Episode 70 - Emma Humphries & prescriptivism

Welcome to Lexis, the podcast all about language and linguistics. I'm Lisa Casey. I'm Jackie Glancy. I'm Rad Trana. And I'm Dan Clayton. On this episode of Lexis, we're really pleased to welcome Dr Emma Humphreys, who's a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, School of Arts, English and Languages at Queen's University, Belfast. So welcome, Emma. Thanks very much for joining us.

Hi everyone, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. And we're going to be talking about prescriptivism, because you're doing a big project, aren't you, at the moment? I'm trying, yes. Right. And we're going to let students and teachers know a bit more about how to contribute to this as well towards the end. But you're really interested in prescriptivism in language generally, not just in English.

How do you actually define prescriptivism? And also kind of what sparked your interest in it? Was it being told that you were using language incorrectly a lot? Or was it something else? Yeah, I finally had enough of being corrected. I had to figure out what that was all about. Starting with the definition, prescriptivism to me in its simplest terms is about correcting language and judging language. So to bring more detail to that, I think of prescriptivism as both an activity.

and an ideology. So as an ideology or a set of connected beliefs, prescriptivism I think has two main principles, I suppose. The first is that there are right and wrong, good and bad, correct and incorrect ways of using the language. And the second part of that is a belief that these rules must be followed, that people must use correct language.

and then as an activity it's about enforcing what is correct and stamping out what is incorrect so telling people that how they're using their language is wrong and insisting that correct language is used so that's the correction And that can happen on loads of different levels, right? So it can be institutional, so through the education system, which teaches us correct language or bans certain words in the classroom. Or it can happen on an individual level, so you might correct.

a friend or family member's speech or a stranger on the internet if you're so inclined which yes there are many of those yeah So that's the correction part. But there are loads of associated beliefs that come with that correction. And that's the judgment part. So judgments are based.

on whether or not someone uses correct or incorrect language or how they sound maybe when they speak so you might meet someone the first time and they say oh your voice is really posh or might be the idea that if someone makes loads of spelling mistakes that they must be stupid or young or lazy there are loads of judgments that we make based on whether or not someone uses what we think is correct or incorrect language and I think what really interests me about prescriptivism is how

deeply entrenched it is in our society. Many people never really reflect on it or think about why we insist on using language in a certain way or what the effects of that might be. We just sort of take it as a given that truly there are right and wrong ways of using the language and since i've started this new project i've noticed that um even more so i'll tell people i'm looking at examples of language correction and popular culture and very often they will say

oh it drives me mad when people say this or can you believe that people can't spell definitely like why don't people know how to spell anymore yeah now i've told them i'm looking at examples of correction not examples of bad spelling or language mistakes, it feels like because prescriptivism and judging is so a part of the language that their brains sort of instantly go into prescriptivism mode. We're sort of programmed that way, I suppose, at some extent. And then...

I suppose my academic interest in it was really well and truly sparked when I was an undergraduate. I did a degree in French and Spanish. And in a French module, we talked about the Académie Française, who I think are super interesting. Can I tell you a bit about them? Yeah, go on. Yeah. So the Académie Française. or the French Academy, they're a language academy. They've been a thing since 1635, so what's that, almost 400?

They're this group of 40 people. They have an average age of about 78. So that was what the average age was when I last checked. They're called the mortals. which is great, and they meet up regularly to discuss the French language. And part of their sort of self-imposed role is to protect the language.

And they will periodically make statements about certain parts of the language that they don't like, words and constructions that they think French people should avoid. And a lot of that... statements that they make about language or at least the ones that get a lot of attention in the media are about English so they're quite famous for being very anti-English borrowing anti-Anglicisms and part of their sort of

way of combating anglicisms is to suggest french alternatives so for instance instead of saying try january they say you should say janvier sans alcohol so january alcohol catchy I know, well, an even catchier one. Instead of saying follower, like a Twitter follower, ex-follower, whatever it might be now, so they would say unfollower. They don't like that. So they say you should say acolyte des illustres.

which has got religious context and actually as far as i understand it is something to do with the catholic church it's something to do with people who are allowed to help the priest during a service i think and illustre is like illustrious like special distinguished people i suppose and that really is not going to catch on like follower

Yeah, particularly if it's like, you know, it sounds very grand, but it might just be some sort of weird wellness influencer that you're following. Yeah, or some bot. Drink these, you know, ginger and turmeric shots. It confers a real status to it, doesn't it, really? This kind of sense of establishing a hierarchy. Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, this is a lot of the problem with their suggestions that they don't really, they don't have the snappy factor that you get from the English, but also they come. they get suggested well after the English word has already sort of been cemented in usage so they just get ignored and it doesn't really help their street cred either because they just seem a bit out of touch in that way. Yeah.

But one of my favourite things about the Académie Française is that when you become a member, when you get elected as an immortal, you get given a uniform. So they all wear these fancy matching black and gold suits and you get a bespoke sword. So every... Immortal has a sword that's been designed especially for them which I guess is some sort of like image about protecting the language.

Bonkers. It's like a Knights Templar thing, isn't it? Yeah. It's really mad. So when I first heard about them, I just thought, this is fascinating. Particularly because in the UK, we don't have a similar academy. It blew my mind a little bit. And yeah, that really made me think, well, this prescriptivism thing is pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, the way you describe it makes me wish we did have an academy like that where we could all dress up and wave kind of cutlasses around and stuff.

I mean, there's a space, there's an opening. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if John Humphreys could be elected as like the leader of it or something. Yeah. You sort of alluded to that idea as well there, that they're responding very slowly to these things. And I suppose that was kind of borne out by the dictionary that they released this year, wasn't it? Which is already...

kind of 30 years out of date. Yeah, I think the process for doing the dictionary... i feel like it happens on a wednesday this might not be correct anymore they meet once a week and they started at the letter p i think and they go through the dictionary and they discuss every word um and then

discuss any additions that's obviously a really slow process and so it took them yeah decades and it means that like the letter p was done in the i don't know 60s and the letter C was done three years ago and so there's a real disparity between

The timeliness of them. We were just saying before we started recording, we talked to Florent Montcomble a year or two back about kind of prescriptivism in French and the academy. And it was just really interesting to, you know, he's part of a group of linguists who are very much at loggerheads.

the academy and kind of see it as ridiculous and partly because they don't have any linguists involved do they you know so you know so you're saying sort of you know the great and the good but not an actual not language specialists as such Yeah, historically it's been writers, journalists, politicians, but yeah, not linguists. Yeah. And not women either until quite recently. Obviously. I mean, what would they know about language? Exactly.

Can you tell us a bit more about the project that you've been working on? So you've been working on prescriptivism in popular culture and a project called You're Wrong. Brilliant name. Oh, thank you. Obviously that works much better visually. But the students will be able to see that on the show notes at the bottom. But tell us a little bit more about this and how it fits into the wider project that you're involved with.

yeah of course so the broader project is about as the title i suppose suggests prescriptivism in popular culture but specifically in contemporary french popular culture and i'm interested in france because It's often put forward as a sort of super extreme example of prescriptivism as the most prescriptivist country.

And it definitely is a society where prescriptivism is present. One of the most obvious examples is the institution we've just talked about, the Académie Française, the very existence of them for... all of those years is seen at least by people in the UK as a sort of evidence of extreme levels of prescriptivism and there's also this really long history of published texts which tell french language speakers or french language users how to use their language

And these go back to at least the 16th century. And much of the research until now, including my own stuff, has been on like traditional prescriptivist texts, like style guides, dictionaries and grammars. But the idea for my new project came about because I realised that prescriptivism is not just in these types of texts, it's everywhere.

It's all around us in all of the different types of media that we're consuming. I think it's Deborah Cameron who said that we're all a bit prescriptivist. And if we are all a bit prescriptivist, then of course it's going to come up. everywhere. It's going to come up all over the place. So that's what my project tries to explore. So I'm asking what kind of prescriptivism do we find in popular culture and where do we find it? So it might be series, films, books, podcasts, music, graffiti.

That's the broader project. You're Wrong specifically is the website part of the project, which sort of has two jobs. The first is to make people aware of prescriptivism and popular culture. And the second is to get people involved. So it's a crowdsourcing. And I'm asking people to share any examples of prescriptivism that they find during their usual watching, reading, listening habits, whatever it may be.

So you can go onto the website and there's a submission form that you can let me know about anything that you notice in popular culture and in any language. And the hope is... that then I'll have this wonderful database full of examples from all different places and languages and from there I'll be able to properly explore how prescriptivism is shared through popular culture and what it looks like.

But the name has turned out to really do the job that I hoped it would. So it's called You're Wrong, but You're is spelt Y-O-U-R rather than the standard Y-O-U apostrophe R-E. And people have described... sort of instantly recoiling when they see it the non-standardness of you're wrong just really touches a nerve it seems to bug people out quite quickly um and then when they realize what the project is about

which is questioning these reactions and the related actions and ideas, it gives people this instant example that they can reflect on. Why did seeing this make me feel the way it did? And what judgments did I make about the author based on? that spelling i mean that or they just think wow she's an idiot and they move on and i've been corrected every time i've shared the website online with people saying i think you mean why are you apostrophe

And I really enjoyed the irony of that. Have you noticed any gender split there? Oh, funnily enough. Yes, very much so. But I think it just goes, it's another bit of evidence that shows just how deeply entrenched. prescriptivism is and these ideas are people can't help themselves but correct it like it's wrong and I must tell her she can't know but otherwise why would she have done that

We were just sort of talking before a little bit as well about how our own sort of feelings about prescriptivism and it's quite complex, isn't it, in some respects? Because there are things where you kind of feel...

Oh, I know that. I was taught that. And then somebody else is using it in a way that's different. And you kind of think, I've made all this effort to... learn this correct way of doing something yet this person is doing it in this this incorrect or non-standard way and maybe there is that sort of sense isn't there that it's like a kind of how can they get away with it when i've put all this effort in i mean is that something that's kind of common across you know

different languages as well do you think that sort of feeling oh yeah very much i think from my experiences of looking at prescriptivism there's very little that's not universal across languages in terms of reactions the things that we react to and maybe the images and metaphors that we use to talk about them differ but the general sense of it seems to be quite similar across languages yeah yeah

You touched on a couple of different places you've been getting some of these examples from. You know, you've mentioned articles, graffiti. So can you give us some further examples of where you've got some of these from? and some of the actual language features perhaps that are being complained about. Yeah, of course. So like I said, I've only just started collecting maybe a month ago, six weeks ago now, but they're coming in from all sorts of...

popular culture formats. One of the first examples that I noticed myself and the one that sort of kicked off the idea of the project for me was in a yoga video that I was doing on YouTube. I am a big yoga with Adrian fan. And there's one video where she says something like, now draw your stomach muscles in. And she corrects how she says draw. And she says, oh, there's the Texas girl coming out of me or something like that.

I thought, wow, I cannot even do 20 minutes of yoga without being confronted with prescriptivism. And like, if it's here in my yoga video, it must be absolutely everywhere. So at the moment, yeah, I've got stuff from series, films, posters and signs, theatre, music, podcasts, books, a really wide variety and in a variety of different languages as well.

English and French, of course, but also in the last week or so, I've had stuff from Mandarin Chinese, from Russian, Irish and Dutch, and sort of what we were touching on before. And when I mentioned earlier that... France is often put forward as this extreme version of prescriptivism but I'm not really convinced that that's the case. Like I said I think a lot of this is universal. I think we see very similar types and levels of prescriptivism across many different societies.

And so far, the range of languages that are being submitted is sort of helping to show that that probably is the case. Interesting ones that I've got recently. Wicked. has come up a few times. Quite a few people have pointed that one out to me. I've not managed to watch it yet, but apparently there are two occasions in the film where Elphaba corrects Glinda. I think it's that way round.

And if you think of the cultural impact that that film has had, the sheer number of people who have seen that film, and there are two examples of linguistic correction in it. Another one that came in this week is... which the BBC series about investment banking. Yeah, someone's telling me how good that is. Yeah, it is very good. It's about like investment banking or stock exchangey, financey stuff. Like I've seen all of it and I still can't really explain the...

nitty gritty of what they do. But one of the big storylines in the first series is one of the big execs. He is Scottish and he's been hiding his Scottish accent the whole time he's worked there for like 20 years or something. And he's been putting on this Southern English accent so that he can be taken seriously.

So in that case, we've got an example of prescriptivism being like a really big storyline. Reality TV, bit of a golden mind, for example, especially dating shows. Like if you think about Love is Blind. The premise of that show is that you can't see the person that you're dating. You're talking to them through a wall. You don't see them face to face. And because you've removed the visual cues, because you can't see the other person, you find the contestants relying.

much more heavily on how the person speaks so where's your accent from it's so sexy or I don't know if I'll date him again because I don't think he sounds very intelligent and so the examples I get are often these little throwaway comments sometimes like in industry it's

a bigger part of the plot. Or like Ross in Friends or Ted in How I Met Your Mother. Being prescriptivist, being a bit of a pedant is a big part of their character. Yeah. But often it's just this little comment here and there, which... on its own, feels a bit insignificant. But when you realise how often these little comments are being made, you realise it's actually quite hard to escape it. Like you really are being bombarded. Basically ruined.

popular culture for myself because every time I sit and watch something, I find another example. Now in the morning with my cereal, instead of watching some trashy TV show, I just stare out of the window because it's... Safe space. In terms of what people are complaining about, again, even though I've only just started collecting, there are some pretty clear patterns coming up and it does unsurprisingly reflect.

many of the types of complaints that people have been making about English for a very long time. So if you think about specific mistakes that you think people complain about and things that people get wrong, does anything particular come to mind?

I was thinking when you said specific, I was thinking like when people say Pacific instead and those things. Yeah, one like that came in the other day. Maybe also... like reflexive pronouns on the traitors so i'm going to be voting for yourself yes that one really got people going didn't it oh god yeah on a similar vein you and i you and me yes yeah quite a lot

In the Apple TV show Shrinking, there's one character who picks up other characters on that quite a lot. Less than fewer. Yeah, we were talking about that before we were recording, about their feelings about that. It's like... Who cares? It's like it doesn't matter. Yeah, so in Game of Thrones, it comes up a couple of times. Yeah, the who and whom thing that people just seem completely baffled by. Like, why have whom?

Yeah, I saw a birthday card the other day that made a joke about, it was like owls saying who, and then it's, well, no, it's to whom. Yes. Yeah. Crazy. And more generally, there's lots of talk about accents. So characters linking accents to social class, intelligence that comes up quite a lot. Kingsman, the main character in Kingsman, Eggsy, he's mocked a lot in the first film for how he speaks. Everyone else has a southern London RP accent.

And he at some point asks, are you going to my fair lady me? Are you going to change my accent to fit in? Well, actually, maybe I'll end on this point. Something that's been really interesting is that even in the context of quite serious discussions. People still make prescriptivist comments. So the one that stood out to me recently is when the politician John Prescott died. BBC coverage kept talking about his accent and how his working class accent sometimes held him back.

or people wouldn't take him seriously because of it. So in the nationally broadcast tribute to this man's life, the BBC eulogy, the way that he spoke was considered to be... one of his most salient characteristics. I mean, it was that and the fact that he punched that person that threw an egg at him. But that's a legacy right there. Yeah, yeah. You're looking at popular culture, you know, very broadly with this. But you mentioned earlier on as well.

prescriptivism comes in the form of style guides and spelling guides and dictionaries and things like that. I guess quite a lot of students will have come across that sort of the history of the language. particularly with English language studies and all of those kind of, you know, grammar. What were they? The sort of grammarians, weren't they, who told us basically how they use language and therefore how we should all be using language because they, you know.

They liked the way they spoke. You know, lots of students on the A-level will do that sort of stuff about the early prescriptivists and where it all came from. But I guess part of what we see on the A-level sometimes is it's often sort of pitted against this kind of idea of like...

You've got the prescriptivists, but then you've got the descriptivists. And it's a bit of a kind of, you know, war, a bit of a binary between those. Is that a helpful way to think about it? Or do you think it's a bit more complicated than that? I think as a very base starting point.

putting the two things against each other as opposites is quite helpful. It's good entry into thinking about the two ideologies. But yeah, like you say, once you start digging into prescriptivism and descriptivism in... any level of detail it becomes much more complicated and much clearer that they're not two opposite unconnected things but it's maybe better to think of it like a spectrum but even that is maybe not so helpful yeah

When I was thinking about this recently, I sort of put it into context with research on these texts, like grammars and style guides, so research about grammars, places where we traditionally think, like you say, about finding prescriptivism. And if you look at those texts... it's really unlikely that any of them are 100% prescriptivist or 100% descriptivist. And this is something that John Joseph has said, that basically it's almost impossible.

to create a text that is completely descriptive because as soon as you start saying people say x y and z which is technically descriptive you're describing what those people say But there's also a level of prescriptivism because what about the people that you didn't mention who say A, B and C? Yeah. Avoiding prescriptivism entirely is pretty difficult. It's basically impossible to be 100% descriptivist. Yeah.

And the additional layer to that is, again, thinking about these traditional prescriptive texts. It's about you can't control how the audience interprets what you say either. So I might set out to write a descriptive language book.

i think i've been entirely descriptive i've avoided all judgments about people how people use language i've smashed it basically but then someone picks up my text they read it and they interpret it completely differently they read it prescriptively and this is something that came up a lot actually in my last

big project, which is a book that's coming out soon, which is exciting. But I was looking at language advice publications. So services where people write in and ask for advice on questions about language. So how do I pronounce this word? Or what's the... real meaning of this um expression yeah

Experts answering the question would often reply saying something like, well, you can pronounce it tomato or tomato, but I use tomato. And even though they haven't technically said tomato is better, avoid tomato, the audience may... well interpret it as prescriptive because they respect the expert. That's why they've written into them. They think that they're an authority on language. So it can be quite difficult in that sense to be descriptivist. And I think...

Another key problem that comes when you pit them against each other is it makes it seem like there's goodies and baddies. Yeah, yeah. I think we should really resist pitching prescriptivists as big meanies and descriptivists as the goodies because it's... Of course, it's not that simple at all. Prescriptorism can be a positive, particularly in minority language situations.

A couple of years ago, I was in a pub in Donegal in a predominantly Irish-speaking area and had a very interesting encounter. A man approached me and turned out he was a linguist. He'd found out that I was a linguist somehow. I think it's a small area and people just go, outsiders here, who are they? What do they do? So this guy came up to me and he said, I hear you study prescriptivism and he wanted to have a chat about it. And he was saying that we need to...

do better reminding people that prescriptivism isn't always bad. He felt like the Irish language needed a bit more prescriptivism. There's so much variety in Irish that it makes it quite hard. to teach and learn was his opinion. Because there's too many ways of saying the same thing. And if we're going to successfully up the numbers of Irish speakers, then we need to be a bit more prescriptive. We need to sort of whittle it down a bit more and make it a bit easier for people, I suppose.

So prescriptivism isn't always bad. And sometimes I think that can be overlooked, particularly when we pit it against descriptivism. Yeah, basically, as a starting point, helpful. But in reality, once you dig into it.

It's way more complicated. Maybe one of the other problems with kind of saying it's like one side against another is, as you say, the sort of goodies baddies kind of argument, which is a bit too binary and simplistic. But also there is, I mean, you could say that...

Quite a lot of prescriptivists come from sort of a conservative viewpoint with a small C and often with a big C. But it's about preservation, isn't it? And keeping things as they are, which I guess is the definition of sort of conservatism. There are also, I guess, kind of liberal and left-wing prescriptivists who are about kind of, you could argue, about policing language, about, you know, advising.

about certain kinds of language, which is, I guess, a form of prescription in itself, isn't it? It's not quite as simple as left-right in that sort of divide, is it? Absolutely. And there's another argument that would be that... we live in a culture where the standard language is the one that has prestige and power and so if you want your children for instance to have access to

all of the great things in the world and have great opportunities in terms of jobs then you do have to teach them the standard language unless we change the culture and so in that way if you're telling your child to use standard language you're not necessarily being mean you're trying your best to help them out i suppose yeah i can think of quite a lot of linguists who would challenge that though someone like ian cushing or something you know yeah

I mean, the ideal thing would be to bring down the system and stop that ideology in the first place. But yeah, there are definitely parents who would say that they're coming from a good place.

Yeah, and I mean, I think we've, you know, Raj and I have kind of talked about this quite a lot with our own students, haven't we, over the years? Because certainly when you're teaching students from working class backgrounds or sort of racially minoritised backgrounds, first generation immigrants, for example, who... have got you know their access to a shared language of prestige is really hugely important and then some kind of you know

lefty teacher saying to him, oh no, there's no such thing as standards, we should be challenging all of that. It's like, hang on a minute. I'm learning this because it's got power and prestige. Yeah, exactly. We need to tackle both problems at once, basically. We can't do one without the other. Yeah. Some of the arguments that we often hear from prescriptivists is that...

really, that they care about the language, they're trying to protect it from misuse, you know, this kind of sense of a perfect language which is being kind of eroded or damaged in some way. What do you make of some of these supposed motivations? idea that we need to protect the language.

Yeah, these are absolute classics, aren't they? They're motivations that have been churned out for centuries. Every generation, for instance, seems to think that young people are ruining the language. You get these same moral panics over and over. But so far English...

seems to be surviving pretty well if we're talking about the English context. To me, I think a lot of this boils down to, in a really simple, like I'm oversimplifying here, but you can boil it down to two things, which is power and wanting to maintain the status quo. So I suppose that's really getting power and keeping power. As we said before, prescriptivism and the associated ideologies, they stigmatize certain language uses.

Certain ways of using the language become associated with negative characteristics. And the flip side of this is that correct language use becomes associated with positive attributes. So people who use correct language are intelligent, they're mature, they're careful. And these positive attributes have power in society. They get you places. But importantly, using correct language sets you apart.

from all of those other people who use the language incorrectly. So it creates an us who are clever and use proper English and a them who don't know how to use you and I or you and me. So basically correct language use can give you power in society. It has value the way we've set up at the minute. And once you've got power, well, you want to keep it. You don't necessarily want to share it.

If the language changes, if it becomes easier, then how will anyone know that you're one of the clever ones who learned all of those intricate, nonsensical rules? That would be a disaster. You have to protect the power. And I think a great example of this comes in reactions to spelling reforms. So I'm going to use the French example again, because I know this one quite well. But in the 90s, there was a spelling reform.

that was proposed and it would change the spelling of about 2 000 words so the word onion for instance was going to be losing a letter and lots of words were losing their circumflex accents of the little hat and the idea behind it was to make the spelling system

a bit less chaotic to bring in a bit more logic and to make it simpler for people to learn and the changes weren't going to be implemented straight away what they were saying was that the new and the old spellings would be correct for an unspecified period of time basically People lost their minds. They said that the language was being ruined. How could you do this to our beautiful language? If people struggle, they should just try harder.

I managed to learn these rules, so why can't they? Because if you simplify the spelling system and more people are able to use it correctly, then those that have the power currently will have to share some of that power and they'll no longer be that superior group. of us that us and them will just become one big us which

To be honest, sounds quite lovely, doesn't it? And like I say, it's obviously more complicated than this. And I'm absolutely not saying that the people that make these claims are power-hungry monsters or necessarily that they're conscious of that. I'm very much simplifying, but I think it's important to really drill into why we feel it needs to be protected and who or what are we protecting it from. Yeah.

And I guess that leads into kind of discussions around how much of this is actually about language. When you say about like kind of us and them, you know, who is the us, that sort of notion and power that's connected to it. We hear a lot from linguists, language commentators. There's lots of people who've kind of argued that...

You know, a lot of these complaints are actually just kind of using language as a proxy. And actually, it's not the language that's the issue for some people. I mean, it clearly is for some, isn't it? They get really wound up in it. There's that sort of visceral reaction. But for a lot of people, it's also...

maybe more about who's using the language, the kind of person, if you like. So, you know, discrimination about kind of class, ethnicity, gender, other things. Yeah. I mean, what do you make of that? Yeah, I mean... I guess the short way of answering it is to say that, yes, language complaints can be discrimination by proxy. They aren't always. And that's an important point. Like you say, for some people, it's not that. But it can be.

That's because language and identity are so massively linked. The way we use language is linked in so many ways to who we are and our backgrounds. But I guess I'd caveat that by saying that... I don't think this means that people are always consciously aware of that. In fact, I think very often they aren't aware of it and that's sort of the secret power of language discrimination is that it's not seen as discrimination.

It's more like, well, of course there are right and wrong ways of using the language. So it's only logical that we correct the wrong bits. So I don't think we necessarily think about correcting someone's grammar as potentially being discrimination.

we think it's helpful like surely they want to get it right I should just tell them and help them out I saw a t-shirt the other day actually that said something on it like I don't judge people for their race or gender i judge them for their spelling or grammar so language discrimination in that way is portrayed as something normal and logical like the right thing to do i don't think it's often viewed as discrimination

And part of this is because it is so deeply entrenched in society, like we've said, that it's embedded in education. We learn that there are right and wrong ways of using the language from the get-go. Of course, that makes it really powerful. And as I'm trying to show with the You're Wrong project, we're being bombarded with prescriptivism and negative judgments about language all of the time through popular culture. So it's no wonder that...

most people aren't stepping back and thinking hang on is this right should we be doing this and i think a second part of it is that we aren't thinking about that link between how we use language and our identity so in many ways language discrimination is like this like cheeky backdoor way of discriminating against other protected characteristics like parts of identities that is otherwise illegal to discriminate against except it's not cheeky at all because the potential consequences are

the same and in that way like i said it's really dangerous because we don't realize the power of it another way of framing it that i think is what Milroy and Milroy say, is that language discrimination is the last remaining socially acceptable form of discrimination. So if you ask people... Should a woman from Cardiff be allowed to be a teacher? I think and very much hope that they would say yes.

Or should working class people be allowed to be barristers? Again, you hope that most people would say yes. Or if they didn't say yes, that they would understand that that is discrimination, that the links could be made. But language is treated differently in that way. Teachers with certain accents are told that they're going to have to lose their accent or change the way they speak if they're going to get a job outside of their local area.

Lawyers and barristers report having similar experiences. Natalie Brabo and her colleagues showed something really interesting about that recently. of lawyers not being taken seriously in the courtroom because of how they speak or of people telling them that they sound more like criminals than lawyers. So we just, on a societal level, don't seem to think... about language discrimination in the same way as we do with other forms of discrimination so yeah

When you criticise someone for how they speak, you're not just criticising their language. I think that's the important point. Because it's linked to other parts of their identity. So by proxy, you may well be critiquing other parts of their identity.

But you've given us a nice plug for our last episode there. Could we talk to Natalie Brava and Alice Paver about exactly that? Yeah, yeah. It was fascinating. And as you say, like massive real world implications of like prescriptive judgments about accents. You know, if a 30 second... clip can indicate that you're you know a criminal then you kind of think well what's what else is going on in like extended interactions with people it's frightening yeah

Sort of looping back to, you know, what the French have done with language. There's been talk recently, I don't know how far it's got, about a kind of law against accent discrimination there. Is that something that you think is like a good way forward to kind of get around the sort of problems that he said about treating language as some sort of like cheeky form of discrimination? Yeah.

Definitely. We already have a law in place to protect against other forms of discrimination. So a law which protected against accent discrimination, I think would be a great step forward and really necessary, to be honest. Because when you make it part of the law, you raise awareness of it.

move it from being an unconscious bias to something that we're more conscious of. And that takes away some of its power. It tells people that language discrimination is serious. It's not flippant. It should and must be taken seriously. The French law is up and running now. I think it was approved by 98 votes to three. So a clear win.

And if you're found guilty of accent discrimination in France or glottal forbie, as they call it, you can face as a maximum three years in prison and or a 45,000 euro fine. So not an insignificant punishment. by any means and that's the same punishment that you would get for any other form of discrimination so it's being treated as an equal form. The French have a longer tradition though of making laws about language which the British don't really.

So another example in France would be the Toubonne law, which came in in the 90s. And that makes the use of French obligatory. That's a legal requirement in certain circumstances. So in government documents, in advertising, in the workplace, you have to use French. So there was an example of a company who

provided a software to their employees and it was only available in English and that got pulled up on this law. Or if you use Anglicisms in an advert, you might get a fine because you're supposed to use only French. So they do have a... a stronger history, I suppose, of language laws in France, which maybe made them more welcoming to this accent discrimination law. I'd be really intrigued to see how people in the UK would react to a similar law.

Only imagine what the Daily Mail headlines might say. I think there even was one because I think Rob Drummond was talking about it recently about how he had kind of been approached about... Was it kind of people imitating foreign accents as comedy? And they basically said, here is the man who killed British comedy. That's how they reported on it. It was like, you know, this is ridiculous, woke nonsense. Yeah, I think he got nicknamed Professor of War, of course. That's it. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

In terms of trying to push this sort of prescriptivist idea forward, we see lots of these kind of language or certainly kind of grammatical pedants, don't we?

These kind of people who are really pushing for, like you say, only the correct way of using language. How do you turn a prescriptivist into an open-minded language appreciator? What a question. Obviously, I'm thinking some sort of like six week boot camp situation. Realistically, I think it's about highlighting the arbitrariness.

of it all so much that we think is a natural important part of language it's just the product of random decisions and chance that there's nothing intrinsically better about one linguistic variety over another there is no linguistic reason for thinking that one variety is better or worse. It's all about attitudes. Like the prestigious accent in England is Southern accent, right?

People will tell you that the best English is spoken by like middle class people in the South, Southeast, maybe London specifically. And that is not because it has superior vowel sounds or fancy Alexis. It's not because these people sound better.

It's because that's where the power in England has sat historically and where it still sits. It's where the government is. So the powerful people lived and worked in London in the government. And over time, the way they spoke, their accents came to be associated with power.

and then correctness. But that is pure chance. If the government had been set up in Birmingham instead, then the Birmingham maxim would be the one that we called the best. And that would be the one we'd be telling learners of English to strive for. A similar example is Irish. So in the 70s and 80s in England, the Irish accent was very unpopular because attitudes towards Irish people were very negative. But now people love the Irish accent and...

When you see those click-baity polls about the sexiest accent, the best accent, Irish is always up there. Nothing about the Irish accent particularly has changed since the 60s and 70s. It's the attitudes that have changed. I can't have imagined in my teenage years kneecap being on like the BBC and being celebrated for their cheeky, scampish kind of West Belfast accents. They'd have had a voiceover, wouldn't they?

Yeah, absolutely. And people would be demanding for subtitles. Yeah, I think those types of arguments can be quite persuasive, basically highlighting that there's nothing naturally or linguistically superior about one variety or another.

They're just highlighting the absolute chance of it all. And I think once you realise it's all just happenstance, it becomes quite difficult to keep arguing for prescriptivism in that form. And then I suppose the other simpler... way is the argument of comprehension that if you can understand the intended message does it really matter that there was a spelling mistake or that the person used was instead of were whatever it might be

Communication in its simplest form is about the transmission of a message. And if the message is received, then surely job done. Successful communication achieved. I think that's another sort of angle. Sometimes you get these kind of pedants going down that route of, well, it's logical. You can't possibly have a double negative because they cancel each other out. You're trying to apply this sort of maths rule.

earlier we're talking about decimate and it's kind of origins of you know kind of reducing by 10 etc so you've got to have and those kinds of arguments that often these kind of pedants are trying to push forward. They don't necessarily... they kind of deflect from the message often, don't they? They draw on a really select piece of information too. Like I know that the etymology of this word means this, so you can't use it like that.

You can guarantee that there's hundreds of other words that that person is using in a way that is not etymologically correct. Yeah. Yeah. Funny. No, it's staff, doesn't it? So, I mean, is it worth like... fighting these people online? But no, it's never worth fighting anyone online. Not on an individual basis. But I'm hoping that projects which raise awareness for prescriptive, like we definitely need to raise awareness of prescriptivism and this arbitrariness.

But yeah, no, going like I've been sharing my project on Facebook groups and it is the wild west. And I just have to tell myself, don't engage. Yeah. I don't think it gets you anywhere. Good advice generally about internet use.

So you said before that students and teachers and anybody listening can submit stuff. There's a form, isn't there, as well? Yes. So that's the best way to do it. If you go on yourwrong.co.uk.

really annoyingly you're wrong.com someone has bought it and is holding it ransom so i had to go for you're wrong.co.uk which is not quite as doesn't slip off the tongue quite as well however um you're wrong.co.uk there's a form section if you click submit examples it's just a really short form you put in as much for as little detail as you have and then I gather those all up into a beautiful database and can get cracking on looking at what's happening so that's a really yeah

If you want to get involved with the project, I'd be hugely grateful. I'd be really interested in talking to any teachers if they wanted to talk about how you might be able to include the website and the project as part of your teaching on prescriptivism. Because it is just you're finding examples from your everyday life. And I think that's a really accessible route, hopefully, for teaching about prescriptivism. Yeah.

Brilliant. No, that'd be really helpful. And I think as well, are you on popularprescriptivism at gmail.com if teachers and students want to get in touch? Absolutely. Or my institutional email, which is easy to find if you Google me. Right. Brilliant.

Now that's really interesting. Thank you very much. I think we've probably talked to you all day about this. I could talk about it all day. We've asked you lots of questions already. There's always more that come to mind. So the quickfire ones. Yes. What's your favourite book about language?

I love this question. It made me feel like I was on Desert Island Discs, which, I mean, hopefully it's the next call I'll get. I'm waiting for Lauren LeBurn to get in touch. Me too. One day. I thought about Bower and Trudgill's Language Myths. It's an edited book, so each chapter is written by a different linguist, and it's super accessible. it's one of the first books about linguistics that i came to and it blew my tiny mind a little bit it takes all of these ideas like

Italian is a beautiful language, German is ugly. Everyone has an accent except me, or young people are ruining the language. It takes all of these common ideas and pulls them apart in a really... easy to understand way and all of these ideas are ones that are presented to us in society as facts basically but in reality they're all as the title suggests just big old myths and I think that was

what really got me interested in sociolinguistics. So that's my pick. Nice one. We'll include a link to that one. Oh, yes. Great. People can follow it up. Yeah. What's your favourite linguistic fact or idea? So some of my favourite... facts come from the English spelling system because it's, well, it's a mess. It's just this hodgepodge of rules and decisions that make it completely unruly and really difficult to learn.

as is often the case in language, sometimes the way we spell things now is just the result of accident. So the snake, an adder, used to be a nadder.

um so the animal was nada not ada but because when you say a nada it's quite difficult to know if it's nadder or adder and eventually people got it wrong enough times that it changed from nadder to adder which i just think is brilliant similarly apron was napron and anoot was an oot So I just think those are great that these spellings that people protect and become so attached to are just these fun little accidents that enough people said it and it came through.

I wonder if that person who was really upset about decimate uses any of those words incorrectly. You have to go back and find them. I think they blocked me now. Finally, what one bit of advice would you give to a budding linguist? Well, as a sociolinguist.

I sometimes describe myself as a professional eavesdropper. I will forever be interested in not just what people are saying, but how they're saying it and why they're saying it. So I think my advice is listen yeah keep listening keep watching keep reading because language is inherently interesting and the great thing about being interested in language is that you're surrounded by it all the time so there's always things that can pique your interest so keep paying attention and

Keep asking questions about the things that you see. Reflect on the whys and the why nots, I suppose, of what people are saying and how. And your project here, your wrong project, is a really good way of... introducing students into that isn't it pay attention to all this popular culture all these different texts and start submitting them yeah i really hope so that was definitely one of the main motivators for this project is how do i get other people to be as excited about

as I am like how do you get people involved in thinking about it so yeah that's the goal brilliant

No, thanks very much. That's fantastic. So much really interesting stuff. And it works so well with this, with the A-level course. It's brilliant. No, great. Thank you both so much. Hopefully we can... catch up with you at some point when you've actually got like all of it you know analyzed as well it'd be brilliant to find out more no I'd love to I'd love to tell you more about what I find because I think it's just going to be yeah a real goldmine of interesting things hopefully

Yeah, brilliant. No, cheers, Emma. That was fantastic. Thanks a lot. Thank you both. It was fun. It's nice to talk about stuff in a fun way.