Linguistics is descriptive, not prescriptive

The above statement can be found in many an introductory linguistics textbook, and enjoys a status akin to Article One of the Faith among linguists. But why is it so important? Once again, a thought experiment may help here.

The problem of value judgements

Picture yourself for a moment back in the bookshop where you (demonstrating great wisdom and intelligence) decided to purchase this volume. But imagine that the book you thumbed through on the shelf had been called Astronomy: A Complete Introduction, and that your eye had fallen on the following paragraph:

Some people behave as if it is perfectly acceptable for the moon to orbit the earth every 24 hours, but any sensible judge will tell you they are wrong. Nor should the earth’s orbit of the sun take a slovenly 365 days: a 300-day orbit would be neater and more efficient. In fact, it’s purely through idleness that the earth orbits the sun at all: early astronomers who saw the earth at the centre of the universe in fact had a very good idea of how things should be. The stars in the night sky are scattered disagreeably, and the less said about Jupiter’s ugly moons, the better.

Clearly, no series editor would ever publish such drivel, but had one done so, there’s little doubt that the book would have stayed on the shelf. You would quite reasonably have objected that, instead of describing the universe as it is, the author has chosen to tediously rehearse his personal prejudices about how it should be. Arbitrary aesthetic judgements are peddled (‘Jupiter’s ugly moons’) and the universe is ascribed negative moral traits, like laziness or slovenliness, for which there can be no possible justification. This work is grossly unscientific, you would surely have concluded, and cannot be taken seriously.

And yet, surprisingly, when it comes to language, we readily accept thinking of this kind. Prescriptive judgements are so common, in fact, that they often pass unnoticed. When we hear, for example, that ‘standards of English are declining’, or that a speaker has ‘slovenly speech’, we rarely to stop to question the basis on which such judgements are made.

In Britain in particular, linguistic value judgements find expression in the entrenched view that some accents are ‘better’ than others. During the Second World War, the broadcaster Wilfred Pickles was asked, apparently in an attempt to confuse the Nazis, to read the news in his native Yorkshire accent rather than in RP. The experiment was soon ended when it became clear that listeners were objecting, and in some cases no longer trusting the information they were being given. As recently as 2006, Olympic gold medallist turned broadcaster Sally Gunnell left the BBC following criticism of her ‘awful estuary English’.

In cases like these, the yardstick for acceptable speech is a social rather than linguistic one: speakers are condemned for using what are perceived to be low-status accents rather than the prestige standard pronunciation. But in linguistic terms, there is nothing inherently superior about RP, nor any reason to favor any one accent, or language variety, over another. Associated primarily with educated, middle-class speakers based in the Home Counties around London, the prestige of RP merely reflects the social advantages its speakers tend to possess. That wealth and power in Britain are largely centred around London is a matter of historical accident: had the UK capital been Gateshead, Dundee or Bristol, then British conceptions of ‘correct’ pronunciation would be very different, and what we now call ‘Received Pronunciation’ – if it existed at all – would be just another low-status accent which purists would enjoin us to avoid (or, for a small fee, offer to ‘cure’ us of).

That linguistic value judgements have a social rather than linguistic basis is quite simple to demonstrate. In what are termed ‘matched guise’ experiments, participants are asked to listen to recordings of speakers saying the same thing, but in different regional accents, i.e. as far as possible all factors except the speaker’s pronunciation are held constant. When native speakers of British English are asked to evaluate the accents of other Britons, whom they cannot see, in terms of intelligence, friendliness, trustworthiness, etc., there is a remarkable consistency in their responses. City accents, particularly those of London, Birmingham and Liverpool, are negatively evaluated, whereas those associated with less densely populated areas, notably the West of England or South Wales, are viewed more positively. Speakers of RP are generally seen to be the most intelligent, though not always as friendly as speakers of some regional accents.

When the same recordings are played to non-native speakers of English, however, this remarkable consensus evaporates, and there’s no agreement at all about which accents are ‘beautiful’, or connote friendliness, honesty or intelligence. Similar findings have been obtained elsewhere, notably in North America, and it’s hard not to conclude that informants are responding not to any linguistic qualities but to social and regional stereotypes associated with the accents in question.