Some Facts About Language

By Jenna Remley

 

Note: This was originally published on June 17, 2019, through the now-defunct Tinyletter service. Minor edits have been made to the original.

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist. I minored in linguistics in college, which means I took four classes in the department, and I occasionally read non-fiction books on linguistics in my free time. I know a little bit more about linguistics than the average person, but I am by no means an expert. The information in this newsletter is collected from my memory, cursory internet research, and anecdotal info from multilingual friends and family.

1. English orthography is nonsense.
   “Orthography” is a fancy word for “spelling.” Feel free to use that to impress your friends and make yourself feel superior. Anyway, you may have noticed that English spelling is a mess. If you speak another language, such as Spanish, German, or Hindi, you might be aware that other languages can have a much closer connection between how the language is spoken and how it is written. For example, there are five vowels in the Spanish alphabet, and there are only five vowel sounds to pronounce (plus combinations of those five sounds, which are called diphthongs). The English alphabet also has five vowels (or, okay, six if you’re counting Y), but we have many more spoken vowels - in American English, around twelve. So our five written vowels have to represent several different sounds. The way you pronounce “o” is different in “hot,” “hold,” and “honey.” There is no end to the weird idiosyncrasies in written English - words that should rhyme but don’t (“gone” and “bone”), letters that are silent under very particular circumstances (as in “debt,” “high,” or “knife”), or the same sounds represented by different letters at different times (like the “s” in “usual” and the second “g” in “garage”). The reasons for these discrepancies are innumerable, caused by odd bits of history, word-borrowing, and who knows what else. The sooner you accept that English spelling has little to do with English pronunciation, the better off you are. This is why we have spelling bees.
   
   
2. There are many dialects of English, and none of them are bad.
   There are so, so many types of English out there. Globally, of course, there are a ton of varieties, but even within the U.S. there are a lot of different ways to speak this one language. These different variants can be cultural (two highly-studied dialects are Chicano English and African American English), or regional (imagine how a native Minnesotan speaks versus a native Texan, or consider the stereotypical "New Yawk" accent). These dialects are noticeably different from Standard American English (which is hard to define, but a simplistic way to think of it is ‘how newscasters on national television speak’). They have their own grammar rules, vocabularies, and pronunciations. But they are still, overall, understandable to English speakers of other dialects. Historically, some of these dialects have been viewed simply as “incorrect” or “bad” English - and classism and racism have played into those assumptions. However, all of the innumerable dialects in this country are valid varieties of English. They may follow different rules than the standard sometimes, but they are still rule-governed. They’ve changed over time from the standard, leaving behind some words and rules to pick up new ones. The many faces of English show how varied and diverse its speakers are - how many locations and backgrounds they come from, and how different places and cultures have made their own marks on the language.
   
   
3. You, individually, have your own personal language.
   When we talk about a language, such as English, we’re talking about the conglomeration of hundreds or thousands or millions of speakers. The ways that they communicate, when taken as a whole, define the language. And then that language can be broken up into subcategories, like different regional or cultural dialects, but even within those subgroups there is so much variety. Ultimately, the way that you personally speak is unique, because your interface with language has been unique. The term “idiolect” refers to one speaker’s distinctive use of language. Your idiolect can be influenced by countless things - where you grew up, where your parents/guardians grew up, where you’ve lived throughout your life, the communities you’ve been a part of, the situations in which you’ve listened to and spoken your language, whether you speak other languages and when you learned them, so on and so forth. You may notice quirks of your language use that you don’t see in most other people, or ways that your friends and family speak that are different from you. We can all understand each other, for the most part, under the broad umbrella of English, but we each bring our own experiences and understandings to it.
   
   
4. Language has always been changing, and will continue to change, and that's great.
   People say “like” a lot. No one really knows when to say “who” and when to say “whom.” We once had an informal second person pronoun (“thou”), but now we don’t use it. The vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation of our language are always changing. English is a little different now than it was when I was born, and that was a little different from when my parents were born, which was different from when my grandparents were born. Chaucer was writing in his version of English in the late 1300s, but now I need an annotated text full of definitions and explanations in order to understand the Canterbury Tales. English, like all languages, is malleable. It’s a living, ever-changing thing. The newest version isn’t worse or better than previous ones, just different. A language adapts over time - sometimes becoming more simplistic, sometimes incorporating complications to adjust for new ideas in the world and culture.

If you are as hyped about language as I am, here are some better resources than my rambling for you to check out:

NYT regional dialect quiz: Answer some questions about your language use, and this quiz will do an excellent job of guessing where in the country you’re from.

Vox video about how the word “OK” was popularized.

An article about the word “lox,” which hasn’t changed in thousands of years.