1918, republished 1919 at the Press of W. F. Humphrey, Geneva, NY, as The elements of style. Sundby, B., Bjørge, A. K., & Haugland. K. E. (1991). A dictionary of English normative grammar 1700−1800. John Benjamins. Taggart, C. (2010). Her Ladyship’s guide to the Queen’s English. National Trust. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2011). The Bishop’s grammar: Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism. Oxford University Press. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2015). Five hundred mistakes corrected: An early American usage guide. In M. Dossena (Ed.), Transatlantic perspectives in late modern English (pp. 55–​71). John Benjamins. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2019). Usage guides and the age of prescriptivism. In B. Bös & C. Claridge (Eds.), Norms and conventions in the history of English (pp. 7–​28). John Benjamins. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2020). Describing prescriptivism: usage guides and usage problems in British and American English. Routledge. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2021). Of greengrocers, sports commentators, estate agents and television presenters: who’s in a usage guide and why. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 42(9), 783–​791. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I., & Ebner, C. (2017). Prescriptive attitudes to English usage. Oxford research encyclopedia of linguistics. http://linguistics.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.001.0001/ acrefore-9780199384655-e-271. Trask, R. L. (2001) Mind the Gaffe: The Penguin guide to common errors in English. Penguin. Vorlat, E. (1996). Lindley Murray’s prescriptive canon. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), Two hundred years of Lindley Murray (pp. 163−182). Nodus Publikationen. Vorlat, E. (2001). Lexical rules in Robert Baker’s “Reflections on the English Language”. Leuvense Bijdragen 90(4), 391−401. Vriesendorp, H. (2016). The internet’s (new) usage problems. English Today 32(3), 18−19. Walker, J. (2008). The footballer’s perfect –​Are footballers leading the way? In E. Lavric, G. Pisek, A. Skinner, & W. Stadler (Eds.), The Linguistics of Football (pp. 295–​303). Gunter Narr. Webster’s Dictionary of English usage. (1989). Merriam-​Webster. Weiner, E. (1988). On editing a usage guide. In E. G. Stanley & T. F. Hoad (Eds.), Words for Robert Burchfield’s sixty-​fifth birthday (pp. 171–​183). D. S. Brewer.

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11 ENGLISH PRESCRIPTIVISM IN HIGHER EDUCATION SETTINGS Focus on Nordic countries Elizabeth Peterson and Marika Hall

1. Introduction In this chapter, our aims are to explore the role of prescriptivism with regard to the English language in the Nordic countries. Our specific focus is on the use of English in institutions of higher education (HEIs). The reasons for pursuing this line of investigation are two-​fold. First, there has been a concerted effort among Nordic universities to enhance their global visibility and competitiveness through the use of English as a language of science and higher education. The outcome is that Nordic universities are, in fact, increasingly the target of prospective students as well as researchers who come to these destinations with the expectation that they will be able to carry out their academic work –​as well as their personal life –​using English. This phenomenon is not without its consequences and tensions, which leads to the second main aim of our treatment here. The use of English in higher education gives rise to many ideological questions that link to prescriptivism. These questions, in no specific order, include: What varieties of English are valued over others in the context(s) of Nordic universities? How does prescriptivism with regard to English relate to prescriptivism with regard to the national language(s)? How is English proficiency treated among and between the Nordic countries compared to speakers of English from other territories? A couple of key factors warrant such an investigation of the Nordic countries. Of particular interest is the fact that the Nordic countries, despite the fact that English has foreign language status and is overwhelmingly an additional, not a first language, routinely rank among those having the most widely proficient speakers of English in the world (Jeong et al., 2021). In addition, English has come to these countries as a result of so-​called “cultural” imperialism, not colonialism, a situation that distinguishes their use of English from territories such as Australia, Bermuda, Canada, India, the Philippines, and other territories that have been under British or American rule (Phillipson, 2008; Lønsmann, 2009; Leppänen et al., 2011; Þórarinsdóttir, 2011; Rindal, 2014; Hult, 2017).

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-13

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In the Nordic countries, there has been no model of English established through historical widespread settlement, as is the case in, for example, Australia, Canada and the United States (Schneider, 2007). Likewise, English-​medium schools and other formal establishments such as government and courts have not been established through colonization, such as in places like Kenya, the Caribbean, and Pakistan (and, obviously, many other places). Thus, the development and accepted norms of English in the Nordic countries emerges as a joint outcome of cultural imperialism (as per, e.g., Phillipson, 1992; Pennycook, 2017) and local interpretations of what any norms of English can and should be. For the purposes of this chapter, prescriptivism is regarded as an orientation toward the norms of use offered by the canonical (i.e., “norm-​providing”) varieties of English, namely British English and American English. The term “British English” is used in this chapter as a more common way of referring to the norms of Standardized Southern British English (Hughes et al., 2012). In conjunction with this definition, prescriptivism with English manifests in the treatment of English users from differing language backgrounds. This is an especially pertinent point when it comes to English, a language used by an estimated 1.5 to 2 billion people around the world (MacKenzie, 2018) and a prime example of a pluricentric language (Clyne, 1992); due (in large part) to its colonial history, English is a language with many homes. In the case of the Nordic countries, then, it is critical to note whether they gravitate toward the norms of English imposed through its history of colonialism and coloniality, or if they recognize and are open to other norms of use. While the role of ideologies about English has been explored relatively extensively in research on languages in Nordic universities (see Section 3 of this chapter), the relationship between ideologies about English and prescriptivism with regard to English remains mostly underexplored, at least from the perspective of the institutions themselves.

2.  The language situation in the Nordic countries The countries comprising the Nordic region of Europe –​Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden –​are by many standards considered “small” populations (see, e.g., Hoffmann, 2000) where, in general, the relationship of national identity and language identity is seen as quite direct. In other words, there is a strong ‘one-​nation-​one-​language’ ideology, a concept considered a premise of successful nations under the assumption that the use of a single language is beneficial for national unity and social harmony (see, e.g. Piller, 2015; May, 2012; Blommaert, 2006). For example, the Finnish language has been referred to as a “holy cow” for Finns due to its perceived difficulty (Latomaa & Nuolijärvi, 2005), and the distinction between Norwegian and Danish is a common example in linguistics classrooms to support the famous observation “a language is a dialect with a navy”. Indeed, the Declaration on Nordic Language Policy (Nordic Council of Ministers, 2006) states, “There are six languages in the Nordic countries that are both complete and essential to society [emphasis added]: Danish, Finnish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian (in both written forms: Bokmål and Nynorsk), and Swedish” (p. 91). Thus, the relationship between Nordicness and national identity and language is well established, even though, of course, each country has its own unique linguistic history. The Nordic countries, with the exception of Finland and Norway, each have a single official language, but also have recognized various regional or minority languages (see Table 11.1). Following linguistic classifications, the Germanic branch of the Indo-​European family tree is the most represented in the languages of the Nordic countries. Of the languages listed in Table 11.1, Danish, Faroese, Swedish, Icelandic, and Norwegian are characterized as Germanic languages. The second most represented language family is Finno-​Ugric: the Sami languages, 176

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English prescriptivism in higher education settings Table 11.1  Population and languages in the Nordic countries Nation

Population

Official language(s)

Minority/​regional languages

Denmark (EU)

~5.8 million

Danish

Finland (EU)

~5.5. million

Finnish and Swedish

Iceland (non-​EU –​EEA) Norway (non-​EU –​EEA) Sweden (EU)

~350,000 ~5.3 million ~10.2 million

Icelandic Norwegian*** and Sami** Swedish

Faroese*, Greenlandic, German Sami**, Romani, Finnish Sign Language, Karelian Icelandic Sign Language Kven, Romani Finnish, Sami**, Romani, Yiddish, Meänkieli

* Official language of the Faroe Islands ** Sami in the table is an umbrella term referring to multiple Sami languages *** Norwegian has two accepted forms: Bokmål and Nynorsk

Finnish, Karelian, Kven and Meänkieli. While the population majority in Iceland, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden are users of Germanic languages, and the population majority in Finland are users of Finno-​Ugric languages, there is overlap across borders –​as would be expected. In other words, there are speakers of Finnic languages in parts of Norway and Sweden, and there are speakers of Germanic languages in Finland. For example, as a result of its proximity and shared history with Sweden, Swedish is an official language in Finland (according to the Finnish Constitution, 1919). Today there are approximately 289,000 speakers of Swedish in Finland, about 5.2 percent of the total population. As always, any list of “official” or “recognized” languages should also be considered more indicative of power relations and politics, rather than reflecting actual linguistic realities.1 While the Nordic countries each have their own systems of governance (constitutional monarchies and republics) and political trajectories, they do interact economically and politically and have for a long time. Denmark, Finland, and Sweden are members of the European Union (EU), and all of the Nordic countries are members of the European Economic Area (EEA). As such, Iceland and Norway are affiliated with the EU through the free movement of goods, services, people, and capital. Due to their proximity and similar cultural beliefs, the Nordic countries have also forged a regional partnership to enhance Nordic cooperation.2 For cooperation purposes, including the Nordic Council and Nordic Council of Ministers (inter-​governmental and -​parliamentary cooperation), the Scandinavian languages of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are to be used, although the practicability and fairness of this has been questioned and, in practice, cross-​Nordic communication often takes place in English (Kristinsson & Hilmarsson-​Dunn, 2012). In fact, English is extensively learned and used within the Nordic countries, including as a lingua franca among Nordic people in certain contexts. It is important to note that English is an L1 for an extremely small minority of people in the Nordic countries, as only one of hundreds of immigrant languages.3 As mentioned previously, there is no history of Anglo-​colonization in the Nordic area, although Iceland was occupied by British, Canadian, and American troops during World War II. Rather, there is a complex history of Nordic colonization with colonial presences in or tied to places such as the Caribbean, North America, and Africa, and within the Nordics and surrounding regions. For example, the Sami territories in Finland, Norway, and Sweden were colonized by people living in each respective area. Iceland has also been under Norwegian and Danish rule, and Finland and Norway under Swedish rule (for more information see e.g. 177

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Höglund & Burnett, 2019), and there is extensive shared political history between Germany and Denmark and Russia and Finland, to name a few examples. The manner in which English language learning was introduced is similar across the Nordic countries –​and indeed bears similarities to how and why English language learning spread around the world in general in the post-​World War II era (see, e.g. Pennycook, 2017). For the Nordic countries in particular, the widespread adoption of English as a foreign language coincided with strong social movements that peaked in the social welfare model of the 1970s. These other factors included urbanization and modernization, education reforms, taxation benefit models, changes to the childcare and healthcare systems, and so on. Country-​specific legislation notwithstanding (see Hultgren et al., 2014), today English is the dominant foreign language learned in school throughout the Nordic region (Björklund, et al., 2013), as either a de jure or de facto required subject. Although the European Parliament (2017) has long promoted the 1+​2 model (“mother tongue” and two foreign languages) specifically with the aim of maintaining and increasing multilingualism in the EU region, the reality in the Nordic countries tends to be “national Nordic language +​English +​other”. In Finland and Iceland the “other” foreign language, however, is fulfilled by the second national language (Finnish or Swedish), and Danish (or other Scandinavian language), respectively. Today, the Nordic countries routinely rank among the places where there is the highest proportion of English-​speakers per capita outside of inner-​circle settings such as the UK and the USA (Jeong et al., 2021; Peterson, 2019). While to a large extent English is embraced, especially by younger generations, there is concern over the effect of English on the national languages. In other words, English is often considered to be a useful and necessary tool and a lingua franca, and as such, mastery in it is considered highly important. At the same time, English can be construed as a threat that ‘pollutes’ the Nordic languages and decreases their importance and usage locally –​a position which can certainly have puristic and nationalistic undertones (Nevalainen, et al., 2015; Hakulinen et al., 2009; Ljosland, 2015; Haberland & Preisler, 2014; Salö, 2014; Josephson, 2014; Saarinen, 2020). In settings of higher education, internationalization and the increasing use of English are often perceived as destabilizing or threatening not only to local science but to nationhood.

3.  Higher Education the Nordic Countries The Nordic countries have a similar approach to higher education, in that it is based upon a commitment to welfare, particularly in providing equal access to education. For this reason, higher education has traditionally been public and tuition-​free.4 In the past decades, however, higher education has undergone notable changes due to globalization and neoliberal economic practices. These broader global realities serve as a backdrop to understanding the shifting of roles of HEIs, specifically in terms of moving from public sector institutions to more competitive and market-​oriented ones (e.g. Bagley & Portnoi, 2014; Piller & Cho, 2013; Olssen & Peters, 2005). While there is notable variation in the actualization of HEI policies in each of the Nordic countries and across different institutions, in general Nordic HEIs are increasingly expected to compete in the global education market –​while at the same time contributing to national economic development and serving the welfare state (Hultgren, et al., 2014; Saarinen & Taalas, 2017; Kivistö, et al., 2019; Fägerlind & Strömqvist, 2004). Internationalization has thus become a key objective for HEIs in the Nordic countries as it is considered an important factor contributing to the overall success and competitiveness of a university. For example, the number of international students5 and research projects serve to boost international rankings (Hultgren, 2014a; Hultgren, et al., 2014; Rumbley et al., 2012; Altbach, 2007; Hénard, et al., 178

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2012; Maassen, et al., 2005; Elken, et al., 2015), and such aims are connected to the use of English. With the increase of international student mobility globally, English-​speaking countries have tended to attract more students, resulting in an Anglophone asymmetry (cf. Hughes, 2008) in the international student market (e.g. Saarinen & Taalas, 2017; de Wit, et al., 2013). To compete with Anglophone countries, although perhaps a bit paradoxically, HEIs around the world have incorporated English as a medium of instruction (EMI). In addition, in Europe, several cross-​national policies and practices aimed at facilitating international mobility have been implemented, for example, the Bologna Process and the ERASMUS programme. The former seeks to ensure that institutions can easily recognize foreign studies and credits within Europe, while the latter is a European exchange programme making temporary studies at other European universities possible. The agreement on Nordic Admission to Higher Education (e.g. SOPIMUS Tanskan, Suomen, Islannin, Norjan ja Ruotsin välillä pääsystä korkeampaan koulutukseen, 1997) also seeks to increase mobility within the Nordic countries by recommending that students from other Nordic countries should be considered for admission on the same or equivalent basis as local applicants (cf. Elken, et al., 2015). Each Nordic country has also ratified the Lisbon Recognition Convention (1997), guaranteeing the recognition of foreign degrees (unless substantial differences are observed), including the admission to tertiary education based on the same criteria as the applicant’s home country in signatory countries –​although more specific entry requirements, such as language, can be set. Language requirements, as discussed in Section 5, are typically satisfied through degree equivalency or local or international language tests. Internationalization on the tertiary level has been comparatively fast in Northern Europe, and especially the Nordic countries. Efforts to internationalize are of course also intricately tied to the issue of language(s) and their use at institutions of higher education. Many institutions in the Nordic countries have indeed adopted English as a language of instruction and even administration, in addition to or even in lieu of the respective national languages (e.g. Altbach & Knight, 2007; Wächter & Maiworm, 2014; Hilmarsson-​Dunn, 2009; Bolton & Kuteeva, 2012; Hultgren, et al., 2014; Lindström & Sylvin, 2014; Hultgren, et al., 2015; Airey, et al., 2017; Saarinen & Rontu, 2018; Holmen, 2018; Nissen, 2018; Arnbjörnsdóttir, 2018). In addition, English-​language materials are increasingly used in classrooms, with approximately 70 to 90 percent of academic articles and dissertations being written in English in Nordic universities. Nordic HEIs, thus, could be considered to be at the forefront of Englishization, with a seeming purpose of enabling mobility rather than imparting knowledge per se (Arnbjörnsdóttir, 2018; Hultgren, et al., 2014; Saarinen & Taalas, 2017). The incorporation of English seems to have been quite effective, as the number of international students in the Nordic countries has increased dramatically since the start of the millennium (OECD). For example, between the years 2000 and 2015 Norway more than doubled its number of international students, most likely due to increased English-​medium instruction and free tuition (Wiers-​Jenssen, 2018). However, EMI is more common in graduate level programmes (20–​40 percent) than it is at the undergraduate level (10–​25 percent). In all, international students make up about 5–​15 percent of the total student populations in the region (Hultgren, et al., 2014; Wächter & Maiworm, 2014). The most obvious advantage of incorporating English into academic functions, in terms of language of instruction as well as research, is that it is already quite widely used. It thus provides a practical common medium of communication, even if the majority of the incoming students are not L1 speakers of English. In addition, EMI programmes do not only attract international

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but local students as well (Marginson & van der Wende, 2009; Wächter & Maiworm, 2014). Of course, due to the various languages spoken and used in Europe, relying on education in the national language(s) would decrease the potential pool of students, especially if the national languages are not widely spoken outside of the national boundaries. Typically, Nordic HEIs do not require that international students learn the national language(s), although faculty and staff might be expected to do so within a “reasonable” time period –​normally three to five years. These changes in the academic environment have led Nordic HEIs to reassess their institutional language policies and practices,6 which has prompted discussions and concern over the decreased usage of national languages. While there is a push for English as a means of internationalization, many stakeholders, including policymakers and university officials, consider universities as having the role of preserving and promoting the national language(s) and cultures (Cots, et al., 2012; Soler, et al., 2018; Hultgren, et al., 2014; Björkman, 2015; Haberland & Preisler, 2014). Thus, HEIs simultaneously attempt to internationalize and safeguard national languages and cultures. Many Nordic universities engage in a practice of parallel language use, which is also encouraged by the Declaration on a Nordic Language Policy (2006), touting the benefits of multilingualism. However, the reality is that “multilingualism” and “parallel language use” often equates “national language(s) and English” –​for example, Swedish and English in Sweden (Källkvist & Hult, 2016) (in line with the general language learning patterns, national language +​English, stated in the previous section). As Hultgren (2014b) argues, parallel language policies at Danish universities may actually be more about the promotion of English than Danish. University students, therefore, are largely expected to be able to understand and produce English even as L1 speakers of Nordic languages (at Nordic universities), which can be problematic as they are not necessarily trained to do so. Indeed, it is difficult to complete a higher education degree in the Nordic countries without some kind of proficiency in English, even if the programme is not EMI (e.g. Ljosland, 2015). Iceland, having the most conservative policy on parallel use, is particularly interesting because Icelandic is so heavily emphasized throughout schooling, and compared to other countries in the Nordic Region the approach to the Icelandic language is perhaps the most purist (see Section 6). Thus, students are expected to primarily read texts and be taught in Icelandic in secondary school, but are expected to read academic texts in English at the tertiary level, with the assumption that this poses no problems (Arnbjörnsdóttir, 2018; Albury, 2016; Hilmarsson-​Dunn & Kristinsson, 2010).

4. Materials With the linguistics and academic set-​up described so far in this chapter, there are many approaches which could be –​and have been –​adopted to explore the phenomenon of language use in higher education. For our purposes, the data used to describe the use of English in HEIs in the Nordic countries comes from official, top-​down sources. Specifically, the data comprises publicly available language policy and language requirements from public institutions of higher learning from the five Nordic countries. We began our investigation by collecting language policy documents we could find online from universities in each of the five Nordic countries, with our initial set of documents amounting to 25 policies and guidelines. After gaining a comprehensive overview of the language situation from examining these documents, we chose to narrow our focus to the following investigations: 1) an overview of the English language requirements for student applicants at the MA level 2) an overview of the English language policy of the universities. It should be noted that each of the universities made their language policy texts available in at least two languages –​the main national language and 180

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English. Because we are writing this chapter in English, about English, and for an international audience, we have chosen to use the English language version of the relevant documents. Further, for the purposes of this chapter we limited our scope to the highest-​ranking, multiple-​programme public university in each of the five Nordic countries. The main reasons for limiting our scope was that the minimum English language requirements are in some cases set at the national level (for example, by the country’s Ministry of Education) and therefore do not vary widely across individual institutions within each country. Second, in some respects the largest and/​or most prestigious universities in each country serves to influence or offer a benchmark in terms of how smaller universities set their own language standards.

5.  Whose English is good enough? Section 3 of this chapter highlighted the perceived necessity to offer English-​medium courses for students and to attract top-​tier international scholars who, presumably, use English as their working and research language. At the same time, Nordic countries actively strive for, and have in fact enacted legislation that allows for uninhibited movement and shared resources among Nordic HEIs. Of particular interest is the status of English as a component part of this cooperation, and it is this component which we now bring into focus. An investigation of the language requirements documents for English medium programmes in HEIs across the Nordic countries shows several areas of similarity. First, not surprisingly, applicants are required to submit a current set of results from a standardized test of English proficiency. This requirement is specified mostly for master’s programmes conducted in English, but in some cases also for bachelor’s programmes or specific courses conducted in English. The most commonly cited tests across the university documents are the TOEFL, IELTS, Cambridge ESOL and Pearson PTE. In addition, it is also worth noting that each of the English language requirements documents analysed for this study were written more or less according to the norms of British English, as evidenced, for example, through spellings such as programme as opposed to program. Some universities, such as University of Oslo and Lund University, have also explicitly outlined the preference for British English in official university documents in their respective language policies (see Section 6). Perhaps not surprisingly, there is variation in the required minimum scores for standardized language tests across Nordic countries, universities, and for different kinds of degree programmes. For example, master’s programmes in English language and literature for some universities require a higher score than other programmes. Overall, the required TOEFL scores, for example, range from 79 to 108, with the lowest, 79, for specific programmes in Iceland, and the highest, 108, for specific English major programmes in Norway. By way of comparison, the average expected TOEFL scores for admission to Ivy League universities in the United States is around 100, and around 110 for Cambridge and Oxford in the United Kingdom. The average range across top universities, both Ivy and non-​Ivy League, is 79–​100. Therefore, it is evident that the English language expectations for admission into an English-​language medium programme in the Nordic countries is on par with places like the US and the UK. Exemptions for standardized English proficiency tests, however, are similar across Nordic countries. For example, a minimum grade in English from an International Baccalaureate is cited almost uniformly across countries. In addition, a minimum grade in English from an EU/​ EEA country is also usually recognized (see Table 11.2). These general observations aside, specific differences enacted at the national level of each country are explored in turn, highlighting areas of overlap against nation-​specific distinctions. The exploration concludes with an overview of the relationship of these requirements against prescriptivism in English. 181

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Table 11.2  English language requirements/​equivalents for master’s degree programmes at Nordic Universities TOEFL

citizenship

schooling

higher ed

other /​International Baccalaureate

Denmark

iBT >83

completed upper secondary school in Denmark with a min. grade of 3 in English B, completed upper secondary education in a Nordic country and have B-​level English

iBT >92

Iceland

79, 85, 108, depending on programme

Australia, Canada (except Quebec), Ireland, New Zealand, UK, USA, 18 different locations in the Caribbean (see full list below)

English A equivalence from an EEA/​EFTA country

Studied or completed a bachelor’s degree at a Danish university; Completed a bachelor’s programme in Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, or USA Foreign language studies in English as part of a Finnish university degree; completed degree at a Finnish university with English as the major subject; University degree in an EU/​EEA country or Switzerland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK, USA in English Completed min. of 1 year of higher education in English in UK, USA, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Canada

IB diploma with minimum grade of 3 in English

Finland

Australia, Canada (except for Quebec and northern New Brunswick), Ireland, New Zealand, UK, USA (NA, see next column)

Upper secondary school in the Nordic Countries, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, UK, USA

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Language skills test specifically for University of Helsinki applicants; IB diploma with a minimum grade 2/​A1, 5/​A2, 2/​A European Baccalaureate with min. 5/​L1 (after 2021) min. 7/​L2 IB or European Baccalaureate in an English-​taught programme

Elizabeth Peterson and Marika Hall

Country

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90 or 108, depending on programme

(NA, see next column)

Sweden

90–​100, depending (NA, see next column) on programme

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Entire upper secondary education in English in Australia, Bahamas, Barbados, Canada, Denmark, Fiji, Finland, Guyana, Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland, Jamaica, Macao, Malta, Mauritius, New Zealand, Norway, Samoa, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Trinidad & Tobago, UK, USA; completed upper secondary school in Norway with grade of 4 or higher Completed upper secondary studies depending on the country of study

Studied or completed a degree in English in a Nordic country or the Netherlands

Completed upper secondary school in Norway with a min. grade of 4

Completed 60+​ECTS (credits) in English in an EU/​EEA country, Switzerland, USA, English-​speaking parts of Canada, Jamaica, Australia, New Zealand, UK

Completed degree in English-​medium program from a recognized institution; partial degrees also accepted in some cases: USA, Australia, NZ, Jamaica, Canada, 17 different African countries (see full list below), India, Pakistan

English prescriptivism in higher education settings

Norway

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There are several discussion points to be extracted from the descriptions in Table 11.2. In terms of the aims laid out in the introduction to this chapter, a key concern is the varieties of English which are considered adequate for admission to a master’s programme without an applicant being required to demonstrate English proficiency through an expensive exam. (The current price for a TOEFL exam, for example, is 185 US dollars.) Across HEIs, there is a prominent partiality for so-​called inner circle varieties of English (Kachru, 1982), or what has also been termed “a majority English speaking country” (as stated in the English language requirements for the University of Iceland). Indeed, citizenship and/​or proof of upper secondary school studies from Australia, Canada (except French-​dominant regions of Canada), Ireland, New Zealand, the USA, and the United Kingdom are exerted preferential treatment across the HEIs examined here. In Denmark and Finland, these inner-​circle settings of English are in fact the only countries that are treated as exemptions –​aside from European and Nordic countries, a topic taken up later. What this means in practice is that a person from, for example, Barbados, may need to take an English proficiency exam such as TOEFL to apply for a master’s programme in Finland, Denmark, and Sweden, but not in Iceland or Norway. These six inner-​circle locations of English aside, it is likewise of interest to note which English-​speaking nations, and, presumably, the varieties of English used in these places, are evaluated as being of a high enough standard for admission. With Finland and Denmark at one end of the scale of acceptability with a limited view of only six English-​speaking countries and the Nordic/​EU/​EAA, the other end of the scale is Sweden, with its much more comprehensive list of countries including India, Pakistan and 17 African nations: Botswana, Eritrea, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Namibia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. Iceland and Norway occupy a position somewhat more in the middle, reporting a comparatively long list of countries that are exempt from English proficiency tests. For the University of Iceland, this list entails mostly countries in the Americas, and the Caribbean region in particular, including Anguilla, Antigua, Bahamas, Barbados, Barbuda, Belize, The British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grand Cayman Islands, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts & Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent & the Grenadines, Trinidad & Tobago, and the Turks & Caicos Islands. As per their guidelines, it seems the University of Iceland has based its decision on what overall proportion of the population has L1 English in a given nation. Given the small populations of the nations in question, however, it is statistically unlikely that many potential applicants would take advantage of this language perk by applying to an Icelandic university.7 The University of Oslo’s requirements appear less territorially oriented; in addition to several Caribbean nations, considerations are also made for Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Africa. In terms of prescriptivism in English, a key consideration emerges on the basis of these lists of countries. It is well established that there is extreme variation in the use of English in any setting, including inner-​circle settings (see, e.g., Hughes et al., 2012; Peterson, 2019; Schneider, 2007; Wolfram & Schilling-​Estes, 2016). The countries that are or are not included in the list of exemptions point toward attitudes about the perceived correctness of a variety used in a given location by a given population, and also how uniform that variety is perceived across speakers. For the core six inner-​circle countries which are exempted without exception, then, there appears an assumption that any (English) speaker who applies from these countries –​Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the USA, and the UK –​conforms to the expected standards of English. This assumption raises numerous questions relating to ethnicity, race, social class, education, and language. Presumably, an applicant from the USA who would apply to a Nordic university would have among other required credentials a history in education in the USA, a situation which likely precludes the use of certain (undervalued) varieties of US English. 184

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That is, there is an informed assumption that the applicant will be fluent in standardized US English. While the same assumption could well hold across other English-​speaking territories, it appears that for most Nordic universities these other varieties of English are not considered good enough. Despite the fact that English speakers from places such as Hong Kong or India can be and indeed are speakers of standardized, prescriptive norms of English, for most Nordic universities their English is not given a chance; they are required to pay for and pass a proficiency exam in English. In this regard, it can be stated that overall the Nordic countries uphold norms of English that favour existing power structures, including colonial and global powers (see, e.g., Pennycook, 2017; Peterson, forthcoming; Piller, 2016; Saarinen & Nikula, 2012). While on the one hand this can be viewed as a practical measure, it is on the other hand a clear favouring of pre-​existing power dynamics external to the Nordic system. Whether intentional or not, these Nordic universities are aligning themselves to these existing power structures by re-​enacting their language prescriptions. The English language guidelines and requirements, then, have the overall property of privileging certain English speakers from certain territories over others. At the same time, it is evident that Nordic proficiency in English, in particular, is elevated to a similar status bestowed upon inner-​circle varieties of English. This is clearly based on the fact that applicants who can demonstrate a minimum grade in English from their upper secondary schooling in a Nordic country (either in English or in general, depending on the requirements) are exempted from an English proficiency test, presumably based on the assumption that the level of English proficiency resulting from upper secondary education in a Nordic country is on equal footing with a native speaker from places such as the US, the UK, and so on. Furthermore, the implication is that the level of English achieved through schooling in the Nordic countries is superior to the English language used in other places throughout the world. In one way, this portion of the language guidelines is a practical and even exemplary outcome of Nordic (and EU/​EAA) cooperation. Indeed, the Common European Framework of References for Languages was established precisely for such purposes, contributing to the possibility for cross-​border cooperation. After all, one might reason, these are Nordic universities, so why shouldn’t students from the Nordics be prioritized? Yet by placing themselves in the same league as inner-​circle English speaking territories such as the US and the UK, the Nordic HEIs further demonstrate a perceived level of superiority regarding their own use of English, positioning themselves as more qualified English language users than those from other backgrounds.

6.  What do we do with English? What about our language? A second component of our investigation in this chapter deals with the English language policies of the Nordic HEIs. For the most part, the language policy documents are freely available on the university websites, with the exception of the University of Copenhagen.8 All of the universities’ language policies have explicitly made accommodations for the use of English at each institution. Unsurprisingly, the reason for the inclusion of English into the functions of the universities is cited as “internationalization” or “international collaboration”. While the use of multiple languages is also encouraged in the name of internationalization, multilingualism, and multiculturalism, for example, they are typically clumped together under the term other (foreign) languages, leaving English as the only (non-​Nordic) language with a name (cf. Nikula, et al., 2012). As mentioned earlier, many of the universities advocate for parallel language use, but the reality again seems to be a Nordic language and English (cf. Källkvist & Hult, 2016), as exemplified in the following statement from the University of Oslo’s language policy: 185

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The University of Oslo shall promote so-​called parallel-​lingualism. This means that Norwegian is to be nurtured as the primary language at the University, at the same time as linguistic diversity is encouraged, with English as the main foreign language. Language policy guidelines for the University of Oslo Similarly, although one of the main purposes of the formulation of a language policy at the University of Helsinki is that it “raises linguistic awareness, builds well-​functioning bilingualism, highlights multilingualism as a strength and encourages the parallel use of different languages” (Language policy of the University of Helsinki, p. 48), subsequent mentions of “parallel language use” primarily refer to Finnish, Swedish (official languages of the university), and English. “Linguistic diversity” and “multilingualism,” thus, seem to be reduced to a limited number of languages, and as such, are perhaps misnomers (cf. Lasagabaster, 2015). An exception to this is the University of Iceland, which clearly designates Icelandic as the language of the university: “Icelandic is therefore the default language for all work at the University and shall be used unless specific circumstances dictate otherwise” (University of Iceland Language Policy). Although this edict is rooted in governmental acts and policies in Iceland, it is nevertheless in contrast to the other universities’ policies which all allow for the use of English or other languages when ‘appropriate’ or ‘necessary,’ for example when a member of a committee is not proficient in the national language. In some cases, this also extends to providing administrative bodies/​departments the freedom to decide which language is to be used within their own affairs. All universities, however, implicitly or explicitly note the importance of nurturing the national languages, as well as developing and protecting them as academic languages. These observations highlight the tensions described in Section 3 of this chapter: Nordic HEIs are in the precarious position of being forced to operate on a world stage while at the same time serving as protectors of their own national –​and Nordic –​languages and cultures, often in conjunction with broader national efforts, as exemplified in the policy for Lund University: The Language Act prescribes Swedish as the language of the public sector in Sweden, and public authorities have a special responsibility for making Swedish terminology in their various areas of expertise accessible, and ensuring that it is used and developed. Access to information in the common language of Swedish is a question of democracy Lund University Language Policy, p. 2 As noted previously, other universities made similar remarks about the development of the national languages in academia. Perhaps in an attempt to quell concerns about English, Lund University, along with University of Helsinki, also explicitly note that the use of English is not in contradiction with the aforementioned guidelines: Lund University constitutes a part of an international academic environment, and the dominant international research language is English. English is also the most important language for international educational collaborations and other forms of international cooperation. The Language Act’s requirement for Swedish as the public sector language does not stand in contradiction with this practice. Lund University Language Policy, p. 3 When it comes to prescribed use of English, the language policy documents investigated reveal individual differences, but overall demonstrate a strong core adherence to the norms established 186

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as “a recognized international English” (University of Iceland Language Policy), presumably meaning an inner-​circle variety. It is notable that none of the language policy guidelines we observed made explicit mention of exclusively US norms, while two of the universities –​Oslo and Lund –​made specific mention of British English as a model. The University of Oslo’s language policy states: “For official information from the University in English the standard is British English (Oxford English Dictionary)” (Language policy guidelines for the University of Oslo), while Lund University states: The norm for official texts of a general nature at Lund University is British English. If there are different variants, the BE version is to be preferred for the names of activities and units, titles, names of organisations and higher education terminology. Lund University Language Policy, p. 3 Aarhus University9 states that documents must be written in “correct English”, “in compliance with [British and American English standard],” although the language policy further specifies that official university letters, brochures, etc., should be in British English. The universities of Copenhagen, Helsinki, and Iceland, on the other hand, do not recommend adherence to the norms on any particular variety of English, although support services are mentioned to aid in the production of written English, and as such, there seems to be an expectation of adherence to at least some standardized written variety (even if that variety is not explicitly mentioned).

8. Conclusion HEIs in the Nordic countries have positioned themselves among an elite set of global universities. This chapter has described how several Nordic universities have come into prominence in recent decades (judging from rankings such as Times Higher Education, QS World University Rankings, Best Global Universities, etc.) and the role English has played in achieving this status (cf. Hultgren, 2014a). In addition to highlighting some of the tensions involved with achieving global prominence –​in English –​while at the same time serving as arbiters of national and regional languages and cultures, the main concern of this chapter has been to describe prescriptivist attitudes about English. This line of questioning was approached through an examination of publicly available documents from Nordic HEIs, in particular language regulations for students to English-​medium master’s programmes and language policy documents. The overarching finding is that, for the most part, Nordic HEIs adhere to and perpetuate prescriptive ideals of English that are offered up from English colonial powers, especially Britain. This is largely in evidence from the English language requirements for prospective students. Applicants from a handful of inner-​circle settings, namely the UK, the US, Australia, New Zealand, (English-​speaking) Canada, and Ireland are especially privileged. Of the Nordic countries, Finland and Denmark demonstrated the most restrictive regulations on English varieties, while Sweden demonstrated the most liberal, in essence recognizing that English is a pluricentric language with many different standardized varieties around the world. Simultaneously, influenced by the drive for both Nordic and EU/​EAA cooperation, the English skills achieved by students from Nordic countries (and other European countries) are treated as on par with inner-​circle standards of English. This means that while an L1, monolingual speaker of English from, for example, Barbados, needs to demonstrate English proficiency through an exam such as the TOEFL (for some Nordic universities), an applicant from a Nordic country (who has a high enough English grade from upper secondary school) does not. 187

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Language policy documents from Nordic HEIs underscore these tendencies, but in a more nuanced fashion. Perhaps because language policy documents apply mostly to staff members and existing students, there are less stringent language gatekeeping tendencies evident in them. Characteristic of the language policy documents is an emphasis on promoting parallel multilingualism and preserving the national languages as languages of learning and science. English is presented as a necessary tool in these documents, and only a few of the language policy documents we viewed recommended adherence to the prescriptive norms of an inner-​circle variety; when this occurred, British English was the preferred variety. The information in this c­ hapter –​and indeed the findings of other research –​highlights an unsatisfactory and bleak reality: that is, to participate in the global stage of world academia, there appears to be either overt or covert pressure to adhere to exclusionary, elitist rules that have thus far dictated English language use and its relationship to higher learning. This certainly appears to be the case for Nordic HEIs, especially considering their external status to colonialism and English; in this regard, they would have no obvious reason to participate in the colonial perseverance of prescriptive English norms. Rather, to align themselves with elite universities, they have adopted similar English language standards as other English-​medium universities. While a strong case can be made for the practical necessity to uphold and adhere to norms of use of English in formal institutions such as universities, the specific array of information laid out in this chapter is nonetheless telling in ideologies about Nordic exceptionalism, in this case relating to the use of English. As a final note, one obvious shortcoming of this chapter is that we have necessarily treated the documents used for data in isolation from the policy-​makers and other actors who created them. While there are clearly many other possible avenues of research related to the topic of higher education and the role of English, an investigation into the decision makers and broader policy sectors behind these policies and guidelines would be a fruitful and necessary way of gaining further knowledge about the content in the documents. After all, policymaking is socially, politically, and historically rooted, and as such, highly multi-​layered.

Notes 1 A map can be found at https://​nordre​gio.org/​maps/​langua​ges-​in-​the-​nor​dic-​reg​ion/​ 2 Nordic Co-​operation, at www.nor​den.org/​en/​info​r mat​ion/​offic​ial-​nor​dic-​co-​operat​ion 3 Some of which include Russian, Arabic, Somali, Kurdish, Serbo-​Croatian, Turkish, and Polish. 4 See, e.g. Elken, et al., 2015, and Pinheiro, et al., 2019 for details on degree structures, admission procedures, and funding structures. 5 This shift is visible in the introduction of tuition fees to non-​EU/​EEA students in Denmark, Finland, and Sweden; Iceland and Norway remain tuition free for the time being. 6 In Finland, university language policies are also regulated through the governmental Universities Act (Universities Act, Ministry of Education and Culture, Government of Finland, 2009/​558) 7 In fact, a look at the University of Iceland’s international student demographics shows no students from Caribbean nations: https://​engl​ish.hi.is/​uni​vers​ity/​facts_​and_​figu​res 8 For a list of URLS, see Appendix. The language policy from the University of Copenhagen was obtained from a staff member of the university. 9 Aarhus University is one of the three top-​ranking universities in Denmark. In the chapter, we drew data from the top-​ranked university in each Nordic country, but we mention this example from Aarhus University for comparative purposes.

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Elizabeth Peterson and Marika Hall Hughes, R. (2008). Internationalisation of higher education and language policy: questions of quality and equity. Higher Education Management and Policy, 20(1), 1–​18. https://​doi.org/​10.1787/​ hemp-​v20-​art6-​en Hult, F. M. (2017). More than a lingua franca: functions of English in a globalised educational language policy. Language, Culture, and Curriculum, 30(3), 265–​282. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​07908​ 318.2017.1321​008 Hultgren, A. K. (2014a). English language use at the internationalised universities of Northern Europe: is there a correlation between Englishisation and world rank? Multilingua –​Journal of Cross-​Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 33(3–​4), 389–​411. https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​multi-​2014-​0018 Hultgren, A. K. (2014b). Whose parallellingualism? Overt and covert ideologies in Danish university language policies. Multilingua –​Journal of Cross-​Cultural and Interlanguage Communication, 33(1), 61–​87. https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​multi-​2014-​0004 Hultgren, A.K., Gregersen, F., & Thøgersen, J. (Eds.). (2014). English in Nordic universities: ideologies and practices. John Benjamins. Hultgren, A.K., Jensen, C. & Dimova, S. (2015). Introduction: English-​medium instruction in European higher education: from the north to the south. In S. Dimova, A.K. Hultgren, & C. Jensen (Eds.), English-​medium instruction in European higher education (pp. 1–​16). De Gruyter Mouton. Höglund, J., & Burnett, L. (Eds.). (2019). Nordic colonialisms and Scandinavian studies [Special issue]. Scandinavian Studies, 91(1–​2). Jeong, H., Elgemark, A., & Thorén, B. (2021). Swedish youths as listeners of global Englishes speakers with diverse accents: Listener intelligibility, listener comprehensibility, accentedness perception, and accentedness acceptance. Frontiers in Education, 6, 651908. https://​doi.org/​10.3389/​feduc.2021.651​908 Josephson, O. (2014). The Swedish language council and English as a lingua franca. Sociolinguistica, 28(1), 105–​122. https://​doi.org/​10.1515/​soci-​2014-​0010 Kachru, B. B. (1982). The other tongue: English across cultures. University of Illinois Press. Källkvist, M., & Hult, F. M. (2016). Discursive mechanisms and human agency in language policy formation: negotiating bilingualism and parallel language use at a Swedish university. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 19(1), 1. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​13670​050.2014.956​044 Kivistö, J., Pekkola, E., Berg, L. N., Hansen, H. F., Geschwind, L., & Lyytinen, A. (2019). Performance in higher education institutions and its variations in Nordic policy. In R. Pinheiro, L. Geschwind, H. Foss Hansen, & K. Pulkkinen (Eds.), Reforms, organizational change and performance in higher education: a comparative account from the Nordic countries (pp. 37–​67). Palgrave Macmillan. https://​doi.org/​10.1007/​ 978-​3-​030-​11738-​2_​2 Kristinsson, A. P., & Hilmarsson-​Dunn, A. (2012). Unequal language rights in the Nordic language community. Language Problems & Language Planning, 36(3), 222–​236. https://​doi.org/​10.1075/​ lplp.36.3.02kri Lasagabaster, D. (2015). Multilingual language policy: is it becoming a misnomer at university level? In S. Dimova, A. Hultgren, & C. Jensen (Eds.), English-​medium instruction in European higher education (pp. 115–​134). De Gruyter Mouton. Latomaa, S., & Nuolijärvi, P. (2005). The language situation in Finland. In R. B. Kaplan & R. B. Baldauf Jr. (Eds.), Language planning and policy in Europe (Vol. 1: Hungary, Finland and Sweden, pp. 125–​232) Multilingual Matters. Leppänen, S, Pitkänen-​Huhta, A., Nikula, T., Kytölä, S., Törmäkangas, T. Nissinen, K., Kääntä, L., Räisänen, T., Laitinen, M., Pahta, P., Koskela, H., Lähdesmäki, S., & Jousmäki, H. (2011). National survey on the English language in Finland: Uses, meanings and attitudes. Studies in Variation, Contacts and Change in English, 5. Varieng. Lindström, J., & Sylvin, J. (2014). Local majority and minority languages and English in the university: The University of Helsinki in a Nordic comparison. In A. Hultgren, F. Gegersen, & J. Thøgersen (Eds.), English in Nordic universities: ideologies and practices (pp. 147–​164). John Benjamins. Ljosland, R. (2015). Policymaking as a multi-​layered activity. A case study from the higher education sector in Norway. Higher Education, 70(4), 611–​627. Lønsmann, D. (2009). From subculture to mainstream: the spread of English in Denmark. Journal of Pragmatics, 41(6), 1139–​1151. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​j.pra​gma.2008.11.003 Maassen, P., Nokkala, T., & Uppstrøm, T.M. (2005). Rethinking Nordic co-​ operation in higher education: national and institutional case studies. Norden. MacKenzie, I. (2018). Language contact and the future of English. Routledge.

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Appendix: Primary data consulted for this chapter Lund University: Language policy. Lund University Language Policy, www.staff.lu.se/​sites/​staff.lu.se/​files/​lund-​uni​ vers​ity-​langu​age-​pol​icy.pdf Language requirements. English requirements, www.lun​duni​vers​ity.lu.se/​adm​issi​ons/​bachel​ors-​ and-​mast​ers-​stud​ies/​entry-​requi​reme​nts/​engl​ish-​requi​reme​nts

University of Copenhagen: Language policy. [Not publicly available] Language requirements. Bachelor’s programmes guide to studies and admission: Admission requirements, https://​stud​ies.ku.dk/​bache​lor/​admiss​ion-​requi​reme​nts/​engl​ish-​langu​age-​qua​lifi​cati​ons/​; Master’s programmes guide to studies and admission: Language requirements, https://​stud​ies.ku.dk/​ mast​ers/​appl​icat​ion-​and-​admiss​ion/​admiss​ion-​requi​reme​nts/​langu​age-​requi​reme​nts/​

University of Iceland: Language policy. University of Iceland Language Policy, https://​engl​ish.hi.is/​uni​vers​ity/​university​ _​of_​icel​and_​lang​uage​_​pol​icy Language requirements. Proof of English proficiency requirements, https://​engl​ish.hi.is/​uni​vers​ity/​ proof_​of_​engli​sh_​p​rofi​cien​cy_​r​equi​reme​nts

University of Helsinki: Language policy. Language policy of the University of Helsinki: From guidelines to practice: towards functional multilingualism, https://​helda.helsi​nki.fi/​bitstr​eam/​han​dle/​10138/​160​446/​HY332​ 282.pdf?seque​nce=​1&isAllo​wed=​y Language requirements. Proving your English language skills –​bachelor’s programme in science, www. helsi​nki.fi/​en/​adm​issi​ons-​and-​educat​ion/​apply-​bachel​ors-​and-​mast​ers-​pro​g ram​mes/​apply-​ bachel​ors-​progra​mme-​scie​nce/​prov​ing-​your-​engl​ish-​langu​age-​ski​lls

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University of Oslo: Language policy guidelines. Language policy guidelines for the University of Oslo, www.uio.no/​engl​ ish/​for-​employ​ees/​supp​ort/​prof​i le/​langu​age/​ Language requirements. English proficiency for bachelor studies, www.uio.no/​engl​ish/​stud​ies/​ admiss​ion/​nora/​engl​ish-​prof​i cie​ncy-​bache​lor.html; English proficiency requirement for master’s programmes taught in English, www.uio.no/​engl​ish/​stud​ies/​admiss​ion/​mas​ter/​engl​ish-​prof​ icie​ncy-​mas​ter.html

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12 PRESCRIPTIVISM IN EDUCATION From language ideologies to listening practices Ian Cushing and Julia Snell

1.  The perpetuity of prescriptivism We begin with three extracts spanning 150 years and taken from teacher textbooks, guidance for schools, and professional standards, all published in England. Defective intelligence. 1) Pronunciation. (1) The most troublesome class of incorrect pronunciations are provincialisms; the substitution of one sound for another, as [ʊ] for [ʌ], and vice versa; the addition of a sound, as idea-​r, and the omission of sounds, as of the aspirate. These faults partake of a mechanical character, belonging to the ear and half as much as to defective intelligence. […] (2) Other mispronunciations consist in an improper accentuation. This is a fault, sometimes of habit, generally of ignorance. Its source is to be sought in the difference between the language of books and that of the common people. […] (3) The cure is with the teacher, who alone is to blame if there exists much incorrectness in his first class. The teacher should take means to secure the accuracy of his own pronunciation and that of his subordinates. […] Of course, every instance of mispronunciation coming under the teacher’s observation must be corrected. Gill, 1863, p. 155–​156 At the present time it will not be denied that to inculcate the speaking of correct English is the chief solicitude of a very large number of persons engaged in Primary and Secondary Education in this country. Those whose business it is to teach, who are to become public speakers, or who wish to enter upon public life, or affairs of any kind, undoubtedly find it convenient to get rid of whatever native “vulgarisms” or dialectal peculiarities their speech contains, and to attempt to approximate their Spoken English to that standard form. Wyld, 1906, p. 356

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A teacher must […] demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject. Department for Education, 2011a, p. 11 We use these extracts as initial illustrations of the perpetuity of prescriptivism in England’s schools, amidst a historical narrative of language ideologies in education and how these have long worked to create explicit and de facto language policy. We also use these extracts to show how contemporary policy is tethered to the past, employing a genealogical perspective to highlight how language ideologies are in constant recirculation, and how both students and teachers are subjected to prescriptive policies which impose racialised and classed “standards”. Whilst the first and second extracts –​taken from John Gill’s Introductory Text-​Book to School Education, Method, and School Management and Henry Wyld’s The Place of the Mother Tongue in National Education –​are perhaps most overtly laden with textual traces of prescriptive and deficit ideologies, the final extract –​the current professional standard for teachers in England –​reproduces the same ideologies albeit in more subtle ways. Tracing interdiscursive contact points across policy spaces and times is key to the genealogical approach we take in this chapter, examining how “discursive and non-​discursive practices come into being and interact to form a set of political, economic, moral, cultural, and social institutions which define the limits of acceptable speaking, knowing, and acting” (Anaïs, 2013, p. 125, our emphasis; see also Foucault, 1978; Stoler, 2016). Our aim is to reject the idea that prescriptivism in education surfaces solely through individual acts (such as a verbal correction in the classroom) and to conceptualise prescriptivism as systemic, institutional, and structural.

2.  Overview and anchor points There are three central anchor points to this chapter. Firstly, that prescriptivism is rooted in language ideologies and is a process which suppresses the language practices of racialised and classed speakers whilst maintaining the interests of the white bourgeoisie. Secondly, that prescriptive ideologies about language in education have a long historical narrative and are recycled over time. And finally, that language is just one of a package of behaviours that gets policed in schools. These are explored in relation to a durable idea which has long underpinned education in Britain and the colonial legacies of empire, namely that “Standard English” is a linguistic category which is easily definable and fundamental for successful schooling. Following Flores and Rosa (2015), we conceptualise standardised English as part of a raciolinguistic ideology which “serves to naturalise the idealised practices of the white speaking subject and position these idealised linguistic practices as integral to social mobility” (Flores & Rosa, 2015, pp. 162–​163). We show how ideologies clustered around standardised English legitimise prescriptive practices which further entrench social injustices and stratification, carrying long-​lasting consequences for teachers and students. The following questions are used as organisational steers. How might prescriptivism be conceptualised as an ideological process and what does this reveal about language inequality in education? In what ways is prescriptivism realised in classroom pedagogies, policy mechanisms, and other technologies of surveillance? How might prescriptivism be understood as an intersectional phenomenon, as a racialised, classed and ableist practice which works to grant dominant groups further powers and suppresses minoritised groups? How does the prescription of language work both alongside and as a proxy for the prescription of bodies?

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How has prescriptivism, as a key tool of standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies, been rendered into policy over time, and what are the historical continuities which have shaped this narrative? And finally, how might exploring such questions contribute to a larger project which seeks to interrogate colonial logics, dismantle linguistic borders and address deeply embedded power imbalances in educational spaces? Our exploration of these questions places a focus on England, given that this is the historical locus of the invention of standardised English, in which schools played a key role (see Crowley, 2003; Fisher, 1996; Mugglestone, 2003), and is thus a key implementational space for prescriptive language ideologies.

3.  Conceptualising prescriptivism in education Throughout this chapter, prescriptivism is understood to describe individual, institutional and socially shared preferences for how language ought to be used and any attempts made to regulate the language of others (e.g. Curzan, 2014). We argue that the enactment of prescriptivism in schools is tied up with intersectional language prejudice, understood as a bias, stigma, discrimination, or unfavourable treatment on the grounds of language which renders some ways of speaking as illegitimate, as part of a racialised and classed pursuit of linguistic and biological purity (e.g. Bauman & Briggs, 2003; Bonfiglio, 2002; Thomas, 1991). Finally, language policing is taken to be the surveillance and punishment of speech, writing, gesture, and other semiotic markers of identity, especially when seen and heard as being deviant from standardised codes constructed by the white listening subject (e.g. Cushing, 2020a; Rosa & Flores, 2017). Across these, discourses about language in education are never only about language (or even about language at all) but reflect moral panics about maintaining ‘standards’ and ‘discipline’ in society more broadly (Cameron, 2012) as well as intersecting with various axes of personhood such as gender, race, disability and class. Central to our discussion is the notion of language ideologies, defined as a “set of beliefs about language articulated by users as a rationalisation or justification of perceived language structure and use” (Silverstein,1979, p. 193). One of the most pervasive of these is the standard language ideology, whereby speakers and hearers come to believe in the existence of a “standard” language and that this represents its most “correct” form (Lippi-​Green, 2012). Given that the social and colonial construct of “Standard English” is designed by, based on, and protected by the language practices of the white middle-​classes, the “educated”, the “well-​bred”, and the “civilised” (Crowley, 2003; see also Bonfiglio, 2002; Heller & McElhinny, 2017; Mignolo, 2000), it follows that ideologies of language standardisation “stigmatise particular linguistic practices perceived as deviating from prescriptive norms” (Rosa, 2016, p. 163), working to silence and erase the actual practices of minoritised speakers. Accordingly, we also consider prescriptivism through a raciolinguistic perspective, placing attention toward the white listening subject, representing not necessarily individual listeners, but various policy technologies such as assessments and curricula (Rosa & Flores, 2017). As the opening extracts to this chapter showed, both standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies have far-​reaching consequences within educational contexts (e.g. Holborow, 1999; Milroy, 2001; Milroy & Milroy, 1991; Rosa, 2018), with implications for how the language practices of both students and teachers are prescribed. For example, when certain ways of speaking are ideologised as representative of certain types of people, they may be further construed as depicting the qualities stereotypically associated with those people (Snell, 2018a, forthcoming). It is through this process of “iconization” (Irvine & Gal, 2000) that so-​called standard forms have come to be understood as emblematic of power, educatedness, authority, and superior moral character, and nonstandard

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forms of the converse. These beliefs are held not just by powerful groups in society but also by marginalised groups, who can be coerced into aligning with the norms of the powerful and regulating their own behaviour accordingly. This explains why studies have repeatedly found that speakers systematically “edit out” stigmatised features from their speech in more formal settings, and, further, why such features are judged most harshly by the speakers who use them the most (Labov, 1972). Educational institutions have received focused attention in terms of language ideologies and the consequences of prescriptive practices (e.g. Cameron, 2012; Cushing, 2022; Rosa, 2018; Snell & Cushing, 2022; Wiley & Lukes, 1996), showing how schools are spaces in which dichotomies such as “academic”/​“non-​academic”, “correct”/​“incorrect” and “appropriate”/​“inappropriate” come to be constructed, normalised, and circulated. The translation of ideology into practice is enacted in a variety of forms, including oral “corrections”, scripts and routines for classroom discourse, professional standards for teachers, assessment criteria for language “competency”, and various policies pertaining to un/​acceptable language use. For instance, Cushing (2021a) examines the textual traces of the standard language ideology within post-​2010 UK state-​level policy mechanisms, revealing a dense web of prescriptive ideologies which position teachers as standard language role models who have a professional responsibility to police students’ language. These ideologies come to be reproduced within school-​produced policies, such as how teachers are expected to “speak with clear diction and correct grammar” and how “Standard English must be modelled at all times and pupils’ speech corrected” (Cushing, 2020b). Whilst some linguists prefer to downplay or ignore the ideological nature of linguistic prescriptivism in schools (e.g. Crystal, 2006; Hudson, 2020; Trudgill, 1999),1 our stance is that this is always ideological and cannot be decoupled from hegemonic power related to disability, class, and race. Furthermore, we argue that any discussion of prescriptive language ideologies needs to be located within the historical, social, and economic contexts in which they surface, especially when considering the colonial legacies associated with standardised English and the politicised nature of education policy making. Indeed, schools are one of the very institutions in which standardised English was first designed, with histories such as Holborow (1999) and Mugglestone (2003) describing schools as a key implementational space of prescriptive ideologies. Schools are spaces where students and teachers are ritualised into the sharing of state-​determined values, cooked up through thousands of hours of interaction which instruct children “how to speak, what to wear, how to move their bodies, and, ultimately, how to inhabit different race, class, and gender positions” (Morris, 2005, p. 44). The inhabiting of different positions in school typically rests on how language practices are perceived by those in power, with “competency” in standardised English one factor in determining which bodies are suitable for school, and which are not. For example, in her ethnography of how racialised bodies are positioned at the periphery of school communities, Ferguson (2000) describes how the “right” kind of student (and we extend this to teachers, too) is one who speaks standardised English, with nonstandardised codes being pathologised and framed as in need of remedial intervention: While children bring a rich variety of language systems into school, the institution imposes a profoundly restricted and jealously guarded monolingual system through the sanction of only one form, Received Standard English, as the legitimate form of expression and exchange in the classroom. […] Incredibly, their ability to speak and think in more than one language system is not presented to the school population as

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a marvellous accomplishment to be envied, emulated, applauded, but it is framed as a handicap, a problem to be corrected before their real education can begin. Ferguson, 2000, p. 205 Prescriptivism in education then is not just about language, but about a constellation of practices which prescribe various aspects of culture, bodies, values, and behaviours through mechanisms of the white listening subject such as curricula, assessments, pedagogies, and classroom discourse. Whereas the majority of work on linguistic prescriptivism in education has focused on speech and writing as disembodied modes of language, here we reiterate the need for an expanded conceptualisation of prescriptivism in which language practices are prescribed alongside other semiotic resources such as clothing, movement, hair, and religious symbols.

4.  Prescribing language; prescribing the body A wealth of work within the sociology of education has shown the range of semiotic resources beyond speech and writing which come to be prescribed in schools, and how schools operate within a broader architecture of social compliance (e.g. Ferguson, 2000; Kulz, 2017; Morris, 2016; Puwar, 2004). Joseph-​Salisbury and Connelly (2018) examine the enduring significance of hair policies and policing in schools, and how these function as embodiments of racialised in/​exclusion, subjugating Black symbols of identity, image and group membership whilst venerating whiteness. Black hair is here conceptualised as a “key site for the social control of Black bodies” (2018, p. 9), much in the same way that Black language practices are routinely stigmatised via prescriptive policies which require racialised speakers to modify their language in ways which fit the demands of the white listening subject (e.g. Alim & Smitherman, 2012). In Kulz’s (2017) ethnography of a London secondary school, she discusses the racialised discrepancies of hair policing, showing how middle-​class white students with long unkempt hair were generally left alone by teachers, whereas Black students who were regularly reprimanded for flaunting hair rules. Kulz describes the importance of language within this, with racialised students having to perform self-​surveillance with their accent and body image in order to become “whiter” and gain legitimacy from teachers (2017, p. 159). Cushing (2021b) also reports on a London secondary school in which body and language policing ran parallel, operationalised through policies and pedagogies which required students to sit, move, and speak in ways which conformed with normative ideas of linguistic and biological “standards”. Various schools in the UK have attracted media attention for hair policies which discriminate against Black bodies, as well as attempts to prescribe and police religious clothing (see Parveen & Thomas, 2021). In discussing uniform policies more broadly, a US-​based study by Morris (2005) further shows the racialised prescription of clothing as part of wider form of regulatory practices, including language, which disproportionally targeted Black and Latinx students who already felt they were not welcome within school. What these studies show then is how language and other semiotic modes of identity are not just proscribed, but criminalised in schools –​as a package of outlawed language practices (Rosa, 2018) which are perceived as failing to meet the institutional demands of mainstream schooling standards.

5.  Class, race and prescriptivism in education Prescriptivism in contemporary English education has been justified across the political spectrum as a means of empowering disadvantaged pupils (e.g. Gove, 2013; Lammy, 2013). According to UK government discourse, the purported goal is to give these pupils access to an objectified 198

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“Standard English” which, it is argued, will open up educational opportunities and grant access to “power” and “the career professions” (Hubbard, 20202). The idea that speaking a standardised form of English will lead to social mobility is a “stock argument” (Blommaert, 1999, p. 10) that has remained consistent in debates about language in education in England for over two hundred years (e.g. Cobbett, 1817, cited in Beal, 2018; Board of Education, 1921, p. 72). The belief in the emancipatory potential of standardised English belies the social and ideological underpinnings of the “standard”, in which racialised and classed speakers are further marginalised whilst being under institutional pressure to internalise raciolinguistic ideologies. For example, Baker-​Bell (2020) asked a group of Black secondary school students to read samples of Black language and standardised English (or White Mainstream English, following Alim & Smitherman, 2012) and describe the imagined speakers. These students associated Black Language with speakers who are “ghetto”, “bad”, “trouble”, or who “skip school” and “get bad grades” and White Mainstream English with speakers who are “smart”, “good”, “proper” and “respectful”. Significantly, these students used Black language and aligned with Black cultural styles and fashions, yet they saw (and heard) these practices as negative and antithetical to success, internalising ideologies which police their own language and bodies. The consequences of language ideologies are particularly marked in postcolonial contexts, where the legacies of linguistic imperialism continue to propagate prescriptivism. In their study of the literacy practices of children in Jamaica, Nero and Stevens (2018) show how the standard language ideology stigmatises Jamaican Creole (JC) and privileges Standard Jamaican English (SJE), despite SJE not being the home language of most students. Teachers and school principals played a significant role in enforcing this view by complimenting children who used SJE and publicly shaming those who spoke JC. While the stated aim was to encourage students to use a “universal” language that would grant “access to power” (2018, p. 17), the reality is that the dominance of SJE and its colonial legacies has “forestalled social mobility for masses of poor people” (2018, pp. 13–​14), whose access to SJE is limited by institutional structures, such as the funneling of lower-​class JC-​speaking children into “shift” (rather than “full day”) schools that provide fewer hours of instruction. While Nero and Stevens situate their account in relation to sharp socio-​economic stratification in Jamaica, it is apparent that SJE is more associated with whiteness and colonial power than JC, and thus that standardised English is a racialised as well as a classed concept. Undoubtedly, standardised English and associated ideologies of prescriptivism “play(s) a powerful role in maintaining white hegemony” (Von Esch et al., 2020, p. 397) and the propagation of white linguistic supremacy, a structure in which ideologies about language work to stratify racial categories (see Kroskrity, 2021). The idea that working-​class, racialised, and other marginalised speakers must change the way they talk in order to achieve upward mobility is so pervasive that many teachers subscribe to it, believing it to be their moral and professional duty to regulate children’s language through policing (Cushing, 2020a), public shaming (Nero & Stevens, 2018), and whole-​school dialect bans (Snell, 2015, 2018a).3 These policies typically lack a coherent rationale, with teachers “pay[ing] selective attention to a small set of socially stigmatized features in children’s speech, while ostensibly ignoring other deviations from prescribed usage” (Levey, 2012, p. 418). Teachers can find themselves experiencing what Orzulak (2015) terms “linguistic ideological dilemmas”, caught between their desire to “take up linguistically responsive positions that value student language variation” and “expectations that they serve as gatekeepers for “standard” English(es)” (p. 176). This dilemma is compounded by teachers’ knowledge that their own language is also subject to surveillance by the listening practices of management and state policies (Cushing, 2020a). One apparent solution to this tension is to enact code-​switching pedagogies, which ask students to “switch from their home speech to school speech at appropriate times 199

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and places” (Wheeler & Swords, 2004, p. 474). However, whilst some scholars advocate code-​ switching as a means of empowering students who speak African American English and other stigmatised dialects (see e.g. Delpit, 2006 on the “codes of power”), others see this strategy as inherently flawed because it simply asks racialised students to see and hear themselves through the eyes and ears of white bodies (Young, 2009). Baker-​Bell (2020b) highlights the labour and exhaustion that speakers must endure when code-​switching: they are continuously monitoring and policing their linguistic expressions and working through the linguistic double consciousness they experience as a result of having to alienate their cultural ways of being and knowing, their community, and their blackness in favor of a white middle class identity. Baker-​Bell, 2020b p. 14 Students may resist the imposition of standardised English at school if they see it as imitating an identity and culture they do not align with. Others may internalise the message that their own language is not suitable for schooling and develop negative attitudes about themselves, losing confidence in their ability to achieve at school and in education more generally (Baker-​Bell, 2020a; Charity Hudley & Mallinson, 2014; Cheshire, 1982; Heath, 1983; Snell, 2013).

6.  Prescribing “appropriateness” Despite ongoing critiques, the idea that students should switch to “appropriate” forms at “appropriate” times is widespread in contemporary educational contexts. “Appropriateness” discourses reinforce standard language ideologies that seek to impose neat boundaries between standardised (or “school”) English and “home” dialects (Flores & Rosa, 2015). However, as Snell (2013) makes clear, these binaries are not reflective of naturally occurring language patterns. In her study of children’s language in two social class differentiated schools in northeast England, working-​class participants used nonstandardised forms alongside a range of other semiotic resources, including standardardised forms (as well as phrases from different languages, song lyrics and popular culture). Interactional analyses revealed that the children’s language choices indexed social meanings that extended beyond formality and that what was considered “appropriate” was continually up for negotiation and contestation, depending on the exigencies of the interactional moment as well as speakers’ relative position in the local social order (Snell, 2013, p. 117; see also Snell, 2010, 2018b). This research makes clear that children’s linguistic repertoires are complex and layered, and thus any attempt to regulate their language use according to separate “varieties” will inevitably oversimplify the range of resources involved. We also further interrogate the usefulness of the distinction between “standard” and “nonstandard”, an ideological binary which continues to be propagated not just in schools but in much linguistics scholarship too. As well as erasing the complexity and dynamism of language, the dichotomous framing of language that underpins appropriateness-​based approaches inevitably leads to status differentials. What is considered “appropriate” in classrooms and other academic settings is standardised English, which becomes the invisible norm to which educators orient (Alim & Smitherman, 2012, p. 171). Students implicitly receive the message that standardised English is valuable for school success, public speaking and the future job market, while nonstandardised English is useful only in informal, casual, and private contexts. This perspective does not account for the fact that standardised forms can be used effectively outside of formal, academic contexts and nonstandardised forms can be used in ways that assert status and authority in addition to 200

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intimacy and group solidarity (see Snell, 2018b; Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 159). Young (2009) offers “code meshing” as a less binary way of thinking about language use, one which acknowledges standard principles for communication, while encouraging “speakers and writers to fuse that standard with native speech habits, to color their writing with what they bring from home” (p. 65) (see also Canagarajah, 2013, and García & Wei, 2014 on translanguaging). Importantly, advocates of code-​meshing and translanguaging show how these pedagogies also offer a politicised way of conceptualising language and power whilst rejecting ideologies of hard linguistic borders and boundaries. Fairclough (1992) argues that because dominant social groups have normalised what counts as “appropriate”, the term tends to be used more flexibly when applied to these groups. Flores and Rosa (2015) show that white middle-​class speakers can deviate from language practices idealised as “appropriate” (or “standard”) without stigma or censure “while racialized people can adhere to these idealized linguistic practices and still face profound institutional exclusion” (p. 165). They draw upon an example from Alim’s (2007) research in a predominantly African American High School, in which a teacher considered she was to be an example of “vernacular English” that has to be “combat[ted]” (p. 164), referring to the generalisation of was to plural and second-​person subjects (e.g., we was, you was) but using the standardised variant she was.4 Flores and Rosa (2015) make the point that such forms are heard as “Standard English” when used by a privileged white student, but when spoken by an African American student the teacher hears them as “vernacular” and “in need of correction”. Adopting a raciolinguistic perspective which asks questions of the listener not the speaker, this suggests that “the issue is not with the linguistic token per se but rather who is uttering the linguistic token” (Flores et al., 2018, p. 23). Likewise, Snell (2018a) describes how working-​class children in the UK regularly use forms prescribed as “standard”, yet their voices are consistently stereotyped as “nonstandard” and requiring remediation. Examples like these expose the deficit ideology behind code-​switching, which contends that marginalised speakers must learn standardised English in order to advance in the public domain but continues to find their linguistic performances wanting while rewarding white middle-​and upper-​class speakers whose language does not conform to an idealised “standard”.

7.  The false promises of prescriptivism Schools prescribe standardised English with the promise that it will grant access to education, the job market, and social mobility. Those who do not comply can expect sanctions and stigmatisation, and the dominant narrative dictates that the “problem” is located within their own language practices. However, the link between language use and upward social mobility can only be made if we view standardised English as a set of objective linguistic practices that can be neatly delineated and thus acquired and exploited. Yet, research has shown that this is not the case. Institutional assessments of what constitutes “home” versus “school” or “vernacular” versus “standard” language are really measures of how well a student is able to embody particular subject positions (e.g. of “idealised whiteness”) rather than empirical linguistic practices (Rosa & Flores, 2017, p. 633). The language of some speakers continues to be stigmatised as deficient regardless of how closely they adhere to perceived standards: the ideological construction and value of standardized language practices are anchored in what we term raciolinguistic ideologies that conflate certain racialized bodies with linguistic deficiency unrelated to any objective linguistic practices. Flores & Rosa, 2015, p. 150; original emphasis 201

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Like standard language ideologies, raciolinguistic ideologies are situated within the broader history of European colonialism, where racial Others were discursively constructed as inferior to the European bourgeois subject as part of nation state/​colonial governmentality (Rosa & Flores, 2017, p. 623; see also Bonfiglio, 2002; Mignolo, 2000). An important aspect of this raciolinguistic perspective is the shift in analytic attention away from the speaking practices of racialised speakers and towards the hearing practices of the white listening subject. Adopting a raciolinguistic perspective to prescriptivism challenges the assumption that modifying the language of classed and racialised speakers is the key to promoting social mobility and eliminating class and racial hierarchies: Simply adding “codes of power” or other “appropriate” forms of language to the linguistic repertoire of language-​minoritized students will not lead to social transformation [… because] they are still heard as deficient language users. Attempting to teach language-​minoritized students to engage in the idealized linguistic practices of the white speaking subject does nothing to challenge the underlying racism and monoglossic language ideologies of the white listening subject. Flores & Rosa 2015, p. 167 Rather than addressing structural patterns which continue to stigmatise minoritised speakers, education policies typically instead ask those speakers to modify their language practices at an individual level, propagating prescriptivism under the guise of social mobility, emancipation and racial justice. These racialised and classed requirements also extend to a cluster of other semiotic resources such as clothing, hair and behaviour, entailing that prescriptivism is enacted through both the eyes and ears of white bodies.

8.  Foundations of prescriptivism in England’s schools The close association between schooling, standardisation, and prescription can be traced back through the nineteenth century and into the eighteenth. In this section we underline key continuities between the language attitudes that crystallized during this period and those that endure today, thus highlighting the recirculation of prescriptive ideologies and practices over time (for a more comprehensive history of prescriptivism in England see e.g. Clark, 2001; Crowley, 2003; Curzan, 2014; Mugglestone, 2003). Eighteenth century educationalists emphasised that schooling had an important role to play in the transmission of “correct” forms of speech (i.e., those sanctioned by the prescriptive tradition). This idea developed apace in the nineteenth century, where notions of “educatedness” were powerfully linked with a particular way of speaking, one associated with the highest classes in London and those who attended prestigious public schools. Within these schools, conformity to a set of spoken “norms” was achieved largely through peer-​g roup pressure, whereupon “the right use of h” and other shibboleths was key to leading “a quiet life” (a point commended by the Oxford scholar Kington-​Oliphant (1873, cited in Mugglestone, 2003, p. 231)). Within the emergent state system, it was the role of the schoolteacher to intervene in pupils’ speech. This typically meant (as it does today) paying attention to a set of socially marked forms, including the double negative, word-​final [ɪn] rather than [ɪŋ], and [h]‌-​dropping. These forms were considered “vulgar”, “provincial”, even “pestilent”. As George Sampson (1924, p. 28) later put it, “the elementary schoolchild began his education with his language in a state of disease, and it was the business of the teacher to purify and disinfect that language”. The result of these attempts at purification and disinfection worked to “reinforce the hegemony of 202

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the standard ideology” (Mugglestone, 2003, p. 255) and create cultures where prescriptive language shaming was a normalised part of school life. Teachers felt the repercussions of this too. The requirement that they adopt the ideals of “standard” speech was underlined in teaching manuals, training colleges, and inspectors’ reports, where “[r]egional accents, connotative of ‘ignorant’ rather than ‘educated’, were increasingly considered incompatible with the office of school teacher” (Mugglestone, 2003, pp. 243–​244; see below for a comparison with current practice, and the Gill extract which opened this chapter). The idea that education could transmit “standards” of speech continued into the twentieth century, as evident in the 1921 Newbolt Report. This major report on the teaching of English stated that “the first and chief duty of the Elementary School” is “to give its pupils speech” and thus to “make them articulate and civilized human beings” (Board of Education, 1921, p. 60). The report warned that this endeavour would involve a “fight against the powerful influence of evil habits of speech contracted in home and street”. Nonetheless, this fight was considered necessary since the child who does not learn “standard English” will experience “a serious handicap in many ways” (p. 67), including in finding employment (p. 72). In addition, “if a child is not learning good English he is learning bad English, and probably bad habits of thought” (p. 10). Thus, Newbolt foregrounds social advancement and moral standards as justification for the educational reforms it sought. In addition, it made claims around social cohesion, since spoken language was identified as a key factor in class division (pp. 22–​23). Despite these egalitarian intentions, the report consistently stigmatises the language of lower-​class children as “uncouth”, “vulgar”, and “bad English”. There would be a challenge to these ideas in the second half of the twentieth century with the publication of several influential educational reports. Chief amongst these were Children and their Primary Schools (the Plowden Report, Department of Education and Science, 1967), A Language for Life (the Bullock Report, Department of Education and Science, 1975), The Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language (the Kingman Report, Department of Education and Science, 1988) and English from Ages 5 to 16 (the Cox Report, Department of Education and Science, 1989). Contrary to earlier beliefs regarding linguistic correctness, the Plowden Report stated that the “test of good speech is whether any particular use of language is effective in the context in which it is used, not whether it conforms to certain ‘rules’ ” (Department of Education and Science, 1967, p. 222). Bullock likewise emphasised the relevance of context, positioning correctness as “a matter of conforming to the linguistic behaviour appropriate to the situation” (Department of Education and Science, 1975, p. 143). Linguists and educationalists would later interrogate what counts as “appropriate” and from whose perspective (as outlined above), but for now we emphasise the point that relative “appropriateness” had replaced absolute “correctness” and this marked a clear departure with what had gone before. Likewise, the aim as outlined in Bullock was not to ridicule or purge the home dialect but to respect it and to teach “Standard English” at school “without making the children feel marked out by the form of language they bring with them” (Department of Education and Science, 1975, p. 287). Kingman and Cox built on these ideas, arguing (as Bullock had done) for the need to extend pupils’ language repertoires. While these reports did not reject the explicit teaching of grammar, they did reject traditional prescriptive grammar, advocating instead for a descriptive approach and the teaching of “knowledge about language” across the English curriculum. In the 1988 Education Act, the British government introduced a National Curriculum for England, which was published in 1990, based on the attainment targets and programmes of study recommended in Cox (with later revisions in 1995, 1999, 2007 and 2014). Hudson and Walmsley (2005) regard this as a positive development, stating that the most striking part of the 203

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curriculum current at their time of writing was “the absence of prescriptivism” (p. 613). They go further, making the bold claim that, in fact: Prescription is dead –​non-​standard varieties are tolerated, as are informal registers; variety is accepted, but different varieties are suited to different occasions so the focus is now on the matching of variety to context. Hudson & Walmsley, 2005, p. 615 However, this optimistic account of prescriptivism sidesteps the controversy sparked by the educational reports published in the 1970s and 80s. Neither the Kingman nor the Cox report was received with approval by the Conservative government of the day, having failed to recommend the return to a prescriptive approach to grammar teaching (and dare we say, associated Victorian values) that had been expected. The reports angered pro-​g rammar conservatives and were pilloried by the right-​wing press for the perceived lax approach to standards of “correctness” (see Cameron, 2012, chap. 3, and Crowley 2003, chap. 8 for a review). The Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) project (directed by Professor Ronald Carter, University of Nottingham) had been commissioned to develop materials that would help teachers to deliver the new curriculum, but its recommendations (which were influenced by contemporary sociolinguistic research) caused such anger amongst government officials that the project was scrapped in 1991 and publication of the materials was blocked by the Minister of State for Education. Crystal (2017) notes that the description of these controversies “could easily have been written in 2014, when grammar once again became a focus of ministerial attention”. We take up this point in the next section.

9.  Ideologies of prescriptivism in post-​2010 reforms This section considers traces of prescriptivism within the context of post-​2010 reforms in England, representing a set of policy mechanisms which are, at the time of writing, in use by the majority of schools. Although framed as “reforms” by the Conservative-​Liberal Democrat coalition which initiated them (and then continued under the majority Conservative government from 2015 onwards), we argue that they are more accurately thought of as a continuation of language education ideologies which have long been in place. Post-​2010 policies must be interpreted in relation to the broader socio-​economic and political conditions in which they were introduced. The coalition government came to power following a global recession which saw them implement a devasting programme of economic austerity, triggering nationwide civil unrest which created an ideological space where standards-​based educational reform was framed as urgent and morally necessary, as a way of countering the “poor choices” made by individuals and the “broken homes” of predominantly multi-​ethnic urban communities (Jones, 2014). Prescriptive ideologies about language played a pivotal role in the deficit discourses used to justify these reforms. For instance, the government identified “illiteracy” and “poor behaviour” as a way for teachers to “take control of the classroom” and close “gaps” in attainment and language (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2013, p. 20), crafting a moral panic in which racialised, working-​class young people were constructed as badly behaved, illiterate and in need of strict schooling as an emergency intervention (Cushing, 2022). These narratives translated to a range of policies, such as a renewed attention on standardised English and the so-​called “word gap”, a deficit perspective stemming from work conducted in the USA (Hart & Risley, 1995) which frames the language practices of racialised, working-​class young people as inadequate for schooling (see Cushing, 204

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2022; Johnson et al., 2017). A cluster of speeches made by Michael Gove, who served as Secretary of State for Education between 2010 and 2014 and is generally taken to be the chief architect of post-​2010 policies, recycled prescriptive discourses of traditional schooling, discipline, social order, and standardised English in which nonstandardised language practices were, quite literally, criminalised (see Cameron, 2012; Cushing, 2021b; Rosa, 2018). For example, Gove (2011) spoke of an “iron-​clad link” between language, truancy, criminality, and illiteracy which “condemns” children to a “prison house of ignorance”. In retracing these well-​worn contours, the government encouraged schools to instil prescriptive language policies which included the “rigorous policing” of grammar. Visit the most exclusive pre-​prep and prep schools in London […] and you will find children learning to read using traditional phonic methods, times tables and poetry learnt by heart, grammar and spelling rigorously policed, the narrative of British history properly taught. And on that foundation those children then move to schools like Eton and Westminster –​where the medieval cloisters connect seamlessly to the corridors of power. Gove, 2013 When linguistic solutions are proposed as the cure for structural inequalities, this allows governments to absolve themselves of any responsibilities and reinforces the myth that all marginalised speakers need to do to enjoy greater social privileges is to modify their own language. It was via these discourses that post-​2010 policies were introduced, granting schools a green light to deploy punitive policies under the guise that this would afford working-​class, racialised youth advancements in employment and educational opportunities if they were to assimilate towards the linguistic practices of the white bourgeois. The following section critiques specific policy mechanisms which buttressed this ideology.

10.  Post-​2010 mechanisms of prescriptivism Prescriptive ideologies within post-​2010 reforms are manifested via a variety of mechanisms, such as the revised national curricula for schools in England (Department for Education, 2014a, 2014b). Whilst it is unremarkable to suggest that all curricula are ideologically driven (see Apple, 2019), the curricula which schools began teaching in 2014 drew heavily on the ideas of the north American academic E.D. Hirsch and his work Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know (Hirsch, 1987). In this, Hirsch lists 5000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts, which he argues constitutes “core knowledge”. Others before us (e.g. Buras 1999; Neumann et al 2020) have shown how Hirsch’s ideologies are symbolic of a neocolonial and neoconservative restoration project in which the most valuable knowledge is that which is created by white, middle-​class Europeans. “Competency” in standardised English is one key strand of this “knowledge”, with Hirsch claiming that standardised English is the one true “literate language” of America, “enabling us to give and receive complex information orally and in writing” (1987, p. 3). Yosso (2005, p. 82) shows how Hirsch’s colonial ideologies deploy a “deficit analytical lens and place value judgments on communities that often do not have access to white, middle or upper class resources”, including language. Hirsch’s writings explicitly underpin the 2014 national curriculum, which opens with the claim that it “provides pupils with an introduction to the essential knowledge that they need to be educated citizens [and] to the best that has been thought and said” (Department for Education, 2014a, p. 6). As part of this, emphasis is given to standardised English and 205

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the listening practices of teachers, who are instructed to monitor “clear” speech, “articulate” language, “confident” ideas, and “appropriate” registers: Pupils should be taught to speak clearly and convey ideas confidently using Standard English. They should learn to justify ideas with reasons; ask questions to check understanding; develop vocabulary and build knowledge; negotiate; evaluate and build on the ideas of others; and select the appropriate register for effective communication. […] This will enable them to clarify their thinking as well as organise their ideas for writing. Department for Education, 2014a, p. 10 This extract is particularly illustrative of standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies which characterise prescriptive policies in education. It reifies “Standard English”, whilst being imbued with discourses of correctness, appropriateness, and an overt requirement placed on students to modify their own language practices, rather than teachers modifying the way they hear. Moore & Spencer (2021) note how current policy reproduces the artificial, binary boundaries between “standard” and “non-​standard” English, framing grammatical variation as a “choice between the standard variety and nonstandard alternatives”. Cushing (2021a) and Snell (forthcoming) provide detailed critiques of the standard language ideologies in the curriculum and other mechanisms, such as state-​issued grammar tests which were introduced by government under the argument that grammar is a system which has “clear right or wrong answers” (Department for Education, 2011b, p. 14; see Cushing, 2021c for an extended critique of how these tests work to coerce teachers into enacting prescriptive pedagogies which embody prescriptive language ideologies). An additional mechanism that works to prescribe the language of teachers is the Teachers’ Standards (Department for Education, 2011a), a set of professional assessment criteria against which teachers’ performance is judged during initial teacher education and then throughout their careers, including job interviews, promotion opportunities, and Ofsted5 inspections. First introduced in 1984, the Teachers’ Standards have undergone various iterations but have consistently included ideologies of linguistic prescription. For instance, the 1997 version imposed by Labour (Department for Education and Employment, 1997) includes six references to ‘Standard English’, such as how teachers Must demonstrate that they know and understand […] the nature and role of standard English as the medium through which all subjects are taught and as the general, public English used to communicate within the United Kingdom and throughout the English-​speaking world. Department for Education and Employment, 1997, p. 24 Whereas the 1997 version invokes ideologies of Anglocentric native-​speakerism and linguistic homogeneity (see Holliday, 2006), the 2011 version of the Teachers’ Standards (Department for Education, 2011a) explicitly associates “correctness” with standardised English and positions teachers as standard language role models who must “promote” this within their practice: A teacher must […] demonstrate an understanding of and take responsibility for promoting high standards of literacy, articulacy and the correct use of standard English, whatever the teacher’s specialist subject. Department for Education, 2011a, p. 10–​11 206

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Failure to use “correct” standardised English (i.e. using nonstandardised English) carries material risks in terms of career and economic advancement, especially given that the policy is used when “considering whether a teacher’s conduct has fallen significantly short of the standard of behaviour expected of a teacher” (Department for Education, 2011, p. 5). Policy requires teachers to hear in certain ways –​to embody raciolinguistic ideologies and “listen on behalf of a broader society” (Flores et al., 2018, p. 19), enacting the prescriptive demands of the state under the threat of punishments and stigmatisation. Finally, we briefly describe the institutional listening practices of Ofsted, as one of the state-​level mechanisms of school surveillance who have enjoyed greater power under post-​ 2010 changes. Cushing and Snell (2022) demonstrated how prescriptivism is normalised within the inspectorate’s institutional culture. We traced the presence of standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies in a corpus of over 3000 inspection reports published since 1839, showing how hostile comments about nonstandardised speech are particularly present in schools serving low-​income and racialised children –​and that these comments are filtered through a predominantly white, middle-​class workforce. Ofsted’s official language policies have long indicated that their inspectors are trained to listen out for nonstandardised speech patterns, such as in a 2011 research report which praises the practice of a London school serving a community of economically disadvantaged students. Inspectors described how staff paid close attention to the difference between standard and non-​ standard English in spoken language. Pupils were quick to correct themselves when they used words such as ‘ain’t’ and ‘gotten’ in their speech when responding to questions from teachers. They explained to inspectors how teachers and assistants taught them to use standard English by reminding them constantly during conversations and in lessons. Ofsted, 2011, p. 22 Our critique presents various examples of prescriptive practices in school inspection reports –​ such as a 2015 report of a London primary school serving largely Black African students, where teachers were praised for “speaking in standard English when pupils lapse into the local dialect”. Similarly, a school in an economically deprived area of outer Liverpool shows how the inspectorate’s language policing targeted the speech of both students and teachers: Some staff use non-​standard spoken English and model incorrect grammar when they teach pupils. The school should consider ways of helping pupils to speak clearly and correctly, using good vocabulary, technical terms and standard English. Ofsted 2019, p. 4 In summary, we argued that the inspectorate represent institutional agents of linguistic prescriptivism and state sponsored language police. The inspectorate’s power is upheld through a reliance on durable language ideologies which put management under pressure to police the language of teachers, and teachers to police the language of students. As is common in pro-​prescriptive arguments, the inspectorate increasingly attempt to legitimise such practices through a lens of social justice, under the logics that if marginalised speakers modify their speech towards what sounds like “Standard English”, then this grants them access to opportunities previously denied them. A language ideological perspective, however, shows us that the same speakers will still continue to face discrimination because ideologies about language are never just about language. 207

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11. Conclusion Prescriptivism in education represents a particularly durable set of language ideologies which have long been rooted in colonial practices of language policing and prejudice. This chapter has provided an overview of prescriptivism in England’s schools, in employing a genealogical and language ideological framework which has shown how standard language and raciolinguistic ideologies have been in constant recirculation. Although there have been various waves of intensity, such as in the contemporary landscape of post-​2010 reforms, we argue that the underlying ideologies of prescriptivism have always shaped policy and practice in England, tethered to colonial logics which have long framed marginalised communities’ language practices as deficient, inferior, and in need of remediation. We therefore repeat our rejection of linguists’ claims that prescriptivism is on the decline or “dead” (see n 1), and instead point out that, through a language ideological framework, we are able to expose how the underlying logics of colonialism, standardised English, and prescriptivism continue to suppress certain speakers and their ways of talking whilst upholding linguistic hegemonies maintained by the white listening subject. In line with innovative scholarship which takes a raciolinguistic perspective, we emphasise the need for future research to attend not to the language practices of prescribed bodies, but to the listening practices of the prescriber. We also insist that analyses of prescriptive practices in education must adopt an intersectional stance, in attending to the fact that perceptions about language are never just about language, but represent a set of interlocking ideologies pertaining to both linguistic and biological purity.

Notes 1 These three linguists all adopt a non-​ideological stance to prescriptivism and standardised English in schools. Crystal (2006, p. 206) argues that the national curriculum in England has “has totally rejected the prescriptive mentality” with standardised English framed “in an inclusive way”. Hudson (2020) supports this position, arguing that curricula in England have always represented “explicit rejections of prescriptivism” (p. 453), that it is “not far from the truth” that prescriptivism is “dead” (p. 458), and that it is a “minority view” that there are social and political reasons to challenge standardised English (p. 455). In a chapter which attempts to define “Standard English”, Trudgill (1999, p. 118) distances himself from the standard language ideology by literally refusing to use the word –​he writes “the word ‘ideology’ will not appear again in this chapter”. 2 Sarah Hubbard was (at the time of writing) Ofsted’s National Lead for English. When giving evidence to the Oracy All-​Party-​Parliamentary-​Group’s Speak for Change inquiry on 14 July 2020, she defined “Standard English” as “English that is correct, that enables you to become an active citizen, to gain entrance to the career professions and also what Geoff Barton calls ‘the language habits of those who wield power”. 3 The head teacher at a Teesside school that banned the use of selected local dialect forms justified the initiative by telling reporters: “we would like to equip our children to go into the world of work and not be disadvantaged” (Williams, 2013). 4 Was/​ were variability is repeatedly and historically referenced in UK policy documents as a nonstandardised construction that teachers should identify in pupils’ speech and writing. 5 Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills. Ofsted carry out regular, formal inspections of schools in England which take place over a week and involve teacher/​student interviews, policy gathering, scrutiny of written work and classroom observations.

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Ian Cushing and Julia Snell Department for Education. (2011b). Independent review of key stage 2 testing, assessment and accountability: Final report (The Bew Report). https://​ass​ets.pub​lish​ing.serv​ice.gov.uk/​gov​ernm​ent/​uplo​ads/​sys​tem/​uplo​ ads/​atta​chme​nt_​d​ata/​file/​176​180/​Rev​iew-​KS2-​Testin​g_​fi​nal-​rep​ort.pdf Department for Education. (2014a). The national curriculum in England: Key stages 1 and 2 framework document (DFE-​00178-​2013). https://​ass​ets.pub​lish​ing.serv​ice.gov.uk/​gov​ernm​ent/​uplo​ads/​sys​tem/​uplo​ ads/​atta​chme​nt_​d​ata/​file/​425​601/​PRIM​ARY_​nati​onal​_​cur​r icu​lum.pdf Department for Education. (2014b). The national curriculum in England: Key stages 3 and 4 framework document (DFE-​00183-​2013). Department for Education and Employment. (1997). Teaching: high status, high standards (Circular 10/​97). Department of Education and Science. (1967). Children and their primary schools. (Plowden Report). HM Stationary Office. Department of Education and Science. (1975). A language for life: Report of the committee of inquiry appointed by the Secretary of State for Education and Science under the chairmanship of Sir Alan Bullock FBA (Bullock Report). HM Stationary Office. Department of Education and Science. (1988a). Report of the Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language (Kingman Report). HM Stationary Office. Department of Education and Science. (1988b). Report of the English Working Party 5 to 16 (Cox Report). HM Stationary Office. Fairclough, N. (1992). The appropriacy of ‘appropriateness’. In N. Fairclough (Ed.), Critical Language Awareness (pp. 33–​56). Routledge. Ferguson, A. (2000). Bad Boys: Public Schools in the Making of Black Masculinity. University of Michigan Press. Fisher, J. (1996). The Emergence of Standard English. The University of Kentucky Press. Flores, N., Lewis, M., & Phuong, J. (2018). Raciolinguistic chronotopes and the education of Latinx students: resistance and anxiety in a bilingual school. Language and Communication 62(A), 15–​25. http://​dx.doi.org/​10.1016/​j.lang​com.2018.06.002 Flores, N., & Rosa, J. (2015). Undoing appropriateness: raciolinguistic ideologies and language diversity in education. Harvard Educational Review 85(2), 149–​171. https://​doi.org/​10.17763/​0017-​8055.85.2.149 Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality. Pantheon Books. García, O., L. Wei (2014). Translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. Palgrave Macmillan. Gill, J. (1863). Introductory text-​book to school education, method, and school management. Longman. Gove, M. (2011, September 1). Gove Speech on ‘the underclass’ in full. Politics.co.uk. www.polit​ics.co.uk/​ comment-​analysis/​2011/​09/​01/​gove-​speech-​on-​the-​underclass-​in-​full Gove, M. (2013, February 5). The progressive betrayal. Social Market Foundation. www.smf.co.uk/​mich​ ael-​gove-​spe​aks-​at-​the-​smf/​ Hart, B., & Risley, T. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experience of young American children. Brookes. Heath, S. (1983). Ways with words: language, life, and work in communities and classrooms. Cambridge University Press. Heller, M., & McElhinny, B. (2017). Language, capitalism, colonialism: toward a critical history. University of Toronto Press. Hirsch, E.D. (1987). Cultural literacy: what every American needs to know. Houghton. Holborow, M. (1999). The politics of English. Sage. Holliday, A. (2006). Native-​speakerism. ELT Journal, 60(4), 385–​387. https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​elt/​ccl​030 Hubbard, S. (2020). ‘Speak for Change’ inquiry APPG responses. YouTube Oracy All-​Party Parliamentary Group, 43:34–​55:34mins. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​mkjC​k3s9​abw Hudson, R. (2020). Comment on ‘The policy and policing of language in schools’ by Ian Cushing. Language in Society, 49(3), 451–​460. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S00474​0452​0000​366 Hudson, R., & Walmsley, J. (2005). The English patient: English grammar and teaching in the twentieth century. Journal of Linguistics, 41, 593–​622. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S00222​2670​5003​464 Irvine, J., & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35–​84). School of American Research Press. Johnson, E., Avineri, N., & Johnson, D. (2017). Exposing gaps in/​between discourses of linguistic deficits. International Multilingual Research Journal, 11(1), 5–​22. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​19313​ 152.2016.1258​185 Jones, K. (2014). Conservatism and educational crisis: the case of England. Education Inquiry, 5(1), 89–​108. https://​doi.org/​10.3402/​edui.v5.24046

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13 LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTIVISM AS SOCIAL PRESCRIPTION The case of gender Evan D. Bradley*

1. Introduction A great deal of attention has been given in recent years to pronouns as an emerging front in the LGBTQ+​rights movement, garnering much more space in the mainstream press than might be expected for morphosyntactic shifts (Manjoo, 2019). Singular they was named the word of the year by Merriam-​Webster, and word of the decade by the American Dialect Society (along with ‘[my] pronouns’ as word of 2020; Mekour, 2020). Although none yet explicitly endorse neopronouns, several major style guides have recently expanded their guidance on singular they, including the Associated Press (2017), American Psychological Association (2019), and Modern Language Association (2020). Clearly, we are witnessing a period of rapid change within a long context of shift. These changes do not occur in isolation, of course, but are merely the latest chapter in language change. Neopronouns are less well known, but may yet follow a similar trend of greater awareness and acceptance in mainstream English. For all this positive attention, developments in pronoun use are still attacked in both popular (Clark, 2021) and academic circles (McBride, 2017; The Economist, 2021). To what degree are these objections about language or about gender? This chapter has three primary objectives. First, I will compare several formulations of types of prescriptivism, in order to better distinguish their linguistic aspects from their social ones. Rather than an exhaustive review of all theories, I will focus on those that bear particularly on issues of identity and harm, as mediated by language, and how these might affect whether and how linguists and other language scholars engage with or in these forms of prescriptivism. In particular, I will suggest that the framework of transcriptivism, which links the descriptive generation of linguistic knowledge to linguists’ duty to consider the methods, effects, and applications of such knowledge within the descriptive paradigm, can help delineate between useful vs. harmful forms of prescriptivism. However, my suggestions are not incompatible with other frameworks which place all forms of language norming or value judgments under the umbrella of prescriptivism because they can also be distinguished by the motivations and effects of such prescriptivisms.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-15

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Next, I will consider social attitudes, particularly about gender, as species of prescriptivism, and analyse their relation to linguistic prescriptivism by reviewing literature and data suggesting that resistance to gender-​neutral and nonbinary language is often driven by extralinguistic or nonlinguistic attitudes, rather than by language ideology. In particular, I want to suggest that, at least in this case, linguistic prescriptivism may at times be driven by or secondary to prescriptive ideology about the nature and performance of gender (rather than the other way around). Finally, I will discuss the role of linguists in reducing gender-​based linguistic violence, particularly misgendering, within the frameworks of prescriptivism and transcriptivism introduced here.

2.  Delineating and distinguishing prescriptivism(s) Rather than an exhaustive review of every perspective on prescriptivism, I will focus on those which bear particularly on issues of identity and ethics, and which attempt to define which forms are compatible with, or can be defended on the basis of, descriptive and sociolinguistic evidence. A common thread in commentary on prescriptivism acknowledges that prescription is often as much, or more, about people than it is about linguistics. As is often taught in introductory linguistics classes, aesthetic or other judgments about languages or dialects are often based more on attitudes toward their speakers than on objective characteristics of the languages themselves. That is, linguistic features are arbitrary, as are aesthetic judgements about them. One key feature of this—for now, narrow—definition of prescriptivism is that prescriptivists generalize a preference for one variety of their language (e.g., the prestige variety and/​or their own variety) into a judgment about the inherent value of that variety. Thus, prescriptivism is one form of social prejudice, and one that is linked to biases toward other social groups (e.g., by race, geography, socio-​economic status). This narrow view could be characterized as hinging on an inherent superiority of prestige varieties, and a default stance which regards linguistic changes with suspicion or hostility.

2.1  Prescriptivism as an umbrella Barber and Stainton (2021) take a somewhat broader view of prescriptivism, which encompasses any value judgment about linguistic choices, noting that there is no single definition of prescriptivism which encompasses all stances typically concerned with judgements about language, instead uniting them under the general concept of language norming. This is slightly different, but comparable with Cameron’s (1995) notion of verbal hygiene (also discussed in this volume), in which various manifestations of prescriptivism should be evaluated on their own merits, rather than dismissed simply by virtue of being prescriptive. They contend that, because it is unavoidable to engage in such norming, it is better to do it transparently and with due caution, and they outline five dimensions along which the merits of possible linguistic norms may be evaluated: aesthetic, promoting beautiful or effective communication styles; practical, aiding in communication; epistemic, transmitting knowledge; moral, promoting good or avoiding harm; and political, promoting equality or social progress. The authors note that “practical prescriptivism demands credible and specific arguments, with due concern for unintended effects” (Barber & Stainton, 2021, p. 17) and that “even an earnest descriptivism might reasonably hold that the science of linguistics ... can and should serve as a departure point for informed social change” (p. 20). For example, an ecologist may study the biological effects of pollution, and based on this empirical evidence, advocate for its reduction as a moral good, without risking contradiction or sacrificing scientific integrity. 214

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Thus, they acknowledge that an ethically tenable prescriptivism should be based on sound linguistic facts, yet not limited to them, and should take into account the broader context of how language and language reforms serve and affect their users.

2.2  Linguistic prescription as a mask for other prejudices Despite the acknowledgement (at least by linguists) that linguistic prescriptivism is driven by social factors, it is often ostensibly presented in the public sphere as being only or primarily about language. When this happens, prescriptivism can become a mask for other prejudices. This masking could be implicit (the prescriptivist is not aware of the social dimension of linguistic judgments), or the masking could be explicit, providing an opportunity for those with social biases to express them in a more “polite” way through language, rather than through direct criticism of the target demographic. Birch (1999) makes such an argument regarding the Oakland Ebonics controversy, contending that no meaningful debate of the educational merits of Ebonics was or could ever have been had because of the prevailing prescriptive attitudes about Ebonics/​African American Vernacular English (AAVE). The relative prestige of AAVE is, of course, correlated with attitudes toward African Americans, and “language prejudice often thinly masks deep-​ seated racial prejudices” (Birch, 1999, p. 54). While casual racism is no longer seen as acceptable in most circles, concern for preserving standard English is tolerated (or even celebrated). This prescriptivism therefore results from the privilege of proximity to standard English, and by extension to whiteness. Many prominent linguists have written on and advocated for an informed linguistic viewpoint regarding AAVE and other varieties of English, both during and after this particular controversy (Linguistic Society of America, 1997; Rickford, 1999; Pullum, 1999; inter alia) by highlighting the linguistic validity of these varieties and sometimes exposing their racist underpinnings. Of course, nonbinary language is not the same as AAVE, in part because it does not belong to as neatly a definable speech community, although the roots of such features, such as neopronouns, have their origins in queer communities (McNabb, 2017; Young, 2019). Rather than racism and classism, the relevant prejudices and privileges for pronouns stem from operating from a binary or essentialist view of gender, which serves as the prevailing social norm. Transgender language reform approaches language not merely as an expression of identity, but the primary way to construct these identities, both for individuals and within the broader public sphere where they may not previously have existed (Zimman, 2017). This is important, because the ways in which language users conceptualize gender influences how they use and interpret grammatical gender (Ackerman, 2019). Linguistic/​prescriptivist debates, then, are not always just about language standards and mutual intelligibility, nor even social group distinctions, but about whose identities can be represented or discussed within the linguistic community.

2.3  Are all prescriptivisms equal? So, are those advocating for linguistic change, such as the spread of a certain feature or variant, the real prescriptivists, or those resisting such change? In a sense, both are. Edwards (2012) considers a minimal prescriptivism, one which recognizes that intentional and unintentional choices about language use are often unavoidable, and prefers minimalist intervention when a choice is unavoidable. This minimalist approach identifies and attempts to resolve a tension within contemporary prescriptivism, which is reluctant to be authoritative (i.e., rejecting the inherent value formulation), but which nonetheless holds strong opinions about language. 215

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This is reminiscent of Birch’s (2001) notion of pragmatic prescriptivism, which occupies a midpoint along a continuum of linguistic ideologies, from equality (similar to the mainstream descriptive view in linguistics, that all varieties are equally valid and effective) to prejudice (that standard varieties are inherently superior). Pragmatic prescriptivism recognizes the validity and inherent equality of all language varieties, but balances this with the recognition that some are more accepted than others in certain (e.g., educational, professional) contexts, which may be unavoidable and which may require accommodation or assimilation by speakers of less prestigious varieties. In pragmatic prescriptivism, resistance to language change or reforms may be motivated by appeal to the grammatical norms of others (namely, users of standardized varieties). Thus, a pragmatically prescriptive attitude toward nonbinary language reform may recognize that these innovations are useful and valid, but should be avoided in some contexts in deference to those language users with more binary conceptions of gender and corresponding linguistic categories. Edwards acknowledges that all language planning or reform is prescriptivist to some degree, is inevitably coloured by ideology, and involves matters of identity. This results in change which is perceived by some language users as desirable progress but experienced as persecution by others. Crucially, under Edwards’ formulation of prescriptivism, “informed refusals not to intervene still reflect active assessment” (Edwards, 2012, p. 2738, emphasis original) and are therefore prescriptive as well. Therefore, refusals by layfolk and linguists alike to adopt or advocate for new forms because “it’s just my grammar,” although it may be defended on the basis of descriptivism, is still a prescriptive view within this framework. One other perspective on language ideology that is relevant to these controversies is transcriptivism (Kibbey, 2019). Transcriptivism, rather than placing the application of linguistic data to language reform, as situated by Cameron, Edwards, and Barber and Stainton under the rubric of acceptable prescriptivism, locates it within the descriptive paradigm. Kibbey considers effects more central than motivations, and moves some of these, namely those involving linguistic violence, under the domain of descriptivism and the application of descriptive linguistic and extralinguistic facts to communicative choices that all language users make. Transcriptivism is primarily concerned about the ethics of language scholars and their moral obligation toward their object of study (languages and language users) and the products of linguistic research (descriptions of languages and language users), as well as a responsibility to use this knowledge to disrupt systems of linguistic violence. For example, linguists generally do not oppose the use of slurs because they are ungrammatical or ugly, but instead oppose them because they hurt people, and consider this a separate question from inherent-​value prescriptive ideas about slurs and profanity as ugly or uncultured. Despite their differences, the common features of Barber and Stainton’s language norming, Cameron’s verbal hygiene, Edwards’ modified minimalist prescriptivism, and Kibbey’s transcriptivism include the fact that value judgements about linguistic changes (whether spontaneous or explicit reforms) are properly contingent on (i) accurate description of linguistic facts, and (ii) extralinguistic or nonlinguistic effects. In any case, any position regarding linguistic change or resistance to such needs to be defended on the basis of some extralinguistic effects; just which extralinguistic effects are relevant or more compelling is where these approaches might differ, or where different linguistics or language users may reach different conclusions. What the approaches agree on is that the narrow, inherent-​value version of prescriptivism is usually incompatible with the facts of language as defined by descriptive linguistic research. For example, claims that “singular they is illogical and confusing” are at odds with data on pronoun perception (Ackerman, 2019; Bradley et al., 2019). Another key link, especially between Edwards’ and Kibbey’s views is the untenability of neutrality: for Edwards, this is 216

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because every choice is forced (and choosing not to change is a choice); and for Kibbey, this is because the moral obligations of linguists extend to the products of their research/​descriptions of language, language use, and language users. The distinction is that the former is concerned with the process of language use by its users, generally, while the latter is concerned with how scholars engage in the practice of linguistic research. The basis of any linguistic reform should be evaluated according to objective criteria including communicative function and social effects, as enumerated by Barber and Stainton. In the next section, I will examine the nature of gender ideology as the basis for resistance to gender-​neutral and nonbinary language reform, and then evaluate these prescriptive linguistic and gendered attitudes within the frameworks established in this section.

3.  Gender ideology as (and expressed by) prescriptivism Just as is the case with language variation along racial, geographic, or class variables, variation in gendered aspects of language is subject to language users’ attitudes about the social groups using or referred to by these variations. In the case of nonbinary language, transphobia and cisnormativity are the prejudiced attitudes which are often masked by linguistic prescriptivism. Although it has a long history, singular they is still the target of prescriptivism, despite being well established, especially in its epicene sense (Balhorn, 2004), and this is likely due to both linguistic and nonlinguistic factors. Bjorkman (2017) outlines how English users vary in their acceptance of different uses of singular they, including epicene, indefinite, and definite uses. The most innovative users do not require gender features to be computed in most (or perhaps any) cases between a pronoun and its antecedent, and so accept singular they even in definite uses. The most conservative users, on the other hand, require gender features to be computed, even when not expressed, and so they is not compatible even with antecedents like “the student” (because the only gender features available to these uses are binary). Thus a broadening of they is underway, with its leading edge being a nonbinary sense, used with individual, definite, or named antecedents; this can be observed by the more liberal use of nonbinary singular they among younger speakers (Conrod, 2019). Konnelly and Cowper (2020) link this progression of they to English users’ willingness or resistance to participate in this change. Although the linguistic steps in this change may seem small and incremental, I will suggest that the leap in the cognitive representation of gender required to enable this change may be larger, at least for some English users. A growing body of literature has found that nonlinguistic cognitive and social attitudes influence the way that English users perceive and use pronouns. Our own research has shown that the grammaticality of English gender-​neutral and nonbinary pronouns is related to not only linguistic prescriptivism, but also personality factors, gender role attitudes (Bradley, Schmid, and Lombardo, 2019), and benevolent sexism (Bradley, 2020). Hekanaho (2020) showed that objection to neopronouns (but not singular they) is related to holding binary views of gender. These general trends hold in other languages, as well. Sarrasin, et al. (2012) compared French, German, and English speakers’ attitudes about gender-​inclusive language reforms, finding that modern and hostile sexism are related to negative attitudes toward gender-​neutral language in French, German, and English, while benevolent sexism was predictive of more positive attitudes about such language in French. These individual differences in attitudes are related to differences in linguistic behaviours. Conrod (2018) found that misgendering is related to attitudes about transgender identities, and Bradley et al. (2021) linked misgendering to individual differences in ethical decision-​making. 217

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Ackerman (2019) distinguishes three components of gender: grammatical gender, a formal component of linguistic structure; biosocial gender, a complex of physical, mental, and cultural traits which together contribute to gender identity and its expression; and conceptual gender; the mental categories that individuals use to classify others. Ackerman argues that in English, unlike languages with more extensive grammatical gender, coreference resolution between pronouns and their referents is based on conceptual gender. Because such domain-​general mental categories are necessarily idiosyncratic, differences in conceptual gender could underlie many of the recent observations of individual differences in acceptance, interpretation, and production of nonbinary pronouns.

3.1  Change in gender, change in language Differences in conceptual gender as a driver of linguistic behaviour suggest that experience, whether personal or via socio-​cultural forces, can influence individuals’ fluency with nonbinary and gender-​neutral pronouns without (or with minimal) changes to the formal, grammatical features of the language or to domain-​specific parsing mechanisms. Indeed, Hernandez (2020) found that language users’ sexual orientation and gender (trans or cis) moderate the relationship between prescriptive grammar ideology and attitudes toward they (Hernandez, 2020). Likewise, our research (e.g., Bradley, Salkind, Moore, & Teitsort, 2019) has observed that those who know someone with they/​them pronouns or neopronouns are more accepting of and better able to interpret nonbinary singular they and neopronouns. This is congruent with observations of gender-​related change in other languages, as well. Perhaps the most well-​documented case of nonbinary language change in recent history is Swedish hen, created to serve as a gender-​neutral and nonbinary form alongside Swedish feminine and masculine forms. Attitudes toward hen have changed over time, related to exposure, including adoption in major media sources (Gustafson Sendén, et al., 2015). Gustafsson Sendén, Renström, and Lindqvist (2021) observed that age (younger), gender (women and nonbinary), political orientation (liberal or left-​wing), and interest in gender issues all contributed to more positive attitudes and increased rate of use of hen, suggesting that such change is related both to exposure and motivation. This is all in a language with a more extensive system of grammatical gender than English, emphasizing the importance of conceptual gender (Ackerman, 2019) and other nonlinguistic factors in coreference. This suggests that the wide acceptance of hen (50 per cent, according to Gustafsson et al., 2021) outpaces the awareness of any neopronoun in English for primarily nonlinguistic reasons. English’s reliance on conceptual gender could in fact be a double-​edged sword, either accelerating or stunting linguistic change for nonlinguistic, cultural reasons or even leading to variation (i.e., sociolects) within the language for non-​linguistic (i.e., ideological) reasons. Greater adoption of such reforms could even have a feedforward effect hen has been shown to reduce gender bias (Lindqvist, et al., 2019), potentially leading to further conceptual change in the linguistic community at large. Gustafsson Sendén et al. (2015) note the role of media, style guides and dictionaries in influencing public opinion about hen. Influential media sources and educational materials can spread and promote new forms, serving as a bridge between prescription and use, serving as a source of authority on the proper use of the language, and giving license to purely linguistic resistors to change their use to match those of linguistic authorities. Such changes in taste are more likely to satisfy pragmatic prescriptivists (Birch, 2001), but perhaps not the truly prejudiced prescriptivists, who may experience fragility at the simultaneous loss of their gendered and linguistic privilege, recalling Edwards’ (2012) characterization of feelings of persecution on the 218

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part of the targets of language reforms, who may see these style makers as caving to popular pressure, rather than upholding the inherent value of the “correct” language.

3.2  Prescribing gender Enforcement of the gender binary or of gender essentialism can be viewed as a form of social prescriptivism. The details are different, but this plays out in a similar way to linguistic prescriptivism. Those in a position of privilege (i.e., users of standardized language varieties, cisgender people) have the luxury of viewing their own gender (and the binary) as natural and correct for everyone, and those of others as other, inferior, or in need of assimilation. This is evident in some of the comments of participants in the language research conducted in my lab. In addition to experimental tasks, we ask participants questions about whether and how they use they and neopronouns, about their concept of gender, and about their awareness and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary identities. Some individuals express attitudes similar to inherent value prescriptivism (that there is some version of English/​gender which is “correct”, “superior”, or “natural”). These are the participants who indicate their agreement with statements like, “there are exactly two genders” (44 per cent of respondents in our most recent study, compared to 32 per cent who disagreed), and “sex and gender are the same thing” (30 per cent of respondents, compared to 56 per cent who disagreed). After these questions, we invite participants to provide any further explanation of their responses. These responses suggest a wide range of motivations (or at least self-​rationale, since explicit awareness of linguistic intuitions is far from guaranteed) for the linguistic behaviours we observe, but they generally fall into several categories which illustrate various types and levels of endorsement or resistance to nonbinary language which are reminiscent of the taxonomies of prescriptivism articulated in the previous section by Birch (2001), among others. Below, I present some of these comments, and explain how they illustrate instances of the several manifestations of prescriptivism enumerated in the previous section for language, but applied by these participants to gender concepts as well as language. Content warning: some of these responses express cisnormative and transphobic attitudes. Many responses indicate that language users are making deliberate choices to align their usage with their values (e.g., engaging in verbal hygiene; Cameron, 1995), especially the beliefs that all genders are valid (cf. equality; Birch, 2001) and worthy of linguistic accommodation (cf. the morality criterion; Barber and Stainton, 2021): “They/​Them can both refer to someone when you don’t know their gender, and when someone is non-​binary and they prefer to use they/​them pronouns instead of she or he. Everyone’s pronouns are valid and should be treated as such.” “If you don’t know ones gender and you don’t want to assume using they/​them would be best so that you don’t harm anyone. The absolute best would to probably ask them their pronouns but if you don’t have the pronouns available they and them are best.” “People can go by whatever they want. I will personally respect their self identity and will be glad to call them by their preferred pronouns.” “sex and gender are not the same thing according to the gender bread man. people can get offended when you dont adress them by their correct pronoun so thats why i try my best to do it. People should defiantly [sic] be aloud [sic] to choose their pronouns” “I do not judge people and I try to make them feel comfortable when I talk to anyone.” 219

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“People should be able to decide [how] to describe themselves” “Depending on the situation, you don’t want to put a gender on someone you barely know especially in today’s society.” Some of these respondents express difficulty learning to use new pronouns, but also that they try to become more fluent because of their values or to facilitate effective communication (cf. pragmatic prescriptivism; Birch, 2001): “I try to refer to people using correct pronouns but sometimes I slip due to previous habit or because I default to a ‘grammatically correct’ pronoun. I am aware of the problem and try to correct but I wanted to be factual on here.” “I have to admit, I am really not up to speed in this area. I don’t know what the current social trend is and I have an English degree, so I would tend to use the language the way it was intended, but at the same time, I would not want to intentionally hurt someone’s feelings. So I would bend the English rules to accommodate them and be inclusive to the person(s).” Others, rather than expressing conflict with their internal grammars or education, express conflict with their personal views on gender. This suggests that the masking of nonlinguistic prejudices (cf. Birch, 1999) by linguistic prescriptivism may not always be implicit: “I feel like it might be because growing up there were always just males and females so its more of a adjusting thing for me. It’s hard to think a different way about something you’ve known your entire life.” “I am traditional and see things for what they are but I also know how to treat others and be compassionate and accommodate their intentions.” “I don’t like to partake in the debate on whether or not there are more than two genders/​sexes. But I will respect a person’s choice and pronouns. It is just not a personal belief of mine.” “I usually will try to be respectful to everyone and refer to someone as they wish. Although, I do not believe that it should be forced upon someone to recognize someone as something different, especially if they are not aware of the persons identification.” “People can do what they want as long as it doesn’t effect [sic] my views.” Other respondents express simple, inherent value linguistic prescriptivism, without reference to gender: “I was told that they and them were plural growing up and I still believe that.” “its the definition of the word [they].” Finally, many respondents express defiance, or even outright hostility, toward both linguistic variants, the concepts of transgenderism and nonbinary gender, and trans and nonbinary people specifically (cf. prejudice; Birch, 2001) “I don’t think They/​Them should be [a]‌way to describe a persons gender.” “if its a guy [I’m] calling him a guy if a girl [I’m] calling her a girl”

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“I believe that everyone comes as either a man or woman, other things are what humans chose to be” “I believe in the scientific evidence Male/​Female, only 2 different genders/​identities” “Because I believe being trans or saying theirs [sic] another mythical gender is wrong and should be a crime.” Under broader views of prescriptivism (Cameron, 1995; Edwards, 2012; Barber and Stainton, 2021), all of these are competing prescriptions for how to conceptualize gender, and how to express and negotiate that gender through language. The merit of these views, and of nonbinary language reforms can be evaluated within Barber and Stainton’s framework (here, I set aside the principle of aesthetics, since this may be regarded as the least compelling criterion by many linguists). In terms of practicality, the use of nonbinary pronouns, honorifics, and other terms more accurately communicates identity, as opposed to using masculine or feminine terms for nonbinary people. Further, the use of pronouns like they in a gender-​neutral sense, instead of the paired he/​she, is maximally inclusive of possible identities referred to. In consideration of unintended consequences, as cautioned by Barber and Stainton, use of singular they sometimes creates ambiguity with plural they. This is not unique to they, as you in many varieties of English serves double duty as singular and plural, and is usually distinguishable by context. As Barber and Stainton observe, time tends to sort these matters out, and “if a phrase is useful, it will probably survive” (2021, p. 17). This has certainly been the case for pronouns like you and will likely be the case with singular they, in all its senses. Epistemic function can be considered on a macro or micro level. Neopronouns, especially, provide new linguistic categories for concepts which could not previously be efficiently encoded in English. At the individual level, nonbinary neopronouns transmit information about their referent in the same manner that she and he transmit information about femininity and masculinity, respectively. The morality of nonbinary language lies primarily in the reduction of harm to trans and nonbinary people, although appeals to other moral values may be relevant. Avoiding misgendering avoids harm, especially to trans and nonbinary people (McLemore, 2015; Freeman & Stewart, 2018; Atteberry-​Ash, et al., 2019). Misgendering is an example of a microaggression. Although each microaggression causes only a small amount of harm, it results from and perpetuates an oppressive system that causes great harm to individuals and groups, which Rini (2020) characterizes as a structural account: what makes any particular act a microaggression is that it “implements a function of subtle oppression” (p. 78). Crucially, the harm of microaggressions depends not on the intent of the aggressor, but on their effect upon their recipient by perpetuating and reinforcing oppressive social forces. Most subtle, and perhaps most insidious, among these are those acts which we are not even aware of. The grammatical patterns of our language are a perfect example of behaviours that affect others, but which are often opaque to our own introspection without some effort. Nonbinary and transgender language reforms are components of political movements for trans and nonbinary recognition, liberation, and equality. This includes recognition both in the general public discourse as well as within educational and legal environments with their own unique linguistic contexts. Many such reforms extend feminist language reforms which targeted androcentric language norms (Bodine, 1975). However, nonbinary language not only shifts the use of existing terminology (e.g., firefighter for fireman, singular they), but also creates new terms for concepts that cannot be adequately expressed in the available dominant language (e.g., neopronouns).

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These are but a few considerations of several factors related to the viability and value of nonbinary pronouns, which are just one component of nonbinary language. Of course, others may arrive at different judgments than I have regarding any of these criteria, but a key consideration is that, recalling Edwards (2012), refusing to incorporate a new variant is still prescriptivism, and the choice not to change when confronted by new nonbinary (or otherwise nonconforming) variants of gender, be they linguistic or embodied in real people, is as moral a choice as any other. Zimman (2016) articulates this, noting that, “there is no apolitical stance we can take on pronouns”. In the final section, I will contend this applies not only to language users, but to linguists as well.

4.  Descriptivism, prescriptivism, and linguistic violence within and outside linguistics Many linguists cherish the ideal of value-​free description of language, especially, but not exclusively, in more formal subfields. On the other hand, linguistics (again, especially but not exclusively, in subfields like sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and anthropological linguistics) is also concerned with language’s origins, social contexts, and effects, which includes linguistic prejudice and linguistic manifestations of social prejudices. Based on the concepts of prescriptivism and data regarding gendered language outlined in the first two sections, I hope to convince linguists and other language scientists to attend to two important ramifications: the first outward looking (how we apply our expertise in the world) and the other inward looking (how we conduct ourselves within the discipline). Looking out into the world, linguists are pretty good at recognizing linguistic prescriptivism, whether they view it in its narrow definition (i.e., “no, that regional accent does not indicate laziness”), or in some of its broader senses. Linguists are also skilled at using their linguistic expertise in some social situations to bring formal, historical, or social context to linguistic debates and (micro)aggressions while maintaining their descriptive stance regarding the linguistic facts (i.e., “yes, racial slurs are perfectly grammatical, but should be avoided due to the harms they cause”). In this way, linguists may adopt the role of impartial language “fact-​checker” or parliamentarian, in contrast to the partial, prescriptivist linguistic punditry common among language columnists and amateur enthusiasts. Is there something different about nonbinary language because it involves pronouns (i.e., a more “grammatical” change as opposed to a purely vocabulary addition)? Or could it be because nonbinary language changes are not just about recognizing the validity of some other variety, but about changing our own language, which sets off our descriptivist defenses? Many linguists seem to implicitly adopt Edwards’ (2012) view that we should engage in prescriptivism as infrequently as is possible, celebrate linguistic diversity, and avoid telling others what to do. However, we should also bear in mind that it may be impossible to remain neutral in some linguistic debates, and that doing so may even be an abdication of our responsibility as language experts. Transcriptivism (Kibbey, 2019) provides a framework for linguistic scholarship within the descriptivist paradigm, within which it is possible to maintain a commitment to objective empirical analyses without abandoning moral obligations as language users and language experts. Kibbey illustrates this through an analysis of a particular pronoun controversy, noting that a purely descriptive approach would present the linguistic differences between the two sides as competing, morally equivalent prescriptions, perhaps also recognizing the power differentials at play between student activists on one side and university administrators and state legislators on the other. A transcriptive approach, on the other hand, would present these same

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descriptive facts, but also take the additional step to recognize and condemn linguistic violence on the part of the more powerful party against the minoritized language activists. Turning inward, transcriptivism is concerned equally with the conduct of linguistic inquiry as with its applications. These go hand-​in-​hand in terms of how the researchers and subjects of the research are subject to systems of linguistic prejudice and violence. Key to this is the recognition that, as language researchers, we are not immune to the same social forces, biases, and worldviews as other language users reviewed in the previous section. Pronoun controversies are not the first time linguistics has had to grapple with social issues impinging on language, both within and outside the field. For example, Charity Hudley, et al. (2020) argue that linguistics needs to deepen its theoretical engagement with race and racism by increasing the diversity of linguistic scholars and through interdisciplinary engagement with other fields. Failure to do so further marginalizes underrepresented linguists and produces poor or incomplete scholarship by failing to take diverse perspectives into consideration. Kotek, et al. (2020) analysed sexism within linguistics, finding that linguistics texts systematically reproduce gender stereotypes and male privilege in their examples, despite this issue having been raised within the field decades ago. Gender prescriptivism, as discussed in the previous section, may be easier to miss than other forms of prejudice, either because it is a newer concept to many, or because it seems tangential to the linguistic system; however, it is crucial to understanding the origins and course of ongoing changes in English (and many other languages). Failure to recognize such forces can result in the assumption or even enforcement of gender binary by linguistics/​linguists. A full accounting of the types of interactions between language and gender prescriptivism is beyond the present scope, but those which linguists ought to especially remain aware of include: 1. Linguistic aspects of gender norms: these have been the target of feminist reforms for decades, and continue to be subverted by queer communities; 2. Linguistic reification of the gender binary and cisnormativity in linguistic analyses, examples, and theories: this includes assuming constructs such as “natural gender” or by neglecting to account for and engage with linguistic varieties which do not behave according to older analyses. Failure to address these biases may, in effect, provide mutual reinforcement for binary gender prescriptivism through language, because it gives coverage to those opposed to nonbinary and transgender recognition to use language as a shield if these innovations are treated by the linguistic establishment as new, fringe, or unnatural. Regardless of linguists’ personal beliefs about gender, they need to be aware of them in order to fully understand languages. As Ackerman (2018) cautions, academic discussions of pronouns cannot be separated from the lives of individuals affected by them. This may be improved by increasing diversity among linguistic practitioners, seeking a wider range of language communities, and through engagement with neighboring disciplines regarding gender.

5. Summary In this chapter, I have reviewed research on aspects of gender-​neutral and nonbinary language to suggest that prescriptivism against such varieties, like other forms of prejudicial prescriptivism, is not primarily about language, but about social prejudices, and should be evaluated as such. Particular to the development of nonbinary language are cognitive constructs of gender

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which may inhibit linguistic change for some language users, based on their personal beliefs, although this may be masked by attitudes about language. Pragmatic models of prescriptivism provide criteria for evaluating competing varieties or reforms based on communicative power and the ability to create, negotiate, and represent identities. Crucially, I have argued that the adoption of linguistic innovations as well as the refusal to adopt them carry equal moral weight and thus a pure, value-​neutral descriptivism may be an untenable position, both for linguists and language users. Transcriptivism provides a framework to solve this dilemma within the descriptive paradigm and to recognize and reduce linguistic violence by becoming more aware of extralinguistic factors which may drive (or obscure) the linguistic facts. Greater attention to these trends will improve the field of linguistics in terms of both the products of our research as well as the diversity and safety of its practitioners.

Notes * Acknowledgements: I would like to thank many colleagues for helpful discussions and advice which helped form the basis for this paper, especially Laura Evans, Kirby Conrod, Lex Konnelly, Joshua Raclaw, Lauren Ackerman, Ártemis López, Maxwell Hope, Eliana Peretz, and Jeffrey Heinz. A word on my own perspective: as a linguist, I have a general interest in describing the full picture of language use, including the grammatical facts as well as the interactional and societal forces at play in language communities. As a psychologist, I have a particular interest in including within said picture the individual attitudes and cognitive characteristics of language users, including how they interact with one another and how they develop over the lifespan. I am not a particular expert on (nor am I a member of) the language communities of transgender, nonbinary, and other queer language users; therefore, I rely on scholars from these communities to inform me about their history, features, and effects. I am most interested in applying this knowledge to better understand the wider language community (for the most part in English, but occasionally of other languages), which consists mostly of cisgender language users. This dynamic is replicated within academic linguistics, and so this endeavor consists of a two-​fold application of this research, both within and outside the language sciences.

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Evan D. Bradley Mekour, D. (2020, February 18). How ‘they’ became word of the decade. Voice of America News. www. voan​ews.com/​usa/​all-​about-​amer​ica/​how-​they-​bec​ame-​word-​dec​ade Modern Language Association. (2020, March 4). How do I use singular they? MLA Style Center. https://​ style.mla.org/​using-​singu​lar-​they/​ Pullum, G. K. (1999). African American vernacular English is not standard English with mistakes. In R. S. Wheeler (Ed.), The workings of language: from prescriptions to perspectives (pp. 59–​66). Greenwood Publishing Group. Rickford, J. R. (1999). The Ebonics controversy in my backyard: A sociolinguist’s experiences and reflections. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 3(2), 267–​266. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​1467-​9481.00076 Rini, R. (2020). The ethics of microaggression. Routledge. Young, E. (2019). They/​them/​their: a guide to nonbinary and genderqueer identities. Jessica Kingsley. Zimman, L. (2016, August 26). Pronouns have always been political. Trans Talk. https://​med​ium.com/​ trans-​talk/​prono​uns-​have-​alw​ays-​been-​politi​cal-​a32c7​53a1​539 Zimman, L. (2017). Transgender language reform: some challenges and strategies for promoting trans-​ affirming, gender-​inclusive language. Journal of Language and Discrimination, 1(1), 83–​14. https://​doi. org/​10.1558/​jld.33139

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14 GRASSROOTS PRESCRIPTIVISM Morana Lukač and Theresa Heyd

1. Introduction Linguistic prescriptivism is often thought of as a phenomenon of longue durée –​it is frequently viewed diachronically, characterized by sustained ideologies, or attitudes that are conserved in speech communities and tend to resurface at intervals (see Spitzmüller (2007) on waves of linguistic purism in Germany; and Cameron (2008) on “historically persistent” aspects of gendered language ideologies). Seen from this perspective, it is not surprising that the foundational work by Milroy and Milroy (2002 [1985]) on standard language ideology is centred around the notion of the complaint tradition and explores prescriptivism and language ideology through “[looking] at the history of linguistic complaint from the Middle Ages onward, and [relating] this to present-​day continuations” (Milroy & Milroy, 2002, p. 26). In other words, an understanding of the prescriptive ideology as continuous, long-​term, and best viewed diachronically informs many key works in the discipline. Despite this entrenched perspective, it is understood that linguistic prescriptivism is subject to change –​change regarding the linguistic features and practices under scrutiny, change regarding the ideologies that come to be associated with them, change regarding ways of speaking about and regulating and policing such linguistic practices. In this chapter on concepts and practices of grassroots prescriptivism, we consider forms of prescriptivism that are arguably recent or at least capture the social imaginary of our time. Thus, we are interested in prescriptive phenomena that are (or appear to be) bottom-​up rather than top-​down, produced and reproduced within communities, networks, and socialities rather than named and visible “experts”, and at phenomena that tend to be styled, prima facie, as ludic, ironic, or trivial, but which, unsurprisingly, contain the typical power differentials and hegemonic gestures traditionally associated with linguistic prescriptivism. Whether these practices are indeed recent and emergent or whether they have existed for a long time and have merely been less than visible in the copresence of overt top-​down prescriptivism is a matter of debate. To situate practices of grassroots prescriptivism in contemporary societies and discourse communities, we connect them to shifted constellations of (linguistic) authorities, and specifically to late-​modern publics (Heyd & Schneider, 2019). Seeing that, in its most tangible form, these new constellations of linguistic authority and public discourse can

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-16

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be found in digital practices, the bulk of our argument and case study is geared towards ongoing practices of digital prescriptivism. In the remaining parts of this chapter, we first offer an insight into the theoretical background of our study and define grassroots prescriptivism as one form of a prescriptive practice. We then argue for the need to re-​examine the notions of authority and publics in describing contemporary forms of digital grassroots prescriptivism, with a specific focus on written and multimodal practices. Finally, prior to presenting our case study of Reddit’s metalinguistic discussions, we define the forms and structures as well as topics and targets of digital prescriptivism on which we focus in more detail. The second part of this chapter introduces the analysis of a Reddit discussion thread in which users of the platform discuss the preferred pronunciation variant of an internet coinage, the word imgur. Our analysis of this self-​initiated digital grassroots debate demonstrates the presence of underlying linguistic ideologies associated with the shared linguistic norms and hierarchies of the Reddit community. While our analytical interest is primarily geared towards Anglophone practice, we suggest that many of our findings are not language-​specific and hold for different linguistic and cultural contexts.

2.  Theoretical background 2.1  Prescriptivism: top-​down, bottom-​up and beyond Linguistic prescriptivism is understood, in the following, as a formalized and pronounced form of language ideology, in line with insights from linguistic anthropology (see Gal & Woolard, 2001) and studies on language policing (see the collection in Blommaert et al., 2009). Whereas language ideology encompasses a broader understanding of attitudes and hegemonic figurations, prescriptivist practice coalesces around largely specific rules, lauded or sanctioned linguistic practices, policies, or institutions. Nevertheless, we assume that all prescriptive practices are an outcome of language ideologies, that is “representations through which language is imbued with cultural meaning” (Cameron, 2012, p. 287) and, more specifically, as strategies of manifesting societal power relations and inequalities through linguistic practice. Thus, prescriptivist stances towards vocal fry are not, in fact, aimed at the finer points of prosodic register, but at differentials of age and gender (specifically, at young women; see Peterson, 2020, p. 29); the policing of minority languages is not, in fact, driven by a wish for mutual intelligibility, but by imaginations of the nation state and national power (see Gal & Woolard, 2001); and the stigmatization of double negation constructions in American English varieties is not concerned with assertional logic, but is fuelled by racist and classist animus toward Black and southern speakers (see Peterson 2020, p. 110f.). Practices of linguistic prescriptivism are, in this epistemological framework, entrenched and recognizable linguistic routines of reproducing language ideologies and thereby enacting societal power differentials. Because of this understanding of prescriptivism-​ as-​ ideology and ideology-​ as-​ hierarchy, studies of linguistic prescriptivism have a tendency, either implicitly or explicitly, to assume vertical relations of influence as shaping the process of prescription. Specifically, prescription is often conceived of as a top-​down process, dispensed from above by individuals, institutions or small groups endowed with power. Whereas Pullum (2004) describes this kind of top-​level actor as “a very vocal class of people I will call prescriptive ideologues” that are part of the “intelligentsia” of the “Anglophone world” (p. 1), Pinker (1994) refers to “language mavens” (p. 373), and Blommaert (1999) famously calls them “ideology brokers” (p. 11). Who belongs to these powerful elites depends on the linguistic and societal context observed, but is likely 228

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to involve certain expectable functions and professions: grammarians, language associations, or academies and educators; politicians and similar public stakeholders; journalists and publishers. Thus Spitzmüller (2007) in his analysis of objections to borrowing from English or anti-​Anglo purism in the German-​speaking world identifies “purists, linguists and journalists (plus, at a certain stage of the debate, politicians)” as groups who “have participated in the given discourse” (p. 262). These powerful ­figures –​whether identifiable by name or associated more generally with the power structures and social roles of a given society –​are seen as imbued with prescriptivist influence both through the symbolic power that they exert on the linguistic market, through formal and informal networks and hegemonic structures, but also through very concrete and material forms of decision-​making, such as concrete policies, editorial decisions, or educational implementations in classrooms and lecture halls. This focus on vertical, top-​ down structures of enacting prescriptivist practice is well-​ researched and represents a key pillar in much of the reasoning around the making of linguistic authority. Yet in the light of substantial transformations of societies on a global scale, the early twenty-​first century presents an opportunity to re-​examine these broad assumptions. These societal transformations, involving processes of globalization, of increasing mobility and fluidity, have in particular produced new digital publics, and new networked structures and practices of communication (see Blommaert, 2010; and Deumert, 2014 on linguistic perspectives on globalization and mobile communication). While power differentials and hegemonic structures within societies have without a doubt remained in place, and, arguably, undergone new calcifications of right-​wing and neo-​authoritarian regimes in many places in the world, it is nevertheless observable that the joint forces of globalization and digitization have opened new practices of communication, new ways of claiming or negotiating linguistic authority, and new discourses about language. The first to prompt this re-​examination was Beal (2010) who engaged with “popular prescriptivism in the 21st century” (p. 57) in her analysis of printed and online sources discussing punctuation, or, more specifically, the greengrocer’s apostrophe. While Beal is intensely concerned with diachronic continuities, rather than disruptive practices, of prescriptivism, her paper is the first to pose the question “why prescriptivism has returned with such a vengeance in the 21st century” (p. 57). As part of her dataset, she examines popular sites of digital prescriptivism, in particular the website of the so-​called Apostrophe Protection Society (current URL: www.apo​stro​phe.org.uk​). While Beal’s treatment of this digital platform is short, it was to our knowledge one of the earliest forays into examining digital prescriptivism, and prescriptivist practice as an activity of online communities. This approach directly leads on to new ways of analysing power dynamics in prescriptivist discourse: namely, an engagement with language and society that is not (necessarily) restricted to “ideology brokers” (Blommaert, 1999, p. 11) and overt stakeholders occupying powerful positions in society, but that is equally accessible from a bottom-​up directionality, shaping, producing, and reproducing language ideology from everyday practices of digital engagement. In the past decade, this new attention to emergent forms of prescriptivist practice has led to a more focused analysis of forms of prescriptivism that are, in the broadest terms, not organized top-​down, but in different ways. In particular, recent studies have explored this under the guise of grassroots prescriptivism (Heyd, 2014; Lukač, 2018), thus taking up the spatial metaphor of up/​down and counter-​directionality. The idea of grassroots prescriptivism borrows the semantics of grassroots initiatives and political action, and thus describes prescriptivist practice as a form of metalinguistic action that is not restricted to small powerful elites. Instead, the term encapsulates the idea that language ideologies exist, and play out below these formalized and institutionalized levels: locally, disjointedly, based on individuals and small groups, and often in 229

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self-​initiated, participatory, and communal ways. Lukač (2018) offers the following working definition of grassroots prescriptivism: Bottom-​up or grassroots prescriptive efforts are here understood as those initiated by lay members of the general public, especially in contrast to top-​down prescriptivism that is carried out institutionally. Whereas the most commonly explored prescriptive efforts are those initiated by official language institutions and authorities, grassroots prescriptivists wage their battles in the media by writing letters to newspaper editors, calling radio stations and engaging in online discussions on topics relating to usage. Lukač, 2018, p. 26 Earlier, Heyd (2014) laid the focus even more strongly on notions of participation and communities of practice enabling grassroots prescriptivist discourse –​a situation not limited to, but found specifically in, digital environments: a form of grassroots prescriptivism [...] operates at the level of individual language users or small-​scale linguistic communities of practice. Simply put, in the participatory culture that is becoming typical for many forms of discourse in the early twenty-​ first century, anyone can be a ‘prescriptive ideologue’. Heyd, 2014, p. 493 Taken together, these two descriptions can thus be seen here as a working definition of what we understand by the term grassroots prescriptivism: a form of prescriptivist practice that is • associated with lay members of the general public; • produced, received, and reproduced at the level of the individual, of small groups or communities of practice; • marked by participatory practices; and • associated with (though not necessarily bound to) digital environments and practices. Importantly, grassroots prescriptivism is not a zero-​sum game; it does not imply the decline of longstanding hegemonic systems enforced through linguistic prescription. Quite to the contrary, these longstanding pathways of associating societal stratification, language ideology, and the making of linguistic rules remain firmly in place, as witnessed through many forms of ongoing language policing, from anti-​feminist backlash against initiatives for inclusive language, to prescriptions regarding normative monolingualism. The following two sections seek to shed light on the context and complications out of which grassroots prescriptivism has arisen, by focusing on underlying sociolinguistic theories of changing publics and authorities, and by afterwards zooming in on the specifics of digital grassroots prescriptivism.

2.2  Changing authorities, changing publics As argued above, the understanding of (digital) prescriptivism outlined here is inextricably linked to wider concepts from anthropological linguistics and sociolinguistics. Specifically, it concerns changing ways in which the relation between language use and publics, as well as language use and authority has been conceptualized, in particular in the transition from modernist to late-​modern theories of language, publics, and socialities. In their overview on mediatized forms of language policing, Blommaert et al. (2009) had already hinted at these complications, 230

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without directly spelling out the links between changing publics and changing prescriptive practices, pointing to the notion that “(m)ultilingual media contexts demonstrate emerging media practices and policing that call into question the concept of language codified in the modernist era [...] in official language policies” (pp. 203–​204). These practices can be hard to classify in terms of established dichotomies (e.g., top-​down/​bottom-​up) and continua (e.g., overt–​covert). Since then, sociolinguistic contributions (in particular, Deumert, 2015; Heyd & Schneider, 2019) have focused on understandings of such “wild and noisy publics” (Deumert, 2015, no pagination) with greater attention. Specifically, this critique targets Habermasian understandings of publics and the public discourse that takes place in them as orderly, civilized, and rational discourse, understandings which often framed these kinds of publics as produced by and for a white, male, educated middle class. In applying sociological critique such as in Gardiner (2004), it has been argued that such modernist readings of public discourse efface the “messier” parts of public discourse which, rather than engaging in the civil encounters in salons and democratic institutions that Habermas discusses, produce loud, heteroglossic, and transgressive ways of speaking. While such spaces have probably always existed, the societal givens of late or liquid modernity make them particularly relevant so that it becomes increasingly unclear and contested who makes claims to (linguistic) authority, who desires it, and who (under certain circumstances) disavows it. As Heyd and Schneider (2019) argue, [t]‌he complex discourses of securing authority in late modern publics, with elite positioning no longer being an unmarked force from “above,” imply a partial blurring of sociolinguistic dichotomies –​of relationships such as “above” and “below”, “standard” and “non-standard”, “minority” and “majority”. Heyd and Schneider, 2019, p. 436 These tendencies become particularly relevant when digital communities and socialities are understood as new or recently emerged publics. The blurring of dichotomies –​not just the ones pointed to above –​has become a central characteristic of digital public spaces, such that digital publics have increasingly been described as convergent spaces (see Heyd, 2014). For example, digital communication practices have long been analysed as a challenge to conventional dichotomies of spoken vs written language, often producing intermediate, hybrid or ambivalent new modalities (see Heyd, 2021). Similarly, many forms of digital interaction blur the boundary between public and private, for example, through dynamics such as context collapse on social media (Marwick & boyd, 2011). In this sense, it becomes increasingly uncertain to which extent communication in online communities is understood as public and “visible” by all participants in the communicative tableau. In more recent developments, it has been pointed out that this complex array of digital publics has seen the emergence of complications in the form of new, previously non-​existent, or at least unnoticed authorities. For example, the increasing dominance of global digital service and platform providers and the associated platform capitalism means that a small number of international corporations exerts a considerable influence on what can be communicated, and how, in large parts of social media interaction. In addition, the increasing importance of algorithmic curation and machine learning for the filtering, presentation, and consumption of digital discourse has been seen as a potential factor in homogenizing what is understood to be proper, legitimate, and readable material online, and providing new norms for this (see, e.g., Gramling, 2016 on the invention of monolingualism). In summing up these complex, sometimes contradictory, aspects which have surrounded digital publics and continue to emerge in their context, some theorists have resorted to the 231

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notion of the post-​digital societies, communities, and forms of communication (e.g. Cramer, 2015). This label has been used to point to the increasing ubiquity of the digital so that the erstwhile online/​offline distinction has become blurred and meaningless. But it also encompasses the ambivalences sketched here between public and private, human and non-​human, top-​down and bottom-​up processes. Blommaert (2020) points to this in describing late-​modern global societies: “we have entered a ‘post-​digital’ era in which big-​tech innovation is matched by grassroots searches for agency, DIY media creation and hybrid media systems” (p. 391). These complexities and methodologically challenging settings need to be kept in mind when we now turn specifically to structures and topics of digital prescriptivism.

2.3  Digital prescriptivism As Lukač (2018) illustrates in her book-​length study, grassroots prescriptivist practice is not inextricably linked to digital communication and thus is not necessarily a recent practice, as we mention in our introduction. Small-​scale acts of prescriptive discourse come to us in the form of radio call-​ins or letters to newspaper editors and public broadcasters. Nevertheless, the intense connection drawn in this paper between bottom-​up, grassroots prescriptivism and digital linguistic practice has manifest reasons. On the one hand, online communication provides affordances that are highly conducive for grassroots prescriptivism: the digital publics outlined above, marked by comparative ease of participation, by networked linguistic practice, and by almost constant and ubiquitous availability through the shift to mobile communication. At the same time, online prescriptivist discourse simply becomes more available to the analytical eye of the linguist interested in such practices, in particular through the archived and searchable nature of many (if not all) digital platforms and communities. To gain a better understanding of the workings and emergent traditions of digital prescriptivism, this section focuses on two domains of analysis, namely forms and structures in which the practice arises, and the topics and linguistic targets around which digital prescriptivism coalesces.

2.3.1  Forms and structures of digital prescriptivism As outlined in the previous paragraphs, grassroots prescriptivism is not dependent on the digital environment, but we will focus here on some of the structural aspects of digital interaction and communication that enable it to thrive and become visible. Most centrally, this concerns the participatory nature of online communication, since at least the second wave of online communication, that is, since the emergence of easily accessible platforms, networks, and social media with the rise of the social internet from the mid-​2000s onwards. Under these participatory conditions, it has become possible for large cohorts of users to contribute to online discourse and voice their opinions, because technical hurdles that existed in the first generation of digital linguistic practices had been taken away. This includes financial aspects such as having access to specialized equipment and an internet connection; social aspects such as having expert knowledge, such as coding skills; symbolic knowledge such as being recognized as a legitimate participant of such early online discourse. Indeed, in the participatory logic of many platforms, networks, and apps as we have known them for the past two decades, users are in fact expected or even nudged toward participating and contributing, for example through social rewards that come with digital-​ symbolic speech acts such as liking, sharing, or upvoting. In other words, many aspects of digital environments provide formal or informal prompts for users to voice their opinions, contribute discourse, and enter online discussions and debates. At least for those who are users of social media 232

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and related platforms, engaging in acts of grassroots prescriptivism becomes easier and lower in affordances than, for example, writing a traditional letter to the editor. The second aspect that is at least indirectly connected to the dynamics of participation in digital discourse is the notion of increased sayability in digital contexts. From early studies on digital discourses onwards, a central question has been to what extent the ease of participating in online discourse prompts the lowering of sociopragmatic standards and enables the voicing of positions and stylistic choices that would not be socially sanctioned in other, non-​ digital contexts. Although this debate has been controversial, the observation remains that online discourse allows for exchanges that may be perceived as impolite, rude, or transgressive. This may include abusive and deceptive linguistic practices from trolling –​understood here in its narrow sense as online antagonism undertaken for amusement’s sake (Hardaker, 2013, p. 77) –​to cyberbullying in the sense of “say(ing) and do(ing) things with the capacity to hurt or emotionally injure each other” in online contexts (Brody & Vangelisti, 2017, p. 739). At the same time, this perceived loosening of norms also implies greater variation in the styles of linguistic production that are possible in online discourses: a long tradition of research exists with regard to the usage of linguistic patterns perceived as informal, non-​standard or anti-​standard (Sebba, 2007), from punctuation and typography to orthography, to forms of reduplication, and omission (see Squires, 2010 for an overview). When we put these two factors in relation with one another, it is easy to see how they might contribute to the budding practice of digital prescriptivism, with linguistic practices perceived as incorrect being in wide use coinciding with a communicative environment that fosters direct and/​or rude interaction. The third structural aspect that appears relevant in the fostering of digital prescriptivism is that of fostering community structures, not just in the more technical sense of creating rather dense networks of users on social media platforms, but also of bringing together like-​minded people in socialities, “light communities” (Blommaert & Varis, 2015), or communities of practice, motivated and oriented by shared interests, goals, or topics.

2.3.2  Topics and targets of digital prescriptivism Apart from the above-​mentioned structural issues that influence why and where digital prescriptivism surfaces, the what is of interest, namely, which topics and targets can be identified that undergo digital prescription. The variability, and sometimes idiosyncrasy, of language ideologies notwithstanding, can we identify recurring patterns of digital prescriptivism, and, if so, how do they coagulate into coherent discourses? When considering the themes that emerge, one general distinction needs to be made, namely between language ideologies online, on the one hand, and ideologies of online language, on the other. Simply put, digital prescriptivism is not selective: it can absorb and encompass existing prescriptivist discourses and become a platform for prescriptivist stances whose targets are not genuinely digital. Thus, online grassroots prescriptivism may reproduce long-​existent language ideologies, from linguistic purism to syntactic prescriptions, from complaints about youth language to issues of spelling and orthography. However, from this broad spectrum, certain topics and themes emerge which can be identified as being specific, and, in some cases, even native to the digital environment. Where digital prescriptivism targets such phenomena that are understood to be digital practices, it makes sense to speak of ideologies about online language. The following overview highlights a few of these digitally specific targets of prescriptivist practice –​some of them more manifestly emerging from online environments, some of them tied more generally to the structural givens of digital communication outlined above. 233

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The first strand of digital prescriptivism concerns the clash of local or national linguistic norms and expectations with the transnational, globalized forms of language use that the internet produces and/​or makes visible. Specifically for anglophone prescriptivism, the heterogeneous and deterritorialized nature of online communication is a challenge to internalized hierarchies of what constitute legitimate and “usable” Englishes (see Mair, 2013). In the sphere of online communication, the fluid and malleable, “open-​source” (Saraceni, 2015, p. 266) nature of a global language such as English becomes evident through hybrid, local, vernacular, and emerging usages. This is a prompt in particular for the voicing of standard and monolingual language ideologies: concrete outlets of such digital prescriptivist discourse include repositories such as engrish.com (making fun of vernacular, grassroots English practice in Asian contexts) as well as mock-​Asian or mock-​Spanish memes. The second point concerns not so much the topics, but the materialities of prescriptivist practice. Through the emergence of the multimodal internet in the mid-​2000s, digital practice became a visual practice, marked by increasing ease of taking photographs and creating pictures, storing, distributing, and reproducing visual material –​practices which are closely connected to increased availability of digital cameras and mobile devices, but also of increased bandwidth and cloud storage, and the proliferation of accessible image software. This visual turn in online practice has been quite sustained and continues onward, through practices such as meme culture (e.g. Varis & Blommaert, 2015), and an increasing relevance of audiovisual material. This sociotechnical development had reverberations also for digital prescriptivism, bringing forth an entire genre of picture-​based prescriptivism. The early website of the Apostrophe Protection Society, analysed in Beal (2010) as described above, was an early example of photography-​based prescriptivist practice. Heyd (2014) explicitly analyses and theorizes about these prescriptivist photo blogs and their semiotic layering, based on data from the Blog of Unnecessary Quote Marks. Many further cases of such photo-​oriented digital prescriptivism exist, and the practice becomes reproduced on many other social media platforms, from Facebook and Twitter to Reddit. Beyond this more multimodally oriented strand of digital prescriptivism, a pervasive –​and indeed, possibly the most substantial –​form of online grassroots prescriptivist practice targets the use of what are understood to be endemically online practices. This concerns in particular enregistered forms of ‘internet language’ or ‘netspeak’, as outlined in Squires (2010), namely stylistic choices that from early on became associated with modalities of writing and typing online. These forms were not only susceptible to processes of enregisterment, as Squires argues, but also to more concrete practices of prescriptivist discourse, because many of them are associated with deviations from standard written orthography and typography. As Squires (2010, p. 468) argues, “[n]‌etspeak also became linked to nonstandardness and youth, and an imperative of containment articulated a normative contextual appropriateness for the variety”. The features of nonstandardness scrutinized in this way are manifold, including traditionally nonstandard spellings, the use of acronyms and other abbreviations, the use of emoticons and numericals as lexical material, patterns of punctuation perceived as excessive or subpar, forms of presence or absence of capitalization, and the like. The prescriptivist discourses linked to these digital practices of writing were, on the one hand, motivated by the innovative character of the medium; as Baron (2002) noted in one of the early analyses of online prescriptivism, “it will be interesting to see how the tension between individual coping strategies and academically constructed standards for writing online plays out” (p. 412). On the other hand, they carried, and continue to carry, an often quite explicit ideology of diminishing literacy and general communication skills (see Squires, 2010 for an extensive discussion). In other words, prescriptivist discourse targeting perceived patterns of internet language in many 234

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ways constitutes a continuation of Milroy and Milroy’s complaint tradition (2012, pp. 24–​46), including sentiments of linguistic and cultural decay. The final point concerns linguistic items that are truly endemic to digital usage, namely internet-​specific jargon, brand names, terminology or related lexical material. Here, the focus turns to items and linguistic practices that are truly endemic to technologically mediated practice. Accordingly, the prescriptivist stances that surround them often reflect aspects of digital epistemologies: being (or not) digitally literate; being (or not) part of communities of practice specific to platforms or discourses; and, in some cases, forms of techno-​elitism and digital gatekeeping. These prescriptivist practices may target different linguistic levels. One of them is pronunciation, where brand names or terminology acquire the status of digital shibboleths (see van der Meulen, 2020) through debates regarding correct pronunciations. Similarly, syntactic and morphosyntactic integration of internet-​based neologisms inspires ideologies of correctness (e.g. German-​language discussions about the infinitive forms twittern vs tweeten). Yet, other discussions target dimensions of semantic or pragmatic meaning, including the perceived-​as-​ correct contexts of usage of specific terms and forms of jargon. In the case of such prescriptivist practices, we are truly in the domain of digital prescriptivism in the most literal sense. The case study below further explores these practices of monitoring and prescribing “online pronunciation” in more detail.

3.  Case study: Reddit imgur thread Reddit is an American social news website and a collection of forums. The platform, which refers to itself as “the front page of the internet” (Widman, 2021), is home to a “large community made up of thousands of smaller communities [...] also known as ‘subreddits’ [that are] created and moderated by redditors”. It prides itself in incorporating “a community about everything you could imagine” (Reddit Zendesk, 2021). The name of this social news aggregating website derives from a play on words: “I read it on reddit” (Reddit, 2021). With 430 million monthly users, Reddit is the twentieth most popular website in the world, third in the UK and seventh in the US. Although its groups of users are often described as open and diverse, the majority of redditors are based in the US (221.98 M), followed by Australia (17.55 M), and India (13.57 M), with its audience skewing young and male (Sattelberg, 2021). On the “anonymity continuum” (van der Nagel & Frith, 2015) associated with social media –​ where Facebook is one of the most transparent if not an “anti-​anonymous” platform (ibid.), with its explicit policies requiring that users provide their legal names and photographs, and 4chan the least transparent, as most of its users post under the username “Anonymous” (ibid.) –​ Reddit’s environment can be described as one of pseudonymity: when joining the website, users are required to create a screen name that is visible across the site. The amount of personal information provided by the users varies from some sharing their legal names, to others creating temporary “throwaway accounts” whose content cannot be linked to the users’ regular pseudonym (ibid.). Most redditors “share personal experiences, give each other advice, [and] support e-​learning” (Richterich, 2014). Next to contributing to the discussions, redditors up-​ and downvote posts of other users, which is synonymous with them being perceived as (un-​) valuable (ibid.). The website is primarily moderated through codes of conduct, which come in the form of rules provided on each subreddit as well as the general list of ‘dos’ and ‘don’ts’ referred to as the reddiquette. The code of conduct is implemented by moderators, who, when the rules are not followed, are able to delete comments or ban user accounts. Seeing that Reddit comprises millions of conversations on different topics, it is unsurprising that linguists before us with an interest in metalinguistic discourses have focused on 235

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its threads as objects of their analysis. Severin (2018) carried out an in-​depth study of the normative behaviour on the subreddit r/​badlinguistics. Applying a discourse analytical approach to her data, Severin’s aim was to reveal trends in normative language attitudes towards salient English usage items on the platform. Although discussions on matters of phonetics and phonology, which are of interest to us here, were not as common as those on lexis, semantics, and morpohosyntax in Severin’s data (p. 71), one of the posts she analysed focused on the pronunciation of the acronym GIF “with debate over whether [g]‌or [dʒ] is the correct variant” (p. 83). Marten van der Meulen (2020) investigated the metadiscourses on the same usage problem and collected a corpus of commentary on the pronunciation of GIF posted on “Reddit, YouTube, websites, Facebook and various newspaper articles” (p. 46). Van der Meulen (2020) found that the authors of the comments he analysed preferred [gif] over the [dʒif] pronunciation, although the creator of the GIF file, Steve Wilhite, declared [dʒif] to be the correct pronunciation (p. 49). Moreover, the author highlighted the differences between the traditional usage debates and those found online. He notes a higher level of linguistic sophistication in the arguments presented by those engaged in the online debates, lesser reliance on authority figures, and a greater acceptance of variation (p. 48). Our study builds on their insights and aims to examine more closely the discourses surrounding the “internet’s new usage problems” (Vriesendorp, 2016, p. 18), which emerged when words originating from (GIF, imjur) or gaining prominence in online contexts (meme), entered spoken discourse. Like Severin and van der Meulen, in what follows we turn our attention towards the commentary on the normative pronouncements of redditors concerning the pronunciation of an internet coinage: the word imgur, which is the name of an online image sharing and image hosting service (current URL: https://​imgur.com/​). The creators of the imgur website have attempted to codify the pronunciation of the word and mention in the About section of the website that the correct pronunciation is [ˈɪmɪʤər]: “Countless Imgurians across the world are unsure how to pronounce Imgur. We’re here to help you win that bet with your friends: Imgur is pronounced ‘image-​er’ (im-​ij-​er). The name comes from ‘ur’ and the extension ‘img’ –​your image!” (Imgur help, n.d.). The dispute about the word’s pronunciation continues, as evidenced by the comment with most upvotes (1100) below this pronouncement: “don’t care, it’s still pronounced IMGUR”. Finally, in the following sections, we explore the discourse within our chosen subreddit thread in detail given the modest size of our sample. In doing so, we touch on how linguistic forms are ideologically related to social identities within the digital context.

3.1  Data and method r/​ funny is a subreddit self-​ described as “Reddit’s largest humour depository” and, with 37.3 million members, it is larger than any other subreddit group except for r/​announcements. This is unsurprising considering how general the topic at hand is. Redditors humorously describe the r/​funny as the subreddit “that links you to your Facebook feed” (Reddit, 2020), implying that its content caters to a wide audience. Most of the posts on r/​funny include amusing images or videos often accompanied by the author’s caption. For our analysis we focused on the thread under the post “My face when I learned that ‘imgur’ was pronounced ‘image-​er’ rather than ‘im-​grr’ ”, with an accompanying GIF depicting Sesame Street’s Bert reading and looking up from the book as if to say “What did I just read?” Originally posted in 2012, the thread is now archived, and it collectively generated 510 posts, ordered primarily through the number of upvotes each comment elicited from the readers. For example, the three comments with the greatest number of upvotes were: 236

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(1) I don’t care how they choose to pronounce it. If they spell it with only two vowels, I’m going to pronounce it with only two vowels. (657); (2) I’m still going to pronounce it im-​grr.. I don’t give a fuck. (375); and (3) Screw that. I shall pronounce it however I damn well please. (168) The page was subject to active moderation with as many as 36 posts deleted, and a moderator questioning whether the topic of the post was appropriate for the r/​funny subreddit: “all Mfw [my-​face-​when] posts should be kept to /​r/​mfw”. For our analysis of the thread, we used NVivo for Mac (Release 1.5), a software program applied in both qualitative and mixed-​methods research, which allows for the capture of web content through its NCapture web-​extension for Chrome and storing the selected pages as PDFs. Once captured, the stored information still largely preserves the appearance of the original website and closely represents the data. In the case of Reddit discussions this is particularly useful as we can still follow the levels of comments, and thus note which of the comments were direct responses to the original post, and which were replies to the existing comments. In other words, we can accurately follow the unfolding of the discourse exchange as it occurred. We coded all of the comments for the preferred pronunciation variant when it was provided by the redditor and the type of argument used to justify that variant. Seeing that the qualitatively analysed comments are public, and that Reddit users use pseudonyms, which protects the privacy of real names, we opted for including direct quotes from users in our analysis without including their Reddit usernames. We are guided in our decision to qualitatively analyse our data by the fact that this research is of value to scholarship on prescriptivism, the information disclosed by the participants in the discussion is not seen as potentially sensitive, and the personal information scarce if present at all. The identity of the real people involved in the discussion is thus protected.

3.2  Pronunciation variants of imgur We first coded all comments in NVivo for the preferred pronunciation variant. Whereas two were mentioned in the original post imager or [ˈɪmɪʤər] and im-​gurr or [ˈɪmgur], redditors introduced several alternative variants included in Table 14.1, the most common among which were [ˈɪmʤur] and the spelled-​out variant as if the word were an initialism [aɪ-​ɛm-​ʤi-​i-​ɑr]. Almost half of the redditors (46 per cent) who stated a preference opted for [ˈɪmgur], and only 18.2 percent opted for the variant prescribed on the website, [ˈɪmɪʤər]. Almost none of the participants in the discussion allowed for optional variability, an exception being one person Table 14.1  Pronunciation variants of imager Variant

N (%)

[ˈɪmgur] Alternative variants: [ˌɪməˈtjʊr], [ˈɪmrɔr], [ˈɪməʤˌjʊər], [ˈɪməʤˌju-​ɑr-​ɛl], [ˈɪməʤˌgr], [ˈɛməˌʤʊr] [ˈɪmɪʤər] [ˈɪmʤur] [aɪ-​ɛm-​ʤi-​i-​ɑr]

81(46.0%) 40 (22.7%)

Total

176 (100%)

237

32 (18.2%) 16 (9.1%) 7 (4.0%)

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who considered the pronunciation of a word that appears most commonly in writing alone to be irrelevant: (4) I haven’t ever said it out loud nor plan on it so I couldn’t care less. If the nature of the normative linguistic debates is changing in the digital medium, our, admittedly limited, dataset does not support intuitions that optional variability, the staple of prescriptivism (Milroy & Milroy, 2012, p. 6), is becoming generally more accepted. Even for a word that is relatively infrequently mentioned in speech, most participants in this discussion prefer agreeing on its single, “correct” pronunciation variant.

3.3  Argumentation in the comments In the second part of our analysis, we examined the comments regarding the type of the argument their authors introduced to justify their preferred pronunciation variant. Five categories emerged from our data, as most commenters resorted to referring to language-​internal logic, naming logic, their own usage, common usage, and external authority. Not all commenters offered a justification for their preferred usage; for the ones who did, the codes are presented in Table 14.2 below. Under language-​internal logic we understand linguistically informed arguments in which redditors explain that their preferred variant reflects pronunciation patterns inherent to the orthography of the English language: (5) Well, look at how it’s spelled. Imgur. There are two vowels, which suggests two syllables. The first is “Im” with a soft “I” because there are two vowels between “I” and “u.” The next is “gur,” which is using a hard “g” because I guess that’s the more common way that letter is used. So, it comes out as “ihmgurr”. Whereas this type of comment is most common for those advocating the usage of [ˈɪmgur], the second category, naming logic, is exclusive to those arguing in favour of the [ˈɪmɪʤər] pronunciation. Here we find comments that point to rules surrounding the pronunciation of internet coinages stemming from HTML conventions: (6) Img is short hand for image, img is generally read allowed as Image and not whatever the pronunciation of ‘img’ would be. So it’s only common sense that Imgur would be the amalgamation of Image and er, right? Table 14.2  Argumentation coding Type of argument

[ ˈɪmgur] (81)

Alternative variants (63)

[ ˈɪmɪʤər] (32)

Language-​internal logic Naming logic Own usage Common usage External authority

21(25.9%) 0 40 (49.4%) 4 (4.9%) 0

2 (3.2%) 0 19 (30.2%) 0 0

5 (15.6%) 19 (59.4%) 4 (12.5%) 1 (3.1%) 3 (9.4%)

Total

65

21

32

238

Total 28 19 63 5 3 118

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The third category, own usage, is the most popular one that we identified in the thread, which means that most participants tend to engage in the discussion by stating their own preferred usage. Those favouring the most popular variant, [ˈɪmgur], do so alongside expressing an anti-​ authoritative stance and rejecting the pronunciation deemed as “correct” on the imgur website: (7) Forever calling it im-​grr. Zero fucks. Common usage points to what the redditors believe to be the most established pronunciation among speakers: (8) Most people call it “imgur”; while, in the external authority category, as small as it is, we find those who refer to the imgur website creators and their attempts to codify the word’s pronunciation (9) [The original post] should have provided a source, but the answer is in their FAQ.

4. Discussion 4.1  Beyond the prescriptive/​descriptive dichotomy Although earlier studies have found that pronouncements made by authoritative sources –​be they individuals or publications such as dictionaries, or style and usage guides –​usually play a relevant role in traditional metalinguistic discussions, such as letter-​to-​the-​editor sections of newspapers (Lukač, 2015), and even in online discussions of the more traditional usage problems (Lukač, 2017; Severin, 2018, pp. 96–​120; Drackley, 2019, p. 303) –​the so-​called old chestnuts (Weiner, 1988, p. 175) –​their relevance seems to be negligible in discussing the pronunciation of imgur. The pronunciation recommended on the About section of the website is largely absent from the discussions and, when mentioned, challenged by most redditors. Our finding echoes van der Meulen’s observations (2020) on online GIF pronunciation discussions. In his study, whereas some of the commenters did justify their chosen variant by deferring to the inventor’s authority, most explained their preference as one motivated by language-​internal logic (p. 49). In both studies, most online discussion participants defy codification attempts by choosing [ˈɪmgur] over [ˈɪmɪʤər] and [gif] over [dʒif]. In our dataset, in fact, some attempt to delegitimize any linguistic authority of the website creators: (10) They can claim anything they like. But it reads “imgur”. It is pronounced “imgur”. In as many as 63 out of the 118 comments offering support for the preferred pronunciation (see Table 14.2), the redditors’ own usage is introduced as evidence of the perceived correct pronunciation. In negotiating the finer points associated with digital literacy, which can no longer be perceived as a variable limited to the written, online realm alone, speakers are resorting to different strategies. In our sample, strategies which Baron (2002) refers to as “user-​generated coping, [in which] adults concoct individual or collective strategies for handling lexical issues or the challenges of written language” (p. 8) are the most prominent. In her analysis of the emerging email writing standards, Baron distinguishes the user-​generated coping strategies from an 239

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opposite force in the norm-​negotiating process, the “externally-​generated prescriptions” for linguistic style, which she describes both as transmitted norms (p. 8) and as synonymous with prescriptivism (p. 9). Although we may be tempted to conclude that redditors themselves seem to set the pronunciation norms of the internet coinage through a democratic negotiation process, a closer look at the discussions reveals a more complex picture. While most redditors reject the linguistic authority of the website’s creators, almost none of them assume a laissez-​faire attitude or argue in favour of optional variability. What many of them often argue instead is that the website’s creators are not following the existing rules of the English language orthography. In other words, they are rejecting the norms imposed by the website’s creators in favour of the established orthographic norms, which they claim to possess. Arguing that their seemingly anti-​authoritarian pronouncements equate them acting against prescriptive pronouncements is incomplete. They are rejecting what they see as an arbitrary prescriptive pronouncement of individuals whom they do not consider to be legitimate language authorities and instead argue in favour of the orthographic norms that they have internalized as competent speakers of English, as illustrated by the following example: (11) There are some hard and fast rules to language and word construction. It’s shit just like this contributing to the general degradation of grammar, spelling, and written communication. Why is it so easy for so many people to treat language as if it’s entirely subjective? No one does this with math. I can’t just decide that 2+​2=​5 because it sounds cool to me. And, likewise, no matter how hip I think it may be, b-​o-​b does not spell ‘bill’ (nor is i-​m-​g-​u-​r pronounced with 3 syllables-​ this is not a matter of opinion). The redditor in (11) thus enters the discussion armed with, in their view, adequate knowledge of the language and argues in favour of maintaining linguistic standards, threatened by arbitrary spellings, such as the disyllabic imgur, which does not represent three syllables in the prescribed variant [ˈɪmɪʤər]. The comment in (11) can be easily categorized in Pullum’s (2004) taxonomy of prescriptive claims under “logicism” or “basing grammatical principles in logic” (p. 12). Our observation here again is not without precedent. In describing the Twitter discussions surrounding orthographic reform in France, Drackley (2019) singles out the figure of the “ideal speaker” as one emerging from the mobilization discourses used in the dissident Twitter debates (p. 311) of those rejecting the reform. Drackley explains this notion as individual positioning, highly revealing of how speakers see themselves and their relation to the standard language. Moreover, these strategies may be generalizable [beyond the French-​speaking context]: in societies that place a high value on the mastery of a standard language, many speakers emphasize their proficiency by comparing themselves to this ideal and by distancing themselves from those who do not conform (as the ‘flawed’ speakers). Drackley, 2019, p. 311 For Drackley, these discourses reveal an internalized prescriptive ideological positioning of speakers, to a degree where they fail to observe the distinction between the linguistic ideal and actual language use, including their own (p. 311). Some of the redditors who argue in favour of the [ˈɪmgur] pronunciation based on language-​internal logic, engage in a similar discourse while positioning themselves as ideal speakers (see examples in (5) and (11)).

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Evidence of normative linguistic behaviour is not limited to this group of comments. Most comments (19/​32) posted by those who favour the [ˈɪmɪʤər] pronunciation introduce arguments categorized under naming logic (see Table 14.2), exemplified above in (6). Although the imgur spelling does not follow the conventions of English orthography, it does draw on HTML shorthand for image, img. Those redditors who are familiar with HTML are unperturbed by the spelling, and for them, the pronunciation of the word is unambiguous: (12)  A: ...you pronounced it ‘im-​grr’? 0_​o I dunno. It was immediately apparent to me upon encountering it for the first time that it’s meant to be pronounced ‘imager’ Maybe it comes from doing HTML. When I say ‘img src’ outloud I say ‘image source’, not ‘imj srs’. So to me, ‘img’ immediately parses as ‘image’ when reading’. B: Exact same reasoning for me. I never even questioned it. I just can’t.. I ..uh.. fuck it. I’m out. The conventional orthographic rules are here at odds with the conventions we find in online environments. The spelling is not unique to HTML either: as the redditor in (13) explains, similar naming patterns can be observed on other websites as well: (13) I assumed it was “imager” because of Flickr and Tumblr and their ilk. You’d think people would know how this works by now. What emerges from these comments are judgments about people who fail to recognize the orthographic HTML-​based rules behind the spelling on imgur, ranging from surprise (“... you pronounced it ‘im-​grr’? 0_​o”), to questioning their intelligence (“You’d think people would know how this works by now.”), and contempt evidenced by opting out of the discussion altogether (“I just can’t.. I ..uh.. fuck it. I’m out.”). In Severin’s analysis of the subreddit r/​badlinguistics, the prominence of judgements about the intelligence of speakers (or rather the lack thereof) was such that the author devoted an entire chapter to the topic (pp. 158–​193). Severin found that the judgement of intelligence (or topos of stupidity) cannot be attributed to either side of the prescriptive/​descriptive dichotomy. In other words, value judgements of someone’s intelligence seem to be common among groups of individuals who position themselves ideologically quite differently in language debates (p. 193). Such dismissive moves in discourse, Severin concludes, tend to “[lead] to conflict,” and polarization, “with neither party willing to engage with the other’s ideas” (p. 191). Polarization in metalinguistic debates is perhaps best exemplified in Chapman’s (2012) analysis of the commentary on the language use of US politicians in left-​and right-​wing online fora. What is clear, Chapman argues, is that “high stock [is placed] in education” and commenters are “[highly confident] that language use is an effective index of a person’s education” (Chapman, 2012, p. 193). To paraphrase the author (p. 201), when a politician’s language use is judged as nonstandard, especially on left-​wing fora, they are no longer seen as a legitimate member of the elite in a meritocracy. Here we would like to draw a parallel between these earlier observations and our own based on examples such as those in (12) and (13). In some strands of the analysed discussion thread, knowing the spelling norms is equated with one’s status as a legitimate member of an online community, that is, a web-​literate and tech-​savvy individual. One commenter thus challenges the original poster by stating: “Your interweb skillz are lacking,” where the word interweb is a humorous term for internet used to refer to an inexperienced user, and z instead of s in skillz points to leetspeak (Mitchell, 2005), a term used to denote spelling conventions originating 241

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from the internet’s early bulletin boards, which, although originally associated with the programming, gaming, and hacker communities, have infiltrated the mainstream internet culture. In the hierarchy of the online community, the “HTML guys”, referred to by the redditor in (14), are associated with greater social capital, and along with it, in this context, linguistic capital, as they are the ones familiar with the coding spelling conventions: (14) I guess HTML guys would know the reference to img immediately. Different redditors thus draw on different ways of legitimizing “correct pronunciation”, and we can recognise their distinct ideological stances as they emerge from the discussions. Whereas some are drawing on their internalized knowledge of the English spelling conventions (11), others point to the new spelling conventions familiar to those who are coding literate (12–​14). Although prescriptive/​descriptive dichotomies are often unsuitable when describing complex online polylogues, such as those found on Reddit (see also Severin, 2018, p. 237), normative linguistic behaviour remains. Ideological stances are still clearly associated with specific usages that are perceived to be “correct” and “incorrect”. Moreover, linguistic variants are still assigned an indexical value and associated with particular social groups and their members’ imagined characteristics, such as “being educated” and “tech-​savvy”.

4.2  Online community building Our report would be incomplete without examining community building strategies that lead to establishing affiliation and creating social alignments in the analysed digital environment (cf., Zappavigna, 2021). The interactions among redditors as they discuss the “correct” pronunciation of imgur demonstrate participation in community building and in establishing a connected presence online. Although the first reading of the responses posted in this thread leads us to conclude that they are replies to a humorous remark, a more thorough investigation reveals them to be negotiation attempts to settle on common (linguistic) norms. As they negotiate, redditors draw on different aspects of the group’s shared identity. Those affiliated with the group are arguably more likely to cooperate in the discussions and attempt to influence others. In what follows we will focus on two strategies of community building used in the thread, namely the use of humour and drawing on different online discourses. The users who post them believe them to be part of a common cultural repertoire shared among the participants in the discussion. Both humour and interdiscursivity act as what Marone (2015) calls “community building cushioning glue [emphasis added] that connects, seals, and buffers different gears of computer-​mediated interaction, contributing to defining the boundaries and the identity of the analysed online space” (p. 61). By grounding the humour on specific references, or through so-​called specialist humour (p. 77), redditors “create ‘insider jokes’ that can be understood and enjoyed only by the members of the community” (p. 79). The value in these interactions is not only in the content and information exchanged, but of online communication as supportive of phatic connotations that help establish online affiliation. Much of the “gluing humour” (p. 65) is self-​deprecating and minimizing, as redditors identify with the sentiment of the original post. Others are examples of “disrupting humour” (p. 65), synonymous with mocking and threatening the other’s face: (15) You had the face of someone who just realized they have had a fist up their ass their whole life [referring to the Bert Sesame Street doll]? Sir, show me on this anatomically correct doll where the evil man touched you? 242

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Some of the humorous and interdiscursive remarks underline group membership through an ability to contextually retrieve the “group-​specific assumptions that are required for optimal humorous discourse comprehension” (Yus, 2018, p. 291). Such contextual, group-​specific knowledge may include showcasing familiarity with the post repository on Reddit. According to the commenter in (16), for example, the platform is home to numerous discussions on pronunciation: (16) Upvote because, 1, me too, and 2, like the only pronunciation spelling I’ve seen on this page that is unambiguous! Redditors in our dataset also reference memes, when they refer to im-​gur as “scumbag pronunciation” in reference to the Scumbag Steve meme, or jokingly state, “I pronounce it ermahgerd”. Finally, long-​standing prescriptive ideologies clearly find their way into digital polylogues. As novel as some of the features discussed online may be, the metalinguistic discussions and the underlying linguistic ideologies, we found, remain constant.

5.  Conclusion and outlook We began our discussion in this chapter by stating that prescriptivism as a sociolinguistic phenomenon is subject to change. In exploring such changes, we focused on self-​initiated digital grassroots debates surrounding the pronunciation of internet coinages, new usage features that have become the object of prescriptive commentary. These words, along with other features originating in online registers, can no longer be viewed as disparate from offline communication, as assumed in earlier scholarship under the “digital dualism” paradigm (Jurgenson, 2012). This lack of separation between online and offline language use (cf. Ilbury, 2020, pp. 24–​27) –​ and the blurring of dichotomies that we discussed above –​becomes obvious once speakers start asking questions such as “What is the correct pronunciation of imgur, meme, or GIF?” The answers that redditors provide to these questions are telling about the linguistic ideologies associated with them and shared community norms and hierarchies that are reflected in the discussions. In these digital communal spaces presumably populated by “wild publics” the discussions may be lively, but, once we analyse the discourse exchanges, not as diverse or removed from their more traditional counterparts. Although the hierarchies may have shifted, they are nevertheless present. Linguistic capital is claimed by ideal speakers, knowledgeable on orthographic rules, and the tech-​savvy, fluent in the digital, programming-​language influenced register. Our findings, as tentative as they may be, point to the complexities and the richness of the discussions on emerging usage conventions. As the debate moves forward, it will be interesting to observe how norms continue to be negotiated as the imagined dividing line between online and offline communication continues to dissipate.

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Grassroots prescriptivism Mitchell, A. (2005, December 6). A Leet Primer. E-​Commerce Times. www.eco​mmer​ceti​mes.com/​story/​ 47607.html Peterson, E. (2019). Making sense of bad English. Taylor & Francis. Pinker, S. (1994). The language instinct: the new science of language and mind. Penguin. Pullum, G. (2004). Ideology, power, and linguistic theory. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Modern Language Association, Philadelphia, 30 December 2004. QSR International Pty Ltd. (2020) NVivo (released in March 2020), www.qsrin​tern​atio​nal.com/​nvivo-​ qual​itat​ive-​data-​analy​sis-​softw​are/​home Reddit. (2020, January 29). Casually Explained [Video]. YouTube. www.yout​ube.com/​watch?v=​Uy9​V_​ v-​XV8Q Reddit (2021). FAQ. Reddit. www.red​dit.com/​wiki/​faq#wiki_​what​_​doe​s_​th​e_​na​me_​.22red​dit.22_​m​ ean.3F Reddit Zendesk (2021). What are communities or “subreddits”? Reddit. https://​red​dit.zend​esk.com/​hc/​ en-​us/​artic​les/​204533​569-​What-​are-​comm​unit​ies-​or-​sub​redd​its-​ Richterich, A. (2014). “Karma, precious karma!’ Karmawhoring on Reddit and the front page’s econometrisation. Journal of Peer Production, 4(1), 1–​12. Saraceni, M. (2015). World Englishes: A critical analysis. Bloomsbury. Sattelberg, W. (2021, Apr 6). The demographics of Reddit: Who Uses The Site? Alphr. www.alphr.com/​ demog​raph​ics-​red​dit/​ Sebba, M. (2007). Spelling and society: the culture and politics of orthography around the world. Cambridge University Press. Severin, A. A. (2018). The nature of prescriptivism and descriptivism online: the case of Reddit and r/​badlinguistics [Doctoral dissertation, Monash University]. https://​doi.org/​10.4225/​03/​5aca9c​f672​1c4 Spitzmüller, J. (2007). Staking the claims of identity: purism, linguistics and the media in post-1990 Germany. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 11(2), 261–​285. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1467-​9841.2007.00320.x Squires, L. (2010). Enregistering internet language. Language in society, 39(4), 457–​492. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1017/​S00474​0451​0000​412 Švelch, J., & Sherman, T. (2018). “‘I see your garbage’: Participatory practices and literacy privilege on ‘Grammar Nazi’ Facebook pages in different sociolinguistic contexts.” New Media & Society, 20(7), 2391–​2410. https://​doi.org/​10.1177%2F1​4614​4481​7719​087 van der Meulen, M. (2020). Obama, SCUBA or gift? English Today, 36(1), 45–​50. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1017/​S02660​7841​9000​142 van der Nagel, E., & Frith, J. (2015). Anonymity, pseudonymity, and the agency of online identity: examining the social practices of r/​Gonewild. First Monday. https://​journ​als.uic.edu/​ojs/​index.php/​fm/​arti​ cle/​view/​5615 Varis, P., & Blommaert, J. (2015). Conviviality and collectives on social media: virality, memes, and new social structures. Multilingual Margins: A Journal of Multilingualism from the Periphery, 2(1), 31–​31. https://​doi.org/​10.14426/​mm.v2i1.55 Vriesendorp, H. (2016). The internet’s (new) usage problems: a further contribution from the Leiden University Bridging the Unbridgeable project. English Today, 32(3), 18–​19. Widman, J. (2021, July 5). What is Reddit? digitaltrends. www.digita​ltre​nds.com/​web/​what-​is-​red​dit/​ Weiner, E. (1988). On editing a usage guide. In E. G. Stanley and T. F. Hoad (Eds.), Words For Robert Burchfield’s Sixty-​Fifth Birthday (pp. 171–​183). D.S. Brewer. Yus, F. (2018). Positive non-​humorous effects of humor on the Internet. In V. Tsakona & J. Chovanec (Eds.), The dynamics of interactional humor: Creating and negotiating humor in everyday encounters (pp. 283–​ 303). John Benjamins. Zappavigna, M. (2021). Ambient affiliation in comments on YouTube videos: communing around values about ASMR. Journal of Foreign Languages, 44(1), 21–​40.

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15 PRESCRIPTION AND TABOO Australia’s sensitivity towards American influence Kate Burridge

1. Introduction [T]‌he idea of dirt implies a structure of ideal. For us dirt is a kind of compendium category for all events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse accepted classifications. The underlying feeling is that a system of values which is habitually expressed in a given arrangement of things has been violated. Douglas, 2003/​1975, p. 109 I have always believed that the concerns people have about the well-​being of their language and the activities that flow from these concerns are the fall-​out from our tabooing behaviour generally (Allan & Burridge, 2006; Burridge, 2010b). Relevant here are insights from Mary Douglas’s theory of pollution and taboo and in particular, her anthropological classic Purity and Danger (1966). Douglas’s ideas on dirt have been applied to everything from discard studies to architectural theory, and to my mind her account of social and cultural systems offers a useful frame to understand prescriptivism. According to Douglas the distinction between cleanliness and filth (what is ‘in’ and what is ‘out’) stems from our basic human need to organize the chaos of our immediate experience –​and by my extension, this includes the need to define language and to force into neat classificatory systems what Samuel Johnson once famously described as “the boundless chaos of a living speech” (1755, p. 28). My focus in this chapter is on the Australian English (AusE) speech community, where I have first-​hand experience of the fervour and passion accompanying what Lukač (2018) labels “bottom up” or “grassroots prescriptivism” (p. 5). In particular, I consider Australian resistance to American English (AmE) influence, which ever since the arrival of the ‘talkies’ (talking films) in the 1920s has been persistent and vocal. In the personal correspondence I receive and in public commentary, Australians loudly denounce “this wholesale invasion and exploitation”; vehement objections are made to “American infiltration into our lingo”, and blame is laid squarely on “the invidious impact of American TV” and “the Microsoft spell-​checker”. The discussion that follows provides detailed examples of these bugbears. As with tabooing practices generally, purists see a clear distinction between what is clean and what is unclean –​what does and what does not belong in a language. Linguists who challenge these prescriptions are challenging people’s “cherished classifications” (Douglas’s description, 246

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1966, p. 48). I argue here that viewing prescriptivism through the lens of taboo is a step towards a better and more constructive dialogue between linguists and the wider community –​a dialogue that has for so long been stymied by the oversimplified prescription–​description binary (see papers in Chapman & Rawlins, 2020).

1.1  On taboo and taboos Where something physical or metaphysical is said to be tabooed, what is in fact tabooed is its interaction with an individual, a specified group of persons or, perhaps, the whole community. In short, a taboo applies to behaviour. Allan & Burridge, 2006, p. 11 In its conception, the Tongan word taboo referred to forbidden behaviour, specifically behaviour that was outlawed because it was believed to be dangerous to certain individuals or to the society as a whole. Contact with tabooed persons or things was believed to put someone at physical or metaphysical risk. This was the interpretation of the earliest accounts of taboo, those that came out of the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, or psychology (e.g. classic works such as Frazer, 1911/​1890; Durkheim, 1963/​1897; Freud, 1950/​1913). More recent classics (e.g. Steiner, 1956; and Douglas, 1966) highlight the role of taboo in everyday life and have broadened the account to include milder taboos such as the social constraints on behaviour regarded as distasteful or impolite within a given social context. These constraints rest ultimately on traditions of etiquette that are intimately linked with social structures and defined by culturally specific parameters (such as age, sex, education, social status etc.). As social beings, we can ill afford to violate these conventions without suffering adverse sanctions, and so we censor our behaviour to avoid giving offence (unless we deliberately intend to offend). In short, constraints on behaviour (Polynesian or Western style) are imposed by someone or some force that individuals believe has authority or power over them, and this can be the law, the gods, the society in which one lives –​even oneself in the case of self-​imposed proscriptions, such as “[c]‌hocolates are taboo for me; they give me migraine” (Allan & Burridge, 2006, p. 9). To put all this in a nutshell, taboo refers to “a proscription of behaviour for a specifiable community of one or more persons, at a specifiable time, in specifiable contexts” (Allan & Burridge, 2006, p. 11). It is a broad label that includes any kind of behaviour perceived to be in some way harmful to individuals or their community; the degree of harm can fall anywhere on a scale from an etiquette breach to a downright fatality. In this chapter, I am concerned of course with language behaviour –​words and phrases that have been subject to cultural and social proscription. I am including here the proscribed words of non-​standard language, as well as the mixed bag of culturally potent linguistic peeves that ordinary speakers acquire over the years. Taboos and their associated avoidance rituals are not universal and, as the chapter shows, notions about what is forbidden will change, sometimes dramatically, across time and space. There are three interlaced aspects to tabooing behaviour, and this chapter demonstrates how all are clearly at play in behaviours associated with prescriptivism: 1. Ritual: Taboos can have a rational basis, but they also persist when original motivations are lost –​much of the time it is routine that ensures the continuance of sanctions; 2. Solidarity: Taboos strengthen group identity by locating us in a social space and creating feelings of distinctiveness –​as with other social practices, what one group cherishes, another spurns; 247

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3. Control: The rites and rituals that accompany taboos give us a sense of control (even in areas where we have little or none, the so-​called ‘calls of nature’) –​when taboos are abandoned, we grow anxious that disorder is setting in. The following discussion shows how these three aspects –​ritual, solidarity, control –​participate in behaviour associated with prescriptivism; they are what lies behind the vehemence (even aggression) that so often accompanies complaints about language. A good example is the relationship Australian English has with it powerful relative American English. Australia’s response to the perceived threat of American influence demonstrates how fiercely people can oppose issues that challenge their social position and their sense of cultural identity. Organizing perception and experience into categories might be a human universal, but what defines the boundaries is a matter of culture.

2.  Prescriptivism –​a matter of taboo? [W]‌henever one person tells another how to do something with language in such-​ and-​such a way, how to say or write something, that is prescriptivism. Straaijer, 2016, p. 233 Verbal hygiene comes into being whenever people reflect on language in a critical (in the sense of “evaluative”) way. Cameron, 2012, p. 9 Like other tabooing practices, acts of linguistic prescriptivism seek to constrain the linguistic behaviour of individuals by identifying certain elements in a language as “bad”. Typically, they involve words and word usage that threaten the identity of the culture in question, and ideologies around “authenticity” are key here. Authenticity has two (related) facets: one, to halt the progress of linguistic change and retain the language in its traditional form; two, to purge unwanted elements and protect the language from foreign influences. However, as Cameron (2012) has argued, and as my involvement with the general public1 also indicates, the prescriptive endeavours of speakers are far more complex and diverse than this description suggests, and it is for this reason that Cameron proposes the label “verbal hygiene” over “prescriptivism” or “purism”. Verbal hygienists can be found in language associations formed to promote causes as diverse as Plain English, apostrophes, Esperanto, Klingon, effective communication –​even something as esoteric as the preservation of Old English strong verbs. They also include those who enjoy thinking and arguing about words, correcting the language of others, and consulting dictionaries and usage guides. All these popular activities, like those of institutional prescriptivism, are born of an urge to improve and clean up the language, and they form part of every speaker’s linguistic competence. People know what is “clean” and what is “dirty”. It forms part of their common-​sense views about how speech and language works –​and the findings of linguistics may have no role to play here.

2.1  “Dirt offends against order” Douglas (1966) is a book about disorder (i.e. dirt), and at its heart is the concept of structure and the transgression of boundaries. Included here are many different aspects of the social system –​everything from religious ceremonies to the cleaning rituals we perform around the

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house. Humans impose order on their messy world, sorting it into categories and naming these: “ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience” (p. 4). We are trained to recognize only the named parts that have their place within the system, and those that do not fit become, as Douglas famously wrote, “matter out of place” (1966, p. 44); in other words, taboo.2 Curiously, linguistic behaviour is absent from Douglas’s account, even though language has clear symbolic significance in the morphology of the social system, and the way people engage with it is a very good example of dirt containment. This is most obvious in the different processes accompanying standardization (e.g. in education, the media, publishing etc.) –​what do these processes do but force languages into tidy classificatory systems, and assign things to their proper place. The tight little bundles of form and meaning inside dictionaries and the elegant paradigms inside handbooks provide the perfect counterpart to the ‘chaos of a living speech’ that lies without. The language is defined by the condemnation and proscription of certain words and constructions deemed impure or not belonging. There is no tolerance of variation –​grey areas have been replaced by clear boundaries as to what is and what is not acceptable. The infiltration of linguistic innovations, lexical exotics and non-​standard features is a transgression of the defining boundaries and poses a threat to the language –​and to the society of which the language is a manifestation and a symbol. The arsenal of prescriptive texts becomes part of society’s arsenal of ritual. Taboos are powerful. As earlier described, they will persist long after the original rationales have disappeared –​or as Durkheim originally put it, old ideas and prejudices “have given birth to ways of doing things which have survived and to which we have become attached” (1963/​ 1897, p. 113). Routine and ritual ensure the prescriptive rules handed down endure (don’t split infinitives, never end with a preposition and so on). Tabooing routines are also part of the mortar that sticks members of the society together; these urges to cultivate and tidy up the language are clearly all about social status and the separating and solidarity maintaining function of language. They also provide a sense of control in a chaotic environment, and when taboos are relaxed, order is in jeopardy. Individual speakers often justify their linguistic concerns by appealing to rational explanations such as the threatened breakdown of communication. Consider the following extract from an early letter of complaint (about me) sent to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) from a passionate apostrophe supporter: I should like to know why the misused and incorrect English of the ignorant, the ill-​ informed, the apathetic and the lazy should be acceptable? If this continues we shall have no formal structure of our language: it will become unteachable, unintelligible, and eventually, useless as an accurate means of communication. Letter received 21 March 1996 This next extract comes from an email prompted by a radio interview on ABC’s Overnights (May 14, 2020); the message I had hoped to get across was that language issues are never a simple matter of a tick or a cross by a linguistic form, but are more complex, and way more interesting than this. However, the listener was not swayed. Despite being a lecturer in Academic English with presumably a commitment to education, she was not interested in alternative ways of viewing those language features she knew were incorrect: You are encouraging what is happening to the English language and are contributing to its demise. You are contributing to those of us over the age of 50 needing an

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interpreter within the next 10 years. […] No doubt you would justify the examples I am giving. Clearly, to gain the qualifications you have acquired, speaking correctly is not a requirement. There is a great irony here. I shall be changing to another station next time you’re on the radio. Email received 15 May 2020 The image of language here is of a clearly delineated structure which is at constant risk of attack from the “misused and incorrect English of the ignorant, the ill-​informed, the apathetic” (Letter received 21 March 1996). As with other acts of censorship, there is also a strong moral dimension. Rules of grammar, like other pollution rules in a society, protect the form of the society and are necessary for its health. The labels “clean” and “dirty” stand for treasured values and practices –​to be clean is to be good, to be dirty is to be bad.

2.2  “Dirt is in the eye of the beholder” As Douglas emphasized, dirt is a relative idea –​one person’s dirt may not be another’s. And while things are out of place all the time, their out-​of-​place-​ness is not necessarily acknowledged; hence, what is classified as dirt varies between groups and across time and space. In the eighteenth century, matters of punctuation largely fell under the radar; these days it is one of the hottest topics of linguistic debate, and superfluous apostrophes generate some of the strongest reactions. Correct punctuation more than conforms. It upholds the social order and, as Beal (2010) suggests, “the apostrophe and its alleged misuse have come to stand for a whole set of values which the ‘grumpy’ generation fear losing” (p. 63). The so-​ called “hard words dictionaries” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked the start of a growing self-​consciousness about English, and they nicely illustrate how observances around dirt and cleanliness can be fashioned. The compilers of these dictionaries adopted the practice of branding words with symbols such as obelisks (†) and asterisks (*) and, whatever intentions lay behind these symbols, by the authority of their dictionaries they were creating their own rituals of prescription and prohibition. The English language during this period was being crammed full of “fustian terms” that drew on high-​bred stems and affixes from Latin and Greek, and the newly emerging and expanding literate groups (generally unschooled in the classics) were eager to become acquainted with them. To illustrate, here the first four marked entries in Edward Phillips (1658) The New World of English Words Or, a General Dictionary (unnumbered pages): † Abaction (Latin), a driving, or forcing away; † Abannition (Lat.), a punishment inflicted; * Abequitation (Lat.), a riding away; * To Abgregate (Lat.), to lead out of the flock. By placing these words in a dictionary, sometimes even crafting them themselves, and then marking a number for special attention with obelisks and asterisks, the lexicographers became niche market providers. While Osselton (1958) and Curzan (2014) view these works as representing an authoritarian stage in lexicography, concerned with legitimacy and purity, I do not see an uncompromising “doctrine of correctness” at work here –​a normative approach, certainly, but something more in line with the modern linguistic idea of “appropriateness in language”, where norms adapt to context of use rather than fix to some ideal of correctness 250

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(Burridge, 2019).3 These early branding dictionaries were a guide to the social meaning of words (especially those big unfamiliar ones), and a red alert to readers about the dangers of inappropriate choices. Their makers recognized that dirtiness was not an intrinsic property of these words but rather a contextual label attached to them. In many ways, they were like today’s language professionals, whose activities advertise violations of codes –​as Bolinger once cheekily put it, “a bit after the fashion of a fireman who makes himself necessary by setting a fire” (1980, p. 7). The standard with its armoury represents a strongly bounded system which can manufacture dirt by generating boundary threats –​or using Bolinger’s metaphor, can deliberately light fires and allow them to smoulder, sometimes for centuries (e.g. the ignition of the different to/​from and that/​which debates). Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2019) attributes the flourishing of usage guides to the lack of strictly defined institutional prescriptivism; in other words, the fact that there was no English Academy or widely recognised authoritative expert to adjudicate the boundaries. As Douglas described, confused or ambiguous boundaries will generate ritualism (1966, chap. 6). Prescriptivist and puristic attitudes are closely aligned with the sort of language cultivation practices that go with highly standardized written languages such as English, but they are not simply the by-​product of codification.4 As earlier described, a sense of linguistic values makes verbal hygiene part of every speaker’s linguistic competence, as basic to language as vowels and consonants (Cameron, 2012). Handbooks and dictionaries might give these attitudes a more public arena, but here is ample evidence of prescriptive sentiments throughout the history of English, even before people started laying down the laws on standards and creating language dictionaries as we know them. Conservative reactions against the flourishing of those “hard words” just mentioned triggered the “inkhorn controversy” –​the traditional camp, those who wanted to eradicate the linguistic aliens and preserve the Anglo-​Saxon pedigree, were up against those who sought to improve the “bankrupt” state of English (Francis Bacon’s description) by co-​opting words, stems and affixes from the more illustrious classical languages. Closer to home, contemporary English-​speaking countries like Australia are now awash with grammars and style guides, even though modern pedagogy in English language classrooms has left the general public with a very limited knowledge of pollution rules around the intricacies of English grammar –​most Australians probably know more about stem cell research than they do about nouns and verbs. Nonetheless, their urges to clean up the language are no less fierce. The definition of dirt has simply shifted to encompass the more superficial aspects of the language, and these days it is American incursions that are the target.

3.  Americanization of Australian English I have been a long-​time and constant critic of the rising damp of Coca-​Colonisation on what we are pleased to call our “culture”. I treasure our yarns, our expressions, our stories, and it gives me the major “irrits” –​look it up –​to see so much of what is precious and unique being slowly swamped by, most particularly, American stories, expressions, and even accents. FitzSimons, 2018 Journalist Peter FitzSimons is describing here his “irrits” (feelings of extreme irritation) at the Americanization of English in Australia. It is a frequently expressed concern, and the following discussion gives examples of those features that routinely show up in the crosshairs of complainants today; these are drawn largely from the following two sources: 251

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1. Personal letters and emails generated from more than 30 years of weekly language segments for talkback radio programs throughout Australia and (2006–​2011) for the TV program Can We Help (see Severin & Burridge, 2020 for details); 2. Two attitude surveys, one focusing on student impressions of AmE influence (Ferguson 2008) and the other on general attitudes to spelling (Wren, 2009). The commentary is frequently hostile and for many speakers of AmE would be disturbing to read, all the more so given the features are oftentimes not actually AmE. As will be explored below, this linguistic intolerance is a striking inconsistency of modern times, though typical of the doublethink that so often accompanies tabooing behaviour.

3.1  The early influx of Americanisms Early AmE influence was considerable, yet it is influence that most Australians remain completely unaware of. The Australian Labor Party takes its name from its American counterpart of the late nineteenth century (though the spelling fluctuated between Labor and Labour until 1918); terms for the subdivision of land such as block are North American, as are the terms state for its main regional sectors and squatter used of someone unlawfully occupying land (Ramson 1966). Many expressions came in via the goldfields during 1850s, including those now thought of as quintessential Australian colloquialisms, such as bonzer ‘very good’ (from US bonanza) and digger (a ‘miner’ and later ‘Australian soldier’). More exposure to AmE also came via 1870s American entertainment (like vaudeville); from the early 1900s, American movies dominated Australian cinemas, and Australian commercial radio stations drew much of their program content from American popular music. AmE influence continued through co-​participation in the two world wars, and then later via the entertainment industry and visiting Americans. Many linguistic commentators (e.g. Baker, 1966/​1945; Taylor, 1989; Sussex, 1995) have drawn attention to the large numbers of AmE words and expressions that came in, and the Macquarie Dictionary has progressively recognised their assimilation (Burridge & Peters, 2020). Linguistic commentary before World War I expressed little or no concern that Australian culture was becoming Americanized (see Waterhouse, 1998). While remarks could occasionally be critical of AusE, particularly its accent, and parallels were sometimes drawn between “familiar atrocities amongst young Australians” and “the Yankee twang” (“Australian pronunciation” 1888, p. 2), there was no sense these “atrocities” were American-​made.5 Certainly, there were no fears voiced around any cultural bulldozing that might be putting Australian identity in jeopardy. In contrast to the fierce commentary today, Kinglake’s early observations are matter-​of-​fact: It is surprising that the Australian has not more resemblance to the American. There is a decided analogy between the conditions under which a great part of the two nations live, and yet there is only in very slight and trivial points that we notice them to be like each other, and unlike the original British. Certainly one hears occasionally a dash of American slang, and one reads specimens of American humour. Kinglake, 1891, as cited in Baker, 1945, p. 281 Relevant here is the youthfulness of early colonial Australian society (Benczes et al., 2017). In the 1850s, at the height of immigration, the proportion of non-​Indigenous Australians aged 65

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or more was around 1 per cent and, in some areas, as low as 0.01 (Davison, 1993, p. 4). It was literally a “young society”, and the high mobility of the population during these early years resonates with this youthfulness.6 First the booming wool industry and then the gold rushes triggered massive internal migration –​as Moore (2008) writes, “Australians were on the move” (p. 88). This was a time of energy, of innovation and discovery, and no one was much fussed by transgressions of any boundaries defining the AusE that was forming in the early linguistic melting pot. As earlier described, dirt may not be recognized until there is a change in social relations. In Australia this coincided with nation-​building and the forging of a national culture that then prompted fears of US practices threatening Australian identity. The change came during Schneider’s nativization phase; Schneider’s (2007) model connects the formation of postcolonial Englishes like AusE with the processes of identity construction (as formed by the social, cultural and political background at the time), and this phase (1901–​1942) was a period when Australia’s cultural orientation was strongly tied to its British roots.

3.2  The later influx of Americanisms Disparaging commentary around American influence became apparent when American cultural products had well and truly embedded themselves and become a way of life in Australia. As documented by historian Damousi (2010), this seems to have taken off with the arrival in the 1920s of the “talking pictures”. We should have been spared that influx of nauseous American slang and vile English which regularly appears upon the screen, and threatens to reduce the Australian vernacular to the level of the New York gutter-​snipe. Australasian, 1925, March 14 It must be already apparent to many thinking people that since the introduction of the American talking films … we are in grave danger of the Americanisation of our speech … I do hope that this matter will be taken up by all those possessing the true Australian spirit, and help to save their country from this wholesale invasion and exploitation by a foreign Power. Sydney Morning Herald, 1930, 5 No longer could Americanisms sneak in undetected; they had become “matter out of place”, and a threat. Below are examples of the now unrelenting vocal resistance to the perceived “rising damp of Coca-​ Colonisation”, as pronounced by FitzSimons above. True, some people are simply curious and not condemning of AmE influence (e.g. “If Americans call petrol gas, what do they call gas”; email received June 8, 2009), but they are in the minority. And although all aspects of AusE are believed to be under siege, some hold much more value for speakers and attract greater criticism. As earlier suggested, when school education moved away from the explicit teaching of linguistic awareness, grievances shifted to the more superficial aspects of speaking and writing (spelling, pronunciation and word choice); in other words, the parts of people’s linguistic knowledge that are more readily amenable to social assessment than others (see Severin & Burridge, 2020 for a breakdown in the frequency of these topics).7 Note: the grammatical and typographical errors in the following examples are original.

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3.2.1  Spelling The strong emphasis in the Australian school system on orthography, especially in the early years (spelling bees etc.), creates the dirt by reinforcing in students’ minds that variation is bad, and AmE spellings are the culprit: I was looking at sugar in the supermarket the other day and I was wondering when castOR sugar become castER sugar. […] It may be that an american has got into the printing team and changed it.?? Email September 5, 2008 I’d like to understand the finer nuances of what exactly the words “enquiry” and “inquiry” mean, and how/​why they (might) differ. Is one just American? If so, why do the yanks do that??? Can’t they get their own language to mess with? Email September 10, 2011 Without doubt, the high visibility of spelling has been intensifying more generally the widespread perception of American influence. A Reddit political self-​post points to changes in spelling that have been altered over time “without our control”: Even spelling is an issue, programs such as word are set to default to American spelling, leaving out our precious U’s, and I’ve noticed even at University, lecture slides will commonly spell words the American way […]. Coyourh, 2018 The matter of “our precious U’s” nicely highlights the complex and often unclear role that AmE has played in many AusE developments. From the early 1850s -​or spellings were commonplace in Australia (e.g. the Australian Labor Party, mentioned earlier). The Age newspaper in Melbourne (Victoria) used these from the start of its publication in 1854. This was not a convention inherited from America (Baker, 1945, p. 403), and yet, it came to be seen as an endorsement of “American” -​or spellings in place of English -​our. As Jernudd (1989, p. 15) documented, when in 1969 the state of Victoria advocated spellings such as color in place of colour, writers were outraged: “We speak English in this country therefore [sic] why should our spelling be changed to follow the American pattern” (The Age October 9, 1969). In 2001 public pressure persuaded The Age to instate the -​our spelling.

3.2.2  Pronunciation Most accent features denounced as Americanisms appear in varieties around the English-​ speaking world; typically, they either coincide with inherited features or represent well-​trodden paths of change (therefore independently motivated rather contact-​induced): Kate, I’m wondering if you can tell me something about the American habit of dropping the g off words ending in ing. I realise that we’ve allways done it out of laziness ie; walk’n talk’n etc. But this is something different; walkin talkin singin etc. This annoying habit seems to be spreading to Australia, is there no way to stop it? Email received September 4, 2008

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I teach Grade 5 and 6 students and the word forehead came up for discussion recently. Most of the students pronounce it fore-​head while I and my teacher aides say “forred”. It the former pronunciation due to the invidious impact of American TV? Email received August 20, 2008 So-​called ‘G-​dropping’ has been a complex tug-​of-​love over many centuries (evident in Nayler’s recommendations for early AusE; 1869, p. 83); it has now fallen out of favour and blame falls squarely on AmE. Pronunciations like ‘fore-​head’ illustrate the modern propensity for speakers to bring pronunciation in line with spelling (such is the clout of the written word). All one can say here is that AmE is accelerating the trends. The same is true for other features such as yodless articulations (e.g. stupid (stupəd)), intervocalic flapping (e.g. latter (læɾə)), shifts to antepenultimate stress (e.g. voluntarily). While Moore might be overstating the case when he writes “the Australian accent has remained utterly unaffected by American accents” (2008, p. 163), American influence is shallow and has done little to shape the structure of AusE phonology.8

3.2.2  Lexicogrammatical features Despite the fact that the Australian lexicon is more closely aligned to that of BrE rather than AmE, there are certain salient AmE expressions (like trash and aluminum) that are high on people’s radars. Words are accessible and lexical influence is usually conspicuous –​especially when viewed as the thin end of an undesirable wedge that will see the decline of Australian values and way of life: [A]‌s you know in the last 30 to 40 years we have dumped (not trashed!) most of our idiomatic language […]. This has all come about because of our constant exposure to Amercian television which has seduced us into this wholesale and unfortunate change in our language. Most of these ‘new’ words have a long history, but that does not preclude the fact that they have come into our language direct from the Amercian culture and at the expense of our own. I refer to this change as Australians becoming very good pseudo Americans!! Email received September 25, 2008 Melbourne writer Andrew Herrick (2010) goes a step further. Not only are “franchised American terms” condemning native Australianisms “to the op-​shop bin of cultural memory”, they are also opening the borders to “America’s toxic culture”: “Border security is high on the agenda”, Herrick writes, “but what about the security of our language?”. So-​called Americanisms often coincide with other types of transgression: perhaps youth slang (chill out), trendy conversions (to beverage), irritating redundancies (going forward) or workplace jargon (touching base). In fact, many of these named ‘Americanisms’ are not American, and misconceptions of this nature have been around since the disapproving commentary began. “Much of the slang called Australian is really imported from the United States”, declared the Sydney Telegraph (1936, July 14); as Baker pointed out, of the 31 expressions listed as American, 22 of them were either English or Australian in origin (Baker, 1959, p. 71). Even though non-​standard grammar and AmE are closely aligned in people’s minds,9 as predicted by Labov’s (1993) “sociolinguistic monitor”, the less observable syntactic knowledge does not attract the same notice (Labov, 1993, as cited in Meyerhoff & Walker, 2013, p. 409). Moreover, the sort of grammatical phenomena that come to speakers’ attention and acquire

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social significance are in essence lexical; for example, “I absolutely hate the word ‘gotten’ ” (email received September 10, 2018). Condemnation of gotten is particularly frequent: … we even see the American “GOTTEN” metastasizing into our media (although I note that you do not seem to use either word). Am I a troglodyte unaware of the sunrise outside or is this something against which we should still fight? Email received October 15, 2011 Dirt can be consistently defined as “that which must not be included if a pattern is to be maintained” (Douglas, 1966, p. 41), but what constitutes a “pattern” in the system of strong verbs has not been consistent. Depending on the period of English history, the verb forms got and gotten have been on different sides of the dirty/​clean boundary. Popular perception now brands older gotten as American but, given Australia has always had vestiges of dialectal gotten users, it is again hard to assess the role of AmE contact.10 For the most part, influence from AmE in this area has gone unnoticed. Over the years, an estimated 10,000 American expressions have sneaked (snuck?) in without detection (Sussex; in Humphries, 2011); among them are even a number of favourite “Aussie” slang expressions like have a gander “to look” (Burridge et al., 2021). Research on these American arrivals shows that they have been well and truly integrated and complement rather than overpower existing vocabulary; often they acquire specialized meanings alongside the established AusE terms and do not displace them (Peters, 2001, p. 302).

3.3 Demographics Lest I leave you with the impression that this lively complaint tradition is generated from insecure listeners and viewers of Australia’s national broadcaster, the ABC, let me summarize the findings of Ferguson’s (2008) survey of 93 first-​year linguistics undergraduates at Monash University. The survey sought to determine (1) how often they used Americanisms and (2) how they felt about AmE influence on AusE generally. Spelling came across once more as the hottest topic, and even those who expressed “neutral” or “positive” attitudes towards AmE influence often gave spelling as an exception. To cite one response: “Neutral –​good aspects –​interesting variation from trad Brit English pronunciation BUT spelling sometimes is annoying when it departs from the trad eng” (p. 82). Overwhelmingly, the results showed intolerance towards language change, and most especially when the trigger was thought to be American –​81 per cent expressed the view that the incorporation of AmE elements into AusE was detrimental to the language. Here is a handful of responses from Ferguson (2008): • Because Australian English would then slowly perish and it won’t be unique anymore; • Americans do not speak to the Australian identity; • Why would we want to speak American English? I think “they” are lazy with language; • Often US English seems to use “wrong” words, I don’t like the use of “z” instead of “s” and cannot stand “for free”; • The pronunciation is degrading the language, especially among the younger generations. Ferguson, 2008, pp. 81–​910 256

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Wren’s (2009) orthography survey asked participants about the acceptability of alternative spellings. The following responses are representative of the mind-​set of the 20–​30 year age group (intriguingly, Wren observed a greater tolerance of spelling variation among the over 50 year-​olds): • I think it’s important … not to fall for America’s kind of childish bastardisation of a very old language; • I think it’s bullshit; • Sometimes diversity in language … marks a loss of cultural identity; • British spelling is what Australian spelling is based on, and it should remain that way; • I think most instances of this have come from American and since we are not American this should be avoided at all costs and never enter into school English programmes. Wren, 2009, pp. 53–​54 Clearly, it is not simply older speakers who perceive the danger of AmE usage –​the “loss of Australian identity” was a familiar refrain in the reactions of even the younger speakers. Despite the fact that these young respondents experienced the “language in use” approach at school (which emphasizes variation and change), there is little evidence of any new open-​mindedness in linguistic thinking when it comes to alleged AmE influence, even among Ferguson’s participants, whose one year of linguistics had immersed them in the accepted wisdom of the discipline: “it’s not sociolinguistically correct to say this”, writes one student, “but I think that American English is ‘bad’ English and we should try and stay away from it as much as possible”.

4.  What matters is how people think A common misconception about myths is the notion that removing its influence is as simple as packing more information into people’s heads. This approach assumes that public misperceptions are due to a lack of knowledge and that the solution is more information –​in science communication, it’s known as the “information deficit model”. But that model is wrong: people don’t process information as simply as a hard drive downloading data. Cook & Lewandowsky, 2011, p. 1 Many things commonly believed to be true about language are in fact false, and linguists constantly find themselves raining on people’s parades –​busting valued ideas about how language works. These parades can involve trivial notions of etymology (no, cats and dogs did not fall off roofs in heavy rain), but they can be more serious and the social consequences far-​reaching. Real problems arise when “grassroots” prescriptivism informs decisions that go on to shape the life chances of others, potentially affecting their employment opportunities, their social mobility, their personal relationships. Much has been written about the misunderstandings surrounding the linguistic education of children, especially those who speak nonstandard dialects, and the repercussions of these misunderstandings go well beyond poor school performance (Siegel, 2012). The legal setting bears particularly dreadful and bitter fruits of ignorance –​as forensic linguists have shown, wrong-​headed thinking about language can even end up putting the wrong person in jail (Fraser, 2018). I had always assumed that by laying out the findings of linguistic research, linguists would get the message across. However, I have since learned that linguistic facts do not speak for themselves, especially when they fly in the face of people’s commonsense views about language. 257

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Even when we think we are getting the linguistic message across, people often fall back on their comfortable knowledge, what they “know” to be true. And when their beliefs about language are challenged, they can occasionally grow hostile. Linguists who confront “cherished classifications” are often misinterpreted as pushing an “anything goes” agenda; they might even be criticized for spouting this agenda from their position of privilege (attained via an education that taught them the importance of the finer points of pronunciation and grammar). The backlash to sociolinguist Janet Holmes’s arguments for dropping the apostrophe was vicious; in a piece entitled “Dumbing down of academia reaches a new low”, Coddington (2008) made much of Holmes’s “fine education”, and how linguistic skills such as “the correct use of apostrophes” had advanced her success in academia. There is no straightforward unveiling of the truth about language –​too simple and it looks like anybody can do it, too complex and it looks like quackery, or worse “junk science” (Burridge, 2022, p. 20).11 People’s notions of dirt are often established at a young age (“Don’t say yous!”) and reactions are often visceral when they encounter it; for example, “yous is about as painful as fingernails on a chalkboard” (talkback caller, May 18, 2014). Taboo words are generally more arousing, more shocking and more memorable than other language stimuli; experiments measuring the impact of words with such techniques as electrodermal monitoring reveal that taboo words (and other sensitive expressions like childhood commands) elicit strong physiological responses, and this is usually attributed to the fact that children pick up the emotive components of these words early in the acquisition process (late bilinguals do not experience the same emotional arousal; Allan & Burridge, 2006, p. 244–​247). As I have noted elsewhere (Burridge, 2022, p. 27–​28), I assume that linguistic pinpricks would join these other culturally potent expressions in triggering strong skin conductance responses. However, even without confirmation from a polygraph test, their emotional impact is clear –​small wonder it is so difficult to desensitize people to their pinpricks and to persuade them to view language in a different way. There is a lot of doublethink underpinning people’s tabooing behaviour (most notably, the fact that we can talk about taboo topics using euphemisms but not direct terms): many complainants who write to me find language change acceptable, even interesting, but only if it remains a historical curiosity; those who complain when dictionaries and handbooks update will stop using these works if they do not (Stockwell & Minkova, 2001, p. 191f); talkback callers are fascinated to discover that be is a suppletive mongrel comprising forms from three, possibly four, different verbs, but horrified to see bring and buy colliding in the same way (Burridge, 2010a); French and British English borrowings “are accepted words to describe the article”, but American additions are not (email received September 4, 2008). As others have observed (e.g. Cameron, 2012), general opinions aired about language are also wildly at odds with the democratic ethos of today’s English-​speaking communities; it is socially unacceptable to criticize fellow human beings based on their race or their class, for example, but it is fully acceptable to criticize them on the basis of their language use, something so integral to their identity. And while Australians noisily celebrate their “egalitarian manners” (historian John Hirst’s term; 2009, p. 150ff), today’s commentary around Americanisms is as vitriolic as it was in the 1920s. Informality, familiarity and friendliness, whatever the setting, is something often remarked upon by overseas visitors (Bryson, 2000, p. 210); yet Australia’s thriving linguistic complaint tradition even exceeds what has been observed in other major English-​ speaking nations (Lukač, 2018, p. 8). Consider the success of Australia’s Celeb Spellcheck (@celeb_​spellcheck), an anonymous page that draws “attention to the dumb spelling errors made by Instagram’s rich and shameless” (Duncan, 2021); examples include: voila spelt “wallah”; lamingtons called “laminations”; “Feels like a wait has been lifted off my shoulders today”; “I feel I am becoming inpatient I actually sit back and question it”. “Lighthearted fun” was how 258

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the anonymous creator described the Instagram account, and the 11 million followers lapped it up; the account was shut down in early April 2021, but not because its linguistic mockery of others was called out.12 This ability of individual human beings to hold contradictory points of view on a common entity or phenomenon is necessary to permit an intelligent organism to pragmatically adapt to its environment. However, it makes exposing misconceptions about language challenging. Language issues can be “hot button” issues involving matters of cultural identity, traditional values and stereotypes; these are compelling shapers of the gut feelings that feed our opinions and create barriers when it comes to changing these opinions. As Cook and Lewandowsky emphasize in their Debunking Handbook, “[i]‌t’s not just what people think that matters, but how they think” (2011, p. 1). The relationship between dirt, cleanliness and language has given me a clearer understanding of how and why people intervene in language and react the way they do. However, in talking with the public, I need a different frame of reference, and so I have shifted from pollution and dirt to the gentler image of gardens and weeds. Gardens and standard languages of course have much in common; being human constructions, they share two fundamental characteristics –​ they are bounded and also cultivated. People generally acknowledge that the weeds growing in these gardens are simply plants “out of place”; like dirt, they are totally centred in human value judgements. The advantage to metaphorical themes is that they can organize and draw together concepts in a coherent, effective and (hopefully) pleasing fashion –​I believe gardens, cherished flowers, weeds, hybrids, exotics, mulch, hothouses, fertilizers and blooming (English) have helped to give linguistic facts a fighting chance (Burridge, 2011).

5.  Conclusion –​the filthy reality of everyday life The moral of all this is that the facts of existence are a chaotic jumble. Douglas, 1966, p. 163 Into the mix of words and phrases that have been subject to cultural and social proscription can be included the forbidden words of non-​standard language, and also those from the cabinet of curiosities that houses people’s pet hates. Here too definitions of what is prohibited are in flux and differ across time and space. Apostrophlation raised no eyebrows in the eighteenth century but now generates strong responses.13 As Tieken-​Boon van Ostade’s (2020) study of usage guides shows, some usage problems continue, some disappear, and new ones take their place. The urges to cleanse and control remain constant, but definitions of dirt will shift with time –​as the social life of language changes, so too will the notion of what is desirable and undesirable. Among the “new-​kids-​on-​the-​block” are Americanisms. There are always contradictions that accompany beliefs and behaviours around taboo, and Australian attitudes to American influence are no exception. Dirt is “in the eye of the beholder”, and linguistic facts rarely get in the way of a personal opinion. Some kinds of American expressions are readily assimilated, while others remain stigmatised and the focus for continuing objections; some named Americanisms are in fact not American at all; and despite the general opposition to AmE influence, the bulk of this influence has gone unnoticed and unrecognised (Burridge & Peters, 2020). Endeavours to intervene in language are attempts to take charge and control nature; prescriptivism, both “top-​down” and “bottom-​up”, tries to impose order on a natural phenomenon. Some individuals have even gone to extreme lengths to engineer logical, consistent and transparent languages, which ditto reality and perfectly match the thinking of their speakers. Of 259

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course, even if one such language was ever successful, it would inevitably be sullied with the same vagueness, indeterminacy, variability, anomaly and inconsistency as natural languages. The facts of experience and perception are indeed “a chaotic jumble”, and so too is the language that describes these facts –​a fixed homogeneous communication system would be dysfunctional. Nevertheless, intellectually and socially we persistently chase dirt, “positively re-​ordering our environment, making it conform to an idea” (Douglas, 1966, p. 12). All this papering, decorating and tidying, however, will always fail, and here lies the paradox of taboo and tabooing practices generally. As earlier demonstrated, acts committed in the name of verbal hygiene necessarily involve a certain degree of mental dishonesty that comes from the inevitable contradiction between the behaviour of language users and the views they hold about their language. Bad language can be proscribed and set apart, just like other aspects of life that make people uncomfortable. They can be banned from being heard, seen or touched, but they will not go away. In fact they are essential to life and language –​there is always value in dirt.14

Notes 1 My account of the ways people think about language and value is based on personal letters, emails, online commentary and general feedback generated by language programmes for radio and television. In these programs, listeners/​viewers provide their observations on language and pose queries about usage (see Severin & Burridge, 2020 for details). 2 Though the phrase “dirt is matter out of place” is most commonly associated with Douglas, it had a life in many different contexts (though in a little less catchy form) before Purity and Danger, including a stirring speech by Lord Palmerston in the 1850s, an essay by Sigmund Freud in the early 1900s, and even the sides of rubbish bins in 1960s London (Liboiron 2019). 3 Here I thank Geoff Pullum and Ingrid Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, who helped open my eyes to the fact that many scholars from this period were not the embodiment of unadulterated prescriptivism, but had their feet firmly planted in usage. 4 Field linguists report that speakers of non-​standardized, non-​written languages also express prescriptive attitudes, and these can be especially strong in minority and endangered language communities. In villages around the Pacific, parents and grandparents criticize younger speakers for not speaking “properly”; writing on Bislama borrowings in Nkep, Meyerhoff states: “I think it is fair to say that there is one sociolinguistic universal: older speakers always think language is going to the dogs” (2016, p. 80). 5 Many thanks to Lee Murray for generously allowing me access to her corpus of early letters on Australian speech. 6 Cartoons of the era, depicting Britain and the colonies, often showed Britain as an old lioness, while the colonies (including Australia) were her unruly cubs; Australia was also often depicted as a child or a young man or woman. 7 Lukač (2018) also observed that lexical choice and spelling conventions attracted more attention in letters to the editor in US-​American and British newspapers. 8 Even apparent phonological transfers are largely limited to individual lexical items; for example, the pronunciation of schedule /​‘skedjul/​(this is labeled “chiefly US” in the 3rd edition of the Macquarie Dictionary, but the 5th edition simply lists it an alternative pronunciation alongside /​’ʃedjul/​; Korhonen, 2017, p. 48). 9 “People generally seem to be quite happy to let English deteriorate into a kind of abbreviated American juvenile dialect, but I’m not. I’ll continue resist incorrect grammar and American English” (email received March 1, 2008). 10 Lowth (1762) writes of got: “This abuse has been long growing upon us, and is continually making further incroachments”; see discussion in Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2002). 11 Not only does evidence often fail to dissuade a person from their pre-​existing beliefs, it might even make things worse by inadvertently reinforcing the very myths that experts are seeking to overturn (something Cook and Lewandowsky dub “backfire effects” (2011, .p. 1)). 12 Contributing to the success of Celeb Spellcheck was also Australia’s infamous the tall poppy syndrome, tall poppies being “high achievers or overly ambitious people generally” (sporting heroes excepted). The egalitarian ethos that has created the tall poppy syndrome makes “celebs” fair game.

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Australia’s sensitivity towards American influence 13 Apostrophlation is the term created by Lederer and Dowis to describe “gratuitous apostrophes”, as opposed to apostophy, their term for the “atrophy of proper apostrophes” (1995, pp. 220–​221). 14 An important aspect of pollution and taboo is the interaction between filth on the one hand and purity and well-​being on the other. Pollutants have over the years been used in official pharmacy, and also witchcraft and folk remedies, in many different societies. During the Middle Ages, bodily emissions (and even symbols of these emissions) could be turned into powerful curative agents, and the most polluting of these substances (subject to the most severe taboos) were believed to have the greatest healing and amuletic powers of all (Allan & Burridge 1991, 2006).

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Australia’s sensitivity towards American influence Schneider, E. W. (2007). Postcolonial English: varieties around the world. Cambridge University Press. Severin, A., & Burridge, K. (2020). What do “little Aussie sticklers” value most. In D. Chapman & J. D. Rawlins (Eds.), Language prescription: values, ideologies and identity (pp. 194–​211). Multilingual Matters. https://​doi.org/​10.21832/​978178​8928​380-​011 Siegel, J. (2012). Second dialect acquisition. Cambridge University Press. Steiner, F. B. (1956). Taboo. Cohen & West. Stockwell, R., & Minkova, D. (2001). English words: history and structure. Cambridge University Press. Straaijer, R. (2016). Attitudes to prescriptivism: an introduction. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 37(3), 233–​242. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​01434​632.2015.1068​782 Sussex, R. (1995). Americanisms roll into Australian English. Australian Style, 3(2), 2–​3. Taylor, B. (1989). American, British and other influences on Australian English. In P. Collins & D. Blair (Eds.), Australian English: the language of a new society (pp. 225–​254). University of Queensland Press. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2002). Robert Lowth and the strong verb system. Language Sciences, 24(3–​4), 459–​470. https://​doi.org/​10.1016/​S0388-​0001(01)00044-​4 Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2019). Usage guides and the age of prescriptivism. In B. Bös & C. Claridge (Eds.), Norms and conventions in the history of English (pp. 7–​28). John Benjamins. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2020). Describing prescriptivism: usage guides and usage problems in British and American English. Routledge. Waterhouse, R. (1998). Popular culture. In P. Bell & R. Bell (Eds.), Americanization and Australia (pp. 45–​60). UNSW Press. Wren, M. (2009). Experiences and attitudes concerning English spelling [Unpublished master’s honours thesis, Monash University].

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16 COPY EDITORS, (NOT) ALL ALIKE Morana Lukač and Adrian Stenton

1. Introduction 1.1  Copy editors and proofreaders Until recently, the work of copy editors and proofreaders had hardly been a subject of attention for linguists conducting empirical research. When mentioned at all, it has been considered primarily anecdotally and described as an effort to ensure uniformity in language use by suppressing variation and, in effect, enact the “ideology of language standardization” (Milroy & Milroy, 2012, p. 68). One rare and often-​invoked account of copy-​editing is laid out in Deborah Cameron’s theory of verbal hygiene first published in 1995 in the book of the same name (see also Cameron, this volume). Verbal hygiene broadly encompasses people’s attempts to “clean up” language so that it would “conform more closely to their ideals of beauty, truth, efficiency, logic, correctness and civility” (Cameron, 2012, p. vii). Among an array of different verbal hygiene discourses and practices described in the book is copy-​editing, which, in Cameron’s account, becomes synonymous with enforcing the rules included in publishers’ style guides. Whilst dealing with texts that are mainly already written in standard English, Cameron further argues, copy editors engage in the process of hyperstandardizing texts and removing variation from the few marginal grammatical contexts where it exists (2012, pp. 47, 53). Consequently, theirs is a crucial role in maintaining the illusion of the standard language. We will argue that, although without question informative, Cameron’s account is far from complete. In academic text production, which is central to our study, we will show that copy editors do far more than engage solely in hyperstandardization, but rather mediate text production in a number of ways. Our research endeavour resonates with the reorientation towards studying prescriptivism as a relevant sociolinguistic factor, and we aim to contribute to the work of scholars who, more recently, have directed their gaze towards the “coal-​face of standardization” (McArthur, 2001, p. 4). Jonathon Owen (2020) and Linda Pillière (2020) have both independently made efforts to capture the patterns and variation found in copy-​editing practices. Owen (2020) did so by comparing the types of changes novice and experienced copy editors introduced to selected texts. To return to the point made above, Owen’s findings challenge Cameron’s claim that ensuring prescriptively correct usage is a primary concern for copy editors. Their practices are more complex than had previously been assumed, he argues. Consistency clearly outweighs the 264

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-18

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prescriptive notions of correctness as a criterion for introducing changes to texts. Pillière (2020) aimed to uncover differences between British and American copy editors by zeroing in on four linguistic features which go beyond dialectal differences in spelling, punctuation, and lexis. By looking at pronoun use following comparative than, the use of one another and each other, the passive voice, and existential there, Pillière sought to find out whether the differences between American and British English copy-​editing practices inform us about their respective values and the state of prescriptivism today. Although she did not observe clear trends separating one group of editors from the other, Pillière, like Owen, did find that “copy editors do not form a monolithic group” and that their decisions “vary not just along national lines, but within the various age categories” (2020, p. 288). In an attempt to answer the call for further research formulated by both of the cited authors, we surveyed 288 copy editors and proofreaders based all around the English-​speaking world (see below), and asked them to edit six short excerpts, all of which were taken from the Stenton Corpus, a 12-​million-​word corpus of international academic English texts. All of the excerpts included the noun data, which, although traditionally seen as a plural noun, has been increasingly used as a singular construction. Our first aim was to establish whether copy editors recognize singular and plural data as two distinct usages depending on the context in which the noun occurs. We also set out to explore whether there is variation across speakers of different varieties of English and across different age groups in their treatment of data. The two sociolinguistic variables should point to regional differences and apparent-​time change towards more pervasive usage of singular data agreement in academic texts. Finally, our qualitative analysis of the arguments that copy editors and proofreaders introduce for explaining their decisions provides a starting point for understanding the shared values of this community of practice in their complexity.

1.2  Data is/​are The construction of data as a singular has been firmly entrenched in usage debates from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards. The Guardian newspaper, which often consults members of the public on writing guidelines (Lukač, 2018, p. 118), has referred to the usage of data as a “contentious issue” and one which evokes polarised discussions on Twitter and among style guide authors alike (Rogers, 2012). According to the same article by Rogers, whilst the Guardian style guide author David Marsh finds the plural usage to be “hyper-​correct, old-​fashioned and pompous”, style recommendations in institutions such as the Office for National Statistics and Royal Statistical Society maintain that plural usage is preferred. In the Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) (Straaijer, 2014), a large albeit not exhaustive database of 77 usage guides published in English between 1770 and 2010, Latinate plurals are first commented upon in an American publication, Joseph Fitzerald’s Word and Phrase: True and False Use in English (1901). His entry reads as follows: “Datum, data; from which it is seen that data is plural; it is sometimes ignorantly –​that is to say, by those who don’t know Latin –​taken to be singular.” From today’s perspective, Fitzgerald’s pronouncement gives away its age at first glance. Although Latin legacy plural forms have continued to be one of the clearest staples of “restorative prescriptivism” well into the present day (Curzan, 2014, p. 24), recent corpus-​based analysis of the usage demonstrates that the singular data construction outnumbers the plural one with a ratio of 3:1 across inner circle varieties of English (Peters, 2018, p. 48). Due to the increased frequency of its usage, especially in registers related to science and computing, the noun data has undergone a semantic extension. Both the singular and the plural construction are codified and, according to the OED, they appear in semantically 265

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distinct contexts. In scientific writing, data is treated as a plural noun when (i) referring to items of (chiefly numerical) information, typically collected for reference, analysis, or calculation, whereas it is used as a mass noun when (ii) related items of information are considered collectively: (i) We often find that no data have been fabricated OED, s.v. datum, n. (ii) Data on long-​term effects on healthy users was not yet available. OED, s.v. data, n. Although the singular data construction in (ii) continues to be discussed within the prescriptive canon (cf. Heffer, 2010, pp. 53–​54; Taggart, 2010, pp. 40–​42), the high level of acceptability of data as a singular construction among speakers of British English had been demonstrated as early as half a century ago in an attitude survey conducted by Mittins et al. (1970, pp. 13, 30–​32). By the time Ebner carried out a comparative study to that of Mittins et al. in 2017 (pp. 149–​151, 199–​213), she considered the plural usage to be more salient than the singular one. Rather than including data is in her survey stimulus sentence, as Mittins et al. did (The data is sufficient for our purpose.), Ebner opted for data are (The data are often inaccurate.). Strikingly, the acceptability ratings for data are in 2017 were, with an average acceptability of 48.5 per cent, 20 points lower than those for data is in 1970 (69 per cent). Both Ebner (2017) and Peters (2018) come to a similar conclusion when they observe that the proscriptions against the singular usage of data demonstrate “the distinction between norms and customary usage” (Ebner, 2017, p. 213) as well as “the strength of linguistic tradition, and the slow adaptation of legacy Latin forms in modern English” (Peters, 2018, p. 41). As pervasive as data as a singular collective may be in usage, in examining the GloWbE (Davies, 2013) and the COCA (Davies, 2008) corpora, Peters clearly demonstrates that the last stronghold of the word’s plural usage is in the academic registers of North American English (2018, p. 46). Moreover, authoritative publications such as the 7th Edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association still prescribe the plural usage of data (APA, 2020, p. 162), as do authors of more conservative usage guides.1 Given the high acceptability ratings for singular data, even, to return to Ebner’s example above, in contexts where plural data would be expected according to the OED, the question arises whether and to what extent the prescription against its usage is still enforced. In this chapter we aim to test the assertion that singular data is an example of a stark contrast between usage, which favours it, and the prescriptive view that it should be replaced with a plural construction, particularly in academic registers. To examine this usage–​prescription dichotomy more closely, we set out to explore the work done by the copy editors and proofreaders whose interventions are part and parcel of the publishing process. As institutional gatekeepers, their decisions directly shape (written) standard English, and are telling of what is deemed acceptable in published texts. Analysing the edits of data agreement can help us decide whether we are observing a change in progress. In other words, our investigation aims to shed light on whether the plural construction continues to be preferred in academic registers.

2.  The survey Our study involved a survey of copy editors and proofreaders for the purpose of determining the differences in the treatment of data agreement depending on the context in which the 266

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noun occurs, as well as the respondents’ age and variety of English. Over the period May to June 2020, we sent emails to 13 organizations for copy editors and proofreaders based in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, the UK, and the US, together with three international organizations. All but one forwarded the survey to their members. Through our snowball sampling method, we further recruited respondents through Twitter, blogs, and LinkedIn. While 622 people began answering the survey set up through the online survey software tool Qualtrics, only 288 respondents completed it fully, with most of those dropping out citing time constraints. The first part of the survey comprised a section with questions eliciting sociodemographic data, including the respondents’ age, variety of English, education level and field, length of editing experience, the type of texts usually edited, and sources consulted on questions of English style and grammar. The distribution of the respondents across age groups and variety can be seen in Table 16.1. In terms of their education level, the participants formed a largely homogeneous group with 91 per cent stating that they were university educated. The three most common fields of editing included arts and humanities, business and management, and social and behavioural sciences. Our analysis showed no significant differences in responses depending on education, field, and length of editing, and the references consulted. Some interesting although not statistically significant patterns did emerge, however, when we considered the references mentioned by our respondents, and we return to these below. While the youngest among the respondents was 19 and the oldest 78, the mean age was 49. Nearly half of the respondents were speakers of US-​American English (46.5%), followed in number by British English speakers (18.4%), non-​native (13.2%), South African (9%), and speakers of Canadian (7.3%) and Australian English (3.5%). The smallest groups included speakers of Irish, Northern Irish and Philippine English varieties. One 77-​year-​old speaker defined their variety as ‘UN/​international English, UK spelling’, coded as International in Table 16.1. In the second, editing part of the survey, we presented six short texts all of which included the use of the word data in different contexts. Each raised different issues with the use of data, and these will be detailed in Section 4. Respondents were asked to “Click and highlight the parts of the text (if there are any) in the […] example that, in your opinion, require editing”. They were then asked to provide their proposed edit, and to add any comments. The six texts came from the Stenton Corpus, which will be described below. The texts also raise issues of presentation, in that the examples were set in a short context, rather than as single sentences or phrases, with the target uses highlighted, which has been seen as a contentious issue in other surveys. These two issues will be discussed in their respective sections below.

Table 16.1  Sociodemographics of the survey respondents Age

19–​29

30–​39

40–​49

50–​59

60–​69

70–​78

Total

20

64 Native 250 Australian 10 International 1 Philippine 2

71

58

52 Non-​native 38

23

288 Total 288

Variety

Region

American 134 Canadian 21 N. Irish 1

British 53 Irish 2 S. African 26

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3. The Stenton Corpus The corpus being used for this study, the Stenton Corpus, is what McEnery and Hardie term an “opportunistic corp[us]”, in that it consists of “nothing more nor less than the data that it was possible to gather for a specific task” (2012, p. 11). The corpus consists of 1031 manuscripts (mss) accepted for publication in three Law journals and three Language journals,2 published by Cambridge University Press (CUP), in Cambridge, England, over the period 2006 to 2016.3 The total word count of the corpus is 11.58 million: the Law journals contain 2.58 million words, and the Language journals contain nine million words. The most pertinent aspects of the Stenton Corpus for this study are that it consists of manuscripts that have not been copy-​ edited and that it does not reflect a single regional variety of English. The Stenton Corpus forms the basis of a separate study (Stenton, in progress), but was also the source of the extracts used in this survey.

3.1  The manuscripts The 1031 manuscripts in the Stenton Corpus are not edited, in the sense that they are not copy-​edited. The mss have all been reviewed by the journals’ editorial boards, they have been sent out for blind peer review, and they have been revised. Once the mss are approved, they are sent out for copy-​editing, and for subsequent proof-​reading and proof collation. The versions of the mss used in the Stenton Corpus are thus the unedited mss as received from CUP, and have not, to our knowledge, been professionally copy-​edited. This lack of copy-​editing is thus potentially a major difference between the Stenton Corpus and many other corpora of written English. The significance of this aspect of the Stenton Corpus is that it avoids what Rawlins and Chapman (2020, p. 10) refer to as “one of the weaknesses of corpus research –​many of the texts in the corpora have been edited, thereby giving the attitudes and practices of copy editors an outsized influence in the published language”. It is also why they are such a useful resource for the current study.

3.2  The authors There were 1657 different authors listed for the 1301 mss. The only information that is available about the authors is their institutional affiliation by country at the time the ms was submitted. There is no information about the nationality, age, or gender of the authors, and none on native languages. For the Stenton Corpus as a whole, four of the seven native English-​ speaking areas (Trudgill and Hannah, 2017, p. 12) provide the highest number of authors: the US (686), the UK (309), Canada (149), and Australia (143). New Zealand provides 11 authors, Ireland 8, and South Africa 6. The eight “second-​language varieties of English” (2017, pp. 128–​ 145) ESL countries provide between them a total of 52 authors, with Singapore providing the bulk of those at 36. The seven native English-​speaking areas thus provide 59 per cent of the authors by affiliation. Notwithstanding the fact that all of the mss were published in England, given the lack of detailed information about the authors, and the wide range of country and institutional affiliations, we cannot assign the mss to the variety of British English. Instead, in the spirit of Trudgill and Hannah (2017), we have chosen to label the language of the Stenton Corpus ‘International Academic English’.4

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3.3 Context We decided to present the examples in context, typically including one sentence before and after the one containing the use of data. Context is generally not included in survey questions, despite it being discussed in both usage guides (see e.g. Gilman, 1989, pp. 23, 122; Peters, 2004, p. 138; Sayce, 2006, p. 25; Taggart, 2010, p. 43) and usage studies (see e.g. Ebner, 2014, pp. 3–​4; Tieken-​Boon van Ostade & Ebner, 2017, §4.4). Usage studies have also found that respondents call for more context in making their decisions on acceptability (Pillière, 2018, p. 262; Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2020, p. 167), and we wanted to discover if usage beyond the immediate sentence had any influence on attitudes to the usage in question. Our assumption is that, with the context of the example being shown, the respondents might be more likely to find an example acceptable.

3.4 Highlighting We highlighted the usage in question within the example, following Mittins et al. (1970). This use of highlighting to identify the usage is also contentious, however. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2013) has pointed out that one of the difficulties with highlighting the phrase of interest is that the respondents “would be biased against features which they knew, however dimly, to clash with accepted standard practice” (2013, p. 4). This notion of bias is taken up by Tieken-​Boon van Ostade and Ebner (2017), and by Ebner (2017, 2018), with Ebner favouring “the methodological advantage of not highlighting the usage problems” (2018, p. 148). Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (2013) noted that many of her respondents “failed to see [the usage] as a potential usage problem” (2013, p. 7), given that the form was not highlighted. In reporting on the same survey in 2020, Tieken-​Boon van Ostade again comments that “many people … failed to identify what usage problem they were asked to comment on. There would therefore be something to be said for highlighting the issue tested after all” (2020, p. 168). Kostadinova (2018) has pointed to the danger of discovering only “the attitudes speakers think they are expected to have” (2018, p. 208) if the usage is highlighted. Meanwhile, Ebner (2017) added that “consciously highlighting the investigated items no longer seems to fit the contemporary research undertaking as awareness [i.e., of the problem being investigated] is becoming an increasingly important factor” (2017, p. 111). For this study, one of the factors contributing to the decision to highlight the phrase of interest was that the Stenton Corpus, the source of the examples, is made up of texts which have not yet been copy-​edited, and so were more likely to contain what could be seen as errors in addition to the phrase of interest, especially given that they were presented in a longer context. In part because the topic of interest was so specific, and in part because it was presented in (an un-​copy-​edited) context, we concluded that it was more helpful to highlight the phrase than not.

4.  The six extracts Our respondents were presented with the following extracts: Extract 1 [IJC] Indeed, estimates suggest that only about 10% of Nigerians have access to essential drugs –​a figure that presumably includes the over 2.7 million people living with

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HIVAIDS. With regards the rate of doctors per citizens, recent data also suggests [suggest] that less than 30 doctors are available to serve about 100,000 people. Indeed, the failings of the public health systems have seen Nigerians resort to private health services, which are estimated to provide 65.7% of the nation’s healthcare needs. This is the simplest of our extracts, in which we expected those respondents who favour the plural use of data to change suggests to suggest.5 Extract 2 [LCO] Some of this [these] data is [are] already in analysis-​friendly form, such as social network information (Lewis, Kaufman, Gonzalez, Wimmer, & Christakis, 2008; Lerman & Ghosh, 2010), diurnal activity patterns (Krishnamurthy, Gill, & Arlitt, 2008), reputation (Standifird, 2001), or Facebook ‘likes’ (Kosinski, Stillwell, & Graepel, 2013). An enormous amount [number] of data, however, is [are] in the form of human generated text, and that is not something that can be directly analyzed. Despite the difficulties of using computer algorithms for analyzing written text, the field is quickly developing. Extract 2 is more complex than Extract 1, although it mimics it on the surface, in that, again for those respondents who favour the plural use of data, we would expect the following edits: (i) data is to data are; (ii) data, however, is to data, however, are. For (i), we would also expect this to these: (iii) Some of these data are. For (ii), there are alternative analyses of the subject noun phrase An enormous amount of data, such that (iv) data functions as the head, with An enormous amount of being a pre-​modifier, and that (v) amount functions as head, with of data being a post-​modifying prepositional phrase. In the case of (iv), data would determine the number of the verb, so the result would be: (iv) An enormous amount of data, however, are. In the case of (v), amount would determine the number of the verb, so the result would be: (v) An enormous amount of data, however, is. Further, for those who prefer (iv), amount could be changed to number, to reflect the change from singular/​mass to plural: (vi) An enormous number of data, however, are. Option (vi) would not, of course, be open to those who regard amount as the head of the subject noun phrase.

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Extract 3 [JCL] To assess the effect of Age on the production of scrambling, the data were [was] adjusted using the following procedure. The two-​year-​old group was not included in the ANOVAs analysis because there were too few participants (N=​6) in it and a high percentage of data (14.6%) was missing. The analysis of the remaining 4 age groups was based only on the data from 10 participants (the number of three-​year-​old children) per group. Extract 3 is similar to Extract 2, in that the first use of data would not be changed by those who prefer the plural, so it is the first opportunity for those who prefer the singular to make a change: (i) the data was adjusted. For those who prefer the singular, the second use of data would also not be changed, irrespective of how they saw the head of the subject noun phrase, i.e., as data or as percentage. However, for those who prefer the plural use of data, there would be two options, again depending upon how they view the head: (ii) a high percentage of data were missing; (iii) a high percentage of data was missing. It is because of options (ii) and (iii) that we encouraged respondents to explain their decisions, as (iii) could be acceptable to both groups, depending on their analysis of the subject noun phrase. We did not expect any changes to the third use of data. Extract 4 [JCL] While the above discussion does not exhaust the range of theories entertained in the literature, it is enough to demonstrate that current empirical data is [are] consistent with a wide range of possibilities, and also to point out what kind [kinds] of data is [are] needed to constrain the theoretical possibilities. In particular, now that it is well established that young children have expectations about the semantics of a verb given its syntax, we need to determine what the boundary conditions and constrains on those expectations are. The present work provides some of these boundary conditions and constraints, but data from younger children and from additional types of verbs (e.g., contact verbs) is [are] needed. Extract 4 raises the same issues as before, and here we expect to see a strong division between those who prefer plural and those who prefer singular uses of data. Extract 5 [JCL] It is essential in a setting with great linguistic diversity (over 40 languages are used in Kenya) that assessment instruments are easily adaptable. Obtaining comprehensive item sets is difficult in a situation where little [few] previous data on child language use is [are] available. In creating the Kilifi CDIs we therefore necessarily started with an English version because there was no closer language version available. Existing data available on the languages studied here, Kigiriama and Kiswahili, suggested that children are more advanced on some aspects of grammatical development. 271

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In Extract 5, we expect the use of data to follow singular or plural preferences, and there is the additional question, for those who prefer the plural use, of whether they will also change little to few: (i) little previous data is available; (ii) few previous data are available. We do not expect the second use of data, Existing data … suggested, to be changed, as the past tense verb is not marked for number. Extract 6 [AJL] Further commentary was provided on the meaning of ‘available’, which McCaffrey suggested to mean that, ‘the notifying State is generally not required to do additional research at the request of the potentially affected State, but must provide only such relevant data and information as have been developed in relation to the proposed use and are readily accessible’. McCaffrey suggests that where data or information is [are] not readily available, but is [are] accessible only to the notifying State, ‘it would generally be appropriate for the former to offer to indemnify the latter for expenses incurred in producing the requested material’. The Watercourses Convention accordingly obliges the notifying State to cooperate with the notified States to provide them, on request, ‘with any additional data and information that is [are] available and necessary for an accurate evaluation’. Extract 6 raises a number of further issues. First of all, the first and third uses of data are within quotations, and so we would not expect them to be revised at all. The second use, where data or information is […], presents a new problem for the copy editors, that of the compound subject, data or information. Here, the proximity principle might suggest that the verb remain singular, as information would be very unlikely to appear with a plural verb. There is also the almost mirroring of the quotation that includes the third use of data, any additional data and information that is […]. Here, though, the compound subject is conjunctive, and, rather than disjunctive, or, but the quoted author nonetheless uses a singular verb, notwithstanding their use of the plural have been developed with a similar conjunctive subject in the first quotation. This we found to be an interesting problem for our copy editors in terms of consistency. It should be noted that, in the respondents’ comments on these extracts, we were not surveying the editors’ grammatical knowledge, we were simply asking them to explain their copy-​editing decisions in whatever way they chose.

5.  Quantitative analysis 5.1  An overview of highlighting and editing choices The survey software tool Qualtrics enables the incorporation of highlighted questions, which allows researchers to present survey participants with an interactive text sample. Participants could select words from the text presented to them and evaluate them. Our criterion for highlighting parts of the text was whether or not it required editing. The distribution of highlighted examples of data agreement per example are illustrated in Figure 16.1. In all but one example (E3 data were adjusted), to which we will return below, in varying degrees, most editors chose not to highlight the examples. 272

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E1 data also suggests E2 some of this data is E2 an enormous amount of data [...] is E3 data were adjusted E3 a high percentage of data (14.6%) was missing E4 current empirical data is E4 what kind of data is E4 data from [...] is E5 little previous data [...] is E6 data and information as have been developed E6 data or information is not readily available E6 additional data and information that is available 0

10

Not highlighted

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

100

Highlighted

Figure 16.1  Percentage of highlighted data agreement across six extracts.

After instructing them to highlight parts of the text that they deemed problematical, we asked our respondents to propose an edit of the highlighted texts. All of the edits, or lack of any intervention, fell into one of five categories: the respondents chose singular agreement by either changing the verb or not intervening with the original text (Singular), they opted for singular agreement and revised the adjacent text (Singular revised), they chose plural agreement by either changing the verb or not intervening with the original text (Plural), they opted for plural agreement and revised the adjacent text (Plural revised), or they revised the original text and avoided data agreement issues altogether by changing the tense of the verb or replacing the noun (Other revised). The percentages of the proposed data agreement edits per category are illustrated in Figure 16.2. Although highlighting and the proposed edits largely overlap, there is one obvious discrepancy in the E3 data were adjusted example. Whereas 63 per cent of the respondents highlighted data agreement in the respective example, only 33 per cent edited it when asked to do so. We propose that acquiescence bias may be at play here, with the respondents generally avoiding editing the text presented to them. This may be because they engaged in light editing in this survey and avoided introducing changes where possible, for time efficiency or lack of investment. Thus, in identifying patterns in the responses, we chose to focus, in the remaining parts of this chapter, only on those 112 respondents who had answered the survey in full.

5.2  Editing patterns The two-​ step cluster analysis procedure is an exploratory tool designed to reveal natural sub-groups (or clusters) within a larger sample that would otherwise not be apparent. In our study, choosing this approach seemed to be the most promising in determining whether our respondents provided consistent responses and formed groups in terms of how they chose to edit data agreement across the six extracts presented in the survey. The question was then 273

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E1 data also suggests E2 some of this data is E2 an enormous amount of data [...] is E3 data were adjusted E3 a high percentage of data (14.6%) was missing E4 current empirical data is E4 what kind of data is E4 data from [...] is E5 little previous data [...] is E6 data and information as have been developed E6 data or information is not readily available E6 additional data and information that is available 0 Singular

Singular revised

10 Plural

20

30

40

Plural revised

50

60

70

80

90

100

Other revised

Figure 16.2  Percentage of proposed edits of data agreement.

whether we can speak of “profiles of editors” in terms of whether they opted for singular or plural verb agreement with the noun data. We thus merged the above-​mentioned categories Singular revised and Singular and Plural revised and Plural into two categorical variables (Singular and Plural) of the edits of verbs in all extracts and performed a two-​step cluster analysis implemented in the base package of IBM SPSS Statistics (version 27.0). We allowed for the procedure to automatically determine the best number of clusters emerging from our dataset. It is worth noting that cluster analysis generally does not allow for missing values, which meant that we could only perform this analysis using the data from the 112 respondents who answered all of the questions posed in the survey and actively edited all of the paragraphs. The cluster quality proved to be fair (average silhouette or ASW equalled 0.5 on a scale from –​1 to +​1, indicating that the object is well matched to its own cluster and poorly matched to neighbouring clusters). The analysis showed the presence of two clusters. Of the 112 respondents, approximately half favoured plural agreement (Group 1: 55 or 49.1%) and the other half generally favoured singular agreement (Group 2: 57 or 50.9%). Not all the examples of data agreement from the survey were equally good predictors of whether a respondent would belong in Group 1 or Group 2. And, more importantly, although Group 1 tends to generally favour plural and Group 2 singular, this did not mean that they consistently chose singular or plural across the six extracts. For example, although Group 1 predominantly chose plural agreement, in E4 what kind of data is, the most common response (43.9%) was not to edit, but to keep singular agreement. Some of the examples of data agreement from the survey indicate starker divisions than others. Table 16.2 lists the edits per paragraph, from the one which best indicates whether someone opts for plural or singular agreement to the one that does so the least. In the parentheses next to each example, the percentage of the preferred response in the group is indicated. This means, for instance, that 96.5 per cent of the respondents in Group 1 chose to edit the third example from E4 data from [...] is needed and change it to plural agreement, whereas 96.4 274

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Copy editors, (not) all alike Table 16.2  Clusters per predictor importance Group 1

Group 2

E4 data from [...] is needed (plural =​96.5%) E4 current empirical data is (plural =​91.2%) E2 some of this data is (revise plural =​52.6%) E5 little previous data […] is (plural =​50.9%) E1 data also suggests (plural =​86.0%) E3 data were adjusted (plural =​98.2%) E4 what kind of data is (singular =​43.9%) E2 an enormous amount of data [...] is (singular =​57.9%) E6 data or information is not readily available (singular =​54.4%) E6 data and information as have been developed (plural =​96.5%) E3 a high percentage of data (14.6%) was missing (singular =​0.2%) E6 additional data and information that is available (singular =​59.6%)

E4 data from […] is needed (singular =​96.4%) E4 current empirical data is (singular =​100%) E2 some of this data is (singular =​98.2%) E5 little previous data […] is (singular =​98.2%) E1 data also suggests (singular =​74.5%) E3 data were adjusted (singular =​50.9%) E4 what kind of data is (singular =​49.5%) E2 an enormous amount of data [...] is (singular =​98.2%) E6 data or information is not readily available (singular =​83.6%) E6 data and information as have been developed (plural =​90.9%) E3 a high percentage of data (14.6%) was missing (singular =​92.7%) E6 additional data and information that is available (singular =​78.2%)

Table 16.3  Group 1 and Group 2 per age category Age

Group 1

Group 2

Total

19–​29 30–​39 40–​49 50–​59 60–​69 70–​78 Total

1 14 10 14 8 10 57

5 11 14 9 15 1 55

6 25 24 23 23 11 112

per cent of Group 2 decided to keep singular agreement. The percentages in parentheses refer to the most common category of responses for the cited example per group.

5.3  Distribution per age and variety We were interested in whether group membership (Group 1 or 2) is associated with the respondents’ age or variety of English and for that we used the Chi-​square test implemented in SPSS. The results of the test revealed no significant relationship between group membership and age (χ2(5, N =​112) =​16.2, p =​.014), nor between group membership and variety (χ2(6, N =​112) =​9.9, p =​.128). However, some interesting patterns did emerge. If we take a closer look at the youngest and the oldest group in the sample in Table 16.3, it becomes clear that 19–​29-​year-​olds favour singular agreement, with the opposite trend among those aged 70–​78. Although our sample is opportunistic and small, this finding tentatively confirms what has been argued in diachronic analyses elsewhere, namely that we are observing apparent-​time change in favour of singular over plural agreement. 275

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Group 1

Group 2

Total

American Australian British Canadian Non-​native Philippine South African Total

19 4 11 3 8 1 11 57

26 2 17 3 4 0 3 55

45 6 28 6 12 1 14 112

The summary in Table 16.4 shows that most US-​American and British copy editors chose singular agreement, albeit with only a slight majority. The opposite is true of Australian, non-​ native, and South African respondents. There may be several different explanations for this, and here we offer one by evoking the “cultural cringe” concept. Severin and Burridge (2020) introduce it in their discussion of prescriptivism in Australian English, whose speakers, the authors claim, “live with a proverbial chip on their shoulder, constantly comparing themselves to other (often Anglophone) countries, primarily Britain and the USA” (2020, p. 204). Such linguistic insecurities, we argue, are not relevant in the context of Antipodean varieties, but can generally be applied to non-​native English-​speaking areas. This group of English speakers may see their own everyday usage as further removed from registers such as academic writing and are thus less likely to refer to general usage as a criterion guiding their decisions, but rather resort to the values shared within the prescriptive canon. The speakers from the two most powerful native-​ speaking areas might not envisage this gap to be as wide.

6.  Qualitative analysis Having presented the results of our quantitative analysis, in this section we turn to the qualitative investigation of the editing choices. As mentioned above, an interesting feature of the two groups identified through the two-​step cluster analysis is that they did not always favour singular or plural in each extract. In this section we attempt to investigate why this should be. For an explanation of what we expected to find, please see Section 4 above. Extract 1 The relevant sentence in this extract was: (i) With regards the rate of doctors per citizens, recent data also suggests [suggest] that less than 30 doctors are available to serve about 100,000 people. The expectation here, especially with Group 1 respondents (i.e., those who favoured the plural), is that they would edit recent data also suggests to recent data also suggest, and 49 of the 57 respondents did exactly this. Of those 49, 16 also made a comment to the effect that “data is plural”. For the Group 2 respondents (i.e., those who favoured the singular), the expectation is that they would make no change to recent data also suggests, and of the 55 respondents, only eight in fact edited it to recent data also suggest. Of those eight, two made no comment, whilst the other six referred to the context of either an academic journal or a style guide, with the occasional 276

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personal preference (“if you prefer data as a plural”). Some comments reflected contradictions between the respondents’ attitudes to data agreement and their actual practices, which were influenced by various factors, such as house style guides, as this quote goes to show: “Also, for my job as copy editor for an arts and entertainment news weekly, I would need to treat data as singular –​it grates on my nerves every time”. Extract 2 The foci of our analysis of Extract 2 were: (i) Some of this [these] data is [are] already in analysis-​friendly form, such as social network information; and (ii) An enormous amount [number] of data, however, is [are] in the form of human generated text. We expected this extract to be much more interesting, and so it proved. Within Group 1, the respondents fell into two main sub-​groups: those who changed both verbs to are (19/​57), and those who changed the first verb to are, but left the second verb as is (26/​57). A third sub-​g roup of 10 respondents either explicitly re-​stated the two verbs as is, or indicated no change. The sub-​group of 26, who changed the first verb to are but left the second as is, also provided the reason for their decision not to change the second verb, which centres around the head of the subject noun phrase, and more specifically whether it should be analysed as data, as preferred by the 19 respondents, or as amount, with of data being seen as a post-​modifying prepositional phrase: [enormous amount [of data]], however, is. One respondent commented on this at length: … Contrary to my edits on the previous text, I’d use the singular verb with ‘data’. In the second instance of the word’s occurrence in this text, in particular, the subject in question is singular (‘amount’), so a singular verb is preferred. This point was explicitly made by five respondents. One further respondent, clearly aware of this possibility, but who nonetheless changed the verb to are, justified the decision by analysing an amount of as an adjectival phrase. For the Group 2 respondents, we would expect no edits to this data is, and no edits to An enormous amount of data … is. However, if the respondents were to revise the text, we wanted to see if, as well as making the verbs plural, they would also revise the determiner (this to these) in the first use, and the (partitive) noun (amount to number), as suggested by many usage guides, in the second use. In fact, none of the respondents revised either use, with some again commenting on the variability of singular/​plural usage, some on the priority of consistency, some on the priority of the author, and some justifying the singular use by reference to some and to amount. Extract 3 A similar approach seems to have been taken with Extract 3 where we focused on: (i) the data were [was] adjusted using the following procedure; and (ii) a high percentage of data (14.6%) was missing. Here, we might expect the Group 1 respondents to leave were in the plural, and to change was to were, and 14 of them did just that. Of the remainder, 15 explicitly re-​stated the forms as 277

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they appeared, and a further 26 made no revisions. One of several respondents who explicitly commented said: “high percentage of data ... was –​percentage is the subject and thus takes a singular verb”. So again we seem to have a principled, if often unspecified, approach, whereby data is not sometimes treated as plural and sometimes as singular by the Group 1 respondents, but where it is sometimes not seen as the source/​target of number agreement with the verb, i.e. it is not seen as the head of the subject noun phrase. For the Group 2 respondents, we might expect them to revise the data were adjusted to the data was adjusted, and to not change a high percentage of data … was missing. In fact, 27 respondents changed the data were adjusted to the data was adjusted. Only 2 respondents changed a high percentage of data … was missing to a high percentage of data … were missing; one of them mentioned consistency with the first use and the other did not comment but left the first use as plural as well. As with the Group 1 respondents, several of those in Group 2 referred to the headedness of the second phrase as a reason for not changing the verb. Five respondents commented on the need for consistency in the extract, and a further five mentioned referring to the journals’ style guides. Extract 4 Extract 4 raises similar issues as before, and here we expected to see a strong division in the two groups between those who prefer plural and those who prefer singular uses of data in the following parts the text: (i) current empirical data is [are] consistent with a wide range of possibilities; (ii) also to point out what kind [kinds] of data is [are] needed; (iii) data from younger children and from additional types of verbs (e.g., contact verbs) is [are] needed. We would expect Group 1 respondents to prefer the plural in all three cases. In fact, there was again a more nuanced set of revisions. There is also a suggestion here that the respondents have now got into their stride, having spent the first three extracts working out both what we were looking for and their own views! For the Group 1 respondents, there was an even split between those who pluralized all three uses and those who pluralized the first and the last, but who left the second as is. Again, this was down to their difference in allocating either data or kind as the head of the noun phrase, with some explicitly commenting on this: “have taken ‘needed’ as qualifying ‘kind’ rather than ‘data’ and left as singular”; “ ‘what kind of data’ takes a singular verb”. Also, some further respondents revised the second use to avoid any apparent conflict, e.g., “to indicate the kind of data needed”. Still other respondents revised what kind of data is to what kinds of data are, with one revising data to datum, again to resolve the conflict. All of these respondents revised the first and third uses to are. For the Group 2 respondents, the vast majority did not highlight any of the uses of data to be changed. Two changed the final use of is to are, and a further two revised the second use to avoid any conflict. One of the two who changed the second use also gave a long explanation of why they were treating the different uses of data differently, and a further 11 commented on how and why they were comfortable with singular data, with four of those mentioning the influence of the context. Extract 5 Here, we expected to see revisions in two places in the text: 278

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(i) little [few] previous data on child language use is [are] available; and (ii) Existing data available on the languages studied here, Kigiriama and Kiswahili, suggested that. For Group 1, 11 respondents made no revisions at all. Of the remainder, most concentrated on the first use of data, revising it to little previous data on child language use are available. However, a number of respondents were unhappy with little data are, with seven changing little to few, scant or limited, and five simply deleting little, and then using the plural are. Two others recognized the problem caused by little and left the verb in the singular, sometimes with a comment such as “ ‘little data’ is a set form” and “ ‘little data’ is necessarily treated as a mass noun (sg)”. Although there was no “need” to revise data … suggested, 10 respondents preferred the present tense, with all bar one changing it to plural suggest. The odd one who changed it to singular suggests also changed is to are for the first use, so this may be no more than a careless error. Many respondents in Group 2 were also concerned with revising suggested to suggests, commenting that this was a “formal document” and that the past tense gave the claim “less weight”. As expected for this group, most accepted data as singular, with only one respondent changing the second use to plural, but with no explanation. Extract 6 In three sentences in this extract, we expected to see editorial interventions with respect to data agreement: (i) … the potentially affected State, but must provide only such relevant data and information as have been developed in relation to the proposed use and are readily accessible; (ii) McCaffrey suggests that where data or information is [are] not readily available, but is [are] accessible only to the notifying State; and (iii) the notified States to provide them, on request, ‘with any additional data and information that is [are] available and necessary for an accurate evaluation’. Here, for the plural group, starting with the second use of data, data or information is… but is, 21 out of 55 respondents made no changes. Twenty-​four changed this to data or information are… but are, and a further 10 changed the first is to are but not the second. It’s not clear whether this was intentional or an oversight. For the last use –​with any additional data and information that is available and necessary –​39 respondents made no changes, as expected. A further nine made no change but added “[sic]” or “[are]” or “[…]” to identify what they saw as the error. Seven respondents revised is to are, seemingly heedless of the quotation. Those who made no changes justified their decisions by referring to the quotations, or to consistency; some of those who made no change to the non-​quoted use mentioned some version of the proximity rule with disjunctive coordination, or simply stated that it was information that determined the verb number. As expected, none of the respondents revised have in the first, quoted, use. As expected, for the singular group this was rather more straightforward, with 39 of the 55 respondents making no changes. Perhaps surprisingly, five respondents changed all three instances of is to are, including the one in the quotation, whilst a further seven revised the final is, in the quotation, to are. Again surprisingly, but more in keeping with their group allocation, four respondents changed have to has in the first quotation. Again, respondents commented on the quotations, consistency and author preference. There was very little in the way of grammatical justification. 279

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Overall, then, it would seem that, whilst we can identify two groups –​one favouring plural and the other singular data –​these groups are most apparent only when there are no confounding contextual influences.

7.  Respondent references As part of the survey, we asked respondents to list their preferred reference sources. We wanted to explore a possible correlation between their editing choices and the advice provided in the references they listed. We had many responses, ranging from “colleagues” to “Google”, and many respondents listed several sources. We decided to concentrate again on the 122 respondents in Groups 1 and 2, whose preferred resources were, in descending order of frequency: Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS)* Oxford* Associated Press Stylebook (AP)* Merriam-​Webster American Psychological Association Manual of Style (APA)* Grammar Girl Hart’s Rules* Cambridge Fowler Grammarly Strunk & White* Modern Language Association Stylebook* American Medical Association Manual of Style (AMA) The frequency range was considerable, with CMoS listed 225 times, and AMA 17 times. Clearly, “Oxford” encompasses a range of titles, including dictionaries and usage guides, as do both Merriam-​Webster and Cambridge, but generally the different titles within each group follow a similar approach in their treatment of data. Hart’s Rules and Fowler are also published by Oxford. Grammar Girl and Grammarly are both online resources. The sources with an asterisk were also found in Pillière’s (2020) study and are clearly widely used. Pillière’s study was in part investigating the influence of style and usage guides on British and American copy-​ editorial decision-​making. She found the relationship complex, and subject to many influences (2020, pp. 271–​273). Of the sources used in the current study, most were equivocal in their use of singular/​ plural data, but when context, i.e. formal or academic, was taken into account, more of them suggested that the plural was a safer choice. The one source that stood out for singular was the AP, which has “revised our guidance to say data typically takes singular verbs and pronouns in writing”. Notwithstanding this, mirroring Pillière’s study, we could find no correlation between reference sources and membership of Groups 1 and 2. Indeed, of those respondents who listed CMoS, 13 were in the plural group and 14 in the singular group. In practice, although many respondents provided explanations for their choice of singular/​plural, only four respondents in Group 1 mentioned a reference source in their choice: three of them cited APA and the fourth cited CMoS, Oxford and the English Academy of Southern Africa. It would seem that the problem of the number of data is sufficiently common for the respondents to not need to check it.

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8. Conclusion The copy editors and proofreaders in our study differed in how they approached data agreement, and we have clearly demonstrated that the variation in their responses was not random, with half of the respondents who completed the survey favouring singular and the other half plural agreement. Although the traditional sociolinguistic variables of age and variety did not help us completely disentangle the factors involved in the decision-​making process, inter-​varietal differences and age may play a role in favouring singular or plural agreement. Further research including a representative, rather than an opportunistic sample, should help us clarify the relevance of these factors with more certainty. Due to the number of differences we found, even within more homogenous groups, our survey makes an argument in favour of providing longer examples together with their contexts in studies eliciting attitudes to usage. Based on the variation we found in our sample, we too, like Owen, are driven to the conclusion that copy editors and proofreaders are “not a homogenous group driven by a single set of values” (2020, p. 302). The practices of these language professionals are guided by the values of their field, to which Amy Einsohn, author of The Copyeditor’s Handbook, refers as the four Cs of copy-​editing: Clarity, Coherency, Consistency, and Correctness (2006, p. 1). To this we can add a fifth C emerging from our data: language-​internal Constraints, such as the perceived semantic distinctions in usage. Finally, copy editors and proofreaders have been described in the past as professionals ensuring uniformity in usage. What our study calls into question is the notion of uniformity altogether. Seeing that our survey examples belonged to the academic register, we expected to see consistent maintenance of the conservative tradition (plural data) among our group of respondents. Our findings show, however, that this was hardly the case. The editorial decisions were often divorced from prescriptions, even where we would expect them to be followed. The world of global academic publishing is made up of speakers of a great number of different varieties of English, and the norms, even of a seemingly more rigid variety such as written standard English, are renegotiated rather fiercely. With this in mind, we urge sociolinguists to investigate further how norms are understood and implemented among different groups of gatekeepers. Studies of this sort will help us understand the processes which de facto shape and direct the development of standard written English.

Notes 1 Simon Heffer’s usage guide Strictly English: The correct way to write … and why it matters (2010) includes the following entry on data: “Certain words, usually of foreign origin, are not always recognised by people as being plural. Data and media are the plurals of anglicised Latin neuter nouns and should take verbs as such –​“the data were wrong” or “the media are scum”” (p. 53). 2 A full description of the Stenton Corpus can be found in Stenton (in progress). 3 We are very grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to hold the files that comprise the Stenton Corpus. The six journals used for this study are: Asian Journal of International Law (AJL), Asian Journal of Law and Society (ALS), Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (BLC), International Journal of Law in Context (IJC), Journal of Child Language (JCL), and Language and Cognition (LCO). 4 Mauranen (2012) and Crystal (2017, p. 206) prefer “English as a Lingua Franca”, but both of these are writing in the context of spoken academic English. 5 Potential revisions shown here in brackets were not included in the survey extracts.

References APA (2020 seventh edition) Publication manual of the American Psychological Association. American Psychological Association.

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Morana Lukač and Adrian Stenton Cameron, D. (2012). Verbal hygiene (2nd edition). Routledge. Crystal, D. (2017) Making sense: the glamorous story of English grammar. Profile Books. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English: prescriptivism and language history. Cambridge University Press. Davies, M. (2008). The corpus of contemporary American English (COCA). http://​cor​pus.byu.edu/​coca/​ [last accessed 11 August 2021]. Davies, M. (2013). Corpus of global web-​based English (GloWbE). http://​cor​pus.byu.edu/​glo​wbe/​ [last accessed 11 August 2021]. Ebner, C. (2014). The dangling participle –​a language myth? English Today, 30(4), 3–​4. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1017/​S02660​7841​4000​327 Ebner, C. (2017). Proper English usage: a sociolinguistic investigation of attitudes towards usage problems in British English. LOT. Ebner, C. (2018). Attitudes to British usage. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides: history, advice, attitudes (pp. 137–​154). Oxford University Press. Einsohn, A. (2006). The copyeditor’s handbook: a guide for book publishing and corporate communications. University of California Press. Gilman, E. W. (Ed.). (1989). Webster’s dictionary of English usage. Merriam-​Webster. Heffer, S. (2010). Strictly English: the correct way to write ... and why it matters. Random House Books. Kostadinova, V. (2018). Language prescriptivism: attitudes to usage vs. actual usage in American English [Doctoral dissertation, University of Leiden]. Leiden University Scholarly Publications. https://​hdl.han​dle.net/​ 1887/​68226 Lukač, M. (2018). Grassroots Prescriptivism. LOT. Mauranen, A. (2012). Exploring ELF: Academic English shaped by non-​ native speakers. Cambridge University Press. McArthur, T. (2001). Error, editing, and World Standard English. English Today, 17(1), pp. 3–​8. https://​ doi.org/​10.1017/​S02660​7840​1001​018 McEenery, T., & Hardie, A. (2012). Corpus linguistics: method, theory and practice. Cambridge University Press. Milroy, J., & Milroy, L. (2012) Authority in language: investigating language prescription and standardisation (4th ed.). Routledge. Mittins, W. H., Salu, M., Edminson M., & Coyne, S. (1970). Attitudes to English usage: an enquiry by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne Institute of Education English Research Group. Oxford University Press. Owen, J. (2020). Practicing prescriptivism: how copyeditors treat prescriptive rules. In D. Chapman & J. D. Rawlins (Eds.), Language prescription: values, ideologies and identity (pp. 292–​306). Multilingual Matters. Peters, P. (2004). The Cambridge guide to English usage. Cambridge University Press. Peters, P. (2018). The lexicography of English usage. In I. Tieken Boon van Ostade (Ed.), English usage guides: history, advice, attitudes (pp. 31–​49). Oxford University Press. Pillière, L. (2018). Imposing a norm: the invisible marks of copy-​editors. In L. Pillière, W. Andrieu, V. Kerfelec, & D. Lewis (Eds.), Standardising English: norms and margins in the history of the English language (pp. 251–​276). Cambridge University Press. Pillière, L. (2020). US copy editors, style guides and usage guides and their impact on British novels. In D. Chapman & J. D. Rawlins (Eds.), Language prescription: values, ideologies and identity (pp. 261–​291). Multilingual Matters. Rawlins, J. D. & Chapman, D. (2020). Introduction: values and binaries in language evaluation. In D. Chapman & J. D. Rawlins (Eds.), Language prescription: values, ideologies and identity (pp. 1–​11). Multilingual Matters. Rogers, S. (2012, June 8). Data are or data is? The Guardian. www.theg​uard​ian.com/​news/​datab​log/​2010/​ jul/​16/​data-​plu​ral-​singu​lar Sayce, K. (2006). What not to write: a guide to the dos and don’ts of good English. Words at Work. Severin, A. A., & Burridge, K. (2020). What do ‘Little Aussie Sticklers’ value most? In D. Chapman & J. D. Rawlins (Eds), Language Prescription: values, ideologies and identity (pp. 194–​211). Multilingual Matters. Stenton, A. (in progress). These Kind of Words: Number agreement in the species noun phrase in International Academic English [Doctoral dissertation, Leiden University Centre for Linguistics]. Straaijer, R. (2014). Hyper usage guide of English. http://​huge.ullet.net Taggart, C. (2010) Her Ladyship’s guide to the Queen’s English. National Trust. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2013). Studying attitudes to English usage. English Today, 29(4), 3–​12. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S02660​7841​3000​436

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PART III

Prescriptivism across languages and cultures

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17 STANDARD LANGUAGE IDEOLOGY AND PRESCRIPTIVISM IN THE ARABIC-​SPEAKING WORLD Andreas Hallberg

1. Introduction Arabic is a macro-​language (Eberhard et al., 2020), which encompasses a large number of uncodified varieties of colloquial Arabic (CA, Ar. ʿāmmiyya/​dārija/​lahja) used alongside Standard Arabic (SA, Ar. fuṣḥā), albeit in different contexts. SA is used primarily for written purposes and is not spoken natively by any segment of the population, making Arabic the epitome of a diglossic language (Ferguson, 1959, 1996). SA, which was codified between the eighth and eleventh centuries, is broadly associated with Islam, Arab nationalism, and a large body of classical and contemporary literature. In this chapter I provide a description of the dominant language ideology in the Arabic-​speaking world and its manifestation in prescriptive practices. Language ideology is here understood as “the ideas with which participants and observers frame their understanding of linguistic varieties and map those understandings onto people, events, and activities that are significant to them” (Irvine & Gal, 2001, p. 402). I draw on four types of sources for this description of Arabic prescriptivism: reports and proceedings from the International Conference of the Arabic Language, prescriptive style guides, televized discussion programs, and Arabic teaching materials. The first two represent the views of language specialists, and the latter two illustrate how these views are disseminated to the public. In her recent book Fixing English, Curzan (2014, pp. 24–​39) usefully divides prescriptivism into four strands: (a) standardizing prescriptivism, attempts to suppress non-​standard forms; (b) stylistic prescriptivism, concerned with variant forms within the standard variety; (c) restorative prescriptivism, attempts to revive historical forms that have fallen out of use; and (d) politically responsive prescriptivism, prescription of “inclusive, nondiscriminatory, politically correct” usage (p. 24). Although Curzan’s book deals specifically with English, this division of forms of prescriptivism is also applicable to other prescriptive traditions. I argue that the first two are particularly useful for describing prescriptivism in the Arabic-​speaking world, as they represent its two main strands.1 Arabic standardizing prescriptivism targets the Arabic-​speaking population

DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-20

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at large to regulate the status of standard and non-​standard varieties of Arabic. It assumes that forms can be trivially dividable into CA and SA variants. Operating on the level of linguistic varieties, it can be seen as a form of status planning (Kloss, 1969), which is less concerned with detailed prescriptions of specific forms. Since SA is portrayed as inescapably and essentially tied to religious and ethnic or nationalist identities, any threat to SA is interpreted as a threat to them as well, making the rhetorical tone of this strand highly moralistic and alarmist. Arabic stylistic prescriptivism, on the other hand, specifically targets users of SA, such as writers and journalists, and not the community at large. It is concerned with detailed judgments on the correctness of specific forms, and can thus be seen as a form of corpus planning (Kloss, 1969). The tone here is elitist, rather than alarmist, as the focus is on features that represent, as Curzan (2014) puts it, “a nicety of usage, a nicety that distinguishes those who ‘know better’ from those who don’t’ (p. 33). To the extent that this strand promotes historical, obsolete forms, it also includes traits of restorative prescriptivism. The main characteristics of these two strands, further described below, are summarized in Table 17.1. The fourth of Curzan’s strands, politically responsive prescriptivism, plays little role in the dominant, conservative discourse described in this chapter. This chapter describes only the dominant Arabic language ideology. Other competing Arabic language ideologies include movements to establish local forms of CA as languages of learning or literary expression, for example in magazines and some literary genres (Håland, 2017; Høigilt, 2017) and in the Egyptian Arabic Wikipedia,2 and the trend in Arabic departments in the West to regard CA as a legitimate and necessary part of formal language instruction (Al-​Batal, 2018; Wahba et al., 2006). In Arab academia, linguistic research on Arabic is conducted within two distinct traditions. One strand of research is published in Arabic and conducted in šarīʿa or Arabic departments, which operate under a traditionalist, prescriptive paradigm. The other strand, often carried out by researchers educated at Western universities, is published in English, and conducted in other, often English departments, which operate under the paradigms and ideologies of modern linguistics (Miller & Caubet, 2010). This chapter focuses only on the former, traditionalist strand of linguistic research in Arab academia, which is the one represented in public discourse, reflected in pedagogical practices, and involved in shaping the public’s views on language. The rest of the chapter is divided into four sections. In Section 2, Arabic is described as a case of standard language ideology, but one with its own characteristics resulting from diglossia and its early codification. Section 3 describes Arabic standardizing prescriptivism, which deals with CA either with direct confrontation and condemnation or by rendering it invisible. In Section 4, Arabic stylistic prescriptivism is described with examples from style guides. The section also includes a discussion of the prominent and complex role of case and mood inflection in Arabic notions of linguistic correctness. The final section of the chapter presents a brief summary and concluding remarks. Translations from Arabic are my own, unless otherwise indicated.

Table 17.1  Features of Arabic standardizing and stylistic prescriptivism

Target Type of language planning Historical origin Rhetoric

Standardizing prescriptivism

Stylistic prescriptivism

the language community status planning the nahḍa (19th cent.) alarmist

writers, journalists, translators corpus planning early codification (8th cent.) elitist

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2.  Arabic standard language ideology Arabic prescriptivism can largely be understood in relation to standard language ideology, that is, the belief that some variant forms represent the proper manifestations of the language and are inherently more correct than others (Milroy, 2007; Ricento, 2006). Milroy and Milroy (1991) poignantly characterized this ideology as “intolerance of optional variability in language” (p. 26). Such ideas are probably a feature of language standardization in general and exist to some degree in all modern standard languages. There are, however, two notable differences between the standard language ideology of Arabic and that of the Western language communities for which this concept was originally developed. The first relates to the lack of native speakers of SA (or of anything resembling it), and the second relates to the status of the codification and the historical distance from its formation. These are discussed in turn below. In many languages, the standard variety is based on, or associated with, the speech of socio-​economically privileged groups (Haugen, 1966; Milroy, 2007). From this association the standard variety derives its status and its association with social mobility. This is seen, for example, in the reflection of social stratification of variation in individuals’ style shifts, so that when an individual pays more attention to their speech, it more closely resembles the speech of the upper classes (Labov, 1972). In these languages, prescriptive acts retrieve much of their authority from the covert social order of class and ethnic relations. The “correct” language these acts promote is by the language community at large associated with social and economic success and therefore requires no explicit justification (Lippi-​Green, 1997; Trudgill, 1979). SA, on the other hand, is not associated with social class; no group in society natively speaks a variety resembling SA, and it is therefore not associated with socio-​economic prestige, socially driven style shifts, or linguistic change. Rather, socially driven change in the Arabic-​ speaking world is typically towards the CA of urban centers, irrespective of their similarities with SA (Al-​Wer, 2013; Ibrahim, 1986). Prescriptivism, efforts to steer language use towards the standard variety, can therefore not tap into class-​based systems of status and prestige in the Arabic-​speaking world. Instead, Arabic prescriptivism claims authority by overtly referring to religious and nationalist ideals and ideologies. These represent the two major political forces in the region, and, while often in conflict, they converge in emphasizing SA as a crucial and essential component of identity and unity. According to Islamic theology, Arabic was chosen by God as the language of revelation and as the vehicle to express religious truths. The Qur’an, the holy text embodying this revelation, is held by Muslims to be the direct word of God, as revealed to the Prophet Mohammad, and is upheld as the ultimate ideal of the Arabic language. Its exact linguistic form is seen as being a significant part of the message, and therefore it cannot be translated. It is a collective duty of all Muslims to learn and preserve the language of the Qur’an as an unadulterated connection to Islam and its message (Haeri, 2003; Suleiman, 2003). Notably, the obligatory prayers must be carried out in Arabic. The colloquial varieties deviate considerably from the language of the source texts, and their widespread use is seen as disconnecting speakers from the source texts and the truths they convey. Secular nationalists have emphasized the role of SA since the nineteenth century nahḍa-​ movement of Arab-​intellectual revival and the rise of pan-​Arab nationalism. Inspired by German nationalist thought, the Arabic language came to be viewed as the single most important and defining factor of Arab ethnicity and identity (Gully, 1997; Suleiman, 2003). During the twentieth century, it became a cornerstone in the nation-​building of the newly independent Arab nation states. Only SA, shared by all Arabic-​speaking peoples, could fill this function, while CA, which differed in each region, came to be perceived as a threat to Arab unity. 289

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Explicit reference to these religious or nationalist ideals is routine in virtually all materials reviewed in the research for this chapter. Indeed, the tendency in Arabic prescriptivism to overtly and forcefully justify itself with reference to Islam and Arab nationalist unity is a distinguishing feature of this tradition. The second difference between the Arabic standard language ideology and that of many European languages relates to the status of the codification of Arabic and the historical distance since this took place. A prescriptivist tradition requires a body of authoritative texts or a consensus on what is to be considered correct language. English, for example, saw an explosion of grammar writing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, formulating rules that came to represent a canon of grammatical correctness (Bailey, 1991; Curzan, 2014). The Arabic canonical grammar hearkens back much further. Arab grammatical and linguistic thought grew out of studies of the Qur’an and poetry in the eighth century, developed into an advanced theoretical science, and reached its final fixed and canonical form around the eleventh century, characterized by “its extreme coherence and systematicity” (Bohas et al., 1990, p. 16).3 One of the main concerns for the early grammarians was that, in their view, the urban life-​style of the new empire and the influx of non-​Arabic speakers had corrupted the language and removed it from its Arabian, Bedouin, desert-​dwelling roots (Versteegh, 1983). For this reason, linguistic sources from after around 750 CE (200 AH) were deemed to be at risk of contamination and corruption and were excluded for purposes of codification as a matter of principle. The material collected before then, consisting of the Qur’an, poetry, known sayings, documented Bedouin speech, and, to a lesser extent, ḥadīṯ, in effect came to form a closed corpus used for the purposes of codification. Subsequently, the period from the twelfth century onward saw development primarily in forms of presentation (Bohas et al., 1990; Carter, 2006). Works from this period, such as Ibn Yaʿīš’s (d. 1245) Šarḥ al‑mufaṣṣal and Ibn Hišāms’s (d. 1359) Muġnī l‑labīb and Qaṭr an‑nadā wa‑ball aṣ‑ṣadā are to this day used as standard references in university-​level Arabic courses. Modern grammars follow the terminology, modes of analysis, and forms of presentation established in these classical works. Accordingly, the grammatical descriptions used as references for linguistic correctness, and the system that is the foundation for contemporary language pedagogy, goes back roughly a millennium. This description is, in turn, based on a variety dating back a couple of centuries earlier, in what Hallberg (2016, p. 50) describes as a “doubly archaic” codification. In many other languages, the association of the standard variety with a social group gives the standard variety a measure of malleability, in that changes in the language of this group may provide legitimacy for new forms to be taken up in the codification (Curzan, 2014, Chapter 5; Havránek, 1982). In the diglossic context of Arabic, however, there is no group associated with the standard variety in this way, making the received grammatical description the only reference for correctness. This makes for a strictly synchronous view of language in which any deviation from the language as described in the classical grammars is interpreted as an error and not as linguistic change. Terms such as Classical Arabic and Modern Standard Arabic, often used in Western academia to designate historical and contemporary forms of SA and implying historical change, have accordingly gained little traction in the Arabic-​speaking world. Reform of the grammatical description is in this context a sensitive issue; the grammatical description is the one fixture of SA, and any tampering with it is felt to be tampering with the language itself (Suleiman, 1996). Proposals for reform to the system of grammatical description have thus been consistently resisted (Diem, 1974; Suleiman, 1996). This backwards-​looking approach towards the past ideal of linguistic correctness is reflected in a lack of a sense of ownership of the language, described by Haeri (2003) as many Arabic speakers seeing themselves as custodians of the language, who serve and preserve it, rather than 290

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as owners free to use it as they see fit for their own purposes. Similarly, in classical works, Arabic is never referred to as “our” language, but rather as “their” language, the language of the ʿarab, the Bedouins of eighth century Arabia (Ayoub, 2006). This attitude is prevalent in the literature reviewed for this chapter. Jawwād (2001), for example, in the introduction to his style guide, rebukes authors and translators who commit mistakes, writing that “the language is not the heritage of them alone for them to carelessly do with it what they please” (p. 10).4 The same attitude is found in the Waṯīqat Bayrūt report (2013), produced by the Arabic Language Council and further discussed below. Its repeated calls for individuals and institutions to act in the service (xidmat) of the Arabic language (pp. 8, 16, 19, 30), and its subtitle (The Arabic language is in danger—​all are responsible for protecting it5), clearly signal the obligations of the speakers towards a language that exists independently of them and that they must serve, maintain, and protect.6

3.  Standardizing prescriptivism The dominant Arabic language ideology is strongly negative towards all forms of CA, regarding it as a corrupt and distorted form of SA and as a sign and/​or cause of cultural and intellectual decline. Since CA varieties are not regarded as proper languages, they are not seen as being able to function as vehicles of intellectual thought, education, or expressions of identity and culture. This is manifested in standardizing prescriptivism, defined by Curzan (2014) as “rules/​judgments that aim to promote and enforce standardization and ‘standard’ usage” (p. 24). In the Arabic context, this strand of prescriptivism must be understood in the context of diglossia. Ferguson (1959), basing his discussion on Arabic-​speaking countries, Haiti, Greece, and Switzerland, famously defines diglossia as a situation where, alongside the natively spoken variety, there is a very divergent […] superposed variety, the vehicle of a large and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used by any sector of the community for ordinary conversation. Ferguson, 1959, p. 336 He labels the native variety the “Low” variety and the superposed variety the “High” variety, and lists a number of spoken and written contexts, specifying which variety is used in each. For example, the High variety is used in newspapers and news broadcasts, speeches, and lectures, whereas the Low variety is used in conversation with family and friends and in folk literature (Ferguson, 1959, p. 329). In a later publication (Ferguson, 1996), he clarified that he intended for diglossia only to include situations where the High and Low varieties are genealogically related. Ferguson’s largely binary conception of diglossia has been criticized by Arabists for being overly simplified and for disregarding complications in observed usage, especially in speech. Several alternative models have been proposed, describing Arabic diglossia as a standard-​ colloquial continuum, possibly with distinguishable intermediate varieties (Badawı̄, 1973; Blanc, 1964; Meiseles, 1980). Nevertheless, on the ideological level and in public discourse, which is the subject of this chapter, a binary view of Arabic as either standard (fuṣḥā) or vernacular (lahja/​ʿāmmiyya/​dārija) is dominant (Brustad, 2017; Suleiman & Abdelhay, 2020), and therefore useful for understanding prescriptivism. 291

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In the dominant language ideology, standardizing prescriptivism is expressed either by portraying CA as posing a direct threat to the language to be actively combated, or by rendering it invisible.

3.1.  Combating colloquial Arabic Since SA is perceived as inescapably tied to national and religious identities, any perceived threat to SA is also a threat to these identities, paving the way for alarmist and aggressively moralist rhetoric in its defense. Such alarmist and moralist discourse in the protection of the standard variety has also been documented for other languages (e.g., Bailey, 1991). The situation differs in Arabic, however, in that this is the dominant view propagated by academia and mainstream media. The alarmist and moralistic discourse of conflict around SA in Arab academia is evident in reports and proceedings from the annual International Conference of the Arabic Language,7 a major conference gathering linguists and policy makers in the region. It is organized by the International Council of the Arabic Language, an independent international organization supported by, among others, ministries of culture and education, language academies, universities in the region, and UNESCO.8 The inaugural conference was held in Beirut 2012 and the main issues discussed at the conference were summarized in a report entitled Waṯīqat Bayrūt [The Beirut document] (2013). The document is prominently featured on the Council’s website and is often referred to in later reports from the conference (e.g., at-​Taqrīr al-​xitāmī, 2018; Qānūn al-​luġa l-​ʿarabiyya, 2013). The report paints a bleak picture of the status of Arabic. The subtitle, the Arabic language is in danger—​all are responsible for protecting it, clearly sets the tone. The introduction warns that “this crisis, if it continues to be ignored, will lead to a language catastrophe threatening independence, self-​determination and cultural, national, and individual identity” (p. 3).9 The main concern is that SA, referred to as al‑luġa s‑salīma (the sound language), is being marginalized by foreign languages and CA (al‑lahjāt al‑ʿāmmiyya), the latter being likened to cancer (p. 26) and pollution (p. 27). The spread of CA is portrayed as rampant in all sectors of society, including education, media, and culture. Drastic measures are suggested to curb the spread of CA, including authorities shutting down media outlets that do not follow linguistic standards and fining or otherwise punishing private actors for using incorrect language on shop signs and in advertisements (pp. 25–​26). Primary education is presented as the key defense against CA. However, most teachers are said to have insufficient skills in SA (p. 9) and it is recommended that efforts be made to train teachers in SA “in order to protect students from instruction in the dialect and to protect communities from the continued spread of the vernacular and foreign languages at the expense of the national Arabic language” (p. 21).10 This message has been reiterated in later installments of the conference. After the second conference in 2013, the Council published the report Qānūn al-​luġa l‑ʿarabiyya [The Arabic language law] (2013), supported by the Arab Lawyers’ Union, which more directly addresses governments and policy makers. It suggests introducing laws regulating language use, including the complete Arabization of all levels of education (p. 12); legal repercussions for institutions that use incorrect language (p. 22); and banning the use of CA and foreign languages in all public and private institutions, companies, and public spaces (p. 21). It also suggests that state actors initiate “comprehensive and sustained campaigns to raise linguistic awareness among the citizens, informing them of the dangers posed by the vernaculars to the sound Arabic language, national unity, economic growth, and equal opportunity” (p. 25).11 The later installments of the conference regularly featured contributions criticizing the use of CA, especially in education. Aḥmad (2015), for example, criticizes the teaching of CA in Western as well as some Arab 292

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institutions, on the basis that “the dialect (ʿāmmiyya) does not have case and mood inflection12 and is not governed by principles, grammar, lexicon, or linguistic forms that elevate it to a language of education or identity” (p. 162).13 Zarmān and Ḍayf (2015) criticize recent calls for the use of CA as a medium of education in Algeria as serving colonial interests and as “having the effect of eradicating all cultural components of the nation, of which the most important by far is the elimination of Islam” (p. 186).14 These views are echoed in public discourse and the mainstream media. On June 28, 2013, the pan-​Arabic Al Arabiya news network aired a panel discussion on the report Waṯīqat bayrūt referenced above, featuring the vice president of the Syrian Language Academy and ministers of education and culture, who reaffirmed that CA does indeed form a serious historical threat to the Arabic language.15 Suleiman and Lucas (2012) analysed eight debate and interview programs dealing specifically with the Arabic language, broadcast on Al Jazeera, another major pan-​Arabic news channel, from 1996 to 2010. They found that a main recurring theme in these programs was the question of whether Arabic is an endangered language (!), and, if so, what to do about it. While some opposing views were expressed, the main message in these programs was that the language is indeed endangered, and that efforts need to be intensified to protect and revitalize it. This tradition has continued on Al Jazeera after the period covered by Suleiman and Lucas (2012). In the documentary Lisān aḍ‑ḍād yajmaʿunā [The language of ḍād unites us], aired on Al Jazeera on December 4, 2013,16 statistics on the widespread use of non-​standard Arabic or foreign languages in university teaching, on shop signs, and on websites is presented in the introduction, whereafter academics and opinion makers voice concerns about the grave danger this poses to the Arabic language and to Arabic identity, all accompanied by dramatically sad and somber background music. An episode of the discussion program Fī l‑ʿumq [In depth], aired on November 17, 2014,17 featured a discussion about the state of the Arabic language with two linguists: ʿAbd as‑Salām al‑Msaddī and ʿAzz ad‑Dīn al‑Būšīxī. In the program, the use of CA in domains traditionally reserved to SA was repeatedly described as a “catastrophe” (kāriṯa). Al‑Msaddī stated that the historic threat now facing the Arabic language is not primarily from foreign languages and globalization, but “the real enemy of the Arabic language in use is the vernaculars” (12:30);18 if no political action was taken, ʿAbd al‑Msaddī claimed, it would face the fate of Latin, which was divided into the modern Roman languages (8:10).

3.2.  Rendering colloquial Arabic invisible The second expression of Arabic standardizing prescriptivism, apart from the alarmist rhetoric of conflict and confrontation describe above, is erasure, defined by Irvine and Gal (2001) as a process whereby “ideology, in simplifying the sociolinguistic field, renders some persons or activities (or sociolinguistic phenomena) invisible” (p. 403). In many contexts where CA may be expected to have a central role as the de facto mother tongue of Arabic speakers and the dominant form of the language in people’s lives, it is often erased, not mentioned at all, as if it did not exist. The erasure of CA is to a large extent achieved by the ambiguous use of the phrase al‑luġa al‑ʿarabiyya ‘the Arabic language’ (or either of these words used separately) to refer either to Arabic in a wide sense, including the colloquial varieties, or in a narrow sense, to refer specifically to SA. This ambiguity makes it possible to speak of the ‘Arabic language’ both as “our” language, the native tongue of Arabic speakers used for all purposes of interaction and self-​ expression, and as a language threatened by the encroaching CA. Often, one and the same speaker or author switches between these uses for different rhetorical purposes. For example, to stress the importance of sound Arabic education, Waṯīqat Bayrūt (2013) states that “the national 293

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language (al‑luġa) is the foundation on which the individual builds their personality, culture, capacities, and abilities, in order to comprehend and understand, and to be able to think, create, work, produce, innovate, and develop their abilities and knowledge” (p. 9).19 Clearly, in the context of Arabic diglossia, these functions (working, learning, developing personality) are primarily conducted in CA. At the same time, as shown above, it is clear from the other parts of the report that CA is not to be developed, but rather shunned, in language instruction. This ambiguous use of al-​luġa al‑ʿarabiyya is also what allows ʿAzz ad‑Dīn al‑Būšīxī, in the program Fī l‑ʿumq referenced above, to stress the strength and importance of the Arabic language (al‑luġa al‑ʿarabiyya) as the language speakers learn in childhood and through which they develop intellectually and form their identity (22:03), only to state, later in the same program, that the Arabic language is threatened by the vernaculars (28:10). In both examples, the fact that CA is the variety that speakers learn first, through which they develop intellectually and socially, and which they use predominantly throughout their lives, is erased and not taken into account. The erasure of CA is especially noticeable in Arabic teaching materials. In the Arabic diglossic situation, learning to read and write is very much a process of learning to read and write in a second language (Ibrahim, 1983; Saiegh-​Haddad, 2003; Saiegh-​Haddad & Spolsky, 2014). Comparisons with CA would thus be pedagogically useful when teaching SA (Maamouri, 1998; Myhill, 2014; Saiegh-​Haddad & Everatt, 2017). However, in reviewing the national curricula for primary and secondary education in several Arabic-​speaking countries,20 not a single reference to CA forms, or even to the existence of a colloquial variety, was found. SA is, in effect, presented as if it were the pupil’s native variety. This is explicitly stated in the introductions to some books, to various degrees. In the previous edition of the Syrian seventh-​grade curriculum, the language in the book was described as “the individual’s vehicle for thought and for fully expressing their needs and beliefs, in speech and in writing” (al-​Xayr & Muḥammad, 2011).21 With this complete erasure of CA, Arabic schoolbooks present a fictitious world where SA is the sole medium of expression, which clashes with the world experienced by the student. Even where educators would prefer to use some measure of comparison with the local CA or to introduce some colloquial forms in the teaching materials to make them more accessible to students, this may not be politically possible. Suleiman and Abdelhay (2020) report a recent rare example of how eight words from the local CA were introduced into an Arabic schoolbook in Morocco. This was met with strong reactions from the public, who accused the authors of betrayal of the nation and of Islam. According to Shaaban (2006), “Arab teachers avoid using foreign-​language methodology in order not to be accused of treating the ‘native tongue’ as a foreign language” (p. 701). Thus, even where there are strong arguments for addressing diglossia in language instruction, if only to improve the acquisition of SA, the strong standardizing prescriptivism is such that this is not feasible.

4.  Stylistic prescriptivism and the Arabic grammatical tradition This section focuses on stylistic prescriptivism, that is, efforts to regulate variant forms within the standard variety. Issues raised in prescriptive language guides are described; thereafter, case and mood inflection, as a central topic in Arabic stylistic prescriptivism, is discussed.

4.1.  Style guides Arabic has a long tradition of prescriptive language guides, going back to the early formation of the grammatical tradition, in a genre known as laḥn al‑ʿāmma (Solecism of the common people) or laḥn literature (Ayoub, 2006), the earliest example of which is Mā talḥanu fīhi l‑ʿawāmm by 294

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al‑Kasāʾī (d. 799). This genre takes the form of lists of what are considered incorrect usages and contrasts them with their proposed correct forms. The lists are generally unorganized; “errors” are considered in isolation, as unrelated phenomena, with no attempts to carry out structural analysis. This is because, as Stetkevych (2006) poignantly describes it, “the author’s purpose is to purge rather than to record” (p. 97). The genre is still popular today, and the discussion below draws on three recent examples: • Qul wa‑lā taqul [Say, and do not say] (Jawwād, 2001), a two-​volume work listing a total of 224 errors with extensive discussions for each, in no apparent order. • Muʿjam al‑ʾaġlāṭ al‑luġawiyya al‑muʿāṣira [A dictionary of common mistakes in modern written Arabic22] (al-​ʿAdnānī, 1999), which lists 2,135 errors ordered alphabetically with a brief discussion on each. • Axṭāʾ luġawiyya šāʾiʿa [Widespread linguistic errors] (al-​ʿIbrī, 2006), which lists 79 errors with extensive discussion under the headings of syntax (naḥw), morphology (ṣarf), plural forms, and orthography, in addition to a chapter on words that are often erroneously thought to be incorrect. These works draw exclusively on the classical tradition to make judgments on correctness. Al-​ʿAdnānī (1999, pp. ii–​iii), for example, lists the following sources as the basis for his judgments: the Qur’an, ḥadīṯ, classical dictionaries, pre-​Islamic poetry, coinages approved by the language academies, and classical grammars. Among the latter he mentions authors from the early stages of the tradition, such as Ibn Qutayba (d. 889) and al‑Mubarrad (d. 898) to those of the later classical period, such as Ibn Hišām (d. 1359) and as‑Suyūṭī (d. 1505). All three authors of style guides painstakingly provide references to the classical authors and examples from the Qur’an, classical poetry, or ḥadīṯ, to support their arguments. Contemporary usage, on the other hand, has little bearing on judgments of correctness in these guides. Indeed, many of the errors listed in these books and mentioned below are firmly established in current usage and appear, for example, in lexicons produced using modern corpus-​linguistic methods (e.g., Arts, 2014; Buckwalter & Parkinson, 2011). Providing an overview of the issues raised by these authors proves to be somewhat difficult due to the disorganized list structure of the genre. However, four types of errors stand out for the frequency with which they are mentioned. The first are errors relating to the use of prepositions, primarily related to transitive prepositional verbs. These prepositions carry minimal semantic content, typically only introducing the object, and may therefore be prone to variation among L2 speakers (which all speakers of SA are). Some examples are ixtalafa fī ‘disagree in’ for ixtalafa ʿalā ‘disagree on’ (al-​ʿAdnānī, 1999, p. 202; al-​ʿIbrī, 2006, p. 18) and taʾakkada ‘confirm’ (without a preposition) for taʾakkada ʿalā ‘confirm on’ (Jawwād, 2001, , vol. 1, p. 35). The second major category of errors concerns semantic shifts in derived forms. Arabic has a rich root-​and-​pattern-​based derivational morphology in which a sequence of typically three consonants carry a basic semantic concept, which is altered or extended through various patterns (Saiegh-​Haddad & Henkin-​Roitfarb, 2014). Certain patterns are related to specific semantic functions, and semantic shifts away from these functions are deemed incorrect. For example, the verb form taR1āR2aR3a (form VI) is typically used for reciprocity, requiring at least two subjects. Some of these words have lost their reciprocity and are often used in the singular, such as taʾāmara ‘conspire’ (Jawwād, 2001, vol. 1, p. 22) or tarāwaḥa ‘fluctuate’ (al-​ʿAdnānī, 1999, p. 275), which is said to be incorrect. The third major group of errors relates to plural forms. Most Arabic nouns form so-​called “broken plurals”, in which the root consonants are placed in a different pattern from the singular. The plural buʾasāʾ (wretched), for example, a form 295

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Andreas Hallberg Table 17.2  Incorrect vowel patterns according to al-​ʿAdnānī (1999) Incorrect

Correct

xaffāš šaqqa ġuzlān fiṭr qifl tikrīt ṭāla maṭāl malḥ manṭiqa

xuffāš šiqqa ġizlān fuṭr/​fuṭur qufl takrīt ṭāla muṭāl milḥ minṭaqa

bat apartment gazelles mushroom lock Tikrit (city) drag on salt area

(p. 196) (p. 350) (p. 485) (p. 517) (p. 555) (p. 574) (p. 633) (p. 637) (p. 669)

popularized by the Arabic translation of Les Misérables, is considered incorrect, with the correct form being bāʾisūn or buʾas (al-​ʿIbrī, 2006, p. 77; Jawwād, 2001, vol. 2, p. 78). Al-​ʿIbrī (2006, pp. 75–​87), in his chapter on this topic, lists an additional nine incorrect plurals, including šabība as the plural for šābb ‘young man’ and wurūd as the plural for warda ‘rose’. The last major category of errors is related to the fact that the Arabic script is phonemically underspecified, with letters indicating only consonants and long vowels. Other phonemic features, most prominently short vowels and consonant gemination, are optionally represented with diacritics (taškīl). Although extensively used in children’s literature and religious source texts, diacritics in other forms of texts are used only very sparingly, if at all. The name Muḥammad, for example, is typically written without diacritics, as ‫〈 محمد‬mḥmd〉, but may also be written with diacritics, as ‫〈 ُم َح َّمد‬muḥammad〉. This lack of representation of vowels in the written word has allowed for variant, prescriptively incorrect pronunciations to proliferate. Some examples from al-​ʿAdnānī (1999) are listed in Table 17.2. Syntactic errors take up relatively little space in these books. The list structure of the genre makes it such that any single syntactic error, however structurally significant, takes up only one item and is swamped by the many lexically conditioned errors. The syntactic errors one does find are structures that, although common in modern SA, do not align with some principles in the Arabic grammatical tradition. One such example concerns words traditionally referred to as tawkīd (emphasis). According to the grammatical tradition, words filling this function, most commonly nafs and ʿayn (same), and kull (all), must follow the emphasized head noun and be accompanied by an enclitic pronoun referring back to it (al-​ʿIbrī, 2006, p. 37). Examples such as (1) are therefore said to be incorrect, the correct form being (2). Al-​ʿAdnānī (1999, p. 675), while noting that this is indeed the majority view among the grammarians, argues that the usage in (1) is in fact correct since it is attested in al‑Kitāb by Sībawayhi (d. 798), the founder of the grammatical sciences. (1) ‫مقارنة بالرجال من نفس العمر‬ muqāranatan bi‑r-rijāl       min nafs  al‑ʿumr23 compared   with‑de f‑men of  same de f‑age ‘compared with men of the same age’ (2) ‫مقارنة بالرجال من العمر نفسه‬ muqāranatan bi‑r-rijāl       min al‑ʿumr   nafsi‑hi compared   with‑de f‑men of   de f‑age1 same‑its1 ‘compared with men of the same age’ 296

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In summary, these guides present contemporary Arabic as a variety fully governed by rules deduced from the classical medieval sources. Any deviations from these rules are listed as errors to be avoided, irrespective of contemporary usage.

4.2.  Case and mood inflection Case and mood inflection holds a central position in Arabic notions of linguistic correctness that are maintained through grammar writing and educational practices. This position is, h ­ owever, undermined by linguistic practices. Arabic has three cases and three moods which are marked with suffixes.Table 17.3 shows the case and mood inflections in the most frequent nominal and verbal inflectional paradigms. The Arabic system of case and mood inflection is syntactically simple compared with the systems in many other languages, but morphologically complex, with various patterns of syncretism in different inflectional paradigms (Hallberg, 2016, pp. 63–​5, 127). As seen in Table 17.3, the inflectional suffixes are generally indicated in writing with diacritics and are therefore absent in most forms of writing. In traditional Arabic grammar, case and mood are, for theoretical reasons as well as for their morphological similarity, regarded as one and the same grammatical system, called iʿrāb. Nominative nominals and indicative verbs, both marked with the suffix -​u, are for example regarded as having the same inflectional form (marfūʿ) and as occupying the same syntactic position (rafʿ). Since none of the colloquial varieties has a similar system of inflection, case and mood inflection has always been regarded as a mark of demarcation between SA and CA and as constituting the core feature of Arabic grammar (Versteegh, 1983). The explication of these suffixes is seen as the sole purpose of naḥw, roughly ‘syntax’, one of the two main branches of the Arabic grammatical tradition (the other being ṣarf, roughly ‘morphology’). In the classical laḥn literature, “the symbolic value of the syntactic endings is clearly seen in the forceful rejection of these errors” (Ayoub, 2006, p. 629).24 It is widely believed that case and mood inflection is unique to Arabic (e.g., as-​Saʿdī, 2012), cementing the view of these suffixes as “the most precious endowment of the language” (Chejne, 1969, p. 50). Case also serves as a basic organizing principle in Arabic grammars, with material organized into chapters depending on which case it relates to. This focus on case and mood inflection in the grammatical tradition is reflected in pedagogical practices across the Arabic-​speaking world in being the main focus of instruction (Haeri, 2003; Ibrahim, 1983). Furthermore, the system is taught with methods that rely heavily on memorization of formulaic explanations, where for each word in a given sentence, the word class, syntactic position, and the inflectional form is mentioned. Students are taught to reproduce the correct formulas verbatim (Hallberg, 2016, pp. 67–​71; Uhlmann, 2012). (3) shows an example sentence and how this is analysed in the ninth-​g rade Syrian curriculum. For more advanced examples, the formulas are often complex, even convoluted, as they are based on theoretical rather than pedagogical considerations (Baalbaki, 1994; Younes, 2007). For example, Table 17.3  Case and mood inflection in Standard Arabic a. Case (‘the book’) Nominative Accusative Genitive

b. Mood (‘he writes’) al-​kitāb-​u al-​kitāb-​a al-​kitāb-​i

ُ‫الكتاب‬ ‫الكتاب‬ َ ‫ب‬ ِ ‫الكتا‬

Indicative Subjunctive Jussive

297

yaktub-​u yaktub-​a yaktub-​ø

ُ‫يكتب‬ ‫يكتب‬ َ ْ‫يكتب‬

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explanations often operate with assumed underlying (muqaddar) suffixes or whole words that are not present in the sentence but that are required to make the analysis comply with syntactic theory. The description of suffixes as “manifest” (ẓāhir) in (3) clarifies precisely that the ending is written out and does not have the status of being “assumed”. (3)  nassaqa   l‑bustāniyy‑u     l‑ḥadīqat‑a     ašjār‑a‑hā arranged  de f‑gardener‑nom de f‑ garden‑acc  trees‑acc ‑its ‘The gardener arranged the trees of the garden.’ ‫ فع ٌل‬:َ‫سق‬ .‫ماض مبن ٌي على الفتحة الظاهر ِة على آخره‬ ّ ‫• ن‬ ٍ .‫ فاع ٌل مرفوع ٌ وعالمةُ رفعه الض ّمة الظاهرةُ على آخره‬:‫• البستاني‬ ُّ ‫ مفعو ٌل به منصوبٌ وعالمةُ نصبِ ِه الفتحة الظاهرة على آخره‬:َ‫الحديقة‬. • ‫ بد ُل‬:‫أشجا َرها‬، • ‫بعض من ك ّل منصوبٌ وعالمة نصبه الفتحة الظاهرة على آخره‬ ٍ .‫و(ها) ضمي ٌر متَّص ٌل مبن ّي على السكون في مح ّل ج ّر باإلضافة‬ • • • •

arranged: a past tense verb with an uninflected manifest final a. the gardener: a nominative subject; its nominative marker is the manifest final u. the garden: an accusative direct object; its accusative marker is the manifest final a. its trees: an accusative partial substitution; its accusative marker is the manifest final a, and ‘its’ [hā] is an enclitic pronoun with an uninflected final lack of vowel in a genitive position as annexation. aṣ-​Ṣāliḥ, 2019, 236

Producing this formulaic analysis is one of the primary ways in which mastery of the Arabic language is demonstrated in exams, and failure to produce it correctly is, accordingly, seen as a deficient linguistic proficiency (Baalbaki, 1994; Uhlmann, 2012; Younes, 2007). In this way, case and mood inflection is constructed as constituting the core of good Arabic in education, to the degree that, for many Arabic speakers, “grammar” has simply come to mean “case and mood inflection”, or iʿrāb (Haeri, 2003; Ibrahim, 1983). This central role ascribed to case and mood inflection stands in stark contrast to its marginal role in language use. Except for a few inflectional classes, case and mood suffixes in writing are indicated with diacritics, which are absent in most types of text. This rarely leads to ambiguity, since these suffixes are almost completely syntactically superfluous due to the fixed word order (Holes, 2004) and, in silent reading, the suffixes are generally assumed not to be phonologically encoded (Bateson, 1967; Saiegh-​Haddad & Schiff, 2016). Hallberg and Niehorster (2021) have recently shown that, even when case inflection does appear in the text, it is often not parsed as encoding grammatical case. When reading aloud, case and mood inflections are generally omitted, except in the most formal situations, such as in news broadcasts or political speeches (Badawi, et al., 2004; Maamouri, 1998; Parkinson, 1991). In news interviews, panel discussions, and the like, where SA is used for unscripted speech, the suffixes appear only sporadically and are consistently absent in some grammatical contexts where prescriptive grammar requires them (Hallberg, 2016). Because of the marginal role of case and mood inflection in language use, and the cumbersome methods with which it is taught, proficiency in the case and mood systems is generally very low, and it is often striking how even highly educated speakers struggle to add the correct suffix in simple sentences. This was clearly demonstrated by Parkinson (1993), who administered multiple-​choice grammar tests to 170 Egyptians of various educational backgrounds. He showed that even for very simple structures, only around half to two-​thirds of

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participants with secondary or tertiary education were able to choose the correct suffix, with numbers dropping radically with more complex structures that included anything beyond the most frequent inflectional paradigm. The contradictions between the perceived centrality of case and mood inflection and its limited practical role comes to the fore in the practice of adding all diacritics in teaching materials and in children’s literature to facilitate reading. Diacritics probably do have a facilitating effect for developing readers in representing lexical stems in a transparent “shallow” orthography where all phonemes are represented (Saiegh-​Haddad & Henkin-​Roitfarb, 2014). However, in addition to this, diacritics marking case and mood suffixes are also added, giving a level of morphological complexity that is absent in undiacritized text. This is illustrated in (4), an example taken from the second year Kuwaiti Arabic curriculum (al-​ʿĀzimī et al., 2018). Note how case and mood inflection in this example is consistently indicated, whereas in the same undiacritized sentence in (5), as it would appear in a text for proficient readers, these inflectional suffixes are absent. (4) ‫ ي ُِحبُّ ُك َرةَ ْالقَد َِم كَثيرًا‬، ٌ‫أَحْ َم ُد ت َْلمي ٌذ ُمجْ تَ ِه ٌد َو َموْ هوب‬ aḥmad‑u    talmiḏ‑un   mujtahid‑un   wa‑mawhūb‑un   yuḥibb‑u  kurat‑a Aḥmad‑nom pupil‑nom diligent‑nom and‑gifted‑nom  likes‑ind ball‑acc l‑qadam‑i   kaṯiran def‑foot‑gen a.lot Aḥmad is a diligent and gifted pupil. He likes football a lot. al-​ʿĀzimī et al., 2018, p. 33 (5) ‫ يحب كرة القدم كثيرا‬،‫أحمد تلميذ مجتهد وموهوب‬ aḥmad talmiḏ mujtahid wa‑mawhūb yuḥibb kurat l‑qadam   kaṯiran Aḥmad pupil diligent  and‑gifted   likes  ball  de f‑foot a.lot Aḥmad is a diligent and gifted pupil. He likes football a lot. There is little technical hindrance to employing diacritics only on word stems and not to indicate inflection, but this is quite rare (Hallberg, 2022). On the contrary, teaching materials for upper primary and secondary education typically feature partial diacritization to mark case and mood inflection, while diacritics on word stems are omitted. This is the case in (3) above, where most diacritics appear in word-​final position (to the left of words) to indicate inflection. The intention to expose children to the most correct form of the language thus leads to texts with significantly more complex morphology than is the case in texts for adults; nouns, adjectives, and verbs in texts for children are supplied with inflectional suffixes according to a system that few proficient readers master and with which they do not engage when reading. These circumstances of case and mood inflection make for a complex and contradictory situation. Case and mood inflection is presented in the grammatical and pedagogical traditions as a central and ever-​present part of the language, but it is generally not represented in writing and it is not mastered by speakers of the language. Covert norms have developed whereby omission of these suffixes is implicitly accepted in most situations, and even expected. Adapting the grammatical description and pedagogy to these linguistic practices would, however, amount to a radical break with a deeply entrenched aspect of Arabic stylistic prescriptivism and a departure from the canonical codification, as well as an admission of linguistic change. Such a reform would therefore require a major shift in the dominant language ideology and prescriptive attitudes.

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5. Conclusion This chapter has presented a description of the dominant Arabic language ideology and how it is expressed in prescriptivism in Arab academia, televized discussion programs, prescriptive language guides, and teaching materials. Arabic is associated with an aggressive standard language ideology supported by both religious and nationalist discourses and a long tradition of prescriptivist literature. The ideology is conditioned by the situation of diglossia, in which there is no reference group of speakers of the standard variety. Judgments of correctness are therefore based on the classical codification as formulated around the eleventh century. Arabic prescriptivism can usefully be divided into the two strands of standardizing and stylistic prescriptivism, which differ in scope, target group, and rhetoric. Prescriptivism largely resides in the realm of ideology and discourse, often with limited effect on actual language use. Indeed, many of the prescriptive aims discussed in this chapter seem somewhat detached from reality and unlikely ever to be achieved. This includes calls for limiting the use of CA for cultural expression, for consistent inflection of words for case and mood, and for changing established usages of specific words or phrases. It has other practical effects, however. This chapter has argued that the strongly conservative Arabic prescriptivism has considerable effects on people’s sense of ownership of their language, on academic research, and, most importantly, on Arabic language instruction, where prescriptivist considerations often take precedence over pedagogical development.

Notes 1 See Gully (1997) for a similar observation about Arabic language debates in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 2 https://​arz.wikipe​dia.org/​wiki/​ 3 For overviews of the canonical Arabic grammatical theory, see Bohas et al. (1990, Chapter 4) and Owens (2000). 4 .‫ من عبث وعيث‬، ‫فليست اللغة ميراثا لهم وحدهم فيعملوا بها ما يشاؤون‬ 5 ‫​ الجميع شركاء في حمايتها‬- ‫اللغة العربية في خطر‬ 6 See Suleiman (2014) for further discussion of this report as an example of language anxiety. 7 https://​alar​abia​hcon​fere​nce.org/​ 8 https://​alara​biah​coun​cil.org/​‫النشأة‬ 9 .‫هذه األزمة التي إن استمر التهاون فيها فسوف تؤدي إلى كارثة لغوية تهدد السيادة واالستقالل والهوية الثقافية والوطنية والشخصية‬ 10 ‫ وحماية للمجتمعات من استمرار انتشار اللهجات العامية واللغات األجنبية‬، ‫حماية للطالب والطالبات من تدريسهم باللهجة العامية‬ .‫على حساب اللغة العربية الوطنية‬ 11 ‫نشر الوعي اللغوي بين المواطنين وفق خطة شاملة ومتواصلة تعرف بخطورة اللهجات العامية على اللعة العربية السليمة وعلى‬ .‫الوحدة الوطنية والتقدم والتطور والتنمية اإلنتاجية وتكافؤ الفرص‬ 12 This is only partly correct, since many varieties of colloquial Arabic inflect verbs for mood, but by a system that differs from SA. The word used for case and mood inflection in the original Arabic (muʿrab), however, typically refers only to SA forms of inflection. See below for the symbolic significance of case and mood inflection. 13 .‫العامية غير المعرب وليس له ضوابط وقواعد ومعاجم وقوالب لغوية ترتقي الى أن تكون لغة التدريس أو لغة الهوية‬ 14 ‫ القضاء على اإلسالم‬:‫وهي ذات تأثير مميت على جميع المقومات الحضارية لألمة وأهمها على اإلطالق‬ 15 www.alarab​iya.net/​ar/​progr​ams/​arab-​conve​rsat​ion/​2013/​06/​28/​‫​خطر‬-‫​في‬-‫​العر​بية‬-‫​اللغة‬-‫​العرب‬-‫حوار‬.html 16 www.aljaze​era.net/​progr​ams/​info​cus/​2013/​12/​4/​‫​يجم​عنا‬-‫​الضاد‬-‫لسان‬ 17 www.aljaze​era.net/​progr​ams/​in-​depth/​2014/​11/​18/​‫​الن​هوض‬-‫​وتحد​يات‬-‫​العر​بية‬-‫اللغة‬ 18 ‫العدو الحقيقي للغة العربية في االستعمال هو العاميات‬ 19 ‫إن اللغة الوطنية هي األساس الذي تبنى عليه شخصية الفرد وثقافته وقدرته وإمكانيته ليتمكن من االستيعاب والفهم وتستطيع التفكير‬ .‫واإلبداع والعمل واإلنتاج واالبتكار والتطوير لقدراته ومعارفه‬ 20 This includes school books published online by the ministries of education in Libya (http://​moe.gov. ly/​), Syria (http://​moed.gov.sy/​), and Kuwait (https://​www.moe.edu.kw/​), as well as the curricula from Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia.

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Prescriptivism in the Arabic-speaking world ً‫عن حاجاتِ ِه وقناعاتِ ِه تعبيرا‬ ً ُ‫أداة‬ ْ ‫وتعبير ِه‬ 21 .‫سان والقلم‬ ‫تفكير الفر ِد‬ ِ ّ‫كامال بالل‬ ِ ِ 22 English title in original. 23 www.bbc.com/​ara​bic/​world-​56514​511 24 In the modern examples of this genre discussed above, errors in case and mood inflection are equally forcefully rejected in the introductions (e.g., Jawwād, 2001, p. 9), but rarely appear in the lists of errors, possibly for being regarded as too basic for the target audience.

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18 PRESCRIPTIVE LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES IN MODERN HEBREW Roey J. Gafter and Uri Mor

1. Introduction This chapter presents an overview of contemporary prescriptive language ideologies and attitudes in Israel towards Modern Hebrew (MH). While Hebrew had virtually no native speakers for centuries, today MH is the national language of Israel and the first language of millions of its citizens, following a successful revitalization project undertaken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. As such, MH is the product of intensive language planning activity that is intimately tied to Zionist ideology and to the establishment of the state of Israel (Mor, 2017). The recent social history of the language has had a lasting effect on prescriptive language ideologies. MH relies on two distinct linguistic varieties that share the social workload typically associated with the notion of “standard”: the prescriptive norm is an institutional standard principally based on faithfulness to forms attested in classical strata and, as such, is often at odds with socially prestigious linguistic practices. Conversely, the conventional norm emerged from native linguistic practices, drawing its legitimacy from the status of the speakers who shaped it at a time when native speakerhood was the exception rather than the rule. Both of these norms are still relevant to speakers of MH as legitimized linguistic standards: the prescriptive norm defines all matters of linguistic “correctness”, whereas the conventional norm serves as the primary marker of social prestige. Therefore, the standard language ideologies that developed in Israel differ considerably from those found in many well-​studied cases in Western Europe, and we argue that they have clear parallels to contexts that Subačius (2002) terms “late dialect selection”. The chapter is structured as follows: Section 2 briefly surveys the historical background necessary to understand the current linguistic dynamic. Section 3 describes the bifurcated notion of “standard” and the two divergent norms in detail. In Section 4, we demonstrate how this tension plays out in several dominant arenas on prescriptive discourse, highlighting the role of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. Section 5 identifies three key contexts that are of particular significance to Israeli prescriptive discourse: nationalism, ethnicity, and gender-​ inclusiveness. Finally, Section 6 offers a concluding discussion, which locates MH prescriptivism in a broader context. 304

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2.  Historical background Although Hebrew garners attention for having been recently revitalized, it has had a winding and complex history, which can be divided into three main phases. In its first phase (until 200 CE), Hebrew was a living spoken and written language. This period saw the emergence of the canonical Hebrew literature, most prominently, the Old Testament and the Mishna. In its second phase (ca. 200 C.E. until 1880), Hebrew maintained its written functions and symbolic status as a pan-​Jewish language. Although new styles and genres of the language proliferated, Hebrew was no longer spoken as a native language. Its oral usage was limited to religious purposes (mostly prayer and reading of the Torah) and intermittent conversations among Jews. In its final phase (early 1880s onwards), Hebrew underwent an expeditious nation-​driven process of revitalization, and, once again, assumed the status of a fully-​fledged living language in both speech and writing (Mor, 2017, pp. 2–​3; Reshef, 2020, pp. 6–​10; see also Ben-​Ḥayyim, 1992/​1985). From a contemporary prescriptivist viewpoint, these three phases translate into classical (i.e., authentic), post-​classical/​pre-​modern, and modern (i.e., nation-​oriented) strata. The history of MH in Palestine/​Israel is further divided into three phases : the Ottoman, the British Mandate, and the statehood period (following Morag, 1993; for details see Blanc, 1968; Mor, 2020a, pp. 104–​116; Morag, 1959; Reshef, 2020). During the Ottoman period (1882–​1917), there were very few native speakers of Hebrew. Prescriptive efforts were focused on lexical selection and expansion, pronunciation, and implementation by means of encouragement and dissemination of Hebrew speech. Prescriptive activities were characterized by a multitude of diverging opinions and (often conflicting) acting agents and institutions. The most prominent among the latter was the Hebrew Language Committee, which was formed in 1889, disbanded after several months, and reassembled in 1904 by the Palestine Teachers’ Association. In the British Mandate period (1917–​1948), although native-​speakers were mostly young and still a small minority, their spoken idiom began to assume a collective local flavor and stand out as an innovative, counter-​traditional alternative to the ubiquitous formal planned variety of MH. During this time, both written and spoken Hebrew became more stable through the processes of selection, leveling, stratification, and standardization. In 1922, Hebrew was recognized, alongside English and Arabic, as an official language of Mandatory Palestine (though the official status of Arabic was revoked in 2018 [Section 5.1]). Prescriptive efforts (to employ Haugen’s [1966] terminology) became a matter of codification and elaboration, rather than implementation, and were focused on improvement of the language of new immigrants on the one hand and native-​speaking children on the other. The Hebrew Language Committee gained more authority, although it still lacked official recognition and funding. In the statehood period (1948 onwards), native speech gradually became the norm. In 1953, the Hebrew Language Committee was succeeded by the Academy of the Hebrew Language (henceforth: the Academy), recognized as “the supreme institute for the science of the Hebrew Language, mandated by law” (The Academy of the Hebrew Language, n.d.-​a). Prescriptive activity shifted to preservation and elaboration of prescribed norms. This period is the main focus of this chapter.

3.  Hebrew notions of Standard Language Until fairly recently, the dynamics of standardization have been explored mainly in the context of Western European languages. Influential models, such as those of Haugen (1966) and Milroy and Milroy (1999/​1985) conceptualize standardization as a process whose initial stages 305

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are those of dialect selection, followed by linguistic prescription and the attribution of prestige to the standard variety. The historical trajectory of MH is quite different from this idealized process; as a recently revitalized language, intensive conscious prescriptive activity preceded the widespread use of the language by its native speakers. The standard language ideologies that developed in Israel, therefore, differ considerably from those typically found in Western Europe, and carry clear vestiges of the recent history of revitalization. The notion of a standard language often entails a linguistic variety that is both shaped by prescriptive activity and endorsed by it, and that acquired social prestige by virtue of its association with hegemonic social groups. In the case of MH as currently spoken in Israel, however, the typical social roles of a standard language are divided between two distinct linguistic varieties. This bifurcation has been previously discussed under a range of different terminologies. To the best of our knowledge, Rosén (1953) was the first to introduce the distinction between the “standard” associated with the speech patterns of the educated elite and the prescribed “norm” enforced through prescriptive activity. Adopting these terms, Ravid (1995) similarly distinguishes between “standard” and “normative” forms (see also Berman, 1989, pp. 109–​111; Blanc, 1968). Yaeger-​Dror (1988) makes a parallel distinction, although she employs the terms “prestige/​koine” norm as opposed to the “Academy/​prescriptive” norm. Other authors, such as Netz, et al. (2018), refer to these two varieties as “standard” and “super-​standard” respectively. As we find the use of standard for the less standardized of the two somewhat confusing, we adopt the terms used by Nir (2011, p. 61) and Mor (2020a, p. 98), and we refer to these two varieties as conventional and prescriptive norms. Differences between the conventional and prescriptive norms occur in the morphology, phonology, and syntax. This can be exemplified in the following simple sentence: Conventional: Prescriptive:

hem lo notnim milgot hem enam notnim melagot They NEG give scholarships “They don’t give out scholarships every year”

be-​ be-​ in

kol xol every

ʃana ʃana

year

The sentences are different in the choice of negation marker (lo vs enam), the morphology of plural nouns (milgot vs melagot) and the fact that the prescriptive norm has a spirantization rule absent from the conventional norm (be-​kol vs be-​xol). Since there are differences in frequent features, even a short text can easily be recognized as aligning with one or the other. However, the difference between these norms is not as extreme as the diglossic situation encountered, for example, in Arabic. Rather, it is a set of mostly minor but commonly occurring linguistic differences that sets the two norms apart. To understand the reasons that led to this persistent arrangement, a brief review of the history of these two linguistic varieties is necessary. The prescriptive norm, which is the outcome of overt prescriptive activities, is ultimately a legacy of the revitalization of Hebrew. The revitalizers’ ideology was to remain as faithful as possible to the older, i.e., classical and “authentic”, strata of the language (Mor, 2020a, p. 107). To this day, the chief criterion employed by the Academy is one of historical attestation: forms attested in the traditional Jewish canon (primarily the Bible and Mishnaic literature) are, by definition, permissible. Conversely, novel forms, including those commonly used by speakers of all social strata, are generally suspect (Albeck, 2013, pp. 303, 305). As such, the prescriptive norm reflects a reified ideal of Hebrew, rather than linguistic practices.

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The emergence of native speakers of MH quickly altered the sociolinguistic landscape. The first native speakers, who were Jewish children born in Palestine before the establishment of Israel, are often referred to as Sabras (lit. prickly pears; see Almog, 2000, pp. 4–​5). The Sabras developed a group ethos that rejected the diaspora and anything associated with it (Sichel & Mor, forthcoming). From a linguistic point of view, their worldview translated into animosity towards the institutional variety, which was seen as overly erudite, imposed, and pedantic –​an anathema to the Sabra ideology, which instead valued authenticity, honesty, and directness (embodied in the notion of dugri, “straight talk”; see Katriel, 1986). Thus, the Sabras embraced the linguistic changes and deviations from the prescriptive norm that had developed naturally in their own speech. Due to the increasing social clout of the Sabras, their native speech patterns formed a desirable alternative to the institutionalized form and became the basis of the conventional norm. However, despite its counter-​institutional origins, the conventional norm is by no means all-​inclusive. In line with their broader disdain for any manifestation of non-​nativeness, the Sabras’ ideology was still one of linguistic purism (Sichel & Mor, forthcoming). Moreover, the first generation of Sabras was ethnically quite homogenous as it comprised primarily Jews of European descent (i.e., Ashkenazi Jews), and the linguistic innovations of other ethnicities were often frowned upon. We discuss matters of ethnicity in more detail below (Section 5.2). Against the backdrop of the rising dominance of the Sabras in the early years of statehood, the conventional norm become the de facto prestige variety for most social purposes, even among educated speakers and public figures, whereas the prescriptive norm was found in formal spoken and written genres and public broadcasting. Thus, both varieties came to fill important roles in the Israeli landscape as “legitimate languages” (Bourdieu, 1993, pp. 66–​67) and in the Israeli collective consciousness as national languages (Glinert, 1991, pp. 236–​238; Mor, 2020b, pp. 26–​27). As we will discuss below, in recent years the conventional norm has encroached on domains traditionally relegated to the prescriptive norm. Nevertheless, the prescriptive norm has not been rendered obsolete, and the basic division of labor remains: the conventional serves as the primary marker of social prestige, while the prescriptive norm retains a monopoly on linguistic “correctness”. This arrangement may appear somewhat counter-​intuitive, since in many well-​studied European languages the notions of linguistic correctness and standardness tend to converge and align with social prestige. For example, in English, a non-​standard form like ain’t is both socially stigmatized and seen as a “mistake”. Such an alignment of social meanings is succinctly captured by Eckert (1989) as “a folk connection between old and new, formal and informal, better and worse, correct and incorrect” (p. 249). In Hebrew, however, these equivalencies do not hold. Myhill (2004) proposes a typology for unpacking the notion of “correctness”. Whereas in English and many other languages it is prestige-​based, that is, the standard is modeled after prestigious speakers, in Hebrew, it is text-​and prescriptive-​based. In other words, what is correct is defined by prescriptive activity, which draws its legitimacy not from the prestige of speakers, but from the authority of the traditional Hebrew texts. As the prescriptive and conventional norms often deviate, Hebrew “correctness” and social prestige are often at odds (Myhill, 2004, pp. 394–​398). We are not suggesting, of course, that prescriptive practices in other languages always align with dominant speech patterns. Quite the contrary. For example, in English, language pundits may insist that only “whom did you see” is correct, even though “who did you see?” is hardly considered non-​standard. What sets the situation in Hebrew apart is the frequency of cases in which the norms diverge, and the extent to which they are orthogonal. Because of the prescriptive norms’ dedication to linguistic conservatism, especially in the realm of morphology,

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a given utterance in mainstream conventional norm Hebrew is quite likely to contain features that are prescriptively “wrong” to some extent. Since the prescriptive and conventional norms draw their authority from completely different sources, there is little expectation that one should speak “correctly,” or even be completely familiar with what the prescribed form is. As Ravid (1995) puts it, ‘Even highly educated, literate speakers are not at all confident about what constitutes the ‘correct’ from of very common, every day Hebrew words’ (p. 7). Many features particular to the prescriptive norm are generally considered far too elevated for everyday usage. For example, past tense second person plural verbs are prescribed with ultimate stress, which is often accompanied with a stem change: katávnu (we wrote) vs ktavtém (you (pl.) wrote) for the verb katáv (write). However, the conventional norm uses penultimate stress with no stem change, as in other suffixed forms: katávtem. Even in formal social contexts, using the common form would have no negative repercussions, whereas the prescribed form will likely sound overly pedantic or even pompous. Other feature of the prescriptive norm, like the prescribed form nemasóti (I melted), rather than the conventional namásti, are so obscure that people may not even recognize them as correct (Mor, 2020a, p. 104). This state of affairs does not mean that Hebrew speakers avoid prescriptive activities or shun linguistic gatekeeping. Rather, the linguistic capital associated with linguistic features is determined by the conventional norm, not by their prescribed status. For example, the verb jaʃán (sleep), has an irregular feminine present tense form: jeʃená. The form joʃénet, created by analogy with regular verb patterns (cf. lomédet (she learns)), occurs in Hebrew, but is stigmatized by speakers of the conventional norm and is associated with lack of education (Schwarzwald, 2020, p. 173). The form joʃénet also happens to be prescriptively wrong, but so are many other features of the conventional norm that are not judged negatively. But as joʃénet is excluded by the conventional norm, it can cause speakers to be negatively evaluated as having low status. It is important to point out that the conventional norm is not simply more permissive than the prescriptive norm: some forms that are prescriptively correct are nonetheless shunned by the conventional norm. For example, there is a set of verbs with parallel first-​and second-​ person past forms, both of which are prescriptively correct: for nisá (try), for example, the two forms are nisíti and niséti (I tried). Only the former, however, is acceptable by speakers of the conventional norm, whereas they would judge the latter as a solecism leading to negative social evaluation, no different from the aforementioned joʃénet (Mor, 2020a, pp. 115–​116). Since the 1980s, a growing shift in the balance between the two norms has occurred. The prescriptive norm is still expected in news broadcasts, official ceremonies, and certain other formal circumstances, and it is promoted by the Academy and certain public institutions, as well as many Hebrew language enthusiasts. For all that, it has been steadily losing its prominence, with reluctance, and even indifference, towards the prescriptive norm and classical Hebrew texts becoming widespread (Glinert, 1991, pp. 236–​237; Gonen, 2013, p. 851). On the other hand, different manifestations of the conventional norm, which for many Israelis is a more suitable emblem of national identity (Mor, 2020b), found their way into public spheres such as literary works, journalism, and public broadcasting. For example, for many decades, Hebrew literary prose was bound to strict stylistic conventions, which dictated a highly elevated and “correct” language, purposely detached from colloquial usage. A certain degree of flexibility was exercised in literary dialogue during the 1960s and 1970s, but only in the 1980s did the narrative writing of Hebrew writers began reflecting common usage (Ben-​Shahar, 1995; Reshef, 2013, p. 163). Among the reasons for this change, two should be mentioned here. The first is the general shift in Israeli society from a socialist-​collectivist spirit to a more individualistic-​capitalistic one and from nationalistic centralism to multiculturalism (Henkin, 2020, pp. 69, 81; Sela-​Sheffy, 308

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2004, p. 481; Shapira, 2000, pp. 632–​634). For lay speakers, this translated into diminishing the trust in and need for institutional cultural guidance. The second is the expansion, popularization, and digitization of the prescriptive discourse (see below), which became more inclusive and dialogic. One outcome of the new prescriptive reality is an increase in the reliance on copy editors in situations where the prescriptive norm is required. Copy editors normally adhere to the prescriptive norm and generally follow (with occasional notable exceptions) the rulings of the Academy (Sharon & Sabar Ben Yehoshua, 2008–​2009), thus participating in their dissemination and implementation. Nevertheless, copyediting activity is far from uniform due to (a) lack of standardization in copyediting training programs, (b) the frequent differences between the two norms, and (c) the complexity of the prescriptive rules (see below). Indeed, the set of conventions and perspectives practiced may vary considerably from one text or one copy editor to another (Mor, 2019, p. 346; Mor, 2020a, pp. 112–​113, 122).

4.  Modern Hebrew prescriptive discourse Prescriptive discourse is the discursive domain in which linguistic prescriptions are formulated, discussed, and negotiated. Current prescriptive discourse in Israel encompasses a wide range of participants, mediums, ideologies, tones, and topics (Mor, 2020a, p. 99). This multiplicity of factors is rooted not only in the two opposing norms (prescriptive vs conventional) prevailing in Israeli culture and the increasing anti-​prescriptivist approach, but also in the specific formation and workings of the field. In this section, we highlight several idiosyncrasies of Israeli prescriptive discourse. Since its establishment in 1953, the Academy of the Hebrew Language has been the official (governmental) body in charge of language maintenance and cultivation in Israel. It is, however, a research-​oriented institution and not merely a prescriptive authority. Notably, most of its members are scholars (Gadish, 2013, p. 11); furthermore, its pronouncements are envisaged as balanced between traditionalism and purism on the one hand and alignment with contemporary usage on the other (Albeck, 2013, p. 307; Gonen, 2013, pp. 850–​851). For all that, it appears that, due to its explicit formal conduct and mode of operation (see below), the Israeli public perceive the Academy as conservative and obsolescent (Gadish, 2013, p. 18). The Academy acknowledges this complexity on its website: Although the Academy has the reputation of being Israel’s “language police,” it does not monitor spontaneous speech, and considers its decisions binding only for written texts and formal speeches. Similarly, from the very name of the institution, a foreign word that has drawn criticism, it is clear that the main purpose of the Academy is to encourage and advance Hebrew, not to stamp out all non-​Hebrew influences. As defined in its constitution, the Academy’s functions are to investigate and compile the Hebrew lexicon by its historical strata and layers, to study the structure, history, and offshoots of the Hebrew language and to direct the development of Hebrew in light of its nature, requirements, and potential, and its daily and academic needs. The Academy of the Hebrew Language, n.d.-​b (originally in English) On the other hand, the Academy is sometimes criticized for being too liberal and lax towards current changes in Hebrew (Gadish, 2013, p. 18). Examples for the dual attitude towards the Academy can be found in informal arenas of the prescriptive discourse, such as comments on the Academy’s Facebook posts. For instance, a post supporting the prescribed form tiré (you 309

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(sg.m.) will shoot) rather than the commonly used tirá (The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2021a) triggered two kinds of comments: some were supportive, commending the Academy for preserving the “original” language and its richness, while most commentators expressed reluctance towards this non-​conventional form and the Academy’s tendency to prioritize traditional rules over intuitive current language. The contested place that the Academy occupies in Israel is, of course, not entirely unique from a cross-​linguistic perspective. It is interesting to note that the “love-​hate relationship between the Academy and the Hebrew speech community of Israel” (Fellman, 1977, p. 154) is reminiscent of the ambivalence towards prescriptive institutions in national languages of “late dialect selection” type (Subačius, 2002), like Latvian (Strelēvica-​Ošiņa, 2016) and Lithuanian (Tamaševičius, 2016; Vaicekauskienė, 2012). These languages, in contrast to “early dialect selection” standards (Subačius, 2002) like English and Danish, are typically characterized, among other traits, by a post-​Renaissance selection process, a comparatively rapid standardization, pertaining to written as well as spoken language, and a consequential fear for the subsistence of the new standard in the face of external influences. A parallel development in MH makes it an additional, non-​European, case of a late dialect selection standard (Mor, 2020b, pp. 32–​35), with two significant differences (compare the exceptions discussed by Subačius, 2002, pp. 145–​ 46). Hebrew was selected for its pan-​Jewish nature rather than vernacular qualities, and its standardization occurred in the context of a collective relocation (immigration to Palestine). Additionally, in MH the anti-​prescriptivist standpoint has gained hegemonic status through enregisterment of the conventional norm (Sichel & Mor, forthcoming). Despite their constitutional authority, the Academy’s decisions are customarily recognized only by copy editors and Hebrew language enthusiasts. They remain unfamiliar to the public and to educators and statespersons alike. This is the outcome of three factors. First, although the Academy endeavors to approach the public and increase its accessibility (Gadish, 2013, pp. 18–​19), its decisions are knowingly detached from native speech patterns (Bar-​Asher, 2012/​1990, p. 151; Gadish, 2013, p. 18), and, therefore, from MH users (e.g. nemasóti rather than namásti; see above). For many Israelis the raison d’être of the Academy lies not in its prescriptive or academic tasks, with which they are commonly not conversant, but rather in its symbolic status as an emblem of national unity and the Jewish past (Glinert, 1991, pp. 236–​237). Second, the Academy’s decisions cover morphology, vocalization, orthography, punctuation, transcription, and lexicon, leaving matters of syntax and style open for debate and personal preference (Albeck, 2013, p. 300; Glinert, 1991, p. 235), e.g., matters of word order. Moreover, its process of decision-​making, which is democratic and scholarly in nature, is not necessarily aimed at phrasing an unequivocal pronouncement, but rather at guiding MH users while articulating the various facets of Hebrew (Albeck, 2013, pp. 304–​305). As a result, the prescriptive norm leaves much room for interpretation (which is not necessarily compatible with the Academy’s viewpoint or intention) or disregard. Third, the Academy’s decisions are not enforced in any manner (Rabin, 1983, p. 54). Consequently, other institutions and authorities that could have taken part in disseminating and implementing these decision (such as the school system and publishing houses) do not necessarily conform to the Academy’s rulings, and instead follow alternative sets of rules which deviate, to a greater or lesser extent, from the Academy’s codices (Mor, 2020a, pp. 113–​114). We conclude this section with an example illustrating the subjective and intricate nature of prescriptive activity, which may result in opposing views (for a detailed discussion see Mor, 2019). The word mispar “number” in Ancient Hebrew is a floating quantifier: it can either follow a noun or precede it. The order noun+​mispar is found once in Biblical Hebrew (yamim 310

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mispar “a few days” (Numbers 9:20)) and occasionally in later, post-​classical texts, while the reverse order mispar+​noun is very rarely found. However, from the end of the eighteenth century (the beginning of the Jewish Enlightenment period) onwards, and until today, mispar+​ noun is widespread in a variety of genres, possibly due to foreign influence and/​or analogy to the majority of quantifiers in Hebrew. This leads to two competing alternatives, both of which are accepted in a formal register: (a) noun+​mispar, which is considered more classical and elevated, or (b) mispar+​noun, which is more intuitive and mundane. This state of affairs is manifested, for instance, in a 1960s manual for Hebrew learners written by one of Israel’s leading linguists: “It either precedes or, more elegantly, follows the modified noun” (Rosén, 1962, p. 343). The fact that most prescriptive authorities, including the Academy, have not discussed this usage suggests that both alternatives are considered correct. However, mispar is mentioned in passing in one of the most influential Hebrew language guides, a manual compiled by Abba Bendavid, who was the language advisor for the Israeli broadcast service on behalf of the Academy from 1959 to 1982 (Bendavid & Shy, 1974, p. 231). Bendavid, who had a formal broadcast register in mind, and was writing for an audience of broadcasting personnel with no linguistic training, preferred the option considered more polished: noun+​mispar. In all probability, he did not intend to invalidate the mispar+​noun usage, but rather to advocate the stylistic advantage of noun+​mispar. As his manual became a nearly mandatory guidebook for normativists (even beyond the broadcasting realm), his recommendation became an unquestionable rule that copy editors follow (or intentionally ignore). Online discussions of this matter in professional forums imply that this is because copyeditors rely heavily on canonical prescriptive literature and favor simple unambiguous rules. In this case they prefer to follow the classical pattern rather than develop a more flexible and knowledgeable approach. Prescriptive reality in Israel is, therefore, far more complicated and inconclusive than the imagined apparatus of objective rules (compare Battistella, 2005, p. 9; Pullum, 2004, p. 6) shared by language users and specialists alike. Copy editors and other Hebrew overseers, who shape texts and disseminate language conventions, do not always have the time, the will, or the effective tools to deal with each and every prescriptive detail they encounter, and thus many language conventions are dependent on habits or personal preference, which are subject to language ideologies (compare Cameron, 2012/​1995, pp. 12–​18 and chap. 2).

5.  Modern Hebrew prescriptivism in context 5.1  Prescriptivism and nationality A discussion of prescriptive language ideologies in Israel is not complete without considering the important role that the ideology of Hebrew monolingualism has played in the national ethos, especially during the early years of nation-​building (Spolsky & Shohamy, 1999). The revitalization of Hebrew entailed a vision of a monolingual society, in which Hebrew would be the primary language of communication in all social domains. This totalistic approach came to a climax in the so-​called “Language War” of 1913, a struggle between supporters of Hebrew and supporters of German as the language of instruction in a planned technological institute of higher education, which Hebrew ultimately won (Aytürk, 2012, pp. 57–​58). The push for Hebrew dominance remained in full swing following the establishment of the state in 1948. Immigrants were generally expected to abandon their languages and adopt Hebrew, leading to the endangerment of many of the Jewish languages that had thrived in the diaspora (Shohamy, 2008). Of particular interest are the attitudes towards two languages: English 311

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and Arabic, both of which were official languages of the British mandate of Palestine alongside Hebrew. The newly established state of Israel abolished English as an official language in 1948, almost immediately after the end of the British mandate (Yitzhaki, 2010). However, since the late 1960s, due to its increasing global status and prestige, English has reacquired a foothold as an important second language in Israel, which has caused much concern among language pundits (Shohamy & Spolsky, 2002). As for Arabic, it holds a unique place: varieties of Arabic served as the native language of both the Palestinian minority as well as many of the Jewish immigrants to Israel. While the incoming Jewish population mostly shifted to Hebrew, for Palestinians in Israel, who were mostly excluded from the national ethos, Arabic remained the primary first language (Ben-​Rafael, 2002). From a legal point of view, Arabic (unlike English) retained its mandatory status as official for many years after 1948. However, the two languages never had equal status in practice: Arabic was always secondary to Hebrew and often absent from public signage and governmental services (Mendel, et al., 2016). Furthermore, in July 2018, the Israeli parliament passed the controversial Nation-​State Law (officially “Basic Law: Israel, the Nation State of the Jewish people”), which defined Hebrew as the sole “state language”, demoting Arabic to “a language with special status”, thus enshrining Hebrew’s primacy in law (Horesh, 2020; Pinto, 2021). Given this backdrop, it should come as no surprise that prescriptive activity in Hebrew is often preoccupied with linguistic purism. Acceptance of borrowed lexicon has increased in recent decades, but purism remains an important part of the prescriptive norm, with the growing number of recent borrowings from English comprising what is perceived as the main threat. The Academy regularly publishes lists of Hebrew alternatives to common loanwords, and although this practice forms but a small part of their actual activities, the practices of Hebraising loanwords is arguably what many Hebrew speakers primarily associate with the language Academy. Furthermore, while loanwords are generally tolerated in speech, there is a general expectation that literary writing include relatively few words of non-​Hebrew origin (Schwarzwald, 1995).

5.2  Prescriptivism and ethnic identity The notion of a linguistic standard is by definition one of contrast. In order for a variety to be referred to as standard, others must be deemed non-​standard. In many languages and communities, regional varieties fill that role, contrasting with a “supra-​local” standard. However, as Ravid (1995, p. 8) states: “Israel is too small and modern Hebrew too young for local dialects to have formed”. While that does not mean that regional variation does not exist, there is no denying that it is seldom the object of overt commentary or the target of prescriptive activity. A social axis that Hebrew speakers are acutely aware of, however, is that of ethnicity, and, as such, it interacts with prescriptivism in complex ways. Israelis often conceptualize Jewish ethnicity in binary terms, namely, as a two-​way distinction between Ashkenazis, Jews of European descent, and Mizrahis, Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent (Smooha, 2003). As mentioned above (Section 3), the early Sabras were predominantly Ashkenazi, reflecting the demographics of pre-​1948 Zionist immigration to Israel. In the 1950s, large-​scale immigration of Jews from the neighboring Arab countries rapidly changed the demographics, such that by the 1960s close to half of the Jewish population was Mizrahi (Ben-​Rafael, 2002, p. 74). Although they were no longer the majority, Ashkenazis retained their dominance in the newly formed nation in many ways. The early years of Israeli independence were characterized by acute socio-​economic stratification, with Mizrahis greatly underrepresented in the social and cultural elite and typically having considerably lower 312

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earnings and education than Ashkenazis (Swirski, 1981). Following years have seen a gradual shift towards greater ethnic equality, but the distinction between Askhenazis and Mizrahis continues to play an important and persistent role in the Israeli social landscape (Cohen et al., 2019; Smooha, 2003). The aforementioned tension between the conventional norm and the prescriptive norm carries over into ethnic distinctions and creates two different –​and often opposing –​ways in which linguistic features associated with Mizrahi speakers are evaluated. Although as described above (Section 3), the conventional norm initially rose as a bottom-​up alternative to institutionalized forms, once it became a legitimate language in its own right, it also began serving as a social gatekeeper. Thus, while the conventional norm absorbed the linguistic habits of the early Sabras, linguistic innovations associated with the incoming Mizrahi immigration were typically shunned. To this day, morphological and lexical features associated with Mizrahi speakers are often invoked in discussions of linguistic “pet peeves” by Hebrew language enthusiasts (Mor, 2020a, pp. 102–​103) For example, where the conventional norm has halax habayta (went home), the alternative form halax habait (using the typical word for ‘home’ as opposed to the dedicated locative form habayta) is considered a Mizrahi feature and is the subject of much ridicule (Henshke, 2019, p. 81). Due to the ethnic inequality, the notions of ethnicity and class in Israel are difficult to tease apart (Ravid, 1995, p. 30), and subsequently, features associated with Mizrahi speakers are often judged as indicating lower socio-​economic status and vice-​versa (on the intertwining of notions of class and ethnicity in Israel, see also Schwarz, 2014). The pejoration of Mizrahi linguistic practices is part of a larger set of stereotypes about Mizrahis (Gafter, 2016a; Lefkowitz, 2004; Sasson-​Levy, 2013). With respect to language use, these stereotypes are ingrained in the ideological association between Mizrahis and “inarticulate” or “vulgar” ways of speaking (Henshke, 2017; Mishani, 2004). The conventional norm’s stigmatization of Mizrahi features as non-​standard reflects broader ethnic power asymmetries in Israel (see Gafter, 2020). The relationship between the prescriptive norm and Mizrahi linguistic features, however, is quite different. Mizrahi innovations –​especially those suspected to have non-​Hebrew roots –​are eschewed, but those Mizrahi features which are seen as historically authentic are deemed desirable by the prescriptive norm, even when they contrast with the conventional norm. This tension is most apparent in the social evaluation of the Hebrew pharyngeal consonants, which is arguably the linguistic shibboleth most strongly associated with Mizrahi speakers (Matras & Schiff, 2005, p. 156). The phonemic inventory of Hebrew historically included two pharyngeal phonemes: a voiceless pharyngeal fricative /​ħ/​and voiced pharyngeal approximant /​ʕ/​. The early revitalizers (who were mostly native speakers of European languages that lacked pharyngeal segments) merged the pharyngeals with non-​pharyngeal consonants. Therefore, the pharyngeals did not occur in the native language of most early Sabras and are consequently absent from the conventional norm. However, early Mizrahi adopters of MH did retain the pharyngeals, leading to their becoming a salient sociolinguistic marker of ethnicity. As a feature used almost exclusively by Mizrahis, the pharyngeals became highly stigmatized, and many younger Mizrahis adopted the merged variety (Bentolila, 2002; Blanc, 1968, p. 246; Yaeger-​ Dror, 1988). In present-​day Israel, pharyngeals are still retained among some, especially older, Mizrahi speakers (Gafter, 2019; Henkin, 2020). Gafter (2016a) argues that despite their relative scarcity, the pharyngeals remain a salient linguistic stereotype that is enregistered as the quintessential Mizrahi feature. The linguistic stereotype referred to as “speaking with ħet and ʕayin” (the two initial Hebrew letters that represent the relevant sounds) is frequently used in Israeli discourse and invokes indexical associations with the aforementioned stereotypes of Mizrahis 313

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as vulgar or uncouth. The prescriptive norm, however, treats pharyngeals quite differently: the 1913 decision of the Hebrew Language Committee (precursor of the Academy, see Section 2) favors them, due to their historical pedigree (Mor, 2020a, pp. 116–​117). While this was likely always an ideal pronunciation rather than a common practice, from a prescriptive point of view, the pharyngeals continue to be perceived as the “correct” form. As part of the prescriptive, although not conventional norm, the linguistic capital of the pharyngeals is rather limited. However, since they still resurface in highly formalized circumstances, such as liturgical reading, they retain indexical associations with old-​school learned prestige (Bentolila, 2002; Gafter, 2016b, 2021). Thus, the pharyngeal have an atypical combination of social meanings, which highlights the persisting friction between the conventional and prescriptive norms.

5.3  Prescriptivism and gender Gender marking in Hebrew is ubiquitous and hierarchical: grammatical gender is assigned to nearly all parts of speech, and the masculine form is principally the unmarked one (Muchnik, 2015, pp. 8, 10–​14, 226–​227; Hebrew morpho-​syntax does not include a neuter gender). This marking mechanism has been historically conventionalized and is morphologically prominent, rendering grammatical gender in Hebrew a popular arena for struggles about sexual identities and gender. The fundamental gender asymmetry embedded in Hebrew morpho-​syntactic structure is supplemented by a cultural-​linguistic bias. Two of the most prominent sources of cultural influence on contemporary Israeli society are markedly male-​oriented: traditional Judaism and Zionism, both of which have affected language usage and language ideologies to a great extent (Henkin, 2020, pp. 78–​79; Sasson-​Levy, 2006, pp. 32–​34; Sichel & Mor, forthcoming). In the 1980s and the 1990s, the social meaning of linguistic masculine priority began to attract public attention and led to attempts to fight gender discrimination. These included language planning actions, for example official recommendations by the Israeli Ministry of Education in 1984 and 1993 (Muchnik, 2015, pp. 189) and The Knesset Committee for the Promotion of the Status of Women in 2004 (ibid., pp. 192–​193; Sa’ar, 2007, pp. 413–​414, 422). Nevertheless, these recommendations, e.g., that one should use feminine forms when addressing an audience in which women are the vast majority, were often not adopted nor did they have a significant effect. From the mid-​2010s onwards, both public consciousness and practice have undergone changes regarding the topic of linguistic gender marking (Henkin, 2020, p. 79; Muchnik, 2015, ­chapter 5), as passionate public discussions in social and news media, and in other public domains illustrate. This led to the formation of a professional committee for gender and sexuality terms by the Academy in 2019 (on the terminological committees of the Academy see Gadish, 2013, pp. 14–​15). In what follows, we focus on the most debated prescriptive matter in this context: that of equal (non-​sexist) writing. Its prominence is reflected in a growing number of manuals (notably Eisenrich, 2020), the development of a set of multi-​gender Hebrew characters (Shomer, n.d.), which were first introduced in July 2019, and a public statement from the Academy of the Hebrew Language (2021b), encouraging speakers of Hebrew “to find the ways to convey gender equality and give expression to the presence of women within the limits of the accepted standard of the Hebrew language” (emphasis added). In her discussion of non-​sexist language campaigns, Pauwels (2003, pp. 555–​556) recognizes three main strategies for achieving equal writing: (a) specification (feminization): explicit indication of female forms of address; (b) neutralization: reduction of linguistic gender marking;

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(c) disruption: accentuation of the sexist nature of common linguistic norms. All three are found in contemporary MH, as the following examples show: (a) Specification is expressed in addressing both (normative) genders rather than the masculine form alone, e.g., xaverót va-​xaverím (friends (f.) and friends (m.)) or conversely, using exclusively the feminine form, e.g., samní et ha-​tʃuvá ha-​nexoná (mark (f.) the correct answer). (b) Neutralization is maintained through gender neutral forms, e.g., kahál nixbád (dear audience) or using the infinitive form, which does not inflect for gender, as an alternate of the inflected imperative: ná lesamén et ha-​tʃuvá ha-​nexoná (please mark (inf.) the correct answer). (c) Disruption is achieved, principally in written texts, through less traditional gender marking, most typically concatenation of two gender-​marked morphemes, often graphically separated by a period or a hyphen, e.g., the word for “friend” followed by both the masculine and the feminine suffixes in either order: ‫ות‬.‫< חברים‬xvrym.wt> or ‫ים‬.‫חברות‬ (occasionally pronounced xaverímot, xaverótim, respectively). A slash may also be used in this context, but since it has been conventionalized in administrative writing for decades, mostly in forms and other utterly non-​subversive documents, its disruption effect is rather small, and, in fact, it is closer to specification solutions (cf. Pauwels, 2003, p. 559). Unlike specification and neutralization actions in MH, the so-​called “period method” introduces morphological novelty, i.e., a deeper intervention in traditional norms. Whereas this is the most criticized and controversial strategy, it is also the most innovative and creative one. Moreover, it best reflects gender fluidity, as it indexes not only crossing gender boundaries, but also playfulness and choice between feminine-​first and masculine-​first, between different punctuations marks, and, in certain words, between final and non-​final forms of letters. One of the most significant recent changes in MH equal writing is the permeation of these new conventions, originally limited to closed marginalized groups, into mainstream culture. This change, which bears the signs of a language reform (cf. Pauwels, 2003, p. 552), is in line with a more global process of adjustment to new, post-​industrial gender roles (Cameron, 2012/​ 1995, pp. 251–​253). It is not the result of professional planning work, but rather a bottom-​ up process, promoted with the help of cultural agents (cf. Pauwels, 2003, pp. 560–​561) that confront the official authority of language institutes with cultural authority, like the politician and media personality Merav Michaeli, who has been advocating equal language since 2001 (Muchnik, 2015, pp. 194–​195; Sa’ar, 2007, pp. 421–​422), and the feminist initiative Dabru elenu (Talk to us), established in 2016 (Eisenrich, 2020, p. 24). Despite its prescriptive status being only one aspect of equal writing, many of its detractors focus on its so-​called ungrammaticality, citing the fact that “in Hebrew the common form is historically marked by masculine forms” (The Academy of the Hebrew Language, 2021b). Clearly, the main issue here is not the prescriptive rules, toward which most MH speakers are indifferent (Sections 3–​4), but rather the very agenda of equality (Muchnik, 2015, p. 195). Other opponents claim that equal writing reduces legibility and burdens the text with redundancy. This is principally true, but the success of such a reform depends on collective willingness to endorse new habits and develop application techniques, and it seems that the lack thereof is the primary obstacle. A deeper motivation to object to equal writing lies in disdain for pedantry, which is traditionally associated with femininity (Cameron, 2012/​1995, p. 170). This may be the result of

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a higher-​order indexical links (Silverstein, 2003); sensitivity to the social meaning of linguistic choices is associated with women (Eckert, 2012, p. 90; Chambers, 2013, pp. 302–​306), and may have come to index stereotypical femininity. In other words, attention to gender marking is seen as petty, insignificant, and exasperating, in contrast to the desired (masculine) language use, which is “natural”, “free”, and “authentic”. In Israeli culture this is exacerbated by the (masculine) individualistic and anti-​prescriptivist nature of the conventional norm.

6. Conclusion The underlying notion that ultimately stimulates Israeli prescriptive activity and prescriptive discourse is the debate over the desired nature of Hebrew as a national language. As we have shown, the large number of participants (e.g., the Academy, the school system, and various groups of speakers and language enthusiasts), platforms (e.g., language manuals, school curricula, and online discussions), viewpoints (e.g., purism, nationalism, individualism, and multiculturism), and social implications (e.g., attitude towards Arabic speakers, Mizrahi speakers, and women) renders MH prescriptivism a highly complex and subjective topic, central to the public discussion of national and cultural identity. Such an integration of prescriptivism, nationality, and socio-​cultural hierarchies is well-​ attested cross-​linguistically. It is grounded in the fact that language serves as a major expression of social stratification, and occupation with language propriety typically reflects a nation-​oriented struggle over social power and social order. What distinguishes the MH case is the coexistence of two hegemonic standard varieties: a prescriptive norm, which is founded on traditional Jewish texts and language planning efforts, and a conventional norm, which is founded on social prestige and on an ethos of nativeness (Section 3). Another important factor embedded into MH prescriptive discourse is the tension between the past and the present. As mentioned (Section 2), the history of Hebrew, according to the Israeli-​Zionist narrative, is divided into a classical period, an interim period of exile, and a modern period of returning to the “land of the fathers” and “language of the fathers” (Neumann, 2011, pp. 152–​153). The evaluation of each of these periods and the meanings attached to them from a modern viewpoint are, of course, a matter of ideology. The historical heritage endows MH with prestige, authority, and profundity, but also with pre-​modern traits that may seem incompatible with the Zionist enterprise and contemporary Israeli life. Therefore, prescriptive questions, such as the pronunciation of pharyngeal consonants (Section 5.2) and equal writing (Section 5.3), concern not only salient social issues, but also the constructed attitude of MH speakers towards its past. For this reason, speakers value the national status of Hebrew far more than they value the minor details of the Academy’s decisions (Section 4). MH prescriptive discourse is, thus, an important public arena, in which Israeli nationality is examined, negotiated, and eventually reaffirmed.

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19 A SOCIO-​P OLITICAL AND HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE OF LINGUISTIC PRESCRIPTIVISM IN RELATION TO THE AFRICAN LANGUAGES OF SOUTHERN AFRICA Russell H. Kaschula, Sebolelo Mokapela, Dion Nkomo, and Bulelwa Nosilela

1. Introduction The standardisation of African languages in southern Africa was largely dependent on where the missionaries settled (Opland 1983; Sigcau 1998). In other words, the varieties of the group among which they settled was ordinarily chosen and developed as the standard language (Oosthuysen 2016). In apartheid South Africa, for instance, languages and varieties were used to divide and rule South Africans into separate nations or peoples (Kaschula, 2021, p. 19). Deumert (2005) astutely points out that, Language standardisation as a general sociolinguistic and political project is concerned with linguistic form (corpus planning) as well as the social and communicative functions of language (status planning). In addition, standard languages are also discursive projects, and standardisation processes are accompanied by the development of specific discourses, practices and linguistic ideologues. (p. 17) Swann et al. (2004) further point out that “[s]‌tandard varieties tend to observe prescriptive, written norms, which are codified in grammars and dictionaries” (p. 327). It is further pointed out that these are ‘idealised varieties’ (ibid.). This is true too of the southern African context, for instance, where Setswana, Sesotho, and siSwati are cross-​border languages. Certain varieties have become idealised or prioritised as standard and prescriptively dealt with in the education system, whether this be for example standard isiXhosa, Setswana, Sesotho, or isiZulu. The aim of this chapter is to provide a background and history of language standardisation and prescriptivism in southern Africa and particularly in South Africa. This is done against a socio-​political DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-22

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and historical backdrop: from precolonial times, through to the colonial and apartheid eras, and then finally the era of democracy. Finally, some commentary on the future of language prescriptivism is offered, followed by concluding remarks.

2.  Theoretical aspects of standardisation: dialects, varieties and languages Language use can be regarded as a complex phenomenon that is impacted by a variety of factors, which might be social, linguistic, cultural, and personal. Arguably, certain norms for behaviour are set up as “proper” in a culture and thereby norms of linguistic behaviour may be set up accordingly. It has been suggested by Wolfram and Fasold (1974, p. 17) that language differences derive from societal differences, and therefore language standardisation is unavoidable. Therefore, the notion of “correctness” can be applied to language based on recognised societal norms that are deemed acceptable. Traditionally, therefore, the notion of correctness in language studies relates to societal norms of appropriateness in terms of speech and behaviour. A standard language is normally used in writing, used on radio stations, in television, in the workplace and so on. It should be noted though that when a certain language is standardised, then people tend to believe that its selected variety is the correct one and that all others are wrong (Trudgill, 1999, p. 13). Other scholars, such as Woolfram and Fasold (1974) as well as Trudgill (1974; 1999), are of the same view that other varieties that are not standardised are a deviation from the accepted speech, or that they are a corruption of the standard language. Wolfram and Fasold (1974) attest to that by defining a standard language as “a codified set of language norms which are considered socially accepted to the most prestigious social class in a society” (p. 18). In there lies the challenge for South Africa, which has many different varieties, even of the accepted eleven “standard languages” that are represented and made official in Section 6 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa (1996). The varieties on which standard languages are based are considered to be “pure” and “correct”, rather than the other forms of speech, which are then excluded from the standard in a way that can be considered discriminatory by many. It is true that a standard language can perform functions that a non-​standard cannot perform, “but that does not necessary make it super-​ordinary” (Maqam, 2014, p. 31). Pride and Holmes (1979, p. 103) attest to this by stating that non-​standard language cannot perform functions that a standard language can perform in a society. For that reason, the standard variety becomes popular in a particular society. This results in the other varieties of the language becoming less prestigious. Those who speak the standard regard themselves as socially superior. IsiXhosa speakers who therefore come from non-​standard groupings may find it difficult when entering the schooling system where the isiRharhabe of Ngqika or isiGcaleka variety is considered standard. In most instances, the setting up of standardised language is formal, and is supported by the codification of a norm in prescriptive grammars and codifying agencies used in schools and other educational institutions. Norms of suitable speech behaviour are effective on two levels, which are inter-​language relations and intra-​language framework (Wolfram & Fasold, 1974, p. 19). In inter-​language relations one language may be set up as a standard language for the nation. However, in terms of intra-​language framework, one variety may be established as a standard language as opposed to other varieties of the same language. In South Africa there are many varieties of each of the official languages which are considered as non-​standard. There are even emerging interlingual urban varieties such as Sepitori (spoken in Tshwane-​ Pretoria and constituted of Setswana, Sesotho, isiZulu, Afrikaans, and other languages) that are 322

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only recognised in that particular city and nowhere else in South Africa (Wagner et al., 2020, pp. 1–​7). When a language is made a standard language the generality of speakers tends to believe that, that language is now superior (Halliday, 2009, p. 233). This implies that when a variety of a language is selected as a standard, its dominance over other varieties creates the assumption that this variety is better than the others. Corson (1994, p. 273) sees standard language as a model of “excellence” and “correctness”. This means that the non-​standard has everything to do with incorrectness and inappropriateness. Halliday (2009) takes a different view to Corson, suggesting that there is no wrong and right variety, but that it depends on how one uses a language. What is therefore considered incorrect in one speech form could be correct in another. Kramsch (1998, p. 80) states that what is authentic in one context could be inauthentic in another context. This brings into question the notion of prescriptivism in a multilingual context, where this could further disempower citizens who speak non-​standard varieties, both socially and economically (Kaschula, 2021). This can be seen as particularly problematic given the history of separatism often based on individual language and varieties, as it became the case during colonial and apartheid times in South Africa. Appel and Muysken (1987, p. 59) associate the non-​standard varieties with low educational achievement. This means that a child who knows the non-​standard better than the standard cannot really succeed in education, as he or she can be disadvantaged, for example a child that has to switch from isiMpondo to standard isiXhosa. Low or poor competence in the standard language by speakers of non-​standard varieties is usually mistaken for generally poor levels of education. Van Wyk (1992) supports this statement when he states that “the non-​standard varieties are used for lower functions such as interactions by peer groups, families and by players and spectators on the playground” (p. 27). The non-​standard in this case can be associated as the language of the poor people, and it can be interpreted as the poor that are being held back by their language, hence the term “econo-​language planning” (Kaschula, 2019, p. 200) to facilitate better integration of all linguistic groups into the mainstream economy. The perception of a standard and non-​standard language can also have a social impact. Trudgill (1974, p. 82) and Kaschula (2021, p. 128) points out that a child is made to feel inferior by school educators when speaking in a non-​standard variety. An example would be a child who speaks isiMpondo variety in Grade 1 as opposed to standard isiXhosa, since the latter does not embrace isiMpondo variety, which is confined to the domestic domains of isiMpondo speaking amaXhosa (Maqam, 2014). Even certain accents may be more valued than others, such as a received pronunciation of South African English or “Model-​C” accent acquired from previously whites only schools where British English is used as the target of English teaching and usage. Learners can use a stigmatised variety, either because it is a home language or peer language and this may result in negative consequences for the learner based on either positive or negative linguistic prejudice (Kaschula, 2021, p. 128). According to Webb and Kembo-​Sure (2000, p. 18) language standardisation is the process by which an authoritative language body, such as a government body, prescribes how the language should be written; how the sounds should be pronounced; how its words should be spelled; which words are acceptable in formal situations, and what the appropriate grammatical constructions of the language are. Webb and Kembo-​Sure (2000) describe language standardisation as an act of language planning by the authorities such as governments, educational systems and the mass media. Halliday (2009, p. 232), in support of Webb and Kembo-​Sure (2000), describes standardisation as the type of planning that consists of creating a standard language out of one form of an existing language, with or without deliberate modifications. The process includes both internal 323

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and external aspects of language planning. Internal, because it involves selecting among, and sometimes modifying, forms of the language itself, its pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. External, because it involves directing people’s language habits, telling them how they should speak or write. From the above description it is clear that standardisation, as a sociolinguistic process, elevates the status and prestige of a particular language variety over others. The major tools of standardising a language are in the domains of writing, followed by the gradual replacement of manuscripts with printed books, leaflets and newspapers led to fixed spelling of words (Mullany & Stockwell, 2010, p. 93). In the southern African context these standardised orthographies have been issued and controlled by bodies such as the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) in the democratic South Africa. Previously, control was vested in the missionary presses such as Lovedale Press and later on in the homeland language boards as well as the present National Language Boards.

3.  African languages and pre-​colonial southern Africa One can only really hypothesise about the status of African languages in precolonial times. What we do know is that the Bantu languages of southern Africa originated from proto-​Bantu. Lipou (1997) notes that: The term Bantu generally refers to typological and genetic relationships of the languages belonging under this language family. For example, Meinhof (1915) attempted to demonstrate the common origin of the present-​day languages on the one hand, and to restore the historical continuity of Proto-​Bantu on the other. The establishment of the Bantu language family has been seen as a successful application of the comparative and historical linguistics. The Bantu family has been classified among the major language families of the world. Lipou, 1997, p. 37 However, the siSwati, Setswana and Sesotho languages are cross-​border languages and have been further standardised and developed both within South Africa as well as Eswatini, Botswana and Lesotho respectively, though with slightly different standardised varieties. One can only hypothesise therefore as to how these varieties were used and conveyed in precolonial times, probably through didactic forms of oral literature and indigenous knowledge systems underpinned by culture and tradition.

4.  The emergence of standard languages in southern Africa History clearly exhibits a common link between the standardisation of southern African languages and the influence of the missionaries, coupled with processes that underpinned colonial and postcolonial politics. Missionary work on African languages and the appropriation of such work by colonial and democratic governments, made it possible to enumerate and classify African languages, even though the emerging results expose socio-​political factors more than pure linguistics playing a more prominent role. What may not be denied is that European missionaries laid the foundations for the standard languages in a prescriptive manner (Prah, 2009; Makoni, 1998; Makoni & Pennycook, 2006). The missionaries created the first word lists based on what they heard in order to translate the Bible. As we seek to demonstrate in this section,

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it is on such foundations that both major and minority languages of southern Africa were established. Among the major languages of southern Africa are Nguni, Shona, and Sotho language clusters, all of which are part of the Bantu language family. The Nguni cluster comprises isiZulu, isiXhosa, isiNdebele, and siSwati, which are official languages in South Africa, as well as isiNdebele of Zimbabwe and isiNgoni found in some parts of Malawi, Tanzania, and Zambia. SiSwati is also an indigenous language of Eswatini, formerly Swaziland. The major indigenous language of Zimbabwe, ChiShona and other minority languages such as iKalanga found in Zimbabwe and Botswana, as well as others found in Mozambique and Zambia constitute the Shona language family. The Sotho cluster is made up of Sesotho in South Africa, Lesotho, and Zimbabwe; Sepedi in South Africa, as well as Setswana in both Botswana and South Africa. In addition to those languages, there are also other languages such as Tshivenda, spoken in South Africa and Zimbabwe, XiTsonga in South Africa and Mozambique, the Khoikhoi and San languages in various southern African countries. Prescriptive processes have significantly influenced the distinction between most of those languages, their status and the roles they play in the different countries. Migration, triggered by the search for more productive land and precolonial wars had already played a role in language shift within language groups when missionaries arrived in southern Africa. For example, the spread of isiNguni language varieties was prompted by the wars of expansionism such as the Mfecane led by King Shaka of amaZulu. As the Zulu Kingdom expanded, some Nguni groups migrated further, with amaXhosa expanding southwards to the present-​day Eastern Cape. Other groups moved northwards beyond modern-​day South Africa, for example, Zimbabwean Ndebele established by Mzilikazi who separated from Shaka’s Zulu Kingdom. Protective enclaves also developed within southern Africa, for example the Swazi and Sotho Kingdoms, which remain landlocked countries within South Africa. Linguistic selection, codification, elaboration and acceptance processes that constitute language standardisation (Haugen, 1972; Hudson, 1980) were determined prescriptively at the outset of missionary and colonial periods in southern Africa to expedite foreign interests. Within the Nguni and Sotho language clusters, as well as within some individual languages making up these clusters, the establishment of standard languages has been contested for being arbitrary instead of being a culmination of decisions based on the science and structure of language. High levels of mutual intelligibility between some members of the language clusters, which, however, has now decreased over time, has resulted in the questioning of the delimitation of the languages. Convenience and expediency have been noted as the main factors influencing the distinction of language varieties and their subsequent standardisation as separate languages due to political and administrative processes. IsiZulu, the largest language in South Africa and isiNdebele of Zimbabwe seem to support this claim as the languages were at some point reported to share 96 per cent of their vocabulary (Hachipola, 1998). Some language varieties such as isiBhaca and isiHlubi are interestingly claimed to be ‘dialects’ of both isiXhosa and isiZulu in South Africa (Spofana, 2011; Makoni, 1998). These examples have been used to argue that it was possible to have isiNguni and Sesotho as umbrella languages instead of clusters of separate standard languages (Makoni, 1998), although such as decision could also be challenged as it will be shown in the case of internal contestations between ChiShona and isiXhosa (Chimhundu, 1992; Makoni, 1998). However, the separate standardisation of Nguni and Sotho languages would later on work well for South Africa’s apartheid system which thrived through the division of indigenous populations using the homeland system. The far-​reaching political implications of standardisation in southern Africa prompted scholars such as Jacob Nhlapo in the 1940s to argue

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strongly for the unification and harmonisation of African languages as a way of establishing a united force against apartheid in South Africa. The arguments would be later evoked by leading scholars such as Neville Alexander and Kwesi Prah, with the latter driving the harmonisation of various African language mutually intelligible clusters for educational purposes under the auspices of the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS). The politics and contestations of prescriptivism due to political reasons in the standardisation of African languages have been much stronger within the established standard languages, with isiXhosa in South Africa and ChiShona in Zimbabwe being prime examples. It has been argued that language standardisation in southern Africa was largely arbitrary in nature as it was dependent on where the missionaries settled (Chimhundu, 1992; Opland, 1983; Sigcau, 1998). However, the limitation of this argument is that it overlooks the fact that missionary stations were themselves not established in an arbitrary fashion. Missionaries needed to get land and permission from kings to establish their mission stations. Churches established with permission from powerful kings were bound to be more successful and influential in their evangelical activities. Thus, the language varieties which were selected tended to be those of the politically powerful traditional leaders, and they ended up being the ones used in the production of Christian and educational literature. In the case of, for example isiXhosa and constituent ­varieties, the missionaries, particularly those from the Glasgow Missionary Society such as Ross and Bennie (Opland, 1983), did selection and this was based on isiRharhabe spoken in the Tyhume Valley around the Lovedale Missionary complex. John Bennie had set up a printing press by 1824 at what is now Lovedale College and the first isiXhosa orthography was ultimately launched from there (Opland, 1983). The name isiXhosa previously referred to one of the Nguni varieties in the Eastern Cape. Thus, prescriptivism with respect to African languages in southern Africa first manifested itself in the selection of varieties and attachment of certain umbrella names for a collection of varieties which would later be formalised as ‘dialects’ of particular language. Looking at the emergence and standardisation of ChiShona in Zimbabwe, Chimhundu (1992) details a process that is reminiscent of the South African experience of isiXhosa. According to Chimhundu (1992), “[t]‌he name Shona started to appear in writing only in the early grammars and dictionaries that were written in English” (p. 95). He asserts that, as the language of the capital, “Zezuru was clearly intended to be used as the norm” (p. 95), which was at the expense of the other varieties. Thus, both the case of ChiShona and isiXhosa illustrate that although there was nothing special in linguistic terms regarding the selected or prescribed varieties, there already existed some form of power or prestige in those that were chosen. Such power and prestige would then be consolidated over other languages through subsequent corpus planning activities, as it will be shown in the next sections. Another major grouping in southern Africa is the Sotho or Sotho-​Tswana cluster, which is found mainly in South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, and Zimbabwe. It consists of three major standardised languages: Sesotho, which is made up of southern Sotho; Sesotho sa Leboa or Sepedi, which is made up of northern Sotho; and Setswana, made up of western Sotho. If one combines these languages, then they make up 24.7 per cent of South Africa’s population (according to the 2011 Republic of South Africa Census). Setswana is also a major language spoken in neighbouring Botswana. Sepedi is in fact a variety of Sesotho sa Leboa even though in the Constitution it is listed as an official language. It also has influences of Kopa, another Northern Sotho language and other languages. This selection of Sepedi was again due to missionary influence in the North-​West Province. Sesotho or southern Sotho was the first variety to be codified and it is spoken mostly in the Free State and Gauteng Provinces as well as in

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neighbouring Kingdom of Lesotho. There is also influence from isiNguni, particularly isiZulu, but the language is well standardised (Da Costa et al., 2014). The delimitation of languages within artificial geographical boundaries created minority and cross border languages. Tshivenda and Xitsonga represent good examples. Tshivenda is a minority language in both South Africa, where it is spoken by only 2.4 per cent of the population of South Africa (Census, 2011), and in Zimbabwe. Its dialectal varieties include Tshipani, Tavha-​Tsindi, Ilafuri, Manda, Guvhu, Mbedzi, and Lembetu (Da Costa et al., 2014). It was during the colonial era that the missionaries selected Tshipani as the standard variety. Xitsonga is found in the provinces of Gauteng, Limpopo, and Mpumalanga of South Africa and in neighboring Zimbabwe and Mozambique. It is also known by alternate names such as Shitonga, Shangana, Thonga, and Shangaan. Like the other languages, Xitsonga also has varieties such as Luleke, Gwamba, Changana, Hlave, Kande, N’walungu, Xonga, Jonga, Nkuma, Songa, and Nhlanganu (Da Costa et al., 2014).

5.  The development of orthographies Following the prescription of the varieties around which standard languages were built, the development of writing systems constituted another important level for prescription. IsiXhosa was the first African language of southern Africa to be written since the speakers of the language were the first major group that the missionaries encountered after moving inland from Cape Town. The written variety of isiXhosa language started with missionaries needing to write and read in the local language using graphemes that would be easy for them to use. Missionaries concentrated more on the efficiency and usability of the orthographic representation of sound. This was a typically linguistic approach that viewed orthography as a scientific attempt involving adoption of graphical principles for mapping the phonemic system of the newly written language. This had nothing to do with the speakers of the language per se, but everything to do with needing to use the local languages for their benefit for religious and political purposes. It is for this reason that the first missionary orthography was not necessarily reflective of isiXhosa language, but was meant for the missionary language learners to be able to read the language by using familiar graphemes. The earliest orthographies that were developed or prescribed for African languages are best accounted for by Chimhundu (1992). Firstly, there was a need for uniformity in the graphic representation of sounds in order to produce Christian and educational literature that would be used by as many language speakers as possible regardless of dialectal variations. Indeed, the missionaries in Zimbabwe “made it clear that they would undertake the publication of only one Shona Bible because it would be too expensive to produce more than one for such a relatively small population” (Chimhundu, 1992, p. 97). Zezuru for ChiShona, isiRharhabe for isiXhosa, Tshipani for Tshivenda, etc., as shown in the previous section, were to provide the standards for writing. Secondly, Chimhundi notes that “the missionaries did not have the necessary linguistic or phonetic training” (1992, p. 100) for the task that was cut out for them in the languages that they were not sufficiently familiar with. Thirdly, they prescribed the writing systems of their own European languages which were themselves not uniform, given the diverse missionary backgrounds. According to Chimhundu, “divergent systems of spelling emerged because the wrong associations were made, quite whimsically, between sound and symbol and with reference only to Roman letters” (1992, p. 100). In the case of ChiShona, Chimhundu (1992) also cites competition and lack of coordination between missionaries from different societies and denominations as an added factor.

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However, one common feature of the earliest orthographies for the languages of southern Africa became the disjunctive writing systems, which is typified by John Bennie’s most cited isiXhosa text. In the old orthography it was originally written in a disjunctive manner, IN KO MO zon ke ze zi ka-​Tixo, while in the present orthography it is Iinkomo zonke zezikaThixo (All cattle belong to God). The disjunctive orthography was based on rough translations which resulted in African language morphemes corresponding to full words in European languages. In languages such as ChiShona and Tshivenda, special characters and symbols such as diacritics were added to the letters in order to distinguish closely related sounds which were unfamiliar to the missionaries. Click sounds for place names such as Ngqurha (Coega), Ncanarha (Nanaga), Gqunube (Gonubie) to mention but a few in isiXhosa and other isiNguni languages presented challenges which resulted in some place names being simplified and thereby losing their original meanings. While the development of orthographies in the languages of southern Africa display prescriptivism that created a false impression of linguistic uniformity in languages such as ChiShona and isiXhosa, it also exaggerated differences within mutually intelligible language clusters such as isiNguni or Sotho languages. As cited by Chimhundu, Tucker laments: we have Zulu and Xhosa, very closely related languages, with considerable orthographic differences, while North Sotho and Tswana now differ from each other and from South Sotho, which (perhaps wisely) has set its face against orthographic change since 1906. Tucker, 1949, as cited in Chimhundu, 1992, p. 100 While mutual intelligibility remains high within language clusters, orthographic differences now make it challenging for the language speakers to read texts produced in the related languages. For example, all isiNguni languages have the same word for beer/​alcohol, with virtually the same pronunciation, but have it is spelt differently as follows: utywala (isiXhosa), utshwala (isiZulu, Zimbabwean Ndebele) utjwala (Siswati). The chosen varieties were prescribed for speakers of constituent ‘dialects’ making up the languages that were arbitrarilymappedby missionaries. In some case, the differences were exaggerated between related languages within the language clusters. Furthermore, the missionaries also imposed the writing systems of European languages. In many African languages, the earliest missionary orthographies were adopted by colonial governments for educational purposes. For example, the Xhosa Language Committee was initially formed, which later became the Xhosa Language Board under the apartheid nationalist government in 1955. This Board proceeded with the standardisation of spelling rules, oversaw the revision of the writing system and prescribing of schoolbooks to ensure that they were devoid of any political content that attacked the apartheid government. In languages such as ChiShona, orthographic revisions saw the special characters being dropped (Chimhundu, 1992) while they remain in languages such as Tshivenda. The special diacritic characters continue to pose challenges with standard electronic keyboards. Indeed, languages such as Sesotho and Xitsonga have retained disjunctive writing systems. In South Africa, orthography is now regularly updated under the auspices of the National Language Bodies, whose work is overseen by the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB). From 2019, PanSALB has been launching the latest orthographies. Efforts to harmonise the orthographies of related languages in order to promote reading within language clusters, which have been driven by CASAS, have not made a significant impact as government has opted to maintain the linguisticmappingsof missionaries and colonial governments. 328

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6.  The standardisation of vocabulary and terminology The quest for uniformity that is the hallmark of language standardisation has also manifested itself in a prescriptive approach to the lexicons of southern African languages. Firstly, vocabularies of the standard languages are largely drawn from the prestigious varieties that were chosen by the missionaries. For example, the isiXhosa adjective for many in its standard form is ninzi and it supersedes alternative dialectal variants such as ninji, nintsi, nintshi and ningi for isiBhaca. While this example illustrates variations of the same word, there are many cases where the differences are lexical and bear no relationship with the accepted standard forms from isiRharhabe, for example, inkwenkwe–​ityhagi, izembe–​itamla, umfo–​umbhem. What is particularly remarkable is that missionaries made a conscious decision of prescribing lexical items from the chosen varieties at the expense of others. For example, with respect to standard ChiShona, Doke (1931) explicitly recommended that “Korekore words should be admitted sparingly” (p. 81). At the same time, words from “Budya and all the other smaller dialects […] were discouraged” (Chimhundu, 1992, p. 106). Such prescription poses serious challenges, especially for learners who speak varieties other than standard languages at home. The teaching and infusion of indigenous official languages as mediums of instruction has been undermined by the exclusion and rejection of lexical items from marginalised varieties, as demonstrated by Maqam (2014) in the case of isiMpondo speaking learners in Mbizana district of the Eastern Cape. Within the broader society, speakers of ‘dialects’ are at the receiving end of linguistic prejudice that is based on the assumed correctness and purity of standard languages. Prescription continues to play out at the lexical level in terms of choices between indigenous words and loanwords in general language and even in the development of terminology for use in academic and professional disciplines. In terms of general language, it is common for certain words to be rejected between related indigenous languages, for example between isiXhosa and isiZulu, Sesotho and Sepedi, or between ChiShona and isiNdebele in Zimbabwe because of ethnic differences which were entrenched during the colonial and apartheid periods. In such instances, it is not unusual that Afrikaans or English loanwords end up being incorporated into African languages as alternatives, although borrowing from these languages is ordinarily discouraged by some speakers of African languages because of political reasons linked to colonialism and apartheid. Thus, while ordinary language speakers may freely use borrowed words from English, textbooks and other references such as dictionaries would normally prescribe indigenous forms that are less frequent or sometimes not used in normal communication.

7.  Cultural prescription in African languages Certain words, when used under certain circumstances, may have meanings that are regarded as indecent and disrespectful. They are usually forbidden by a particular society. This prescriptive manner of language usage is found in all societies. Societies place norms under which language should conform. These are social constructions that have nothing to do with the words or the linguistic terms used. It is motivated by emotional and social reasons such as politeness, respect, decency, and so on, that force the speaker to avoid phrases or words considered to be disrespectful, rude, or indecent. Allan & Burridge (2007) discuss the socio-​cultural prescription of languages noting that some words are forbidden in certain contexts. This prescriptive use of language appears to be a socially determined forbidding of linguistic forms. Trudgill (2000, p. 18) also supports this point by proclaiming that a taboo is something which is prohibited from being articulated and is usually believed to be forbidden or regarded as immoral or improper. Trudgill (2000) even 329

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views it as behaviour which is prohibited or inhibited in a seemingly irrational manner. Instead of using these avoided words they are substituted by words of avoidance. The avoided words are usually substituted, for example by loans words, euphemisms, circumlocutions, or metaphors. The interchange of taboo words by euphemistic expressions becomes prescriptive by its nature since these words are regarded as “correct” at the level of a particular language community. Usage of euphemism is considered as presenting positive social attitude and purifying the language on matters perceived traditionally as taboo words which are regarded as insulting, derogatory, and discriminating. Having strict rules which prescribe euphemistic terms or expressions for particular situations and environments may be perceived as a form of social censorship, specifically by more liberal and uninhibited speakers of a language. These prohibited words or phrases might be associated with superstitions, principles, and beliefs that reflect a particular societies’ customs, traditions, and views. The use of taboos is highly influenced by the culture of that particular society and this fact is just as prescriptive in nature. Wardhaugh (2010) points out that a society’s culture is the “know-​ how” of whatever it is one has to know or believe in order to operate in a manner acceptable to its members, “and to get through the tasks of daily living” (p. 211). This is an indication of the influence of society on language use. The fact that the words used rely on the culture and the user’s knowledge of their world is an indication that language and culture are intertwined. The cultural norms and values of a society can have an influence on its language. Taboo then reflects what is seen as improper usage of language and cultural values of a language. This is reflected in all people’s languages and cultures. What is considered as taboo in one society might not necessarily be viewed as taboo in another community. The euphemistic expressions define and reflect the socio-​cultural structure of a community. As suggested above, being forced to use euphemism instead of a taboo word is a prescription of behaviour that affects all people’s daily lives. One universal type of taboo are the terms associated with body parts especially genitalia and this aspect is based on social constraints that are reflected in the languages. Most languages use euphemism for these terms and using their proper terms might be regarded as improper and offensive to the listener depending on the environment. This is part of socio-​cultural prescriptivism. For example, it is accepted that the proper terms for genitalia are needed when dealing with health related matters. It is quite interesting to note that in most languages the terms on death and dying are taboo. For example, in South Africa in the Afrikaans language there is a difference between the term for the death of an animal vrek and the word dood for a person. In Nguni languages (isiXhosa, isiZulu, isiNdebele and siSwati) it is similar as ukufa is used for animals while ukubhubha, ukusweleka and ukutshona is used with reference to humans. Respect for death is a linguistic universal. The custom known among Nguni as ukuhlonipha (to respect) and among Southern Sotho as ho hlonepha for women is another example. Married women are not allowed to pronounce, or use words which are similar to the names of their husbands’ family, especially the father-​ in-​law, hence they invent new names for these family members. The taboo words or hlonipha can be associated with rites of passage, where each stage has its own forms of hlonipha words of avoidance, depending on the rite of passage. The individual or group of people are prescribed to as to which terms are acceptable or not by virtue of the environment, situation and circumstances they find themselves in. Anderson and Trudgill (1990) observe that some taboos are “important elements in the structure and social life of a culture” (pp. 55–​56). The term unyoko (your mother) in isiXhosa, isiZulu and isiNdebele cannot be used by a younger person to an older person as it would be derogatory and disrespectful. This term can only be used by an older person to a younger person. Even though that is the case a similar term that refers to a male uyihlo (your father) does not have the same connotation and it could be 330

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used by both younger and older generations without sounding vulgar. These terms have both evolved semantically and are now displaying gender and age discrimination by the interlocutors. This indicates that the prescriptiveness of the taboo language is not stagnant and it evolves with the times. Words that were not necessarily taboo might become taboo in the future. The rites of passage to womanhood among amaXhosa females is referred to as intonjane and the male coming of age as ulwaluko. These are associated with certain behaviour and linguistic rules where certain words are regarded as taboo and certain terms of hlonipha (‘respect’) language are used to represent the group and space each member finds himself/​herself in. For example, in isiXhosa a married woman would use the term ukumunda for eating instead of ukutya (to eat). In isiZulu they would use isinyathelo for isicathulo (shoe). In the circumcision school abakhwetha (initiates) would call a woman isigqwathi instead of using the common term umfazi (woman). It is mostly married females who are expected to avoid some syllables that are found in the names of her husband’s family, for example umntu (a person) would be umdyu (hlonipha) where the syllable [-​ntu] has been replaced by [-​dyu] if for example the husband’s surname or father-​in-​law’s name is Mntumni. In other instances, a synonym is use to avoid the taboo word, for example isitulo for isichopho (chair). For the female in intonjane the girls are taught about how to use linguistic avoidance terms in preparation for being married woman who would need to use the hlonipha language. Increasingly though, the use of this prescriptive taboo language is changing, particularly in urban areas where there is little adherence to, for example, hlonipha language. Nevertheless, it does represent a cultural example of prescriptivism. This prescriptivism has also manifested in the creation of dictionaries.

10.  Language prescriptivism and lexicography The earliest dictionaries in African languages were compiled by missionaries (Awak, 1990; Busane, 1990; Gouws, 2007; Nkomo, 2020) and they constituted integral prescriptive instruments in the standardisation of the languages of southern Africa (Gouws, 2007; Hadebe, 2002). The work of some missionaries confirms Hudson’s (1980) assertion, quoted by Béjoint (2000), that “[g]‌rammarians and lexicographers’ respective patches turn out to look like the north end and the south end of the same field, rather than like different fields separated by a hedge” (p. 28). For instance, Rev. James McLaren published his A Xhosa Grammar in 1944 to elaborate the use of isiXhosa in line with his two dictionaries, A Concise Kafir–​English Dictionary (McLaren, 1915) and A Concise English–​Kafir Dictionary (1923). Similarly, Clement Doke, who did a lot of work on the grammar of several languages of southern Africa such as ChiLamba, ChiShona and isiZulu, also published the Zulu–​English Dictionary with Benedict Wallet Vilakazi. The spelling systems and grammar rules that were initially developed for use for religious purposes, based on the varieties of African languages spoken in the hinterlands of missionary stations, were then transferred into dictionaries in which they were fixed as overall standard representations of speech forms found in larger geographical areas. This is the case with isiXhosa discussed above, whereby after the adopting of the orthography based on the varieties spoken around the Tyhume area, dictionaries such as A Kafir–​English Dictionary compiled by Rev. Albert Kropf (1899) would further assert the developed orthography. They went on to select and standardise isiXhosa vocabulary based on words used in their missionary circuits. A similar parallel may be drawn in the case of the standardisation of ChiShona of Zimbabwe. The language emerged out of a contentious unification of several varieties such ChiZeruru, ChiKaranga, ChimaNyika, ChiKorekorekore, and ChiNdau (Chimhundu, 1992), whereby the former provided the basis for the standardisation of the orthography and vocabulary of the language as would later be captured in Hannan’s (1959) A Standard Shona Dictionary, for instance. 331

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At the outset of missionary work and colonialism, prescriptivism manifested itself in the deliberate efforts of “concept and knowledge revisions” by Europeans (Chirikure et al., 2017, p. 41). They purported themselves to be ushers of civilisation; be it in religious, cultural, social, or in political terms. The Europeans could therefore not accept African ways of life, being and knowing and they sought to re-​organise African cosmology. Language was crucial for that purpose. Accordingly, words that related to African religions and cultures were excluded from dictionaries (Hadebe, 2002) or had their meanings distorted (Moropa & Kruger, 2000). In fact, instead of accepting cosmological differences, blatant vilification of African cultures and religions manifested itself through prescriptive addition of meaning layers or re-​interpretation of cultural concepts. For example, bilingual dictionaries pairing English with African languages such as ChiShona, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, and isiZulu provide “bride price” as translation equivalents for lobola, an integral component of traditional African marriages, while giving “witch doctor” as equivalent to words for traditional doctors (Nkomo, 2020). Neither of these are accurate and they serve to denigrate the traditional institutions of marriage and healing. What one infers from such lexicographical treatment of African concepts is that Africans sell and buy women as wives, and that their medicinal practices are inferior to western medicine. The standards established first by missionaries were later on cemented through the western colonial education and the work of colonial linguistics (Makoni, 1998). Even today, words from varieties such as isiMpondo and isiHlubi remain excluded from the lemma stock of isiXhosa dictionaries compiled under the auspices of isiXhosa National Lexicography Unit, which continues to rely heavily on earlier dictionaries to produce new dictionaries. Therefore, while learners of isiMpondo and isiHlubi stand not to benefit much from mother-​tongue education that recognises isiXhosa as the official language in the Eastern and Western Cape Provinces, as official records of the language, isiXhosa dictionaries stand as prescriptive instruments that provide the respective isiXhosa communities with acceptable vocabulary and meanings. Contestations between indigenous words and loanwords also play out in dictionaries, with some lexicographers excluding the latter or dictionary users and critics condemning dictionaries that include loanwords, no matter how popularly used they are. It is in this respect that modern lexicographers study dictionaries in terms of prescription, description, and proscription (Bergenholtz, 2003).

11.  The possible future of language prescriptivism in southern Africa Intellectualising African languages in southern Africa for use in powerful domains that befit official languages remains a major priority that has occupied policy makers, sociolinguists, lexicographers, and educationists from the outset of democracy. Drawing inspiration from the adoption of the Language Plan of Action for Africa in 1960, African countries sought to elevate the status of African languages as exemplified by the South African and Zimbabwean constitutions. What is ironic is that language policy development implemented the prescriptive systems first by focusing on the standard languages that developed into print through missionary and colonial processes as outlined above. Continued language activism, such as activism that led to the promotion of ChiNdau and ChiShangani in Zimbabwe, has the potential of disrupting hegemonic linguistic structures that emerged from prescriptive processes. The isiXhosa NLB and PanSALB are currently occupied with considerations of accommodating the lexicons of minority varieties such as isiMpondo and isiBhaca. Over the past years, PanSALB has been sponsoring literary competitions in isiMpondo, the variety which seems to have a formidable critical mass of linguistic activism. It appears as if the options are limited as we look into the future; either isiMpondo and other 332

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isiXhosa varieties are carefully and judiciously incorporated into the standard language or they will soon follow prescriptive processes that will see them being recognised as fully fledged languages in their own right as experienced in Zimbabwe with ChiNdau, which was eventually listed as one of the officially-​recognised languages after years of being treated as a dialect of ChiShona. Thus, it appears the time is ripe for a review of previous prescriptive standardisation to usher in a process of re-​standardisation as outlined by Johl (2002). One of the areas that continues to pose a challenge in the post-​democratic era is the tension between varieties of a particular standard language, including the development and place of urban varieties such as Sepitori and isiCamtho. Another example is related to Afrikaans and the emergence of Afri-​Kaaps variety which poses serious questions regarding standard Afrikaans in South Africa. Afri-​Kaaps is contesting traditional standard forms of Afrikaans and it is a variety spoken by younger people who identify largely as descended from the first nations such as the Khoikhoi. The energetic advancement of scholarship and advocacy for translanguaging as a liberating pedagogy by postcolonial linguistics may have implications for official standard languages. García and Kleyn (2016) define translanguaging as “the deployment of speakers’ full linguistic repertoire, which does not in any way correspond to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named languages” (p. 14). Translanguaging challenges named standard languages, advocating for a liberal approach to language usage whereby multilingual speakers can draw from different languages to unleash their linguistic repertoires for meaning-​making purposes. This applies in formal settings including the classroom, meaning that aspects of the previously frowned upon code-​mixing and code-​switching can possibly be legitimised for meaning-​making purposes in the future. This approach will have to contend with government-​sponsored intellectualisation activities which are being executed within language policies and overseen by language policy implementation watchdogs such as PanSALB and language bodies whose mandates follow officially recognised languages. Linked to the above, is the influence of technology, particularly the social media which provide platforms where language regulation has few subscribers. New spelling forms and new terminologies that transcend orthographical and morphological rules dominate SMSs, WhatsApp, Facebook, and Twitter language. The custodians of linguistic purity, particularly educators, have expressed agitation at what they see as imminent disintegration of linguistic structures, reporting that learners are even struggling with formal writing in schools, leading to what Thurlow (2006) calls moral panic. Even so it is possible that prescriptivism and standard languages may not remain unchallenged in the future. Finally, one can consider the democratic and contemporary Parliament of South Africa, the highest-​level decision-​making body to which both PanSALB and the NLS are answerable, as a place of linguistic contestation when it comes to the future of prescriptivism. The dawn of democracy in South Africa was built on the prescripts of inclusivity in terms of language, culture, and religion as enshrined in the Constitution. This afforded, for example Members of Parliament (MPs) with the comfort of using their indigenous languages in the proceedings of the Parliament of South Africa (POSA). There was therefore a need for the POSA to provide interpreting and translation services to facilitate and ensure that MPs understand each other during deliberations in the House. A Section then called Hansard, named after the official publication of parliamentary proceedings and currently referred to as Language Services Section (LSS), was established and language practitioners (LPs) from all official linguistic communities were employed to provide these services –​interpreting and translation. These LPs had different backgrounds, some were former teachers and others served as court interpreters in various provinces. They were all coming to a different environment to perform unfamiliar tasks with no prior training. They had to be trained on the job, using the existing in-​house prescriptive 333

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style guide that was used in the previous National Party government, which was catering only for English and Afrikaans languages. New term lists such as the parliamentary terms had to be developed for all the indigenous languages to be used by all LPs both when interpreting in the Houses –​the National Assembly (NA) and in the National Council of Provinces (NCOP), as well as in Portfolio Committees and in Public Hearings –​and in translations. These terms lists are developed by the LPs in an exercise called terminology development, on the days when there are no sittings and when Parliament is on recess. LPs of each language group are all from different areas with different varieties, and these differences manifest during the terminology development exercises. All LPs have to adapt to the standardised forms as set out in the PanSALB orthographies mentioned above. It is clear therefore that even in South Africa’s parliament the practice of linguistic prescriptivism is firmly entrenched, embedded in historical processes of standardisation of languages that date back to the years of apartheid. The future of language prescriptivism will therefore remain interconnected with past practices and present-​day politics.

12. Conclusion With regard to southern African languages and standardisation or prescriptivism it has been language boards, Education Departments, Parliaments and authoritative institutions such the PanSALB in South Africa that make final decisions on standardisation, more especially with regard to schools and the use of African languages in the public domain. There is very little meaningful engagement with the public in this regard and this further isolates and stigmatises speakers of other varieties. In a democratic South Africa any standardisation would need to be done under the auspices of the PanSALB, National Lexicography Units, National Language Services in the Department of Sports, Arts and Culture, as well as the Department of Basic Education. The point of departure should be to broaden the idea of standardisation to bring in other varieties into the present standard in order to create an inclusive language standardisation that does not isolate people in the educational, political, and economic system of the country. This would also improve the self-​esteem of learners and allow them to bring their own familial and societal knowledge into the educational system as an asset rather than as a barrier to knowledge and belonging. In a multilingual Africa, language diversity should be regarded as an asset, as it offers opportunities to expand learners’ linguistic repertoires. This could be possible through the promotion of additive multilingualism, instead of subtractive bilingualism which results from the loss of the learner’s mother tongue. In the education context, promoting language diversity offers a wide range of benefits, such as language development, motivation to learn other languages, and high self-​esteem as everyone’s languages are recognised and respected. This results in improved communication skills and interpersonal relationships, as well as improved opportunities to succeed. It remains to be seen as to how dialectal varieties of southern African languages can be accommodated within prescriptive and standardised language models, whether this be in the realm of politics, public life, or education. It will no doubt be linked to a bottom-​up driven approach where speakers of varieties will make certain demands for inclusive models of language use in higher domains.

References Allan, K., & Burridge, K. (2007). Forbidden words: Taboo and the censoring of language. Cambridge University Press.

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Prescriptivism in African languages of Southern Africa Anderson, L., & Trudgill, P. (1990). Bad language. Oxford University Press. Appel, R., & Muysken, P. (1987). Language contact and bilingualism. Edward Arnold. Armstrong, N. R., & Mackenzi, I. (2016). On prescriptivism and ideology. Representaciones, 11(2), 27–​58. Awak, M. K. (1990). Historical background, with special reference to Western Africa. In R. R. K. Hartmann (Ed.), Lexicography in Africa (pp. 8–​18). University of Exeter Press. Banda, F. (2002). Towards a standard Bantu orthography. In K. K. Prah (Ed.), Writing African (pp. 43–​54). Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society. Béjoint, H. (2000). Modern lexicography. Oxford University Press. Bergenholtz, H. (2003). User-​oriented understanding of descriptive, proscriptive and prescriptive lexicography. Lexikos 13, 65–​80. https://​doi.org/​10.5788/​13-​0-​722 Biko, H. (2019). Africa reimagined: Reclaiming a sense of abundance and prosperity. Jonathan Ball Publishers. Blommaert, J. (2006). Language policy and national identity. In T. Ricento (Ed.), An introduction to language policy: Theory and method (pp. 238–​254). Blackwell Publishing. Bock, Z., & Mheta, G. (Eds.). (2014). Language, society and communication. An introduction. Van Schaik Publishers. Busane. M. (1990). Lexicography in Central Africa: The user perspective, with special reference to Zaire. In R. R. K. Hartmann (Ed.), Lexicography in Africa (pp. 19–​35). University of Exeter Press. Calteaux, K. (1996). The role of standard and non-​standard African language varieties in the urban areas of South Africa. HSRC Publishers. Chimhundu, H. (1992). Early missionaries and the ethnolinguistic factor during the ‘invention of tribalism in Zimbabwe. The Journal of African History 33(1), 87–​109. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S00218​ 5370​0031​868 Chirikure, S., Nyanmushosho, R. T., Chimhundu, H., Dandara, C., Pamburai, H. H., & Manyanga, N. (2017). Concept and knowledge revision in the post-​colony: mukwerera, the practice of asking for rain amongst the Shona of southern Africa. In M. Manyanga & S. Chirikure (Eds.), Archives, objects, places and landscapes: Multidisciplinary approaches to decolonised Zimbabwean pasts (pp. 14–​55). Langaa RPCIG. Corson, D. J. (1994). Minority social groups and non-​standard discourse: Towards a just language policy. The Canadian Modern Language Review/​La Revue canadienne des langues vivantes, 50(2). 271–​295. https://​doi.org/​10.3138/​cmlr.50.2.271 Crystal, D. (1987). The Cambridge encyclopedia of language. Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. (2010). The Cambridge encyclopaedia of language (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Da Costa, D.F., Dyers, C. & Mheta, G. (2014). Language standardization. In Z. Bock & G. Mheta (Eds.), Language, society and communication: An introduction (pp. 333–​360). Van Schaik Publishers. Deumert, A., & Webb, V. (2005). The shape of the standard –​reflections on post-​colonial standard languages, with special attention to South Africa. In V. Webb, A. Deumert, & B. Lepota (Eds.), The standardization of African languages in South Africa. Report on the workshop held at the University of Pretoria 30 June-​1 July 2005 (pp. 17–​34). PanSALB. Doke, M. (1931). Report on the Unification of the Shona Dialects. Austin & Sons. Fromkin, V., & Rodman R. (1983). An introduction to language (3rd ed.). CBS College Publishing. García, O., & Kleyn, T. (2016). Translanguaging theory in education. In O. García & T. Kleyn (Eds.), Translanguaging with multilingual students: Learning from classroom moments (pp. 23–​47). Routledge. Gouws, R. H. (2007). On the development of gilingual dictionaries in South Africa: Aspects of dictionary culture and government policy. International Journal of Lexicography, 20(3), 313–​327.https://​doi.org/​ 10.1093/​ijl/​ecm​020 Hachipola, J. (1998). A survey of minority languages in Zimbabwe. University of Zimbabwe Publishers. Hadebe, S. (2002). The standardisation of the Ndebele language through dictionary-​making. Allex Project. Halliday, M. A. K. (2009). Collected works of M.A.K. Halliday (Vol. 9: Language and education, J. Webster, Ed.). Continuum. Hannan, S. J. (1959). A Standard Shona Dictionary. Rhodesia Literature Bureau. Haugen, E. (1972). Language planning theory and practice. In E. Haugen. (Ed.), The ecology of language: essays. (pp. 287–​295). Stanford University Press. Hudson, R. A. (1980). Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press. Johl, C. (2002). (Re-​)standardisation, harmonisation and Afrikaans. In K. K. Prah (Ed.), Speaking in unison: The standardisation and harmonisation of southern African languages (pp. 161–​176). CASAS. Kaschula, R. H. (2019). Econo-​language planning and transformation in South Africa: From localisation to Globalisation. In R. Hickey (Ed.), English in multilingual South Africa: The linguistics of contact and change (pp. 196–​215). Cambridge University Press.

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Russell H. Kaschula, Sebolelo Mokapela, Dion Nkomo, and Bulelwa Nosilela Kaschula, R. H. (2021). Languages, identities and intercultural communication in South Africa and beyond. Routledge. Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and culture. Oxford University Press. Kropf, A. (1899). A Kafir–​English dictionary. Lovedale Press. Lafon, M., & Webb, V. (Eds.). (2008). The standardisation of African languages. Language political realities. IFAS Working Paper Series, 11. IFAS. https://​hal​shs.archi​ves-​ouver​tes.fr/​hal​shs-​00449​090 Lipou, A. (1997). Mixed languages and Bantu historical linguistics. In R. K. Herbert (Ed.), African linguistics at the crossroads. Papers from Kwaluseni (pp. 39–​54). Rüdiger Köppe Verlag. Lyons, J. (1991). Language and Linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Makalima, R. G. S. (1981). Assessment of the educational implications of the development of Xhosa as a written medium form 1820–​1950: A historical didactical analysis [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of Fort Hare. Makoni, S. (1998). In the beginning was the missionaries’ word: The European invention of an African language: The case of Shona in Zimbabwe. In K. K. Prah (Ed.). Between distinction and extinction: The harmonization and standardization of African languages (pp. 57–​164). Witwatersrand University Press. Makoni, S., & Pennycook, A. (2006). Disinventing and reconstituting languages. In S. Makoni & A Pennycook (Eds.), Disinventing and reconstituting languages (pp. 1–​41). Multilingual Matters. Maqam, E. Z. (2014). The experiences of isiMpondo speakers in learning standard isiXhosa through the formal education system: An exploratory study at a school in the Bizana district of the Eastern Cape [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Rhodes University. McLaren, J. (1915). A Concise Kafir–​English Dictionary. Lovedale Press. McLaren, J. (1924). A Concise English–​Kafir Dictionary. Lovedale Press. Moropa, K. & Kruger, A. (2000). Mistranslation of culture-​specific terms in Kropf ’s Kafir–​English dictionary. South African Journal of African Languages, 20(1), 70-​79. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​02572​ 117.2000.10587​414 Mullaney, E., & Stockwell, P. (2010). Introducing English language: A resource book for students. Routledge. Nkomo, D. (2020). Vernacular lexicography in African languages: From early days to the digital age. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, 41(2), 213–​243. https://​doi.org/​10.1353/​ dic.2020.0012 Oosthuysen, J. C. (2016). The grammar of isiXhosa. SUN Media Press. Opland, J. (1983). Xhosa oral poetry. Aspects of a black South African tradition. Cambridge University Press. Prah, K. K. (Ed.). (2009). The role of missionaries in the development of African languages. Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society. Pride, J. B., & Holmes, J. (1979). Sociolinguistics. Penguin Books. Republic of South Africa, Constitution, 1996. Rubin, J. (1973). Language planning, policy and implementation in South Africa. UMI. Saussure, F. de (1972). Course in General Linguistics. Columbia University Press. Sigcau, N. (1998). Educational implications of non-​standard varieties of isiXhosa [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of Cape Town. Spofana, D. G. (2011). Learners’ texts: A portrayal of the influence of certain varieties of isiXhosa on English texts and vice versa [Unpublished Doctoral dissertation]. University of South Africa. Swann, J., Deumart, A., Lillis, T., & Mesthrie, R. (Eds.). (2004). A dictionary of sociolinguistics. Edinburgh University Press. Thurlow, C. (2006). From statistical panic to moral panic: The metadiscursive construction and popular exaggeration of new media language in the print media. Journal of computer-​mediated communication, 11(3), 667–​701. https://​doi.org/​10.1111/​j.1083-​6101.2006.00031.x Trudgill, P. (1974). Sociolinguistics: An introduction. Penguin Books. Trudgill, P. (1999). The dialects of England. Wiley-​Blackwell. Trudgill, P. (2000). Sociolinguistics: An introduction to language and society (4th ed.). Oxford University Press. Tucker, A. N. (1949). Sotho-​Nguni orthography and tone-​marking. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 13(1), 200–​224. https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​S00419​77X0​0081​957 Van Wyk, E. B. (1992). The concept ‘standard language’. South African Journal of African Languages, 92(sup 1), 23–​34. https://​doi.org/​10.1080/​02572​117.1992.10586​946 Wardhaugh, R. (2010). An Introduction to Sociolinguistics (6th ed.). Wiley Blackwell. Wagner, V., Ditsele, T., & Makgato, M. Influence of Sepitori on standard Setswana of its home language learners at three Tshwane townships. Literator, 41(1), 1–​7. https://​hdl.han​dle.net/​10520/​EJC-​1dd​ 7d23​82c

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20 PRESCRIPTIVISM IN GREATER CHINA Historical trajectories and contemporary pluricentricity Henning Klöter

1.  Prescriptivism and pluricentricity Prescriptivism refers to efforts to influence language use according to normative standards. There are three layers to this wide definition of prescriptivism. First, the ideological belief that language rules must be established and implemented “in order to counter fracture within the speech community” (Wright, 2016, p. 53). Second, the definition and codification of language norms, an activity that is also known as corpus planning (Wright, 2016, pp. 53–​69). Third, the implementation of norms through education, which is also known as acquisition planning (ibid., pp. 69–​75). Prescriptivism is therefore closely bound to language planning; the very notion of prescriptivism highlights the norm-​giving and therefore reductionist nature of language planning. As Percy and Tieken-​Boon van Ostade put it, linguistic prescription “attempts to reduce variation and to retard change” (2017, p. 4). This brief definition implies that there are official agencies which have the means and the power to define and implement linguistic standards. When it comes to the linguistic norms of Chinese and the ways these are implemented, things get a little more complicated because the norms of Chinese are defined and implemented by different agencies in different polities or “self-​governing entities” (Kaltenegger, 2020, p. 2). These include the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macao,1 Singapore, and Taiwan. The historical and political differences between four of these polities are aptly summarized by Goh who writes: Politically, mainland China had embraced a communist system of government, Taiwan had experienced 50 years of colonisation under Japanese rule, Hong Kong underwent 156 years of British colonial rule and Singapore developed from a British outpost into an independent nation. Such differences, along with contact with local cultures and languages, as well as with other Chinese dialects (fangyan, literally ‘regional languages’) contributed to differences among community identities, value systems and language

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among the Chinese of the four areas of mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Goh, 2017, pp. 18–​19 In response to the growing economic integration of these polities in the 1990s, journalists and political economists widely employed the term Greater China when referring to this area (Harding, 1993). Aside from its economic implications, as Harding points out, the term also has important cultural and linguistic connotations, since “a common culture, a common language, family ties and ancestral roots all make it somewhat easier for Chinese to do business” (1993, p. 665, emphasis added). To be sure, from the 1990s onwards, the term Greater China has been met with criticism. A growing number of people, especially in Taiwan, object to the political integration and unification that the name suggests. In this chapter, the decision to use the term Greater China is purely of a sociolinguistic nature. It is loosely used as a collective term for the five afore-​mentioned polities, since these are the only polities that have introduced official language planning policies for Chinese at the highest governmental level. Language planning within Greater China is characterized by both similarities and variances. In each polity, the definition of linguistic norms takes place within a unique pattern of societal multilingualism. At a basic level, therefore, prescriptivism is not so much about setting the norms for one particular language but rather about selecting one language for formal usage and, by definition, excluding alternative options. At the same time, linguistic prescriptivism in all polities is marked by both shared and unique historical pathways. It is for this reason that Chinese meets the defining criteria for a pluricentric language. According to Clyne, this term denotes “languages with several interacting centres, each providing a national variety with at least some of its own (codified) norms” (Clyne, 1992, p. 1; Kloss, 1978, pp. 66–​67). Seeing, however, that the glottonym Chinese is highly ambiguous, covering historical and modern standard languages alike, such as the classical Chinese literary language or Mandarin, Sinitic regional languages,2 as well as the Chinese character script, the analysis of prescriptivism within different regional contexts requires further specification. Previous studies have conceptualized pluricentricity through the lens of a particular language by looking at the transregional spread of certain varieties (Mandarin, Cantonese, Southern Min, etc.) or the pluricentricity of Mandarin due to its official status in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Singapore (Clyne & Kipp, 1999, p. 5). By contrast, in this chapter, pluricentricity is not conceptualized through the prism of a single language or a set of languages. Instead, I look at a cluster of linguistic options, both spoken and written, and its deployment within a process of standardization in different regional contexts. These regional contexts have different language planning agencies, different historical particularities, and different linguistic configurations of the respective community of speakers. In concrete terms, while most of the polities discussed here have adopted Mandarin as a standard language, this decision has ramifications for unstandardized varieties and scripts and whether Mandarin was “appropriate” in terms of its rootedness in a community prior to its introduction as a standard. In other words, to use a distinction that is often used in World Englishes research, Mandarin may refer either to an exonormative standard, i.e., one that has been imported from outside, or an endonormative standard, i.e., one that has developed within the speech community. Distinguishing different combinations of linguistic options that language planning agencies deem relevant for normative language use and the selections made, the gist of this chapter is that ‘Chinese’ represents a configuration of selections and exclusions that are specific to the

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linguistic ecology of a given polity. Since these idiosyncrasies grew out of a shared language history, the first paragraphs of this chapter are dedicated to a sketch of the historical roots of prescriptivism. It is demonstrated that the historical paths of today’s prescriptivism did not evolve in lockstep. Instead, language standards were established in reaction to specific historical events at different times. The combination of spoken and written rules says a lot about a polity’s standing in relation to mainland China. In other words, from a historical perspective, Chinese prescriptivism is about political demarcation or alignment, traditionalism, and local identities.

2.  Prescriptivism in imperial China After the passing of the famous Chinese thinker Confucius in 479 BCE, his disciples compiled a collection of his famous sayings in a book that came to be known as the Analects (Lúnyǔ). One quotation in the Analects reads as follows: “The occasions upon which the Master used correct pronunciation were when reciting the Songs or the Books and when practicing ritual acts” (Analects 7.17, trans. Waley, 1938, p. 126). The English translation “correct pronunciation” renders the Chinese term yaˇyán (雅言), which is reputedly one of the earliest, if not the earliest, allusion to traditional Chinese notions of prescriptivism. Since yaˇyán remains ill-​defined in the original source, it has become subject to different explanations.3 Regardless of what yaˇyán reveals about the nature and the scope of language standardization in the early days, China clearly has a tradition of linguistic prescriptivism that goes back to the first millennium BCE. At the same time, the example of yaˇyán also points to the necessity of making clear distinctions between different domains of language use when referring to linguistic prescriptivism. Prescriptivism was mainly concerned with the written language before the commencement of modern language planning in the early twentieth century. In Chinese writing, prescriptivism can refer to a character’s shape or the quantity and arrangement of strokes within a graph. In the case of the former, a mix of material, political, and aesthetic considerations resulted in the formation of many writing styles (cf. Bottéro, 2017, pp. 600–​602), which, until today, exist side by side depending on the specific context and requirements of usage. As Bottéro points out, the modern “regular script” known as kǎishū that is still used today emerged around the third century CE (2017, p. 602). In Figure 20.1, the formal kǎishū style is represented by characters (a), (c), and (d), all of which stand for wéi (do, make, be). This formal style contrasts with the playful wáwa (baby) style in (b), which may typically appear in informal public signage. Variation on the level of writing styles (a vs b) needs to be distinguished from allographs (yìtı ̌zì), i.e., variation in terms of graphic arrangement and/​or number of strokes, e.g., (a) written with nine strokes vs (c) written with 12 strokes. Characters (a) and (c) are variants of a traditional Chinese character. Traditional characters are still used in Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan; they need to be distinguished from simplified characters (d) which are the official standard of the People’s Republic of China, as will be discussed presently. The regulation of forms and arrangement goes back to the first century BCE when “the government began enforcing the written standard employed in its administration. Nevertheless,

Figure 20.1  Graphic variation in Chinese writing.

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character forms outside of this standard were still commonly used in everyday life” (Galambos, 2006, p. 95). The standardization of writing is closely bound to the history of lexicography, since new norms in terms of form and arrangement were typically encoded in official dictionaries. A case in point is a dictionary known as the Kangxi Dictionary of 1716. Compiled by leading scholars of the time under the patronage of the Kangxi emperor (1654–​1722), its headwords represent the standard contemporary script (cf. Vedal, 2019, pp. 121–​122). Thus, in imperial China, norms of correctness in terms of writing characters and composing essays were clearly established. It must be emphasized, however, that prescriptivism was mainly an issue for the social elite, notably the literati officials whose social position heavily depended on their ability to write according to the existing norms. Outside officialdom, variation prevailed. Prescriptivism in writing stood in stark contrast to prescriptivism in speech. There was a high level of government commitment in the case of the former and much laissez-​faire in the case of the latter. Given that multilingualism has long been a characteristic of Chinese society, it may appear strange that no attempts were made to promote smooth and effective cross-​regional communication. After all, the extent of non-​intelligibility between regional languages, whether Sinitic ‘dialects’ or non-​Sinitic languages of ethnic minorities, cannot be overstated. Again, from a sociological standpoint, there was no need for formal regulation of spoken language use for most speakers. If communication across linguistic boundaries became necessary, as in trade, the form of communication evolved without interference from imperial court language planners. As previously stated, historical sources refer to prescriptivism in the spoken sphere as early as the pre-​imperial period. However, it was not until the middle of the Ming dynasty (1368–​1644) that prescriptivism made more systematic inroads into the spoken language. This development is closely connected to the glottonym Mandarin, which, in the context of the imperial period, is the English translation of the Chinese word Guānhuà (language of the officials). First appearing in sources of the sixteenth century, it broadly refers to “the lingua franca or koiné used in China in administrative, educated, and similar circles” (Coblin, 2017, p. 327). After the imperial court had fallen into the hands of Manchu rulers in the middle of the seventeenth century, the use of Mandarin became subject to stricter official scrutiny and formal regulation. Söderblom Saarela (2020) argues that, among other factors, the coexistence of two official languages in state administration –​Manchu and Mandarin –​contributed to the politicization of language in late imperial China. This politicization manifested itself in efforts to codify the standard pronunciation in reference books, in the establishment of academies where standard pronunciation was taught, and in the formal testing of examination candidates’ pronunciation (cf. Söderblom Saarela, 2020, pp. 40–​48). The prescriptivist nature of Guānhuà is evidenced by the fact that in sources of this period, the pronunciation of Mandarin is labelled as zhèngyīn, literally meaning “correct pronunciation” (ibid., p. 41). Occasionally, local officials demanded prescriptivist measures that went beyond court policies. In 1735, for example, it was requested that promotion in the military should depend on a command of Mandarin (Söderblom Saarela, 2020, p. 45). This proposal, combined with a restriction on local language use, was supposed to benefit the spread of Mandarin in the dialect strongholds of southeastern China. Although not implemented, the proposal tellingly foreshadowed the way linguistic prescriptivism was to be implemented in the twentieth century. As with the written standard, the promotion of Mandarin remained restricted to the political and cultural elite. In contrast to the former, however, according to Söderblom Saarela, the active promotion of “correct” Mandarin among examination candidates “is considered to have failed, as government-​sponsored Mandarin teaching had by and large ceased in these areas by the middle of the eighteenth century” (2020, p. 45). It was not only the failure to successfully implement an unambiguous pronunciation norm that distinguishes acquisition planning 341

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in imperial days from modern times. In addition, in the field of corpus planning, there was also no consensus as to how this norm should be codified. Here it is important to emphasize that Guānhuà/​Mandarin had different regional bases, notably the region of the former southern capital Nanjing and that of the Beijing area. By the time the Manchu seized power and founded the Qing dynasty (1644–​1911), according to Simmons, “southern Mandarin-​ based Guānhuà had become deeply and firmly entrenched as the prestigious lingua franca … of the native Chinese Han literati” (Simmons, 2020, p. 16). The Manchus recognized this prestige and codified the southern pronunciation in the afore-​mentioned Kangxi Dictionary, thus lending it a quasi-​official status. However, the disagreement on the question as to how to define Mandarin in regional terms persisted until the Republican period. Whereas “the Manchu court may have preferred Beijing pronunciation, the city’s dialect was otherwise widely dismissed among the Han Chinese, including the literati elite” (ibid.). In other words, China did not have an unambiguously codified and widely disseminated spoken standard at any point during its imperial history. Nonetheless, the imperial period paved the way for language planning in the modern era. The last dynasty was a period when negligence towards pronunciation was superseded by explicit debates about correct pronunciation. There was also a widespread consensus that Mandarin and not one of the regional languages of the southeast should take center stage.

3.  Republican China Following the establishment of the Republic of China (ROC) in 1912, language standardization and language ideological debates became an essential feature of nation building. Inspired by the example of Japan,4 the new government quickly made efforts to establish a national language. When it came to defining the standard in terms of a regional base dialect, however, representatives from various provinces became embroiled a heated debate. As pointed out above, at the beginning of the century there was by no means a consensus that the pronunciation of the capital Beijing was the most prestigious variety. In addition, the very notion that there should be one standard pronunciation to the exclusion of linguistic alternatives was anything but recognized. Yuen Ren Chao, one of the leading Chinese linguists of the twentieth century, pointed out that “a command of Mandarin during the imperial days was regarded rather as a convenience than a matter of prestige and having a southern accent was more of an in-​convenience than anything to be ashamed of ” (Chao, 1961, p. 171). In other words, what is known as Mandarin in the sense of Guānhuà was an integrative language that was open to regional variation. By contrast, the approach taken by ROC language planners was to establish an exclusive standard with a clear dividing line between right and wrong (for details, see Klöter 2020, pp. 106–​109). Such an approach was as new to China as the Western concept of a national language representing a unified state and a unified people. Such a shift in language standardization could obviously not be implemented smoothly. Since first attempts at reaching a solution failed, the committee entrusted with language standardization agreed upon a compromise standard that contained linguistic elements of both North and South. Yuen Ren Chao (1892–​1982),5 who was directly involved in the language planning activities and obviously also endeavored to learn how to speak according to the new norm, later recollected that “for thirteen years I was the sole speaker of this idiolect, meant to be the national language of 4, 5, or 600 million speakers” (Chao, 1961, p. 175). The controversy lasted for more than a decade before 1924 when the Beijing pronunciation became the basis for the Mandarin standard (Simmons, 2017, p. 79).

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The need to establish an unambiguous standard became more urgent following the decision to adopt a phonetic notation system that represented the sounds of the national language. The choice fell on the system known as Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (MPS, zhùyīn zìmǔ), the graphemic components of which are derived from Chinese characters (e.g., ㄅ for the initial b-​, ㄆ for p-​, ㄇ for m-​, ㄈ for f-​; for details, see Wippermann, 2017). Thus, by the end of the Republican period, Mandarin as a “national language” (Guóyǔ), based on the pronunciation of Beijing, had been established along with a system of phonetic symbols indicating correct pronunciation. During the same period, Mandarin evolved as the uncontested standard of the written language known as Standard Written Chinese, which replaced the classical Chinese literary language as the language of school textbooks, literature, and print media. The gradual standardization of spoken and written Mandarin during the Republican period, known as the National Language Movement (Kaske, 2017), was accompanied by a number of alternative movements and a plethora of counter proposals by language activists and scholars. These included the replacement of Chinese characters with an alphabet, the promotion of Esperanto, and the cultivation of dialects. In other words, when language standardization continued under a new regime, crucial steps towards standardization had been made and a broad spectrum of language-​ideological debates had unfolded.

4.  People’s Republic of China After the foundation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, language planning quickly rose to the top of the political agenda of the newly founded state. The name of the national language was changed from Guóyǔ to Pǔtōnghuà “common language”. This change in nomenclature arguably conceals the fact that there was a surprisingly high degree of continuity in maintaining the basic principles of linguistic prescriptivism. In February of 1956, the State Council declared: “Pǔtōnghuà is the standard form of Modern Chinese with the Beijing phonological system as its norm of pronunciation, and Northern dialects as its base dialect, and looking to exemplary modern works in báihuà ‘vernacular literary language’ for its grammatical norms” (translated by Chen, 1999, p. 24). Thus, as Ramsey has pointed out “the National Language Movement under a different name weathered the Communist Revolution. The Communist goal was now stated to be the ‘unification of the Chinese language,’ and this was the very program that had been advocated by supporters of the National Language, pursued by the Kuomintang government, and bitterly opposed by the Left” (Ramsey, 1987, pp. 14–​5). According to Simmons, it was only after the foundation of the PRC that the pronunciation of the Beijing region became the undisputed yardstick of normativity (cf. Simmons, 2017, p. 66). Correct pronunciation thus came to be defined regionally. Whereas this remained much the same before and after 1949, there are also important differences between the two periods. In contrast to the Republican period, when standardization focused on pronunciation, the new government now enforced prescriptivism on pronunciation, script, and lexicon. At the same time, the intended social outreach of prescriptivism broadened significantly, since the new standards aimed at the language use of the entire population. The focus of post-​1949 language standardization was clearly on script reform. Within days of the founding of the new state in October 1949, an Association for Chinese Script Reform (Zhōngguó wénzì gǎigé xiéhuì) was established. This was the first step towards a more systematic institutionalization of language planning during the 1950s. It was accompanied by a public debate on script reform during the same period.6 Script reform had two closely connected aspects: the simplification of characters and the development of the transcription system known

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as Hànyǔ Pīnyīn. Co-​occurring with Chinese characters on public signage, book titles, and dictionary entries, the latter was an effective means to indicate unmistakably the correct pronunciation of the former and thus an integral feature of prescriptivism. At the time of its development, however, some ambiguity remained about the future role of alphabetic writing. In 1951, state founder Mao Zedong (1893–​1976) himself declared that the “written language must be reformed and oriented toward [the use of] a phonetic system as is common with the world’s [other] written languages” (quoted in Kau & Leung, 1986, p. 235). This was reiterated by the famous author and politician Guo Moruo (1892–​1978) at the First National Writing Reform Conference in 1955. Guo argued that “with the promotion of the new writing, Chinese characters will gradually fade from everyday usage by the majority of the people” (quoted in Seybolt & Chiang, 1979, p. 48). At the same time, he emphasized that characters would “certainly not” be entirely abolished (ibid.). These remarks echo some of the positions that had been articulated in language debates during the 1920s and 1930s in a much more outspoken and pointed manner. In hindsight, however, even if the goal of the script reform was the dominance of Hànyǔ Pīnyīn over characters, the actual development took a different course. Simplified characters are now the undisputed written standard,7 whereas the use of Hànyǔ Pīnyīn is by and large restricted to language education, digital language input, and street signage. The spread of the new language standard is closely bound to some ambitious lexicographic projects. One example is the Xīnhuá zìdiǎn (‘A character dictionary of New China’), a copy of which can supposedly be found on the bookshelves of most private households in China. Since the publication of the first edition in 1953, a revised edition has appeared on average every six years. The Xīnhuá zìdiǎn is the yardstick of correct character writing and pronunciation. The most important prescriptive source for words and phrases is the Xiàndài Hànyǔ cídiǎn (‘Modern Chinese Dictionary’), which, like its ‘smaller’ counterpart, is regularly updated and revised. Since the editors refused to include a number of new words or meanings due to moral concerns, the release of the sixth edition in 2012 stirred a public debate about entry selection and the prescriptive nature of dictionaries (for details, see Klöter, 2017, pp. 64–​67; 2019, pp. 333–​335). This practice can arguably be seen as a continuation of the strong politicization of lexicography after the 1950s, which is manifested in the large amount of political phraseology among the entries and example sentences in earlier editions of PRC dictionaries. This composite of correct characters, correct pronunciation, and politicized content clearly exemplifies the ideological dimension of linguistic prescriptivism in the PRC. Language planning in China succeeded in reducing variation at different levels. Now more Chinese people than ever before are aware of linguistic standards and speak and write according to them. Almost seventy years after the definition of the new standards, efforts aimed at implementing them are still in full swing. In 2000, the National People’s Congress passed a “Law of the People’s Republic of China on the National Commonly Used Language and Script” (Rohsenow, 2004, p. 36). Backed by this new legislation, a series of measures aimed at encouraging the use of language according to the norms were taken. For example, the use of Mandarin as the sole medium of instruction was reinforced, especially in regions known for the dominance of regional dialects. In addition, in 1994, the Pǔtōnghuà Proficiency Test (Pǔtōnghuà Shuı ̌píng Cèshì) aimed at formally testing the language competence of civil servants and educators was launched. Another measure has been the annual “National Publicity Week for Pǔtōnghuà Promotion” (Quán guó tuīguǎng Pǔtōnghuà xuānchuánzhōu) ever since 1998 (for details, see Klöter, 2020, pp. 111–​114). Due to China’s sheer size, its number of speakers, and its important international position, language norms defined in the PRC are obviously a benchmark of linguistic prescriptivism, the impact of which extends far beyond the borders of China. 344

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This position has been compounded by the rapid international spread of Chinese language teaching and the growing international recognition of the Chinese proficiency test known as Hànyǔ Shuı ̌píng Kǎoshì (HSK).8

5.  Hong Kong With a population of more than seven million and located in the Pearl River Delta, Hong Kong is known as an international trading hub, a center of commerce, entertainment, and tourism, and as a beacon of higher education in the region. Its urban development, including the growth of its educational infrastructure, is closely bound to British colonial rule which started in 1842 in the wake of the first Opium War. During the first century of its rule and beyond, the colonial government showed little interest in Chinese language education. Although early official documents paid some lip service by declaring that English and Chinese should be put on a “footing of perfect equality” (quoted in Poon, 2019, p. 62), English as the colonial language dominated the high domains of government administration and education. Historically, as a result of migration from different regions of southeastern China, language use in the private domain was marked by a high degree of dialectal variation. In the course of time, however, Hong Kong society witnessed a language shift towards the majority language Cantonese due to its role as the lingua franca of the Chinese population (Li & Tong, 2020, p. 149). Today, when Chinese is mentioned in the context of Hong Kong, speakers usually refer to Cantonese. There have never been attempts to standardize Cantonese formally, but due to its wide use in locally produced TV drama series and movies, something like a “media standard version” of Cantonese has evolved (Tang & Cheng, 2017, p. 392). In 1974, the British government formally recognized Chinese as the second official language of the colony. However, as Simpson points out, “the government did little in practice to promote this new recognition of Chinese” (2007, p. 175). In the same period, the education system shifted from elite to mass education, which led to a “decline in language standards” (Poon, 2019, p. 62). This shift in educational policies and what it had revealed about the English language competence of students led to greater attention on the issue of choosing a medium of instruction. As a result, “Chinese” (i.e., Cantonese) became widely accepted as a medium of instruction. This widespread use of Cantonese in the classroom as a corollary to educational reform persisted until the handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997 and beyond. It should be emphasized, however, that the colonial government did not formally support the use of Cantonese. The acceptance of Cantonese in educational contexts aimed at improving graduation statistics and maintaining the elevated status of English. In contrast to the language spoken by students in the classroom, which is Cantonese, the linguistic identity of written texts is rather hybrid. In terms of lexicon and syntax, the texts reflect Standard Written Chinese, which is essentially written Mandarin using traditional characters. When read aloud, however, the texts are recited in Cantonese. Since there are some significant differences between Mandarin and Cantonese, especially in the use of grammatical function words, Hong Kong students face the challenge of reading texts aloud in a way that differs considerably from the way they speak. Although Cantonese has also developed its own written form,9 texts written in Cantonese are widely considered informal and they are not used in educational contexts. In 1997, Britain ceded power and Hong Kong became a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the PRC. The SAR government has since then pursued a language-​in-​education policy goal known as “biliteracy and trilingualism”, i.e., “the ability to read and write Chinese and English, and to speak and understand Cantonese, English, and Pǔtōnghuà” (Li & Tong, 345

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2020, p. 148). The appearance of Pǔtōnghuà on the language planning agenda has obvious ideological connotations, since it is the sole national language of the unified nation. Moreover, Pǔtōnghuà has an increasing instrumental value due to the growing economic, political, and social integration with mainland China (cf. Poon 1999, p. 135). The increasing recognition of Pǔtōnghuà is also accommodated in the SAR’s language-​in-​education policy where it has been given special emphasis (Poon, 2019, p. 68). This is reflected in the scheme known as PMIC, i.e., using Pǔtōnghuà as the medium of instruction for teaching Chinese. Launched some ten years after the handover, the PMIC scheme aims at raising the portion of classes taught in Mandarin and “rigorously promoting Putonghua in the wider community” (Poon, 2019, p. 69). The increasing spread of Pǔtōnghuà has thus far not yet gone along with a systematic promotion of simplified characters, although proposals in this respect have already been made (cf. Poon, 2019, p. 71). The presence and acceptance of Cantonese in formal domains of Hong Kong society is unique. Together with Macao, Hong Kong is the only place where a Sinitic language other than Mandarin has gained formal recognition. It needs to be emphasized, however, that an elevated position of Cantonese has never been a target of language planning in Hong Kong. Aside from the fact that a binding standard for Cantonese has not been developed, its position needs to be assessed in the context of the linguistic configuration before and after 1997. In colonial times, the use of Cantonese in education was part of a framework that gave clear priority to English. After the handover, due to the increasing integration with mainland China, Cantonese is now at risk of becoming marginalized due to the strong official support of Pǔtōnghuà. Against this background, Poon conjectures that “all subjects except English language will sooner or later adopt Putonghua as the medium of teaching, as in other cities in mainland China” (Poon, 2019, p. 71).

6. Macao Located close to Hong Kong and neighboring the Chinese metropolis of Zhuhai, the city of Macao is also marked by the dominance of Cantonese. Along with Hong Kong, it is the only place in Greater China in which a Sinitic language other than Mandarin has official status and is widely used as a medium of instruction. In terms of norm codification, however, a certain degree of ambiguity can be observed. This may be explained by the fact that Macao is currently in a stage of transition from a century-​long policy of non-​intervention to alignment with PRC language standards. The Portuguese presence in Macao goes back to the second half of the sixteenth century. Originally a settlement and trade outpost, it became a Portuguese colony in 1887 (Dos Santos, 2017, pp. 659, 662). In the field of language education, the colonial government largely pursued a policy of non-​intervention. For most of the time, official language education policy remained restricted to the operation of a few Portuguese-​medium schools for students with ties to Portugal (Bray & Koo, 2004, p. 223; Young, 2009, p. 415). Education for the local people, on the other hand, “rested overwhelmingly on religious bodies such as the Roman Catholic Church and Protestant Churches, as well as associations and individuals” (Young, 2009, p. 415). Thus, when Portugal ceded power and Macao gained its current status as a SAR of China in 1999, there was an established practice of teaching Chinese that did not result from official language planning. Teaching was conducted in Cantonese, the “usual language” of almost 90 percent of the population (Moody, 2019, p. 77). As in Hong Kong, literacy was based on texts written in Standard Written Chinese, which is essentially written Mandarin, using traditional characters. Thus, by the time Macao came under Chinese jurisdiction, there was only limited congruity between the prescriptive standards of the PRC and language practice in the SAR. 346

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In contrast to colonial times, Macao now has prescriptive norms for language use. The Macao Basic Law prioritizes “Chinese as the primary official language and Portuguese as an ‘additional’ official language” (Moody, 2019, p. 84). In the light of the fact that less than one percent of the population identify Portuguese as their “usual language” (ibid., p. 81), this official position of Portuguese is more symbolic in nature. As an international language, English outstrips Portuguese in terms of student numbers at all levels of education. Interestingly, the original Chinese and therefore legally binding word for “Chinese” is Zhōngwén, an “informal and frequently used term for any form of Chinese, especially written forms” (Wiedenhof, 2015, p. 8, emphasis added). In other words, at its legal core, prescriptivism evades specification, since Zhōngwén can also refer to Cantonese. The same is true for the written standard, which is meant to be Standard Written Chinese without explicitly mentioning this (Moody, 2019, p. 84). Such ambiguities in the legal wording have now been replaced by slightly more concrete specifications in official documents released by the SAR government. On the one hand, these documents confirm the official status of the traditional script and of Cantonese as the medium of instruction. At the same time, however, they pave the way for simplified characters and Mandarin instruction by stating that “the standard spoken Chinese language refers to Putonghua” and that “the standard written Chinese language refers to standardised Chinese characters” (quoted in Moody, 2019, pp. 86–​87). Although not stated explicitly, Moody suggests that simplified characters are meant and therefore notices “an important shift in the importance given to Putonghua and simplified Chinese characters” within language education policy (2019, p. 87). In short, the current realities of linguistic prescriptivism in Macao still reflect the pre-​ handover status quo of little congruity with PRC standards. The configuration of language-​ related norms continues to put emphasis on local language use and traditional writing. But these are norms under pressure, so to speak, due to the growing integration with China. In its ultimate consequence, this development will lead to a reduction in terms of pluricentricity.

7. Taiwan Located some 180 kilometers off the southeastern coast of mainland China, the political status of Taiwan is controversial. Whereas the PRC claims sovereignty over the island, Taiwan continues to raise the flag of the Republic of China. Political antagonism is an essential factor behind the demarcating approach taken by Taiwanese language planners. Despite the political antagonism, the PRC and Taiwan share Mandarin as the official language. From a broader historical perspective, the spread of Mandarin in Taiwan got off to a slow start. First attempts date back to the Qing dynasty, when Guānhuà academies were established (Heylen, 2012, p. 25). Largely unsuccessful, the promotion of Mandarin came to a standstill after 1895, when Taiwan became a Japanese colony. Although the language itself was hardly used, the ideologies that found expression in the national language movement also stirred language-​ ideological debates among Taiwanese intellectuals. In Taiwan, however, the ideal of promoting Mandarin as a vernacular language quickly led to a reverse effect by stirring support for the protection and cultivation of the regional Sinitic language now known as Taiwanese or Hoklo. The systematic promotion of Mandarin started in 1945, after the end of Japanese colonial rule, when Taiwan fell under the jurisdiction of the Republic of China. After taking power, the ROC government transferred existing language laws to its new territory. As a result, Mandarin, under the established name Guóyǔ (national language), became the sole standard. Mandarin in Taiwan was truly an exonormative standard, since hardly anyone spoke the language by the time it became the norm. In other words, its status as an official language was based purely on 347

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the ideological claim that one national language should represent the entire unified nation. The successful spread of Mandarin in Taiwan resulted from a combination of restrictions on the use of local languages in education and media and immense efforts to establish Mandarin as the sole medium of instruction. The elevated position of Mandarin was challenged after the 1990s, when local languages like Taiwanese and Hakka were declared compulsory subjects in primary school education. The modification of language policies came during the period of cultural and political indigenization (běntǔhuà) and the emergence of a Taiwanese consciousness (Táiwān yìshì). Due to the modest number of teaching hours, however, this new support of local languages “has not yet accomplished its goal, as Mandarin remains the dominant language” (Chen, 2020, p. 127). What is more, even in the areas where Taiwanese was widely used, younger speakers are increasingly using Mandarin even in private domains, resulting in an interruption of intergenerational language transmission (cf. Klöter, 2020, p. 116). Official commitment to multilingualism also finds expression in the draft of a “National Languages Act” released in 2019, according to which “all national languages shall be equal; nationals using a national language shall not be discriminated against or face restrictions” (LRD, 2019). Script policies are also marked by a high degree of continuity. In the 1950s, character simplification made a brief appearance on the agenda of language planners. When their PRC counterparts prepared to do the same, however, these plans were discontinued (cf. Lee, 2018). Significantly, the ROC later criticized character simplification in China “as treacherous and destructive of traditional culture,” whereas the PRC saw the refusal to adopt simplified writing in Taiwan “as reactionary and regressive” (Wang, 2004, p. 798). In the case of Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, the effects of political antagonism were less strong. Although MPS are still used for teaching character pronunciation to children, Hànyǔ Pīnyīn has been adopted as the official transcription system on street signs (cf. LRD, 2021). This official recognition of Hànyǔ Pīnyīn brings a temporary end to a long and controversial debate about the choice of a romanization system. Prior to the official acceptance of Hànyǔ Pīnyīn, a locally devised system known as Tongyong Pinyin10 had been adopted in 2002. Thus, aside from a few minor exceptions, the set of language standards that are still in effect today are a direct continuation of ROC language policies. The standards can be described as exonormative in a dual sense: when it became standard, Mandarin was not part of the language ecology of Taiwan. On another level, the high status of Mandarin and the normativity of northern pronunciation arose from a context that was not an integral part of Taiwan history. Today, the positions of Mandarin and traditional characters are undisputed, despite attempts to elevate the status of local languages.

8. Singapore For most of the time after its founding in 1819, Singapore was part of the British Empire. British rule was only briefly interrupted by Japanese occupation towards the end of the Second World War. After gaining independence from Britain in 1963, the island first became part of Malaysia, followed by full independence in 1965. The main ethnic group in terms of size, some 70 percent of the population, are descendants of Chinese migrants; other recognized ethnic groups are Malays and Indians (cf. Goh and Fong, 2020, p. 166). Singapore’s language policy aims at striking a balance between ethnic groups by recognizing English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil as official languages. English is the main language of cross-​ethnic communication, the working language of the government and administration, and the dominant language in education.

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Since ethnic Chinese are descendants of migrants who came from southeastern China, Singapore continues to be home to various mutually unintelligible dialects. When Chinese education was offered by private or community initiatives in the nineteenth century, these dialects were used as a medium of instruction (cf. Shepherd, 2003, pp. 37–​38). Thus, “fragmentation into dialect groups” (ibid., p. 37), the main characteristic of the Chinese community as a whole, was also reflected in education. In 1899, however, Singapore witnessed a first campaign to promote the use of Mandarin in education. The campaign was initiated by the medical doctor Lim Boon Keng who was driven by the ideal to overcome ethno-​linguistic division within the community. At the same time, he recognized business opportunities with China (ibid., p. 39). The support of Mandarin in education received a boost in the 1920s, when the national language movement in China swept to Singapore and sparked pro-​Chinese sentiments, notably among students (Kenley, 2003). As a corollary to the growing prestige of the national language and an influx of teachers and teaching materials from China, by 1930 Mandarin became the medium of instruction in almost all Chinese schools (Shepherd, 2003, p. 43). Thus, when Singapore gained independence in 1965, it already had a history of pro-​ Mandarin campaigning and Mandarin teaching. After 1965, the support of Mandarin was not merely continued, but significantly intensified. Emphasizing social harmony among ethnic groups, the political agenda of the first prime minister of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew (1923–​ 2015) foregrounded the importance of language policy. Accordingly, Mandarin, known in Singapore as Huáyǔ (language of the ethnic Chinese), was assigned the status of a “mother tongue language” representing all ethnic Chinese, although it was least widely spoken within this group (Goh & Fong, 2020, p. 170) and thus an exonormative standard. Most importantly, Mandarin was considered a “neutral” language in the sense that its use would not privilege one group of speakers over another (ibid., p. 170). In 1979, the government initiated the Speak Mandarin Campaign (SMC), which aims at spreading the use of Mandarin through advertising and other activities. Although the name of Mandarin in Singapore –​Huáyǔ –​is different from its mainland Chinese counterpart, similarities between the linguistic norms in the PRC and Singapore are considerable. Singapore Huáyǔ or Mandarin, as observed by Shang and Zhao, “is closely approximate to Putonghua in all linguistic aspects” (2017, p. 317). Similarly, Lù states that “it can be said that Singapore Mandarin and Pǔtōnghuà are basically the same. They are both based on Beijing pronunciation as the standard pronunciation and northern Mandarin as the base dialect. But in terms of pronunciation, lexicon, and grammar, there are also differences between the two” (2018, p. 4). Pǔtōnghuà, however, has never been declared the official standard of Huáyǔ (Shang & Zhao, 2017, p. 321). Instead, the normativity of Pǔtōnghuà is recognized implicitly (ibid., p. 323). This stands in contrast to English, which follows the standards of British English (ibid., p. 322). Other areas of standardization also follow the example of China. In 1969, the Ministry of Education issued a first list of some 500 simplified characters. Within seven years, character simplification was fully aligned with PRC norms (cf. Shang & Zhao, 2017, p. 320). Hànyǔ Pīnyīn soon followed suit. By the time of independence, Mandarin Phonetic Symbols had become a firmly established standard for indicating the correct Mandarin pronunciation of characters. In 1973, however, the Singapore Ministry of Education officially announced that from the year 1975, it would gradually be replaced by Hànyǔ Pīnyīn (Shang & Zhao, 2017, p. 319). Like the appropriation of the PRC Mandarin standard, this alignment, according to Shang and Zhao, can be characterized as implicit acceptance motivated by pragmatic considerations (2017, p. 324). Against this background, they emphasize that Chinese language standardization

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in Singapore was implemented before the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two sides in 1990 (ibid., p. 320). Due to language contact, actual language use in Singapore often differs considerably from the standard. On the level of language standards, Singapore has the highest degree of correspondence with the PRC. A crucial difference lies in the embedding of this standard into the overall configuration of language standards. Compared to the other places discussed above, English in Singapore is the only example of a former colonial language that is still used in wider communication and in high domains. It is also the only place where Mandarin as an official language is subordinate to another language.

9.  Concluding remarks This chapter makes the case for understanding Chinese prescriptivism in pluricentric terms with different regional norm-​giving contexts and histories. Prescriptivism unfolds through a cluster of different normative linguistic features, including the sociolinguistic position of the standard language(s) vis-​à-​vis other languages of the community. Against this backdrop, differences within Greater China therefore lie in the transformation of prescriptivism into a concrete set of rules and regulations as well as in the implementation of these rules. There are no two polities within Greater China that define linguistic prescriptivism in the same way. The PRC continues the longstanding tradition of maintaining Mandarin as the sole spoken standard without a counterpart. In the Mandarin dialect areas, which extend from the outer northeast to southwestern China, Mandarin can be seen as an endonormative standard. In the dialect areas of southeastern China, as a result of systematic acquisition planning, Mandarin has arguably evolved from an exonormative to an endonormative standard, since it is now widely used and accepted by younger generations of speakers in various domains. Norms for the written language are based on the use of simplified characters, while Hànyǔ Pīnyīn is the undisputed norm for transcribing the correct sounds of Mandarin. As regards the development towards endonormativity, Mandarin in Taiwan is comparable with southeastern China. It is now widely used in various domains, especially by younger speakers. The sociolinguistic status of Mandarin in Taiwan is not as absolute as in the PRC because other Sinitic languages, such as Hoklo (Taiwanese) and Hakka, have gained formal legal status and also occupy a modest space in primary education. In writing, Taiwan maintains a traditionalist approach by employing traditional characters. As a result of long-​term colonization, Hong Kong and Macao are the only places where Cantonese as a non-​Mandarin language is formally recognized as a medium of instruction on all levels of the education system. In both places, the normative written language is Mandarin, which is represented with traditional characters and read aloud in Cantonese. Both SARs maintain a former colonial language as a second official language. In contrast to the marginal role of Portuguese in Macao, however, the sociolinguistic setting of Hong Kong is marked by a continued use of English in formal domains. Both places are seeing early signs of alignment with the national standard, which is spoken Mandarin and simplified characters, as a result of their growing integration with the PRC. The presence of a high number of Chinese speakers in Singapore has historically been due to migration rather than political affiliation. Singapore has declared Mandarin an official language and promoted it as an exonormative standard among its ethnic Chinese population, demonstrating a strong alignment with PRC language standards. Mandarin is subordinate to the former colonial language English, which dominates most formal domains in the multi-​ethnic and multilingual overall setting of the city state. This brief summary supports the claim that each polity within Greater China is home to a unique cluster of linguistic norms. This assertion is based on a broad definition of prescriptivism 350

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that encompasses multiple levels of linguistic norm-​setting. If we subscribe to a narrow definition by defining prescriptivism as the “final stage in the language standardization process” (Percy & Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2017, p. 3, drawing from Milroy & Milroy, 2012, pp. 22–​ 23 and Haugen, 1966), new questions arise. For example, what are the normative differences between Mandarin in the PRC (Pǔtōnghuà), Taiwan (Guóyǔ) and Singapore (Huáyǔ)? The emphasis lies on normative, since differences in actual spoken usage have been analysed in previous studies (for example, Kubler, 1985; Lù, 2018). How and on what basis are these normative differences communicated in education? To put it another way, how do native learners distinguish between right and wrong? Finding answers to these and other questions must be left for future research.

Notes 1 Both spellings Macao and Macau exist. The former is the spelling used in official documents and also in this article, except for quotations from other sources. 2 In Chinese terminology, these regional languages are termed fāngyán, which is usually translated as “dialect”. It needs to be emphasized, however, that there is no mutual intelligibility between these “dialects”. Traditionally, seven dialect groups are distinguished (Mandarin, Wú, Xiāng, Kèjiā/​Hakka, Mǐn, Gàn, Yuè/​Cantonese; cf. Norman, 2017, p. 42). Except for Mandarin, these dialects or regional languages are spoken in eastern and southeastern China. 3 According to one definition, it represents the official language of its time (Nienhauser, 1986, p. 98). Other definitions narrow the scope of yǎyán by describing it as “a sort of standard language that was used in performing rituals and as a kind of diplomatic language that could be used by emissaries and wandering scholars” (Norman, 2017, p. 44). It has also been defined as a word for elegant pronunciation (Harbsmeier, 2001, p. 377), which is supported by the fact that in the example quoted above, Confucius uses yǎyán when reciting a text, which needs to be distinguished from spoken interaction. 4 In Japan, national language planning had been initiated in the late nineteenth century already. For a lucid study of modern language planning in Japan, I refer to Heinrich (2012). 5 According to LaPolla, Chao “is easily the most famous linguist to have come out of China” (2006, p. 295). Aside from his involvement in the standardization of pronunciation, Chao is also known for his outstanding academic achievements. He held different positions in China and the US, including a professorship at the University of California at Berkeley (1952–​1960). His Grammar of Spoken Chinese (1968) is widely considered a landmark in modern Chinese linguistics. 6 English translations of some representative contributions to this debate can be found in Seybolt & Chiang (1979). 7 Simplified writing was implemented gradually. The current standard is largely based on the General List of Simplified Characters that was released in 1964. With this list, the average number of strokes of 2,236 characters was reduced from 15.6 to 10.3 (cf. Chen, 1999, pp. 154–​157). Examples of simplified/​traditional characters include 门/​門 mén (door), 龙/​龍 lóng (dragon), 学/​學 xué (learn, study) 饿/​餓 è (hungry), 党/​黨 dǎng ((political) party); see also Figure 20.1. 8 Formally established in the 1990s, the HSK can now be taken in more than 1,000 test centers around the world. According to official figures, it was taken 6.8 million times worldwide in 2018, an increase of 4.6 percent from 2017 (Zou, 2019). 9 Written texts closely reflecting colloquial Cantonese lexicon and syntax are associated with informality, directness, and intimacy. Although written Cantonese lacks standardization and exposure to education, it has nonetheless developed a relatively high degree of conventionalization and consistency in terms of character use. Examples of widely-​used Cantonese characters are 揼dap6 (to beat, pound), 佢 for keoi5 (he, she, it), and (3) 冇 for mou5 (not have, no) (for details, see Bauer, 2018; the examples are quoted from p. 111). 10 Supporters of Tongyong Pinyin argued that Taiwan should adopt a standard that was developed in Taiwan. It was also claimed that Tongyong Pinyin more accurately reflected Taiwan Mandarin pronunciation. Some important differences compared to Hànyǔ Pīnyīn are the initial spellings jh-​(vs. Hànyǔ Pīnyīn zh-​), s-​ (vs. x-​), c-​ (vs. q-​), and the final spellings -​ong (vs. -​eng) after f-​ and w-​ and -​yong (vs. -​iong). For details, see Wikipedia contributors (2022).

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References Bauer, R.S. (2018). Cantonese as written language in Hong Kong. Global Chinese, 4(1), 103–​142. DOI: 10.1515/​glochi-​2018-​0006 Bottéro, F. (2017). Chinese writing. In R. Sybesma et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (Vol. 1, pp. 595–​605). Brill. Bray, M., & Koo, R. (2004). Postcolonial patterns and paradoxes: language and education in Hong Kong and Macao. Comparative Education, 40(2), 215–​239. DOI: 10.1080/​0305006042000231365 Chao, Y.R. (1961). What is correct Chinese? Journal of the American Oriental Society, 81(3), 171–​177. Chao, Y.R. (1968). A grammar of spoken Chinese. University of California Press. Chen, P. (1999). Modern Chinese: history and sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press. Chen, S. (2020). Language policy and practice in Taiwan in the early twenty-​first century. In H. Klöter & M. Söderblom Saarela (Eds.), Language diversity in the sinophone world: historical trajectories, language planning, and multilingual practices (pp. 122–​141). Routledge. Clyne, M. (Ed.). (1992). Pluricentric languages: differing norms in different nations. De Gruyter Mouton. Clyne, M. & Kipp, S. (1999). Pluricentric languages in an immigrant context: Spanish, Arabic and Chinese. De Gruyter Mouton. Coblin, W.S. (2017). Guānhuà 官話, historical development. In R. Sybesma et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (Vol. 2, pp. 327–​332). Brill. Dos Santos, R.E. (2017). Macau: language situation. In R. Sybesma et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (Vol. 2, pp. 659–​666). Brill. Galambos, I. (2006). Orthography of early Chinese writing: evidence from newly excavated manuscripts. Department of East Asian Studies, Eötvös Loránd University. Goh, Y.S. (2017). Teaching Chinese as an international language: a Singapore perspective. Cambridge University Press. Goh, Y.S., and Y.W. Fong (2020). One people, one nation, one Singapore: language policy and shifting identities among Chinese Singaporeans. In H. Klöter & M. Söderblom Saarela (Eds.), Language diversity in the sinophone world: historical trajectories, language planning, and multilingual practices (pp. 164–​181). Routledge. Harbsmeier, C. (2001). May Fourth linguistic orthodoxy and rhetoric: some informal comparative notes. In M. Lackner, I. Amelung & J. Kurtz (Eds.), New terms for new ideas: western knowledge and lexical change in Late Imperial China (pp. 373–​410). Brill. Harding, H. (1993). The concept of “Greater China”: themes, variations and reservations. The China Quarterly, 136, 660–​686. Haugen, E. (1966). Dialect, language, nation. American Anthropologist, 68(4), 922–​935. DOI: 10.1525/​ aa.1966.68.4.02a00040 Heinrich, P. (2012). The making of monolingual Japan: language ideology and Japanese modernity. Multilingual Matters. Heylen, A. (2012). Japanese models, Chinese culture and the dilemma of Taiwanese language reform. Harrassowitz. Kaltenegger, S. (2020). Modelling Chinese as a pluricentric language. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. DOI: 10.1080/​01434632.2020.1810256 Kaske, E. (2017). National Language Movement. In R. Sybesma et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (Vol. 3, pp. 139–​144). Brill. Kau, M.Y.M., & Leung, J.K. (1986). The writings of Mao Zedong (Vol. 1: September 1949–​December 1955). M. E. Sharpe. Kenley, D.L. (2003) New culture in a new world: the May Fourth Movement and the Chinese diaspora in Singapore, 1919–​1932. Routledge. Kloss, H. (1978). Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800. Schwann. Klöter, H. (2017). ‘What is correct Chinese?’ revisited. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade & C. Percy (Eds.), Prescription and tradition in language: establishing standards across time and space (pp. 57–​70). Multilingual Matters. Klöter, H. (2019). China from c. 1700. In J. Considine (Ed.), The Cambridge world history of lexicography (pp. 317–​339). Cambridge University Press. Klöter, H. (2020). One legacy, two legislations: language policies on the two sides of the Taiwan Strait. In H. Klöter & M. Söderblom Saarela (Eds.), Language diversity in the sinophone world: historical trajectories, language planning, and multilingual practices (pp. 101–​121). Routledge. Kubler, C. (1985). The development of Mandarin in Taiwan: a case study of language contact. Student Book.

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Prescriptivism in Greater China LaPolla, R.J. (2006). Chao Yuen Ren (1892–​1982). In K. Brown (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier. LRD (2019). Development of National Languages Act. https://​law.moj.gov.tw/​ENG/​LawCl​ass/​Law​All. aspx?pcode=​H0170​143 LRD (2021). Dàolù jiātōng biāozhì biāoxiàn hàozhì shèzhì guīzé [Rules for the placement of road traffic signs, signals, and markings] https://​law.moj.gov.tw/​Law/​LawS​earc​hRes​ult.aspx?ty=​ONE​BAR&kw=​ %e6%8b%bc%e9%9f%b3​ Lee, Hao-​ming (2018). 1950 niándài Táiwān de Hànzì jiǎnhuà wèntí [The simplification issue of Chinese characters in Taiwan during the 1950s], Research in Taiwan Studies, 22, 77–​108. Li, D.C.S. & Tong, C.L. (2020). A tale of two Special Administrative Regions: the state of multilingualism in Hong Kong and Macao. In H. Klöter & M. Söderblom Saarela (Eds.), Language diversity in the sinophone world: historical trajectories, language planning, and multilingual practices (pp. 142–​163). Routledge. Lù, J. (2018). Xīnjiāpō Huáyǔ yǔfǎ [A grammar of Singapore Mandarin]. The Commercial Press. Milroy, J. & Milroy L. (2012). Authority in language: investigating standard English. Routledge. Moody, A. (2019). Educational language policy in Macau: finding balance between Chinese, English and Portuguese. In A. Kirkpatrick & A. J. Liddicoat (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of language education policy in Asia (pp. 76–​96). Routledge. Nienhauser, W. H. (1986). The Indiana companion to traditional Chinese literature. Indiana University Press. Norman, J. (2017). Dialect classification. In R. Sybesma et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (Vol. 2, pp. 42–​49). Brill. Percy, C., & Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2017). Prescription and tradition: establishing standards across time and space. In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade & C. Percy (Eds.), Prescription and tradition in language: establishing standards across time and space (pp. 1–​20). Multilingual Matters. Poon, A.Y.K. (1999). Chinese medium instruction policy and its impact on English learning in post-​1997 Hong Kong. In International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 2(2), pp. 131–​146. DOI: 10.1080/​13670059908667684 Poon, A.Y.K. (2019). Language education policy in Hong Kong. In Kirkpatrick, A. & Liddicoat, A.J. (Eds.), The Routledge international handbook of language education policy in Asia (pp. 60–​75). Routledge. Ramsey, S.R. (1987). The languages of China. Princeton University Press. Rohsenow, J.S. (2004). Fifty years of script and written language reform in the P.R.C.: The genesis of the language law of 2001. In M. Zhou Ed., Language policy in the People’s Republic of China: Theory and practice since 1949 (pp. 21–43). Kluwer Academic Publishers. Seybolt, P.J. & Chiang, G.K. (1979). Language reform in China: documents and commentary. M. E. Sharpe. Shang, G. & Zhao, S. (2017). Standardising the Chinese language in Singapore: Issues of policy and practice. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 38(4), 315–​ 329. DOI: 10.1080/​ 01434632.2016.1201091 Shepherd, J. (2003). Striking a balance: the management of language in Singapore. Peter Lang. Simmons, R. (2017). Whence came Mandarin? Qīng Guānhuà, the Běijīng dialect, and the national language standard in early Republican China. Journal of the American Oriental Society, 137(1), pp. 63–​88. https://​doi.org/​10.7817/​jamero​r ies​oci.137.1.0063 Simmons, R. (2020). What was standard Chinese in the nineteenth century: divergent views in the times of transition. In H. Klöter & M. Söderblom Saarela (Eds.), Language diversity in the sinophone world: historical trajectories, language planning, and multilingual practices (pp. 13–​38). Routledge. Simpson, A. (2007). Hong Kong. In A. Simpson, A. (Ed.), Language and national identity in East Asia (pp. 168–​185). Oxford University Press. Söderblom Saarela, M. (2020). Manchu, Mandarin, and the politicization of spoken language in Qing China. In H. Klöter, H. & M. Söderblom Saarela (Eds.), Language diversity in the sinophone world: historical trajectories, language planning, and multilingual practices (pp. 39–​59). Routledge. Tang, S.W. & Cheng, S.P. (2017). Hong Kong: language situation. In R. Sybesma et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (Vol. 2, pp. 391–​394). Brill. Vedal, N. (2019). China, c. 600–​1700. In J. Considine (Ed.), The Cambridge world history of lexicography (pp. 109–​129). Cambridge University Press. Waley, A. trans. (1938). The Analects of Confucius. Allen and Unwin. Wang, H.L. (2004). National culture and its discontents: the politics of heritage and language in Taiwan, 1949–​2003. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46(4), 786–​815. DOI: https://​doi.org/​10.1017/​ S00104​1750​4000​362 Wiedenhof, J. (2015). A grammar of Mandarin. John Benjamins.

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21 PRESCRIPTIVISM AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA Lionel Wee and Nora Samosir

1. Introduction The issue of English language prescriptivism in Southeast Asia (SEA) is both a complex and an interesting one to explore, seeing that the countries in the region have had significantly different histories with the language, mainly owing to their contact with colonialism or lack thereof. For example, while Brunei, Burma, Singapore, and Malaysia were under British rule, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam were colonized by the French, Indonesia by the Dutch, and Thailand avoided colonial rule altogether. These different histories continue to influence, in various ways, both the language policies and speakers’ attitudes. Such a complex picture poses challenges for attempts at modelling the spread of English in SEA and carries concomitant difficulties to our understanding of the dynamics of English language prescriptivism in the region. Our contribution examines prescriptivism in SEA through the lens of the three most influential approaches to the study of World Englishes: Kachru’s Three Circles Model (Kachru 1985, 1997), Schneider’s (2007) Dynamic Model, and the English as a Lingua Franca project (Seidlhofer, 2004). Considering that the entire linguistic landscape of SEA is beyond the scope of this chapter, we provide examples from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand in arguing that these approaches are not entirely compatible with describing various prescriptive practices. We conclude by suggesting that it may be useful to treat prescriptivism as a form of language management (Spolsky, 2009). We also argue that the study of prescriptivism is inherently methodologically eclectic considering the range of situations in which prescriptive practices may arise.

2.  Prescriptivism and approaches to world Englishes 2.1.  The Three Circles Model Constructing a model of world Englishes that would account for similarities and differences across different speech communities has proven to be challenging. Arguably, the best known of these attempts is Kachru’s Three Circles Model (TCM), which distinguishes between the Inner, Outer, and Expanding Circles (Kachru, 1985, 1997).1 In Inner Circle countries (e.g. the DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-24

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UK, the US), English is supposedly the native language for most. Outer Circle countries (e.g. Malaysia, Singapore) are where English was implanted because of colonization and is arguably the second language. Expanding Circle countries (e.g. Indonesia, Thailand) are places where English is a foreign language. The model’s implications for prescriptivism are fairly clear. Kachru (1992) suggests that Inner Circle countries are “norm-​providing”, the Outer Circle ‘norm-​developing’, and the Expanding Circle “norm-​dependent”. In other words, there is a tendency to look to Inner Circle countries for guidance as to what constitutes “good/​proper/​standard” English, which is more equivocal, however, in the Outer Circle than in the Expanding Circle. The Outer Circle countries are “norm-​developing” and are more ambivalent than the Expanding Circle countries about adopting Inner Circle standards because they struggle to legitimize their own nativized varieties of English. This struggle is supposedly absent in the “norm-​dependent” Expanding Circle countries, where speakers are willing to embrace the Inner Circle varieties as models of correct usage (Kachru, 1992).

2.2.  The Dynamic Model The Three Circles Model has been criticized, however, for, among other things, overlooking the significant differences that exist between the Outer Circle countries. The social, historical, and cultural circumstances of individual countries cannot be ignored because they have different linguistic consequences for community identity and language attitudes. This is the starting point for Schneider’s (2003, 2007) Dynamic Model (DM), which aims to provide an account of the development of postcolonial Englishes (PCEs). The DM focuses on the changing relationships between the colonial settlers and the indigenous communities. It posits five phases to the development of English in postcolonial contexts, thus connecting the developments of PCEs to their colonial histories as well as to their later socio-​political conditions: (i) Foundation: “English begins to be used on a regular basis in a country that was not English-​speaking before, because a significant group of English speakers settles in a new country for an extended period.” (2003, p. 244). (ii) Exonormative stabilization: The settlers stabilize their presence so that “English is now regularly spoken in a new environment” (2003, p. 245). (iii) Nativization: For both the settler and the indigenous communities, “traditional realities, identities, and socio-​political alignments are discerned as no longer conforming to a changed reality” and this has “linguistic consequences, for the drastically increased ranges of communication between the parties involved now makes language use a major practical issue and an expression of new identity” (2003, p. 247). (iv) Endonormative stabilization: This involves the “gradual adoption and acceptance of an indigenous linguistic norm” although “some insecurity remains (residually fostered by conservative members of a society who still long for old times and old norms)” (2003, pp. 249–​250). (v) Differentiation: “Politically and culturally, and hence also linguistically, a new nation has achieved not only independence … but even self-​dependence … As a reflection of this new identity, a new language variety has emerged” (2003, p. 253). Placing countries into different phases allows for a more nuanced account of (post-​)colonial sociolinguistic dynamics. For example, while both Malaysia and Singapore are postcolonial countries, English has had a much more contentious status in the former, to this day, competing with Malay for prestige (Pennycook, 1994). In contrast, English in Singapore enjoys a more “neutral” status. While it is pragmatically recognized as an official language of economic value, it is neither an official “mother tongue” (that is, a language officially assigned to an ethnic community, such as Mandarin to the Chinese community, Malay to the Malay community, or 356

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Tamil to the Indian community) nor does it enjoy the status of a national language as Malay, for instance, does. A testament to the relevance attributed to English is the following statement taken from the English language syllabus in the Ministry of Education’s 2001 English Language syllabus, which asserts that English “has become the medium by which most Singaporeans gain access to information and knowledge from around the world” (Ministry of Education, 2001). The less contentious status of English in Singapore compared to that in Malaysia means that there has been greater social space for the emergence and use of a nativized variety, which is why Schneider (2007, p. 153) describes Singapore as having the potential “to go all the way along the cycle” but places Malaysia firmly in phase (iv). The DM does not focus on English in non-​postcolonial contexts, or what Kachru calls the Expanding Circle, but the English as a Lingua Franca model does.

2.3.  English as a Lingua Franca According to the English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) model, English is increasingly being used in situations where none of the interlocutors are speakers of English as a first language. Consequently, it makes is no sense to look to Inner Circle countries as models of proper English usage. Rather, because interlocutors from Expanding Circle countries form the majority –​even outnumbering speakers from Outer Circle countries –​it is they who should set the norms regarding what counts as proper or acceptable English internationally (Jenkins, 1998). The ELF model emphasizes intelligibility. So long as the interlocutors can understand one another, “correctness” should not be of primary concern (Seidlhofer, 2004, p. 220). The model then attempts to identify linguistic features (phonological, morphosyntactic, pragmatic) that characterize this international use of English. But to arrive at such features, the ELF model limits itself to describing situations and speakers deemed relevant for the model by restricting the kinds of situations and speakers that are considered irrelevant. Thus, Kirkpatrick suggests that “descriptions and analysis of varieties of English and lingua franca be based on the language of expert users” (2007, p. 177). The term “expert users” reveals inherent normativity within the model, which sits oddly with the attempt to downplay correctness. This normativity arises because the ELF model also has a pedagogical mission. “Lingua franca English” (Kirkpatrick, 2007, p. 177) is pitched as something that should be taught to learners of English. This is presumably why situations are highlighted within the model where the “expert users” are all educated professionals such as UN peacekeepers, politicians, and academics (Park & Wee, 2012). Cases where the interlocutors are from lower socio-​economic backgrounds (e.g. a Bangladeshi construction worker interacting with a street vendor in Myanmar using English) seem to be excluded. There is no good reason why such cases should not count as involving “expert users”. But their inclusion would likely work against the project’s pedagogical goal of establishing “lingua franca English” as worthy of inclusion in the English language curriculum.

3.  Prescriptivism in Southeast Asia: case studies Considering that prescriptivism is a common phenomenon, the examples discussed in what follows are not intended to be representative, much less comprehensive. They rather point to the heterogeneity and complexity of English language prescriptivism in SEA, which requires further consideration. Prescriptivism can be broadly defined as any attempt at providing advice on matters pertaining to language (Mooney & Evans, 2018; Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2019). The advice itself can range in its strength of illocutionary force from friendly suggestions and 357

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mild guidance to unforgiving strictures. A few examples of the contexts in which prescriptivism has been explored in the past include prescriptive practices related to heritage or identity (Blackledge & Creese, 2008), and educational purposes (Milroy & Milroy, 1999). In one example of a workplace setting, employees in call centres are expected to follow institutionally devised phrases and interactional routines (Cameron, 2000). This range of different practices, we will see, poses a problem for the three models discussed in the preceding section. This is not intended as a criticism because these models were developed with different goals in mind than the study of language prescriptivism.

3.1. Thailand2 Thailand illustrates what is perhaps the most typical case of prescriptivism. Thailand is officially monolingual, with English as a foreign language albeit one that the government considers important for economic development (Baker & Jarunthawatchai, 2017). There can be very strong reactions if the quality of English language teaching is found to be suspect. Consider the following incident, which took place in May 2020. A primary school teacher was giving an English language lesson to sixth graders online, and the session was recorded and publicized.3 Many Thais negatively commented on her language use, which they found inadequate. In particular, her use of the non-​standard phrase “Have you breakfast?” to greet the students came in for severe criticism. This is because “Have you breakfast?” is not standard English even though exactly what counts as “standard English” is itself a matter of controversy. The viral video was retweeted more than 8500 times, and the teacher depicted in it came in for considerable criticism, with one user tweeting the following: Welcome to the real world, Khru Wang [Palace Teacher]4. Your bad English must be punished. Reflect upon yourself and improve. Your teaching is not for only the 10 students in the class to see. It is distributed to over 100,000 students all over the country. Incorrect knowledge is not acceptable. Do not make any excuse. Tweets comprising the hashtag #savekruwang, on the other hand, expressed support for the teacher and criticized what they saw as an example of cyber bulling. A widespread public discussion followed. Some netizens criticized the Ministry of Education for providing students with poor English language instruction. University lecturers also joined the debate with Thammasat University’s Faculty of Liberal Arts even organizing an online seminar to discuss the issue in the following week. Dr Anuchit Toomaneejinda, a lecturer of World Englishes, said he saw no problem with “Have you breakfast?”, or even just “Breakfast?”, claiming that, “The sentence is perfect in terms of intelligibility.” According to Toomaneejinda, the problem was that Khru Wang was a teacher and she was making the “problematic” utterance in the context of the classroom. Assistant Professor Phrae Chittiphalangsri of the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, similarly argued that the incident demonstrated a number of English language teaching problems in Thailand such as lack of updated curricula, inequality between schools in metropolitan and remote areas and abuse of English language competence to display social status and superiority. During this time, Khru Wang posted an apology on her Facebook page for her mistakes and vowed to try to improve herself. At least three observations are worth making about this example. The first concerns the virulence of some of the criticism. Speakers, regardless of their levels of proficiency in a language, make performance errors. But the reaction is intolerant of errors, especially when students 358

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exposed to the error are not limited to those in the classroom but are distributed “all over the country”. Underlying this criticism, then, is a concern about the scope of “contamination”. Learners are not supposed to be exposed to “problematic” English, especially from someone who is supposed to exemplify “proper” English. And this is compounded if the “problematic” English is given mass exposure. The second concerns the “intelligibility” defence offered by Dr Anuchit Toomaneejinda, the World Englishes lecturer. According to this view, grammaticality is not important as long as there is intelligibility. However, this position was itself undercut by the expectation that in the classroom context, the English language teacher is expected to be more than just intelligible. This of course brings us back to the first point and it also presents a problem for the ELF’s main argument, namely, that intelligibility can trump correctness. The third is a broader indictment of the quality of English language education in Thailand, evidenced by the unequal resources available to metropolitan schools and their rural counterparts. The inequity in educational resources is linked to linguistic elitism, where competence is an index of social status and a sense of superiority. This latter point, in particular, is reminiscent of Cameron’s (1995) discussion of verbal hygiene, where she notes that language prescriptivism is seldom about language per se, but is usually a proxy for other issues such as maintaining class differences or lamenting a lack of societal discipline.

3.2. Indonesia The concern with the quality of English language education is also notable in Indonesia. Like in Thailand, English in Indonesia is considered an important foreign language (Lauder, 2008, pp. 11, 13) that provides its speakers with access to scientific and technological expertise as well as better employment prospects. However, the role of English in identity construction and cultural expression is downplayed because the language is seen as a potential threat to local culture and values (Lauder, 2008, p. 13). While British and American English are the model varieties for speakers of English in Indonesia, other varieties have been gaining prominence. According to Lauder “the middle class are beginning to find that sending their children to Australia, Singapore, or Malaysia for their education becomes an option, they are asking experts if the English their children would pick up there represents a desirable norm, or at least a tolerable one.” (2008, p. 15). As with Thailand, this outward orientation is exacerbated by problems concerning the domestic English language education: The first and I believe most important is that Indonesian teachers are not sufficiently trained to teach in English only schools. Their teacher training is carried out in their own language not in English and many feel that their level of English is very often not up to the standard. Likewise, teachers are expected to teach imported curricula again without sufficient training. This is causing a lot of problems amongst teachers who feel inadequate and suffer from a lack of confidence in their abilities, which in turn is causing stress and low motivation. … With teachers struggling to teach in a language they are not good at and with students trying to learn in a language which they often do not hear or have exposure to at home, it is difficult for teachers to insist on an English only policy at school, or to create an English only environment. Ubaidillah, 2018 359

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And the issue of teacher morale is compounded by a preference for “native speakers of English”: Often, schools hire native speakers of English to teach in classes without even checking their education background, qualifications and experience. Often native teachers are employed by schools simply because they are native to an English-​speaking country. Sometimes they are not teachers at all and do not even hold any teacher qualifications. This leads to great resentment among native Indonesian teachers who have had to undergo a period of teacher training and who are expected to produce good results in spite of their shortcomings in English. Ubaidillah, 2018 Such examples reflect what Holliday (2006) calls “the native-​speakerist element” in TESOL and TEFL which assumes that the native speaker automatically possesses superior linguistic and pedagogical knowledge for teaching English simply by dint of being a native speaker (see also the discussion of ELF above). As Holliday points out, “Native-​speakerism is a pervasive ideology within ELT, characterized by the belief that ‘native-​speaker’ teachers represent a ‘Western culture’ from which spring the ideals both of the English language and of English language teaching methodology” (2006, p. 385). Local English varieties in Singapore and Malaysia, which are widely spoken in the two countries, may potentially replace British and American English models, a postcolonial consequence. When a language is widely used in a speech community, in this case, a country, it is sociolinguistically unsurprising that local lexical, grammatical, and pragmatic conventions are developed to reflect that community’s communicative and communal needs (Widdowson, 1994). In the case of Singapore and Malaysia, this means that in addition to the standard variety taught in schools, there will also be a nativized variety whose existence has been the bane of more linguistically conservative segments of the population.

3.3.  Singapore and Malaysia A much discussed situation in Singapore concerns arguments over the legitimacy of the nativized variety known as Singlish (Rubdy, 2001; Wee, 2018). The Singapore government has long expressed concerns over the popularity of Singlish, which makes the learning of “good/​ proper/​standard” English difficult, if not impossible (Wee, 2018). The government has pointed to the sitcom Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd as largely responsible for the popularity of Singlish. As Rubdy points out: The show centres on a crude and uneducated but endearing Singlish-​speaking contractor named Phua Chu Kang, played by the popular comic Gurmit Singh, who is set against his better-​educated brother and his snobbish wife. Phua and his catchphrase, “Don’t pray, pray” (a mispronunciation of “Don’t play, play”, which translates as “don’t play around or tease me”), which has since been excised, were blamed for the less than perfect English of young Singaporeans. Rubdy, 2001, p. 346 In his 1999 National Day Rally Speech, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong remarked, “In trying to imitate life, Phua Chu Kang has made the teaching of proper English more difficult … We cannot be a first world economy and go global with Singlish.” Despite its attempts to eradicate Singlish as part of its Speak Good English Movement (see details below), the government has 360

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eventually adopted a stance of resigned tolerance. The continuing use of Singlish amongst the populace has made any attempt at eliminating the language nearly impossible. One example of such power dynamics is the Speak Good Singlish Movement (SGSM) (Wee, 2014), launched by some private citizens in direct response to the Speak Good English Movement. The following extract uses Singlish to explain the rationale behind the Speak Good Singlish Movement: We not against Speak Good English Movement in Singapore hor. But we feel people should get it right with speaking Singlish and not just English. We are damn tired of people confusing Singlish with broken English. We are damn tired of people kay-​kay speak Singlish but really speak bad English. We are damn tired of people picturing Singlish speakers as obiang chow Ah Bengs and Ah Lians. You dun wanna learn the subtle rules of this natural evolving language, then dun anyhow say it is simple, shallow, and useless please! Singlish is full of culture, of nuances and wordplay. It pulls together the swee-​ness in the grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of so many languages. Best OK! Facebook5 The SGSM argues that, contrary to the government’s reservations about Singlish, the variety is not to be equated with “broken” or “bad” English; it has “subtle rules” that combine the beauty (swee in Hokkien means “beautiful”) of the “grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of so many languages.” The government’s anti-​Singlish stance was further challenged when Singlish words were added to the Oxford English Dictionary. As Lee observes: OED’s maiden online version, which was launched in March 2000, contained the Singlish words “lah” and “sinseh”. Ironically, this inclusion was announced just a month before then-​Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong launched the Speak Good English Movement, aimed at stamping out Singlish. … Former Straits Times journalist Janadas Devan also noted in a 2007 interview that the Internet has played a large role in legitimising some words approved by the OED. Lee (2015) And in a later article: In its March quarterly update, the hallowed Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has added 19 new “Singapore English” items in its lexicon. There are new senses of common English words, loanwords from Chinese and Malay, and formations in English that are only used in Singapore, OED said on its website … The examples it cited: “blur”, meaning slow in understanding, “ang moh” (a light-​ skinned person, esp. of Western origin or descent; a Caucasian), “shiok” (cool, great; delicious, superb), “sabo” (to harm, inconvenience, or make trouble for; to trick, play a prank on) and “HDB” (a public housing estate). Lee, 2016 The debates on Singlish demonstrate conflicting views about the legitimacy of the nativized variety in Singapore. Though Singlish had its supporters even prior to the OED’s 361

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intervention, the dictionary editors’ decision to include Singlish items is seen as an additional endorsement of the variety’s legitimacy, thus creating a prescriptivism conundrum for naysayers of Singlish. But the OED’s endorsement is not simply a matter for Singaporeans. It has also created some consternation in Malaysia. Indeed, one interesting cross-​border issue that arose is Malaysian6 outrage following the description of the particle ‘lah’ as native to Singapore. The Straits Times (‘Whose word is it anyway, lah?’ 7 April 2000, page 37, no byline) reported that: Malaysians are up in arms over an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary which attributes the much-​loved ‘lah’ to Singapore rather than Malaysia … Malaysians should feel pleased the word has now been recognized by the OED. But the definition is galling: ‘In Singaporean English, a particle used with various kinds of pitch to convey the mood and attitude of the speaker’ … Ask any Malaysian and the response is shock … [The OED’s principal philologist Edmund Weiner] said there was nothing sinister in not attributing ‘lah’ to Malaysia. “It is simply that we have not collected examples of it being used there.” The third edition of the OED has since been amended to describe lah as a particle found in Malaysian, Singaporean, and Bruneian English. This shows that the recognition of the OED seems to grant both the particle and the variety that it indexes (‘Singlish’ in Singapore and ‘Manglish’ in Malaysia) a degree of prestige. This is made clear in the title of Tam’s (2016) newspaper article “Manglish is ‘atas’ now, says Oxford English Dictionary.” Atas, as Tam (2016) goes on to explain, indicates ‘high social status’: The Oxford English Dictionary has included Malay-​Manglish words such as rendang and mamak among more than 1,000 revisions and updates to its latest edition. Other Malaysian words in the September list of new terms include atas (high social status), bodoh (stupid), aiyah, char kuey teow, kopitiam (coffeeshop), ang pow and pancit (colloquially used to mean “worn out and tired”). Tam, 2016 The OED example is reminiscent of an often-​neglected dimension of prescriptivism. Most discussions, unsurprisingly, focus on prescriptivism as a form of correction: a linguistic feature that is considered to be incorrect or inappropriate is contrasted with its correct or appropriate counterpart. This example, however, shows that prescriptivism can be present even when the issue of correctness or appropriateness is absent. In this case, even though the OED overtly takes a descriptive approach to language, and as such is not envisaged as a prescriptive authority, it has the effect of bestowing institutionalized authorization upon that which hitherto lacked such authorization. What is more, such cases are not uncommon. As a simple illustration, consider how words with multiple spelling variants might ultimately become standardized. In Singlish, for example, the Hokkien word for takeaway (as in “to have food packed to go rather than consumed onsite”) has been variously spelt tarpau, tapow, and tapao. Whereas some speakers may have personal preferences, many spelling variants coexist in Singapore. Should there, however, be a serious attempt to codify a word, by including it in the OED, for example, the chosen variant might then enjoy a veneer of legitimacy that would be denied to the other variants.

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4.  Native-​speakerism The foregoing examples illustrate some of the key issues that any attempt to engage with English language prescriptivism in SEA needs to consider. Perhaps the least surprising issue is the continuing influence of the native speaker, particularly in the domain of language education. And, as is made clear from the Thailand example, local teachers can be judged very harshly. Unlike in Singapore and Malaysia, there is no local variety of English in Thailand or Indonesia that could challenge the ascendancy of the native speaker. Seeing that native-​speakerism clearly remains an important issue, we need to ask, how if at all it could be dismantled. A provisional answer is provided by Holliday, who suggests that “[t]‌he undoing of native-​speakerism requires a type of thinking that promotes new relationships … native-​speakerism needs to be addressed at the level of the prejudices embedded in everyday practice” (Holliday, 2006, p. 386). In this regard, the developments in Singapore and Malaysia are potentially encouraging signs towards the development of local norms, in part because of the enthusiasm and pride that locals take in Singlish and Manglish, respectively. As illustrated by the role that the comedic character Phua Chu Kang played in popularizing Singlish, an otherwise stigmatized variety acquires legitimacy when its users appear in the media and attain celebrity status. In the case of Phua Chua Pte Ltd, this is no doubt aided by the sitcom’s positioning of the Singlish-​speaking character as a down-​to-​earth protagonist who is pitted against his Standard English-​speaking (and hence, snobbish) sister-​in-​law. Media and celebrity are important issues to consider in language prescriptivism. Local celebrities and their ways of speaking provide alternative linguistic role models to that of the native speaker, especially when the ways of speaking are indexed to stereotyped personas such as the “Humble and Authentic Local” contrasted against the “Uppity Native Speaker Wannabe”. However, a note of caution is required here. Even supporters of Singlish and Manglish tend to accept a form of diglossia when discussing the legitimacy of these varieties (Wee, 2018, p. 26). That is, as colloquial varieties, they are to be used for Low situations (e.g. when communicating informally with family and friends). In situations where the High variety is preferred (e.g. important occasions such as public speeches or official meetings), Standard English is seen as the appropriate choice. What this suggests is that when issues of language prescriptivism arise, even with regard to the local varieties found in Singapore and Malaysia, the influence of native-​ speakerism remains: local varieties must be kept in their place. This is why the OED’s decision to include Singapore and Malaysian English words has evoked such strong reactions in the two countries since it appears to confer undue prestige onto these varieties.

5.  Political Correctness Another important aspect of language prescriptivism that requires attention is the impact of political correctness (Cameron, 1995; Curzan, 2014). For example, considering the changing perception of gendered identities has led not only to the use of gender-​neutral terms such as chairperson (as opposed to chairman), but also more recently to a widespread usage of singular they to address nonbinary individuals, that is, individuals who do not identify themselves according to the traditional gender dichotomy (e.g. “Jess is a great painter. They have an exhibition coming up.”). This usage of they has become institutionalized and introducing one’s preferred pronouns has become in many cases part of individuals’ official signatures. Political correctness has led to the prohibition of the use of specific lexical items, the most well-​known being the “N-​word” as the euphemism for the racially charged term that it replaces. Another example

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would be the R-​word movement (Wee, 2015), a campaign that has called for the eradication of the term “retarded” (and its morphological variants), on the grounds that the term is deeply offensive to those who are intellectually disabled. The impact of political correctness presents an interesting turn because it is motivated by impetuses that mainly originate from outside Southeast Asia where concerns about gender equality, racial discrimination, and social injustice, mainly emanating from Western societies, have led to specific kinds of linguistic remedies. Unlike native-​speakerism, the reasons behind political correctness are evolving as communities outside the region become concerned with new values and with finding new linguistic responses to navigate and reflect these values. Users of English in Southeast Asia certainly need to be aware of these kinds of prescriptivism. Any form of English language teaching that seeks to highlight them, however, cannot rely on the narrow bases of prescriptivism (e.g. “this is what the grammar books say” or “this is how the native speaker would say it”) because many of these politically correct prescriptions are at odds with traditional grammar and even established usage. Indeed, the point of politically correct proposals is to replace established and offensive usage. Political correctness not only raises conceptual issues about the scope and nature of prescriptivism; it also brings up challenges for English language pedagogy because it problematizes the relationship between language and culture-​related teaching, raising the question of whether it is possible to separate the two and, if not, then whose culture is being taught.

6.  Language prescriptivism as language management Given that prescriptive practices occur in many different domains of social life and touch on a wide range of language matters, it is useful to relate them to language policy and management (LPM) (Spolsky, 2009). Spolsky (2004) suggests that language policy consists of three interrelated components: (i) the language practices that speakers actually engage in; (ii) the language ideologies that guide the evaluation of the practices as desirable, proper, standard, etc.; and (iii) the language management efforts of individuals or groups to modify the practices of targeted speakers. The first two components are necessarily present since the linguistic behaviours of speakers constitute their practices and all speakers, whether they are consciously aware or not, hold some beliefs or ideologies about their language practices as well as those of others. The third component is optional, since there may not be any actual efforts made to manage language practices. Where no management attempts are made, “ideology operates as ‘default’ policy” (Lo Bianco, 2004, p. 750). Because language policy is always present, even when no official policy exists, there is a need to go beyond a focus on the official declarations of nation-​ states. As a result, scholarly concerns have started to widen to include a number of domains other than the nation-​state, such as the family, religion, the workplace, the military, the media, schools, and various international organizations, including NGOs (Spolsky, 2009). Since prescriptivism involves deliberate and conscious intervention in language matters, it constitutes a form of language management. What this means, then, is that an analysis of prescriptivism should be cognizant of how language practices, language ideologies and management efforts may be combined –​in ways that may at times be coherent and at others contradictory –​in order to try to effect change or to maintain the status quo, as the case may be. For example, researchers could study the attempts to eradicate the use of the word retarded, which started in 2004 in the domain of sports when the Special Olympics’ proposed to replace mental retardation with intellectual disabilities (Wee, 2015). The R-​word campaign has since expanded its scope to include public discourse, political documents, and celebrity chat shows. 364

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In so doing, the initiators of the campaign shared stories of individuals affected by the pervasive use of the word on social media. The movement directed attention toward the US federal bill, Rosa’s Law (Public Law 111-​256, 111th Congress) on October 5, 2010,7 that calls for the removal of the term retarded from health, education, and labour policy. The document, however, has also faced resistance from individuals who worry that the campaign disregards context and has a dampening effect on the ability to discuss social discrimination publicly. While there is no overt sign that the R-​word campaign has been gaining traction in SEA, as a global organization, the Special Olympics is represented in Asia, including Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Moreover, the websites of the Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia bodies all state that “Special Olympics is a global organization that serves athletes with intellectual disabilities”.8 Their choice of wording suggests that the SEA bodies of the Special Olympics are actively avoiding the use of the word retarded. Understanding any growing momentum in campaigns to replace offensive terminology and its relevance to the SEA context involves unpacking the ideological debates about personhood and what it means to cause offense, the deployment of media coverage by the campaign’s supporters as well as its opponents, and the specific linguistic remedies in SEA in place of retarded. The exploration of the listed phenomena would benefit from employing a language management approach.

7.  Methodological implications There is no single method that would be suitable for studying all forms of prescriptivism. In some domains, such as the family, where parents correct their children’s English or chide them for using vulgar terms, prescriptions are informal. In other domains, such as the media or the workplace, there may be formalized guidelines or training manuals that prescribe ways of speaking, or, at the very least, appropriate communication. Moreover, members of the public often use newspaper and online forums as platforms for airing grievances about the perceived abuse of language. Thus, the degree to which prescriptivism may be formalized in policy documents varies considerably, and this means that getting access to the data may require not just getting hold of documents, but permission to record informal discussions. Another important line of inquiry concerns not the specific prescriptions per se, but also the processes leading to their adoption. Situations such as meetings between committee members and discussions between parents about how to advise their children on language matters necessitate different approaches to data collection. Finally, questions remain as to how the targets of prescriptivism respond or negotiate the prescriptions. Alongside any enthusiastic embrace of the prescriptions could be more covert attempts at resistance. Surveys are useful if the target happens to be a large group and if it is kept in mind that survey participants tend to answer questions with a high degree of self-​consciousness. Ethnographically informed approaches may be more apt if researchers are interested in how actual language practices may diverge from what is being proclaimed by respondents. Methodological eclecticism thus seems to be most appropriate, given not just the range of questions but also the wide variety of situations in which prescriptive practices can occur.

8. Conclusion Prescriptivism is a matter of interest because, as Cameron (1995) points out, most people are in fact interested in language from an evaluative perspective; they are concerned with what is linguistically correct or appropriate. English language prescriptivism in SEA is particularly interesting given the global status of the language and the region’s different histories and 365

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attitudes. The Three Circles Model treats prescriptivism at the level of national varieties of English, describing how countries in different Circles are positioned relative to the normative conventions concerning what might count as “good/​proper/​standard” English. The Dynamic Model focuses on the evolution of English in countries with a history of colonial rule, and the changing status of English in the postcolonial era. It leaves out of consideration the development of English in non-​postcolonial contexts. Finally, the English as a Lingua Franca Model emphasizes intelligibility in the international arena, making the argument that since non-​native speakers of English outnumber native speakers, they should be treated as “expert users”. None of these models gives attention to the role that the media play in entrenching or critiquing native-​speakerism, nor do any of these models pay sufficient attention to political correctness. It may, therefore, be more useful to study prescriptivism from a language management perspective in contexts discussed here.

Notes 1 For a critical discussion of the model, see Bruthiaux, 2003. 2 We thank Orawan Yafa (personal communication) for this example. 3 https://​twit​ter.com/​r rb​angk​airo​tee/​sta​tus/​1262​6391​1841​8210​817; accessed 15 August 2020. 4 The teacher was referred to as “Khru Wang” (Palace teacher; Khru =​teacher, Wang =​palace) because she was from the Wang Klai Kangwon Palace school of Hua Hin. The school was established by King Rama IX in 1938 to provide educational opportunities to underprivileged pupils www.kkws.ac.th/​data​ show​_​202​067 5 www.faceb​ook.com/​MyS​GSM/​info; accessed 27 February 2013 6 Thanks to Peter Tan for help with the references on the dispute over ‘lah’. 7 www.govi​nfo.gov/​cont​ent/​pkg/​STAT​UTE-​124/​pdf/​STAT​UTE-​124-​Pg2​643.pdf; accessed 12 August 2022. 8 www.spec​ialo​lymp​ics.org/​progr​ams/​asia-​paci​fic/​malay​sia; accessed 3 November 2021; and www.spec​ ialo​lymp​ics.org/​progr​ams/​asia-​paci​fic/​indone​sia; accessed 4 November 2021

References Baker, W., & Jarunthawatchai, W. (2017). English language policy in Thailand. European Journal of Language Policy, 9(1), 37–​44. Bex, T., & Watts, R. J. (1999). Introduction. In T. Bex & R. J. Watts (Eds.), Standard English: the widening debate (pp. 1–​12). Routledge. Blackledge, A., & Creese, A. (2008). Contesting “language” as “heritage”: negotiation of identities in late modernity. Applied Linguistics, 29(4), 533–​554. Bruthiaux, P. (2003). Squaring the circles: issues in modelling English worldwide. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 13(2), 159–​178. Cameron, D. (1995). Verbal hygiene. Routledge. Cameron, D. (2000). Styling the worker: gender and the commodification of language in the globalized service economy. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 4(3), 323–​347. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English. Cambridge University Press. Fairbrother, L., & Kimura, G.C. (2020). Introduction. In G.C. Kimura & L. Fairbrother (Eds.), A language management approach to language problems (pp. 1–​28). John Benjamins. Holliday, A. (2006). Native-​speakerism. ELT Journal, 60(4), 385–​387. Jenkins, J. (1998). Which pronunciation norms and models for English as an International Language? ELT Journal, 52, 119–​126. Jernudd, B., & Neustupny, J. (1987). Language planning: for whom? In I. Laforge (Ed.), Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Language Planning (pp. 69–​84). Less Presses de L’Universite Laval. Kachru, B.B. (1985). Standards, codification and sociolinguistic realism: the English language in the outer circle. In R. Quirk & H. Widdowson (Eds.), English in the world: teaching and learning the language and literatures (pp. 11–​30). Cambridge University Press. Kachru, B.B. (1992). World Englishes: approaches, issues and resources. Language Teaching, 25, 1–​14.

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Prescriptivism and the English language in Southeast Asia Kachru, B.B. (1997). World Englishes and English-​using communities. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 17, 66–​87. Kirkpatrick, A. (2007). World Englishes: implications for international communication and English language teaching. Cambridge University Press. Lauder, A. (2008). The status and function of English in Indonesia. Makara, Sosial Humaniora, 12(1), 9–​20. Lee, M.K. (2015, February 11). Kiasu is Oxford English Dictionary’s Word of the Day: other Singlish words in the OED. The Straits Times. www.strai​tsti​mes.com/​singap​ore/​kiasu-​is-​oxf​ord-​engl​ish-​dict​ iona​r ys-​word-​of-​the-​day-​other-​singl​ish-​words-​in-​the-​oed Lee, M.K. (2016, May 12). Shiok! 19 Singlish items added to the Oxford English Dictionary. The Straits Times. www.strai​tsti​mes.com/​singap​ore/​shiok-​19-​singl​ish-​items-​added-​to-​the-​oxf​ord-​engl​ish-​dic​ tion​ary Lo Bianco, J. (2004). Language planning as applied linguistics. In A. Davies & C. Elder (Eds.), Handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 738–​762). Blackwell. Marcellino, M. (2008). English language teaching in Indonesia. TEFLIN Journal, 19(1), 57–​69. Milroy, J., & Milroy, L. 1999. Authority in language (3rd ed.). Routledge. Ministry of Education (2001). English language syllabus primary https://​web.arch​ive.org/​web/​201​2051​7094​ 409/​http://​moe.gov.sg/​educat​ion/​syl​labu​ses/​engl​ish-​langu​age-​and-​lit​erat​ure/​files/​engl​ish-​prim​ary- ​ second​ary.pdf Mooney, A., & Evans, B. (2018). Language, society and power: an introduction. Routledge. Park, J., & Wee, L. (2012). Markets of English. Routledge. Pennycook, A. (1994). The cultural politics of English as an international language. Longman. Prodromou, L. (2008). English as a lingua franca. Continuum. Rubdy, R. (2001). Creative destruction: Singapore’s speak good English movement. World Englishes, 20(3), 341–​355. Schneider, E. (2003). The dynamics of new Englishes. Language, 79(2), 233–​281. Schneider, E. (2007). Postcolonial English. Cambridge University Press. Seidlhofer, B. (2004). Research perspectives on teaching English as a lingua franca. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, 24, 209–​239. Spolsky, B. (2004). Language policy. Cambridge University Press. Spolsky, B. (2009). Language management. Cambridge University Press. Tam, M. (2016, September 13). Manglish is ‘atas’ now, says Oxford English Dictionary. The Star. www. thes​tar.com.my/​news/​nat​ion/​2016/​09/​13/​mangl​ish-​atas-​oxf​ord/​ Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2019). Describing prescriptivism: guides and usage problems in British and American English. Routledge. Ubaidillah, M. F. (2018, August 13). Some thoughts on English language teaching in Indonesia. EFL Magazine www.eflm​agaz​ine.com/​engl​ish-​teach​ing-​indone​sia/​ Wee, L. (2003). Linguistic instrumentalism in Singapore. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 24(3), 211–​224. Wee, L. (2014). Linguistic chutzpah and the Speak Good Singlish Movement. World Englishes, 33(1), 85–​99. Wee, L. (2015). Mobilizing affect in the linguistic cyberlandscape: the R-​word campaign. In R. Rubdy & S. ben Said (Eds.), Conflict, exclusion and dissent in the linguistic landscape (pp. 185–​206). Palgrave. Wee, L. (2018). The Singlish controversy. Cambridge University Press. Widdowson, H.G. (1994). The ownership of English. TESOL Quarterly, 28(2), 377–​389.

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22 LITERARY NORMS IN RUSSIA Past and present Arto Mustajoki

1. Introduction The number of speakers and the distribution of a language influence its standardization. Most spoken languages can be divided into two groups as to their geographic spread as a mother tongue. English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic are pluricentric, having more than one homeland, while Mandarin Chinese, Hindi, Bengali, and Russian are more or less monocentric, though each of them in its own way. This fact has an effect on the “ownership” of a language, in other words on who (which country) has the right to set the norm. When we live and work within one nation, the ownership question is not important, but, in international settings, this issue may cause disputes about the correct norm. Russian, being an official language of many international organizations, does not share this problem with English whose speakers habitually discuss norms. The term “literary norm” is closely connected with the Russian concept of literaturnyj jazyk (lit. literature language).1 Both terms have three different meanings: 1) the language and norm of written texts; 2) codified language, based on the official norm variety of a language; and 3) the language of literature (fiction) (cf. Lunde, 2018). These intertwined interpretations are in use when we consider the history of the Russian (literary) language. The meaning “language of written texts” is usually first applied to the written documents of a language. Writing texts is only possible if certain principles of writing exist and there is a suitable surface for it (e.g. stone, papyrus, birch bark, or paper). As argued in what follows, literatyrnyj jazyk emerged in the eleventh century. The second meaning of the term literatyrnyj jazyk is the one used since the eighteenth century onwards, meaning “standard” or “official” language, both of which most commonly have the same referent. We have spoken of Russian liteturnyj jazyk in this sense since the eighteenth century. Third, the expression is applied, for example, in Ingunn Lunde’s recent book Language on Display: Writers, Fiction and Linguistic Culture in Post-​Soviet Russia (2018).2 In the Russian context, the term jazyk hudozhestvennoj literatury (language of fiction) is more common. Fiction makes the link between the different meanings of “literatyrnyj jazyk” and “literary norm”. Early texts written in a language are often fictional and, in the Russian tradition, texts of renowned writers are regarded as a manifestation and model for “literary language”.

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2.  The relationship between the official norm and various collective norms3 2.1.  Definitions and characteristics ‘Literatyrnyj jazyk” (or standard language) is based on a literary (or official) norm. The implementation of the official norm functions “top-​down” and is promoted by authorities or other established bodies or individuals.4 The official norm is closely connected to the notions of “standard language”, “literary language”, “codification or normalization of a language”, and “prescriptivism”. The need for codification of languages derives from the idea of a nation state. The official norm gives rules for writing texts outside people’s personal lives. An important manifestation of a standard language is school grammar. Its intensive learning for several years resembles the learning of a foreign language (cf. Zemskaja, 1987, p. 4; Mustajoki 2017a, p. 235). Teaching grammar at school is an effective tool in launching a standard language because nobody in a society can avoid its influence. Therefore, awareness of what is acceptable and unacceptable according to the official norm is ingrained in people’s consciousness. This is especially true regarding the written variety of the official language. Most languages in the world do not have a literary (standard) language, and thus they do not have an official norm. Nevertheless, native speakers of these languages cannot speak “freely” without restraint, because as members of a community, in order to be understood and accepted, they have to follow its social norms. In many cases, these collective norms are created over centuries through joint efforts of the speech community. Such collective linguistic norms are of great significance in countries like Russia where people have learnt an official norm of their mother tongue at school because the official norm is not suitable for most communicative settings, especially in everyday interactions. In contrast to the official norm, other varieties of a language are mainly learnt by observation and imitation without conscious effort during the learning process. Thus, a collective norm is established “democratically” through unconscious agreement of the linguistic community. If the written standard language is very much about grammatical rules and orthography, collective norms determine a much wider scope of characteristics of communication. Children learn a collective norm of their mother tongue from their parents and siblings. The famous Russian language philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin claims that this “home language” is the primary speech genre of a language, while other genres learnt later are secondary ones Table 22.1  Features of official and collective norms Official norm

Collective norms

Top-​down

Based on unconscious conventions and traditions created by the speech community Have a lot of variation Have no clear outspoken manifestations but are realized in regular use (usus) Are mainly learnt by observation and imitation of other people’s interaction Concern a large range of spontaneous oral interactions or written texts which are common in that community Can have irregular occasional features

Clear-​cut rules as an ideal Is manifested in grammar books and dictionaries Is mainly learnt at school The main target of use is written language in official settings Changes very slowly

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(Bakhtin, 1986). When children go to school, they begin the long journey towards acquiring proficiency in the standard language. This skill is not of much immediate use outside of the classroom, but is acquired for the future. At the same time, youngsters learn new collective norms, which help them in communicative situations that are important for their socialization and developing self-​esteem. After schooling in colleges and universities, familiarization with other collective norms continues. As part of a professional education, students learn to communicate in a way specialists do. In the Russian linguistic tradition, large clusters of collective norms are called “functional styles”. According to the standard theory, there are, besides a standard style for oral speech (razgovornyj stil’), four styles for a written language: ofitsial’no-​delovoj (official business), gazetno-​ publitsisticheskij (publicistic), nauchnyj (scientific) and hudozhestvennyj (artistic, i.e. the style of fiction). Each profession and speciality has a narrower “sublanguage” (pod”jazyk).Table 22.1 shows the main features of official and collective norms.

2.2.  Mutual interplay of norms The primary medium of all dialogical speech is the first linguistic variety people learn at home, while the primary medium of all written texts is the standard literary language based on the official norm that is learnt at school. The official and various collective norms interact all the time. An awareness of the official norm intuitively influences the way that people write, and, in some communicative settings, also the way they speak. Let us consider how spoken language can influence the official norm. Each new word always has its first individual user. This can be compared to the natural phenomenon of mutation. In nature, natural selection determines which mutations are viable: some remain while others die out. Something similar happens with a new word mutation. If a word is useful, for example in naming a new thing, it will also be used by other speakers –​if not, it remains an odd individual phenomenon. Thus, just as nature is responsible for the selection of species, the speech community decides on the viability of new words, albeit only within their own restricted circumstances. Let us take a concrete example. The English abbreviation PR (public relations) became part of Russian business jargon in the form piar in the 1980s. Its first occurrences can be traced to Russian radio and TV programmes of the early 1990s. In 2000, the word started to appear in the written media. Now the usage is slowly declining but there are still 25,000 occurrences a year.5 The Russification of the word has gone so far that there are more than 50 derivatives and compound words based on this root. Some examples include verbs such as piarit’ (to do PR), podpiarit’ (to do PR a little bit), raspiarit’ (to do PR in different situations), nouns including piarstvo (the process of doing PR), piarshchik or piarist (a person doing PR), and compound nouns such as antipiar, kontrpiar, piar-​pobeda (PR victory), piar-​hod (a move in doing PR), and piar-​tekst (Levanova, 2019). In addition, the meaning of the word has been undergoing change as well. Sometimes it is used in the meaning of chërnyj piar (“black PR”), which in the Russian context denotes dishonest and manipulative PR work. Piar is now a common word that is accepted as part of the official norm.

3.  Outlining the history of Russian (literary) language6 3.1.  Historical overview7 The history of what the arguably first Slavonic literary language is rather clear. In 863, two brothers, today known as St Cyril and St Methodious, translated the Bible into a new written 370

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language based on the local Macedonian dialect, which was also influenced by written Greek. This was the origin of Old Church Slavonic, which for centuries was a literary language in all meanings of the word. Moreover, it was never a native language of a speech community nor was it used in everyday communication, much like the position of Latin in the Middle Ages. Over the following centuries, Church Slavonic was adopted with Christianity to Kyiv (Kiev) and Novgorod, the political centres of Russia during the first centuries of the second millennium. The language was influenced by the local dialects and was also used in other than religious texts, especially in epic literature. The two other terms used to refer to the variety, Old Russian and Old East Slavonic, point to the fact that two languages, namely Ukrainian and Belarusian, descended from the language. The exact time when the East Slavonic languages split into separate branches remains a contentious issue. Both in Ukraine and Belarus, an active movement towards one’s “own” language took place in the nineteenth century, but, in reality, the process had already begun much earlier. In Kyiv Rus’ (until 1240), during the so-​called Mongol yoke (1240–​1480), and afterwards, during the period of the Moscow-​led state, two written norms were in parallel use. Although the first was substantially influenced by the Church Slavonic tradition and used in religious and epic literature, it is questionable whether it can be referred to as the Russian literary language. At the same time, a vernacular-​based language closer to the actual usage of Russian written language was developed gradually in other text types. Excavations of birch bark manuscripts, which began in 1951, have provided new evidence about the existence of a vernacular-​based written Russian language in the Novgorod region. More than 1000 text excerpts show that, at least from the eleventh century onwards, short texts were also written on everyday topics.8 Because Novgorod was more or less politically independent until 1478 and was never occupied by the Mongols, we cannot be sure to what extent a similar vernacular-​based written language was used in other parts of Russia. The standard view in Russian scholarship is that the Russian literary norm was established by two individuals. First, the famous linguist and polymath Mikhail Lomonosov (1711-​1765) adopted the concept of the three styles of rhetoric and literature from other languages and applied it to Russian. The high style was used in stately texts, such as odes and tragedies, the middle style in dramas, elegies, and satires, and the low style in comedies, songs, and fables. However, most credit for the establishment of the Russian literary language is given to the national poet of Russia, Alexander Pushkin (1799-​1837). Through his literary masterpieces Pushkin established the main features of contemporary Russian, merging three basic ingredients into a coherent whole. A large vernacular Russian foundation was enriched through a variety of loanwords mostly from other Indo-​European languages and the embedding of Church Slavonic elements. Somewhat ironically, the beloved Russian poet and founder of the contemporary Russian language was taught by French governesses in French, a language he used in many everyday situations.

3.2.  Grammars and dictionaries Grammatiki slavenskia pravilnoe sintagma (“Slavonic grammar with correct syntax”), written in 1619 by Archbishop Meletius Smotritsky (1577-​1633), is sometimes regarded as the first Russian grammar. It significantly influenced all East Slavonic languages until the end of the eighteenth century, although it mainly reflected literary Church Slavonic. It is not surprising that the first grammar of genuine Russian was compiled by a non-​Russian author, Heinrich Ludolf, whose Grammatica Russica (Oxford, 1696) was a short handbook for foreigners with examples translated into Latin and German. 371

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In 1755, Mikhail Lomonosov’s Rossijskaja grammatika (“Russian grammar”), began a new era in Russian grammatography. The book’s overall structure and the set of grammatical categories largely resemble those found in today’s grammars. Lomonosov distinguished three Russian dialect areas –​Northern, Ukrainian, and Moscow dialects –​but he took the rules of pronunciation from the Moscow dialect, referring not only to its status as the speech of the capital, but also to its “unparallelled beauty”. As pointed out in Jartseva and Arutjunova (1972), the tradition of Russian “academic grammars” began in 1802. These grammars bear this epithet for two reasons: first, they were compiled by linguists working in the Academy of Sciences, and second, they reflect scholarly research in presenting grammatical categories and using grammatical terms. Thus, the issue of an academic grammar is seen as an important milestone in the history of Russian linguistics. The chief editor of the 1952–​1954 grammar was the most prominent Russian linguist of the time, Viktor Vinogradov (1895-​1969). The experimental 1970 grammar and the more traditional 1980 grammar were compiled under Natalia Shvedova’s (1916-​2009) supervision. The academic grammars demonstrate the tradition of presenting language structures and forms in a rather normative mode. They can thus be classified as prescriptive rather than descriptive. Today we are facing a revolution, or at least a new era, in Russian grammatology. In the Academy of Science Institute of Russian language, a new type of academic grammar is under construction.9 Instead of using classical literature as a source of examples, it relies on large contemporary corpora. Moreover, the grammar is digitized and regularly updated. The absolute peak of monolingual Russian dictionaries taking a descriptive approach was reached with Vladimir Dahl’s Tol’kovyj slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo jazyka (Explanatory dictionary of the living Great Russian language) (1863–​1866). The dictionary comprises approximately 200,000 lexical units, reflecting both the literary language and various spoken varieties (dialects and urban vernaculars). Since then, all major dictionaries, large and small alike, have had an exclusively normative orientation. In the lexicographical tradition, the bulk of illustrative examples are taken from famous writers. Because the notion of “contemporary Russian language” was taken to extend from recent usage to Pushkin’s time, nineteenth-​century writers were well represented in dictionaries published in the 1980s. Lexis outside the written norm was frequently attributed the label razg. (colloquial), but it typically belonged to the register characteristic of the relaxed speech of the intelligentsia.

3.3.  The origin and development of the Cyrillic alphabet and orthography The alphabet and rules of orthography are an important aspect of a literary norm. In reality, it is the most visible and recognizable result of an active standardization of a language. Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that the choice of an alphabet and orthography are top-​down processes, any changes in it regularly provoke a huge protest among language users. An alphabet is also a significant part of people’s linguistic identity. The history of the Cyrillic alphabet begins with the aforementioned brothers, Cyril and Methodius. Despite the persistent opinion of some researchers and most lay people, what they created was not the Cyrillic but the Glagolitic alphabet, which for centuries remained a parallel way of writing mostly sacred texts in Slavonic (Tschernochvostoff, 1947; Kiparsky, 1964). The Cyrillic alphabet was developed by the disciples of Cyril and Methodius at the end of the ninth century.10 The Cyrillic alphabet went through several reforms, two of which were particularly important. A major reform was put into effect by Peter the Great at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The Tsar aimed to make the alphabet easier to learn so that more people could 372

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learn to read and write. Some unnecessary letters were dropped and the spelling system was simplified. The new version of the alphabet, called grazhdanskij shrift (the “civil” or “secular script”), is known today as the Russian alphabet. The second major modernization and simplification was carried out by the Communist government in 1917, though the reform had been planned much earlier. Although the reform, which again abolished some letters that no longer had real phonemic value, was originally not connected to the new Communist regime, the “new writing” became a symbol of the political upheaval in Russia. For decades, émigrés in the West continued to use the “old writing” system in their publications, and, in the 1990s, for nostalgic reasons, some elements of the old spelling, especially the so-​called tvërdyj znak or “hard sign” at the end of words, reappeared in some names and titles, for example Коммерсантъ (Kommersant), which was one of the leading newspapers at the time. Whereas the lay perception relates the Cyrillic alphabet to Russian, a number of variants of this alphabet are used for several languages. Today the Cyrillic alphabet is used in all East-​ Slavonic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian) and some South-​ Slavonic languages (Bulgarian and Macedonian), as well in Tajikistan and Mongolia. In Montenegro as well as in Bosnia and Serbia, both the Roman and Cyrillic alphabet are used in parallel. Uzbekistan officially introduced the sole use of the Latin script twenty years ago, but the change is still in process. Kazakhstan has decided to do the same by 2025. Foreign alphabets are often considered strange and impractical or even primitive. As to the Cyrillic alphabet, it fits the Russian language very well. This is easy to show with a single example. The surname of the former Soviet leader Хрущёв looks very simple if it is compared to its English (Khrushchev), German (Chruschtschow) or Swedish (Chrusjtjov) equivalent. There are strict norms for the Romanization of Cyrillic names. The only problem is that there are several international standards for it, and in addition to that, many countries or languages have their own conventions. So, in different settings and countries you may see at least the following spellings of Чехов, including Čehov, Čechov, Čexov, Chekhov, Chexov, Tjehov, Tshekhov, Tschehov, and Tšehov. In Russian, the relationship between letters and sounds is rather systematic. When familiar with word stress and some basic rules of pronunciation, speakers are able to pronounce 99 per cent of Russian words correctly. In contrast to this, the pronunciation of a word does not reveal its written form. At the beginning of the new millennium, this feature of normative Russian orthography provoked an Internet movement around a new “language” called olbanskij jazyk (Albanian language) or jazyk podongov (language of the scum), both names reflecting stereotypical perceptions of certain groups of people.11 The idea was to write Russian words as incorrectly as possible without changing their pronunciation.

3.4.  The Soviet period (1922–​1991)12 Building the world’s first socialist country with ambitious economic goals required strong state measures. Because education and effective communication are key factors in promoting welfare, a great deal of attention was paid to the school system and language policy. A massive likbez programme (abbreviation for likvidatsija bezgramotnosti (elimination of illiteracy)) began immediately. One obstacle to this process in a multi-​ethnic and multilingual country was the large number of languages without a literary norm. In order to tackle this problem a large group of linguists was summoned to create and standardize dozens of literary languages (Comrie, 1981; Alpatov, 1997). This was not an easy task considering the great diversity of languages belonging to various language groups, such as Turkic, North-​Caucasian, and Uralic. 373

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The general language policy supported bilingualism. Russian was the lingua franca of the whole state, while the major language (titul’nyj jazyk (title language)) of each Soviet republic or region was their second official language. Bilingualism in Russia was, as a rule, asymmetric: Russians did not speak minority languages, but speakers of other languages spoke Russian. During the Soviet times there were periods when the authorities tried to weaken the role of languages other than Russian. Russification also expanded because parents thought that Russian as a language of education was a good choice for their children’s future (Pavlenko, 2011). The Turkic languages spoken in the Soviet Union (Azerbaijani, Kazakh, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Kyrgyz) faced considerable changes in their writing systems. They were written in Arabic script until the end of the 1930s, after that in Latin for ten years, and then in Cyrillic. Because changing the writing system is a generation-​long process, one can only imagine how these decisions slowed down the development of these republics. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these countries have gradually been transferring back to the Latin script, each at its own pace. These processes have shown how painful and slow the change of a writing system is. The question of writing systems becomes even more complex if we consider these languages outside their native countries. Azerbaijani, for example, is still written in the Persian alphabet in Iran, while the Cyrillic script is used in Dagestan. Similar variable practices may be observed in many other languages. The Soviet regime pursued a very active language policy. Against this background, it is surprising how little the state was interested in the normalization of the Russian language. This could arguably be explained through the role of the intelligentsia. Normative dictionaries of spelling, accentuation, and pronunciation (orthoepy) as well as usage guides were published. Norm-​setting did not mean launching a new norm, but selecting the most preferable from the existing variants. This variant was regularly the one that was used by the Moscow intelligentsia. Guide books were often published under the title kul’tura retši (the culture of speech), which reflected the ethos of the time: the knowledge of grammar and orthography indicated that one was a cultured person. Norm-​setters came from academic circles, and most of them were prominent linguists, namely Russianists employed by the Academy of Science.13

4.  Standardization of Russian and the battle for a better language after the collapse of the Soviet Union 4.1.  Significant changes in the linguistic environment in the 1990s The collapse of the Soviet Union brought about a total change in the form of a radical ideological and cultural shift. After the initial enthusiasm and acceptance of the market economy and political democracy, disappointment quickly followed. The media were affected by general changes in society, such as the de-​ideologization of human activities, anti-​totalitarian tendencies, removing restrictions from political and social life, a diminution in censorship and self-​ censorship, and a common openness to new currents from the West in economics, politics, and culture (Zemskaja, 1996; Krysin, 2000; Kon’kov et al., 2004). If we compare the situation to that in Western countries, the main difference is not in the final outcome of the process but the speed in which the change took place. The jump from a highly regulated media landscape to a new publishing culture with a less normative language and an increasing share of entertaining materials happened very quickly. Democratization also involved the right to free speech. The public media, which used to be in the hands of a small number of speakers of literary Russian, suddenly enabled almost all voices to be heard. With the newly acquired freedom of speech,

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people actively introduced colloquial expressions and English loanwords into official speech. Consequently, both personal and public communication became affected by spontaneous language use. If the change in the linguistic world of mass media was shocking for many Russians, the dawn of social media brought about what was perceived as a disaster. The introduction of Wikipedia, email communication, and Facebook was observed rather calmly because, language-​wise, the changes were rather modest. However, a real linguistic revolution started with online chat and text messaging. In Russia, like everywhere else, the new interactive formats quickly led to linguistic patterns that had very little to do with the traditional norm of a written language. The first reactions among Russians varied from complete rejection to ignoring the whole phenomenon. It took a while for speakers to accept the new variety of the Russian language and one that was worth researching at that. The open market led to a remarkable turn in publishing dictionaries and language guides. Dictionaries of criminal slang, swearing, and other taboo words as well as normative dictionaries appeared. A large number of norm-​setters led to a certain pluralism, which does not coincide well with the original idea of an official norm.

4.2.  Influx of loanwords Despite some periods of puritanism, Russian has always been rather open to foreign influences. Therefore, in addition to many international words like universitet, matematika, and ministr, there are thousands of old borrowings from different languages, such as shosse (road) and garazh (garage) from French, landshaft (landscape) and galstuk (tie) from German, lift (lift, elevator) and vokzal (< Vauxhall, railway station) from English. In fact, almost all terms in the field of sport and computer technology are loans from English.14 Even with this background, the influx of new borrowings from the 1990s onwards has been exceptional (Kostomarov, 1999; 2014; Ryazanova-​Clarke & Wade, 1999). Among borrowed English words, there are also many atypical Russian compound words with an indeclinable first part, e.g. veb-​dizajn, internet-​kafe, art-​projekt and biznes-​shkola (cf. Valgina, 2001, pp. 139-​140). Some initial components have gained wide popularity, e.g. éks- (ex-, former): éks-zhena (-wife), éks-muzh (-husband), éks-glava (-director) and even éks-privychka (former habit) and psevdo-​: psedvogosudarstvo (pseudostate), psevdolekarstvo (pseudomedicine), psevdonauchnyj (pseudoscientific), psevdoiskusstvo (pseudoart)) (Ratsiburskaja, 2008). Speakers’ attitudes towards loanwords are dualistic. The old layer of loanwords, even words like tok-​shou and press-​konferentsija, are regarded as respectable Russian words, while more recent loanwords, such as daunshifting, karshering, dress-​kod, guglit’ evoked negative reactions from speakers, especially if they were used by politicians or journalists in public. A case in point are the reactions to the adoption of the new loanword sendvich in the 1990s. This particular word was met with severe criticism, because, the speakers claimed, “we have our own good word for this –​buterbrod”.15 A particular target for negative attitudes are words which have a rather clear Russian equivalent, such as kouch (instead of the “Russian” trener), respekt (uvazhenie) and juzer (pol’zovatel’). Nevertheless, when chairing a conference session, an active critic of “unnecessary borrowings” may announce a kofe-​brejk instead of using the traditional Russian pereryv na kofe. Inconsistent attitudes towards “trendy” new words occur. The speaker or author of a text often finds it necessary to apologize for using a certain new word and will introduce metacommentary, such as, “I dislike this word” or refer to a “damned new word” (Mustajoki & Vepreva, 2006).

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4.3.  Language laws The debate during the 1990s about the degeneration of Russian led to concrete actions in order to establish a law that would help cleanse the language from undesirable elements. There are two specific causes for modern-​day negative metalinguistic commentary: the widespread use of foreign loanwords and violent language. In discussing these phenomena, people often use strong expressions like “linguistic nihilism” and “linguistic utilitarianism”, which lead to “semantic primitivism”, or simply “crisis”, and undesirable words are called slova-​parazity (word parasites) (Judina, 2010, pp. 9–​16). However, there are also linguists who regard the changes in language use as a sign of democratization. Nina Mechkovskaja (2006) even argues that the previous situation reflected some sort of “linguistic apartheid”, which had lasted for centuries. One of the most critical comments has been made by Nikolai Golev (2009), who claims that poor linguistic intuition among Russians is the result of a one-​sided school curriculum in which all attention is focused on gramotnost’, correct spelling and punctuation, without any concern for real communication. The process in the Duma was long and lively. Finally, in 2003, the Duma passed a law on the Russian language, directed at loanwords and “bad language”. Thus, the law states that “it is not allowed to use substandard [prostorechnyh], contemptuous [prenebrezhitel’nyh] or abusive [brannyh] words and expressions, or foreign words for which a commonly used analogue [in Russian analog] in the Russian language exists” (translation and emphasis mine). This point provoked a good deal of cynical commentary because in the text the loanword analog could have been replaced by a Russian equivalent. Another interesting change in the Russian tradition of norm-​building was a paragraph which grants the Ministry of Education the right to determine the linguistic norm (see e.g. Krongauz, 2007, pp. 195-​202). This was the first time in history that this role was given to a body representing state structures (for more detail, see Ryazanova-​Clarke, 2006, and Pyykkö, 2010). In 2005, another law determining the linguistic environment in Russia, the Law on Russian as the State Language, was adopted. It grants several other languages a local status, but at the state level Russian is the only official language. In 2009, the Ministry of Education for the first time exercised its right to determine the official norm of the Russian language by nominating four dictionaries as authoritative reference works. The most notable implications of this decision were: 1) some relaxations of linguistic norms (most of them connected with word stress: jógurt and jogúrt, dogovór and dógovor (agreement)); 2) acceptance of the use of the word kofe “coffee” as a neuter besides the traditional masculine interpretation (the earlier spelling expressed masculine gender: kofej). These changes are interesting from the perspective of the distance between the norm and usage. The official decision reflects a more liberal position than the previous situation in which representatives of the intelligentsia were the de facto linguistic authorities.

4.4.  Linguistic consciousness There is some evidence for arguing that most Russians have a strong “linguistic consciousness”, by which I mean an awareness about the state of the language. Although the phenomenon itself is more or less universal in Western countries, Russia can be used as a particularly clear example of it. As pointed out by Preston (2002), most people tend to have a general understanding of the ideal of an error-​free use of language. It is common that norms taught at school evoke ambivalent reactions from those learning them. Many speakers, however, seem to internalize these rules and notice when other speakers do not follow them, although they are often unaware of their own usage and of whether or not it corresponds to the prescribed norm. In fact, they 376

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are not aware of the nature of the official norm (cf. Cameron, 2012). Instead, they feel that it belongs to the Russian people and do not realize that it is created by others. The transmission of the standard language ideology is astonishingly effective. The debate on “spoiling” the national language standards is reported in many countries, but it is arguably more emotional and impassioned in Russia than elsewhere (Vanhala-​Aniszewski, 2010; Wingender et al., 2010). The normative tone and the desire to teach people to speak correctly is manifested in various radio and TV programmes, the most popular and longstanding among them being Eho Moskvy’s Govorim po-​russki (Let’s speak Russian; cf. Ryazanova-​Clarke, 2006, p. 47). In addition, a large foundation, Russkij mir (Russian world), was established in 2007 to support the teaching and studying of Russian, while an extensive street advertising campaign encouraging people to speak correctly was launched in St Petersburg in 2014. The new language law, together with the criminalization of defamation and the widespread prosecution of verbal abuse, has created a new market for linguists, who often appear as experts in court cases involving verbal assault. The task of the expert is to determine whether a word or expression is beyond the level of normal conversation so that the victim is entitled to compensation. There is a good deal of literature on the topic, and, recently, a new academic journal appeared devoted to it exclusively. This new branch of linguistics is called lingvisticheskaja ékspertiza or juridicheskaja lingvistika (forensic or legal linguistics) (see e.g. Baranov, 2007). In the Russian context the norm-​setters are, due to the hierarchical mind-​set, not ordinary speakers. Therefore, the literary language is regarded by many as “their” language, not “ours”. For most people, the collective norm of the social groups they belong to is much more important because the collectivistic feeling is strong. On the other hand, the literary language with strict rules gains support from people because it makes a stable foundation for language use and helps to avoid uncertainty (cf. the discussion in Coupland & Kristiansen, 2011). The official norm is also elevated among speakers for its symbolic patriotic value: it represents the language of rodina (homeland), which was the variety of the greatest works of Russian literature. The language is often referred to by its speakers as velikij and moguchij (“great” and “mighty”), evoking Ivan Turgenev’s famous lines, while actively forgetting that Turgenev also referred to the Russian language as svobodnyj (free), namely, “free from strict restrictions”. The knowledge of the literary norm is exemplified in the competition or test called total’nyj diktant (total dictation), which is an open test examining the subtleties of orthographic and linguistic norms. The initiators of the movement were students from Novosibirsk, who in 2004 decided to instigate a battle against the degeneration of their native tongue by giving people the opportunity to test their knowledge of Russian. Since then, total’nyj diktant has become very popular in Russia and abroad, with more than 200,000 people participating in the competition in 2019 (Mustajoki, Mihienko, et al., 2021). In order to understand the attitude of Russians towards the official norm, one more phenomenon is worth highlighting, namely the interpretation of the concept of a “native speaker” in Russian linguistics. According to the established Russian linguistic tradition, there are two categories of native speakers: those who are able to speak the normative standard language (nositel’ literaturnogo jazyka) and those who are not (nositel’ prostorechija (vernacular speakers)). Nositeli literaturnogo jazyka may make mistakes in speech, but they are able to speak “correctly” if required.

5.  Russian outside Russia Russian spoken outside Russia adds an interesting perspective to the discussion on an official norm of the language. The speakers in this category outnumber native speakers living in 377

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Russia.16 One can ask to what extent the kind of Russian used in Kazakhstan, Latvia, or the US differs from Moscow Russian. Moreover, the question that arise is: Are the existing differences sufficient to distinguish between different varieties of Russian?17 Russian researchers in Russia generally agree that there is no reason to speak of different varieties of Russian. In fact, Moser comes to the same conclusion in his study on Russian spoken in Ukraine (Moser, 2020). On the other hand, a large number of studies provide evidence of differences in the Russian spoken outside Russia.18 There are three types of circumstances in which Russian is spoken outside the mother country (cf. Vahtin et al., 2010; Mustajoki, Protassova, et al., 2021). In the first group, Russian systematically appears in official documents, which is the case in Belarus (Woolhiser, 2014) and Kazakhstan (Suleimenova & Smagulova, 2005; Suleimenova, 2011). Russian used in these countries differs from Moscow Russian only in some special lexical terms. In most cases, no systematic normalization measures are taken, but we see an inherent, “natural” norm creation, a kind of collective norm. Spoken varieties and those used in mass media develop mostly independently of any regulations. This resembles the situation in some parts of Russia. A largely similar process takes place where ethnic Russians comprise a minority, namely, in Bashkortostan, Buryatia, Dagestan, Tatarstan, Yakutia, and other regions of Russia enjoying rather high autonomy. The second group comprises countries with large numbers of Russian immigrants (the US, Germany, and Finland), where written Russian is used only in the media, brochures, and leaflets for foreigners and immigrants, but has no official status. Russian used in these countries is more heavily influenced by the surrounding societies and languages. In most cases, the collective norm of Russian is rather vague and one can observe diverse developments. There are two reasons for such processes. First, native speakers of Russian live in different parts of the respective countries and do not always form close-​knit communities. Second, new Russian immigrants are continually joining the community of Russian-​speaking people. This introduces fresh elements originating in Russia into the language of the diaspora. Competition usually takes place between archaic and regional varieties and reflects new developments in Moscow Russian. Russian changes, in a manner similar to dialects or slang, due to the collective intuitive effort of the people using that language. The third category, the “Island Russian” varieties, differs from the previous ones in the cohesion of the community of users. A small religious fraction, the so-​called Old Believers, form quite an interesting group among these varieties (see e.g. Kasatkin et al., 2000; Sinochkina, 2004; Glushkovski, 2010). After systematic persecution by the Orthodox Church in the seventeenth century, they started to emmigrate to different parts of Russia and then abroad. Nowadays, significant communities of Old Believers live in Brazil, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Romania, Belorussia, and the US (Oregon). They have preserved an archaic, seventeenth-​ century variety. An interesting small community of Russians lives in Alaska, whose ancestors remained in the territory after Alaska was sold to the United States for 7.2 million dollars in 1867. Their Russian dialect is strongly influenced, in both lexis and grammar, by English (see e.g. Bergelson & Kibrik, 2010). In this context, it is worth mentioning linguistically interesting mixed languages. In Belarus, where both Russian and Belorussian are spoken, a Russian-​Belorussian mixed language exists called trasjanka (see e.g. Hentschel, 2016). It is the mother tongue of half of the population. A similar, but less widespread language is surzhik, a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian (see e.g. Hmelevskij et al., 2019). An interesting mixture of Ukrainian, Russian and Yiddish is the Odessan language, which not only lives in people’s imagination but is also a real language (see e.g. Kabanen, 2021). 378

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There are also some pidgin languages, based partially on Russian, which have been spoken in the border regions of Russia (for a comprehensive overview, see Stern, 2020, and also Vahtin, 2011 and Fedorova, 2018). The first pidgin which provoked linguistic interest was Russenorsk, a variety historically spoken among Norwegian fishermen and Russian traders in the nineteenth century (Broch & Jahr, 1984; Lunden, 1978).

6.  A final remark Over the last few years, I have been creating a general theory of miscommunication, with illustrations mainly taken from Russian or Finnish (Mustajoki, 2012, 2017b, 2021; Mustajoki & Baikulova, 2020, 2022; Mustajoki et al.; 2018). Within the respective framework, it is reasonable to ask whether speaking and writing according to the official norm of a language diminishes or increases misunderstandings and communication failures. At the upper level, the answer is “yes”. Creating and maintaining a unified standardized language is especially important in countries with great dialectical differences, such as China, but it is necessary in all countries that want to educate people and distribute general information to them. At the level of concrete linguistic output, single deviations from the norm, for example small defects in punctuation, or writing soldatov (genitive plural for “soldier”) instead of the normative soldat (a similar case as sheeps instead of the standard sheep in the plural in English), do not necessarily hinder comprehension. Problems, naturally, occur if a text is compiled in a very “individual” manner without any respect for norms. Taking another perspective, correctness as such does not guarantee or facilitate understanding. Newspaper texts in the Soviet era were compiled very strictly according to the norms of the literary language, yet they were difficult to comprehend. Since 1990, however, a more colloquial style of writing with deviations from the literary norm have spread, and readers could better grasp the available information. English as a lingua franca is an interesting example here. Several studies show that it possesses regular features that are deviations from the norms of American or British English (see e.g. Cogo & Dewey, 2006; Seidlhofer, 2006), nevertheless it seems to be an effective instrument for international communication.19 From the perspective of intelligibility of linguistic output, the most important thing, both in written and oral communication, is recipient design or accommodation, the adjustment of speech or text for the target audience.20 To do this properly, we have to put ourselves in the recipients’ shoes or, more scientifically, we have to be aware of their mental worlds. A mental world includes linguistic competence, knowledge and awareness of various concepts, values, and attitudes (Mustajoki, 2012, pp. 223–​226). Authorities often write official texts that adhere to the literary norm but are not understandable to those who belong to the target audience. This is also the case in Russia, where obscure, bureaucratic language, the so-​called kantselarit, has a long tradition. According to a recent study (Knutov et al., 2020), Russian laws are less understandable than Kant’s philosophical texts. This is, however, only a single example of a more general phenomenon. If a substantial share of citizens is unable to comprehend the information authorities distribute, they will be isolated from the society, which is a big risk factor for both them and the society as a whole. This situation has led to actions towards introducing plain and comprehensible language (for an overview, see Matveeva et al., 2017 and Lindholm & Vanhatalo, 2021). The overall pathos and ethos behind this movement is “Correctness is not enough if a text is not understandable for the audience it is meant for.” Such a demand is generally of great value because it changes the way authorities act, but it is an even more revolutionary challenge in a country like Russia, where up until relatively recently all the stakes have been placed on the correctness of texts at the expense of 379

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readability. This problem, however, has been recognized in Russia, and practical measures are being introduced (cf. Mustajoki, Mihienko, et al., 2021).

Notes 1 In his note on Russian literary language, Russian-​born German linguist Boris Unbegaun (1973) writes: “ ‘Literary language’ is, I am afraid, a Russianism or a Gallicism: literaturnyj jazyk or langue littéraire. The proper English term would have been standard language, the German –​Hochsprache.” 2 See also the discussion in Vinokur et al. (1983). 3 This section is a compilation of ideas presented in a number of my articles (Mustajoki 1988, 1995, 2013, 2017a). 4 I prefer the term “official” to “literary”, because there are also other norms for written texts, and the norm of fiction does not always follow the official norm. 5 The figures are based on the Integrum database, the largest Russian database (Mustajoki, 2006; Kopotev & Mustajoki, 2008; Kopotev et al., 2020). 6 This section is mainly based on two of my publications (Mustajoki, 2016, 2019). 7 There are good sources for more detailed descriptions of the history of the Russian literary language written both by Russian (e.g. Larin, 1975; Uspenski, 2002; Zagorovskaja, 2016) and Western (e.g. Unbegaun, 1965, 1973; Vlasto, 1986; Press, 2007; Nesset, 2015) scholars. See also the English translations of Russian linguists (Vinogradov, 1969; Vinokur, 2010). This represents an interesting difference between them. The Russian tradition is concentrated on the connection of the language to the historical development of the state of Russia, as well on the role of influential persons in this process, while Western scholars pay more attention to the relationship of the vernacular-​based “real” Russian and Church Slavonic-​based literary language. 8 There are many publications on birch bark documents, by A. A. Zalyznyak, V. L. Janin, A. A. Gippius and others. For a thorough overview and analysis, see Schaeken, 2019. 9 All information about the project, the corpora used and publications are available on the website https://​rus​corp​ora.ru/​new/​. 10 For further reading on this topic, see for instance Iliev, 2013. 11 The phenomenon has naturally also been noticed by linguists; see e.g. Krongauz, 2013; Lunde, 2018. 12 For more about language policy during the Soviet period see e.g. Comrie et al., 1996; Alpatov, 1997; Arutjunova, 2012. 13 Ditmar Rozental, the most productive and popular author of books on the topic of “What is correct in Russian” was an exception. His MA degree was in Italian and he lectured at the Moscow State University in the department of stylistics. 14 New words were also introduced into Russian by the Soviet regime, especially during its first decade. See further Matthews, 1960 and Istrin, 1988. 15 Buterbrod is a somewhat misleading word for this Soviet-​style food item. It was usually bread with cheese or sausage but without butter. A well-​known fact is that the English word sandwich is named after the Fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718–​92), an English nobleman who ate food in this form in order to avoid leaving the gaming table. 16 One can find different figures estimating the number of Russian-​speaking people in the world; see the discussion on this issue in Mustajoki, 2010, p. 41; Ryazanova-​Clarke, 2014a. 17 There is no obvious equivalent for the English term “variety” in the Russian linguistic tradition. Krysin (2004) speaks of the “variation” of the Russian language in non-​Russian circumstances; Dorofejev (2010) uses the word “variant”. Some use the term idiom (cf. Mustajoki, 2014). 18 There is a rich literature on the topic of ‘Russian outside Russia’; see e.g. the compiled works: Zemskaja, 2001; Mustajoki et al. 2010; Mustajoki & Protassova, 2004; Ryazanova-​Clarke, 2014b; Mustajoki et al. 2019; Norman & Kusse, 2020. 19 English as a lingua franca is a fascinating variety of languages from the perspective of norm-​setting. It has no official norm, and its speakers do not create such a compact speech community as dialects, slang and jargons do. Therefore, setting a collective norm takes place more loosely (cf. Hülmbauer, 2009). 20 Several terms are in use: recipient design (Newman-​Norlund et al. 2009, Blokpoel et al. 2012, Mustajoki 2012), audience design (Sacks & Schegloff, 1979; Horton & Gerrig, 2002), accommodation (Palomares et al., 2016) or just tailoring (Pierce-​Grove, 2016; Leskelä et al., 2022). Katrina Bremer and Margaret Simonot (1996) regard recipient design as the main tool in achieving mutual understanding.

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Literary norms in Russia: Past and present Vahtin, N., Mustajoki, A., & Protassova, E. (2010). Russkie jazyki. In A. Mustajoki, E. Protassova, & N. Vahtin Instrumentarium of linguistics: Sociolinguistic approaches to non-​standard Russian (pp. 5–​16). Slavica Helsingiensia 40. University of Helsinki. Valgina, M. S. (2001). Aktivnye protsessy v sovremennom russkom jazyke. Logos. Vanhala-​Aniszewski, M. (2010). Unity or diversity? The language ideology debate in Russian media texts. In M. Lähteenmäki & M. Vanhala-​Aniszewski (Eds.), Language ideologies in transition: multilingualism in Russia and Finland (pp. 101–​121). Peter Lang. Vinogradov, V. V. (1969). The history of the Russian literary language from the seventeenth century to the nineteenth. University of Wisconsin Press. Vinokur, G. O. (2010). The Russian language: a brief history. Cambridge University Press. Vinokur, G. O., Tsetlin, P. M., & Vinokur, T. G. (1983). Jazyk literatury i litraturnyj jazyk [The language of literature and literary language]. In Ja. E. El’berg (Ed.), Kontekst 1982, Literaturno-​teoreticheskie issledovanija (pp. 255–​289). Nauka. Vlasto, A. P. (1986). Linguistic history of Russian to the end of the eighteenth century. Oxford University Press. Wingender, M., Barkijević, I., & Müller, D. (2010). Korpuslinguistische Untersuchungen von Standardsprachenmerkmalen. Ein Beitrag zur vergleichenden Standardologie [Corpus linguistic studies of standard language features: A contribution to comparative standardology]. Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie, 67(1), 125–​161 Woolhiser, C. (2014). The Russian language in Belarus: Language use, speaker identities and metalinguistic discourse. In L. Ryazanova-​Clarke (Ed.), The Russian language outside the nation (pp. 81–​116). Edinburgh University Press. Zagorovskaja, O. V. (2016). Normy russkogo literaturnogo yazyka: tipologija i osnovanija dlja klassifikatsii [The norms of the Russian literary language: Typology and grounds for classification]. Izvestija Voronezhskogo gosudarstvennogo pedagogicheskogo universiteta. Serija: Pedagogicheskie nauki, 3, 121–​126. Zemskaja, E. A. (1987). Russkaja razgovornaja rech’: lingvisticheskij analiz i problemy obuchenija [Russian colloquial language: Linguistic analysis and problems of teaching]. Russkij jazyk. Zemskaja, E. A. (1996). Vvedenie [Introduction]. In Ruskij jazyk kontsa XX stoletija (pp. 9–​14). Jazyki russkoj kul’tury. Zemskaja, E. A. (Ed.). (2001). Jazyk russkogo zarubezh’ja: obshchie voprosy i rechevye portrety [Russian outside Russia: General questions and speech portraits]. Nauka.

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23 PRESCRIPTIVISM IN CROATIA Anđel Starčević, Mate Kapović, and Daliborka Sarić

1. Introduction1 In this chapter, we first discuss the definition of prescriptivism, after which we give a short historical overview of prescriptivism in Croatia, and then critically analyse some of the ideologies of Croatia’s contemporary prescriptivist discourse on examples from popular “usage guides” and other sources. We also introduce a classification of mono-​ideologies found in Croatian prescriptivist discourse. The term prescriptivism has been used in various ways in the literature ‒ for example, both for the process of language standardization and language policy in general and as a term for the belief that some language features or varieties are “better” and “more correct” than others. In this chapter, as per Kapović (2013, pp. 393‒394), we distinguish between prescriptivism and prescription. We define prescription as the technical process2 of codification/​standardization of a certain language variety for official/​institutional/​public use. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, we see as the practice of influencing and correcting one’s own and other speakers’ production, based on certain ideological beliefs about the supposed superiority of some features and varieties, typically on the ideology of the standard language (Milroy, 2001, 2007). In our work and in this chapter, we criticize traditional, conservative, and institutional standard-​dialect prescriptivism, promoted from positions of power and authority, because of its real and potential negative social effects, namely linguistic insecurity, schizoglossia (Haugen, 1962, p. 148), and social exclusion.3 However, prescriptivism can also be carried out based on other ideologies, for example the ideology of dialect (Watts, 2010). This type of dialectal prescriptivism, for example, is a form of prescriptivism in which older or local, non-​standard forms can be considered to be “real” dialectal forms and are thus to be preferred (for example, some speakers of the Zagreb dialect may insist on the exclusive use of kaj (what) because it is perceived as part of the “real” Zagreb Kajkavian dialect, even though in the contemporary Zagreb dialect kaj is used together with the younger/​Štokavian šta/​što). Such dialectal prescriptivism is sometimes endorsed even by traditional dialectologists, who search for “true dialect” and are usually not interested in or even actively disregard non-​regional language variation, innovative speakers, or code-​switching. When discussing standard-​dialect prescriptivism, based on the ideology of the standard language, which juxtaposes standard (supposedly “correct”) and non-​standard (supposedly “incorrect”) features or varieties in general, it should be noted that traditional prescriptivism as a 386

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form of ideological practice may involve a critical stance towards usages that are already part of the standard variety –​in other words, even the standard-​dialect status, i.e. being listed in a dictionary or a grammar, does not automatically guarantee a language feature “correctness”, because for some commentators even the standard can always be improved to become more “correct”, “logical”, “precise” or “better”. For instance, in Croatian prescriptivism, sometimes just one of the standard variants will be preferred although more than one can nominally be standard ‒ for example, prescriptivists will often insist that the genitive plural form primjedaba “objections” is “more correct” than the genitive plural variant form primjedbi because the former is older and the latter is innovative, even though both are prescribed as variant standard forms in normative grammars and dictionaries. Thus, prescriptivism is insistence on the ideology of “correct language”, where what is “correct” is decided through an inconsistent and haphazard process of traditional prescriptivist judgements, one’s own subjective opinions, and general unscholarly prejudice and biases, often (but not always) determined by the prescription of the standard dialect and the mystification of the elusive and idealized standard dialect. In this chapter we deal only with standard-​dialect related top-​down prescriptivism (as promoted in usage guides, by public figures promoting “proper/​correct language”, etc.) and not with non-​institutional prescriptivism (for example, popular opinions on language, related or unrelated to the standard dialect). We aim to show that common words and patterns used in public discourse cannot be “proved” to be illegitimate, regardless of their status in formal standardization or usage guides and regardless of prescriptivists’ discursive efforts to portray their language ideologies as “objective/​scientific/​ neutral”. In the following sections we first present a short historical overview of prescriptivism in Croatia, followed by what are, in our view, some of its basic characteristics and its most authoritative proponents. Then we turn to our critical discourse analysis of prescriptivist mono-​ ideologies and some related phenomena such as erasure, as well as two prescriptivist strategies, namely apparent descriptiveness and ideological projection. In selecting our examples, we were guided by two main criteria –​we focused on ideas promoted by 1) Croatia’s most prominent, typically conservative, theorists of language policy and planning (for example Katičić, Babić, and Brozović), and 2) the best-​known ‘practical’ prescriptivists and their usages guides, as well as ideas which they put forward in the public sphere.

2.  A short historical overview of Croatia’s prescriptivism Institutional-​type prescriptivism has been present in Croatian standardization efforts since its premodern days, from the early seventeenth century onwards (the first Croatian grammar, the grammar of “Illyrian” by Bartol Kašić, dates from 1604), as well as since the beginning of modern standardization in the nineteenth century. In the earliest days, it usually featured purist tendencies to exclude from written language words perceived as foreign –​for example, in works by lexicographers such as Faust Vrančić (1551–​1617) or Jakov Mikalja (1601–​1654), and writers such as Matija Antun Relković (1732–​1798).4 In premodern times, literary language was a tool espoused by the nobility and affluent intellectual elites, including the Illyrian Movement, roughly in the first half of the nineteenth century.5 In the second half of the nineteenth century, this changed under the influence of Vuk Karadžić (1787–​1864) and his Vukovian successors, whose conception of Croato-​ Serbian/​ Serbo-​ Croatian based on the rural East-​Herzegovina Neo-​Štokavian dialect eventually won.6 In an act of opposition to the highly formalized and artificial slavjanoserbski (Slavo-​Serbian) in Serbia, Vuk presented the ideal of “pure people’s language”, which was a feature of standardization efforts up until the 387

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mid-​twentieth century, together with insistence on the unity of all Štokavian literary/​standard varieties (primarily the idea that Croats and Serbs share the same language and perhaps even belong to the same “umbrella” nation as well7), which was never fully achieved. This meant that early-​twentieth-​century prescriptivist interventions were slightly different than in premodern times and in the (non-​Vukovian) nineteenth century, because Vukovian prescriptivism mostly insisted on “the pure (Štokavian) language of the people” –​but they were nevertheless prescriptivist in many regards.8 Well-​known early twentieth century examples are Branič jezika hrvatskoga (The Guardian of the Croatian Language, 1911) by Nikola Andrić (1867–​1942)9 and, more importantly, Hrvatski ili srpski jezični savjetnik (Croatian or Serbian Usage Guide, 1924) by one of the most prominent Vukovian linguists, Tomo Maretić (1854–​1938). Things did not change much in socialist Yugoslavia: from 1945 to 1990, traditional prescriptivism, though clearly a right-​wing conservative ideology in language (Kapović, 2013), was as mainstream as it could possibly be, as can clearly be seen for example in the writings of Ljudevit Jonke (1907–​1979) or works such as Slavko Pavešić’s Jezični savjetnik s gramatikom (Usage Guide with Grammar, 1971).10 Even purism was not always perceived as problematic, except when it was anti-​Serbian or connected to extreme Croatian nationalism and separatism. Opposing voices were rare –​an anti-​prescriptivist view of language was present from the 1960s in (usually ignored) works by Damir Kalogjera (1932–​; see, for example, Kalogjera 1965, 1978, 1989), informed by anglophone linguistics, and in certain works by Vladimir Anić (1930–​2000, for example Anić, 1998, 2009).11 In recent times, the anti-​prescriptivist current has become stronger than before, with for example, Kordić (2010), whose reception was troubled because of a strong nationalist opposition and negative reaction to her promotion of Serbo-​Croatian as a pluricentric language, and with Kapović (2011), a popularly written book on various linguistic topics, including prescriptivism. Finally, the recent publication of the book Jeziku je svejedno12 (Language Could Care Less, Starčević, et al., 2019) by the authors of this chapter contributed substantially to anti-​prescriptivist efforts in the Croatian language context (see also Starčević, et al., forthcoming).

3.  Some of the basic characteristics of Croatian prescriptivism Let us try to briefly delineate what is typical of Croatian prescriptivism in comparison to prescriptivism elsewhere. Firstly, Croatian prescriptivism is intricately connected to nationalism and the historical experience of real-​socialist Yugoslavia, which, from the perspective of both the political and the linguistic right wing, is viewed as completely negative. In Croatia, due to its specific situation and history, criticism of prescriptivist ideas is often described by discursive opponents as being “anti-​Croat”, “pro-​Yugoslav” or “communist”.13 Secondly, Croatian prescriptivism is inherently linked to linguistic purism, the opposition to foreign elements, similarly to prescriptivism in, for example, Slovene, Czech, and Slovak (cf. also Thomas, 1996, p. 53), but not Serbian or English. Thirdly, prescriptivist stances and conservative views in Croatia are not only typical for non-​linguists but also for academic linguists working at universities and institutes, including even the highest echelon of linguistic experts. Three renowned Croatian linguists can be mentioned with regards to prescriptivist efforts in the academic context, namely, Dalibor Brozović (1927–​2009), Radoslav Katičić (1930–​2019), and Ranko Matasović (1968–​). All three are known linguists in their own fields of expertise –​Brozović primarily as a dialectologist, Katičić mainly as a historical linguist and Matasović as a pre-​ eminent contemporary Croatian Indo-​Europeanist and typologist, who has recently taken it upon himself to spearhead the new generation of traditional Croatian standardology (compare again Starčević et al., forthcoming). All three were/​are also politically conservative (Brozović 388

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in his later phase) and esteemed members of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. However, despite being renowned linguists (and historical linguists at that, who are, by definition, aware of mechanisms of language change), all three are also supportive of the traditional prescriptivist concept of the standard dialect –​see for example Brozović, 2005 (a collection of his late columns published in Vijenac), Katičić, 1992 (a collection of linguistic essays, some of which present his prescriptivist stances) and Matasović, 2019 (his review of the book Jeziku je svejedno14), 2020 (his views on standardization) and 2021 (his response to Kapović 2021). This shows that it is quite possible to be a well-​established linguist in a specific linguistic field while also endorsing traditional prescriptivist attitudes. However, this does not in any way prove that prescriptivism has any linguistic merit ‒ only that linguists, from all sides of the political spectrum, are also people, individuals who have their own political and ideological views and who in some instances prefer to let their political views eclipse their linguistics.

4.  Prescriptivist mono-​ideologies Modern linguistics has shown that language is not built on simple, invariable, consistently symmetrical structures. Just like human societies, languages are complex and diverse. They are full of intricate forms, meanings, and their combinations. Language, equally in its standard and non-​standard varieties, is without exception characterized by phenomena such as polysemy, synonymy, ambiguity, redundancy, and constant variation and change. Its rules typically operate on a subconscious level, and are therefore difficult to observe, analyse, and fully understand. However, this is where prescriptivism enters as a reflex of conservative political ideology in language (cf. Kapović, 2013).15 Conservative and right-​wing thought, just like traditional language-​prescriptivist thought, are often linked to ideologies such as “law and order” (in society as well as in language) and to simplistic and reductive views of the world. Thus, only one type of sexual behavior is “normal”, only one type of family is considered appropriate, there should only be one nation in one country, with only one national language, and so forth. By the same token, prescriptive ideologies are aimed at (typically unattainable and non-​rational) uniformity (compare Milroy & Milroy, 2012) and symmetry in language. As we have shown in our book (Starčević, et al., 2019, pp. 75‒79), these tendencies can be analysed as what we have termed mono-​ideologies ‒ an attempt at reducing the normally occurring variation and heterogeneity in language variables to single variants, a phenomenon also observed and discussed by Von Polenz: Die s p r a c h m o n o m a n e Haltung: Man geht oft davon aus, dass von mehreren konkurrierenden Ausdrücken bzw. Bedeutungen nur e i n e (r) der/​die richtige, gute, eigentliche sein könne (meist die eigene oder die den eigenen Interessen entsprechende Variante), die anderen seien falsch oder schlecht. The l a n g u a g e - m o n o m a n i c stance: It is often expected that among several competing expressions or meanings only o n e can be the right, good, proper one (usually one’s own variant or that which suits one’s own interests), the other ones are (said to be) wrong or bad. Von Polenz 2021, p. 6 Thus, one word/​morpheme should have only one meaning, morphemes should all be derived from the same source language, and so on. In the following sections we present some of the mono-​ideologies and other ideologies of Croatian prescriptivism, examples of which will easily be found in other prescriptivist traditions as well. We will primarily focus on the ideologies 389

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of monocodia (only one code is needed, i.e. the standard dialect), monoglossia (codes should not mix), monooriginy (all language material should originate from the same source), monoverby (one word is better than a multi-​word expression), monosemonymy (one form should only be paired with one meaning and vice versa), and monostylia (only one style is correct, i.e. the formal style), as well as apparent descriptiveness and ideological projection as ideology-​promoting strategies.

4.1.  Erasure and apparent descriptiveness Conservative language ideologies are usually promoted through attempts at erasure or deletion (Gal & Irvine, 1995, p. 974, Irvine & Gal, 2000, p. 38, Machin, 2013, p. 352) of variation. All types of prescriptivism include erasure of unwanted elements from mental representations of legitimate language as a concomitant ideological strategy, with varying degrees in various guides and individual pieces of usage advice. The following is a particularly radical and contradictory example taken from a recent usage guide: (1) Otkako sam dobio sina, ne prođe dan, a da ne čujem kako Borna liči ocu ili majci. Nitko ne kaže sličiti, a isto tako ni nalikovati. (...) Glagol je ličiti stara riječ (…) Imao je nekada mnogo više značenja nego što ih ima danas. Osnovna su mu dva značenja bila biti sličan komu i mazati bojom što, bojiti. Stari hrvatski pisci upotrebljavali su oblike u oba značenja. Danas se u hrvatskom jeziku upotrebljava samo to drugo značenje. Primjerice, možemo ličiti sobu, kuću. (…) Drugo značenje glagola ličiti –​ biti sličan komu odavno se izgubilo u hrvatskom jeziku. Ever since I have had a son, not a day goes by without me hearing that Borna liči [looks like] his father or mother. No one says sličiti or nalikovati. The verb ličiti is an old word (…) It used to have many more meanings than it does today. Its two basic meanings were look like somebody and apply paint on something, paint. Old Croatian writers used the forms in both meanings. In today’s Croatian only this second meaning is used. For example, we can paint a room, a house. (…) The second meaning of the verb ličiti –​ to look like somebody has long disappeared from the Croatian language. Baraban in Ham, et al., 2014, p. 8616 The author promotes the verbs sličiti “look like” and nalikovati “resemble” while proscribing and trying to erase the variant ličiti “look like”. He does so by claiming that “not a day goes by” without someone using a pattern that he also says “has long disappeared” from Croatian –​a curiously paradoxical view which can only be understood if the Croatian language is taken to be synonymous with standard Croatian (with the latter perceived as the only legitimate code), which represents an instance of metalinguistic erasure typical of the ideology of the standard language and traditional prescriptivism. Still, if the variety which the author has in mind is indeed standard Croatian, why does he object to speakers’ using the proscribed form in what is obviously a very informal and private domain of language use (commenting on a child’s resemblance to their parents)? It might be argued that the example points to the presence of the ideology of constant standard language use –​the idea that the standard dialect should be used in both public and private situations, with an ever-​increasing number of extralinguistic domains in which language use should be controlled by prescriptivists. Thus, certain language features are perceived as not only “wrong” in the standard dialect corpus but “wrong” in the “whole of Croatian”. Moreover, such ideological views are often propagated by using the strategy of apparent descriptiveness (Starčević, 2016, p. 76, cf. Eagleton, 1991, p. 19), i.e. erasure is carried out by relying on 390

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seemingly descriptive, non-​modal statements which are deployed to background and hide the prescriptive character of what is ultimately an ideological claim (for example, this verb is not used in Croatian instead of the more explicitly prescriptive this verb should not be used in Croatian, the latter pattern allowing others to challenge the claim more easily).17 Finally, it should be noted that the criticized sense of the verb ličiti is sometimes classified as a Serbianism (for example Brodnjak, 1992, p. 266), which is why it might be stigmatized by prescriptivists in the name of monoglossia and extralinguistic nationalism.

4.2.  Ideology of monocodia Monocodia is the idea that only one linguistic code is needed for successful communication ‒ the code being, of course, the standard dialect. The ideology of monocodia is a fundamental component of the ideology of the standard language. Here, the standard dialect is perceived in notions of “language culture/​cultivation”, as a carefully nurtured code, as well as the most efficient and precise language variety. In opposition, all non-​standard varieties are perceived as something less, not as efficient, not as “cultured/​cultivated” or even completely “uncultured/​uncultivated”, and so forth. While their existence will sometimes be acknowledged and begrudgingly “allowed”, non-​standard language varieties are predominantly (implicitly or explicitly) regarded as less coherent, less valuable, and less legitimate. Nives Opačić, one of Croatia’s best-​known prescriptivists and a former Croatian language lecturer in the University of Zagreb’s Croatian Department, thus says: (2) Čudaci ispadaju oni koji uopće od nekoga traže da se izražava pravilnim standardnim hrvatskim jezikom u javnoj uporabi. Mnogi navode da se možemo sporazumjeti i drukčije. Takvima obično kažem da se možemo sporazumijevati i šutke, jer postoji i govor tijela, znakovi, tzv. neverbalna komunikacija. Možemo se, dakle, sporazumijevati a da i ne otvorimo usta. Those who demand that someone express themself in correct standard Croatian in public use are made out to be weird. Many claim that we can communicate in other ways, too. To those people I usually say that we can also communicate by not speaking at all, because there is also body language, signs, so-​called non-​ verbal communication. We can therefore communicate without even opening our mouths. Glas Koncila 7/​1756, 17 February 2008 In this example from the Catholic weekly Glas Koncila (Voice of the Council)18 Opačić laments the portrayal of self-​appointed guardians of the standard dialect as outliers, valiantly defending the standard and its public use, as if their ideas were not prevalent both in education and the public sphere and as if they were not the most powerful ideology brokers (Blommaert, 1999, p. 9). She tries to be ironic by promoting the idea that communication in a non-​standard code is the same as non-​verbal communication, using the latter as a negative standard of comparison and thus simultaneously stigmatizing both non-​standard varieties and non-​verbal modes of communication. In other words, this promotion of monocodia delegitimizes non-​standard language as incomplete and inappropriate for “serious” communication, as non-​language, and devalues the multimodal nature of spoken interactions, typically accompanied by conventionalized and structured body language, in spite of Opačić’s implicit suggestion of the inferiority of non-​ verbal signs. That non-​verbal layers of human communication are extremely important can be seen when analysing written communication, in which speakers often try to make up for 391

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the lack of body language by using emoticons and emojis, except in the most formal types of discourse. In sharp contrast, it seems that Opačić implies that the only “real” communication is verbal communication in the standard dialect. Monocodia tends to symbolically erase all language varieties except the “cultivated” standard (which is not just any type of standard but the prescriptivists’ idea of the standard) by claiming that it alone is the only legitimate variety for communication, with non-​standard language and non-​verbal layers of communication presented as inferior and unnecessary.

4.3.  Ideology of monoglossia Another mono-​ideology, closely connected to the already mentioned monocodia, is monoglossia (García & Torres-​Guevara, 2010, p. 182, Wardhaugh & Fuller, 2015, pp. 89‒90, 411, Thomas, 1991) ‒ the purist idea that codes should not mix –​primarily languages, but also dialects, styles or any types of language varieties at any language level. This view, in its various forms and often part of the ideology of the standard language, seems to pervade not only the general public’s perceptions of language but also those of professional linguists. While even apologists for prescriptivism will speak of different styles and registers, and will nominally acknowledge the right of non-​standard varieties to exist, they will be adamant that different codes should not mix. Academic linguists (even field sociolinguists!) often behave similarly, for example, when describing a variety, they will also often search for the “real dialect”, vernacular, and such, and will often, if only for the sake of simplicity, ignore various kinds of code-​switching, language and dialect contact, and the basic postulates of linguistics such as “individual languages are the product of language contact” (Langer & Davies, 2005, p. 11). Speakers themselves will also often insist that the “real dialect/​language” should be “pure”, devoid of interferences with other languages, and such. However, this is not what real-​life communication is like and what one typically finds in the field is various instances of code-​switching and code-​mixing. Speakers will sometimes, consciously or subconsciously, avoid mixing codes, but, from a linguistics point of view, monoglossia cannot be presented as the only natural/​spontaneous and hence legitimate way to communicate, though it sometimes is portrayed as such, as will be shown by the following paragraph from Katičić’s 1992 collection of theoretical essays: (3) Važno je na prvom mjestu uočiti da je jezik već po samoj svojoj naravi purističan. Zahtijeva, naime, da se govoreći njime služimo izražajnim sredstvima koja mu pripadaju i koja su u njemu sadržana, a ne kakvim drugima. Jezik je sam po sebi zadavanje i po tome ograničenje i omeđivanje govornih mogućnosti. U svakom je jeziku sadržano određenje toga koje mu govorenje pripada, a koje ne. U svakom se jeziku, bar u načelu, zna što ulazi u nj, a što ostaje izvan njega, i svaki zahtijeva da se govoreći njime ostane unutar njegovih granica, da se odabiru samo takve mogućnosti kakve on predviđa i zadaje. Po tome je stanovit elementarni purizam sastojak same jezične naravi. On je nužnost samoga jezičnoga bića. It is important to note in the first place that language is puristic by its very nature. It demands that, while speaking it, we use those means of expression which belong to it and which are contained in it, while not [using] some other ones. Language in itself is about setting, and therefore limiting and restricting, speech options. Each language contains a determination of what production belongs to it and which does not. In each language, at least in principle, it is clear what is part of it and what remains outside of it, and each requires that, by speaking it, one should remain within its boundaries, [and] that the only options selected are those which 392

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it [the language] specifies and determines. Hence a certain elementary purism is a component of the very nature of language. It is a necessity of the linguistic being itself. Katičić, 1992, p. 56 This is a strong-​ worded manifesto of monoglossia which attributes the author’s own monoglossic ideas to language, in stark disagreement with most speakers’ everyday experience of language, which is why it can be viewed as the strategy of ideological projection, in which someone’s ideas and wishes are projected onto other entities, in this case, onto language, in order to background the real source of the ideology and make its propagation more successful.

4.4.  Ideology of monooriginy Monooriginy can be regarded as a radical subcomponent of the ideology of monoglossia. It is the view that all linguistic features (for example morphemes, words, forms, and meanings) should originate from one, “native”/​original, source ‒ in the case of Croatian, from Slavic (more specifically, Croatian, or what is perceived as Croatian by prescriptivists). In practice, monooriginy is most often a tendency to resist classical borrowing of linguistic features (typically words, but also meanings, and syntactic patterns). Needless to say, consistent monooriginy is untenable in any natural language and purism in practice always functions as mostly haphazard, random, and inconsistent replacement of certain foreign elements in language. For example, after the break-​up of Yugoslavia in 1990–​91 and the establishment of Croatia as a sovereign state, the foreign word pasoš “passport” was largely replaced with the Slavic-​coined putovnica (used as the new official term). Given that language is too complex for anyone to fully control it, purist interventions are typically inconsistent, compare for example the loanwords kompjuter (< English computer) and tastatura ‘keyboard’, whose purist counterparts are, respectively, računalo (derived from računati ‘to count’, where račun ‘account’ is a Romance loanword) and tipkovnica (derived from tipka ‘key’, which is derived from the German tippen ‘to type’). Since Croatian purism has been analysed elsewhere (Thomas, 1978, 1996),19 there is no need to adduce numerous examples of the various purist interventions. However, one more radical example will perhaps be of interest: (4) Imenica lopov mađarska je riječ, a nastavak -​luk je turski. Lopovluk je, dakle, jezična nakaza. The noun lopov [thief] is a Hungarian word, while the suffix -​luk [-​ness] is Turkish. Lopovluk [thievery] is, thus, a linguistic abomination. Bilić, et al., 2011, p. 126 Here we can see an extreme example of chauvinism in language; it is not difficult to imagine what would be or is the non-​linguistic ‒ that is social –​equivalent of this line of reasoning: “people with mixed ancestry are an abomination”, “some groups of people do not belong here”, etc.

4.5.  Ideology of monoverby The ideology of monoverby is the idea that a single word is a better formal expression of a given meaning than a phrase/​multi-​word unit, as in the following example of monoverbal erasure (from the same usage guide as ­example (1)): 393

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(5) Budući da imaju ulogu policajca, te se izbočine obično nazivaju ležeći policajac. Taj je naziv stvoren po uzoru na žargon tuđih jezika –​engl. sleeping policeman, njem. liegender Polizist, tal. poliziotto sdraiato. Hrvatski jezik ima svoju riječ za ležećega policajca, a to je uspornik. Uspornik je bolji od ležećega policajca jer bolje odgovara pojmu koji označuje –​svrha je uspornika usporavati. Uz to, jedna je riječ u nazivu uvijek bolja nego dvije –​jednostavnije je i lakše reći uspornik nego ležeći policajac. (…) Tuđicu ne valja upotrijebiti ako se može upotrijebiti hrvatska riječ pa bi riječ rotor trebalo izbjegavati. Međutim, hrvatski su nazivi pomalo nespretni jer se sastoje od dviju ili triju riječi, a takve izraze govornici uvijek teže zamijeniti jednom riječju. Zbog toga je smišljena nova hrvatska riječ za pojam prometnoga kruga u kojem se susreću ceste –​raskružje. (…) Uvijek je bolje za imenovanje jednoga pojma upotrijebiti jednu riječ, a ne dvije ili više –​narav je jezika takva da je jezik štedljiv i da ne voli trošiti mnogo govornikove snage i vremena ako ne mora. Jedna riječ uvijek troši manje nego dvije. Kućice na autocestama kraj kojih moramo zastati da bismo platili cestarinu, nazivamo naplatnim kućicama. Postoji i nova hrvatska riječ za taj pojam –​naplatnica –​jedna riječ pa zato bolja od dviju postojećih jer jezik ovdje štedi –​manje snage i vremena trošimo izgovarajući jednu riječ, nego dvije. (…) Ako želite reći da se muškarac bori, reći ćete da je borac. A kako biste rekli za ženu koja se bori? Žena-​borac? Ženski borac? Ne, najbolje je upotrijebiti jednu riječ, a to je borkinja. Since they have the role of a policeman, these bumps are usually called ležeći policajac [lit. lying policeman]. This term was coined after other languages’ slang expressions –​ Eng. sleeping policeman, Ger. liegender Polizist, Ital. poliziotto sdraiato. Croatian has its own word for the sleeping policeman, and that is uspornik [speed bump]. Uspornik is better than ležeći policajac because it better fits the concept which it denotes –​the purpose of uspornik is to slow [vehicles] down. Also, one word in a term is always better than two –​it is simpler and easier to say uspornik than ležeći policajac. (...) A foreign word should not be used if a Croatian word can be used so the word rotor [roundabout] should be avoided. However, the Croatian terms are somewhat clumsy because they consist of two or three words, and speakers always tend to replace such expressions by using a single word. This is why a new Croatian word was coined for the concept of the traffic circle in which roads meet –​raskružje. (...) In order to name a single concept, it is always better to use a single word, not two or more –​the nature of language is such that language is economical and does not like to spend much of the speaker’s strength and energy if it does not have to. One word always requires less energy than two. Booths on highways where we need to stop in order to pay the toll are called naplatne kućice [tollbooths]. There is also a new word for this concept –​ naplatnica –​one word, which is why it is better than the existing two because here language economizes –​we spend less energy and time by pronouncing one word rather than two. (…) If you wish to say that a man fights, you will say that he is a borac [fighter]. And what would you call a woman who fights? Žena-​borac [woman-​fighter]? Ženski borac [female fighter]? No, it is best to use one word, and that is borkinja. Ham in Ham, Mlikota, Baraban & Orlić, 2014, pp. 15–​16 The author, Sanda Ham, is also editor-​in-​chief of the Croatian linguistics journal Jezik (Language), which organizes the yearly “best new Croatian word competition”, in which “replacements for unnecessary foreign words have priority.” (Ham 2021, p. 80, original 394

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quotation “natječaj za najbolju novu hrvatsku riječ”and “prednost imaju zamjene za nepotrebne tuđice”). Having in mind the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and given that the cognitive motivation of the image is expected and transparent in both ležeći policajac [lit. lying policeman] and uspornik [lit. that which makes somebody slow down’], a linguist cannot justify Ham’s claim that uspornik is a better way to express the meaning in question. Even Ham, ironically, provides a reasonable explanation for the motivation behind the two-​word expression. In addition, such a strong focus on single words reflects a non-​linguist’s view of language as a collection of words, a perspective which disregards various lower and higher levels of morphosyntactic structure in language and communication, and posits single words as the only legitimate labels for various concepts. The author presents her view as a supposedly objective and rational fact that can be used to save speakers’ energy, which does not hold: once a speaker has gotten used to using a certain form, it can be said that for them it is this very element that is economical, regardless of whether it is a single-​or a multi-​word unit. Ham fails to mention the effort and energy which the speaker should devote and expend in order to control their language production so as to replace each multi-​word expression by a single word –​not just any word, but that promoted by Ham herself, all of which translates into wasting rather than saving energy. Lexicalization typically occurs through either single or multiple words without creating any communicative problems which speakers could not solve for themselves. Furthermore, the strategy of ideological projection and even personification (language is economical and avoids spending our time and energy) is again deployed to hide the real source of the ideology and make the claim come across as more “rational” and “objective”. We can therefore conclude that the main prescriptivist aim of promoting this ideology is not to “save” anyone’s time and bodily energy but to use it as 1) an erasure strategy for the propagation of other ideologies, such as monoglossia (the “inanimate policeman” metaphor is already present in several other languages, which makes it undesirable as a result of language contact, just like another informal and proscribed variant from German, hupser < Ger. hopsen “hop/​jump”20) and 2) presenting prescriptivism as a supposedly rational, objective, scholarly, and neutral activity which is supposed to bring forth a “more systematic/​precise/​economical” variety but in reality ideologically stigmatizes fully functional linguistic features, without any foundation in linguistics.

4.6.  Ideology of monosemonymy The ideology of monosemonymy is the cognitively and practically impossible idea that one form (signifier) should be paired with only one meaning (signified) and vice versa. The term is a blend of monosemy and mononymy, traditionally used in terminological literature (Felber, 1984, p. 183). The ideology is implemented through prescriptivist attempts at erasing polysemy and various types of synomymy, its ostensible “rational” aim to make the standard dialect and communication more precise and efficient. This view is, of course, only possible if one completely disregards the obvious fact that practically any standard dialect sentence can be assigned at least two different interpretations –​precision does not depend on the standardness of the utterance but on the speaker’s and the addressee’s (often multimodal) communicative competence applied to the (extra)linguistic context in particular domains of language use and micro-​situations, all of which has been erased in the following example: (6) Međutim, kako je dvoznačnost protivna naravi književnoga jezika, norma ne smije dopustiti takvo pravilo za koje se unaprijed zna do [sic] može proizvoditi i dvoznačne rečenice. Tada se ne bi znalo što je autor zapravo želio reći. 395

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However, as ambiguity is contrary to the nature of the standard language, the norm must not allow a rule which is known in advance to be able to produce ambiguous sentences as well. In such cases, one would not know what the author really wanted to say. Babić, 1995, p. 180 More specifically, if a certain element’s form is perceived as problematic, mononymic erasure is adopted to eliminate synonymy –​only one form is portrayed as legitimate while others are presented as unnecessary/​redundant. In the following example lexical synonymy is criticized by offering a curious perspective from which “language richness” is cultivated by eliminating language variation. In addition, variation is stigmatized by pseudo-​rational and pseudo-​scholarly claims that synonymy is a psycholinguistic burden, ignoring speakers’ everyday use of the words under attack. Finally, also erased is the fact that in many cases full synonymy does not obtain due to differences in collocations, register, connotations, and such: (7) Eto u čemu je bogatstvo jezično: da za svaki pojam, za svaku govornu potrebu jezik ima jednu, ali dobru riječ. Druga koja u potpunosti isto kaže samo opterećuje naše pamćenje. Zato su jezični balast riječi dozvoliti, efikasan, elan, kreator, produkcija, pendžer, peškir, (šugaman), špajza uz naše lijepe riječi dopustiti, uspješan, (djelotvoran), polet, stvaralac, proizvodnja, prozor, ručnik, smočnica. This is what language richness is about: [about] the language having [only] one –​ good –​word for every concept, for every production necessity. Another [word] which expresses exactly the same [meaning] only burdens our memory. This is why the words dozvoliti, efikasan, elan, kreator, produkcija, pendžer, peškir, (šugaman), špajza are linguistic ballast, as opposed to our beautiful words dopustiti, uspješan, (djelotvoran), polet, stvaralac, proizvodnja, prozor, ručnik, smočnica. Babić, 1990, p. 65 Brozović (1998, pp. 166–​ 167) also refers to synonyms derived from Serbian as “a completely superfluous burden”, dismissing claims about their enriching a language as (rhetorical) “gimmicks” and arbitrarily proclaiming them to be “non-​functional”, again based on unrealistic projections of total synonymy, leaving us to wonder why and how Croatian is different from other, “developed, elaborated, and rich languages”: (8) Tu bi zadržavanje srpskih oblika bilo posve suvišno opterećenje –​to jest dvostrukost u kojoj bi obje dublete imale posve istu značenjsku i stilsku vrijednost, što ne pogoduje normi. Smicalice o tome kako i takve dvostrukosti “obogaćuju” jezik zaista su samo smicalice: razvijeni, izgrađeni i bogati jezici nisu se “bogatili” na taj način. (…) sam [je] smisao svakoga standarda u uklanjanju nefunkcionalnih dvostrukosti i višestrukosti, u jeziku i svagdje drugdje. In such cases, retaining the Serbian forms would be a completely superfluous burden –​that is, a doubleness in which both doublets would have the exact same semantic and stylistic value, which is not favourable for the norm. Gimmicks about how such doublets too “enrich” the language are really just gimmicks: developed, elaborated, and rich languages were not “enriched” in this way. (…) the whole point of any standard is to eliminate non-​functional doublets and multiple forms, in language and everywhere else. Brozović, 1998, pp. 166–​167 396

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It is also difficult to understand how one decides what exactly is “non-​functional” in language. Moreover, arguing in favour of removing “non-​functional” variation begs the question of what kind of extralinguistic erasure “everywhere else” is envisaged and promoted here. Morphological/​morphosyntactic synomymy is also perceived as problematic: the nominative form of the noun kći (daughter) should not be kćer (Opačić, 2015, p. 136) or kćerka (Blagus Bartolec et al., 2016, p. 92); only vratâ is acceptable as the genitive plural form of vrata (door), not vratiju (Pavešić, 1971, Bilić et. al., 2011, p. 274); the latter form is however accepted in Barić et al., 1997, p. 141, which again goes to show that language homogeneity is impossible (cf. Lyons, 1981/​1995, p. 24) both pragmatically –​on the level of language use –​and metapragmatically, on the level of language codification, in standard dialects. Similarly, Markova sestra ‘Marko’s sister/​a sister of Marko’s’ should be used instead of sestra od Marka (cf. Opačić, 2015, p. 100). Conversely, if the meaning of an otherwise “legitimate” form is deemed to be “wrong”, monosemic erasure is carried out in order to eliminate polysemy as only-​one-​meaning-​per-​form is promoted. A case in point is one of the most notorious proscriptions in Croatia: pričati vs govoriti (speak). As the verb pričati is increasingly being used to mean “speak”, not only “narrate, tell”, many prescriptivists see this semantic/​metonymic extension as a linguistic problem, a view consequently endorsed by some members of the general public as well: (9) Pričajte jeftinije! (mame nas novi operateri u svoju mrežu). On tako dobro priča engleski (hvale ljudi vješta govornika). Kako vidimo, glagol pričati izbacio je i glagol govoriti i glagol razgovarati. Pričati znači usmeno kazivati, opisivati kakav događaj, pripovijedati, razgovarati o čemu, a glagol govoriti znači imati sposobnost prenošenja poruke govorom, no ta se sposobnost ne mora uvijek i ostvariti. Tako je primjer: On dobro priča engleski; zapravo trebalo reći: On dobro govori engleski; jer se htjelo reći kako on taj jezik dobro zna, može se njime dobro služiti, no ne i da mu taj jezik izlazi iz usta od 0 do 24 sata. (...) Talk [Cro. pričajte] cheaper! (thus new providers lure us into their network). He talks [Cro. priča] English so well (people praise a skilled speaker). As we can see, the verb pričati [talk] has eliminated both the verb govoriti [speak] and the verb razgovarati [talk, speak]. Pričati [tell] means to tell orally, to describe an event, to narrate, to talk about something, and the verb govoriti [speak] means to have the ability to convey a message through speech, but this ability does not always have to be realized. Thus the example: He talks [Cro. priča] English well; should have been expressed as: He speaks [Cro. govori] English well; because what was meant was that he knows the language well, he can use it well, not that the language is coming out of his mouth 24/​7. (...) Opačić, 2015, p. 101 Monosemonymic ideals, long found in traditional language planning (cf. the analysis of French grammars by Poplack et al., 2015, p. 15) and typically presented as rational, objective, and scholarly, are promoted in the name of clarity and cognitive order. However, just like the ideology of monoverby, in Croatian prescriptivism they are often used as a strategy for the promotion of other, from a conservative point of view, “more fundamental” ideologies. These include the ideology of the source language (features transferred into the target language should not differ from the ones found in the source language, for example source language meanings, forms, and word stress should be retained in their “pure” state),21 the ideology of tradition (the new 397

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meaning of the verb pričati is a relatively recent development) and, above all, the monoglossic ideology (dozvoliti, efikasan, etc. are all viewed as foreign, non-​Croatian, with the new meaning of pričati also said to be a result of Serbian influence on Croatian, see for example Starčević, 2016, p. 78–​80). These ideologies are in turn propagated with the aim of stigmatizing, among others, members of other ethnic and national groups, speakers of regional varieties, speakers with lower levels of formal education, and minorities at large.

4.7.  Ideology of monostylia The ideology of monostylia is the idea that only one style of the standard dialect –​the formal one –​is legitimate in public discourse. The expression of this view ranges from seemingly neutral to moderate and more extreme judgemental portrayals. Informal and conversational language is demoted as secondary, of inferior quality, and even (jokingly) paired up with mental disorders. Its use in the public sphere is regarded as a lack of good manners and essentialistically matched with outlandish and inappropriate extralinguistic behaviour: (10) U razgovornom jeziku (koji nije normiran) može se reći i drukčije (kupaona, radiona itd.), no to može biti samo pričuva pravilnim oblicima. In colloquial language (which is not standardized) one can say it differently (kupaona [bathroom], radiona [workshop], etc.), but these can only be a reserve for correct forms. Opačić, 2015, p. 156 (11) Likovi koji se također čuju –​cvjećarka, cvjećarna –​pripadaju razgovornom stilu, pa neka ondje i ostanu. Kad se želimo izraziti biranijim stilom, izaberimo najbolje! The other forms which can also be heard –​cvjećarka, cvjećarna [florist, florist’s] –​ belong in colloquial style, so let them stay there. When we wish to express ourselves in a more sophisticated style, let us choose the best! Opačić, 2015, p. 52 (12) Zato, ako ne želite podleći (uglavnom neznalačkoj) većini, držite se pravilna oblika shizofrenija, shizofrenik i sl., a razne šizike ostavite razgovornom jeziku. Therefore, if you do not wish to succumb to the (mostly ignorant) majority, stick to the correct form shizofrenija [schizophrenia], shizofrenik [schizophrenic], and leave the various šizike [schizos] to colloquial language. Opačić, 2015, p. 281 (13) No, dakle, odnos prema jeziku je za mene odnos prema svemu. Odnos prema pojavama oko, koje me okružuju, odnos prema ljudima koji me okružuju, žaljenje, šaljenje, veselje, kako god okrenete, sve je zapravo u tom jeziku. I sve se može izreći tim jezikom ako se čovjek želi malo potruditi pa da izdiferencira te svoje iskaze, usmene i pisane, jer najgore je kad su, kad su svi isti, a kod nas se to upravo i događa. Kad vi slušate recimo televiziju, oni svi govore kao što govore u svojoj kuhinji. Razgovorni jezik se rabi. Ja nemam ništa protiv razgovornog jezika, sad to, ali to je otprilike kao da dođete na premijeru u kazalište u nekakvim gumenim

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čizmama do bedara, jel’, jer ste baš s ribičije došli, vidite tako. Ne ide jedno s drugim, znate. Nema uopće, nema uopće zapravo jezičnoga bontona jer se misli da toga i inače nema. Međutim, zašto ne bi bilo, ako ima svakog drugog bontona, ako ga ima, zašto ne bi bilo i jezičnog bontona? Therefore, for me the relationship to language is the relationship to everything. The relationship to phenomena around, which surround me, the relationship to people who surround me, grief, merriment, joy, however you look at it, everything is in language. And everything can be expressed by this language if one is ready to put in a bit of effort by diversifying one’s utterances, spoken and written, because it is the worst when, when everyone is the same, and this is exactly what goes on in Croatia. When you listen to, say, television, they all speak like they do in their kitchens. Colloquial language is used. I have nothing against colloquial language, now that, that is roughly like coming to a premiere in a theatre in some rubber boots up to your thighs, right, because you have just been fishing, like that. One does not go with the other, you know. There is hardly, no language etiquette at all because it is believed that there is no such thing anyway. However, why wouldn’t there be [such a thing], if there are all other types of etiquette, if they exist, why wouldn’t there be language etiquette? Croatian Radio-​Television’s radio program Jezik i predrasude (Language and Prejudice), 15 December 2015 Considering ­example 13, it is interesting to note that very few people go to the theatre wearing rubber boots, but many more use less formal and informal language in public discourse, which makes this comparison of everyday linguistic production with radical extralinguistic fashion choices inaccurate and mystifying rather than “commonsensical” or “scholarly”. Also, by opting for a binary “all-​or-​nothing” type of erasure, Opačić claims that in public discourse all speakers speak in the same way. She thus postulates only two styles: the most formal style of the standard dialect and the very informal private, or what she dubs “kitchen” style, instead of acknowledging the full continuum of personal, local, regional, etc. standard and non-​standard varieties. This is seen as negative, but if all speakers speak the way they do “in their kitchens”, how can such different instances of production by various speakers be the same? “Kitchen languages” around Croatia are extremely diverse, a fact of which the author is surely aware. Such hypothetical production, in which speakers use their full-​on “kitchen styles” in public discourse –​which they normally do not do –​would in fact celebrate the diversity of Croatian and would go against the supposed homogenization and uniformity which Opačić complains about. The idea that “everyone is the same” could be expected if the opposite were true, that is, if everyone used the same rigid standard style of the standard dialect (to which cause and sameness the author has dedicated years of prescriptivist advice and never presents it in a negative light), not when speakers use local dialects. Still, in order to propagate monostylia, Opačić decides to erase these simple facts and employs the discoursal strategy of promoting uniformity while claiming to be criticizing it, all the while purporting to be promoting language diversity, even resorting to the classic “I-​have-​nothing-​ against-​X-​but” trope for good measure.22 In the following three examples (14–​16) the authors of another usage guide proscribe some metaphorical extensions of certain prepositions while prescribing some others, apparently because the criticized variants sound more informal, though this is not stated as the reason:

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(14) Taj prijedlog [ispred] u standardnome jeziku ne treba upotrebljavati ni u vremenskome značenju [In the standard language, this preposition [ispred] [‘in front of ’] should not be used in the temporal sense either]: Proljeće je ispred ljeta. > Proljeće je prije ljeta. [‘Spring is before summer.’] Hudeček et al., 2012, p. 112 (15) Prijedlog pod ne treba upotrebljavati za izricanje vremenske povezanosti ili kakve popratne okolnosti [The preposition pod [‘under’] should not be used to express a temporal link or a circumstance]: pod nastavom > za vrijeme nastave/​tijekom nastave [‘in class, during the class’] pod uvjetom > uz uvjet [‘on condition’] pod prijetnjom > uz prijetnju [‘under threat’] Hudeček et al., 2012, p. 117 (16) Pred je mjesni prijedlog i ne treba ga upotrebljavati u vremenskome značenju [Pred [‘in front of ’] is a preposition of place and should not be used in the temporal sense]: pred godinu dana > prije godinu dana [‘a year ago’] pred odlazak na studij > prije odlaska na studij [‘before going to university’] Primjer je dobre uporabe, tj. uporabe u mjesnome značenju: [An example of good use, i.e. use in the spatial sense, is:] Stani pred prodavaonicu. [‘Stand in front of the store.’] Hudeček et al., 2012, p. 118

5. Conclusion The mono-​ideologies presented in this chapter can be said to be fractally recursive (Gal & Irvine, 2019, p. 137 et passim), as they repeat the same opposition (“only one X is needed”) on different (extra)linguistic levels23: only one socially constructed language –​Croatian –​should ideally be used in the public sphere, without mixing with other languages or dialects (monoglossia), with all language material and features ideally originating from the same source (monooriginy). Within Croatian, only one code/​dialect –​standard Croatian (presented as the only “rounded” and legitimate variety of Croatian) –​should be used, with no need for other codes/​varieties (monocodia). Within the standard dialect, the formal style is preferred, without mixing with less formal styles (monostylia). Within the lexis of formal standard Croatian, only one form should be paired with one meaning and vice versa (monosemonymy), and a single word is perceived as better than a phrase/​multi-​word unit (monoverby). In order to promote a more sustainable and inclusive type of language planning in Croatia we advocate a more realistic view of all kinds of production, both standard and non-​standard. In other words, we believe that all demands in language policy and planning should be based on linguistics, which also includes recognizing orderly heterogeneity, that is structured variation as the basic characteristic of all language competence and use (Weinreich, et al., 1968, pp. 100–​101). This is why instead of the traditional uniform/​ homogeneous/​ invariable/​ same-​ for-​ all standard dialect we posit the concept of the personalized standard,

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which is the result of (1) a unique order and manner of acquiring individual languages, dialects, styles, and varieties, (2) contact between these codes in the person’s mind, and (3) the speaker’s individual metapragmatic capability and desire to control or not to control the overlapping or separation of codes in various situations of use. Starčević, et al., 2019, p. 38 In this chapter, we have tried to present a brief overview of some of the prescriptivist ideas in Croatia. As shown, these ideas are still very present indeed, not only among the general public, exposed to prescriptivist usage advice, but also in academia, among professional linguists, especially, though not exclusively, Croatian-​language specialists. Changes are however infiltrating and even the most outspoken proponents of prescriptivism and traditional standardology often begrudgingly admit that Croatian linguists are now divided into two currents ‒ the prescriptivist bloc and the anti-​prescriptivist one. Prescriptivism is therefore not the only game in town anymore ‒ despite common denunciations of anti-​prescriptivists as promoting “anarchy”24 or being “against the standard language”25, “antinormativists” (Bašić, 2017) and “anational” (Matasović, 2020, p. 47). In our view, the goal of Croatian anti-​prescriptivism in the future will have to be a further promotion of modern scholarly and progressive stances among younger generations of linguists and in the public sphere, as well as challenging and minimizing prescriptivism and the ideology of the standard language as normalized and supposedly “neutral” perspectives in academia and general education.

Notes 1 This chapter contains some of the previously published analyses from the authors’ 2019 Croatian-​ language book Jeziku je svejedno [Language could care less]. We would like to thank Morana Lukač, Robin Straaijer, and the anonymous reviewer for many valuable suggestions and constructive feedback on the earlier versions of this chapter. 2 Naturally, the process of language standardization is, in a broad sense, always political, even when no states are involved (for example, when a field linguist is helping a small community to start writing and teaching their own language). 3 In an even wider sense and on a higher meta-​level, even insistence on descriptivism or anti-​prescriptivism in linguistics can be viewed and classified as prescriptive (cf. for example Cook, 2003, p. 18). 4 See for example Thomas, 1996, p. 51. For other instances of early purism in old Croatian dictionaries cf. Vuletić, 2017. 5 The Illyrian Movement was a Croatian and wider South-​Slav political movement in the first half of the nineteenth century, which emerged in Croatia (then part of the Habsburg Monarchy) and envisaged a form of wider South-​Slav cultural and eventual political unity, see for example Greenberg, 2010. 6 Some of the important dates are the Vienna Literary Agreement (1850), Đuro Daničić’s (1825–​1882) editorship of the Academy Dictionary (1880–​1976), the first edition of Tomo Maretić’s grammar (1899) and Broz-​Iveković’s dictionary (1901). However, remnants of the old Illyrian conception of literary Croatian, for example in orthography, were present in practice up until World War I. 7 In the quest for South-​Slav unity, the Croat side was usually more Yugoslav-​oriented, while the Serbian side’s conception was usually more expansionist and Serb-​nationalist (cf. Vuk’s “all Štokavians are Serbs”). 8 For Maretić’s contradictory views, see for example Thomas, 1996, p. 58. 9 Its influence extends to the present, cf. the homage title “Branič jezika standardnoga” [The guardian of the standard language] (Matasović, 2020). 10 A non-​exhaustive list of twentieth-​and twenty-​first-​century Croatian prescriptivist usage guides is available at http://​ihjj.hr/​stran​ica/​jezi​cni-​savj​eti/​27/​ 11 See also his 2000 interview by Miljenko Jergović: http://​postj​ugo.filg.uj.edu.pl/​baza/​texts_​disp​lay. php?id=​37 12 In open access at: www.sand​orf.hr/​adm​inis​trac​ija/​down​load​pdf/​2020​1222​0604​200.jezi​ku_​j​e_​sv​ejed​ no_​s​ando​rf_​2​019.pdf

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Anđel Starčević, Mate Kapović, and Daliborka Sarić 13 This is not only typical of anti-​prescriptivism but also applies in other social domains. For instance, criticism of religion will also almost automatically be perceived as connected to the same political position (being “anti-​Croat”, etc.). 14 See also Kapović, 2021 for a response. 15 For an overview of political conservatism, compare for example Honderich, 2005 and Robin, 2011. 16 The authors would like to thank Alexander D. Hoyt for his excellent suggestions concerning the translations of the Croatian examples in this chapter. Of course, all errors or imprecisions remain our own. 17 Another instance of the same strategy and type of erasure: “Često se umjesto glagola počešati rabi glagol koji ne postoji u hrvatskome jeziku –​posvrbjeti.” (Bilić et al. 2011, p. 36) (Often, instead of the verb počešati (scratch) a verb which does not exist in the Croatian language is used –​posvrbjeti. 18 Cf. also Glas Koncila’s extremely positive stance towards the latest attempt at drafting and passing a Croatian Language Act: www.glas-​konc​ila.hr/​za-​zakon-​o-​hrvats​kom-​jez​iku-​matic​ina-​oblj​etni​cka-​ luk​avst​ina/​?fbc​lid=​IwAR2N49​QDsl​V1dM​rAdO​3A65​LrVf​FkxL​yUR-​RTZLDs​CjA9​K2nk​9H1s​ QgSG​_​f4 19 See also Turk & Opašić, 2008 for an overview of Croatian purism. 20 https://​hjp.zna​nje.hr/​; www.duden.de/​rech​tsch​reib​ung/​hop​sen; www.collin​sdic​tion​ary.com/​dic​tion​ ary/​ger​man-​engl​ish/​hop​sen; 21 The opposite view is, of course, the ideology of the target language, i.e. the belief that transferred features should adapt to the rules of the receiving language. 22 Finally, the impossibility of a “perfect” and “pure” standard production advocated by prescriptivists is shown in the (very language-​conscious) author’s use of a prefixed perfective form, izdiferencirati ‘diversify’, of what is originally a biaspectual verb (diferencirati), a morphological process she herself stigmatizes in her usage guide as redundant/​unnecessary (Opačić, 2015, pp. 142, 149). 23 “In fractals, the relation between or among the more encompassing terms is recapitulated among the more specific ones. The same difference is reproduced at each level.” (Gal & Irvine, 2019, p. 130) 24 https://​www.mat​ica.hr/​vije​nac/​672/​jez​iku-​nije-​sveje​dno-​29742/​ 25 https://​www.vecer​nji.hr/​kult​ura/​hrvats​kom-​nar​odu-​nije-​sveje​dno-​ne-​moze-​biti-​ni-​jez​iku-​1364​151

Prescriptivist sources Babić, S. (1990). Hrvatska jezikoslovna čitanka [A Croatian linguistic reader]. Globus. Babić, S. (1995) Hrvatski jučer i danas [Croatian yesterday and today]. Školske novine. Bilić, M., Donkov, M., Fišer, A., Grčević, R., Ružić, J., Sinković, B., Tomljenović, A., & Ujević, I. (2011). Lektorska bilježnica [The lector’s notebook]. Hrvatski radio. Blagus Bartolec, G., Hudeček, L., Jozić, Ž., Ivanković, I. M., & Mihaljević, M. (2016). 555 jezičnih savjeta [555 usage tips]. Institut za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje. Brodnjak, V. (1992). Razlikovni rječnik srpskog i hrvatskog jezika [A differential dictionary of Serbian and Croatian]. Školske novine. Brozović, D. (2005). Prvo lice jednine [First person singular]. Matica hrvatska. Ham, S. (2021). Poziv za sudjelovanje u 16. kolu natječaja za najbolju novu hrvatsku riječ, Šreterova natječaja. Jezik: časopis za kulturu hrvatskoga književnog jezika, 68(2), 80. https://​hrcak.srce.hr/​cla​nak/​ 383​331 Ham, S., Mlikota, J., Baraban, B., & Orlić, A. (2014). Hrvatski jezični savjeti [Croatian usage advice]. Školska knjiga. Hudeček, L., Matković, M. & I. Ćutuk (2012). Jezični priručnik Coca-​Cole HBC Hrvatska [Coca Cola HBC Croatia’s usage guide] (2nd ed.). Coca-​Cola HBC Hrvatska d.o.o. Opačić, N. (2015). Reci mi to kratko i jasno [Tell it to me briefly and clearly] (2nd ed.). Znanje. Pavešić, S. (1971). Jezični savjetnik s gramatikom [Usage guide with grammar]. Matica hrvatska.

References Anić, V. (1998). Jezik i sloboda [Language and freedom]. Matica hrvatska. Anić, V. (2009). Naličje kalupa. Sabrani spisi. [The reverse of the mould. Collected essays], Ed. by Ivan Marković. Disput.

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Prescriptivism in Croatia Barić, E., Lončarić, M., Malić, D., Pavešić, S., Peti, M., Zečević, V., & Znika, M. (1997). Hrvatska gramatika [Croatian grammar]. (2nd ed.). Školska knjiga. Bašić, N. (2017). Hrvatski na razmeđi normiranja i samonormiranja. Jezik, 64(3-​4), 152–​155. Available at: https://​hrcak.srce.hr/​190​970 Blommaert, J. (1999). The debate is open. In J. Blommaert (Ed.), Language Ideological Debates (pp. 1–​38). De Gruyter Mouton. Brozović, D. (1998). Aktualna kolebanja hrvatske jezične norme u slavenskome i europskome svjetlu. Jezik, 45(5), 161–​200. Cook, V. (2003). Applied Linguistics. Oxford University Press. Eagleton, T. (1991) Ideology: An Introduction. Verso. Felber, H. (1984). Terminology manual. General Information Programme, UNISIST. UNESCO–​ International Information Centre for Terminology (Infoterm). Gal, S., & Irvine, J. T. (1995). The boundaries of languages and disciplines: How ideologies construct difference. Social Research, 62(4), 967–​1001. Gal, S., & Irvine, J. T. (2019). Signs of difference: language and ideology in social life, Cambridge University Press. García, O., & Torres-​Guevara, R. (2010). Monoglossic ideologies and language policies in the education of U.S. Latinas/​os. In E. Murillo, S. Villenas, R. Trinidad Galván, J. Sánchez Muñoz, C. Martínez, & M. Machado-​Casas (Eds.), Handbook of latinos and education: Research, theory and practice (pp. 182–​194). Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah. Greenberg, M. L. (2010). The Illyrian Movement: A Croatian Vision of South Slavic Unity. In J. A. Fishman & O. García (Eds.), Handbook of language and ethnic identity: The success-​failure continuum in language identity efforts (Vol. 2, pp. 364–​380). Oxford University Press. Haugen, E. (1962). Schizoglossia and the Linguistic Norm. In E. Haugen (1972). The Ecology of Language: Essays by Einar Haugen (pp. 148–​158) Stanford University Press. Honderich, T. (2005). Conservatism: Burke, Nozick, Bush, Blair?. Pluto Press. Irvine, J. T. & Gal, S. (2000). Language ideology and linguistic differentiation. In P. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: Ideologies, polities, and identities (pp. 35–​84). School of American Research Press. Kalogjera, D. (1965) O odnosu regionalni dijalekat –​standardni jezik. [On the Relationship Between Regional Dialect and Standard Language]. Jezik 13(1), 27–​30. Kalogjera, D. (1978). On Serbo-​Croatian Prescriptivism. Folia Slavica 1, 388–​399. Kalogjera, D. (1989) Some aspects of prescriptivism in Serbo-​Croatian. In M. Radovanović (Ed.), Yugoslav General Linguistics (pp. 163–​186). John Benjamins Publishing Company. Kapović, M. (2011). Čiji je jezik? [Who does language belong to?]. Algoritam. Kapović, M. (2013). Jezik i konzervativizam [Language and conservatism]. In M. Kolanović (Ed.), Komparativni postsocijalizam: slavenska iskustva (pp. 391‒400). Zagrebačka slavistička škola. Kapović, M. (2021). Osvrt na osvrt: o jezičnoj politici i objektivnosti [Review of a review: On language policy and objectivity]. Suvremena lingvistika, 47(91), 103‒118. Katičić, R. (1992). Novi jezikoslovni ogledi [New linguistic essays] (2nd ed.). Školska knjiga. Kordić, S. (2010). Jezik i nacionalizam [Language and nationalism]. Durieux. Langer, N. & Davies, W. (2005). An Introduction to Linguistic Purism. In N. Langer & W. Davies (Eds.), Linguistic Purism in the Germanic Languages (pp. 1–​17). Walter de Gruyter. Lyons, J. (1981/​1995). Language and linguistics. Cambridge University Press. Machin, D. (2013). What is multimodal critical discourse studies? Critical Discourse Studies, 10(4), 347–​355. Matasović, R. (2019). Anđel Starčević, Mate Kapović i Daliborka Sarić (2019) Jeziku je svejedno, Sandorf, Zagreb. Suvremena lingvistika, 45(88), 279–​284. Matasović, R. (2020). Branič jezika standardnoga [The guardian of the standard language]. Jezik 67(2–​ 3), 41–​59. Matasović, R. (2021). Ideološki i drugi vrijednosni stavovi o jeziku: odgovor Mati Kapoviću. Suvremena lingvistika, 47(92), 351–​354. Milroy, J. (2001). Language ideologies and the consequences of standardization. Journal of Sociolinguistics, 5(4), 530‒555. Milroy, J. (2007). The ideology of the standard language. In C. Llamas, L. Mullany, & P. Stockwell (Eds.), The Routledge companion to sociolinguistics (pp. 133–​139). Routledge. Milroy, J., & Milroy, L. (2012). Authority in language: investigating standard English (4th ed.). Routledge. Poplack, S., Jarmasz, L. G., Dion, N., & Rosen, N. (2015). Searching for standard French: The construction and mining of the Recueil historique des grammaires du français, Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 1(1), 13‒55.

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Anđel Starčević, Mate Kapović, and Daliborka Sarić Robin, C. (2011). The reactionary mind. Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin. Oxford University Press. Starčević, A. (2016). Govorimo hrvatski ili ‘hrvatski’: standardni dijalekt i jezične ideologije u institucionalnom diskursu [We speak Croatian or ‘Croatian’: The standard dialect and language ideologies in institutional discourse]. Suvremena lingvistika, 42(81), 67‒103. Starčević, A., Kapović, M., & Sarić, D. (2019). Jeziku je svejedno [Language could care less]. Sandorf. www.sand​orf.hr/​adm​inis​trac​ija/​down​load​pdf/​2020​1222​0604​200.jezi​ku_​j​e_​sv​ejed​no_​s​ando​rf_​2​ 019.pdf Starčević, A., Kapović, M., & Sarić, D. (forthcoming). Croatia’s language ideologies and language activism. In C. Cutler, U. Röyneland & Z. Vrzić (Eds.), Language activism: the role of the scholar in linguistic reform and social change. Cambridge University Press. Thomas, G. (1978). The origin and nature of lexical purism in the Croatian variant of Serbo-​Croatian. Canadian Slavonic Papers, 20(3), 405–​420. Thomas, G. (1991). Linguistic purism. Longman. Thomas, G. (1996). The impact of purism on the development of the Croatian standard language in the nineteenth century. Fluminensia, 8(1–​2), 49–​62. Turk, M., & Opašić, M. (2008). Linguistic borrowing and purism in the Croatian language. Suvremena lingvistika, 65(1), 73–​88. Von Polenz, P. (2021). Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, Band I. Einführung, Grundbegriffe 14. bis 16. Jahrhundert (3rd ed.). De Gruyter Mouton. Vuletić, N. (2017). Croatian in the Mediterranean context: language contacts in the Early Modern Croatian lexicography. Lexicographica, 33, 69‒93. Wardhaugh, R., & Fuller, J. M. (2015). An introduction to sociolinguistics (7th ed.). Wiley Blackwell. Watts, R. (2010). The ideology of dialect in Switzerland. In J. Blommaert (Ed.), Language ideological debates (pp. 67–​104). Mouton De Gruyter. Weinreich, U., Labov, W., & Herzog, M. I. (1968). Empirical foundations for a theory of language change. In W. P. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel (Eds.), Directions for historical linguistics. (pp. 95–​195). University of Texas Press.

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24 STANDARDIZATION, PRESCRIPTIVISM AND DIGLOSSIA How acceptable is normalized Breton to native speakers? Gary D. Manchec German*

1. Introduction If it is theoretically true that all languages are linguistically equal, the speakers of the world’s languages certainly do not all share the same social, economic, political or cultural statuses or privileges. This chapter is based on the premise that the terms “language”, “dialect” or “variety” cannot be attributed equally to the world’s idioms as if they had universal applications. Consequently, the idea of “saving” an endangered minority “language” by normalizing its grammar and modernizing its lexicon with the hope that this will arm future generations of speakers to compete with the prestigious language of a powerful nation-​state can be doomed to failure. I argue in this chapter that, unless great care is taken, adopting this strategy can result in the replacement of traditional dialects with a recently codified, unified standard which can be perceived by natural dialect speakers as totally foreign. Breton, a Celtic language closely related to Welsh and Cornish, is a case in point. Classified by UNESCO as “severely endangered”, it is still the mother tongue of approximately 175,000–​ 200,000 inhabitants of Western Brittany, France.1 Nevertheless, the bad news is that according to Broudic’s 2018 TMO survey, 79 per cent of these are over 60 years of age and 72 per cent are retired (Broudic, 2018, slides 14, 16). Secondly, knowing one’s language and choosing to speak it are two entirely different matters. The number who actually used Breton daily was estimated by Broudic (2007) to be around 34,000. Today, this survey shows that 5 per cent of the estimated 207,000 (learners and native speakers combined) use the language every day. This amounts to around 10,500 people. A further 8 per cent (16,500 people) claim to use it at least once a week.2 On the other hand, this same study shows that the number of young learners of the new Breton secular standard (henceforth NBSS; see type-​1 learners, Section 4) has doubled and is around 4 per cent. On the face of it, this is encouraging news. On the downside, however, as intimated above, this new form of Breton is generally so distant from the inherited varieties that DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-27

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communication between the generations is often next to impossible. This brings us back to the question implied above: is the new Breton prescriptive standard a case of language “revival” or language “replacement”? I want to state from the outset that the point here is not to criticize the young NBSS speakers who have studied the new language with great diligence and are now fluent. Their passion and dedication are thoroughly admirable. Indeed, for reasons that lie outside the scope of this chapter, it is important to state that most older speakers have adamantly refused to speak Breton to their children or grandchildren arguing that it is “for their own good”. In many respects, this new model is the only one available for many learners today and, on the positive side, learning Breton is increasingly popular. Nevertheless, the consequence has been the rise of a form of diglossia that has never existed in the history of Breton, at least under its present form. By “diglossia” I mean the sociolinguistic situation by which a prestigious variety of language or “high” language (Ferguson, 1959) is judged to be linguistically superior to a colloquial or a “low” variety of the same language. Unlike Ferguson, however, I also consider that, in the context of Brittany, a “low language”, i.e. dialectal Breton, can also be genetically different from the high language which, in this case, is French (for definitions of “acrolect”, “basilect/​ badume” see below).

1.1.  Standardization and prescriptivism The concepts of “standardization” and “prescriptivism” are sometimes confused. Trudgill (2011) defines “standardization” as a “process” comprising three separate stages: the first is “language determination” which he defines as the “decisions which have to be taken concerning the selection of particular languages or varieties of language for particular purposes in the society or nation in question”. The second is “ ‘codification’, the process whereby a language variety acquires a publicly recognised and fixed form. The results of codification are usually enshrined in dictionaries and grammar books”. Finally, the third stage is “stabilisation”, the “process whereby a formerly diffuse variety… undergoes focussing and takes on a more fixed and stable form” (Trudgill, 2011, p. 1; also see Hudson, 1991, pp. 32–​34). “Prescriptive”, on the other hand, is defined by The Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics (1997, p. 293) as “a (grammar, rule) which aims to ‘prescribe’ what is judged to be correct rather than to ‘describe’ actual language. Hence, in practice, one that may defy usage.” The OED defines it 1. a. That prescribes or directs; giving definite, precise directions or instructions. In later use, frequently spec.: that lays down rules of usage. In Linguistics: opposed to descriptive (see DESCRIPTIVE adj. 3b). See also normative grammar n. at NORMATIVE adj. and n … (for further development of this definition see Beal, 2018, p. 1). What I believe is lacking in these definitions, however, is the social dimension of language use. Prescriptivism presupposes that certain features are “correct” while others are “incorrect” but, in fact, the prescriptive rules are often determined in accordance with the variety and speech habits of powerful socio-​economic and cultural elites (see Section 2.5). Thus, prescriptivism is not necessarily determined qualitatively in relation to any justifiable linguistic criteria per se. In eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century England, for instance, codified grammars, pronunciations, grammars and lexicons were described as reflecting the speech of “polite” society while the slightest deviation from this model was reflective of “the vulgar” (Dobson, 1968; Beal, 1999). Despite the condemnation of such views by modern linguists, these attitudes are so deeply engrained in the minds of formally educated people, that these judgements still permeate our understanding of language with language teachers being trained to drill prescriptively determined rules into the minds of young people. Consciously or unconsciously, and also 406

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quite understandably, language planners apply similar strategies in their didactic strategies to defend threatened languages. In the introduction to her The Development of Standard English 1300–​1800, Wright makes the highly pertinent remark that “prescriptivism tends to follow, rather than precede, standardization, so that by the time a grammarian tells us what we should be doing, we have already been doing it (in certain contexts) for centuries: prescriptivism cannot be a cause of standardisation” (Wright, 2000, p. 3). In my view, this also applies to Breton, although I shall argue that, ultimately, the invention of a Breton prescriptive standard model is largely in reaction to the omnipresent and dominant French prescriptive model that has been imposed by the French state over the centuries. The history of the standardisation of Breton is thus a multifaceted process which occurred at least at two levels: • the first is the result of a long period of codification by the Catholic church since the Middle Ages (Section 2.4 Ecclesiastical standard); • the second phase has occurred since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and particularly, during the twentieth century, i.e. “deliberate language planning” (Trudgill, 2003, p. 128) by clerical and secular elites, the final stage being the foundation of a “national” language for an independent Breton state or an autonomous “nation” within France. The link between standardization and prescriptivism should become fully apparent in Section 3.1. In order to address these and other questions, the chapter is divided into three sections: • What is “Breton”? (Section 2) • From ecclesiastical standards to prescriptive standard. (Section 3) • The acceptability of NBSS to native speakers. (Section 4) This section includes the results of a preliminary investigation of this question.

2.  What is “Breton”? The response to this question is largely inspired by the research of Le Dû and Le Berre (1996, 2019) who developed a theoretical sociolinguistic model3 which deals specifically with language use and attitudes in the rural and maritime communities of Western Brittany. It is also based on my own work on the southern Cornouaillais dialect of Breton over the past 43 years which concurs with their views on numerous points (see also Costaouec, 2002; Le Pipec, 2016, 2019; Hewitt, 2016). The advantage of their theoretical model is that it provides insights from the perspective of those who have been on the lower end of the socio-​economic scale and whose opinions are rarely taken into consideration by language activists. In general, the tendency has been for Breton prescriptivists to have a distinctly top-​down vision of the language which is paradoxically close to the French Jacobin approach they so often decry. This should not be surprising because, as we shall see, their priority has been to promote a secular acrolect (which has not existed since the eleventh century) designed to resist the French norm and certainly not to preserve the current basilectal varieties spoken by the majority of Bretons.4 As is often the case, the stigmatization of the vernacular has more to do with the low social status of the speakers rather than to any relevant linguistic criteria. The result has been that many subtle aspects inherent to the grammars and phonological systems of the individual Breton basilectal varieties are often ignored, rejected or simply absent in the 407

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codified grammars (For a notable exception see F. Favereau’s Breton dictionary, 1992, and grammar, 1997).

2.1.  Institutions and idioms At the heart of Le Dû and Le Berre’s theory is the idea that all societies are composed of “institutions” which are defined as follows: “any relatively stable social structure which serves as a framework for human communication and interaction” (Le Dû & Le Berre, 2019, pp. 178–​ 183). An institution is thus almost infinitely variable in the sense that it can refer to the nuclear family or extended family, the crew of a fishing boat, with its deck hands and its captain, or a team of farm workers with its overseer and so on. By “idiom” they mean any variety (having overt or covert prestige) that has been adopted and judged to be appropriate as the vehicle for communication by the members of that “institution”. An “idiom” cannot exist outside of its corresponding institution and, likewise, the members of an institution cannot communicate clearly without mastering its idiom. The advantage of the term “institution”, is that it identifies speakers within explicit social contexts which allows (socio-​)linguists to identify and offer an accurate description of the “idiom(s)” that is used within it. It is thus the institutions and their related idioms which compose a “linguistic community”. For these reasons, the Le Dû-​Le Berre model provides a precise and practical theoretical framework for examining questions of standardization and prescriptivism. The institution which has been at the heart of rural Breton society from the time of the Brythonic Celtic settlement of Brittany to the mid-​twentieth century is the parish. As one of the oldest and most frequent elements in Breton toponomy is plou-​, “parish” (related to Welsh plwyf < Latin plebs), it is thought to have been one of the first ecclesiastical and administrative institutions established by the incoming Brythonic settlers from Celtic Britain between the fourth and seventh centuries. Describing the sociolinguistic environment of his home parish of Plougrescant (Bro Dreger) during the 1940s, Jean Le Dû writes that outside of its physical boundaries “nearly everything was unknown … and the word ‘Breton’ was applied to the idiom spoken within that limited environment … . Other forms of Breton from outside the parish were simply viewed as ‘funny-​sounding’ or even ‘ridiculous’ ”. He writes that “It is this vision which still dominates the linguistic consciousness of ‘natural’ Breton speakers whose discourse is often judged [i.e. by prescriptivists] to be ‘poor’, ‘imprecise’. These speakers have no critical or historical perception of their daily use of the language” (Le Dû & Le Berre, 2019, p. 202). Thus, the common people have never had a clear “national” Breton identity, much less a national linguistic one, but a rather very strong local sense of belonging not only at the parish-​level but, to some degree, to larger territories called the bro(iou) or “home-​region(s)” (the same word as in Welsh). As one Leonais speaker put it to me, the attachment to these territories is “viscerally tribal”. Figure 24.1 reflects the major cultural but also the concomitant micro-​linguistic territories which often share a similar material and immaterial culture (regional dances, costumes, agricultural methods, etc.).5

2.2  Paritary and disparitary registers This brings us to the “paritary” and “disparitary” registers of Breton. Le Dû and Le Berre describe the paritary register as being reserved for communication along a horizontal axis “between equals, people who are similar to ourselves and with whom we have intimate bonds” 408

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409 Figure 24.1 The bro/​pays, cultural and micro-​linguistic regions of Western Brittany. Source: Map reproduced at my request by Mael Jézéquel and inspired by Mikael Bodlore-​Penlaez and Divi Kervella (2011).

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(Le Dû & Le Berre, 2019, p. 133). It is this paritary register that has always been dominant in rural and maritime societies. Now that Breton is no longer a community language anywhere, however, the only institution in which it is used spontaneously is within the family (normally between the oldest members of the household). The fact is that, with the collapse of the traditional agriculture and the disappearance of the fishing fleets, the institutions in which Breton once thrived no longer exist. More than any other single reason, including France’s linguicidal policies, this is the greatest cause for the abandonment of Breton (see German, 2020). Diametrically opposed to this is the disparitary register which is restricted to highly formal, solemn or official contexts. In Western societies at least, it is intimately associated with the written acrolect, the form of language used by the governing and intellectual elites. Since the eleventh century, the latter have always been French-​speaking (Le Pipec, 2019; 2016). For this reason, it is constructed along a superior/​inferior social axis (Le Dû & Le Berre, 2019, p. 133) and, in France, this disparitary register par excellence is the French “norm” (see Section 2.5 below).

2.3  The badumes Until recently, the “paritary” register has always been dominant and expressed under the form of what Le Dû and Le Berre call badumes,6 that is, a highly variable, uniquely oral, informal varieties of Breton which have been used for centuries within the confines of the parish and are perfectly adapted to the practical daily needs of the agricultural and maritime societies in which they developed (see Figure 24.1). Furthermore, the badume speakers are generally conscious that they, as well as their idioms, are viewed with condescension by their social superiors. This has had a direct effect on their self-​esteem, which has led to the rejection of the native idiom in favour of the socially (but not linguistically) superior French “norm” (see Section 2.5). In Brittany women were at the forefront of the shift to French (Guillou, 1998). Very broadly, the term badume corresponds to the notion of “basilect” with the important distinction that it incorporates not only paritary but also affective dimensions of language by which one expresses feelings of warmth, solidarity, laughter, pleasure and trust in the members of one’s community (see Giles and Ogay 2007). In this sense, unlike “basilect”, the term badume is thus not restricted to being a “low” language. The modern Breton badumes are also fragmented into as many varieties of Breton as there are parishes in Western Brittany (see Figure 24.1). In this regard, since they have been at the bottom of the social hierarchy for so long, Breton speakers identified each other in terms of geography (being from such and such a village or parish). The reason for this is simple: within the diglossic scheme presented here, higher status people speak French, not Breton. Nancy Dorian (1982, pp. 31–​32) describes a similar situation for East Sutherland Scottish Gaelic where she writes: “Regional variation is the obsessive interest of East Sutherland Gaelic speakers, not social variation. Every East Sutherland Gaelic speaker is on the alert at all times for the intrusion of a variant characteristic of one of the other villages.” This has always been a game among Bretons who enjoy imitating, in a teasing way, the speech of their compatriots from neighbouring parishes.7 The degree to which Brittany remained monolingual until recent times is quite remarkable. Broudic (1999) concludes that, in 1900, 90 per cent of the inhabitants of Finistère had Breton as their native language (and this was certainly true in the Departments of Morbihan and Côtes d’Armor). 40 per cent of these had at least some notion of basic French and 60 per cent were monolinguals. However, unlike Protestant Wales, where three-​quarters of the population could read the Welsh Bible by the end of the eighteenth century (Clement, 1971), aside 410

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from the Catholic clergy, the Bretons remained illiterate in both Breton and French until the end of the nineteenth century (see Le Pipec, forthcoming). This fact is revealed by French Army records which, in 1869, gave the percentage of conscripts from Finistère who were illiterate in both languages to be over 70 per cent overall (including the cities). In the small rural Breton-​speaking towns of southern Finistère, the illiteracy rate ranged between 80 per cent and 93 per cent (Archives départementales du Finistère, 1869). Today, of course, everyone is literate in French but upwards of 90 per cent of the traditional Breton-​speaking population still cannot read Breton.

2.4  The ecclesiastical standard As mentioned above, the parish was the institution and linguistic “ecosystem” in which the Breton badumes flourished. The central figure was thus the priest or curate who is still known as aotrou person (“Sir /​Lord parson”). After the French Revolution, the French-​speaking mayor of the commune made his appearance. The commune is a secular French government administrative unit that was grafted onto the Catholic parish (with roughly the same boundaries) and served as a gateway for the disparitary French language when free French-​medium public schools were built in each commune after 1881. Holding the keys to heaven or hell, the priest was an immensely powerful figure who regulated every aspect of people’s spiritual lives. Because the congregations were composed of badume-​speaking monolinguals, starting in the sixteenth century, the clergy in each bishopric was forced to devise idioms for liturgical purposes that would allow the priest to preach and be understood by his flock. Characterized by dialect levelling, these interlanguages eventually developed into what Le Dû and Le Berre (1996) call “standards” or, “ecclesiastical” or “clerical” standards. In this way, the common people mentally internalized aspects of the disparitary ecclesiastical language during the weekly sermons in church and through the prayers, the catechism and hymns which were committed to memory. Traditionally, the clerics divided the badume micro-​varieties discussed above into four major dialects corresponding to the four bishoprics of Western Brittany: Leo(u)n (Léon), Kerne(w) (Cornouaille), Tregor (Tréguier) and Gwened (Vannes) (see Figure 24.3). Of these four, two standards were selected by clerics as models, namely, the varieties of Leon and Gwened. Leon was selected partly because it was viewed as more conservative linguistically and also because mutual comprehension between it and the Kerne(w) and Tregor dialects was (and is) generally easier than with Gwened Breton. For this reason it is known as KLT Breton. Another reason is that many priests have come from this region, which is still known as la terre des prêtres. Even now, badume speakers from Tregor and Kerne(w) identify this Leon ecclesiastical variety as Brezhoneg beleg or “priest Breton”. On the other hand, Gwened Breton (Vannetais) was and is clearly distinct from KLT Breton (see Section 4.1) and, for this reason, the clergy decided to develop a separate standard for this region. The frontiers of the bishoprics are thought to have arisen from Roman administrative regions. These, in turn, correspond to even earlier Gaulish tribal territories. Nevertheless, Figure 24.3 offers a far less accurate picture of the geolinguistic distribution of Breton dialects than Figures 24.1 and 24.2 (in that order).

2.5  The French norm The third component of Le Dû and Le Berre’s sociolinguistic model is the French “norm”. After the French Revolution and the foundation of the French Republic, the Constitution 411

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412 Figure 24.2  The Breton dialectal regions according to Meynier 1976. Source: Map by M. Jézéquel.

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413 Figure 24.3  Four traditional dialect regions associated with the four bishoprics of Western Brittany. Source: Tanguy & Lagrée 2002 map produced with Fañch Broudic’s permission.

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declared that Basques, Bretons, Flemish, Catalans, Alsaciens and Occitans, etc. were now French “citizens” and their regional, ethnic and linguistic identities were thus erased. The disparitary French model sanctioned by the Académie Française was imposed as the sole official language of the new Republic and this is still the case today. This is why the British and Irish views on minority languages are so radically different given that the United Kingdom is predicated upon the union of four ethnically separate “nations”. The Welsh, Scots and Irish have always had a de facto national identity (based on traditional ethnic enmity for the English), which the Bretons have generally not had towards the French since the sixteenth century.8 This does not mean, however, that a latent sense of Breton ethnic pride is not present underneath the surface. Le Dû and Le Berre argue that what makes the French “norm” so different from the Breton ecclesiastical standard(s) and the basilects is that it is the sole officially recognized disparitary “idiom” of a unified, centralized, secular French State which encompasses all of the pre-​ existing institutions of France. All the instruments of the state promote this disparitary norm (or “superdialect” see Trudgill & Chambers, 2004) which, axiologically, is predefined as good, cultivated, ancient, precise, creative, etc. Furthermore, it continually enriches itself and adapts to everchanging new realities. In this way it discourages any excursions outside the prescribed rules. The “norm” is thus the idiom in which the lexicon and the grammar are “formalized by proscription or prescription” (Le Dû & Le Berre, 2019, p. 101). The authors conclude that, because Brittany is not a nation-​state and lacks these institutions to define, maintain and perpetuate a unified, standard model of Breton, it cannot be considered to have a “norm”. Naturally, this interpretation is rejected by those who still seek greater political autonomy or even independence from France (see Section 3.2).

3.  From ecclesiastical standard to prescriptive standard To address this question, we turn our attention now to how the nascent Breton ecclesiastical standards were formally codified between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. As mentioned above, only one of the ecclesiastical standard models discussed above (Léon Breton) was selected as the basis for a new secular model during the nineteenth century. The first (KLT) Breton dictionary, the Catholicon, was compiled by Jehan Calvez in 1464 to assist the priests in their religious tasks. It was published in the town of Tréguier (Tregor region)9 in 1499, making it not only the first Breton dictionary but also the first French dictionary, not to mention the first trilingual dictionary (Breton–​Latin–​French) ever published in the Western world (Guyonvarc’h 1975). In 1659, the Jesuit priest, Julien Maunoir, published his Les Dictionnaires français–​breton et breton–​français in which he introduced new orthographical reforms. One of the most remarkable books to come out of Brittany during the early eighteenth century, however, was Abbé Pezron’s Antiquité de la nation, et de langue des Celtes, autrement appelés les Gaulois.10 Published in 1703, he is thought to be the first to have identified the Breton and Welsh languages as “Celtic” or “Gaulish”, terms which he used synonymously. Furthermore, Pezron also elevated the Breton and Welsh languages to the level of quasi-​sacred languages arguing that Gomer, the son of Japhet and grandson of Noah, was the “father of the Gaulish people”. The Bretons and Welsh would thus be the direct descendants of the Gauls. Put another way, Breton was not only the most ancient language spoken on earth, it was also the language in which Noah would have communicated with God. Expressed in modern terms, Pezron viewed Breton in the same way modern scholars view Proto-​Indo-​European, that is, it was the “mother-​language” of the languages of Europe. Breton, alongside Hebrew, was thus at the summit of a linguistic hierarchy. This book, I believe, is the ultimate source which provided 414

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the ideological foundation which prefigured the Breton prescriptivist models of later centuries. Unfortunately, I can only outline the major publications here and their impact as follows: • At the request of the Etats de Bretagne (the Breton Parliament) Grégoire de Rostrenen publishes his Dictionnaire Françoise-​Celtique ou Françoise-​Bretonne in 1732 and his Grammaire Françoise-​Celtique ou Françoise-​Bretonne follows in 1738 in which he stresses that the Breton language was “given by God to Japhet, to his son Gomer … Its excellence appears in its venerable age” (p. viii). • Cillart de Kerampoul is commissioned to write his Vannetais (Gwenedeg) dictionary (published in 1744). In the Preface he describes Vannetais as “the best of all the Breton dialects, the most ancient, the veritable Celtic language”. • The Etats de Bretagne request that Dom Le Pelletier prepare his etymological Dictionnaire de la langue bretonne (où l’on voit son antiquité, son affinité avec les anciennes langues, which is published in 1752 (his original manuscript dates to 1716). Now that the standard language was well on its way to being codified, the stage was set for the final phase during which prescriptivists imposed their judgments (see Wright, 2000, p. 3). In conclusion, these linguistic and historical studies (see Dom Lobineau’s influential Histoire de la Bretagne, 1707), had the dual effect of boasting the noble antiquity of the Breton language (i.e. hence its superiority to both French and English) and, indirectly, demonstrating to the French Crown the early primacy of the Bretons over Brittany thus intimating that the Bretons were not vassals of the kings of France. Interestingly, the idea that the Bretons were of purely British Celtic stock, not of Gaulish origin, would have to wait until de la Borderie (1850) and Loth (1883, 1890) altered the historical, ethnic and, hence, linguistic narrative which is now central to the modern nationalist movement: the Bretons and the Breton language are Brythonic, not Gaulish.

3.1  Toward a secular prescriptive model Building on the work of these seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century precursors, Jean-​François Le Gonidec de Kerdaniel, a nobleman born in Le Conquet, Léon, set out to produce a normalized grammar of Breton, which he completed in 1807. As a Leonard, he also naturally believed the Leon dialect to be the “classic” form of Breton on which the linguistic model should be based. As a passionate Celtophile and member of the newly-​founded Académie Celtique in Paris, the goal of his Dictionnaire Celto-​Breton (1821), following Pezron, was also to demonstrate the “droit d’aînesse” of the Breton language over all the living languages of Europe (Le Gonidec, 1821, p. vi) but, more importantly for our purposes, to produce a unified linguistic secular model for the Breton people. Above all, Le Gonidec strived to present the Breton language as close to its “primitive” (i.e. “pure”) form as possible (Le Gonidec, 1821). For this reason, he did not refrain from including those Vannetais words in his dictionary which he believed were ancient. After his death, Le Gonidec’s Dictionnaire Français-​Breton was reprinted by Prudhomme, St. Brieuc, in 1847. It was accompanied by the Vicomte de la Villemarqué’s Essai sur les origines du Breton. Often portrayed as Le Gonidec’s disciple, de la Villemarqué lauds him as the “legislator” of the language stating that “Thanks to him, authority has replaced anarchy, rules replace whims, unity reigns with regard to orthography, vocabulary and syntax; common and general principles prevail over local custom” (de la Villemarqué, 1847, p. lxiv). In this work, he also proposes a comparative study of Welsh and Gaelic words, a study he pursues in an a re-​edition 415

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of Le Gonidec’s dictionary and grammar with a view to enriching the Breton language with more Celtic words (Le Gonidec, 1850). In the Preface to the Nouvelle grammaire bretonne d’après la méthode de le Gonidec (1847b), the unnamed author, possibly de la Villemarqué, heaps lavish praise on him: The true Breton language relives in all its purity, with one orthography which is simultaneously national and logical … Almost forgotten, this simple and intelligent orthography, which is the only one in accord with the true language, reflects the genius of our language which is only found in a few very ancient manuscripts … Thanks to Le Gonidec, order, rules and unity replace anarchy and, today, Bretons, whose orthography is now fixed, can write and speak their language correctly and uniformly. He has done for Brittany what the Académie Française has done for France and Dr Johnson for England by dictating grammatical and orthographic laws that, henceforth, no one can violate “Breuriez ar Feiz”,11 in Le Gonidec 1847a, pp. v–​vi. Italics are mine In these two passages the prescriptive link between the former ecclesiastical standard and the future NBSS is most evident here, the key words being “the true Breton language”, the “purity” and “genius” of Breton, its association with a “national” identity, as well as the “order, rules and unity” of the language which render it “correct” and “dictate” the “grammatical and orthographic laws” and “authority” which “no one can violate”. This also sounds the death knell for dialect Breton which is equated with “anarchy”, “whims” and “local custom”. Ironically, however, de la Villemarqué was a Cornouaillais (Kerne) dialect-​speaker who never mastered the Leonais spoken or written standard he defended (German & Postic, 2017)! Nevertheless, it is to Le Gonidec and de la Villemarqué that we owe the foundations of the modern prescriptive tradition in Brittany (see Blanchard, 2006; Le Dû & Le Berre, 2019, p. 103).

3.2  Breton nationalism and prescriptivism The history of the modern standard Breton is too complex to relate in detail here. Suffice it to say that, ideologically, it was constructed upon Breton/​Brythonic ethnic identity, pan-​ Celticism, a position which was taken to extremes by a handful of nationalists during the inter-​ war period. Inspired by the creation of an independent Irish State in 1922, these men dreamt of founding an independent nation for which Breton would be the language of the Breton nation, a concept defined in terms of Celtic ethnicity. Roparz Hemon12 was one of the main architects of this movement. He was also the founder of the literary review known as Gwalarn (The Northwest) the stated objective of which was to transform Breton into a culturally sophisticated language which would have the same prestige and vitality as the other major European languages. To accomplish this the new model required the invention of massive numbers of Celtic-​based neologisms. In the tracks of de la Villemarqué before them, the goal was to eliminate French loanwords from Breton, many of them ancient (and often identical to those borrowed into English) and replace them with Old Breton, Middle Breton or even Welsh words. When France was defeated and occupied by the Wehrmacht in 1940, pro-​fascist nationalist groups actively collaborated with the Nazis throughout the war (Aziz, 1975). It is purportedly Leo Weisgerber, a Celticist at the University of Bonn who was sent to Brittany as Sonderführer to oversee the activities of the Breton nationalists who suggested the idea of unifying Breton 416

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orthography. The logic behind this was that a future Breton state would require one national language. The momentous decision to fuse the former KLT and Vannetais (Gwened) standards into one orthographic system resulted in a system known as peurunvan (super-​unified) Breton (see Section 4.3). For example, words such as KLT brezoneg and G Brehoneg were now spelt Brezhoneg “the Breton or ‘Brythonic’ language”.13 A problem confronting the militants, however, was that, unlike the native-​speaking priests who had designed the ecclesiastical standards as interlanguages to preach the Gospel to monolinguals, this new prescriptive standard, ironically, eliminated many of the features of the Breton vernaculars, many of them thoroughly Brythonic. One explanation for this is that the most influential militant and nationalist leaders were nearly all from middle-​or upper-​class families from Eastern Brittany or Paris with only tenuous ties to Western Brittany and even fewer connections with the labouring classes there. Most of those who knew Breton had learnt it academically. In a nutshell, it was not unconceivable for them to imagine that what they perceived as “decadent” dialects could serve as a linguistic model for the future Breton nation. Quite the contrary, once nationhood would be achieved, the plan was to re-​educate the badume speakers by teaching them this revived, unified linguistic model in Breton-​medium schools. Writing in 1943, Hémon put it this way: Al levrioù-​skol, al levrioù gouiziegezh, al lezennoù ha kement skrid uhel a zo ret e buhez ur bobl ne vezont savet e bro ebet e yezh ar gwrac’hed kozh (Nowhere in the world are school books, science books and law books or other lofty writings that are necessary in the life of a nation written in the language of old hags) (Calvez, 2000). Naturally, such comments did not endear him to the population in the West whose mothers and old grandmothers he disparaged.14 Branded as collaborators after World Word II, the effect on the Breton language movement was crippling for decades. The problem for the nationalists, however, was that in the 1940s there were still 1,100,000 native speakers of the traditional varieties, of whom 700,000 used the language as their primary medium of communication. 100,000 of these were older monolinguals (Gourvil, 1952). The “old hags” and “old geezers” were far more numerous than the handful of prescriptivists.

3.3  The triumph of the peurunvan /​NBSS model Popular resentment towards the nationalists remained high following the war, and other orthographic proposals were made by scholars from Western Brittany to circumvent the ideology with which peurunvan had been associated. The subject is too complex to delve into here (see Wmffre, 2007). In a word, during the 1980s, under the presidency of socialist President Mitterand (1981–​1995), France promoted increased decentralization, and a new institution was founded in Brittany called the Région Bretagne. Within this structure the Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg (Office for the Breton Language) was created becoming one of the main organs for the promotion of Breton. This was accompanied by Kuzul ar Brezhoneg (the Breton Language Council). However, each of these organizations championed peurunvan as the official orthography as do the privately funded Diwan full-​ immersion schools.15 In this way, peurunvan developed hand-​in-​hand with the “new secular grammatical standard” discussed above as well as its modernized and expanded lexicon. Ironically, it is this official support by the French government that tipped the balance in the favour of peurunvan and the NBSS. Even more ironic, for the first time since the Breton parliament was dissolved in 1789, it is the French state which has provided the institutional framework for the coordination and consolidation or “stabilization” of the new prescriptive norm. To conclude this part of the discussion, the simple fact is that peurunvan has indeed won the orthography wars (Le Bihan, 2019) and I would add that the normalized NBSS phonological, 417

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grammatical and lexical word-​stock that accompanies it, have also won the day. Importantly, however, it must be stressed that an overwhelming majority of young learners have no links with or even awareness of the fascist ideologies of the early twentieth century.

4.  The acceptability of NBSS to native speakers For nearly all Bretons, the disparitary French “norm” is now fully accepted and used at all levels of society. All Bretons have been educated in its use. Indeed, Brittany has the highest university-​educated population in all of France today (du Guerny, 2010). Furthermore, all young people in Brittany are fluent in what Le Dû and Le Berre (2019, p. 118) have called NPF (New Paritary French), an informal register of French that is a little over 100 years old and which is now used by young people everywhere in France. Thus, NPF has largely replaced the old paritary Breton badumes, French patois and minority languages which formerly had this function everywhere across France. The frank reality is that, despite their profound attachment to Brittany, few young people give any serious thought to learning Breton. The discussion that follows concerns only a small group of die-​hards. Within a solely Breton linguistic context, however, the NBSS has now replaced the moribund Leonais and Vannetais ecclesiastical standards on which it was built. As previously stated, the consequence has been the creation of a new form of diglossia that has never existed before which divides Breton speakers into two broad categories: the first concerns younger, literate, type-​1 NBSS speakers and, the second, older, illiterate, type-​2a badume speakers. At the top of the social scale are what I call type-​1 speakers of the disparitary NBSS. Socially, they are often university educated, have urban middle-​class backgrounds and are under forty. In both Eastern or Western Brittany, they have rarely (or never) had contacts with badume-​ speaking families or neighbours. All study the peurunvan /​NBSS grammatical model as a second language.16 This is now the main standard taught to children in Diwan and most Catholic and Public sector schools throughout Brittany, east and west. However, their Breton is particularly marked by phonetic and prosodic French influence and the morphological, syntactic and lexical purism mentioned above. In nearly all cases, the home language is French although growing numbers claim to be native speakers of this new variety. For all these reasons, this group interacts within self-​sufficient linguistic networks having relatively few or no contacts with older badume-​speakers. Since they rightly believe they are the future of Breton, the tendency is to view badumes as a thing of the past.17 This second category is composed of badume speakers whom I have subdivided into four subgroups. 2a) Numerically, the vast majority of speakers in Brittany (circa. 200,000) fit in the “older illiterate badume” category. While many are now “middle class”, their roots are often to be found in the traditional agricultural and maritime communities of Brittany. The use of the language is restricted to the paritary register within the family or the few remaining institutions linked to agriculture or maritime activities. Most of these are well over 60 years old and are increasingly isolated, having fewer and fewer people to communicate with in their own varieties of Breton. Many are forgetting their Breton while others have simply refused to speak it and often pretend they never knew the language. It is important to stress, however, that many speakers love chatting and joking in Breton with their family and friends but, in my experience, most have never given much thought to transmitting the language to their children and few ever express any sentiment of loss

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(much like English or French dialect speakers who have turned to their respective national standards). In addition to these natural speakers are three related classes of individuals. 2b) This group consists of a small category of speakers based mainly in the West who are fluent in one of the Breton badumes and who have learnt to read and write Breton. These speakers have had little choice but to conform to either the Léonais or Vannetais ecclesiastical standards, or to F. Falc’hun’s Orthographe universitaire (Skolveurieg)18 (1950s) which I would describe as a modified ecclesiastical standard. Fañch Morvannou’s Orthographe interdialectale (Etrerannyezhel) has been hailed for its scientific precision but was also rejected by peurunvan supporters leaving the latter as the only alternative. 2c) Closely tied to the former group are older passive speakers and semi-​speakers19 living in the West who would like to speak their own badumes in order to reconnect with their communities. Many of these also seek to read and write but are quickly discouraged by the distance between the written standard and spoken dialects. Because they heard the language spoken naturally as children, many could be fluent within a matter of months … but only if they would have the pedagogical tools to learn their own badumes (see German, 2018). 2d) Finally, there are younger learners who have learnt their respective badumes from family members or neighbours. Their motivation for studying the language is generally affective (see Section 3.3), their major preoccupation being to preserve what they see as their vanishing, but “authentic” Breton-​speaking vernaculars that are part and parcel of the local culture. Once these learners achieve a degree of fluency in their local badumes, they are generally accepted as full members of these small, close-​knit clusters of native speakers (see Dorian, 1982). In most cases, even though older speakers have actively discouraged young people from learning Breton, once the young people master the local parish dialect, it sends a signal that they share the same intimate bonds that make them “one of us”. The shift to conversation in Breton generally goes unnoticed, particularly now when code-​ switching and code-​mixing are so common. The new diglossic framework can be summarized in Table 24.1.

4.1  A preliminary investigation This leads us to a question which is central to our discussion, namely, to what extent is communication between type-​1 NBSS speakers and type-​2a badume speakers possible? For the purposes of this chapter, I had initially hoped to record the impressions of at least 50 older speakers’ opinions of the NBSS. However, on account of the Covid restrictions, I chose to do a preliminary study based on three inter-​related approaches: a) a preliminary survey of 12 type-​2a speakers in Cornouaille and Trégor; b) the impressions of three experienced field-​workers who are specialists of Leon, northern Cornouaillais and Vannetais Breton; c) my own observations based on 40+​years of life and fieldwork in Brittany (mainly in southern Cornouaille /​Finistère). The first part of this discussion focuses on 12 older native badume speakers from Cornouaille from the parishes of La Forêt Fouesnant, Fouesnant, Saint Yvi and Scaer as well as from Bégard 419

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Paritary Register

Idioms

Institutions & function

Status

1. French norm

French State, apparatus, schools, all formal contexts School, social & professional networks

2. NBSS (see Type 1a below)

Idioms

Institutions & function

Status

Omni-​present 1.New Paritary French

In all informal social contexts

Omnipresent

4% of the 2. No clearly population definable between 15 paritary and 19 register yet

No official status

3. None

School, associations & social clusters, networks None

4. Badumes or hybrid Leon & local badumes

Family, close friends & local associations in the West

An older minority within the minority

5. Badumes

Older family & Rapidly close friends, declining parish with no associations official support

3. Ecclesiastical Catholic Moribund standards (Léon/​ Church since the Gwened) 1950s 4. Largely Leon-​ Small circles Small based secular of native & number: standard passivespeakers no reliable model: often 2b, & defenders figures 2c & 2d speakers of the vernaculars -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​ -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​​ -​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​-​--​ ​

None

(Lannvear) in the Tregor region. They were asked to listen to a four-​minute passage taken from a Breton-​language television programme (FR3). The television hosts were fluent type-​1, NBSS speakers: a young man and woman. The program also featured a short report by another young female type-​1 speaker.20 In Cornouaille, after a minute or so, several listeners visibly lost concentration and began staring out the window. The others did their best to follow but their mystified looks betrayed their frustration. At the end of the passage, I asked if they could give me a summary of what had been said. Except for one 68-​year-​old, type-​2b speaker who can read Breton, they uniformly responded that they could only pick out a few words but not the general meaning. In one self-​ evaluation, an 80-​year-​old speaker from Saint Yvi, claimed that, globally, she understands about 10 per cent of what she hears on TV. Most complained about the strong French accents and the neologisms as the main impediments to comprehension. I followed the same procedure with three Tregorrois listeners who reacted precisely the same way with one speaker (92-​years old) uttering: Oh ma Doue! (Oh my God!), that must be Finistère Breton (i.e. Leon). I understood Breizh (Brittany) and karanté (love) but not much else … They used to tell us that

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the Breton of Finistère was the best for writing and speaking and that our Breton wasn’t worth anything at all … but that didn’t make much of an impression on us (laughter). For the second phase of this preliminary survey, I turned to several trained linguists/​fieldworkers, two of whom have doctorates in Breton dialectology, who studied the same televised passage. All are fluent in local Breton and have collectively interviewed well over a thousand vernacular speakers in the relevant regions of Brittany. Given their solid experience, I asked them to imagine how their older badume informants would react to this NBSS passage. Initially, for the reasons explained above, I had expected that the passage would have been far better understood in Leon than elsewhere. Nevertheless, Yann Riou (Lampaul-​ Ploudalmézeau, Leon) answered point-​blank that NBSS speakers “are not Breton-​speakers (bretonnants)” but rather “Brittophones” (a new word coined by militants to describe the NBSS). For him these are “two different languages”. He judged that, even in the heart of Leon, an older native speaker “would guess that it’s Breton but he would not understand it all. It would be a little like having a first-​year student of German listen to a conversation on German radio. He would know it’s German but he would be incapable of giving a summary of what he has heard.” Tanguy Solliec, who is from northern Cornouaille, began his assessment by stressing that his impressions were not intended to hurt or judge the speakers but only to give “linguistic facts” (which is also the case for me and the other two linguists). I think a native speaker would be lost and would pick out words here and there but they wouldn’t get all the ideas expressed by the speakers. I would be delighted if I am wrong! My impression is that the presentation is not intended for the general public. The scope seems to be reduced only to a few insiders: those who are part of the talk and those who are able to understand the neologisms. I feel the whole recording [i.e. the televised extract] is definitely not bretonnant-​friendly. Globally, the word and sentence stress is French and intonation in the sentences is non-​existent … The neologisms are used without any explanation of what they mean. Finally, a third linguist who preferred to remain anonymous made the following remarks regarding its acceptance with regard to Vannetais Breton. It is evident that understanding this kind of Breton in the Vannes area would pose a real challenge. I have collected numerous testimonies from Vannetais speakers who have confided that they understand nothing on Breton television except a few words which they equate with “Finistère Breton” (i.e. Léon). I should add that the question of comprehension of television programmes by Vannetais speakers is problematical in the sense that Vannetais Breton can be described as a dialect that is very distinct from the other varieties of Breton (i.e. KLT). So the following question should be asked: Would the diffusion of programmes in natural spoken Breton, and not neo-​ Breton spoken with very strong French accents, be more comprehensible to Vannetais speakers? He went on to offer numerous examples demonstrating that “natural” speakers from the “central zone” (between Cornouaille and Trégor) are generally quite well understood in the Vannes

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region despite considerable dialectal differences although Leon Breton would pose a greater challenge. These powerful testimonies, which were offered without any prior consultation between the three men, reinforce the views of Christian Fagon (personal communication 2012), a high school teacher of Breton and dialectologist from Leon who administered the Breton baccalauréat oral exams for well over a decade to both private (Diwan) and public sector students. He estimated that only 10–​15 per cent of the students he examined every year could carry on a conversation with older speakers “in a local farmhouse”. Of these 10–​15 per cent (mainly 2c & 2d speakers), almost all had rural or maritime connections in Western Brittany. These observations correspond well to my own experience over the past 40+​years. Bluntly put, the stark conclusion is that type-​2a badume speakers have little ability to understand or communicate with younger type-​1 learners. The reverse is also true. Le Dû and Le Berre (2019, p. 162) went so far as to describe the type-​1 Breton as “disguised French” which raises the question of whether NBSS is truly autonomous or rather an unconscious heteronomous imitation of the French “norm”. For reasons outlined above, communication between type-​2a speakers is obviously far easier with 2b, 2c and 2d speakers. In this regard, Solliec and the anonymous third linguist ask an excellent question, namely, “why aren’t native speakers taken as the real references by revivalists?” (see Gros, 1974). Several experts, whom I prefer not to name, suspect that this is due to a fully conscious decision on the part of certain language planners. During the 1990s, for instance, one militant academic from Eastern Brittany (now deceased), a staunch defender of the peurunvan-​NBSS model in the tradition Roparz Hemon, made several revealing declarations about the future of Breton on a Welsh (S4C) television programme entitled “The Noble Trail” in which he made the following points: a) there is now no longer a real difference between Eastern (French/​Gallo-​speaking) and Western (Breton-​speaking) Brittany –​i.e. because Breton vernaculars are condemned to disappear; b) the future of Breton lies in the hands of young urbanites and, for that reason, the Breton language must be transformed from a rural language into an urban one. Put another way, there is no room for native vernacular speakers in the media or in any other official capacity. We have already seen that the reason for this lies in the blatant disregard for the vernacular language expressed by certain militants who are locked in the older prescriptivist tradition.

4.2  Supporting evidence Steve Hewitt, a leading specialist of Tregor Breton, has argued for decades that NBSS is incomprehensible for traditional Breton speakers and has long called for a popular debate about the kind of Breton people would wish to learn and hear in the media. Unfortunately, this has never occurred, and he explains that the “militants defend Breton because it exists but the problem is that many of them do not really like what exists”. The consequence is their stubborn insistence “on reshaping the language” in order to serve as a “more spectacular identity symbol” (Hewitt, 2016). Current literary Breton is unrecognizable to native speakers at all levels: phonetically, syntactically, lexically and in terms of phraseology … and the cumulative effect has 422

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been that, for an everyday Breton speaker, this new model is very opaque and foreign the result being that it alienates the majority of natural Breton speakers. We see here the perversity of a linguistic movement which is largely cut off from the community for which it is fighting Hewitt, 2016 To illustrate his point, he presents a NBSS translation of the United Nations’ Declaration of Human Rights. Hewitt’s example tells the whole story. All the highlighted neologisms (none of which would be comprehensible to any native speaker) have been invented to avoid French borrowings, despite the fact that a few of these words are also of Latin origin: O vezañ ma’z eo bet gouestlet gant ar Stadoù-​Ezel diogeliñ, gant kenlabour Aozadur ar Broadoù-​Unanet, an doujañs hollvedel ha gwirion ouzh gwirioù mab-​den hag ar frankizioùpennañ Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in co-​operation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms cf. Hewitt, 2016 Note that the English words in bold are all of French or Latin origin! Paradoxically, a 2a speaker would stand a better chance of understanding the English original than the NBSS translation. Here I repeat the question asked at the beginning of this chapter: in such instances, can we speak of language “revitalization” or language “replacement”?

5. Conclusion To end on a more positive note, the greatest hope of spontaneous exchanges between the quickly declining type-​2a traditional speakers (most of whom will pass away in the 10 to 15 years) rests with 2b, 2c and 2d speakers who have roots in the local communities in which they live and speak recognizable forms of vernacular Breton. According to my sources, an estimated 20–​25 per cent of radio hosts are type-​2c & -​2d speakers. There are fewer of these on television. Although they still remain in the minority, the influence of type-​2b, c, d speakers seems to be growing among type-​1 speakers, perhaps for reasons of perceived “authenticity”. Indeed, Le Dû and Le Berre (2019, pp. 276–​277) have stated that a “new oral ‘standard’ ” has emerged over the years among younger people among these groups who have succeeded in fusing benign aspects of the literary standards with those of the local badumes which allows for easier communication with older speakers.21 More specifically they write: “this new variety of Breton, which contains traces of the old badumes, allows for transparent neologisms and a good number of French borrowings.” The ultimate solution may thus lie in innovative new didactic approaches which could encourage a compromise between the most compatible features of the prescriptive standard and the traditional dialects (see German, 2018) but, as we have seen, opposition to this point of view still runs deep among type-​1 prescriptivists. Simply put, no matter how well-​crafted it may be, a standard, disparitary language without its paritary dimension is like a human being with a keen intellect but without any ability to express emotion, love or joy … it cannot survive without its paritary counterpart. In Brittany, this paritary model has been largely occulted. 423

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Notes * My sincere thanks to the two anonymous reviewers, to Morana Lukač, editor of this volume, as well as to Dr. Tanguy Solliec (CRBC, University of Western Brittany) and Dr. Fañch Broudic (CRBC) for their helpful advice in improving an earlier draft of this chapter. I also thank Yann Riou and a third anonymous scholar for sharing their views. Any remaining errors are my own. Many thanks as well to Mael Jézéquel (CRBC) who produced the maps in fi ­ gures 1 & 2 and, again, to Dr. Fañch Broudic who kindly gave me permission to reproduce the map in Figure 3. All translations from French and Breton to English are my own. 1 The French government does not recognize minority language and no official census as ever been undertaken. 2 See for more information, see Broudic’s TMO survey (Broudic, 2018, slide 9). 3 Both men are from Breton-​speaking families in Western Brittany and experienced the language shift first hand. The primary source I have used for this chapter is their book, Métamorphoses (2019), which is an anthology including 22 of their major articles written over 30 years. 4 These terms are borrowed from Creolistics. ‘Acrolect’ is the ‘high language’ while ‘basilect’ is the ‘low language’ (Ferguson 1959); see ‘badume’ below for more detail. 5 My male informants from St Yvi (born around 1900), whom I recorded in the 1970s and 80s, told me that they could recognize the men from the neighbouring parish of Elliant, not only by their speech but also by the way they held their scythes while mowing wheat during the harvest or by the way they stood while threshing. 6 This term comes from Breton dialect, ba du-​m’, which roughly means “around here” or “here at home”. 7 Speakers have clear notions of their own Breton and varieties spoken outside their parish and simply call them by the relevant parish name: Brezoneg Briec, Brezoneg Elliant, Brezoneg Bannalec, etc. Briec Breton, Elliant Breton, Bannalec Breton. 8 Broudic’s 2018 TMO survey reveals that 38% of Bretons see themselves as equally Breton and French. 14% consider themselves as more Breton than French and only 4% see themselves as “only Breton” for a total of 56%. On the other hand, 22% see claim they are only French and 17% as more French than Breton for a total of 39%. Five per cent describe their identity as “other”. 9 The hometown of Ernest Renan. 10 Translation: The Antiquity of the nation, and the language of the Celts, otherwise called the Gauls. 11 A Catholic Breton-​language journal by this name, meaning the “Brotherhood of Faith”, was founded in 1844 at de la Villemarqué request. 12 His official name was Louis-​Paul Némo. 13 Brezoneg (KLT) or Brehoneg (Gwened/​Vannetais) is an ancient native word known to all. Galleg (literally meaning “Gaulish”) is the word for the French language or the “Gallo” French dialect of eastern Brittany. 14 He could have used the word maouezed “mature women” but he chose gwrac’h which is an insulting word also meaning a “witch”. 15 For the activists’ point of view, see the websites of these organizations: www.brezho​neg.bzh/​ and www.brezho​neg.org/​fr 16 For recent work on this matter see Le Pipec (2019, 2016). 17 Several grandmothers whose children attend Diwan schools have told me over the years that their grandchildren cannot understand their Cornouaillais Breton. One older woman from Trégunc told me that her granddaughter described her Breton as “rough” and “ugly”. The latest example came from one of the women (from Scaer) participating in my Section 3.1survey. She informed me (9 June 2021) that her granddaughter had told her that her Breton was not “good Breton” and was “incorrect”. 18 An excellent but sadly neglected vernacular-​based method using this orthography is J. Tricoire’s Komzom, lennom ha skrivom brezoneg. 19 Passive speakers are people who were raised in Breton-​speaking households but whose parents forbade them to speak Breton. They often understand their native badumes perfectly but cannot speak the language. This situation is typical of those born after 1945. “Semi-​speakers” come from the same background but can only speak “broken” Breton. The TMO does not address the question but estimates that those who know “a few words and expressions” to be about 20 per cent of a total of 207,000 estimated speakers (see Broudic, 2018: map 9).

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Standardization, prescriptivism and diglossia 20 I have chosen not to indicate the name of the program or the names of the television hosts. The point here is not to criticize or insult the speakers but, quite the contrary, to reveal a sociolinguistic reality which is a taboo subject in some circles. For the same reason, I have not indicated the names of my 12 informants. 21 A number of associations such as Mervent (based in Quimper, Finistère), which are dedicated to teaching Breton, promulgates such a fusion.

References Anonymous (1869). Situation des conscrits sous le rapport de l’instruction. Tableau de 1869, Finistère. Archives départementales du Finistère. pp. 56–​58. Aziz, P. (1975). Histoire secrete de la Gestapo française en Bretagne. 2 vols. Editions Famot. Beal, J. (1999). English Pronunciation in the 18th century. Clarendon Press. Beal, J. (2018). ‘Back to the future’: The ‘new prescriptivism’ in twenty-​first-​century Britain. E-​rea, 15(2). DOI: https://​doi.org/​10.4000/​erea.6112 Blanchard, N. (2006). Barzaz-​Breiz. Une fiction pour s’inventer. Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Bodlore-​Penlaez, M. & Kervella, D. (2011). Atlas de Bretagne =​Atlas Breizh: Géographie, culture, histoire, démographie, économie, territoires de vie des Bretons =​Douaroniezh, sevenadur, istor, poblañs, ekonomiezh, tiriadoù buhez ar Vretoned. Coop Breizh. Broudic, F. (1999). Qui parle le breton aujourd’hui? Qui le parlera demain? Brud Nevez. Broudic, F. (2007). Le breton: une langue en questions. Emgleo Breiz. Broudic, F. (2018). Les langues de Bretagne, Enquête sociolinguistique. Sondage 2018: les principaux résultats. TMO Région & Région Bretagne. www.breta​gne.bzh Calvez, R. (2000). La radio en langue bretonne. Roparz Hemon et Pierre-​Jakez Hélias: deux rêves de la Bretagne. Presses Universitaires de Rennes-​CRBC. Chambers, A. K. & Trudgill, P. (2004). Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Cillart de Kerampoul, C. V. (1744). Dictionnaire François-​Breton, François-​Celtique du dialecte de Vannes. La Compagnie. https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​bpt6k1​0403​699/​f7.item.zoom Clement, M. (1971). The Campaign against Illiteracy. In A. J. Roderick (Ed.), Wales throughout Ages –​from 1485 to the beginning of the 20th Century (Vol. 2, pp. 86–​93). Christopher Davies. Costaouec, D. (2002). Quel avenir pour le breton populaire? Enquête à la Forêt-​ Fouesnant. Emgleo-​Breiz. De la Borderie, A. (1850/​1975). Histoire de Bretagne. Réimpression offset. Joseph Floc’h. De la Villemarqué, T. (1847). Essai sur l’histoire de la langue bretonne précédé d’une étude comparée des idiomes bretons et gaëls. A. Franck. https://​gall​ica.bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​bpt6k5​8324​831.tex​teIm​age De Rostrenen, G. (1732). Dictionnaire Françoise-​Celtique ou Françoise-​Bretonne. Julien Vatar. https://​gall​ica. bnf.fr/​ark:/​12148/​bpt6k6​2358​566/​f2.item.tex​teIm​age.zoom De Rostrenen, G. (1738). Grammaire Françoise-​Celtique ou Françoise-​Bretonne. Julien Vatar. http://​bib​num. univ-​renn​es2.fr/​items/​show/​485 Dobson, E. J. (1968). English pronunciation 1500–​1700, Clarendon Press. Dorian, N. (1982). Defining the speech community to include its working margins. In S. Romaine (Ed.), Sociolinguistic variation in speech communities (pp. 35–​48). Edward Arnold. Du Guerney, S. (2010, December 29). Son système éducatif dope le palmarès scolaire de la Bretagne. Les Echos. www.lesec​hos.fr/​2010/​12/​son-​syst​eme-​educa​tif-​dope-​le-​palma​res-​scola​ire-​de-​la-​breta​gne-​ 437​755 Falc’hun, F. (1951). Le système consonantique du breton: avec une étude comparative expérimentale. Imprimeries Réunies. Favereau, F. (1992). Gerado ar Brezhoneg a-​vremañ, Brezhoneg-​Galleg; Galleg-​Brezhoneg. Skol Vreizh. Favereau, F. (1997). Grammaire du breton contemporain. Skol Vreizh. Ferguson, C. A. (1959). Diglossia. Word, 15, 325–​340. German, G. (2018). In Which linguistic model for Brittany? Studia Celto-​Slavica, 9: 1–​30. German, G. (2020). Elements of a sociolinguistic theory: the case of Breton. In A. Van Nahl (Ed.), Dialectogia et geolinguistica (pp. 1–​52). De Gruyters. German, G. & Postic, F. (2017). La Villemarqué collecteur de contes: un précieux cahier manuscrit en langue bretonne. In F. Postic & N. Blanchard (Eds.), Au-​delà du Barzaz Breiz, Théodore Hersart de la Villemarqué (pp. 145–​186). CRBC.

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25 METAPHOR AS A MANIFESTATION OF PRESCRIPTIVISM The case of France and Quebec Olivia Walsh and Emma Humphries

1. Introduction This chapter examines the use of metaphor as one manifestation of prescriptivism in French-​ language metalinguistic texts to show how prescriptivism has been couched in similar terms in two geographic contexts (France and Quebec) and across time (nineteenth to twenty-​first centuries). In the first section, a brief definition and discussion of prescriptivism is provided. In the second section, the development of prescriptivism in France and Quebec is outlined. In the third section, an overview of the kinds of metalinguistic “language advice” texts produced in both places since the seventeenth century is given. In the final section, a case study analyses the language areas most commonly discussed and critiqued in a corpus of metalinguistic texts and examines one means by which prescriptivism can be enacted in such texts, the use of metaphors or imagery, specifically those concerning health/​sickness. The case study involves a close qualitative analysis of a sample of “language advice” texts, including a language advice journal, several newspaper columns and online language commentary. The sample of texts is taken from both France and Quebec and ranges from the nineteenth to the twenty-​first century, allowing for a comparison of the objects of discussion and the types and purposes of images used.

2.  What is prescriptivism? Linguistic prescriptivism –​recommending or condemning certain language usages –​appears to be a widespread and common human activity. It often arises during the process of standardization: selecting a norm naturally involves the idea that the form chosen is superior to other available forms; codifying that norm means deciding upon its structure and therefore explicitly laying down rules about its usage (Haugen, 1966; see also Walsh, 2016, p. 1). Codification tends to be accompanied by prescriptivism,1 which labels certain usages as “correct” (this implies the rejection of others). Milroy and Milroy (2012, p. 22) state that “prescription becomes more intense after the language undergoes codification … because speakers then have access to DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-28

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dictionaries and grammar books which they regard as authorities”. Linguistic prescriptivism is generally informed by broader language ideologies –​beliefs or ideas about language or about social and linguistic relationships, which are used to justify particular language uses and condemn others (Silverstein, 1979, p. 193; see also Walsh, 2016, p. 1). These language beliefs or ideas frequently include the notion that one form of language is superior to others, and that “language homogeneity” is “a natural state rather than something that is constructively produced by language ideologies of the group … in relation to cultural practices” (Kroskrity, 2000, p. 26). In this chapter, we conceive of prescriptivism as both an ideology and a practice. It is an ideology which contains the following beliefs: 1. there are “good” and “bad” ways of using a language; and 2. prescriptions must be followed. Prescriptivism is also a behaviour involving an insistence on correct language use and the recommendation and condemnation of particular usages. Prescriptivism can have real social consequences for those who cannot or do not use the prestigious standard, including reduced social mobility (Paveau & Rosier, 2008, p. 141) and linguistic discrimination (Milroy & Milroy, 2012, p. 2). When present in high levels, prescriptivism can lead to linguistic insecurity, that is, a feeling that one’s language variety is inferior in some way. In the twenty-​first century, the internet has provided a platform for prescriptivism on an individual and institutional level, which is more accessible than ever before. This applies both to those who actively engage in prescriptivism, by writing blogs about language or commenting on someone’s language use on social media, for instance, and to the potential audience accessing prescriptivist texts –​online dictionaries are accessed more frequently online than their print equivalents (Lew & de Schryver, 2014, p. 347). As Osthus (2003) affirms: “you don’t need to be a linguist or an academic to judge good language use and norms. You just have to log on to the internet” (“il ne faut ni être linguiste ni académicien pour juger sur le bon usage et les normes. Il suffit de se brancher sur Internet”).2 In this chapter, we examine the metaphor and imagery used in prescriptive texts found both offline and online, focusing specifically on texts that provide some kind of language “advice”, to show how such images can be used to support prescriptive views or enact prescriptivism.

3.  Development of prescriptivism in France and Quebec This section provides a brief overview of the development of prescriptivism in France and Quebec. It does not provide a detailed account of the standardisation of French or the development of the French language in Quebec, although these histories are of course interconnected. There exist many excellent histories of the standardization of French (e.g. Brunot, 1966; Rickard, 1989; Trudeau, 1992; Lodge, 1993; Ayres-​Bennett, 1996) and the development/​ history of French in Quebec has likewise been well studied (e.g. Martel & Cajolet-​Laganière, 1997; Plourde, 2000; Bouchard, 2002).

3.1. France The variety that was to become standard French (Francien, the variety spoken in the Île-​de-​France area) gradually began to replace Latin in functions such as law and government between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries (Lodge, 1993, pp. 118–​120; Judge, 2007, p. 16). However, it remained largely uncodified until the sixteenth century (Lodge, 1993, p. 159). One of the major reasons for codifying Francien was to allow it to gain the prestige of Latin. Latin was understood to obey grammatical rules and, to gain prestige, French had to show it could 428

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do the same. This prestige was not limited to the language itself but extended to those who could access the codified language, essentially a small elite section of society (Rickard, 1989, pp. 85–​86). At the time, and until the twentieth century, the majority of the population spoke regional varieties (either regional languages, such as Breton, Basque and Occitan or regional dialects such as Picard, Poitevin and Limousin) rather than French. In the seventeenth century, codifying efforts increased in intensity and the number and types of metalinguistic texts being produced, such as grammars, monolingual dictionaries and usage guides, equally increased (see Ayres-​Bennett, 2014, pp. 176–​182). The Académie française was founded in 1635 and its aims related clearly to standardisation with a particular focus on codification and elaboration (see Haugen’s [1966] standardisation process): “to give definite rules to our language and render it pure, eloquent and capable of dealing with the arts and sciences” (donner des règles certaines à notre langue et à la peuple pure, éloquente et capable de traiter les arts et les sciences).3 The preface to the Académie’s first dictionary (1694) further distinguished between “good usage” (le bon usage) and the language use of the “masses” (le peuple, i.e. dialect speakers), thereby explicitly laying out a hierarchy of usages, with “bon usage” at the top. The hierarchisation of varieties led by the middle of the seventeenth century to the notion that there now existed a “superior” French, one requiring protection from contamination. This was reinforced by the work of many seventeenth-​century authors including, most notably, Vaugelas, whose Remarques sur la langue françoise (1647) was a collection of comments on various features of French which showed some variation or hesitation in usage and represented a move from metalinguistic texts aimed primarily at foreign language learning to those aimed at perfecting the French of first-​language French-​speakers –​a very limited strata of society at this time. While Vaugelas occasionally acknowledged and even approved variation in usage (see Ayres-​Bennett, 2011, pp. 12–​15), he also explicitly stated that he was basing his work on one type of usage only, “good usage” (le bon usage), which was based on the “soundest part of the Court” (la plus saine partie de la Cour). Vaguelas therefore contributed to the idea of the existence of a “superior” form of French noting, in the preface to his Remarques, that “our language … has reached this peak of perfection where we see it today” (nostre langue … est paruenue a ce comble de perfection où nous la voyons auiourd’huy) (Vaugelas, 1647, Préface §XV, para. 3ff.). The belief that the language had reached a “perfect” state was echoed by other seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century authors such as Bouhours (1920 [1671]) and even Voltaire (1966 [1751], pp. 45–​60). Of course, during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the prescriptive attitudes encapsulated in these works only reached a very small elite group of speakers, rather than the population at large, given not only widespread illiteracy but, more importantly, the fact that the majority of the population spoke regional varieties, rather than French (Francien), as noted above. It was only after the French Revolution in 1789 that prescriptive attitudes and use of the standard language began (slowly) to spread more widely. The Revolution began the process of acceptance of the standard (in the sense of Haugen [1966]), in particular by promoting the French language as “the element binding the French people together” (Lodge, 2004, p. 207). From the nineteenth century onwards, the social change brought about by the introduction of free and compulsory education by the Jules Ferry laws (1881–​82), the industrial revolution and related urbanisation and improved transport, the Franco-​German war, and two world wars meant that ever greater numbers of the population were exposed to –​or impelled to use –​standard French (see Rickard, 1989, p. 122; Judge, 2007, p. 27). The promotion and spread of standard French, particularly through its use in the education system, solidified a belief in the “superior” status of the standard language which led to the stigmatization of other language varieties. Use of standard French became an important social 429

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marker and a trait by which to discriminate against others (Saint-​Gérand, 2009, pp. 10–​11). In twenty-​first-​century France, standard French is used in all domains, and while some regional varieties are still spoken, there remain no monolingual speakers of these. Consequently, prescriptivist and metalinguistic texts have their largest potential audience yet. The impact of prescriptivism is visible, first, in the high levels of linguistic insecurity in France (Ager, 2008) and, second, in the language myths of clarity, logic and beauty that persist to the current day (e.g., in online language commentary, see Humphries, 2021; Tarnarutckaia & Ensslin, 2020).

3.2. Quebec Metalinguistic discussion of Canadian French has a much more recent history, emerging only in the second half of the nineteenth century. There was some sporadic evidence of such discussion earlier, for example, in the language columns published by Michel Bibaud in the journal L’Aurore from 1817 (mostly condemning the use of anglicisms in legal French), but it was the publication in 1841 of Thomas Maguire’s Manuel des difficultés les plus communes de la langue française that really saw the beginnings of a more widespread metalinguistic discourse (Bouchard, 2002, p. 207). This manual aimed to correct and improve Canadian French and was based largely upon the standard French of France, with no concessions made for regional variety, and it led to a wave of similar corrective manuals being published, alongside numerous language columns (from the 1880s). This is significant, because many speakers of French in Canada did not speak a variety that approximated the standard French of France; regional Canadian French varieties differ in their lexis, phonology and even their syntax from the standard French of France (for an overview of the features of Canadian/​Québécois French, see Léard, 1995 on grammar; Poirier, 1995 on lexis; Ostiguy & Toussaint, 2008 and Bigot & Papen, 2013 on phonology). This increase in (overwhelmingly negative) metalinguistic discourse can be directly linked to the fact that, after almost a century of isolation from France after the 1763 Treaty of Paris ceded Canada to the British crown, renewed contact with France began in the mid-​nineteenth century.4 This led, first, to an awareness that the French used in Canada partly differed from that used in France (Bouchard, 2000, p. 197; see also Mercier, Remysen & Cajolet-​Laganière, 2016, pp. 284–​285), as both language varieties had developed independently. This later grew into a disparagement of the Canadian variety of French, with it being dismissed as a “patois” because of these differences (although many of them were in fact usages that had been common in France in the seventeenth century that later fell out of use there, given that the original settlers had mostly spoken a variety close to standard French/​Francien, see Mercier, Remysen & Cajolet-​ Laganière, 2017, p. 283). This led eventually to a press campaign that openly advocated the realignment of Canadian French with the French of France (Mercier, Remysen & Laganière, 2017, p. 285). Manuals such as Maguire’s, articles, books and language columns were published, most targeting usages specific to Canadian French, including archaisms, regionalisms and neologisms (Bouchard, 2000, pp. 197–​205). Anglicisms were also particularly targeted in metalinguistic discussion (Daoust, 2000, p. 200). The negative discourse surrounding Canadian French continued well into the twentieth century. While it had arguably little effect on the language itself, aside from possibly limiting somewhat the influence of English (Bouchard, 2002, p. 169), it exacerbated the deterioration of the image French Canadians had of their language, already negatively impacted by the economic and social domination of English speakers which had led to a decrease in the status of both French speakers and their language over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (see Plourde, 2000). By the middle of the twentieth century, French speakers in 430

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Quebec had not only come to despise their own language, but considered themselves “at least partly guilty of contaminating their language” (coupable, au moins en partie, de la contamination de leur langage) (Bouchard, 2002, p. 170). This crisis of confidence in French-​Canadian French finally reached a head in the 1960s, with the “joual controversy” (querelle de joual),5 a debate centring on the perceived deterioration of the language and culture in Quebec, which eventually led to the questioning of all aspects of the social and political organization of French Canada (Durocher, 2000, p. 288). Canadian French speakers became increasingly aware of the connection between the status of their language and their inferior economic and social position. This awareness eventually led to political demands to act in favour of the French language, which resulted in the enactment of linguistic legislation (in particular, Bill 101, the “Charter of the French language”) that had far-​reaching, positive outcomes for Canadian French speakers in Quebec (see Walsh, 2016, p. 33). From this period, we can also see the development of grammars and dictionaries that are based on French as it is used in Quebec, rather than taking the standard French of France as the starting point, with, for example, work on the Trésor de la langue française au Québec in the 1970s, and the production of general dictionaries of Québécois French such as the Dictionnaire general de la langue française au Canada in 1979, the Dictionnaire du française plus in 1988, the Dictionnaire québécois d’aujourd’hui in 1992 and the online dictionary USITO in 2013. The first three works adapted existing French (of France) dictionaries to include Québécois usages but USITO was based purely on a corpus of Québécois texts and did not take an existing French dictionary as its base (see Mercier, Remysen & Cajolet-​Laganière 2017, pp. 301–​303 for more detail on this subject). Prescriptivism in France and Quebec was in the past –​and still is to an extent today –​based on one idealized variety of the French language, generally viewed as the form spoken by the Parisian elite, which is often equated by speakers with standard French. This has led to high levels of linguistic insecurity in both geographical contexts but to differing extents. Access to the idealized standard variety of French used in France was out of reach to many speakers of Canadian French, in particular to those who had little access to schooling and were therefore employed in entry-​level jobs with little social or economic prestige. This led arguably to even higher levels of linguistic insecurity than that experienced by speakers of regional varieties in France who, at least by the very end of the nineteenth century, had more opportunity to access standard French in the workplace. The situation in Quebec has also highlighted the fact that the perceived status of a language can play a role in prescriptivism –​improved status can lead to the acceptance of previously derided forms. For example, the enactment of Bill 101 (1977) led to French becoming “the language of Government and the Law, as well as the normal and everyday language of work, instruction, communication, commerce and business.”6 While the law on the whole focuses on the status and use of the French language in Quebec rather than on its form, with very little advice on the type of French to be used, the improved status of French has in fact led over time to a broader acceptance of a French Canadian standard variety and a move from a highly monocentric to a more pluricentric model of standard French that allows for more than one centre of standardization, as is evident in the creation of reference works such as the USITO dictionary,7 which takes into account both the Québécois and North-​American referential context as well as the French one (Mercier, Remysen & Cajolet-​Laganière, 2017, pp. 302–​303; see also Walsh, 2021a). Nevertheless, in spite of improvements, the “idea of a monolithic norm ... still resides in the imagination of Québécois French-​speakers” (la conception d’une norme monolithique … continue d’habiter l’imaginaire francophone; Villeneuve, 2017, p. 49) and linguistic insecurity is by no means consigned to the past. 431

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4.  Sources of language advice in French: metalinguistic texts This section provides a brief overview of the types of metalinguistic “language advice” texts produced in France since the sixteenth century and in Quebec since the nineteenth century.8 Although discussions of French prescriptivism often have as their focus seventeenth-​ century remarqueurs such as Vaugelas (see next section) and the role of official bodies, such as the Académie française, and although this is the context in which much of the prescriptive activity in France developed (Ayres-​Bennett & Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2016, pp. 105–​106, 116), prescriptivism is not limited to top-​down institutions in either France or Quebec. It is also manifested in dictionaries and grammars from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on (in France) and the nineteenth century on (Quebec); in “corrective” works from the eighteenth century on (France) and the nineteenth century on (Quebec); in the media, most notably, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in language journals and language columns published in local and national press (see Ayres-​Bennett, 2015); in private language societies (see Walsh, 2016); and, in the twenty-​first century, in a variety of online spaces (see Humphries, 2021).

4.1.  Metalinguistic “language advice” texts in France Although, in France, the first true single-​language dictionary of French appeared in 1606 –​ Nicot’s Trésor de la langue françoise –​and grammars of French also began to appear in the sixteenth century (by Meigret, 1550; Estienne, 1557; and Pierre de la Ramée, 1572, for example), the first texts that are really concerned explicitly with language “advice” –​that is, with telling readers how to speak correctly –​are those associated with the remarqueurs genre which began to flourish during the seventeenth century (Ayres-​Bennett, 2014, p. 180). This genre consisted of “volumes of generally short observations or remarks on points of doubtful usage” (Ayres-​Bennett, 2006, p. 263), which included points about not only lexis but also morphology and syntax and even pronunciation. Vaugelas’s Remarques sur la langue françoise (1934 [1647]) marked the start of the genre (Rickard, 1992, p. 40),9 followed closely by similar volumes by authors such as Bouhours (1674, 1692 [11675], 1693 [11692]), Ménage (1675 [11672], 1676), Andry de Boisregard (1692 [11689], 1693), Alemand (1688), La Mothe Le Vayer (1669 [11647]) and Dupliex (1651) (see Ayres-​Bennett, 2014, p. 178). Many of these authors claimed to simply record usage, but it is clear from the metalanguage used in such works that by “usage”, they meant “le bon usage”. Although all were not necessarily always prescriptive –​Vaugelas, for example, often acknowledged variation (see Ayres-​Bennett, 2014, p. 179; Ayres-​Bennett, 2019, p. 211) –​readers often interpreted them as prescriptive, seeing them as guides to the “correct” usage of French. In the eighteenth century, the model for good French became broader than that in use at the royal court, moving to the salons of Paris (i.e. upper class Parisian usage), and this period also saw the creation of volumes aimed at avoiding regional usages, such as Desgrouais’ Gasconismes corrigés (1766), which laid out what not to say (regional usages) alongside their “correct” forms (Parisian usages). The first language advice journal also appeared in 1785, Domergue’s Journal de la langue françoise, which dealt with questions of “correct usage” (Walsh and Kibbee, forthcoming). This continued to be published until the 1840s and was followed in 1868 by the periodical Le Courrier de Vaugelas, which provided responses to reader questions about French grammar or hesitations in usage. Towards the end of the century, chroniques de language first appeared (Osthus, 2015, p. 163), newspaper columns discussing specific French usages, often in a context of correct/​incorrect usage. These works clearly reflect the desire of the general population for language advice. Columns are also sometimes collated and republished as collections, indicating their popularity as a genre and their sizeable audience. 432

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Language columns continued to be popular throughout the twentieth century, enjoying a “golden age” of popularity in the mid-​twentieth century (Ayres-​Bennett, 2015, p. 48). In many ways a continuation of the remarqueurs genre (Ayres-​Bennett, 2015), language columns often discuss “correct” language use or hesitations in usage and are therefore frequently prescriptive, although they are not necessarily so (see Walsh, 2021b). Topics of discussion vary across individual authors, but they can include questions of vocabulary, meaning, morpho-​syntax, style and language history and, much more rarely, pronunciation. As their potential reach is large, so too is their potential influence on the language attitudes of non-​specialists (see Bouchard, 2002). Since the advent of the internet, metalinguistic texts have found an online presence too. Dictionaries and conjugation manuals –​popular in printed form during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries –​now have online counterparts, and language commentary of a type similar to that found in the seventeenth-​century remarques and twentieth-​century language columns has also moved online, with numerous blogs and websites discussing language usage (see Humphries, 2021, p. 14). The Académie française, too, has an online presence, including a section of its website, Dire, Ne pas dire, which facilitates interaction with members of the public (the title of this section demonstrates the continued prescriptive outlook of the Académie). The website publishes just a small number of the language queries it receives. The most frequently published question topics include morpho-​syntax, meaning and vocabulary, with the majority of vocabulary questions concerning borrowings. Additionally, we now have access to the views of “non-​specialists” on websites such as Twitter and Facebook, where issues such as the spelling reform and language and gender have been debated (see, for example, Humphries, 2019), demonstrating a continued interest in the state of the language and its “correct” usage. For instance, Bescherelle ta mère,10 an example of what Heyd (2014, p. 497) terms “grassroots prescriptivist photo blogs”, shares photos of language “errors” and encourages its users to critique and judge them. Bescherelle ta mère differs from the other mentioned metalinguistic texts in that, rather than advising on how to avoid errors, the website’s posts and the accompanying user comments discuss actual errors made by others.

4.2.  Metalinguistic “language advice” texts in Quebec In Quebec, until the mid-​nineteenth century, very few metalinguistic texts were produced; it appears that the question of the French language was not of particular interest (see Bouchard, 2000, p. 197). As noted earlier, the first metalinguistic discussion of Canadian French can be seen in Bibaud’s “language column” published in the newspaper, L’Aurore, from 1817. This column, which was restricted in scope, consisted of short articles condemning the use of anglicisms in legal vocabulary. In 1841, Maguire’s corrective manual, intended to improve the French used in Quebec appeared, shunning any regional usages. While not everyone agreed with Maguire’s approach (see Poirier, 2000, p. 120), it began a tradition of corrective manuals which aimed to remove “errors” –​principally vocabulary “errors” –​from Canadian French, including, for example, Napoléon Caron’s Petit vocabulaire à l’usage des Canadiens-​français (1880) and Raoul Rinfret’s Dictionnaire de nos fautes contre la langue française (1886). Like the corrective volumes published in France in the nineteenth century, these volumes compared “barbarisms” and “errors” (French-​Canadian regionalisms, archaisms, neologisms or anglicisms) with the “correct” term (i.e. that found in contemporary French dictionaries). These were followed by numerous articles with the same aim –​denouncing French-​Canadian usages and promoting French ones. For example, Arthur Buies published a series of articles in the newspapers Le Pays (in 1865) and L’Electeur (in 1888), denouncing “Canadian barbarisms” (Bouchard, 2000, 433

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p. 199). Jules-​Paul Tardivel published a number of pamphlets and articles positioning anglicisms as the “enemy” of the French language (Bouthillier & Meynaud, 1972, p. 207). Many other articles appeared –​often written by respected writers and academics such as Louis Fréchette and Victor Barbeau –​with titles referring to the “neglect” of the language and the influence of English (see Bouthillier & Meynaud, 1972, pp. xi–​xiii). Language columns were also extremely popular; between Buies’s first column in 1865 and 1960, 64 language columns appeared in French-​Canadian newspapers, including La Presse, La Patrie and Le Droit, nearly all of which denounced anglicisms (Daoust, 2000, p. 200) and other “barbarisms”. The columns continued to be popular throughout the rest of the twentieth century and indeed are popular today (see ChroQué, online database of Québécois language columns from 1865–​1996; see also Remysen, 2005). As in France, language is also discussed in online spaces, such as Twitter and YouTube (see, e.g., Bideaux, 2021).

4.3.  Enacting prescriptions in “language advice” texts All of the types of text discussed above use varying kinds of metalanguage to describe, prescribe and proscribe various language usages. This can vary from registering some kind of usage marker (more general in dictionaries, e.g. familier “familiar”, soutenu “refined” etc., but also used in advice manuals, for example, to register whether a usage is a regionalisme “regionalism” or archaïsme “archaisme”), to using language such as imperatives (Ne dites pas X, mais dites Y “Do not say X, say Y”) or the modal falloir (ll faut dire/​il ne faut pas dire, “you must say/​you must not say”) (see Kibbee & Craig, 2019, pp. 74–​75). It can also include the creation of authority, for example, by referring to institutions, grammars and dictionaries, and literary texts that hold particular cultural weight in France, to back up and legitimize the points being made. It can, too, include the use of metaphors to clearly promote the usage that authors view as “correct” or to reinforce a prescriptive point of view that sees one form of language as the “best”.11 It is this imagery that we discuss in the following section.

5.  Case study 5.1.  Sources of data We use a broad-​based qualitative case study to examine, first, the areas of language being discussed and critiqued and, second, the health and sickness imagery used to enact and enforce prescriptions in a corpus of metalinguistic texts from France and Quebec from the nineteenth to twenty-​first centuries. This case study –​which draws on data from two much larger studies of various types of prescriptivism (see Humphries, 2021; Walsh & Cotelli Kureth, 2021) and also includes some new analysis of data from Quebec –​aims to demonstrate prescriptivism in practice, and to show that strikingly similar imagery is used across time and across the two geographical contexts, in most cases, to encourage certain usages and discourage others. The way in which the imagery is used does also develop somewhat over the period examined, as we shall show. We use three samples of metalinguistic texts. The first two samples are taken from a language advice journal and various language columns from nineteenth and twentieth century newspapers, written by authors who are positioned as language “experts”. The third sample is taken from a twenty-​first-​century online language commentary website, with input from various non-​specialists.12 The first two samples are used to compare the imagery used in France and Quebec, and the third sample contributes to a comparison across time. The data sources are displayed in Table 25.1. 434

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Metaphor as a manifestation of prescriptivism Table 25.1  Sources of language advicea Sample 1: nineteenth century France: 19th-century Language advice publication Quebec: 19th-century language columns

Éman Martin Le Courrier de Vaugelas (1868–​1881)

Sample of 150 responses to reader questions.

Arthur Buies Sample of 13 articles from two 1866 “Barbarismes canadiens”, Le Pays language columns. 1888 “Chronique”, L’Électeur

Sample 2: twentieth century France: 20th-​century language columns

Quebec: 20th-​century language columns

Lancelot [Abel Hermant] “Défense de la langue française”, Le Temps Pierre Bourgeade “La vie des mots”, Le Figaro Magazine Jean-​Marie Laurence “Bribes de grammaire”, Le Devoir Louis-​Paul Béguin “Au fil des mots”, Le Devoir

Sample of 50 articles (1933–​35)

Bescherelle ta mère

Sample of 3000 Facebook comments

Sample of 50 articles (1987–​89) Sample of 50 articles (1932–​35) Sample of 50 articles (1981–​82)

Sample 3: twenty-first century 21st-​century online language commentary site

a Note that Buies’s thirteen articles comprise the entirety of the two language columns. See the Chroqué online database of French-​Canadian/​Québécois language columns.

All of the sources analysed are forms of language commentary. Most of the sources include responses to questions about language from the readership, but to differing degrees. Le Courrier de Vaugelas (nineteenth century) is written in a question–​response format, with topics directly related to reader questions. The language columns, on the other hand, sometimes include responses to reader questions, but not in any systematic manner; the topics are frequently simply chosen by each individual author with no clear reasoning behind the choice, except that the author is interested in the question at hand. Bescherelle ta mère differs from the other mentioned metalinguistic texts in that, rather than advising on how to avoid errors, the website publishes errors made by others, primarily for entertainment.

5.2.  Areas of discussion This section outlines the areas of language that are discussed by the various authors in the sources used. Given that the publications generally aim to advise readers on language issues, these areas can be assumed to represent areas of difficulty or doubt for French speakers. The areas discussed are categorized into a number of broad topics, according to what aspect of language they address. The categories used are based on the methodology developed by Humphries (2021, pp. 118–​119), and include vocabulary, morpho-​syntax, semantics, phonology, spelling, style, language history and a “general” topic, that covers topics that do not fall into one of the other areas (e.g., authors discussing newly published grammatical works and metalinguistic knowledge). For the language columns, each topic is counted once per article. For example, if 435

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Olivia Walsh and Emma Humphries Table 25.2  Topics discussed by language column authors Category

Vocabulary Morpho-​syntax Semantics Phonology Spelling Style Language history General

Quebec

France

Buies (1865–​88) [13 articles]

Laurence (1932–​36) [50 articles]

Béguin (1981–​82) [50 articles]

Snell (1929–​30) [50 articles]

Bourgeade (1987–​88) [50 articles]

13 [100%] 10 [77%] -​ -​ 2 [15%] -​ -​ 2 [15%]

16 [32%] 28 [56%] 6 [12%] -​ 6 [12%] 6 [12%] 6 [12%] 9 [18%]

30 [60%] 6 [12%] 10 [20%] 1 [2%] 3 [6%] 9 [18%] 1 [2%] 9 [18%]

17 [34%] 45 [90%] 23 [46%] -​ -​ 8 [16%] -​ 1 [2%]

22 [44%] 1 [2%] 7 [14%] -​ -​ 1 [2%] 1 [2%] 24 [48%]

a single article discusses questions of morpho-​syntax, vocabulary and pronunciation, then each of these topics is counted once. Similarly, if an author discusses multiple points of vocabulary in one article, then this is counted once. Table 25.2 shows the number of articles in which each of the topics is discussed by language column authors. The topics covered and the frequency with which they are covered varies across authors and it appears that the choice of topic is largely related to each author’s individual interests. However, there are some similarities and some apparent differences between the earlier and later language columnists. Only one columnist, Béguin (1980s) discusses phonology and, even then, only in one article. Just three authors discuss spelling, but do not do so very often: Buies (1860s–​80s) in two articles (15%), Laurence (1930s) in six (12%) and Béguin (1980s) in three (6%). While Buies (1860s–​80s) does not discuss semantics, the other four columnists do, to varying degrees. Most of them concentrate on simple questions of the meaning of words or phrases and, in some cases, extension or reduction in semantic scope and synonyms. Laurence and Snell (1930s) are both more likely to discuss topics relating to morpho-​syntax (in 56% and 90% of articles, respectively) than vocabulary (32% and 34%). Béguin and Bourgeade (1980s), on the other hand, are more likely to discuss topics relating to vocabulary (60% and 44%, respectively) and discuss morpho-​syntax only rarely (12% and 2%). Authors differ in the topics relating to vocabulary with some discussion related to questions such as gender (Laurence (1930s), Béguin (1980s) and Snell (1930s)) and plural (Laurence (1930s) and Bourgeade (1980s)). All authors, however, discuss borrowings, but here we see quite a marked difference between the Québécois and French columnists. When discussing vocabulary, Buies (1860s–​80s), Laurence (1930s) and Béguin (1980s) discuss borrowings in 92%, 46% and 24% of articles, respectively, whereas Snell (1930s) and Bourgeade (1980s) discuss them in only 8% and 10% of articles, respectively. The 13 articles that form the totality of Buies’s two language columns mostly concentrate on questions of vocabulary and morpho-​syntax. Buies is wholly focused on highlighting what he considers to be problematic areas of the French used in Canada, what he terms “des barbarismes canadiens” (Canadian barbarisms) (indeed, his first column has this as the title). These “barbarismes” are nearly all either English borrowings or French terms/​expressions that have changed due to contact with English e.g. raffle for loterie (lottery) or “payer l’intérêt sur” for “payer l’intérêt de” (to pay interest on) (26/​10/​1865), and he also discusses some regional usages. Laurence (1930s) similarly often advises readers to avoid certain anglicisms, for example, 436

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réaliser in the sense of “to realize” (extension in meaning due to contact with English) instead of comprendre (to understand) (21 January 1933). He also often complains about the creation of new terms such as échantilloner (14 January 1933) instead of using the existing “offrir un échantillon” (to offer a sample), as he sees them as damaging to the language. Béguin (1980s) also highlights the influence of English on Québécois French, always viewed negatively. For example, in a discussion of the use of “reclamation” (“claim” in the sense of “to file an insurance claim”), Béguin says “It is a shame, in 1982, to use an anglicism that has been condemned, banned, singled out dozens of times” (C’est dommage, en 1982, de se server d’un anglicisme condamné, banni, montré du doigt et de la plume des dizaines de fois.) (18 January 1982). Béguin also, however, refers on more than one occasion to improvements in the French of Quebec. In an article praising the improvement in French since 1975, he notes that a French that is “de plus en plus correct” (more and more correct) is being used in Quebec, and that people are increasingly conscious of the need for “une langue écrite conforme au code international” (a written language that conforms to the international code) (14 May 1982). However, by “international” here, he really means a language that conforms to the standard French of France, and he is in fact quite prescriptive on the whole. Snell (1930s) concentrates most on morpho-​syntax and covers issues ranging from inflectional and derivational morphology to valency, word order and the use of pronouns. Inflectional morphology comes up by far the most frequently, however, most often in discussions of verb paradigms, tense usage and agreement. For example, the question of whether/​when to use the subjunctive/​indicative is discussed in eight separate articles (e.g., 23 April 1929), and various forms of agreement in no fewer than 15 (e.g., 19 March 1929). Indeed, we can see from the introductory article to his column that concentrating on questions of morpho-​syntax is a deliberate strategy: “It is better, if we want to be useful, to stick to questions of syntax rather than to simple questions of words” (Mieux vaut, si on veut faire œuvre utile, s’attacher aux questions de syntaxe qu’aux simples questions de mots.) (26 February 1929). Snell takes a generally fairly prescriptive approach, but occasionally displays an openness to variation. Bourgeade (1980s) does not always stick to a strictly linguistic theme in his articles; although he frequently discusses points of linguistic interest, he also discusses the French language and French literature more broadly, often praising the French language as he does so. For example, he gives very positive overviews of the new Hachette Dictionnaire du français (05 December 1987). He also often praises French for its beautiful literature (e.g., 03 September 1988). Morpho-​syntax is discussed in only one article, where Bourgeade claims that using the suffixes “-​iste/​-​eur” for word creation leads to “inelegant neologisms” (des néologismes inélégants). He is generally relatively prescriptive but is descriptive on occasion and sometimes open to variation. Table 25.3 presents the topics of readers’ questions published, with responses from “expert” editor Eman Martin, in Le Courrier de Vaugelas (1868–​ 1881). The three most frequently occurring topics were language history (691 questions), semantics (686 questions) and morpho-​ syntax (404 questions). Language history was less frequently discussed in the language columns from both regions across each time period, but morpho-​syntax was a frequent area of discussion, as was the case for both the French and Québécois columnists in the 1930s (Snell and Laurence). Semantics was also frequently discussed, but this was the case really only for Snell (1930s) amongst the language columnists. Borrowings (a subcategory of vocabulary) are the concern of just three out of 2019 questions suggesting that this is not a strong concern for nineteenth-​century speakers in France. This is also the case for the two French columnists, although it is a much stronger concern for the Québécois columnists in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Martin’s approach to giving language advice is generally prescriptive 437

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No. of questions

%

Language history Semantics Morpho-​syntax Spelling Phonology Vocabulary Style General Total

691 686 404 88 61 61 17 11 2019

34% 34% 20% 4% 3% 3% 1% 1% 100%

but he does show openness to variation; his advice is often governed by etymology and the history of the language rather than contemporary usage. Bescherelle ta mère is a website which posts perceived language errors made by others and allows users to publish comments alongside this content. The featured errors predominantly concern spelling, including ideogram errors (e.g. cest (its) rather than c’est (it’s))13 and misanalyses (e.g. une canne de tous rather than une quinte de toux (coughing fit)),14 and silent morphology errors (e.g. Le prix des carburants (re)flambent rather than Le prix des carburants (re)flambe (The price of fuel has shot up))15. The format of the photo blog naturally excludes certain topics from discussion, e.g., phonology, and classifying the featured errors by “type” is not straightforward. For instance, many of the texts featured are examples of computer-​mediated communication and consequently the possibility that errors are inadvertent typos or the result of autocorrection cannot be disregarded. However, despite the website’s tagline (“We’re teaching you French, dammit!”, (On t’apprend le français, bordel!)), its primary purpose is to entertain its users rather than to educate and so the cause or type of error is not discussed or positioned as important. Analysis of this small sample of metalinguistic texts suggests that while vocabulary is a common topic of discussion in both France and Quebec and across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Québécois authors are much more likely to discuss borrowings –​specifically, anglicisms –​ than French columnists are. This is an interesting finding, given the reputation France has for disliking anglicisms, but it reinforces the results of a study carried out by Walsh (2016) which found that “ordinary” French speakers are not in fact overly concerned by the use of anglicisms in French. Given the much greater threat posed by the English language in Quebec, it is unsurprising that French speakers there hold more negative attitudes towards anglicisms. Morpho-​ syntax appears to have become less discussed over time, with the two columnists in the 1980s discussing it much more rarely than the earlier ones in the 1930s. It is unclear why this is the case. Questions of phonology and spelling are rare. This is interesting, given that these are two areas where one might assume speakers to experience hesitancy or uncertainty. Spelling errors are, however, the most frequently discussed error type in the twenty-​first-​century Bescherelle ta mère corpus, but this is possibly related to the format and purpose of the website.

5.3.  Imagery in metalinguistic texts As we can see, in all of the sources examined, various language usages are not only described but frequently also prescribed or proscribed, although individual authors can do this to a greater or lesser extent. One means of prescribing language usages is to use negative imagery. Indeed, 438

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there is a long tradition of the use of imagery in metalinguistic texts and grammars, found in grammatical works dating as far back as Quintilian and Horace (Ayres-​Bennett, 2011, p. 239). Typical metaphors used to describe language include milling; gardening, cultivation and growth; war and battle; filth and stench; richness and poverty; dress, disguise and makeup; disease and healthy; genealogy; religion; and law (see Thomas, 1991; Jones, 1999). Such metaphors are typically associated with language purism. Metaphor was also used in metalinguistic texts such as those produced by the remarqueurs for prescriptive purposes, to persuade readers to use certain language forms and dissuade them from using others (see Ayres-​Bennett, 2011). Such metaphors have continued into the twentieth and twenty-​first centuries, although their usage has developed somewhat. In this section, due to limitations of space, we discuss only one type of imagery: that related to sickness and health.

5.4.  Images of sickness and health Prescriptivist imagery often relies on the personification of the language, positioning the language as a living organism which can be harmed, become sick and even die (Langer & Nesse, 2012, p. 617). Images related to sickness and health are a frequent feature in prescriptivist commentary on the French language. They are used, for instance, by all the language columnists included in Walsh and Cotelli Kureth’s sample (ranging from 1918–​1989), mostly (although not always) with prescriptive intent (2021, pp. 478–​479). Images related to health and sickness are found in all samples of prescriptivist text analysed in this study: in France and in Quebec, in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-​first centuries. These images take two main forms: the language is sick/​ill/​dying, or the use of non-​standard language causes pain and suffering. In the nineteenth century, French-​Canadian language columnist, Buies, frequently uses health imagery to discourage particular usages or encourage others. For example, in a discussion of the use of capitalization in newspapers (he considers it to be used too widely and incorrectly), he says “Upper case usage … has become a real epidemic in our journalism, an epidemic which has invaded and afflicted our miniscule literature” (La majuscule … est devenue une veritable épidémie dans notre journalisme, une épidémie qui a envahi et qui désole notre minuscule littérature) (9 January 1888). He sees the misuse of capital letters as an “epidemic” that is overtaking and harming Québécois literature. He also equates what he views as a lack of engagement with seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century French literature with a lack of “healthy, strong” food (“La nourriture n’est plus saine et forte” (Food is no longer healthy and strong)) which causes “dyspepsia of intelligence” (les dyspeptiques de l’intelligence) akin to physical dyspepsia (21 January 1888). In an article on what he views as the deplorable language used in French-​Canadian journalism, he claims that by reading such journalism, “we have allowed … the healthy, enlightened part of our population to become contaminated … to the point of no longer even suspecting the extent of the risk by which it is threatened” (nous laissons … la partie saine, éclairée de la population se contaminer … au point de ne plus soupçonner l’étendue du périle qui la ménace). In a further article complaining about journalistic Canadian French, he refers to the “pain of seeing such tortures inflicted on our good, obliging generous French language” (la douleur de voir infliger de pareilles tortures à notre bonne, complaisante et généreuse langue française) (18 February 1888). Buies also occasionally uses metaphors to indicate that particular usages can cause pain and suffering to the author or to speakers of the language. For example, in an article again complaining about the language used by journalists, he states that a certain usage (of the term assumption, used with the English meaning “assumption”) caused him to faint (“je tombai en une forte syncope”) (25 February 1888). In a later article, he talks about certain terms (système, 439

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resignation, requisition and votation used with the meaning of their English counterparts) “gouging our eyes” (nous crever les yeux) every time they appear (03 March 1888). In each case where Buies uses this kind of metaphor it is either to denounce a particular usage (often an anglicism) or the lack of quality of French-​Canadian journalism in general. It acts to strengthen the force of his statements and clearly adds to the prescriptive nature of his articles, positioning certain usages (e.g. the semantic loans above) as “incorrect” and not to be used. The simple positioning of the language as “sick” or in danger of its health being attacked is much more common in his work than the use of metaphor to show himself (or the reader) feeling discomfort. In the nineteenth-​century language advice publication, Le Courrier de Vaugelas, the self-​ positioned expert, Éman Martin, uses metaphor infrequently in comparison to his Québécois contemporary, Buies. There is, however, one extended use of health imagery in the sample, alongside uses of health-​related lexis such as “infliger” (to inflict) and “défecteux” (defective). In response to a reader’s question about the inclusion of a pleonasm (“un zéro en chiffre” (a zero in figures)) in dictionaries published in 1727 and 1771, Martin writes: “It was, therefore, between 1727 and 1771 that this regrettable confusion took place [literally “was operated” in the French]: the damage is not old enough yet that it can’t be cured” (Ce serait donc entre 1727 et 1771, que cette confusion regrettable se serait opérée: le mal n’est pas assez ancien pour qu’on n’y puisse porter remède) (1 June 1875). Whereas Buies’s health imagery focused on pain and illness, Martin’s image focuses on bringing the language back to health. The person healing the language is in the position of an expert, of a surgeon or physician, as is often found in purist language commentary (cf. Thomas, 1991, p. 22). Martin makes numerous references to the effects of language use on the ears and eyes, e.g., he describes the word bougrement (“damned”) as “too hard on the ear” (trop dur à l’oreille) (15 November 1868), but in no instances in this sample does this extend to pain, as we saw in Buies’s column and will see in the later sources. Both French and Québécois language columnists in the twentieth century also make use of images of health and sickness, although to a lesser degree. In the 1930s, both the French-​ Canadian columnist, Laurence, and the French columnist, Snell, occasionally frame language in terms of health or sickness. For example, Laurence, positions the French subjunctive mood as in ill health in the following: “The subjunctive, which is an infinitely precious mood, is already sick enough for us to stop ill-​treating it out of vainglorious stupidity” (Le subjonctif, mode infiniment précieux, est déjà assez malade pour qu’on s’abstienne de le maltraiter par sotte gloriole) (30 March 1935). He also talks about the “invertebrate syntax” (syntaxe invertébrée) of certain usages, such as “as agreed” (comme convenu), stating that “the most benign concession can have fatal consequences” (la concession la plus bénigne peut avoir des consequences funestes), thereby indirectly presenting the language in terms of ill-​ health (05 March 1934). He further refers to speakers who use “is it” (est-​ce que), e.g. saying “Qu’est-​ce que vous dites?” instead of “Que dites-​vous?” (What are you saying?) as “parasites” (des parasites) (24 December 1932) and to radio broadcasters who use direct translations into French from English as “anencephalic growths” (pousses anacéphales), i.e. growths without a brain (27 April 1935). He therefore presents not only the French language as being in a state of ill-​health or disease, but also some of its speakers. However, these are the only examples found in the sample examined. In the sample analysed, Snell uses only one image related to health. In the first article of his column, he states that certain types of error are more serious than others, namely that questions of vocabulary (e.g. the creation of “unnecessary” or “unpleasant” neologisms) are less damaging than grammatical errors, which may “cripple” or “maim” the language: “Unnecessary or unpleasant neologisms will simply disappear and cause no damage to the language but it is different with grammatical errors which may cripple it” (Les néologismes inutiles ou déplaisants 440

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tombent d’eux-​mêmes et ne causent aucun dommage à la langue: autre est le cas des solécismes qui l’estropient.) (26 February 1929). Health imagery occurs infrequently in the 1980s in the columns of Louis-​Paul Béguin (Quebec) and Pierre Bourgeade (France). For example, Bourgeade refers to a reader being “afflicted” (affligé) by seeing English used instead of French (28 October 1988) and talks about the French language becoming “weaker” (le française s’affaiblira) due to allowing things like using the verb débuter (to start, being) transitively (July 1987). He also, in a (very positive) discussion of a book series on the French language called Le Français retrouvé, notes that “ ‘Le français retrouvé’ [Rediscovering French] is also resuscitating French” (“Le français retrouvé”, c’est aussi le française resuscité). (26 September 1987). However, while Bourgeade frequently uses other types of imagery and metaphor –​and always for prescriptive purposes –​these are the only examples of images of health/​sickness he uses. (Note that in spite of this, he is often descriptive in approach). Béguin also only rarely uses this type of image. In an article on the use of anglicisms, he says “we must fight this laziness, this snobbery, which means that we inflict a thousand serious injuries on the French language” (il faut lutter contre cette paresse, ce snobisme, qui fait qu’on inflige au français mille blessures graves) (18 January 1982). He also refers to anglicisms “tiring our ears” (on nous fatigue l’oreille) and, in a more extreme image, states that “I nearly strangled myself ” (je faillis m’étrangler) when he saw a particular calque being used (concurrentialité for compétitivité (competitiveness)). In the twenty-​first century non-​specialist discourse from the Bescherelle ta mère Facebook page, imagery related to sickness and health continues. Whilst no user comments in the sample of 3000 mention an unhealthy or pained language, 11 comments elevate the idea of a sick language to describe the death of the language, nine of which refer to a massacre, e.g.: “every time someone massacres the French language on social media, somewhere a Father Christmas dies” (chaque fois que quelqu’un massacre la langue française sur un réseau social, un père noël meurt quelque part). Extreme imagery is often prevalent in online discourse (Demjén and Hardaker, 2016, p. 354) and the Bescherelle ta mère comments section is no exception. More common in the Bescherelle ta mère sample are images which present errors as painful to the hearer or reader, rather than the language (165 comments). 62 users mention pain localized in their eyes, e.g. “It makes my eyes sting!! I’m blind” (“Ça pique les yeux!! Suis aveugle!! ”) and several references to violent sexual attacks on the eyes, alongside ailments ranging from vomiting, fainting (as we saw in Buies’s column), and heart attacks. Such images no longer show concern for the state of the language, but rather position using “correct” language as a civil duty, to avoid doing harm onto others. Moreover, the images can create an “us” and “them” divide, i.e., those who know how to use the language “correctly” and those who do not. While this is not unique to this online commentary –​this individualistic approach is also found in the discourse of language columnists –​the user comments in the sample differ from the others discussed in the chapter in that they are concerned with discussing (and in many cases policing) the language, rather than giving linguistic advice, and they are frequently stronger in tone.

Conclusion The case study has shown that the use of imagery for prescriptive purposes is present, albeit to varying degrees, across all three samples (nineteenth-​century France and Quebec; twentieth-​ century France and Quebec; and twenty-​first century online non-​specialist discourse) and that, while the areas of language discussed varies across individual authors, there are nevertheless some apparent trends, including far more discussion of anglicisms in Quebec than in France 441

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and an apparent decline in discussions of morphosyntax across time. All authors use images of sickness/​health to position themselves in regard to particular usages. From the limited sample analysed, it appears that this imagery is rather more common in Quebec language advice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries than it is in French language advice, but by the late twentieth century it is somewhat less common in both France and Quebec. It is also far more commonly used to prescribe the use of anglicisms or decry the influence of English on French in Quebec than it is in France, where it is only used on one occasion for this purpose (Bourgeade, 28 October 1988). Given that the nineteenth-​and twentieth-​century samples used language advice compiled by what we might term language experts, this is perhaps unsurprising. As Kibbee and Craig point out (2019, p. 77), there has been a general tendency in the French tradition towards more “tolerance” of variation (i.e., towards a more descriptive view), at least in France (although of course this is not the case across the board). It is also unsurprising that we find more use of this kind of imagery in Quebec during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, given the very real threat from English, and the desire to keep the language as close as possible to the French of France to mitigate this threat, reflected in the explosion of corrective language manuals. Anglicisms have similarly been the aim of prescriptivist discourse in France, with even legislative attempts to “defend” the French language from English made in the 1994 loi Toubon. Thus, the role of individual author style as an influencing factor in the frequency and choice of metaphor cannot, of course, be disregarded. Most of the imagery used positions the language as being either in a state of ill-​health or in danger of becoming ill or contaminated, although in a few cases, the authors themselves or speakers are presented as being injured by a particular usage (e.g., causing a heart attack). This is slightly more common in the Québécois authors than the French authors from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, perhaps again a reflection of the greater threat to French felt by French speakers there. In the sample from the twenty-​first century, we no longer see images of a sick language, rather the language is now presented as in real danger of dying or being massacred by those who speak it. Speakers frequently present themselves as being personally injured by particular usages, often using violent and extreme imagery. Although we already see examples of this in the late nineteenth century, it appears to have become more widespread. Of course, we must bear in mind that the twenty-​first century commentary is not language advice written by “experts” but rather by presumed “non-​specialists”, even if these non-​specialists may want to position themselves as experts in some way. What is common across all samples is the fact that these images are used for very clearly prescriptive purposes, to position one usage as incorrect and another as correct, or at the very least, to hierarchize usages as more or less desirable. Given the differing histories of the development and use of French in France and Quebec, it is hardly surprising that we see some differences in the frequency and targets of such imagery. What is striking is its presence in all of the (relatively small) samples of texts analysed, continuing a tradition in French language commentary which can be traced back to at least Vaugelas and his contemporaries (Ayres-​Bennett, 2011). Four centuries later, this tradition is still alive and well online.

Notes 1 Tends to accompany but does not necessarily accompany; codification can result in a prescriptive or descriptive norm (Ayres-​Bennett, 2019, p. 187). 2 All translations ours, unless otherwise specified. 3 www.acade​mie-​franca​ise.fr/​linst​itut​ion/​les-​missi​ons

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Metaphor as a manifestation of prescriptivism 4 Overwhelmingly, but not exclusively, negative. For instance, Martineau’s (2014, p. 21) study of nineteenth-​century metalinguistic discourse provides examples of, amongst other things, positive evaluations of the French spoken in the St Lawrence valley, Quebec, by travellers to the region. 5 Joual is defined by the Québécois dictionary, USITO, as “A working-​class variety of Québécois French characterised by particular features (mainly phonetic and lexical) generally borrowed from English” (Variété populaire du française québécois, caractérisée par certains traits (surtout phonétiques et lexicaux) généralement empruntés à l’anglais). USITO, https://​usito.ushe​rbro​oke.ca/​d%C3%A9fi​niti​ ons/​joual. Although debate in the past often placed ‘standard’ French and joual in opposition, as though these were the only two varieties used in Quebec, in reality, joual is just one variety among many used in Quebec, where there is as much social and geographical variation in language use as anywhere else. 6 LégisQuebec, “Charter of the French language” http://​legi​sque​bec.gouv.qc.ca/​en/​show​doc/​cs/ C-​11/​20021​001#se:162 7 www.usito.com/​ 8 As the chapter focuses on “language advice” texts, more general metalinguistic works such as general dictionaries and grammars are not discussed (for an overview of the development of such texts in France, see Walsh and Kibbee, forthcoming). 9 Although, note the existence of Jean de Wapy’s Remarques sur la langue françoise pour parler à la mode & selon l’air du temps (1534), which appeared before Vaugelas’s own remarks. Wapy had little influence, however (see Ayres-​Bennett, 2014, p. 178). 10 Website available at https://​besche​rell​etam​ere.fr/​. Facebook page, where users’ comments are published, available here: www.faceb​ook.com/​besche​rell​etam​ere (accessed 23 February 2022). The name of the website, Bescherelle ta mère, alludes to the famed French language reference book franchise Bescherelle, and ta mère (your mum), an offensive interjection, used in informal language –​also in the form of “nique ta mère” (motherfucker; Go fuck yourself). 11 Note that while the majority of language commentators analysed here use references to various forms of linguistic authority and purist metaphors to promote a prescriptive point of view, the same tools can occasionally be used to promote a descriptive point of view. See Walsh 2021; Walsh and Cotelli-​ Kureth 2021 for discussions concerning language columnists. 12 The extent to which those interacting with Bescherelle ta mère are “non-​specialists” is unclear, as little is known about the page’s audience. “Non-​specialist” here is used to distinguish between this discourse and that of the commentators in the first two samples, positioned as “experts”. 13 https://​besche​rell​etam​ere.fr/​jul-​vous-​souha​ite-​un-​joy​eux-​noel/​ 14 https://​besche​rell​etam​ere.fr/​si-​vous-​avez-​cinq-​minu​tes-​pour-​dec​hiff​rer-​ces-​deux-​malad​ies/​ 15 http://​besche​rell​etam​ere.fr/​faute-​classi​que-​mais-​toujo​urs-​enerva​nte/​

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Metaphor as a manifestation of prescriptivism Kroskrity, P. V. (2000). Regimenting languages: language ideological perspectives. In P. V. Kroskrity (Ed.), Regimes of language: ideologies, polities and identities (pp. 1–​34). James Currey. Kroskrity, P. V. (2016). Language ideologies: emergence, elaboration, and application. In N. Bonvillain (Ed.), The Routledge handbook of linguistic anthropology (pp. 95–​108). Routledge. La Mothe Le Vayer, F. de. (1669 [11647]). Lettres touchant les nouvelles remarques sur la langue françoise, in Œuvres de François de la Mothe Le Vayer, conseiller d’estat ordinaire: Tome X: Contenant divers petits traitez, en forme de lettres. L. Billaine. Langer, N. & Nesse, A. (2012). Linguistic purism. In J. M. Hernández-​Campoy & J. C. Camilo-​Silvestre (Eds.) The handbook of historical sociolinguistics (pp. 607–​625). John Wiley & Sons. Léard, J.-​M. (1995). Grammaire québécois d’aujourd’hui: comprendre les québécismes. Guérin. Lew, R. & de Schryver, G.-​M. (2014). Dictionary users in the digital revolution. International Journal of Lexicography, 27(4), 341–​359. Lodge, R.A. (1993). French: from dialect to standard. Routledge. Lodge, R.A. (2004). A sociolinguistic history of Parisian French. Cambridge University Press. Martel, P. & Cajolet-​Laganière, H. (1997). Le Français québécois: usages, standard et aménagement. Presses de l’Universite de Laval. Martineau, F. (2014). L’Acadie et le Québec: convergences et divergences. Minorités linguistiques et société /​ Linguistic Minorities and Society, 4, 16–​41. https://​doi.org/​10.7202/​102469​1ar. McLelland, N. (2021). Grammars, dictionaries and other metalinguistic texts in the context of language standardization. In W. Ayres-​Bennett & J. Bellamy (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of language standardisation (pp. 263–​93). Cambridge University Press. Ménage, G. 1675 [11672]. Observations de Monsieur Ménage sur la langue Françoise, 2e éd. C. Barbin. Ménage, G. (1676). Observations de Monsieur Ménage sur la langue françoise. Segonde partie. C. Barbin. Mercier, L., Remysen, W. & Cajolet-​Laganière, H. (2017). Québec. In U. Reutner (Ed.). Manuel des francophonies (pp. 271–​310). de Gruyter. Milroy, J. & Milroy, L. (2012). Authority in language: investigating standard English (4th edition). Routledge. Osthus, D. (2003). Le bon usage d’Internet –​discours et conscience normatifs dans des débats virtuels. In D. Osthus, C. Polzin-​Haumann & C. Schmitt (Eds.), La norme linguistique: théorie –​pratique –​médias –​ enseignement: actes du colloque tenu à Bonn le 6 et le 7 décembre 2002 (pp. 139–​152). Romanistischer Verlag. Osthus, D. (2015). Linguistique populaire et chroniques de langage: France. In C. Polzin-​Haumann & W. Schweickard (Eds.), Manuel de linguistique française (pp. 160–​170). de Gruyter. https://​doi.org/​ 10.1515/​978311​0302​219-​008. Ostiguy, L. & Tousignant, C. (2008). Les prononciations du français québécois: normes et usages. Guérin. Paveau, M.-​A. & Rosier, L. (2008). La langue française: Passions et polémiques. Vuibert. Plourde, M. (Ed.). (2000). Le Français au Québec: 400 ans d’histoire et de vie. Fides. Poirier, C. (2000). Une langue qui se définit dans l’adversité. In M. Plourde (Ed.), Le Français au Québec: 400 ans d’histoire et de vie (pp. 111–​122). Fides. Poirier, C. (1995). Les variantes topolectales du lexique français: proposition de classement à partir d’exemples québécois. In M. Francard & D. Latin. (Eds.), Le régionalisme lexical (pp. 13–​56). Duculot. Remysen, W. (2005). La Chronique de langage à la lumière de l’expérience canadienne-​française: un essai de définition. In J. Bérubé, K. Gauvin & W. Remysen (Eds.), Les Journées de linguistique: Actes du 18e colloque 11–​12 mars 2004 (pp. 267–​81). Centre interdisciplinaire de recherches sur les activités langagières. Rickard, P. (1989). A history of the French language (2nd edition). Routledge. Rickard, P. (1992). The French language in the seventeenth century: contemporary opinion in France. D. S. Brewer. Rinfret, R. (1886). Dictionnaire de nos fautes contre la langue française. Cadieux & Derome. de Rivarol, A. (1991 [1784]). L’universalité de la langue française. (edited by J. Dutourd). Arléa. Saint-​Gérand, J.-​P. (2009). Entre (t) erreur et faute, trémulations de la langue et police du langage (1794–​ 1870). Romantisme, 146, 9–​24. https://​doi.org/​10.3917/​rom.146.0009. Silverstein, M. (1979). Language structure and linguistic ideology. In P. R. Clyne, W. F. Hanks, & C. L. Hofbauer (Eds.), The elements: a parasession on linguistic units and levels (pp. 193–​247). Chicago Linguistic Society. Tarnarutckaia, E. & Ensslin A. (2020). The myth of the “clarté française”: language ideologies and metalinguistic discourse of videogame speech accents on Reddit. Discourse & Media, 33, 1–​19. https://​doi. org/​10.1016/​j.dcm.2019.100​352.

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26 DUTCH PRESCRIPTIVISM IN A HISTORICAL-​ SOCIOLINGUISTIC PERSPECTIVE Measuring the effect of institutionalized prescriptivism Eline Lismont, Gijsbert Rutten, and Rik Vosters*

1. Introduction As is the case for many other European languages, Dutch has a long tradition of metalinguistic commentary, taking the form of, for instance, grammars, orthographies, schoolbooks, or treatises on language. In many of these cases, such works can be seen as part of attempts to standardize the language, with codifiers prescribing specific forms and proscribing others. As we will discuss in this chapter, this even resulted in official norms for grammar and orthography mandated by the Dutch government in the early nineteenth century as an early culmination of corpus planning efforts to regulate and standardize language use. In this chapter, we discuss such instances of linguistic prescriptivism in the history of Dutch from a historical-​sociolinguistic perspective while focusing on the Early and Late Modern period (1550–​1850). In Section 2, we discuss the difference between “non-​institutionalized” and “institutionalized” prescriptivism. We also argue that prescriptions and proscriptions need to be studied as historical phenomena tied to specific social contexts and language ideologies, where analyses of historical prescriptivism should take into account both their linguistic and social embedding. Section 3 discusses some significant developments in the history of Dutch institutionalized prescriptivism, where we observe how prescriptions became more institutionalized over time, while the social and linguistic embedding of prescriptions also changed. In Section 4, we then discuss the relationship –​or lack thereof –​between language norms and actual language use, while considering several important factors in the attempt to determine prescriptive success. In this contribution, we focus mostly on the crucial role of chronology and its relation to the social embedding of prescriptivism. This is illustrated in the case study in Section 5, where we discuss changing prescriptions and changing norms of usage DOI: 10.4324/9781003095125-29

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in a historical corpus of Dutch from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. We conclude the chapter by recapitulating the main lines of our argument and the most important findings of our case study along with some recommendations for future research into the history of prescriptivism. We adopt a wide definition of prescriptivism under which we understand all attempts by metalinguistic commentators to prescribe or proscribe specific forms of language use either explicitly (e.g. by discussing why a particular form should not be used or another is preferred) or implicitly (e.g. by including particular forms in examples or morphological paradigms and excluding others). We do, however, restrict ourselves to prescriptivism targeting people with Dutch as a dominant language, i.e. we do not discuss grammars or language guides for learners of Dutch as a second or foreign language, and we mostly look at comments of language authorities that are laid down in metalinguistic works, although societal processes are also considered.

2.  Historical prescriptivism: institutionalization and embedding Metalinguistic activity is likely to be an inherent aspect of human communication (Cameron, 2012, pp. 1–​2), and it often takes the form of corrective practices and attitudes (Moschonas, 2020). Moschonas (2020) distinguishes between two basic types of correctives, viz. correctives proper, which identify what must be used and what should not be used, thus combining prescription, proscription, and permissives, which indicate the circumstances under which certain forms may be used. This approach provides us with sufficiently abstract schemes to cover prescriptive practices from different times and contexts. After all, “verbal hygiene” may be a “general phenomenon”, but “it only exists concretely in specific practices, and these are always socially situated, embedded in history” (Cameron, 2012, p. 2). Such specific practices can take place in everyday human interaction, for example, when parents correct the language used by their children. In such cases, we may talk about non-​ institutionalized forms of corrective practices and attitudes, even though they usually involve the reproduction of community norms (cf. Cameron, 2012, p. 2; Curzan, 2014, p. 16). These community norms may be tied to either local or supralocal language ideologies; in the latter case, this can also be the standard language ideology that is simultaneously reproduced in institutional settings such as schools, curricula, and editing policies. The fact that Crystal (2006, p. 197) even compares people’s relationship with the norms of the standard language to the Stockholm syndrome is telling. The institutional embeddedness of the standard language, and the chances of social success associated with this, may prompt parents to instil the standard norms in their children. The difference between non-​institutionalized and institutional settings is therefore gradual rather than categorical. Historical examples of non-​ institutionalized forms of corrective practices are difficult to uncover, and are typically found in ego-​documents, such as personal letters, diaries, and travelogues. A well-​known example from the history of Dutch comes from the poet and historian P. C. Hooft (1581–​1647). Hooft is considered one of the major authors of the seventeenth century, when the foundation of the Dutch standard was supposedly laid (Rutten, 2016). On 27 October 1646, Hooft sent a letter from Amsterdam to his son Arnout (1630–​1680), who was living in Leiden during his studies (van Tricht, 1979, pp. 771–​772). He advises his son on his studies and extra-​curricular activities such as dancing and fencing. Relevant here is that Hooft also criticizes his son’s language use, formulating a series of correctives proper: the word for “now” is written nu instead of nuij, the word for “I” is spelt ik, not ick, the verb “be” is zijn, not sijn. His son, Hooft claims, should sign his letters uw onderdaanighste zoon “your most humble son” instead of uw onderdaanighsten zoon, adding the declination of this phrase according 448

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to the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and ablative cases. The reason for his criticism, Hooft explains, is that he wants his son to learn to write and speak his mother tongue well. After signing the letter, he adds that his son should call himself Arnout when writing in Dutch, not Arnoldus. Such non-​institutionalized practices, which often take place in spoken interaction, are difficult to identify for historical sociolinguists compared to institutionalized forms of corrective practices and attitudes, which are more easily traceable through language history. However, Havinga and Krogull (2022) show that uncovering language attitudes from historical sources, while difficult, is not impossible. The same text types they mention as valuable sources for research on historical attitudes, namely grammars and schoolbooks, are also often used in research on historical prescriptivism. Typically, the earliest normative publications on Dutch emanate from institutional contexts that trigger metalinguistic practices, such as schools, the printing press, and the literary field, with schoolteachers, printers, and literary authors as the writers of prescriptive works (Dibbets, 1977, p. 24; van der Wal & van Bree, 2008, p. 191). Over time, these metalinguistic practices become institutionalized and part of an increasingly focused normative tradition, maintained by language experts who form a discourse community (Watts, 1999). Nonetheless, such traditions remain sensitive to significant spatio-​temporal specificities. A higher level of institutionalized prescriptivism is reached when corrective practices and attitudes become officialized through policy measures such as school regulations and educational laws. This often happens when language develops into a contested object of socio-​ political debate. In the history of Dutch, such debates intensified in the course of the eighteenth century, when contemporary cultural nationalism increasingly acquired a political touch. This resulted in an official Dutch language policy in the early nineteenth century, leading to the official codification of the spelling and grammar of Dutch (Rutten, 2019). Whether institutionalized or not, prescriptive practices are always social phenomena tied to variable language ideologies. Some correctives are extremely stable through time. An example from the history of Dutch is the form of the definite article in the genitive masculine singular. The grammatical tradition promoted the form des “of the” from the sixteenth century onwards and well into the nineteenth century (Krogull & Rutten, 2020). The approach presupposes case and gender to be relevant grammatical categories in Dutch, which is not self-​evident, and which moreover becomes increasingly problematic in the course of the Early and Late Modern period. The linguistic embedding of this particular prescription has weakened since Dutch has been in the process of losing case and gender distinctions, making this prescription extremely conservative. This means that the discrepancy between this particular prescription and language use also became greater over time, which raises the question of why a form such as des was still prescribed in, say, the nineteenth century. The answer must be partly social, and, in general, such historical changes call for the analysis of the social embedding of corrective practices and attitudes. Social aspects that need to be included in the analyses of historical prescriptivism include the intended audience of the prescriptive publication, the register targeted by corrective practices and the underlying language ideologies motivating them. In the case of des, it is important to note that older stages of Dutch, and the seventeenth century in particular, became idealized in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century discourse (Rutten, 2016). The sixteenth-​century prescription in of des usage may be grounded in the selection of one of the variants found in the contemporary linguistic repertoire, or in the desire to comply with classical morphology. In the nineteenth century, the prescription was also motivated by the desire to adopt the forms used (or in any case prescribed) by the literary and norm-​providing figures of the seventeenth century. 449

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3.  Changes in Dutch historical prescriptivism Dutch institutionalized prescriptivism begins in the sixteenth century with various works on orthography, most of which were published in the Southern Netherlands in the regions of Flanders and Brabant. These works were usually intended for school use, and the authors were often schoolteachers, printers, or both (Dibbets, 1977). The prescriptions in these works differed significantly from one another due to the regional orientation of many of the authors. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, the first fully-​fledged grammar of Dutch was published titled Twe-​spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst (Dialogue about Dutch grammar, 1584). Although anonymously published, it is widely assumed that the author was the wealthy merchant H. L. Spieghel (1549–​1612). Spieghel was the co-​founder of the Amsterdam chamber of rhetoric De Eglantier, and the Twe-​spraack was in fact presented as a collaborative enterprise of this chamber. The chambers of rhetoric were local communities of adult middle and upper-​middle class men with a strong pedagogical purpose. They sought to educate their members in the liberal arts, primarily with the aim of promoting educated regional citizenship, but also in order to develop a learned culture in the vernacular (van Dixhoorn, forthcoming). The Twe-​spraack, for example, was part of a series of publications in the tradition of the trivium focusing on the “artes serminocales”, i.e. grammar, logic or dialectic, and rhetoric. The trivium period of Dutch metalanguage ended around 1650 (Klifman, 1983). A number of grammars and orthographies were published in the seventeenth century, some of which, such as Kók (1649), were indeed still part of a series of publications including texts about logic and rhetoric. The second half of the seventeenth century saw the rise of a new paradigm: the literary texts produced in the first half of the century were increasingly conceptualized as examples of “good usage”. This led to the Vondelianist approach to language, named after the main author, the poet Joost van den Vondel (1587–​1679) (Rutten & Vosters, 2013). At the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, various prescriptive works addressing style, spelling, grammar, and rhetoric were published. The approach looked back on the literary works of the seventeenth century and aimed to create a similar literary culture by identifying young poets as an important target group. The Vondelianist approach aimed to offer grammatical and stylistic advice to those who were to perform the higher linguistic registers in public life, such as politicians, lawyers, ministers, and literary authors (Rutten, 2019, p. 52). The prescriptive works of the early periods, and until c. 1700, offered many correctives at various language levels, from orthography to style and discourse. The correctives were primarily targeted towards specific social groups within Dutch society, such as the authors’ immediate peers (Rutten & Vosters, 2021). The next major shift takes place during the eighteenth century, when the target audience of metalinguistic texts is gradually extended to include the population as a whole, against the background of the emerging standard language ideology. This change is accompanied by a pedagogical reorientation of normative grammar and takes place both in the Northern and in the Southern Netherlands. For the northern, Vondelianist tradition, this means that the concrete correctives often remained the same throughout the decades, while their socio-​political and language-​ideological embedding had dramatically changed (Rutten & Vosters, 2021). By the end of the eighteenth century, the nation and the national language had become the natural points of orientation for authors of prescriptive works. Thus, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, a second level of institutionalized prescriptivism was reached in the Northern Netherlands. An official language policy was established as part of an educational reform. An important aspect of the new regulations, encompassing also

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official spelling and grammar regulations published on behalf of the government (Siegenbeek, 1804; Weiland, 1805), was the introduction of a control mechanism, i.e. a system of school inspection, enabling enforcement of language planning measures (Schoemaker & Rutten, 2017). The decades around 1800 mark the beginning of a still existing national language culture. When the Southern and Northern Netherlands were reunited in 1814, in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat, the official Northern norms also spread to the South (Vosters et al., 2014). The United Kingdom of the Netherlands ceased to exist in 1830, evoking a debate between integrationists and particularists about the extent to which the written language in the South should comply with the Northern normative tradition (Willemyns, 1993). Close contacts between Southern and Northern scholars of language and literature were intensified from the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, when a series of binational conferences were set up (Willemyns, 1993). One outcome was the plan for a national dictionary that would describe the Dutch vocabulary from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, and that would simultaneously fulfil an important prescriptive function by offering writers, and literary authors in particular, correct lexical items, viz. the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (Dictionary of the Dutch Language). Loanwords were excluded to the extent possible (Rutten, 2019, pp. 161–​162). In 1863, a new spelling system was introduced in the context of the dictionary, which was eventually adopted by the Belgian and Dutch governments in 1864 and 1883, respectively (Bakker, 1977, p. 146). Since 1804, spelling has remained part of the official language policy. Today, the Nederlandse Taalunie (Dutch Language Union), a policy organization supported by the Belgian, Dutch, and Surinamese governments, regularly evaluates and updates Dutch spelling. The continued social importance of spelling is illustrated by the annual televised spelling test Groot Dictee der Nederlandse Taal (Grand Dictation of the Dutch Language), broadcast from 1990 to 2016, which moved to the radio in 2018. The official 1805 grammar, however, was not only the first, but also the last official grammar of Dutch. This leaves a gap in the standard language culture, resulting in numerous publications, organizations, and websites focusing on style and grammar from a prescriptive perspective, particularly in the twentieth and the twenty-​first century (van der Meulen, 2020). Among the most authoritative language advice services are the website of the Nederlandse Taalunie and the online advice service of the Genootschap Onze Taal (Society Our Language) (van der Meulen, 2020, p. 123), a private initiative originally established in the 1930s in order to reduce the number of German loan words. In the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, standard Dutch competed with French in many higher registers and domains (e.g. as a language of higher education, in legal proceedings, among social elites) in the Dutch-​speaking part of Belgium (Vandenbussche et al., 2004). In addition, the Dutch standard was often perceived to be northern, i.e. exogenous. This complex situation led to a period of Flemish hyperstandardization from the 1950s to the 1980s, characterized by a range of prescriptive institutions aiming to diffuse standard Dutch, including societies and youth organizations, a production house sponsored by industry and business that produced documentaries, advertisements and films, the public broadcasting corporation and numerous newspapers and journals (Jaspers & Van Hoof, 2013). For example, the prescriptive television programme Hier spreekt men Nederlands (One speaks Dutch here) was broadcast three days a week from 1964 to 1972. The corrective practices in this period also included pronunciation, which had until then not been a contentious issue in Dutch prescriptivism. Finally, they show once more that corrective practices and attitudes had become matters of national concern and were both socially and ideologically far removed from the earlier days of prescriptivism.

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4.  Prescription and language use From the perspective of the history of linguistic thought, the study of prescriptivism is worthwhile and interesting in its own right; but if we want to deal with prescriptivism in relation to central notions in historical sociolinguistics, such as standardization, we need to juxtapose prescriptions and actual language use, and focus on the interaction between both. In older histories of the language, the influence of prescribed language norms on usage was often tacitly assumed, and traditional models of standardization such as Haugen (1966; cf. Joseph, et al., 2020) depart from the idea that particular norms are codified in metalinguistic works and subsequently implemented and spread throughout the community of language users. However, this issue requires empirical investigation, and we argue that any sort of direct influence from prescribed language norms on actual usage should not be assumed as a starting point. Several studies have preliminarily investigated the impact of norms on usage, often with a relatively specific focus on one particular grammar or grammarian (e.g. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, 2011, McLelland, 2014) or on one particular linguistic feature (e.g. Langer, 2001; Auer, 2009). For Dutch, there has been recent work on both Northern and Southern varieties of the language, mostly from a historical sociolinguistic perspective. Vosters (2011), Vosters et al. (2014) and Rutten and Vosters (2016) set out to explore both changes in prescriptive works from the Southern Low Countries, as well as changes in writing practices during the period of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, where we can note a striking reorientation in writing practices from about 1815 onwards towards the norms prescribed by Northern grammarians. However, rather than attributing this to prescriptive influence, the authors conclude that both language use and language norms “operate against the same sociolinguistic background, and this shared context can shape both norms and usage, independently from each other, but in a similar fashion” (Vosters et al., 2014, p. 96). Krogull (2018), Rutten, et al. (2020) and Krogull and Rutten (2020) investigate the impact of the schrijftaalregeling “written language regulation” and the propagation of these official spelling and grammar regulations published by the Northern Dutch Batavian government in the early nineteenth century (Siegenbeek, 1804; Weiland, 1805). In a range of different genres, they find quite a remarkable pattern of convergence in usage towards the officialized norms over the course of just a few years. In this case, prescriptive influence is both possible and very likely, given the strong policy focused on implementation of the new norms as markers of national identity. Beyond such relatively specific and fine-​grained studies, there is a clear need for larger-​scale and more general investigations, systematically evaluating the evolution of writing traditions in the light of ongoing metalinguistic interference with writing. Previous studies suggest the importance of several factors in determining normative success (Rutten & Vosters, 2021). First, it seems that orthographical variables are more easily influenced by prescribed language norms than morphological or syntactic variables: Krogull (2018), for instance, clearly demonstrated the impact of the Siegenbeek (1804) spelling norms on language use in different genres, but does note that this is much less clear and much less certain for the three morphosyntactic features also included in his investigation (i.e. neuter relative pronouns, masculine and feminine singular and plural relative pronouns, and genitive case marking). Second, we may assume that the envelope of variation also plays a significant role: linguistic variables with a more complex feature set, displaying for instance three or four different variants for the same variable (such as the 3 Sg , or forms of d-​stem verbs, discussed in the following section), can be assumed to be more resistant to conscious, top-​down normative manipulation, compared to features which fall into an easy binary opposition (e.g. versus spellings for closed-​syllable 452

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long /​a:/​phonemes, as also discussed in the next section). Third, we believe that very salient features which are often discussed in grammatical treatises and other normative publications are easier targets for prescriptive success than more obscure features, which are often not even mentioned in normative works (Vosters, 2011). Before even considering the impact of any of these factors, a careful examination of the chronology of observed changes both in language use and in normative prescriptions is crucial in determining prescriptive success (Anderwald, 2016) –​as our case study in Section 5 demonstrates. When the chronology points towards changes in usage preceding changes in norms, the case is relatively clear-​cut, in such cases prescriptive influence leading to language change is impossible. What is possible, however, is that prescriptions –​while not contributing to the “actuation” of new forms –​aid in the further “diffusion” of already ongoing changes, either by slowing down the spread of incoming forms using proscriptions, or by using prescriptions to accelerate the spread of incoming variants. If changes in norms precede changes in usage, there is a possibility for these changes in usage to have arisen as a result of the changed prescriptions –​at least logically, the chronology allows for this possibility. Nonetheless, in such cases, we must be careful to avoid the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” pitfall (Moschonas, 2020): it is not because a change in usage follows a change in normative orientation, that the usage change is caused by the normative change. This fallacy is in part at least avoidable by carefully considering the social embedding of corrective practices, namely, identifying and considering target audiences of prescriptive works on the one hand, and differences in language use between genres and text types on the other hand. Grammars prescribing norms for formal language use and aimed an elite audiences of literary authors and fellow-​g rammarians (Rutten, 2009), for instance, may have been important for changes spreading through parts of the speech community in a top-​down fashion, but are highly unlikely to have caused changes from below, which first occurred among the lower ranks of society or in less formal text types. Also, in such cases, effects of prescriptions slowing down or accelerating the spread of new variants should be seen as more likely, taking into account a reasonable time lag between the publication of prescriptive comments and the possible or assumed impact on language use (Anderwald, 2014). The same trend may be observed also across genres, with prescriptions then first affecting texts by authors in the target audience and readership of the grammarian, or genres with high amounts of editorial intervention (e.g. newspapers).

5.  Case study: the importance of chronology To illustrate the importance of the chronology of language change in studies investigating the effect of prescriptivism, we discuss the diachronic development of two orthographic variables in both the metalinguistic tradition and in actual language use to uncover the effectiveness of language prescriptions in the history of Dutch. The first linguistic variable presented is the representation of the long a in closed syllables, a feature that enjoyed a tremendous amount of metalinguistic attention from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. The long a, which is traditionally lengthened by adding an to in Middle Dutch, can be found in forms like raed “council” and naem “name”. Yet, in the course of the seventeenth century, the spelling became stigmatized in Hollandic sources and was no longer the preferred spelling. The doubling of the grapheme then arose as the new and preferred way to indicate the lengthening of the vowel. Spelling practices like raad and naam thus became more prominent, and ultimately made it into the national orthography of Siegenbeek (1804) and the grammar of Weiland (1805) introduced in the early nineteenth

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century as the official language policy of all administrative and educational domains in the Northern Netherlands (Van de Voorde, 2022).1 The second feature we investigate in our case study is the spelling of the final /​t/​in the second-​and third-​person singular verbal endings of d-​stem verbs, such as leiden “to lead”. The phonetic variant , as in (hij) leit “(he) leads”, was the most common spelling in the Middle Dutch period. In the second half of the eighteenth century, two other variants gained ground: and . The former spelling arose out of a principle of uniformity, where all singular d-​stem verb conjugations had the same ending, as in (hij) leid. The alternative spelling (hij) leidt, which is based on etymological (abbreviation of the medieval form (hij) leidet) and morphological grounds (stem +​t principle), was equally used and accepted into the official language policy in the Northern Netherlands. Later in the nineteenth century, at the time of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815–​1830), both the double grapheme spelling in closed syllables and the verbal endings were also introduced as the official spelling variants in the Southern Netherlands as part of the language policy of King William I (Van de Voorde, 2022). In order to establish the chronology of language change for these orthographic variables, we mapped out the diachronic development of both features in a corpus of metalinguistic texts, on the one hand, and a usage corpus, on the other. The corpus of metalinguistic texts comprises 74 authoritative spelling guides and (school) grammars published between 1550 and 1830. We selected works from both the Northern Netherlands (the present-​day Kingdom of the Netherlands) and the Southern Netherlands (the Dutch-​speaking territories of what is today Belgium), which are written in Dutch by native speakers and intended for a readership of mother tongue language users.2 The patterns in the prescriptions and metalinguistic comments on the two orthographic features are compared to the developments in the usage corpus, namely, a preliminary version of the Historical Corpus of Dutch, a multi-​genre corpus compiled at Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Leiden University with the aim to investigate pluricentricity in the history of Dutch (Van de Voorde, Rutten, Vosters, Van der Wal & Vandenbussche, forthcoming). The corpus therefore comprises documents from Holland and Brabant, two central regions in the Northern Netherlands and the Southern Netherlands respectively, as well as texts from a more peripheral region in each of the language areas, Zeeland in the North and Flanders in the South. The material in the usage corpus includes texts from the middle of each century (sixteenth–​nineteenth centuries), and the preliminary version of the corpus covers two text genres: pamphlets and ego-​documents. While pamphlets are a rather diverse genre in which commentaries on political and religious topics, public ordinances and other similar texts are included, the documents selected for inclusion in the corpus are all printed and of a rather formal nature. The ego-​ document component, on the contrary, comprises more personal and handwritten documents, such as personal chronicles, diaries, and travelogues, which are often produced to be read by the author and their relatives only (Elspaß, 2012). To establish the patterns of variation and change in the metalinguistic discourse, we uncovered the prescriptions and other normative comments concerning the two above-​mentioned orthographic variables in the corpus of metalinguistic texts. We hereby distinguished between explicit prescriptions, where an actual comment on the feature is formulated, and implicit prescriptions, which are instances where the orthographic feature is used in examples and paradigms in the metalinguistic work without explicitly commenting on the feature itself. Both types of prescriptions are coded in terms of the prescribed variant, and they are processed together in the case study. This means that we prioritized the explicit prescriptions in our analysis (Example 1 and 2), but if an explicit comment is lacking, we coded the implicit prescription of the grammarian in the analysis (Example 3 and 4). 454

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Explicit prescription: (1) Wat nu aangaat de Lettergreepen, waarinmen de A volko-​ men moet hooren, alschoon’er Médeklinkers naa vólgen, het gebruik heeft wel meest gewild, dat men dan de A verdubbele en AA schryve, als in Gaan, Slaan, Haat, Maagd, enz. As for the syllables, in which the A must fully be heard, and which are followed by consonants, usage has most wanted that the A should be doubled, so that one writes AA, as in Gaan, Slaan, Haat, Maagd, etc. Van Belle 1755, p. 3 (2) Dóch om weder tót de T te keeren, zy behoort ook gebruykt te worden in de tweede en derde persoon der Werkwoorden, als Gy, hy, zy wordt, bidt, houdt, bindt, vindt, biedt, enz. To turn back to T, it should also be used in the second and third person of the verbs, as in Gy, hy, zy wordt, bidt, houdt, bindt, vindt, biedt, etc. Séwel, 1708, p. 27 Implicit prescription: (3) De h […] moet uytgesproken worden met het ophaelen des adems uyt de borst: en diend bezonderlyk om het onderscheyd te maeken tusschen veéle woórden, die zonder deéze de zelve uytspraek zouden hebben. Zal hier van eenige voorbeél-​den laeten volgen. […] haes, wilde beest; aes, voedsel The h […] must be pronounced with the breath drawn from the chest and serves in particular to distinguish many words which would have the same pronunciation without it. I will give some examples of this. […] haes, wild animal; aes, food Ballieu, 1792, p. 5 (4) “Een werk-​woord is een spraek-​deel, dat het zijn, doen of lijden beteekent, als: ik ben, gij bemint, hij word gegeesseld A verb is a part of speech that expresses the being, the doing or the suffering, as: ik ben, gij bemint, hij word gegeesseld Henckel, 1815, p. 22 As Figure 26.1 shows, the prescriptions concerning the spelling of the long a in closed syllables develop differently in the Northern Netherlands and the Southern Netherlands. The first prescriptions favoring appear already in the sixteenth century in both language areas. The seventeenth century, conversely, is more diverse with a high degree of variability in the Northern Netherlands. Some codifiers prescribe whereas other grammarians prefer the older variant . There are no metalinguistic comments in the seventeenth-​century South, but in the eighteenth century, we notice that mixed prescriptions pave the way for a uniform Southern tradition of prescriptions in the second half of the eighteenth century. At the same time, almost all Northern codifiers find consolidation in the spelling, indicating 455

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distinctive metalinguistic traditions in both language areas: as the preferred variant in the North, whereas was favored in the South. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, and mainly during the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, most Southern grammarians turn to mixed prescriptions again or even adjust to the Northern tradition and start codifying the more innovative spelling. When compared to language use, a different and more gradual pattern is observed (Figure 26.2).3 All of the sixteenth and much of the seventeenth century is characterized by spellings in both language areas. Although the first traces of language change appear around 1650 ( =​18.3%), the actual transition from to occurs in the eighteenth century only in the Northern Netherlands (88.8%). Meanwhile, Southern language

Figure 26.1  Prescriptions long a in closed syllables.4

Figure 26.2  Usage long a in closed syllables.

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users largely adhere to , although the beginning of a change to is also noticeable here (11.4%). The change towards further developed in the nineteenth-​century Southern Netherlands (25.7%), whereas the transition to the incoming variant was already complete in the Northern Netherlands. In terms of chronology, the change to in the normative tradition precedes the developments in actual language use, since the first prescriptions favoring already show up in the sixteenth century when spelling practices were still common. As mentioned in the previous section, a chronology where a change in metalinguistic works is followed by a change in usage possibly indicates a transition in language use that is initiated from prescriptive influence. Two facts, however, contradict the possible effect of prescriptivism on language use. First, we have to consider the disparate prescriptions in the seventeenth century, which are opposed to the rather consistent writing practices in actual language use. As these capricious patterns in the metalinguistic discourse continue in the eighteenth century, at the time that usage shows a gradual change towards (cf. traditional S-​curve in the Northern Netherlands), the comparison of both patterns in norms and usage suggests that prescriptions were not steady enough to affect language use. Moreover, when considering the time gap between the first prescriptions in the sixteenth century and the convincing change in language use, which only occurs in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the possibility of prescriptive influence becomes even more unlikely. Although an imposed change in the normative tradition needs some decades to establish in language use, a time gap of two or three centuries between prescriptive pronouncements and change in usage is unlikely. The prescriptions on the spelling of the second-​and third-​person singular of d-​stem verbs initially vary, as Figure 26.3 illustrates. In the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, the three variants appear next to each other, and they are prescribed equally often. The first language norms in the Southern Netherlands show up only in the beginning of the eighteenth century and introduce a highly uniform tradition of prescriptions which lasts until the early nineteenth century. Although there is some variation in the eighteenth-​century Northern prescriptions, a preference for emerges, which also culminates in uniformity towards the end of the century. Similar to the long a, albeit less pronounced, the eighteenth century presents a distinct metalinguistic tradition in the Northern and the Southern Netherlands, with clearly being the Southern variant, whereas is the favorable form in the North. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, and especially towards the end of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands in the 1820s, most Southern codifiers start adhering to the Northern norm by prescribing . As far as language use is concerned, most of the standardization history of this variable is characterized by variation (Figure 26.4). In the North of the language area, on the one hand, the variability between and observed in the sixteenth and the seventeenth century even increases in the eighteenth century, when also shows up in language use. This variability largely disappears in the nineteenth century, as 92 percent of the Northern language users makes the change to spellings. In the Southern Netherlands, on the other hand, the variation between three variants persists from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. It is only in the nineteenth century that disappears from Southern usage, and that 65.4 percent of the language users opts for verb endings instead. Unlike in the North, a considerable number of Southern scribes still uses the variant (34.6%), which means that the real breakthrough to in the Southern Netherlands did not occur before 1850 and more probably in the late nineteenth century. Since the sixteenth and seventeenth century are characterized by a large amount of variation in both language norms and usage, the possibility of a prescriptive effect is ruled out at 457

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Figure 26.3  Prescriptions verbal endings of d-​stem verbs.

Figure 26.4  Usage verbal endings of d-​stem verbs.

the time. Even so, when looking at the chronology, we notice that the Northern prescriptions favoring in the seventeenth century precede the occurrence of the variant in actual language use in the eighteenth century. As we have seen before, this is a scenario that allows for prescriptive influence. But even though the trend shows up in the metalinguistic discourse first, and is later on followed in usage, norms may not directly influence usage, and, here, this is even highly unlikely. The seventeenth-​century prescriptions, after all, are all implicit in nature, which means that actual prescriptions with explicit comments do not exist for this variable at 458

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the time. In addition, these normative works have a relatively limited scope in terms of target audiences, while we observe the incoming spellings both in the ego-​documents and in the pamphlets in our corpus. Hence, it is very unlikely that metalanguage has affected language use. The spelling therefore most probably arose as an innovation in Northern language use between 1670 and 1730. On the contrary, when considering the chronology of language change, we also observe the uniformity in the early-​nineteenth century Northern prescriptions, which is followed by an increasing use of forms in Northern usage around 1850. As the variant was already in use back then, a direct impact of prescriptivism with codifiers initiating a change, is ruled out. Nonetheless, other than introducing a change in language use, the tradition of uniform prescriptions has probably played a role in this increase of in language use, more specifically by accelerating the change towards the prescribed variant. The most effective and widespread prescriptions at the time were probably produced by Siegenbeek, who published the official spelling in the Northern Netherlands in 1804. In his national orthography, the codifier thus prescribed a form that was already common in language use, but he succeeded in disseminating and actually establishing the variant in Northern usage (Krogull, 2018). Also Southern language practices represent the same augmenting use of around 1850. As the first prescriptions favoring show up in the Southern Netherlands during the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, the rise of in usage is situated one or two decades later in this part of the language area. Although this particular chronology again allows for a restricted impact of language norms on usage, similar to the influence of Siegenbeek in the Northern Netherlands, the change to in Southern language use is probably unrelated to prescriptive influence. Both language norms and usage changed to more or less simultaneously, exactly at the time when the United Kingdom of the Netherlands was established and shortly thereafter. The changed sociohistorical and language-​political context, with the Northern norm entering the Southern language area, thus likely caused the shift in both language norms and usage in the Southern Netherlands (cf. Vosters et al., 2014). For both orthographic variables it becomes apparent that the tradition of metalinguistic works and actual language use in the Southern Netherlands adjusted to the Northern norm in the nineteenth century. That these features developed in the direction of the codified variants in the Northern Netherlands is not surprising, though. As Siegenbeek (1804) prescribed the and variants in the official Northern language policy, these forms were also introduced in the Southern Netherlands at the time of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, and it is particularly during this period, when the Northern and Southern Netherlands were reunited, that Southern grammarians started adopting the Northern language norms. Around the same time and shortly after the period of reunification, also Southern language use shifts to the Northern and variants. This implies that Northern forms generally became more widespread in the Southern Netherlands from 1815 onwards, and accordingly both Southern codifiers and actual language use turned to Siegenbeek’s prescribed variants (Vosters et al., 2014). Overall, by comparing the chronology of language change in a corpus of metalinguistic texts, on the one hand, and a multi-​genre usage corpus, on the other, we were able to unravel the question whether changes in historical language use are caused by prescriptivism. A direct impact of norms on usage in the actuation of language change is, after all, only possible (although not necessary) if changes in metalanguage convincingly precede trends in usage. Otherwise, when trends show up in usage first, grammars simply reflect these changes, and prescriptions can only affect already ongoing change. In this case study, we observed that prescriptivism thus had little effect on language use. As codifiers did not manage to initiate a change in usage, a direct influence of norms on usage in the transmission of language change is 459

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lacking for the two variables under scrutiny. However, by comparing patterns of variation and change in both language norms and actual usage, we did uncover instances where grammarians may have succeeded in accelerating the ongoing transmission of incoming forms in language use. The nineteenth-​century codifiers, and more specifically the official Siegenbeek spelling, had a limited influence on language use, by successfully affecting a change that was already in progress.

6. Conclusion In this chapter, we discussed prescriptivism in Dutch language history from a historical-​ sociolinguistic perspective, focusing mostly on the Early and Late Modern periods. After discussing and illustrating two core concepts in historical prescriptivism –​that is, the notion of institutionalization on the one hand and the issue of social and linguistic embedding of prescriptions on the other –​we gave an overview of how prescriptivism in Dutch changed over time in this regard. We discussed how normative practices started to become increasingly more institutionalized over time, with a strong pedagogical turn in grammar writing taking place during the eighteenth century, and a full institutionalization in the early nineteenth century, when a formal corpus planning policy with official spelling and grammar norms was adopted nation-​wide. Meanwhile, we also observed how prescriptivism gradually became socially embedded, with a target audience moving away from literary circles and specific, elite social groups, to include the entire nation as part of the late eighteenth-​and early nineteenth-​ century nation building enterprise. In the second part of this chapter, we warned against simplistic assumptions about prescriptive influence on actual language use. Discussing possibly relevant factors such as the nature of the variable (i.e. orthography versus morphosyntactic features), the envelope of variation (binary oppositions versus more complex sets of variants), and metalinguistic salience (how frequently particular variable appear on the radar of grammarians and other codifiers), we mostly focused on the role of chronology. Here, we argued that the default assumption should not be that norms impacted language use, and we discussed a careful examination of the chronology of innovations appearing in prescriptions and in actual language use as a prerequisite before any assumptions about prescriptive success can be made. In fact, even in cases where normative injunctions clearly and reasonably –​taking into account a possible time lag for prescriptions to spread –​predate changes in usage, we pleaded for more attention to the social embedding of prescriptions (e.g. in terms of genres and target audience) to avoid the “post hoc ergo propter hoc” fallacy. Finally, we considered prescriptions and language use across the centuries for two orthographical variables in Dutch: the representation of the long a in closed syllables and the spelling the final /​t/​in second-​and third-​person singular verbal endings of d-​stem verbs. For the long a spellings, we saw a pattern where the chronology of change allowed for possible prescriptive influence: prescriptions to favor over already appeared in the sixteenth century, while only started to appear to any significant degree in usage from the mid-​seventeenth century onwards. However, considering the overall pattern of change in prescriptions versus language use especially highlights how different both developments were across the centuries. Prescriptions go back and forth displaying a capricious pattern with a strong and clear North–​ South divide, while actual usage shows a much more gradual pattern of change towards the incoming forms, with the development in the Southern Netherlands lagging behind that of the Northern provinces. Based on this overall observation, in addition to the large time lag between the first prescriptions and its first occurrence in usage, we showed 460

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that prescriptive influence –​although possible –​is not very likely for this variable. For the second variable, the d-​stem spellings, we see equally distinct patterns when comparing the developments in norms with those in usage. The earliest spellings are used well into the eighteenth century, long after the normative consensus shifted away from , while the modern incoming variant was already in use for centuries before codifiers notice and select it as the preferred variant. Only for the spellings, prescriptions reasonably predate usage, but the implicit nature of the prescriptions and their limited social embedding again make prescriptive influence highly unlikely. With the case study of Dutch orthographical norms and usage, we have demonstrated how mapping out the chronology of change allows us to move beyond easy assumptions of normative influence, and even beyond simple dichotomies of norms influencing language use or vice versa. Systematically determining the chronology of language change is thus of great importance in studies quantitatively investigating the effect of prescriptivism in historical settings. In this respect, it is important to keep in mind that the success of prescriptions is not necessarily limited to initiating new changes, but prescriptive influence can likewise take place by reinforcing or slowing down ongoing changes that already have some roots in language use, as was the case for the official Siegenbeek prescriptions in the early nineteenth century. Although this case study is still limited in its scope, we argue that future studies of norms and usage should attempt to investigate systematically the relationship between the two while taking into account the chronology of change as well as other factors.

Notes * We wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) for the ongoing research project entitled “Setting the standard: Norms and usage in Early and Late Modern Dutch (1550–​1850)”, in which the case study discussed in this chapter is to be situated. 1 Other variants, such as and , did exist as well but from the Early Modern period onwards, but they are so rare that they hardly play any role in either the metalinguistic discourse or actual language use. We therefore focus on the two main variants of the variable. 2 Because of the scanty number of metalinguistic works in the sixteenth-​century Southern Netherlands, we included one spelling guide that is written in Latin: A. Sexagius, Orthographia Linguae Belgicae (1576). 3 Note that we generated a simple random sample of 5,000 out of 17,720 hits of long A in the two subcorpora of the Historical Corpus of Dutch. From this random sample, 4,751 results were drawn for the corpus analysis. 4 We projected the main variants in terms of prescriptions and usage onto distinct points on a numeric scale (1-​2 and 1-​2-​3) on the y axis, which allowed us to add locally estimated scatterplot smoothing to visualize larger-​scale trends in our data (cf. the two-​colored lines on each plot).

References Anderwald, L. (2014). Measuring the success of prescriptivism: quantitative grammaticography, corpus linguistics and the progressive passive. English Language and Linguistics, 18(1), 1–​21. Anderwald, L. (2016). Language between description and prescription: verbs and verb categories in nineteenth-​ century grammars of English. Oxford University Press. Auer, A. (2009). The subjunctive in the age of prescriptivism: English and German developments in the eighteenth century. Macmillan. Bakker, D.M. (1977). De grammatica in de negentiende eeuw. In D.M. Bakker & G.R.W. Dibbets (Eds.), Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse taalkunde (pp. 113–​160). Malmberg. Ballieu, J. (1792). Néderduytsche spel-​en spraek-​konst. J.E. Parys (second print). Cameron, D. (2012). Verbal hygiene (2nd edition). Routledge. Crystal, D. (2006). The fight for English: how the language pundits, ate, shot and left. Oxford University Press. Curzan, A. (2014). Fixing English. prescriptivism and language history. Cambridge University Press.

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Eline Lismont, Gijsbert Rutten, and Rik Vosters Dibbets, G. R. W. (1977). Grammaticale geschriften uit de zestiende eeuw. In D.M. Bakker & G.R.W. Dibbets (Eds.), Geschiedenis van de Nederlandse taalkunde (pp. 23–​37). Malmberg. Dixhoorn, A. van (forthcoming). Schools of rhetoric, language eloquence and learning among Dutch-​ speaking rhetoricians (1450–​1650). In G. Rutten & P. Swiggers (Eds.), The Dutch Language (1500–​ 1800): History, description and contexts of use. Peeters. Elspaß, S. (2012). The use of private letters and diaries in sociolinguistic investigation. In J.M. Hernández-​ Campoy & J. C. Conde-​Silvestre (Eds.), The Handbook of Historical Sociolinguistics (pp. 156–​169). Blackwell. Haugen, E. (1966). Dialect, language, nation. American Anthropologist, 68, 922–​935. Havinga, A., & Krogull, A. (2022). Researching language attitudes based on historical data. In R. Kircher, & L. Zipp (Eds.), Research Methods in Language Attitudes (pp. 297–​312). Cambridge University Press. Henckel, F. L. N. (1815). Nieuwe Vlaemsche spraek-​konst. P.F de Goesin-​Verhaege. Jaspers, J., & Van Hoof, S. (2013). Hyperstandardisation in Flanders: Extreme enregisterment and its aftermath. Pragmatics, 23, 331–​359. Joseph, J. E., Rutten. G., & Vosters, R. (2020). Dialect, language, nation: fifty years on, Language policy, 19(2), 161–​182. Klifman, H. (1983). Studies op het gebied van de Vroegnieuwnederlandse triviumtraditie (ca. 1550–​1650). Foris. Kók, A. L. (1649). Ont-​werp der Neder-​duitsche letter-​konst. Ed. G.R.W. Dibbets. 1981: Van Gorcum. Krogull, A. (2018). Policy versus Practice. Language variation and change in eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​century Dutch. LOT. [PhD dissertation, Leiden University]. Krogull, A., & Rutten, G. (2021). Reviving the genitive: prescription and practice in the Netherlands (1770–​1840). Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics, 7(1), 61–​86. Langer, N. (2001). Linguistic purism in action. How auxiliary tun was stigmatized in Early New High German. Walter de Gruyter. McLelland, N. (2014). Language description, prescription and usage in seventeenth-​century German. In G. Rutten, R. Vosters & W. Vandenbussche (Eds.), Norms and usage in language history, 1600–​1900: a historical-​sociolinguistic and comparative perspective (pp. 251–​276). John Benjamins. Meulen, M. van der. (2020). Language should be pure and grammatical: values in prescriptivism in the Netherlands 1917–​2016. In D. Chapman & J. D. Rawlins (Eds.), Language Prescription: values, ideologies and identity (pp. 121–​144). Clevedon. Moschonas, S. (2020). Correctives and language change. In M. Sekali, S. Raineri & A. Leroux (Eds.), La correction en langue(s), Linguistic correction/​correctness. Press de Paris Nanterre. Rutten, G. (2009). Grammar to the people: the Dutch language and the public sphere in the 18th century with special reference to Kornelis van der Palm. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, 19, 55–​86. Rutten, G. (2016). The “Golden Age Myth”: the construction of Dutch as a national language. In G. Rutten & K. Horner (Eds.), Metalinguistic perspectives on Germanic languages: European case studies from past to present (pp. 13–​34). Peter Lang. Rutten, G. (2019). Language Planning as Nation Building: ideology, policy and implementation in the Netherlands, 1750–​1850. Benjamins. Rutten, G., & Vosters, R. (2013). Une tradition néerlandaise? Du bon usage aux Pays-​Bas (1686–​1830). In W. Ayres-​Bennett & M. Seijido (Eds.), Bon usage et variation sociolinguistique: perspectives diachroniques et traditions nationales (pp. 233–​243). ENS Éditions. Rutten, G., & Vosters, R. (2016). Prescriptivism between the devil and the deep blue sea: competing language norms in the Southern Low Countries (1815−1830). In I. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade and C. Percy (Eds.), Prescription and tradition in language: establishing standards across time and space (137–​151). Multilingual Matters. Rutten, G., & Vosters, R. (2021). Language standardization “from above”. In W. Ayres-​ Bennett & J. Bellamy (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Language Standardization (pp. 65–​92). Cambridge University Press. Schoemaker, B. & Rutten, G. (2017). Standard language ideology and Dutch school inspection reports (1801–​1854). Sociolinguistica: International Yearbook of European Sociolinguistics, 31, 101–​116. Séwel, W. (1708). Nederduytsche spraakkonst. Assuerus Lansvelt. Sexagius, A. (1576). De orthographia linguae Belgicae. Ioannes Masius. Siegenbeek, M. (1804). Verhandeling over de Nederduitsche spelling. Johannes Allart. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. (2011). The Bishop’s grammar: Robert Lowth and the rise of prescriptivism in English. Oxford University Press.

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Dutch prescriptivism in a historical-sociolinguistic perspective Tricht, H.W. van (1979). De briefwisseling van Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft. Volume III (1638–​1647). Tjeenk Willink/​Noorduijn. Twe-​spraack vande Nederduitsche letterkunst. (1584). G.R.W. Dibbets (Ed.). 1985: Van Gorcum. Van Belle, J. (1755). Korte schets der Néderduitse spraakkonst. Christoph Henrich Bohn. Vandenbussche, W., De Groof, J., Vanhecke, E., & Willemyns, R. (2004). Historical sociolinguistics in Flanders: rediscovering the 19th century. In H. Christen (Ed.), Varietäten und Varianten im sozialen und zeitlichen Raum (pp. 49–​80). Edition Praesens. Vosters, R. (2011). Taalgebruik, taalnormen en taalbeschouwing in Vlaanderen tijdens het Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden. Een historisch-​sociolinguïstische verkenning van vroeg-​negentiende-​eeuws Zuidelijk Nederlands. [PhD dissertation, Vrije Universiteit Brussel]. Vosters, R., Belsack, E., Puttaert, J., & Vandenbussche, W. (2014). Norms and usage in nineteenth-​ century Southern Dutch. In G. Rutten, R. Vosters & W. Vandenbussche (Eds.), Norms and usage in language history, 1600–​1900: a historical-​sociolinguistic and comparative perspective (pp. 73–​100). Benjamins. Wal, M. van der & Bree, C. van. (2008). Geschiedenis van het Nederlands. Spectrum. Watts, R. J. (1999). The social construction of Standard English: grammar writers as a “discourse community”. In T. Bex & R. J. Watts (Eds.), Standard English: the widening debate (pp. 40–​68). Routledge. Weiland, P. (1805). Nederduitsche spraakkunst. Johannes Allart. Willemyns, R. (1993). Integration vs particularism: the undeclared issue at the first “Dutch Congress” in 1849. In Joshua Fishman (Ed.), The earliest stage of language planning. the ‘first’ congress’ phenomenon (pp. 69–​83). De Gruyter.

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AFTERWORD David Crystal

Handbooks like this one play an important role in the development of a subject. They provide an opportunity to take stock: to review past achievements, report ongoing activity, and identify new research directions. The chapters in this collection illustrate all three functions. However, unlike most handbooks, the initial task with this volume was to clarify the history and use of the term in its title. This is apparent in the introductory remarks of all the chapters, and the entire focus of two (Pullum and Cameron). My overall impression is that there has been a significant growth in understanding the complexity of the notion. From a simple concept of the prescribing or proscribing of individual usages, in which prescriptive and descriptive perspectives were seen as polar opposites, the chapters display a nuanced acknowledgement of the different approaches that exist within prescriptivism, the parallels that can be found with linguistic enquiry, and a recognition of the need to explore the underlying issues involved, with “ideology” a recurring theme. Pullum draws attention to one of these parallels: “evidence-​based grammars, aiming simply to characterize the sentence structures characteristic of a language, and evidence-​based prescriptive manuals, which aim to present reasoned advice on how to use the language in ways that will be well regarded”, and several examples of the latter are reported in these pages. Cameron illustrates the need for a new direction, in her retrospective on “verbal hygiene”: “criticism might do better to focus less on the idea that making value judgments is inherently bad or wrong, and more on the nature, logic and quality of the judgments being made in any given case”. She also points to the need for a global perspective, mentioning France and Brazil as countries where attitudes to verbal hygiene are going to differ, and it is this that constitutes the most striking feature of the handbook’s coverage.

1.  The global perspective A global frame of reference is critical in developing a general account of prescriptivism. Our understanding of its nature has been limited by the fact that so much of the literature around the subject has focused on English. There has been a (largely unspoken) assumption that the kinds of issue that characterise the history of prescriptivism in English will recur in other linguistic settings. Perhaps the most important contribution of the handbook is to show that this is not

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the case. Its perspective is impressively global, and major differences emerge among languages as well as within individual languages. To summarise the coverage: Europe and nearby: Austria and Germany (Dollinger), Netherlands (Lismont et al.), Spain (Hickey), Nordic countries (Peterson and Hall), France (Walsh and Humphries), Brittany (Manchec German), Croatia (Starčević et al.) Middle East: Israel (Gafter and Mor) Africa: Arabic-​speaking countries (Hallberg), Nigeria (Schneider), South Africa (Kaschula et al.) Australasia: Russia (Mutajoki), India (Schneider), Southeast Asia (Wee and Samosir), Singapore (Schneider), China (Klöter), Australia (Peters, Burridge) Americas: Canada (Walsh and Humphries), South America (Hickey) Several other parts of the world are mentioned in passing in other chapters. Moreover, the differences that emerge between languages have their analogy in the differences that are found within pluricentric languages. This is discussed for Spanish (in the Americas) by Hickey, for Chinese by Klöter, for Arabic by Hallberg, and for English by Schneider in relation to World Englishes, Peters in relation to “inner-​circle” norms (with particular reference to Australia and Canada), and Burridge in relation to American influence on Australian spelling norms. Wee and Samosir add the perspective of English-​speaking situations where none of the interactants have English as a first language, which has led to the growth of a notion of English as a Lingua Franca, with norms that can be very different from those in inner-​circle countries. All these authors emphasize how prescriptivism takes on an individual character in their country. The political history of a nation is usually the critical factor. In the case of Chinese, this is extensive, as Klöter points out: “China clearly has a tradition of linguistic prescriptivism that goes back to the first millennium BCE”. But the influence of long histories can also be found elsewhere. Arabic and Hebrew are cases in point. Hallberg stresses the individuality of Arabic: “two notable differences between the standard language ideology of Arabic and that of the Western language communities for which this concept was originally developed. The first relates to the lack of native speakers of SA [Standard Arabic] (or of anything resembling it), and the second relates to the status of the codification and the historical distance from its formation” –​referring to its Islamic roots. The conclusion is as clear a contrast with an English-​ language perspective as one could imagine: SA is “not associated with socio-​economic prestige, socially driven style shifts, or linguistic change”. Similarly, Gafter and Mor stress the individuality of Hebrew’s classical origins: “the standard language ideologies that developed in Israel differ considerably from those found in many well-​ studied cases in Western Europe”, due to its three-​stage development, in which the classical period was followed by a long period of disuse, before the modern, nation-​oriented stage was achieved. The linguistic revitalization of Hebrew was based on an ideology that “was to remain as faithful as possible to the older, i.e., classical and “authentic”, strata of the language”. The small size of the country is another factor that provides a contrast with an English-​language perspective. Regional variation “is seldom the object of overt commentary or the target of prescriptive activity”. Instead: “A social axis that Hebrew speakers are acutely aware of, however, is that of ethnicity, and, as such, it interacts with prescriptivism in complex ways” (the authors illustrate from Askhenazi and Mizrahi groups). Several other chapters show how old and new political and cultural situations define the character of a country’s prescriptivism. Kaschula et al. illustrate this in relation to the role of missionary activity in South Africa, and to the development of a unique sociolinguistic situation

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there, in which eleven official languages compete for norms in a post-​apartheid world. Peterson and Hall show it in relation to the Nordic countries. The attitudes encountered in Iceland, for example, with a tradition of literary continuity that reaches back to the Icelandic sagas, are very different from those seen in countries where such a tradition is lacking. In Croatia, the major political changes seen in the region of former Yugoslavia since the 1990s present a unique challenge: “criticism of prescriptivist ideas is often described by discursive opponents as being ‘anti-​Croat’, ‘pro-​Yugoslav’ or ‘communist’, In relation to English, Wee and Samosir illustrate the impossibility of generalising about prescriptivism in Southeast Asia: “the countries in the region have had significantly different histories with the language, mainly owing to their contact with colonialism or lack thereof. For example, while Brunei, Burma, Singapore, and Malaysia were under British rule, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam were colonized by the French, Indonesia by the Dutch, and Thailand avoided colonial rule altogether”. Similarly, Klöter stresses the political issue in China: “the norms of Chinese are defined and implemented by different agencies in different polities or ‘self-​ governing entities’ ”, notably the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and Taiwan. As they go on to explain: “In each polity, the definition of linguistic norms takes place within a unique pattern of societal multilingualism”, so that “prescriptivism is not so much about setting the norms for one particular language but rather about selecting one language for formal usage and, by definition, excluding alternative options”. They conclude: “no two polities within Greater China … define linguistic prescriptivism in the same way”. In so many cases, we see the “centre of gravity” of a language shifting. This is well recognized in relation to English, where for every one native speaker these days there are some five or six non-​native speakers (Crystal, 2019). But we see it also in relation to Russian, as Mustajoki points out: “Russian spoken outside Russia adds an interesting perspective to the discussion on an official norm of the language. The speakers in this category outnumber native speakers living in Russia”. Manchec German shows it on a smaller scale in relation to intergenerational transmission in Breton, where the original native speakers, a steadily decreasing minority, find themselves “largely cut off from the community for which it is fighting”, due to the growth in a younger movement that promotes a variety of Breton that older people find unintelligible and which leaves “no room for native vernacular speakers in the media or in any other official capacity”. Ironically, the same concern is expressed in relation to a language that we would not conceive of as “endangered”. Hallberg comments: “the historic threat now facing the Arabic language is not primarily from foreign languages and globalization … the real enemy of the Arabic language in use is the vernaculars”. The fear is that Standard Arabic will go the same way as Latin.

2.  The digital perspective Several papers draw attention to the Internet in general, and to social media in particular, as a major factor that changes the “centre of gravity” of a language, and thus the character of the norms that are reflected in prescriptive thinking. A term that many readers will find novel is grassroots prescriptivism. It is characterized by Lukač and Heyd as “prescriptive phenomena that are (or appear to be) bottom-​up rather than top-​down, produced and reproduced within communities, networks, and socialities rather than named and visible experts”. The contrast is between individual members of the general public and a country’s institutions, which can be anything from a personal usage manual to an official Academy (as noted in the papers on French and Hebrew). Until recently, there was simply no way for most individuals to make their views known, apart from the occasional “letter to the editor”, and suchlike. I had the experience of 466

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dealing with the thousands of letters sent to the BBC, during my “English Now” series during the 1980s, but I always felt that the constituency of Radio 4 listeners who were bothered enough to complain about usage (accompanied by a sense of urgency, as most letters had first-​ class stamps, to arrive as soon as possible) were not typical of the majority whom I encountered in other settings, especially younger people. Social media has changed all that. It is now possible for anyone with a computer or smartphone to have a voice. And not only a computer: as Ellen Jovin shows in her novel approach (Jovin, 2022), it is possible to hear grassroots voices simply by setting up a table in a public place and waiting for questions and comments to arrive. I suspect every writer in this book could have made a point about the Internet. The issue is explicitly addressed in several chapters: by Cameron –​“social media are increasingly influential in setting the grassroots verbal hygiene agendas”; by Mustajoki in relation to Russian –​“a real linguistic revolution started with online chat and text messaging”; and by Kaschula et al. in South Africa, talking specifically about the way taboo words can change as a result of “the influence of technology, particularly social media platforms which provide platforms where language regulation has few subscribers”. Walsh and Humphries broaden the perspective, to include “top-​down” approaches as well: “the internet has provided a platform for prescriptivism on an individual and institutional level, which is more accessible than ever before. This applies both to those who actively engage in prescriptivism, by writing blogs about language or commenting on someone’s language use on social media, for instance, and to the potential audience accessing prescriptivist texts –​online dictionaries are accessed more frequently online than their print equivalents”. But it is the “bottom-​up” perspective which is most intriguing. I wonder, for example, what impact it might have on the situation in Arabic-​speaking countries. Hallberg comments: “Arabic is associated with an aggressive standard language ideology supported by both religious and nationalist discourses and a long tradition of prescriptivist literature”. Could a grassroots movement alter such a situation? One of the next stages in the development of prescriptivism studies must surely be to evaluate the role of “grassroots voices”. Is this a world “in which prescriptivism plays no role at all” (Schneider)? Or is it one in which a new kind of prescriptivism will emerge? It is too soon to say. Social media have been around for less than twenty years (Facebook 2004, YouTube 2005, Twitter 2006), which is an eye-​blink in the history of language; the technology and behavioural norms are constantly changing (as when Twitter’s prompt switched from “What are you doing?” in 2006 to “What’s happening?” in 2009); and the linguistic character of individual platforms, and of the Internet as a whole –​what I used to call “Netspeak” (Crystal, 2006a) –​is still unstable. Social and cultural changes generate new constituencies and demographics that make generalisation difficult. Facebook has got older; Twitter has got younger. And circumstances alter. Who in 2020 (BC –​Before Covid) would have predicted the extraordinary growth of Zoom-​type platforms, with their different patterns of conversational interaction? And then there is the near future, which will make the medium more audio and less graphic. At present, any prescriptive trends are focused on the written manifestations of the Internet –​punctuation, capitalisation, spelling, texting abbreviations, and so on –​but a new dimension will emerge as speech takes up more and more digital space. The issues surrounding accents, for example, have not hitherto been a major Internet issue. That will change.

3.  Evaluating the variables This mention of accent raises a more general question. Which features of language loom largest in any discussion of prescriptivism? The chapters have no consensus here. There is of course a widespread focus on writing, as opposed to speech, and on vocabulary. But it is difficult to get 467

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reliable information. Lismont et al. draw attention to “non-​institutionalized practices”, such as parents correcting or advising their children, and note that these are difficult to identify. A perspective from child language acquisition, missing so far from the prescriptivism debate, could help here. Historiographical methods are another good starting-​point, as shown in the chapters by Tieken-​Boon van Ostade on usage guides and Yáñez-​Bouza, who looks at these and also grammars and pronunciation dictionaries. Corpus studies are a further resource, as pointed out by Szmrecsanyi and Bloemen. But these approaches face serious difficulties. Authors of usage guides never give criteria for the selection of the entries they include, which makes it impossible to establish the motivation for including a particular topic. I can understand why. Having written one such guide (Crystal, 2000/​1984) I appreciate how difficult it would be to make intuitions about selection explicit, other than an impressionistic reliance on notions of frequency derived from earlier guides, letters to the press and (in my case) to radio programmes, and suchlike. Corpora face a different issue, for studies of prescriptivism, because (as Lukač and Stenton point out) it is never clear just how far the texts included have been altered by copy editors. Variation in a writer’s usage is particularly likely to be eliminated, because (as they go on to say) “Consistency clearly outweighs the prescriptive notions of correctness as a criterion for introducing changes to texts”. It is not only copy editors. Anyone with editorial responsibility can alter a text to follow in-​house pressures, which can be anything from the amount of text that will fit in a line or column to a concern to follow a house style or conform to an imagined standard of excellence. There is no uniformity of practice, as Lukač and Stenton conclude in their study, identifying two broad groups in the decision-​making process over data is vs data are, one favouring singular data and the other plural, at the same time noting that practice can vary depending on the accompanying linguistic context. It is not as if all the variables are equal. There are big differences between, on the one hand, items of contentious vocabulary, which are sporadic in occurrence (how often will we encounter disinterested in our reading?) and disputed morphology and syntax (somewhat less sporadic, but again, how often will we encounter data is/​are?), and on the other hand, punctuation, which is always in front of our eyes (paragraphing, word-​spacing, and the like, as well as sentence punctuation) and pronunciation (including accent), which is always in our ears –​ hence the relevance of the chapter by Watt et al., which stands out in a volume that is largely devoted to the written language. Frequency of encounter is a critical factor, as Peters points out in her discussion of -​ise and -​ize: “The entrenchment of -​ise in AusE and -​ize in CanE … is in both cases helped by the fact that the regional spelling is instantiated in countless verbs in their respective dictionaries, and reinforced by regular encounters with representative verbs in everyday texts”. She contrasts this with gotten as past participle and phenomena as a collective singular, which “have few analogues”. These are all illustrations from English. When we consider different languages, the priorities vary dramatically, as seen in several chapters. In Dutch, for example, “orthographical variables are more easily influenced by prescribed language norms than morphological or syntactic variables” (Lismont et al.). By contrast, in Arabic, a language with “a rich root-​and-​pattern-​ based derivational morphology”, errors here are a major source of disquiet (Hallberg). Choice of alphabet is a factor in territories where Russian plays a major role, and countries adopt their own conventions for the romanization of Cyrillic names (Mustajoki). In Chinese, handwriting (the only time this is addressed in the handbook) is critical, as Klöter points out: “In Chinese writing, prescriptivism can refer to a character’s shape or the quantity and arrangement of strokes within a graph. In the case of the former, a mix of material, political, and aesthetic considerations resulted in the formation of many writing styles”. From the examples in this book, it appears that each language presents its own constellation of items that attract prescriptive 468

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concern –​which raises the question: are there any prescriptive universals? Differences loom large in this volume –​an inevitable consequence of the small number of languages it proved practicable to include. As the number of languages surveyed grows, I would hope to see an increased focus on similarities.

4.  Evaluating influence It’s clear that we are still a long way from understanding the role of prescriptivism in relation to language practice and change. How many people actually care about the issues raised by prescriptivists? And, among those who do, does the awareness of the prescriptions have any real impact on their linguistic lives? As Cameron says: “we still know relatively little about either the linguistic preoccupations which are most salient in many people’s everyday lives, or the kinds of institutionalized authority they find relevant to their concerns”. “Can precepts shape language usage?” ask Szmrecsanyi and Bloemen. Their study shows mixed results: yes, in relation to preposition stranding; no, in relation to that-​shift. Lismont et al. conclude from their research that prescriptivism “had little effect on language use” –​though they “did uncover instances where grammarians may have succeeded in accelerating the ongoing transmission of incoming forms in language use”. Tieken-​Boon van Ostade points out the big difference between asking the general public what their favourite usage guide is and finding out whether this is actually used. I would add a third question: do people feel their reading has changed their linguistic practice? I asked all three questions in 2006, when I was giving literary festival talks about The Fight for English (Crystal 2006b), my riposte to Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots and Leaves, which came out in 2003. I would ask the audience: How many of you have bought Lynne’s book? Virtually every hand went up. How many of you have read all of it? About half the hands went up. How many of you feel your punctuation practice has been altered as a result of reading the book? Usually, no hands went up. Related to this is the question of just how much of a language is influenced by a particular set of prescriptions. There is often an assumption in usage guides that the target is “the language as a whole”. However, it is a matter of common experience that sociolinguistic and stylistic varieties by their nature have different linguistic identities and are thus likely to evoke different prescriptive attitudes. The kind of usage issue that would concern a user of, say, religious English, and the ideology lying behind it, is going to be very different from the issues that concern lawyers, journalists, broadcasters, and all the other users –​let alone the diversity of opinion expressed by literary authors, whose potential influence is unknown. But, to take an example, did Kurt Vonnegut’s injunction in A Man Without a Country ever cause anyone to change their practice, especially in view of his final quip? Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college. He uses no semicolons in his book, until the very last chapter, when he uses one and adds: And there, I’ve just used a semi-​colon, which at the outset I told you never to use. It is to make a point that I did it. The point is: Rules only take us so far, even good rules. This is a big topic for future research, for as Schneider says, “little research has been conducted on the interrelationship between prescriptive attitudes and language varieties” –​or, for that 469

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matter, individual authors. I have met many budding authors who say they are modelling their style on a famous author. In one case (described in Crystal, 2016), the budding author was Joanne, age 10, and her model was Terry Pratchett. But would Pratchett’s antipathy to, say, repeated exclamation marks, transfer to her? (One of the characters in the Discworld novel Eric (1990) insists that “Multiple exclamation marks are a sure sign of a diseased mind”.) The concept of variety has itself been questioned. While linguists were happy to see in educational thinking an absolutist notion of “correctness” replaced by a relativistic, variety-​ dependent notion of “appropriateness”, there is a danger that the concept of a variety can be interpreted too rigidly. This is a point taken up by Cushing and Snell, arguing against a model in which people “impose neat boundaries between standardised (or ‘school’) English and ‘home’ dialects”. They make the point that “children’s linguistic repertoires are complex and layered, and thus any attempt to regulate their language use according to separate ‘varieties’ will inevitably oversimplify the range of resources involved”. The same point might be made about any variety. Those who advocate a “plain English” usage in such areas as law, politics, and medicine need to recognize that there is no clear-​cut distinction between “plainness” and “complexity”. And heterogeneity underlies the “mono-​ideologies” identified by Starčević et al. We are just as uncertain about the relative role of the institutions that are involved. Which “territorially-​specific authorities”, as Dollinger puts it, are most relevant? The notion of “top-​ down” includes a multiplicity of sources, from national government policies, academies, the view of individual ministers, local governments, school boards, shared school practices, individual teachers, publishing houses, usage guides, and individual authors. Of all these, in my Radio 4 series, when correspondents told their own stories, it was school practice that was most often mentioned. As one writer explained: The reason why the older generation feel so strongly about English grammar is that we were severely punished if we didn’t obey the rules. One split infinitive, one whack; two split infinitives, two whacks; and so on. This emphasis on individual points of correction is a familiar trope in the prescriptivist literature. Against it must be placed the view of Cushing and Snell (and others in this volume): “Our aim is to reject the idea that prescriptivism in education surfaces solely through individual acts (such as a verbal correction in the classroom) and conceptualise prescriptivism as systemic, institutional and structural”. The devil lies in the detail –​here, just how much is involved in the notion of “not solely”. We are also uncertain about the constituency that buys, reads, and is influenced by (or claims to be influenced by) prescriptions. Here too there is a familiar trope: it is an older and conservative population. The handbook provides evidence that this is an overstatement. Burridge concludes: “it is not simply older speakers who perceive the danger of AmE usage –​the “loss of Australian identity” was a familiar refrain in the reactions of even the younger speakers”. Youth plays a critical role in developing new norms for Breton (Manchec German). And Kaschula et al. provide the example of Afri-​Kaaps, “contesting traditional standard forms of Afrikaans”; it is “a variety spoken by younger people who identify largely as descended from the first nations such as the Khoikhoi”. These points, of course, apply equally to linguists and others who adopt a descriptive stance. Have all the linguistically informed usage guides and descriptions been as influential as their authors hoped? There is a pessimistic tone in some of the chapters. Burridge has a long

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experience of encounters with the general public, and she concludes: “I had always assumed that by laying out the findings of linguistic research, linguists would get the message across. However, I have since learned that linguistic facts do not speak for themselves, especially when they fly in the face of people’s commonsense views about language. Even when we think we are getting the linguistic message across, people often fall back on their comfortable knowledge, what they ‘know’ to be true”. Cameron concurs, noting the recurrence of the same issues of prescriptivism over the years, and wondering if it is “futile to exhort language-​users to refrain from engaging in it”. Is it, as she hints, an effect of age? I sympathise. I have just looked at the first published piece I ever wrote for the general public: an article in the Liverpool Daily Post in 1963. I could have written it today with hardly any change. But I am still optimistic. Is there a “perpetuity of prescriptivism” (Cushing and Snell) in England’s schools? My experience, based on innumerable school visits over the past twenty years (BC) is that this has been seriously reduced, at least in the teaching of English language at A level. I hardly ever encountered a teacher of the old-​school kind, insisting on prescriptions. This has been replaced by routine classroom discussion of the nature of prescriptivism, its historical origins, and the issues it raises. Teachers stress the relevance of appropriateness and are well aware of the fuzziness involved in such notions as variety. Generations are thus emerging who do not share the prescriptive mentality of earlier generations. New materials and resources, such as the school-​orientated Babel magazine, reinforce the new attitudes. But of course, this is only one country. And while all this is going on, there continues to be a role for the linguist, who can add a more general and informed perspective to any debate. This is a point made strongly by Bradley, who describes the linguist in “the role of impartial language ‘fact-​checker’ or parliamentarian”. I also believe it is still of value to draw attention to the facts of usage –​for example, pointing out that claims about usages being “recent” usually have historical antecedents –​even if some people persist in ignoring them. But it’s important not to overstate. My BBC correspondence shows that there are others who do take the point, and where the interaction has not been futile. And most do express interest in linguistic facts, even if their attitudes apparently remain unchanged. They are, after all, genuinely interested in language, otherwise they would never have written (and paid for their stamp). It can also be helpful for linguists to provide additional perspective to a contentious issue. I am thinking here of cases of contested pronunciation such as the choices for imgr discussed by Lukač and Heyd, where similar issues turn up in onomastics, in relation to the pronunciation of personal names and place names, and cases like the singular use of they discussed by Cameron, where people tend not to notice that there is a parallel case in the historical development of you –​something Bradley draws attention to in his chapter. It may be necessary to develop new models in the process, such as the “more realistic view” of production as “orderly heterogeneity” advocated by Starčević et al. and the concept of “pragmatic prescriptivism” discussed by Bradley in relation to gender, but just as applicable to other areas of linguistic enquiry. Anyone who reads through these chapters can surely be left in no doubt about the editors’ claim in their introduction, that “prescriptivism can no longer be a fringe topic in the description of language in society”, and must be viewed as “a serious field of study within linguistics”. We are still some way from a general theory of prescriptivism that is capable of encompassing all languages and all variation within a language, but this handbook clearly points the way towards such an achievement, in its focus on principles alongside practices, proposals for methods of enquiry, and illustration of the way hypotheses about usage and attitudes might be tested.

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David Crystal

References Crystal, D. (2000). Who cares about English usage? (updated ed.). Penguin. (Original work published 1984) Crystal, D. (2006a). Internet linguistics (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Crystal, D. (2006b). The fight for English: how language pundits ate, shot, and left. Oxford University Press. Crystal, D. (2016, June 3). A defence of grammar. Times Educational Supplement, 26–​32. www.david​ crys​tal.com/​GBR/​Books-​and-​Artic​les Crystal, D. (2019). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press. Jovin, E. (2022). Rebel with a clause: tales and tips from a roving grammarian. Hachette UK.

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers in bold indicate tables; those in italics indicate figures. Endnotes are indicated by the page number followed by “n” and the note number e.g., 424n4 refers to note 4 on page 424. Aarhus University 187 Abdelhay, A. 291, 294 Aboriginal/​aboriginal 96 Academia Argentina de Letras 148 Academia Colombiana de la Lengua 148 Académie française 123, 147, 160, 414, 416, 428, 432–​433 academies 146–​149, 151, 305, 308–​312, 314–​316 academic register 281 Academy of Science, Russia 372, 374 Academy of the Hebrew Language 305, 308–​312, 314–​316 Accent Bias in Britain (ABB) project 33, 39–​49, 41, 44–​45, 47, 48 accents: Australia 252, 254–​255; bias 31–​50; Breton 420; China 342; digital perspective 467; mutability 36–​37; prejudice/​discrimination/​ accentism 31–​32, 35–​36, 39, 43, 46, 47, 48–​50; South Africa 323; Standard British English 145–​146; World Englishes 110 Ackerman, L. 218, 223 acrolects 407, 410, 424n4 Adelung, J. C. 127 al-​ʿAdnānī, M., Muʿjam al‑ʾaġlāṭ al‑luġawiyya al‑muʿāṣira 295–​296, 296 African American Vernacular English (AAVE) 215 African languages 321–​334 Afrikaans 322, 329–​330, 333–​334, 470 Afri-​Kaaps 333, 470 Age, The (Melbourne newspaper) 254 age factors: accent bias 43–​45; African languages 331, 333; attitudes towards prescriptivism 89; Australia’s sensitivity towards American influence 252–​253, 257, 260n4; Breton

405–​406, 417–​419, 466, 470; China 350; copy editors 267, 267, 275, 281; gender-​neutral pronouns 217, 218; Hebrew 313; higher education in Nordic countries 178; influence of prescriptivism 470–​471; inner-​circle Englishes 86; netspeak 234; Reddit 235; Taiwan 348, 350; top-​down prescriptivism 228; usage guide audience 168; usage guide writers 163; World Englishes 114 Aḥmad, M. 292–​293 Aitchison, J. 87 Alaska 378 Alexander, N. 326 Alfonso X 144, 147 Algeo, J. 165 Algeria 152n5, 293 Alim, H. S. 201 Allan, K. 247, 329 Alsagoff, L. 115 amaXhosa 323, 325, 331 American English (AmE): Australia 90–​91, 93–​94, 98, 246, 251–​260; Canada 90–​91, 93–​94, 98; copy editors 265; corpus linguistics 78–​79, 81–​82; double negatives 228; vs English as a lingua franca 379; gotten 93–​94, 94, 112; grassroots prescriptivism 103; higher education in Nordic countries 176, 187; HUGE database 64–​67; metric system 97; pluricentrism 140, 149; Southeast Asia 359; World Englishes 106–​107, 110–​111 American Heritage Book of English Usage, The 12 American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, The 12 Americanisms 167, 252–​256, 258, 259

473

474

Index American Medical Association Manual of Style 280 American Psychological Association 266, 280 American Spanish 143–​144, 143 Anaïs, S. 195 Analects 340 Ancient Hebrew 310 Anderson, B. 124 Anderson, L. 330 Anderwald, L. 79–​80, 83 Andrić, N. 388 Ang, J. 115 Angola 152n5 Anić, V. 388 Anne, Queen 145 antepenultimate stress 255 Antesperger, J. B. von 127 anti-​variationism 76, 80 apostrophe 170, 229, 249–​250, 258 Apostrophe Protection Society 170, 229, 234 apostrophlation 259 Appel, R. 323 appropriateness-​based approaches in schools 200–​201 Arab Lawyers’ Union 292 Arabic 152n5, 287–​300, 312, 368, 465, 466–​468; linguistic tradition 288, 290, 293–​296, 300; script 296, 374 Arabic Language Council 291–​292 Al Arabiya 293 Argentina 140, 142–​144, 148 Argentinian Spanish 144 Arutjunova, N. D. 372 Ashkenazi Jews 307, 312–​313, 465 Ashley, L. 39 Asociación de Academias de la Lengua Española 148–​149, 151 Associated Press Stylebook 280 Association for Chinese Script Reform 343 Attenborough, D. 50 attitudes towards linguistic prescriptivism xx–​xxiii, 89 Auer, A. 75–​76 Aurore, L’ 433 Austen, J. 167 Australia 90–​91, 140, 142, 151, 161, 184, 235, 246, 251–​260, 470 Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) 249 Australian English (AusE) 87, 90–​100, 246, 251–​260, 468 Australian Oxford Dictionary 92 Austrian Dictionary 131 Austrian German 122–​136 Austrian Imperial Standard (Gemeindeutsch) 126, 128 Austrian Standard German 125 Austrian Studies 125, 133 authenticity 248, 419, 423

authority 5, 25–​29, 33, 58, 104–​107, 110, 112, 151, 168, 228–​231, 238–​240, 305–​310, 315, 316, 415, 416, 434 Ayres-​Bennett, W. xxvi, 126, 432 Azerbaijani 374 Babel 50, 471 Babić, S. 387, 396 Bacon, F. 251 badumes 410–​411, 418, 419, 420, 423 Bahamas 151 Baker, J. T. 65 Baker, R. 64, 66, 160, 163, 171 Baker, S. J. 255 Baker-​Bell, A. 199, 200 Bakhtin, M. M. 369 Ballieu, J. 455 Bantu languages 324–​325 Baraban, B. 390 Barbeau, V. 434 Barber, A. 214–​217, 221 Barère, B. 123 Baron, D. 26 Baron, N. S. 23, 234, 239–​240 basilects 407–​408, 410, 414, 424n4 Bates, K. L. 166 be 18 Beal, J. C. xxii–​xxiv, 57, 61–​62, 229, 234, 250 Béguin, L.-​P. 436, 436–​437, 441 Belgium 451, 454 Bello López, A. 150–​151 Belorussia/​Belorussian 371, 373, 378 Bendavid, A. 311 Bengali 368 Bennie, J. 326, 328 Bescherelle ta mère 433, 435, 438, 441 Bibaud, M. 430, 433 Biblical Hebrew 310–​311 Bilić, M. 393 bilingualism 109, 114, 332, 374 Birch, B. 215, 216, 219 Bishop, H. 40, 43 Bismarck, O. von 127 Bjorkman, B. M. 217 blasphemy see offensive language Blog of Unnecessary Quote Marks 234 blogs 24, 67, 93, 234, 428, 433, 438, 467 Blommaert, J. 228, 230–​231, 232 Bloomfield, L. 4, 6, 14 Bogetić, K. 23, 29 Bohas, G. 290 Bokhorst-​Heng, W. 115 Bokmål 122, 176 Bolinger, D. 251 Bologna Process 179 Booher, D. 162–​163 Bosnia 373

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475

Index Botswana 324, 326 Bottéro, F. 340 bottom-​up prescriptivism see grassroots prescriptivism Bouchard, C. 431 Bouhours, D. 429, 432 Bourdieu, P. 122–​123, 125–​126, 133–​135 Bourgeade, P. 436, 436–​437, 441 Bradley, E. D. 217 Brazil 28, 378, 464 Brazilian Portuguese 152n5 Brennan, G. 15n3 Breton 405–​423, 466, 470 Bridging the Unbridgeable project 63–​67, 89, 169 Brinton, L. xxixn4 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) 34, 37, 50, 87 British Empire see United Kingdom/​Great Britain British English (BrE): accent bias 33–​36, 38–​48; copy editors 265; corpus linguistics 78–​79; data 266; ECEG database 54–​58; ECEP database 59–​62; vs English as a lingua franca 379; got 112; grassroots prescriptivism 103; higher education in Nordic countries 176–​188; HUGE database 63–​67; inner-​circle Englishes 90, 92–​93, 97–​98; metric system 97; Nigeria 116; pluricentrism 151; South Africa 323; Southeast Asia 349, 359; Standard British English 107, 112, 116, 144–​147; World Englishes 106–​107, 113, 116 British Guyana 152n7 British National Corpus 93 Broudic, F. 405, 410, 424n8 Brown, K. xxixn4 Brown corpora 78 Browning, R. 166–​167 Brozović, D. 387–​389, 396 Brunei 355, 466 Bryan, W. F. xx, xxi Buchanan, J. 59, 61 Bucholtz, M. 22 Budach, G. xxvi Buies, A. 433, 434, 436, 436, 439–​441 Bulgarian 373 Bullock Report 203 Burchfield, R. W. 65, 160, 162, 163 Buregeya, A. 112 Burma/​Myanmar 355, 466 Burn, J. 59 Burrell, A. 146 Burridge, K. 247, 276, 329 al‑Būšīxī, ʿAzz ad‑Dīn 293, 294 Busse, U. 160–​162, 168 buterbrod (Russian) 375 Calle-​Martin, J. 93 Calvez, J. 414

Cambodia 355, 466 Cambridge Guide to Australian English Usage 92, 94–​96, 98 Cambridge Guide to English Usage 87–​88 Cambridge University Press (CUP) 268 Cameron, D. xix, xxii–​xxiii, xxv, xxvi, 17–​23, 88, 89, 169, 214, 216, 228, 248, 264, 268, 359, 365, 448 Campbell, G. xxi can 13–​14 Can We Help (TV series) 252 Canada 90–​91, 142, 151, 161, 184; see also Quebec Canadian English (CanE) 38, 87, 90–​99, 111, 468 Canadian French 77–​78, 152n5, 430–​442, 435, 436; see also Quebec Canadian Oxford Dictionary 92, 94–​98 Cantonese 345–​347, 350 Caron, N. 433 Carter, R. 204 case inflection, Arabic 297–​299, 297 caste issues, India 116 Castilian Spanish 141, 144, 147–​151 Catalan 121 Catholic Church 407, 411, 418 Celeb Spellcheck 258 Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) 326, 328 Century of Prose Corpus 76 Černjak, V. D. xxvi Cervantes, M. de 148 Chabacano 143 Chancery Standard English 144 Chao, Y. R. 342 Chapman, D. xxv, 65, 166, 170, 241 characters: simplified 340, 344–​350; traditional 340, 346, 350 Charity Hudley, A. H. 223 Chaucer, G. 165, 167 Chejne, A. G. 297 Chen, S. 348 Chicago Manual of Style (CMoS) 14, 26, 87, 280 ChiLamba 331 Chile 143, 144, 150 Chimhundu, H. 326–​328 China: imperial 338–​345, 350–​351, 466; PRC 346–​351; Greater China 338–​351 ChiNdau 332–​333 Chinese 121, 338–​351, 368, 465, 468 ChiShangani 332 ChiShona 325–​329, 331–​333 Chittiphalangsri, P. 358 Chomsky, N. 6 Chrisomalis, S. 22, 23 Church Slavonic 371 cisnormativity 217, 219, 223 clarity, and accent bias 34

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476

Index class issues: accent bias 39; Arabic 289; Breton 417, 418; China 341–​342; education 195–​197, 199–​205, 207; grassroots prescriptivism 231; Hebrew 313; India 115, 116; Indonesia 359; Standard British English 145–​146; top-​down prescriptivism 228; usage guides 168, 171, 172; verbal hygiene 359; World Englishes 105, 109, 113, 115, 116 Classical Arabic 152n5, 290 clearly 13 cluster analysis 273–​374, 276 Clyne, M. 339 Coddington, D. 258 code meshing 201 code mixing 392 code switching 199–​201, 392 Cole, A. 50 collective norm 369–​370 colloquial Arabic (CA) 287–​294, 297, 300 colloquialisms 76, 78–​79, 93–​94, 98, 372 Colombia 143, 144, 148 Colombo, C. 142 colonialism: Australia 252; education 197, 199, 202, 205, 208; Hong Kong 345–​346, 350; inner-​circle Englishes 86, 100n2; Macao 346, 350; Nordic countries 177, 185, 187–​188; pluricentric languages 140–​143, 151, 176; Singapore 348, 350; Southeast Asia 355, 466; southern Africa 324–​325, 327–​329, 332; Taiwan 347; World Englishes 103–​105, 108–​109, 114, 116 colloquia on linguistic prescriptivism xxiii–​xxv Common European Framework of References for Languages 185 Commonwealth of Nations 105 communication failures 379 communities, discourse 57, 58, 449 communities, imagined 124 communities of practice 230, 233, 235 complaint tradition 109, 110, 227, 235, 256, 258 Concise Dictionary of the English Language 160 Condorelli, M. 62 conferences on linguistic prescriptivism xxiii–​xxv Confucius 340 Connelly, L. 198 Conrod, K. 217 constraints 5–​7, 80–​81, 133, 247 contemptuous attitudes in prescriptivism 8, 10 control, and taboos 248–​249 conventional norm, Hebrew 306–​310, 313–​314, 316 Cook, J. 257, 259, 260n11 Cooper, C. 145 copy editors 10, 264–​281, 309–​311, 467 Cordero, M. 147 Corpora 58, 64, 73–​79 corpus linguistics 73–​83, 467

Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) 79, 266 Corpus of Historical American English 79 Correas, G. 147–​148 Correlation 81–​82, 280 Corson, D. J. 323 Costa Rica 144 Cotelli Kureth, S. 439 Coulmas, F. 123 Coupland, N. 43 Courrier de Vaugelas, Le 432, 435, 437–​438, 438, 440 Cowper, E. 217 Cox, B. 50 Cox Report 203, 204 Craig, A. 442 Croatia 122, 386–​401, 466 Croatian 386–​401 Croato-​Serbian 387, 388 Crystal, D. 161–​162, 164, 171, 204, 208n1, 281n4, 448, 469 Cuba 143 Cuervo, R. J. 150 cultural appropriation 27 cultural cringe 276 cultural imperialism 175–​176 culture wars 27–​28 Curme, G. O. 7 Curzan, A. xxvi, 23, 25, 27, 88–​91, 97, 123, 134, 250, 287–​288, 291 Cushing, I. 197, 198, 206, 207 cyberbullying 233 Cyril, St 370, 372 Cyrillic alphabet and orthography 372–​373, 468 Czech 122, 388 Czechoslovakian 122 Dagestan 374 Dahl, V. 372 Damousi, J. 253 dangling participles 160, 162–​165, 167, 171 Danish 122, 176–​178 Dann, H. 62 data 265–​281, 273, 274, 275, 468 Davidson, M. C. xxiv Davies, M. 92 Davies, W. 392 Ḍayf, ʿAbd. as-​S. 293 De Boor, H. 127, 128 De Cillia, R. 124 de la Borderie, A. 415 de la Villemarqué, T. 415–​416 Declaration on a Nordic Language Policy 180 decolonization 134–​136 definitions of linguistic prescriptivism xx–​xxi, 406 Defoe, D. 8 dehegemonization 134–​136

476

477

Index Denmark 176–​178, 177, 180, 182, 184, 187 des (Dutch) 449 descriptive linguistics xx–​xxi, xxiii, xxv, 122, 216, 222–​224 Deumert, A. 321 Deverson, T. 109, 110 Devonish, H. 111 diacritics 296–​299, 328 dialectism 32, 34 dialects: Arabic 293; Australian 256; Austrian 125; Breton 407, 411, 412–​413, 415, 417, 419, 423; China 343, 344; Chinese 114, 338, 341–​345, 349–​350, 351n2; corpus linguistics 74, 81; Croatian 386–​387, 391–​392, 395, 398–​399; education 199–​200, 203, 207; ECEP database 60; evolution 100n3; French 429; German 130; Hong Kong 345; inner-​circle Englishes 86, 93; normative vs prescriptive grammars 4; Russian 372; Singapore 114, 349; sociohistorical constructionism 122, 125–​127, 131; southern Africa 321–​324, 326–​327, 329, 331, 333–​334; Standard British English 145–​146; World Englishes 108, 114 dictionaries: accent bias 32, 33; Austrian 130–​133; Breton 414–​416; China 341, 342, 344; Croatian 387; and dirt 250–​251; Dutch 451; ECEP database 60, 62; France 429, 432–​433, 437, 440; German 127, 130; grammars 57; HUGE database 65; inner-​circle Englishes 86–​88, 90–​99; online vs print 428, 467; pluricentrism 148–​149; Quebec 431–​432, 432; Russian 372, 374, 375, 377; sociohistorical constructionism 126; southern Africa 329, 331–​332; as text type 160; verbal hygiene 26–​27, 28, 29; World Englishes 110–​111; see also specific dictionaries Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles 90, 111 Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English 90 differentiation phase, Dynamic Model 87, 108, 356 digital perspective 229–​243, 466–​467 diglossia 287, 290–​291, 294, 300, 363, 406, 410, 418–​419, 420 Dion, N. 77–​78, 80, 83 dirt 246, 248–​251, 253, 256, 258–​260 disciplinary bias 214–​218, 269 discriminatory language 24, 322 disfluencies 81–​82, 82 disparitary language 24 disruption, Modern Hebrew 315 diversity 26, 49 Doke, C. 331 Doke, M. 329 Dollinger, S. 111 Domínguez-​Rodríguez, M. V. 57, 58 Dominican Republic 143

Dorian, N. 410 double comparatives 75–​76 double negation 146, 228 Douglas, M. 246, 248–​251, 256, 259–​260 Dowis, R. 261n13 Drackley, P. 240 dropped letters 33, 61 Duden, K. 130 Durkheim, E. 249 Durrell, M. 131 Dutch 447–​461, 468 Dutch Guyana 152n7 Dynamic Model 107–​111, 113, 356–​357, 366 early dialect selection 310 Early Modern English 75 Early New High German 74 East African English 112 East Central German Standard (Ostmitteldeutsch) 126–​131 East Slavonic languages 371–​373 East Sutherland Scottish Gaelic 410 Easy Introduction to the English Language, An 58 Ebner, C. 23, 63, 65, 66, 89, 171, 266, 269 Ebonics 215 Eckert, P. 307 Editing Canadian English 92–​93, 95–​97 education: acquisition planning 338; Arabic 287–​288, 292, 294, 297–​300; Australia 253, 257; Austria 124, 131–​133; Breton 417, 418, 425n21; China 344–​345; copy editors 267; Croatia 398, 401; Dutch 449–​451, 454; ECEG database 57, 58; elocution movement 57; England 194–​208; English as a Lingua Franca model 357; France 429; German 127, 128; Greater China 341, 344–​346, 348–​350; Hebrew 308, 316; Hong Kong 345, 350; India 115, 116; Indonesia 359–​360; influence of prescriptivism 470–​471; inner-​circle Englishes 86–​87; Macao 346, 350; Nigeria 116–​117; Nordic countries 178–​187; pluricentric languages 141, 146; political correctness 364; Russia 369–​370, 373–​374, 376–​377; Singapore 114, 348–​349, 357; sociohistorical constructionism 131; South Africa 321–​323, 327–​329, 332–​334; Taiwan 348, 350; Thailand 358–​359; usage guides 159, 168–​170, 172; verbal hygiene 18–​19, 22, 23, 28; World Englishes 104–​107, 112–​117 Edwards, J. 215–​218, 222 Eglantier, De 450 Egypt 298 Eho Moskvy 376 eighteenth century 54–​68, 74–​76, 122–​128, 144–​148, 171, 250, 259, 311, 368, 371, 414, 415, 432, 439, 449–​450, 455–​461

477

478

Index Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars database (ECEG) 54–​58, 67–​68 Eighteenth-​Century English Phonology database (ECEP) 54, 59–​62, 67–​68 Einsohn, A. 281 Eliot, G. 166, 167 elocution 39–​40, 57, 59, 60, 145; see also pronunciation Elspaß, S. 133–​134, 136n2 empiricism 10–​12, 88, 112 endoglossic language policy 113 endonormative stabilization phase, Dynamic Model 86–​88, 90, 108–​111, 113–​114, 131–​132, 339, 350, 356–​357 England: accents 146; education 194–​208; ECEG database 57; grammar teaching 18–​19; history of prescriptivism 406; National Curriculum 203–​206, 208n1; pluricentrism 142, 144–​145, 148; Teachers’ Standards 206–​207 English: accent bias 32, 33–​34; canonical grammar 290; corpus linguistics 75–​76, 78–​82; French anglicisms 430, 433–​434, 436–​438, 440–​442; gender-​neutral language 25, 217–​222; global perspective 464–​466; grassroots prescriptivism 234; higher education in Nordic countries 175–​188; Hong Kong 345; influence of prescriptivism 471; as an International Auxiliary Language (EIAL) 111; as an International Language (EIL) 111, 112; Israel 311–​312; as a Lingua Franca (ELF) 111–​112, 178, 281n4, 357, 359, 366, 379, 465; Macao 347; as a medium of instruction (EMI) 179–​180, 185–​187; pluricentrism 140–​147, 149, 151, 368; prestige-​based “correctness” 307; Russian loanwords 375; as a second language (ESL) 103–​104, 117; Singapore 348–​350; Southeast Asia 355–​366, 466; southern Africa 329, 334; usage guides 159–​172; see also specific varieties enregisterment 21, 234, 310 equal writing 314–​316 equality, and accent bias 49 Equatorial Guinea 143, 152n8 ERASMUS programme 179 erasure 293, 390–​391, 395–​397, 399 Erfurt, J. xxvi Esperanto 18, 343 Estonia 378 Estuary English (EE) 38, 40, 43–​45, 44, 46, 47, 47, 48 Eswatini 324, 325 ethical issues 214–​217, 219, 222 ethnicity factors: Arabic 288–​289; Breton 416; Greater China 341, 348–​350; Hebrew 307, 312–​314, 316; 465; Nigeria 117; Russian 373, 378; Singapore 114, 348–​350; southern Africa 329; UK 414; usage guides 172; World Englishes 113, 114, 117

euphemisms 330, 363–​364 European Economic Area (EEA) 177, 184, 185, 187 European French 152n5 European Portuguese 152n5 European Union 177, 184, 185, 187 evidence 8, 14, 15, 54, 59–​67, 99, 422–​423, 464 exonormative stabilization phase, Dynamic Model 86, 98, 108–​109, 112–​114, 128, 130, 141, 339, 347–​350, 356 Expanding-​Circle Englishes 355–​356, 357 exposure, and accent bias 46 Facebook see social media Fairclough, N. 145–​146, 201 Falc’hun, F. 419 familiarity, and accent bias 34–​35, 38, 45–​46, 45 Fang, F. 107 Faroese 176 Fasold, R. F. 322 Felbiger, I. von 128, 130 Fellman, J. 310 feminism 25, 221, 223, 315 feminization, Modern Hebrew 314–​315 Fens-​de Zeeuw, L. 65 Ferguson, A. 197–​198 Ferguson, C. A. 291, 406 Ferguson, N. 256–​257 Fernández-​Martínez, 58 filled pauses 81–​82, 82 Finland 176–​178, 177, 182, 184, 186, 188n6, 378 Finnish 176, 178, 186 First Nations 96–​97 Fitzgerald, J. 265 FitzSimons, P. 251, 253 Five Hundred Mistakes of Daily Occurrence 172 Flores, N. 195, 201–​202, 207 Flórez, A. 147 Follett, W., Modern American Usage 11 forehead 255 forensic linguistics, Russia 376 form–​function symmetry, doctrine of 80–​83 foundation phase, Dynamic Model 108, 356 Fournol, E. 123 Fowler, F. G. 8–​10 Fowler, H. W. 8–​10, 80, 87, 89, 93, 160, 162–​163, 167, 171, 280 France 28, 49, 240, 355, 464, 466; Breton 405–​423; metalinguistic texts 427–​430, 432–​442, 435, 436, 438; Revolution 122–​124, 127, 411, 429 Franz Joseph I 130 Fréchette, L. 434 Freeman, J. 10 French 127, 152n5, 217, 375, 410–​414, 418, 428–​442, 435, 436, 438, 451; see also specific varieties

478

479

Index French Guiana 152n7 From Inglis to Scots (FITS) database 62 future markers 77–​78 G-​dropping 254, 255 Gaelic 410 Gafter, R. J. 313 Gal, S. 287, 293 Galambos, I. 341 Galician 121 García, O. 333 Gardiner, M. E. 231 Gardner, M. H. 80–​82, 83 Garner, B. 10–​12, 65, 87, 160, 162, 171 Gasconismes corrigési 432 Gaskell, E. 166, 167 gender 169, 213–​224, 228, 231, 235, 314–​316, 331, 410; essentialism 219 gender-​neutral language 213, 215–​223, 363 gendered language 25–​26, 27–​28 General Northern English (GNE) 40, 43, 44, 45, 47, 47, 48 generational factors see age factors generative grammars 10, 15n2 generic masculine 25 Genootschap Onze Taal 451 Genung, J. F. 166 George I 145 German 74, 121–​136, 217, 235, 311, 375, 451; see also specific varieties German–​Austrian War 127, 130 German Studies 125, 132–​133 Germany 178, 378 get 79, 93–​94, 94, 99 GIF 236, 239 Giles, H. 40, 41 Gill, J. 194, 195 Gilman, E. W. 8, 11 Giovanardi, M. B. 26, 27 GLAAD 26, 28 Gladstone, W. 32 Glagolitic alphabet 372 Glasgow Missionary Society 326 global perspective 464–​466 Global Spanish 151 globalization 229 GloWbE corpus 93, 99, 266 Goh, Y. S. 338–​339 Goh Chok Tong 360, 361 Goldberg, A. E. 83n1 Golev, N. V. 377 Goncalves, B. 93 Gonzalez-​Diaz, V. 75–​76 Google N-​g ram viewer 11 Gordon, E. 109, 110 Görlach, M. 160, 161 got/​gotten 93–​94, 94, 99, 112, 256, 468

Gottsched, J. C. 127–​131 Gove, M. 205 Gowers, E. 160, 162–​164 Gramling, D. 124 Grammar Girl 67, 280 Grammarly 280 grammars: African languages 322, 331; Arabic 290; Australia 251; Breton 407–​408, 415–​417; Castilian Spanish 147–​150; Croatian 387, 388; dictionary 57; Dutch 447, 449–​453, 459–​460; ECEG database 54–​58; education 204–​206; France 432; generative 10, 15n2; German 129–​130; HUGE database 63; normative 3–​15; pluricentrism 145, 147–​150; Quebec 431, 432; Russian 369, 371–​372; school curriculum, England and Wales 18–​19; scientific 4, 5–​7; Standard British English 145; vs usage guides 163; World Englishes 110, 113 grassroots prescriptivism 227–​243, 466–​467; Australia 246, 257; France 433; HUGE database 67; prescriptive momentum 89; Reddit 235–​239, 237, 238; verbal hygiene 25, 27, 28; World Englishes 103, 105 Great Britain see United Kingdom/​Great Britain Great Vowel Shift 62 Greater China 338–​351, 466 greengrocer’s apostrophe 170, 229 Greenwood, J. 58 Grégoire, Abbé 123 Grillparzer, F. 131 Guam 143 Guardian (newspaper) 265 Guo Moruo 344 Gustafsson, O. L. 75 Gustafsson Sendén, M. 218 Guy, G. 146 Gwalarn 416 Habermas, J. 231 habitus 134 Haeri, N. 290 Haiman, J. 83n1 Haiti 143 Hakka 348, 350 Hall, J. L. 159, 162–​168, 171 Hall, R. J. 20 Hallberg, A. 290, 298 Halliday, M. A. K. 106, 323 Ham, S. 394–​395 Hannah, J. 268 Hannan, S. J. 331 Hanyǔ Pīnyīn 344, 348–​350 Hanyǔ Shuǐping Kǎoshi (HSK) 345 hard words 250–​251 Hardie, A. 268 Harding, H. 339 Harper’s Dictionary 65

479

480

Index Hart, J. 144–​145 Hart’s Rules 280 hate speech 24 Haugen, E. xxii, 122, 124, 126, 305, 429, 452 Haugen’s Sequence 126, 127 Havinga, A. D. 124, 127, 449 Hawthorne, N. 167 Haydn, J., Kaiser-​Hymn 132 Haywood, E. 58 he 25 Hebrew 304–​316, 465 Hebrew Language Committee 305, 314 Heer, F. 130 Heffer, S. 8, 13–​14, 164, 169, 171, 281n1 Heffernan, K. 91 Heidelberger Korpus 74 Hejná, M. xxiii Hekanaho, L. 217 Helsinki Corpus 75 Hemon, R. 416, 417, 422 hen (Swedish) 218 Henckel, F. L. N. 455 Hernandez, E. 218 Herrgen, J. 133 Herrick, A. 255 Hewitt, S. 422–​423 Heyd, T. 230, 231, 234, 433 Hickey, R. 61–​62 higher education see education Hindi 368 Hinrichs, L. 10, 78–​80 Hirsch, E. D. 205 Hirst, J. 258 Ibn Hišām 295 Hispaniola 143 Historical Corpus of Dutch 454–​460 historical prescriptivism 447, 450–​451 historiographical methods 54–​68 history 8, 11 Hodson, J. xxii Hoklo/​Taiwanese 347–​348, 350 Holborow, M. 197 Holliday, A. 360, 363 Holmes, J. 258, 322 Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation (HRE) 126–​127 Hong Kong 109, 185, 338–​340, 345–​346, 350, 466 Hooft, P. C. 448–​449 hopefully 10–​11, 12–​13 house style see style guides Hubbard, S. 208n2 Huddleston, R. 8, 15n5 Hudeček, L. 400 Hudson, R. A. 203–​204, 208n1, 331 Hultgren, A. K. 180 humour 242–​243, 252 Humphries, E. 435

Hundt, M. 113 Hurd, S. T., Grammatical Corrector 161 Hurdes, F. 132 Hyper Usage Guide of English (HUGE) database 54, 63–​68, 89, 161–​165, 167, 171, 265 al-​ʿIbrī, X., Axṭāʾ luġawiyya šāʾiʿa 295–​296 Iceland/​Icelandic 11, 176–​178, 177, 180, 182, 184, 186–​187, 466 identity 214; accent bias 36; alphabets 372; Arabic 292, 294; grassroots prescriptivism 242; Hebrew 316; nonbinary 217, 219; pluricentric languages 151; prescriptivist debates 215; schools 198; Singapore 115; verbal hygiene 26; World Englishes 113, 115; see also national identity idiom 408–​414, 420 iKalanga 325 Île-​de-​France-​French 123 Illyrian Movement 387 Ilson, R. F. 162 Imagery 427, 428, 434, 438–​442 imagined communities 124 imgur 236–​243, 237, 238, 471 inaccurate generalizations in prescriptivism 7–​8, 10 inclusive language 20, 217, 230, 234 India 105, 109, 112, 115–​116, 140, 161, 185, 235 Indian English 106 indicative subjunctives 75 Indigenous/​indigenous 96–​97, 97, 99 Indonesia 355–​356, 359–​360, 365, 466 inequality 195, 313, 358 inflectional subjunctives 75, 76 influence of prescriptivism 469–​471 informality 76, 78–​79, 94 inkhorn words 251 inner-​circle Englishes 86–​100, 184, 187, 355–​357 integrated relative clauses 8–​10 intelligibility, and accent bias 34–​35 interdiscursivity 242–​243 International Academic English 268 International Conference of the Arabic Language 287, 292 International Corpus of English project 104 International Council of the Arabic Language 291–​292 International Society for General Semantics 18 International Spanish 151 international students, Nordic countries 178–​181 internet language see netspeak intervocalic flapping 255 ipse dixit approach 65, 87, 164, 168 Iran 374 Ireland 38, 142, 146, 172, 184, 414, 416 Irish English 38, 61 Irvine, J. T. 21, 287, 293

480

481

Index Isabella I 142, 152n14 -​ise 92–​93, 99, 468 isiBhaca 325, 329, 332 isiCamtho 333 isiGcaleka 322 isiHlubi 325, 332 isiMpondo 323, 329, 332–​333 isiNdebele 325, 329–​330, 332 isiNguni languages 325, 327–​328 isiRharhabe 322, 326–​327, 329 isiXhosa 321–​323, 325–​333 isiZulu 321, 325, 327–​332 Islam 287–​290, 292–​293, 465 Isomorphism, Principle of 83n1 Israel 304–​316, 465 -​ize 92–​93, 99, 468 Jamaica 111, 143, 151, 199 Jamaican Creole (JC) 199 Japan 342, 347 Jartseva, V. N. 372 Jawwād, M. 291, 295–​296 Al Jazeera 293 Jernudd, B. 254 Jespersen, O. xx, xxi, 122, 135 Jezik 394–​395 Jezik i predrasude (radio programme) 399 Johl, C. 333 Johnson, S. 160, 246 Johnston, W. 59 Jones, D. 37 Jones, S. 59 Jonke, L. 388 Joseph, J. E. 5, 15n3, 121, 134 Joseph-​Salisbury, R. 198 joual controversy 431 Journal de la langue françoise 432 Journal of English as a Lingua Franca 112 Journal of Language and Discrimination 50 Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development xxiv, 89 Jowitt, D. 116–​117 Judaism 305, 314 Justice, P. xxiii Kachru, B. B. 100n2, 104, 106, 107, 355–​356 Kalogjera, D. 388 Kangxi Dictionary 341, 342 Kant, I. 379 kantselarit 379 Kapović, M. xxvi, 386, 388 Karadžić, V. 387–​388 Kaschula, R. H. 323 Kašić, B. 387 Katičić, R. 387–​389, 392–​393 Kazakh 374 Kazakhstan 373, 378

Kembo-​Sure, E. 323 Kenrick, W. 59 Kenyan English 112 Kerampoul, C. de 415 Khoikhoi 325, 470 Kibbee, D. A. 442 Kibbey, T. 216–​217 Killian, J. xxixn7 Kinder, A. 39–​40 King James Bible 80 Kinglake, E. 252 Kingman Report 203, 204 Kirkpatrick, A. 357 Klein, W. P. xxiii Kleyn, T. 333 Knesset Committee for the Promotion of the Status of Women 314 Kók, A. L. 450 Konnelly, L. 217 Koppensteiner, W. 133, 135 Kopsa 326 Kordić, S. 388 Kostadinova, V. 65, 66, 165, 269 Kotek, H. 223 Kozyrev, V. A. xxvi Kramsch, C. 323 Krassnigg, A. 132 Kripke, S. 6 Krogull, A. 449, 452 Kropf, A. 331 Kroskrity, P. V. 428 Kulz, C. 198 Kuwait 299 Kuzul ar Brezhoneg 417 Kyrgyz 374 Labov, W. 77, 255 lah 362 Lämmert, E. 135 Lange, C. 116 Langer, N. 74, 392 language advice 427, 432–​434, 442 language and politics 326, 334, 374 language academies 146–​149, 151, 305, 308–​312, 314–​316 language change: chronology 453–​461 language columns 430–​437 Language in the National Curriculum (LINC) project 204 language ideology 256, 287–​300, 450 language instruction 288, 294 Language Log (blog) 24 language management 355, 364–​365 Language Plan of Action for Africa 332 language planning 123, 216, 288, 304, 323, 397, 400, 407, 451 language policing 196–​198, 207, 228–​230

481

482

Index language policy 113–​115, 180, 185–​188, 332–​333, 348, 349, 364, 374, 386, 387, 400, 449–​451, 454 language replacement 343, 393, 405–​406, 423 language requirements 180–​188 language revitalization 304–​306, 311, 423, 465 language term 121–​126 Laos 355, 466 late dialect selection 310 Late Middle English 93 Late Modern English 59, 75 Latimer, H. 167 Latin 127, 371, 428, 466 Latvia/​Latvian 310, 378 Lauder, A. 359 Laurence, J.-​M. 436, 436–​437, 440 Le Berre, Y. 407–​411, 414, 418, 422–​423 Le Dû, J. 407–​411, 414, 418, 422–​423 Le Gonidec, J.-​F. 415–​416 leap past tense inflections 79 Lederer, R. 261n13 Lee, M. K. 361 Lee Kuan Yew 114, 349 leetspeak 241–​242 legal linguistics, Russia 376 legitimate language 240, 313, 390 Leimgruber, J. 115 Lemberg, E. 123 Lenz, A. 133, 135 Leonard, S. A. xxi–​xxii Lesotho 324, 326–​327 Levey, S. 199 Levon, E. 42 Lewandowsky, S. 257, 259, 260n11 lexicography 331–​332 LGBTQ+​ people 213, 217–​222 liberation linguistics 106 Lim Boon Keng 349 Lindqvist, A. 218 linguistic norms 20, 22, 29, 109, 111, 140–​142, 214, 338–​339, 349–​351, 369, 374, 377 Linguistic Society of America (LSA) 213 Lipou, A. 324 Lippi-​Green, R. xxvi Lisbon Recognition Convention 179 literally 66 literary language 339, 343, 368–​372, 376, 379 Lithuanian 310 litre/​liter 97 loanwords 312, 329–​330, 332, 361, 375, 377, 393, 416, 451 Lobineau, G. A. 415 Lomonosov, M. 371, 372 Loth, J. 415 Lotter, W. 135 Lounsbury, T. R. 165–​166 Lovedale Press 324, 326

Lowth, R. xxi–​xxii, 65, 160–​161, 171, 260n10 Lù, J. 349 Lucas, R. E. 293 Ludolf, H. 371 Lugard, Lord 105 Lukač, M. 65–​67, 230, 232, 246, 260n7 Lund University 181, 186–​187, 192 Lunde, I. 368 Luxembourgish 121, 132 Lyons, J. xxiii Mabie, H. W. 166 Macao 338, 340, 346–​347, 350, 466 Macaulay, T. B. 105 Macedonian 373 machine learning 231 Macquarie Dictionary 92–​97, 111, 252, 260n8 Mager, N. 163 Maguire, T. 430, 433 Maguire, W. 62 Mair, C. 162 Malawi 325 Malay 348, 356–​357 Malaysia 105, 113, 348, 355–​357, 360, 363, 365, 466 Maling, J. 11 Mallo-​Alfonso, M. 62 Manchu 341 Mandarin 114, 339, 341–​351, 356, 368 Mandarin Phonetic Symbols (MPS) 343, 349 Mandeville, J. 167 Manglish 362–​363 manner adjuncts 10, 12, 13 Mao Zedong 344 Maqam, E. Z. 322, 329 Marckwardt, A. H. 165 Maretić, T. 388 Maria-​Theresia, Empress 127, 128 Marone, V. 242 Marsh, D. 265 Martin, E. 437–​438, 440 Martineau, F. 443n4 Matasović, R. 388–​389 matched guise technique 40 mathematical language 22 Maunoir, J. 414 Mauranen, A. 281n4 McEenery, T. 268 McLaren, J. 331 Mechkovskaja, N. B. 377 media: accent bias 31–​32, 34, 37, 38, 50; African languages 322; Arabic 287, 292–​293, 300; Australia 246, 252–​253; Breton 420–​423; Cantonese 345; Croatia 399; Dutch 451; gotten 94; grassroots prescriptivism 466–​467; Hebrew 308, 311; native-​speakerism 363, 366; and prescriptivism, interplay 88–​89; Russia 370,

482

483

Index 374–​376, 378; Singapore 360, 363; Taiwan 348; verbal hygiene 24, 26, 28 Menand, L. 14 Mendoza, P. de 143 Merriam–​Webster 213 Mesthrie, R. xix metaphors 427–​428, 434, 439–​442 Methodious, St 370, 372 metres 98, 98 metric system 97–​98, 98, 99 Mexican Spanish 152n17 Mexico 140, 142, 143, 148 Meyerhoff, M. 260n4 Michael, I. 56 Michaeli, M. 315 microaggressions 28, 49, 221–​222 Microsoft 246 Mikalja, J. 387 Millar, A. 6–​7 Miller, J. xxixn4 Milroy, J. and L. xxii, xxvi, 20, 23, 109, 126, 146, 227, 235, 264, 289, 305, 427–​428 misgendering 217, 221 mispronunciation see pronunciation missionaries, southern Africa 321, 324–​329, 331–​332, 465 Mitford, N. 168 Mitterand, F. 417 Mittins, W. H. 65, 89, 160, 165, 266, 269 Mitzka, W. 132 Mizrahi Jews 312–​314, 316, 465 modal adjuncts 10–​11, 12–​13 Modern Hebrew (MH) 304–​316 Modern Standard Arabic 290 Modern Standard German 74 Mongolia 373 monocodia ideology 391–​392, 400 monoglossia ideology 392–​393, 400 mono-​ideologies 389–​400, 470 monolingualism 124, 311, 410–​411, 417 monooriginy ideology 393, 400 monosemonymy ideology 395–​398, 400 monostylia ideology 398–​400 monoverby ideology 393–​395, 400 Montenegro 373 mood inflection, Arabic 297–​299, 297 Moody, A. 347 Moore, B. 253, 255 Moore, E. 206 Mor, U. 306 Morocco 152n5, 294 morphology 94, 163, 295, 306–​310, 437–​438, 468 Morris, E. 197 Morvannou, F. 419 Moschonas, S. 448 Moser, M. A. 378

Mozambique 152n5, 325, 327 al‑Msaddī, ʿAbd as‑Salām 293 al-​Mubarrad 295 Mugglestone, L. xxvi, 197, 203 Muhr, R. 133 Mukherjee, J. 113 multi-​genre corpus 454, 459 Multicultural London English (MLE) 40, 43–​48, 44, 47, 48 multilingualism: African languages 323, 334; Austria-​Hungary 127; Greater China 339, 341, 345, 348; Hong Kong 345; India 115–​116; Nordic countries 176–​178, 180, 186, 188; Russia 373; Taiwan 348 Murphy, L. 50 Murray, L. 65, 93 Muysken, P. 323 Myanmar/​Burma 355, 466 Myhill, J. 307 Mzilikazi 325 Napoleon I 127 national identity 124–​125, 127, 130, 135, 176, 253, 257, 288, 292–​294, 308, 311–​312, 316, 359, 408, 414, 416, 452, 470 National Trust 169 nationalism 24, 28, 123, 131, 178, 287–​290, 388, 391, 416–​417 native speakers/​native speakerism 360, 363, 366, 376–​377, 422 nativization phase, Dynamic Model 108, 109, 112, 253, 356, 357 Navest, K. 58 Ndebele 325, 328 Nebrija, A. de 147, 148, 152n15 Nederlandse Taalunie 451 neo-​positivism 122 neopronouns 213, 215, 217–​219, 221 Nero, S. 199 Netherlands 355, 447–​461, 466 netspeak 234–​235, 467 Netz, H. 306 Neutral Spanish 151 neutralization, Modern Hebrew 314–​315 new Breton secular standard (NBSS) 405–​406, 416–​423 New Englishes 104; see also World Englishes New Parity French (NPF) 418 New Zealand 109–​110, 140, 142, 151, 184 New Zealand English 141 Newald, R. 127, 128 Newbery, J. 58 Newbolt Report 203 News of the World (NOW) corpus 92, 94, 94–​97, 95, 97, 98, 98–​99 Ngqika 322 Nguni languages 325, 326, 330

483

484

Index Nhlapo, J. 325 Nicaragua 144 Niehaus, K. 133–​134 Niehorster, D. C. 298 Niehr, T. xxixn7 Nigeria 105, 109, 113, 116–​117 Nigerian English 116–​117 Nir, R. 306 No Synonymy, Principle of 83n1 Noll, V. 143 nonbinary language 26, 27, 213, 215–​223, 363 Nordic Council of Ministers 177 Nordic countries 175–​188, 466; see also specific countries normativity 3–​15, 21–​23, 33, 54, 56–​57, 67, 86–​100, 106–​113, 236, 242 Norway/​Norwegian 122, 176–​177, 177, 179, 181, 183, 184–​187, 379 Nynorsk 176 obscenity 24 Odessan language 378 Oertel, H. 4, 5 Ofcom 24, 28 offensive language 24, 28, 216, 233, 329, 363–​365, 375–​377 Office for National Statistics 265 official norm 368–​370, 376–​379 Ofis Publik ar Brezhoneg 417 Ofsted 206, 207, 208n5 Old Believers 378 Old Church Slavonic 371 Old East Slavonic 371 Old Russian 371 Opačić, N. 391–​392, 397–​398 -​or spellings 254 orthography see spelling Osselton, N. E. 250 Österreichisches Wörterbruch (ÖWB) 132 Osthus, D. 428 Ottawa-​Hull French Corpus 77 -​our spellings 254 Outer-​Circle Englishes 355–​356 Owen, J. 264–​265, 281 Oxford English Dictionary (OED): dangling participles 172n4; data 265–​266; descriptive linguistics defined xx–​xxi; gotten 93, 100n16; higher education in Nordic countries 187; inner-​circle Englishes 88; ipse dixit 172n2; lah 362; Manglish 362, 363; prescriptivism defined xx–​xxi, 406; Singlish 361–​363; standard English 144; style guides 160; usage guides 161; woman 26–​27 Oxford Guide to Canadian English Usage 87, 92–​96, 98 Oxford University Press 146–​147

Palestine 305, 307, 310, 312 Palestine Teachers’ Association 305 Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB) 324, 328, 332–​334 Panama 143 Paraguay 143 parallel languages 180, 185–​186, 188 Paratext in Eighteenth-​Century English Grammars project 58 paritary language 408–​410, 418, 420, 423 Parkinson, D. B. 298 Partridge, E. 164 Patwa/​patois 111 Pauwels, A. 314 Pavešić, S. 388 Pecock, R. 166 Peel, R. 32 Pelletier, D. Le 415 Peninsular Spanish 143–​144, 150 Percy, C. xxiv–​xxv, 58, 338, 351 period method, Modern Hebrew 315 periphrastic subjunctives 75 Perry, W. 59, 62 Peru 148 Peter the Great 372 Peters, P. 93, 103, 110, 162, 164, 266 Petersen, J. 136 petulance in prescriptivism 8 Pezron, A. 414–​415 pharyngeal consonants, Modern Hebrew 313–​314, 316 phenomena 94–​96, 95, 99, 468 Philippines 113, 143, 148, 152n8 Phillips, E. 250 piar (Russian) 370 pidgin languages 117, 379 Piller, I. 121–​122, 125 Pillière, L. 264–​265, 280 Pinker, S. 20–​21, 24, 170, 228 platform capitalism 231 plead past tense inflections 79 Plowden Report 203 pluricentrism 132, 134, 140–​151, 339, 347, 350, 368, 454, 465 podcasts 67 Poe, E. A. 167 Poland 378 political correctness 27, 363–​364, 366 politically responsive prescriptivism 25–​27, 89–​90, 96–​98, 287–​288 Poon, A. Y. K. 346 Poplack, S. 77–​78, 80, 83 Popowitsch, J. S. V. 129–​131, 136 Portugal 142, 152n7, 350 Portuguese 28, 121, 152n5, 346–​347, 368 post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy 453, 460

484

485

Index Postcolonial Englishes 104, 107; see also World Englishes postcolonialism 103–​117, 141, 199, 253, 324, 356, 360 post-​digitalism 232 Pouillon, V. 145 pragmatic prescriptivism 214, 216, 220, 471 pragmatism, and accent bias 35–​36 Prah, K. 326 Pratchett, T. 470 Prator, C. 106, 107 precept corpus 74–​79 prejudice 24, 196, 214–​216, 220, 223; see also accents: prejudice/​discrimination/​accentism preposition stranding 76 Preradovic, P., Land der Berge 132 prescriptions: types 454–​455 prescriptive norm, Hebrew 306–​310, 313–​314, 316 prescription-​description binary 247 Preston, D. R. 38, 376 Pride, J. B. 322 Priestley, J. xxi, xxii profanity see offensive language proficiency tests see tests of language proficiency progressive passive 79 pronouncing dictionaries 54, 59, 61, 62, 67 pronunciation 468; accent bias 31–​50; Australia 254–​255; China 342–​344; Dutch 451, 455; ECEG database 57; ECEP database 59–​62; education 194; grassroots prescriptivism 235–​243, 237, 238; Greater China 340–​344, 348–​349; India 116; influence of prescriptivism 471; pluricentric languages 142, 145, 151; Russian 372, 373; Singapore 349; Standard British English 145; Taiwan 348; usage guides 163; World Englishes 113, 116; see also elocution proofreaders 264–​281 proscriptive 88, 161, 163, 164, 168, 171 proto-​Bantu 324 Prussia 127–​131 Puerto Rico 143 publics 227–​232 Pullum, G. K. xxii, 8, 12–​14, 15n5, 159, 164, 172, 228, 240 punctuation 467, 468; apostrophe 170, 229, 249–​250, 258 purism 227, 229, 233, 307, 309, 312, 388, 393, 418, 439 Pushkin, A. 371, 372 Pǔtōnghua 344–​347, 349 Puttenham, G. 145 quantitative analysis 12, 54, 88, 272–​275 Qānūn al-​luġa l‑ʿarabiyya (the Arabic language law) 292

Quebec 90, 427–​428, 430–​442, 435, 436 Québécois French see Canadian French Quirk, R. 106, 112 Qur’an 289–​290, 295 Ibn Qutayba 295 R-​word campaign 364–​365 race factors 195–​202, 204–​207, 215, 223, 228, 231 raciolinguistic ideologies 196, 199, 202, 206–​208 Radford, A. xxixn4 Ramsey, S. R. 343 Ransmayr, J. 124 Ravid, D. 306, 308, 312 Rawlins, J. D. xxv, 268 Real Academia Española 147–​151 Received Pronunciation (RP) 33–​36, 38–​40, 43–​48, 44–​45, 47, 48, 59, 62, 116 Récits du français québécois d’autrefois 77 Recueil historique des grammaires du français (RHGF) 77 Reddit 235–​243, 254; see also social media reformist zeal in prescriptivism 8–​10 religion: Arabic 287–​290, 292–​293, 295; Breton 407, 411, 418; Hebrew 305; Macao 346; Russian 370–​371, 378; southern Africa 321, 324–​329, 331–​332, 465; Welsh Bible 410 Relković, M. A. 387 remarquers 432–​433, 439 Renström, E. 218 Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, A 75 research, growth of xxiii–​xvii restorative prescriptivism, Arabic 287–​288 retarded 364–​365 revisionism in prescriptivism 8–​10 rhetoric 19, 57, 167, 288, 293, 450 Richterich, A. 235 Rinfret, R. 433 Rini, R. 221 ritual, and taboos 247–​249, 251 Roadkill (TV series) 159 Roberts, A. 50 Roberts, P. A. 111 Rodríguez-​Álvarez, A. 58 Rodríguez-​Gil, M. E. 58 Rogers, S. 265 Romania 378 Roosevelt, F. D. 10 Rosa, J. 195, 196, 201–​202, 207 Roscoe, W. 146 Rosén, H. B. 306, 311 Ross, A. S. C. 168 Rostrenen, G. de 415 Royal Statistical Society 265 Rozakis, L. 162–​163 Rozental, D. 380n13

485

486

Index Rubdy, R. 360 Rudd, K. 97 rules 6, 9, 13, 15n2 Russenorsk 379 Russia 178, 368–​380 Russian 368–​380, 466, 468 Russian alphabet 373 Russkij mir (Russian world) 376 Rutten, G. 452 Sabras 307, 312–​313 Sairio, A. 58 aṣ-​Ṣāliḥ, N. 298 Sampson, G. 202 San 325 sandwich 380n15 Saraceni, M. 106, 107 Sarić, D. xxvi Saro-​Wiwa, K., Sozaboy 105, 117 Saussure, F. de xx, 32 Sayce, K. 168 schedule 260n8 Schiewe, J. xxixn7 Schmidlin, R. xxvi Schneider, B. 231 Schneider, E. W. 90, 104, 141, 253; Dynamic Model 107–​111, 113, 356–​357, 366 schools see education Schröder, A. 160–​162, 168 scientific grammars 4, 5–​7 Scotland 38, 57, 142, 146, 410, 414 Scott, A. 37 Scott, T. 50 Scott, W. 59 Scottish English 61, 62, 93 Seidlhofer, B. 355, 357 Seijido, M. xxvi Sen, R. 61 sendvich (Russian) 375 sentence adverbs 10, 12 sentence-​final prepositions 146 Sepedi (Sesotho sa Leboa) 325, 326, 329 Sepitori 322, 333 Serbia 122, 373 Serbo-​Croatian 387, 388 Sesotho 321, 324–​329 Sesotho sa Leboa (Sepedi) 325, 326, 329 Setswana 321, 324, 325, 326 Severin, A. A. 236, 241, 276 Séwel, W. 455 sexism 25, 26, 27 Shaaban, K. 294 Shaka, King 325 Shakespeare, W. 148, 167 Shang, G. 349 Sharma, D. 42 Sheridan, T. 59, 61, 62, 145

Shona languages 325, 327 Shvedova, N. 372 SI units 97–​98 Sibawayhi 296 Siegenbeek, M. 452, 459–​461 Sigurjónsdóttir, S. 11 silence 81, 82 silent letters 33 Silverstein, J. 196 similarity, and accent bias 46, 46 Simmons, R. 343 Simon, J. 8, 14, 15n4 Simpson, A. 345 Singapore 109–​110, 113–​115, 117, 338–​339, 348–​351, 355–​357, 360–​363, 365, 466; Speak Good English Movement 114–​115, 117, 360–​361; Speak Good Singlish Movement 117, 361; Speak Mandarin Campaign 114, 349 Singaporean English 355–​357, 360–​363, 365 Singlish 114–​115, 117, 360–​363 siSwati 321, 324, 325, 328, 330 slang 252–​253, 255–​256 Slovak 122, 388 Slovene 388 slurs 216 Smart, B. H. 146 Smith, L. E. 111 Smotritsky, M. 371 Snell (language columnist) 436, 436–​437, 440–​441 Snell, J. 200, 201, 206, 207 snobbishness 8, 10, 12, 36, 168, 441 social capital 48, 242 social embedding 447, 449, 453, 460 social media 27, 28, 428; accent bias 50; data 265; France 433, 441; grassroots prescriptivism 231–​243, 466–​467; inner-​circle Englishes 93; Quebec 434; retarded 365; Russia 375; southern Africa 333; Thailand 358 social mobility 39, 49, 195, 199, 201–​203, 257, 289 sociohistorical constructionism 121–​136 sociolinguistic theory 123, 133–​135, 471 Söderblom, Sarela, M. 341–​342 solidarity, and taboos 247–​249 Sonnenfels, J. von 128 Sotho Kingdom 325 Sotho languages 325–​328 South Africa 109, 116, 320–​334, 465–​466; pluricentrism 140, 142, 146 South Asian Englishes 112 Southeast Asia (SEA) 355–​366, 466 southern Africa 321–​334 Spain 121, 142, 147–​148 Spanish 121, 140–​144, 147–​151, 368; see also specific varieties Special Olympics 364–​365 specification, Modern Hebrew 314–​315

486

487

Index spelling: accent bias 33–​34; American English 149; Australia 92–​93, 254, 256–​259; Breton 417; Canadian English 91, 92–​93; digital perspective 467; Dutch 447, 449–​461, 456–​457, 458, 468; ECEG database 57; French 438; German 130–​131; grassroots prescriptivism 249–​242; netspeak 234; pluricentric languages 149, 151; Russian 372–​373; southern Africa 324, 326–​328, 331, 333; Spanish 151 Spence, T. 59 Spencer, S. 206 Spieghel, H. L. 450 Spitzmüller, J. 229 split infinitives 7, 66, 159–​167, 171, 470 Spolsky, B. 364 Squires, L. 234 Stainton, R. J. 214–​217, 221 standard African languages 321–​334 Standard Arabic (SA) 152n5, 287–​298, 465–​466 Standard Austrian German 128, 130–​131, 133–​135 Standard British English 107, 112, 116, 144–​147 standard Croatian 390–​391, 400 standard Dutch 451 standard, endonormative 86, 87, 90, 108–​114, 339, 350, 356 standard, exonormative 86, 98, 107–​108, 113–​114, 128, 130, 141, 347–​350 Standard English 62, 195–​208, 215, 266, 363 standard French 123, 428–​431, 437 Standard German German 126–​133 Standard Jamaican English (SJE) 199 standard language ideology 196–​197, 287–​300, 305–​309, 376, 450 Standard Scottish English 38 Standard US English 38 standard varieties 38, 133–​135, 216, 316, 322 Standard Written Chinese 343, 345–​347 standardization 20, 21, 25, 264, 289, 291, 305, 405–​423, 427, 431, 452 standardizing prescriptivism, Arabic 287–​288, 288, 291–​294, 300 Starčević, A. xxvi, 388, 400–​401 Stenton Corpus 265, 267–​269 stereotypes 32, 196, 201, 259, 313–​314, 316, 363, 373 Stetkevych, J. 295 Stevens, L. 199 Straaijer, R. xxiii–​xxiv, xxvi, xxixn4, 63–​65, 89, 161, 248 Strunk, W. 9–​10, 12–​13, 80, 160, 162, 164, 171–​172 Strycharczuk, P. 40 style guides 467; Arabic 287, 294–​297, 296, 300; Australia 251; copy editors 264–​266, 276–​278, 280; inner-​circle Englishes 87, 90–​99; singular

they 213; vs usage guides 160, 161, 163; verbal hygiene 19; World Englishes 110 Style Manual for Authors, Editors and Printers 92–​97, 99 stylistic prescriptivism, Arabic 287–​288, 288, 294–​300 Subačius, G. 304 subjectivity, and accent bias 37–​38 subjunctives 75, 76 Suleiman, C. 293 Suleiman, Y. 294 supplementary relative clauses 8–​10 Suriname 152n7, 451 surzhik 378 as‑Suyūṭi 295 Swann, J. 321 Swaziland/​Eswatini 324, 325 swearing see offensive language Sweden/​Swedish 122, 176–​178, 177, 183, 184, 186–​187, 218 Sweet, H. 167 Swift, J. 145 Switchboard corpus 81 Switzerland 125, 130 Swords, R. 200 Syria 294, 297 taboos 246–​252, 258–​260, 329–​331, 375 Taggart, C. 65, 159, 163–​164, 168–​171 Taiwan 338–​340, 347–​348, 351, 466 Taiwanese/​Hoklo 347–​348, 350 Tajikistan 373 Tam, M. 362 Tamil 348, 357 Tan, S. I. 110 Tanzania 113, 325 Tardivel, J.-​P. 434 target audience 55, 59, 379, 460 Tebbit, N. 18 terminology 3–​5, 7 tests of language proficiency: 181, 182–​183, 184–​185, 188, 344–​345 Thackeray, W. M. 167 Thailand 355–​356, 358–​359, 363, 365, 466 Thammasat University 358 that 78–​79, 80, 89, 469 theoretical fail-​safes 134 they (singular) 25–​28, 213, 216–​221, 363 Three Circles Model (TCM) 355–​356, 366 Thurlow, C. 333 Tieken-​Boon van Ostade, I. xxv, xxvi, 4, 64–​67, 103, 163, 169–​170, 251, 259, 269, 338, 351 Tongyong Pinyin 348 Toomaneejinda, A. 358, 359 Torah 305 Tordesillas, Treaty of 142–​143 totalnyj diktant 376

487

488

Index transcriptivism 213, 216, 222–​224 translanguaging pedagogies 201, 333 transphobia 217, 219 Trapateau, N. 62 trasjanka 378 Trask, R. L. 162, 170–​171 Treaty of Tordesillas 142–​143 trolling 233 Trudgill, P. 208n1, 268, 322–​323, 329–​330, 406 Truss, L., Eats, Shoots and Leaves 469 Tshipani 327 Tshivenda 325, 327, 328 Tucker, A. N. 328 Tunisia 152n5 tun-​periphrasis 74 Turgenev, I. 376 Turkmen 374 tuteo 144 tweeten (German) 235 Twitter see social media twittern (German) 235 Tyrkkö, J. 57 Ubaidillah, M. F. 359–​360 Udofot, I. 116 uh 81 Ukraine/​Ukrainian 371, 373, 378 um 81 Unbegaun, B. O. 380n1 unfilled pauses 81–​82, 82 uniformitarian hypothesis 134 United Kingdom/​Great Britain: accent bias 33–​34, 38–​49; attitudes towards prescriptivism 89; and Australia 91, 93, 260n6; Department for Education 195; ECEG database 55–​56; Education Act (1988) 203; English language expectations in higher education 181; Equality Act (2010) 39, 49; and higher education in Nordic countries 184; and Hong Kong 345; Inner-​Circle English 356; integrated relative clauses 10; minority languages 414; Reddit 235; and Singapore 348; and Southeast Asia 355; usage guides 159–​164; verbal hygiene 24, 28; see also England; Scotland; Wales United States of America: accents 146; attitudes towards prescriptivism 89; Australian sensitivity towards influence 246, 251–​260; education 204; English language expectations in higher education 181; foreign policy, Canadians’ antipathy to 91, 93; and higher education in Nordic countries 184–​185; hopefully 11; Inner-​Circle English 356; integrated relative clauses 10; Math Corps programme, Detroit 22, 23; national language academy 148; pluricentrism 140, 142, 148, 151; politicians’ language use 241; Reddit 235; Rosa’s Law (2010) 365; Russian 378; Strunk’s The Elements

of Style (and White’s revision) 13; usage guides 159, 161–​168; verbal hygiene 22, 23, 28 Universal Spanish 151 university admissions 179–​184 University of Copenhagen 187, 192 University of Helsinki 186, 187, 192 University of Iceland 184, 186, 187, 192 University of Oslo 181, 184–​186, 187, 193 Urban West Yorkshire English (UWYE) 40, 43, 44, 47, 47–​48, 48 Uruguay 143 usage-​based approach 165 usage corpus 74–​8, 168, 454 usage guides: characteristics 161–​164; context 269; Croatian 387–​388, 390, 393–​394, 399–​400; Dutch 450, 454; entry selection criteria 468; France 432–​442, 435; Hall’s English Usage 165–​168; Hebrew 311; HUGE database 63–​8; influence 469; inner-​circle Englishes, evolution of 86–​91, 93–​96, 98–​99; normative vs prescriptive grammars 8, 10–​12, 14–​15; Quebec 430, 432–​442, 435; Russia 374, 375; Taggart’s Her Ladyship’s Guide to the Queen’s English 168–​171; as text type 159–​172 usage problems: split infinitive 165–​167, 171; dangling participle 65, 66, 160, 167, 171 Uzbekistan/​Uzbek 373, 374 Valdés, J. de 147, 152n15 Vallins, G. H. 164 Van Belle, J. 455 van der Meulen, M. 236, 239 Van Rooy, B. 113 Van Wyk, E. B. 323 variable: sociolinguistic 265, 281; orthographic 453, 454, 459 variation 31, 37, 59–​65, 73–​83, 86–​88, 145, 217, 264–​265, 338–​342, 386, 389, 396, 397, 410, 429, 432, 437, 458, 460 Vaugelas, C. F. de 160, 429, 432, 442 Venezuela 143, 144, 148, 150 verbal hygiene xxii–​xxiii, 17–​29, 214, 216, 219, 248, 251, 260, 264, 359, 448, 464 Vietnam 355, 466 views on linguistic prescriptivism xx–​xxiii, 89 Vilakazi, B. W. 331 Villalón, C. de 147 Vinogradov, V. 372 Voltaire 429 Von Esch, K. S. 199 Von Polenz, P. 389 Vondel, J. van den 450 Vonnegut, K., A Man Without a Country 469 Vorlat, E. 163 voseo 144 Vosters, R. 452 Vrančić, F. 387

488

489

Index Walcott, F. G. 165 Wales 18–​19, 410, 414 Walkden, G. xxiii Walker, J. 59, 145, 170 Wallis, C. 68 Walmsley, J. 203–​204 Walsh, O. 438, 439 Wapy, J. de 443n9 Ward, Mrs H. 166 Wardhaugh, R. 330 Washington, G. 8 Waṯīqat Bayrūt report 291–​294 Watts, R. J. xxvi Webb, V. 323 Webster, N. xxi, 129, 140, 149–​151 Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage 3, 87, 162, 165, 171 Webster’s Third New International Dictionary 3 Wee, L. 110, 115, 117 Weiland, P. 453–​454 Weiner, E. 63, 160–​163 Weinreich, M. 122, 124–​126 Weisgerber, L. 416–​417 Wells, J. C. 59–​60, 61 Welsh 410, 414, 416 Welsh English 38 West Africa 117 Wheeler, R. S. 200 which 78–​79, 80, 89 White, E. B. 9–​10, 12–​14, 80, 160, 162, 164, 172 White, R. G. 8 Whitney, W. D. xxixn1 who/​whom 159, 162, 163, 172 Widodo, H. P. 107 Wiedenhof, J. 347 Wikipedia 67, 288 Wilcox, E. W. 166 Wilhite, S. 236 Willem I 454 Wittgenstein, L. 131 Wodak, R. 124–​125, 135

wokeness 27, 36 Wolfram, W. 322 woman 26–​27 World Englishes 100n2, 103–​117, 355–​357 Wren, M. 257 Wright, L. 407 Wright, S. 338 writ/​writt/​wrote/​wrott/​written 75 Wycliffe, J. 165 Wyld, H., The Place of the Mother Tongue in National Education 194, 195 Xhosa Language Committee/​Board 328 Xiandai Hanyǔ cidiǎn 344 Xīnhua zidiǎn 344 Xitsonga 325, 327–​328 Yaeger-​Dror, M. 306 Yáñez-​Bouza, N. 54, 56–​58, 62, 65, 76, 124 yards 98, 98 Yiddish 121, 378 yod-​coalescence 61 yod-​dropping 61 yodless articulations 255 Yosso, T. 205 Young Ladies Guide to the Knowledge of the English Tongue, The 58 Young, M. Y. C. 346 Young, V. A. 201 Yugoslavia 388, 393, 466 Zagreb dialect 386 Zambia 325 Zarmān, M. 293 Zezuru 326, 327 Zhao, S. 349 Zimbabwe 325–​327, 329, 331–​333 Zimman, L. 222 Zionism 304, 312, 314, 316 Zulu 325, 328 Zwicky, A. 14

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490