In the Preface to his landmark Dictionary of 1755, Samuel Johnson wrote that ‘sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride’. Any dictionary, any grammar, is but a snapshot: all living languages change, and they do so constantly and at every level.
Yet there is an instinct in many of us to fix aspects of our language or to nudge it in this or that direction. It’s commonplace to the point of banality to flinch at a pronunciation, spelling, idiom, or other usage. The trick is to acknowledge the subjectivity (and usually futility, and often infelicity) of such a feeling – maybe even to get over it.
The caricature of prescriptivism – the prescribing of norms in language use – is of pedants and purists decrying variation and innovation in language, insisting on style rules they learned in school. But prescriptivism is a broad church. It can make a linguistic variety more consistent, enhancing its communicative reach and facility. Some prescriptivism, contra the conservative stereotype, is progressive, advocating a more inclusive lexicon.
Prescriptivism as a field of study is likewise impressively rich and complex, and this is evidenced in the recent book New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research (2024), whose publisher, Multilingual Matters, kindly sent me a copy. Nuria Yáñez-Bouza, who edited the collection astutely with María E. Rodríguez-Gil and Javier Pérez-Guerra, summarises its approach:
While the umbrella theme of prescriptivism runs as a connecting thread in the volume, the innovative contribution of this collection is observable in the approaches, methods and research questions addressed in the individual chapters. By examining prescriptivism from different perspectives, we can achieve a deeper understanding of its impact and influence, and of how this relates to sociocultural issues.
The book is structured into three thematic strands, each with several chapters. Language looks at prescriptivism’s roots in grammar books and usage manuals and their continuing impact; literary and scripted texts looks at how prescriptivism has manifested as a social and cultural phenomenon; and speech communities looks at how prescriptivism applies to non-mainstream dialects and other languages.
Chapters derive from the 6th Prescriptivism Conference, which took place in Vigo, Spain, in 2021, and are written as scholarly papers. Among their topics are prescriptive attitudes in online dating; language ideology in poetry over the centuries; the status of codified norms in Indian English and Hong Kong English; and the use of prescriptivism in Australian literature. The publisher’s page has a full list of contents; those described below I’ve selected at random.
Some usage issues discussed, such as the spelling of coronavirus in Greek, are localized (though no less interesting for that). Others are generally familiar, such as split infinitives, singular they, who vs whom, and subject vs object pronouns (they met Kim and I/me). To what degree ‘metalinguistic awareness’ of such issues could affect one’s position on them is examined in Anja Wanner and Difei (Lynn) Zhang’s chapter.
If you think online discourse points to an unprecedented level of discord over language use, consider that almost two thousand English grammar books were published in the 19th century, all differing in some respects. Marco Wiemann’s chapter, which examines attitudes to pronunciations in this period, reveals the arbitrariness of their judgements:
Non-rhoticity had thus conflicting connotations in both localities in the 19th century. In Britain, its stigma was connected to the ‘vulgar’ as well as ‘educated’ Londoners and eventually became the standard. In North America, it was seen by some as a marker of good education and cultivation, while others evaluated it as pretentious, feminine and un-American.
Icelandic, famously conservative, is the focus of Heimir F. Viðarsson, whose study of student texts from different eras offers insights into slowly evolving linguistic norms via both students’ choices and their examiners’ responses. It finds wrinkles along gender and geographical lines, and less adherence to standard norms now than in 19thC texts, which were written by a more homogeneous group.
For all the diversity of material in the book, there are concepts common across chapters. Edgar Schneider’s dynamic model of postcolonial Englishes recurs, its five stages of evolution for an emerging English variety offering a lens through which to analyze research findings. Anne Curzan’s four categories of prescriptivism also serve to scaffold discussion.
A descriptivist at heart, I still apply multiple types of prescriptivism in my copy-editing work. The role of copy-editing in (hyper)standardization is explored by Linda Pillière, who mines the archives of Penelope Lively, Jim Crace, and Kazuo Ishiguro to study their interactions with copy editors. Though the authors tended to resist proposed changes to their lexicon, she found,
grammatical changes have been more easily accepted. This could be because authors consider copy editors to be professionals in this field or perhaps this is a reflection of a general linguistic insecurity regarding grammar. Perhaps, too, writers feel that such changes play a less important role in terms of their style.
Poetic licence has long co-existed with the expectation, among some critics, that poets abide by the prevailing norms of usage: Lowth’s influential grammar of 1762 criticized Dryden, Milton, and Pope for what he deemed wayward usage. Joan C. Beal’s chapter in New Horizons… traces how the rise of dialect poetry in the 18thC pushed back on such attempts to constrain artistic expression.
Yet prescriptive constraints have historically been less absolute than is often claimed, argue Machteld de Vos and Marten van der Meulen in a chapter on optional variability in language. Surveying studies of Dutch grammars in particular, they find a whole spectrum of approaches: Suppression–Reallocation–Conditional suppression–Awareness–Acceptance–Advocacy:
While suppression still plays an important part, our survey shows that the exclusive theoretical focus on this stance actually, and ironically, suppresses the widespread variation that exists in dealing with variability in prescriptive literature.
This model of the ‘complex prescriptive reality’, they write, ‘has important implications for current theories on prescriptivism’ and for ‘evaluating the impact of prescriptive rules on language usage, and vice versa’.
The importance of stance is also the subject of Jane Hodson’s fascinating chapter, where she assesses its use in fictional representations of nonstandard language and prescriptive attitudes to it (something I’ve blogged about regularly over the years). A novel can offer a ‘dialect-endorsing stance’ alongside a prescriptive one, and ‘it can be a source of considerable pleasure to the reader to re-orientate themselves’.
For readers comfortable with its academic style, New Horizons in Prescriptivism Research is an illuminating, thought-provoking, and enjoyable read. As well as tracing the influence of prescriptive practices over the centuries, it also looks to the future and shows how modern research methods and emerging theories of prescriptivism can deepen our understanding of language attitudes and use.
The book is recommended for language students, educators, researchers, and professionals, particularly those in sociolinguistics, but it may also appeal to general readers who are interested in the subject matter and comfortable with the sometimes technical language. It is likely to broaden the minds of all readers, including linguists, who have dismissed prescriptivism based on a stereotype or a false binary with descriptivism.
Multilingual Matters, an independent UK publisher with an impressive stock of scholarly linguistic books, is to be commended for its contribution to the protean and often oversimplified subject of prescriptivism. The hefty price of a hardback copy, unfortunately, will put the book reviewed here beyond the reach of many readers unless a paperback option becomes available, though libraries or e-books are other possibilities.