Linguistic prescription


Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the attempt to establish rules defining preferred or "correct" use of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices may suggest that some usages are incorrect, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use.
Linguistic prescriptivism may aim to establish a standard language, teach what a particular society perceives as a correct form, or advise on effective and stylistically felicitous communication. If usage preferences are conservative, prescription might appear resistant to language change; if radical, it may produce neologisms.
Prescriptive approaches to language are often contrasted with the descriptive approach, employed in academic linguistics, which observes and records how language is actually used. The basis of linguistic research is text analysis and field study, both of which are descriptive activities. Description, however, may include researchers' observations of their own language usage. In the Eastern European linguistic tradition, the discipline dealing with standard language cultivation and prescription is known as "language culture" or "speech culture".
Despite being apparent opposites, prescription and description are often considered complementary, as comprehensive descriptive accounts must take into account and record existing speaker preferences, and a prior understanding of how language is actually used is necessary for prescription to be effective. Since the mid-20th century some dictionaries and style guides, which are prescriptive works by nature, have increasingly integrated descriptive material and approaches. Examples of guides updated to add more descriptive and evidence-based material include Webster's Third New International Dictionary and the third edition Garner's Modern English Usage in English, or the Nouveau Petit Robert in French. A partially descriptive approach can be especially useful when approaching topics of ongoing conflict between authorities, or in different dialects, disciplines, styles, or registers. Other guides, such as The Chicago Manual of Style, are designed to impose a single style and thus remain primarily prescriptive.
Some authors define "prescriptivism" as the concept where a certain language variety is promoted as linguistically superior to others, thus recognizing the standard language ideology as a constitutive element of prescriptivism or even identifying prescriptivism with this system of views. Others, however, use this term in relation to any attempts to recommend or mandate a particular way of language usage, without, however, implying that these practices must involve propagating the standard language ideology. According to another understanding, the prescriptive attitude is an approach to norm-formulating and codification that involves imposing arbitrary rulings upon a speech community, as opposed to more liberal approaches that draw heavily from descriptive surveys; in a wider sense, however, the latter also constitute a form of prescriptivism.
Mate Kapović makes a distinction between "prescription" and "prescriptivism", defining the former as "process of codification of a certain variety of language for some sort of official use", and the latter as "an unscientific tendency to mystify linguistic prescription".

Aims

Linguistic prescription is categorized as the final stage in a language standardization process. It is culture dependent and politically motivated. It can be called social progress and included in the cultivation of a culture. As culture is seen to be a major force in the development of standard language, multilingual countries often promote standardization and advocate adherence to prescriptive norms.
The chief aim of linguistic prescription is to specify socially preferred language forms in a way that is easily taught and learned. Prescription may apply to most aspects of language, including spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics.
Prescription is useful for facilitating inter-regional communication, allowing speakers of divergent dialects to understand a standardized idiom used in broadcasting, for example, more readily than each other's dialects. While such a lingua franca may evolve by itself, the tendency to formally codify and normalize it is widespread in most parts of the world. Foreign language instruction is also considered a form of prescription, since it involves instructing learners how to speak, based on usage documentation laid down by others.
Linguistic prescription may also be used to advance a social or political ideology. During the second half of the 20th century, efforts driven by various advocacy groups had considerable influence on language use under the broad banner of "political correctness", to promote special rules for anti-sexist, anti-racist, or generically anti-discriminatory language.

Authority

Prescription presupposes authorities whose judgments may come to be followed by many other speakers and writers. For English, these authorities tend to be books. H. W. Fowler's Modern English Usage was widely taken as an authority for British English for much of the 20th century; Strunk and White's The Elements of Style has done similarly for American English. The Duden grammar has a similar status for German.
Although lexicographers often see their work as purely descriptive, dictionaries are widely regarded as prescriptive authorities. Books such as Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which argues for stricter adherence to prescriptive punctuation rules, also seek to exert an influence.

Formal regulation

Linguistic prescription is imposed by regulation in some places. The Académie française in Paris is the national body in France whose recommendations about the French language are often followed in the French-speaking world, though not legally enforceable. In Germany and the Netherlands, recent spelling and punctuation reforms, such as the German orthographic reform of 1996, were devised by teams of linguists commissioned by the respective governments and then implemented by statutes, some met with widespread dissent.
Examples of national prescriptive bodies and initiatives are:
Other kinds of authorities exist in specific settings, most commonly in the form of style manuals. Style guides vary in form, and may be alphabetical usage dictionaries, comprehensive manuals divided into numerous subsection by facet of language, or very compact works insistent upon only a few matters of particular importance to the publisher. Some aim to be comprehensive only for a specific field, deferring to more general-audience guides on matters that are not particular to the discipline in question. There are different types of style guides, by purpose and audience. Because the genres of writing and the audiences of each manual are different, style manuals often conflict with each other, even within the same dialect of English.
Many publishers have established an internal house style specifying preferred spellings and grammatical forms, such as serial commas, how to write acronyms, and various awkward expressions to avoid. Most of these are internal documentation for the publisher's staff, though various newspapers, universities, and other organizations have made theirs available for public inspection, and sometimes even sell them as books, e.g. The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage and The Economist Style Guide.
In a few cases, an entire publishing sector complies with a publication that originated as a house style manual, such as The Chicago Manual of Style and New Hart's Rules in non-fiction book publishing in the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively, and The Associated Press Stylebook in American news style. Others are by self-appointed advocates whose rules are propagated in the popular press, as in "proper Cantonese pronunciation". The aforementioned Fowler, and Strunk & White, were among the self-appointed, as are some modern authors of style works, like Bryan A. Garner and his Modern English Usage.
Various style guides are used for academic papers and professional journals, and have become de facto standards in particular fields, though the bulk of their material pertains to formatting of source citations. Some examples are those issued by the American Medical Association, the Modern Language Association, and the Modern Humanities Research Association; there are many others. Scientific Style and Format, by the Council of Science Editors, seeks to normalize style in scientific journal publishing, based where possible on standards issued by bodies like the International Standards Organization.
None of these works have any sort of legal or regulatory authority. They still have authority in the sense that a student may be marked down for failure to follow a specified style manual; a professional publisher may enforce compliance; and a publication may require its employees to use house style as a matter of on-the-job competence. A well-respected style guide, and usually one intended for a general audience, may also have the kind of authority that a dictionary does, consulted as a reference work to satisfy personal curiosity or settle an argument.

Origins

Historically, linguistic prescriptivism originates in a standard language when a society establishes social stratification and a socio-economic hierarchy. The spoken and written language usages of the authorities are preserved as the standard language. Departures from this standard language may jeopardise social success. Sometimes, archaisms and honorific stylizations may be deliberately introduced or preserved to distinguish the prestige form of the language from contemporary colloquial language. Likewise, the style of language used in ritual also differs from everyday speech. Special ceremonial languages known only to a select few spiritual leaders are found throughout the world; Liturgical Latin has served a similar function for centuries.
When a culture develops a writing system, orthographic rules for the consistent transcription of culturally important works allow a large number of speakers to understand written communications easily, and across multiple generations.
Early historical trends in literacy and alphabetization were closely tied to the influence of various religious institutions. Western Christianity propagated the Latin alphabet. Eastern Orthodoxy spread the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets. Judaism used the Hebrew alphabet, and Islam the Arabic alphabet. Hinduism used the Devanagari script. In certain traditions, strict adherence to prescribed spellings and pronunciations was and remains of great spiritual importance. Islamic naming conventions and greetings are notable examples of linguistic prescription being prerequisite to spiritual righteousness. Another commonly cited example of prescriptive language usage closely associated with social propriety is the system of honorific speech in Japanese.
Most, if not all, widely spoken languages demonstrate some degree of social codification in how they conform to prescriptive rules. Linguistic prestige is a central research topic within sociolinguistics. Notions of linguistic prestige apply to different dialects of the same language and also to separate, distinct languages in multilingual regions. Prestige level disparity often leads to diglossia: speakers in certain social contexts consciously choose a prestige language or dialect over a less prestigious one, even if it is their native tongue.
Government bureaucracy tends toward prescriptivism as a means of enforcing functional continuity. Such prescriptivism dates from ancient Egypt, where bureaucrats preserved the spelling of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt into the Ptolemaic period through the standard usage of Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Criticisms

Prescriptivism is often subject to criticism. Many linguists, such as Geoffrey Pullum and other posters to Language Log, are highly skeptical of the quality of advice given in many usage guides, including highly regarded books like Strunk and White's Elements of Style. In particular, linguists point out that popular books on English usage written by journalists or novelists often make basic errors in linguistic analysis.
A frequent criticism is that prescription has a tendency to favour the language of one particular region or social class over others, and thus militates against linguistic diversity. Frequently, a standard dialect is associated with the upper class, for example Great Britain's Received Pronunciation. RP has now lost much of its status as the Anglophone standard, and other standards are now alternative systems for English as a foreign language. Although these have a more democratic base, they still exclude the vast majority of the English-speaking world: speakers of Scottish English, Hiberno-English, Appalachian English, Australian English, Indian English, Nigerian English or African-American English may feel the standard is arbitrarily selected or slanted against them. Thus prescription has political consequences. Prescription can also be used consciously as a political tool.
A second issue with prescriptivism is that it tends to explicitly devalue non-standard dialects. It has been argued that prescription, apart from formulating standard language norms, often attempts to influence speakers to apply the proposed linguistic devices invariably, without considering the existence of different varieties and registers of language. While some linguists recognize the practical role of language standardization in modern nation states, certain models of prescriptive codification have been criticized for going far beyond mere norm-setting, i.e. by promoting the sanctioned language variety as the only legitimate means of communication and presenting it as the only valid baseline of correctness, while stigmatizing non-standard usages as "mistakes". Such practices have been said to contribute to perpetuating the belief that non-codified forms of language are innately inferior, creating social stigma and discrimination toward their speakers. In contrast, modern linguists would generally hold that all forms of language, including both vernacular dialects and different realizations of a standardized variety, are scientifically equal as instruments of communication, even if deemed socially inappropriate for certain situational contexts. Resulting in standard language ideology, normative practices might also give rise to the conviction that explicit formal instruction is an essential prerequisite for acquiring proper command of one's native language, thus creating a massive feeling of linguistic insecurity. Propagating such language attitudes is characteristic of the prescriptivists in Eastern Europe, where normativist ideas of correctness can be found even among professional linguists.
Another serious issue with prescription is that prescriptive rules quickly become entrenched and it is difficult to change them when the language changes. Thus, there is a tendency for prescription to lag behind the vernacular language. In 1834, an anonymous writer advised against the split infinitive, reasoning that the construction was not a frequent feature of English as he knew it. Today the construction is in everyday use and generally considered standard usage, yet the old prohibition can still be heard.
A further problem is the difficulty of specifying legitimate criteria. Although prescribing authorities may have clear ideas about why they make a particular choice, and their choices are seldom entirely arbitrary, there exists no linguistically sustainable metric for ascertaining which forms of language should be considered standard or otherwise preferable. Judgments that seek to resolve ambiguity or increase the ability of the language to make subtle distinctions are easier to defend. Judgments based on the subjective associations of a word are more problematic.
Finally, there is the problem of inappropriate dogmatism. Although competent authorities tend to make careful statements, popular pronouncements on language are apt to condemn. Thus, wise prescriptive advice identifying a form as colloquial or non-standard and suggesting that it be used with caution in some contexts may – when taken up in the classroom – become converted into a ruling that the dispreferred form is automatically unacceptable in all circumstances, a view academic linguists reject. A classic example from 18th-century England is Robert Lowth's tentative suggestion that preposition stranding in relative clauses sounds colloquial. This grew into a grammatical rule that a sentence should never end with a preposition. Such dogmatism has often caused resentment.
For these reasons, some writers argue that linguistic prescription is foolish or futile. Samuel Johnson commented on the tendency of some prescription to resist language change:

Examples of prescriptivist topics