Attitudes to Language Change

Morning all!

It is important to consider attitudes to language change. Two key terms that you need to try and get into your essay (apart from diachronic and synchronic) are the terms for the two contrasting attitudes: prescriptive and descriptive.

A descriptive attitude is the one we try to take where you observe and try to objectively record what is happening linguistically, exploring what it might be.

A prescriptive attitude is giving a judgement about whether language use/change is 'good' or 'bad', 'correct' or 'incorrect'.

Although prescriptive attitudes have been discovered in texts written in the early centuries AD, it was only after standardisation (through dictionaries and grammar texts in the 1700s) that prescriptivists could make specific claims about what was right and wrong with any authority. You must remember that these texts (grammar texts and dictionaries) were written by self-appointed 'experts' and the only reason their ideas about what was correct and incorrect became authoritative was the popularity of their texts (we, as English speakers, agree on what constitutes a valid part of our language  - if it doesn't 'catch on', it won't be in our language).

Today's Task

Here is a detailed discussion from The Guardian linking attitudes to language change to attitudes to fashion and exploring that analogy. Read the text closely, looking up the links too. Then research Jean Aitchison's metaphors for prescriptive attitudes to language change (just Google 'jean aitchison metaphors'. Then sum up some ideas about attitudes to language change on your blog, thinking about the terms and theories/concepts you could link to in the exam.


If you finish these, I have another past paper text for you to look at and annotate with these new ideas.