Language Log: Keeping "wrong grammar" off the air

A program will be assigned a "PG" rating if it shows "people speaking with wrong grammar (except for humorous effects)."

The article doesn't say who gets to be the "grammar cop" -- some colonel with time on his hands, I guess, who would presumably delegate the problem to a clerk. There's potential for a comic novel here. Usually it's self-appointed language mavens who get to make up arbitrary prescriptions. Imagine, however, being a young company clerk in Bangkok, endowed with the power to decide (say) that dai "get, be able to" can't be used with compound verbs, or that theung "although" should never be used to start a sentence. And given the general Southeast Asian areal interest in subtleword-play, you could even invent some politicially subversive grammatical prescriptions.

In a casual conversation, my linguistics teacher and friend Zdeněk Starý, once remarked that it is important to see language purism (a historical phenomenon in the development of Czech) as part of linguistic competence, as indispensable to the functioning of language as the ability to produce syntactically well-formed sentences. Another Czech linguist, J. V. Neústupný has written about the importance of the language area as being in some ways greater the the genealogical relationships among languages. I've been trying to explore the consequences of this ever since and I'm always reminded of this when linguists criticize language mavens, such as the one above. Not that the mavens don't talk a lot of nonsense about the "good" use of language. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine the functioning of language without linguistic conservatism of which the mavens are one of many instantiations. Of course, the progressives (among whom you will find most theoretical linguists) have the same right to enter into this discussion, because language innovation is as important as linguistic conservatism. In fact, the consensus that is linguistic usage emerges out of the conversation between conserving and innovating tendencies.

The broader question that applies to academics outside their ivory towers is what should the linguist who knows this do as a political actor. On the one hand, she is aware of the complexities of language as a social as well as cognitive and textual phenomenon, but on the other, she cannot escape being a member of the linguistic community. Should she suggest conservatism or innovation? What status should her familiarity with the ‘science’ of language afford her in the political context? All this speaks to the tension between academic knowledge and political action. Sociologists, educators, policy analysts all have this problem. Enacted knowledge (and an act of publication is a kind of enactment) itself becomes subject to academic inquiry. Does it cease to be academic?