Dialects—The Fallacy of Blackboard Grammar

Understanding language change and how languages differ helps us to see that many of the things that we are taught are “wrong” about speech are misanalyses. Grammarians of the 1600s and 1700s passed many of these conceptions down to us, assuming that all languages should be patterned after Latin and Greek (thus, no Billy and me went to the store), that language change is decay (thus requiring the retention of whom), and that grammar must make strictly logical sense (thus, a pox on I ain’t seen nothin’).

Another artificial incursion into the natural history of language is that because of the influence of standard dialects, people who speak written languages are often taught that constructions that they produce spontaneously are “errors” that they must be taught out of. This is a prescriptivist approach to language, in contrast to the descriptivist approach that linguists take.