Laura Wagner, Sumurye Awani, Nikole D. Patson, and Rebekah Stanhope have a very interesting article, “To what extent does the general public endorse language myths?” (Language and Linguistics Compass 17.3 [2023], e12486, open access), which “reports on an investigation of adults’ level of endorsement of 18 language myths” and discusses “how this snapshot of public understanding can help linguists target their efforts at public education.” From the introduction:
Beyond the topic of linguistic prejudice, there are comparatively few studies looking at other kinds of misconceptions that people have about language. […] One of the more comprehensive studies of people’s language misconceptions, and a touchstone study in this field, is Folk Linguistics by Niedzielski and Preston (1999/2010). They took an ethnographically inspired field-work approach to examine the perspectives that ‘the folk’ had about several dimensions of language. They documented beliefs connected to linguistic prejudice and dialect, as well as misconceptions related to language development. For example, their participants indicated that speaking to children in babytalk would hinder their language development, and that using the passive voice represents bad writing.
The goal of the current study is to add to this general literature about what language misconceptions are held by members of the general public. We note from the outset that this work is descriptive in nature: we are not proposing any systematic analysis about why people believe certain myths (but not others), we are not interrogating the ideologies behind these myths, and we provide only a few suggestions for how to combat them. We aim instead to augment the body of data that feeds into these broader goals with a large, up-to-date sample of participants. Our study investigated a wide range of myths, which we chose with some care. Following the traditions of sociolinguistics, we focused on topic areas that have genuine societal import. Thus, we included several myths connected to linguistic prejudice because belief in such myths has notable negative social consequences. But misconceptions about language have meaningful consequences in other domains as well. Myths about children’s language development impact parenting practices; myths about bilingualism impact immigration policies and educational practices; myths about linguistic diversity impact international relations. And finally, misconceptions about what linguists know and care about limit the ability of language scientists to influence popular opinion and public policy on matters where they should have a strong voice. […] This snapshot will provide a first step towards a broader goal of identifying the areas where linguists’ voices could do the most good in encouraging the public to adopt a more scientifically grounded understanding of language.
Thanks, Y!
Unsurprising stuff (by design), if depressing.
I think it’s a bit suspect to conflate attitudes to non-standard dialects with simply erroneous ideas about language: as the authors themselves note, the former is intimately bound up with negative attitudes to the actual speakers, which makes it a much more thorny issue conceptually than simple errors of linguistic fact, as well as when it comes to doing anything about it. It wouldn’t matter what the actual dialect was like in linguistic terms, it would still be Wrong, because the people who speak it are inferior. People aren’t arguing from non-standard features of dialect to the inferiority of the speakers: they take the inferiority of the speakers as a given, and use it for folk explanations of the dialect features.
This being Language Hat, where nitpicking is not only tolerated but de rigueur, I must point out that one of their “completely uncontroversial facts”, viz that “all languages have dialects”, is in fact not factual at all. Certainly Arabic must be close to the least suitable of all languages for the claim that it has no dialects, but there are a good many languages which are not spoken by enough people over a large enough territitory to have dialects; only idiolects, if anything.
@ David Eddyshaw The word “dialect” being ambiguous (it has been used to mean ‘topolect’, ‘non-standard lect’, ‘substandard lect’, and so on), it is best to specify the lects you have in mind before anyone tries to see whether any currently used languages have no lects other than idiolects.
If you interpret “dialect” to include “idiolect”, then the statement “all languages have dialects” becomes entirely vacuous for any language with more than one speaker; and as there are (still) a few languages with only one remaining speaker, it would still be false as a generalisation.
(It reminds me on an improving story I read somewhere about the perils of assuming that a language with only one speaker was not in regular use. The last speaker of, IIRC, an American language, who was a devout Christian, was found to be regularly praying to God in that language. Alas, it is not recorded if God replied in a different dialect, or the same one; and the question of idiolects raises some complex theological issues in this context.)
Alas, it is not recorded if God replied in a different dialect, or the same one;
So you assume the frequency of God actually answering prayers with spoken words is higher than zero (Not including Jewish jokes, obviously)?
Alas, We Just Don’t Know.
so you assume
No, English “or” does not necessarily have that implication.
I may go to bed now, or I may have a cup of tea. Or I could do something else entirely. Who can fathom my ways? (This is meta-nitpicking now. Only on LH! Accept no substitutes!)
people readily endorse the myth that literacy and explicit grammatical knowledge are intrinsic to knowing a language
Is this really a myth? Of course you can “know a language” without being literate in that language, and in a purely linguistic sense this is true. But language is a “social” and not merely a “linguistic” phenomenon; it’s perfectly normal for people in a literate society to expect that members of that society should be proficient in both spoken and written language.
Suggesting that the use of non-mainstream dialects such as AAVE is inherently informal or inappropriate (as many of our participants did) is a means of denigrating the people who use those dialects.
Well, there are situations where people expect the use of a standard or mainstream dialect. If the person in question is a truck driver, the formality of their speech might not matter, but if they’re a lawyer, nonstandard “white English”, not to mention AAVE, is likely to be regarded as inappropriate. Sure, this is a social expectation, but is it really a myth? Surely the denial of this social expectation is itself a demi-myth put about by linguists. Only a linguist would maintain scrupulous adherence to the “linguistic facts” (whatever they might be) and dismiss social expectations as a “myth”.
@ DE “If you interpret “dialect” to include “idiolect”…”
I myself (cf. the second word of the preceding sentence) do not use the word “dialect” at all because of its polysemy, hence ambiguity).
Since you do use it, I would like to know how you define it.
David Eddyshaw: It wouldn’t matter what the actual dialect was like in linguistic terms, it would still be Wrong, because the people who speak it are inferior.
QFT
… and because it reminds me of another point that often bothers me (which I have probably mentioned before). Well-meaning individuals often state that women and speakers of low-prestige dialects are disproportionately responsible for linguistic innovation. That may be true, but it is likely significantly overstated, for the simple reason that innovations by privileged speakers are much more likely to go without remark.
“people do not argue”
@DE, they do, it is complicated.
People urge each other not to sound like uneducated people. It is understood that it is bad to BE uneducated, but it is also understood that this specific person appears so because she IS partly so. And she is supposed to imitate you, an edcuated speaker in her speech, her dress (and sometimes her knowlege, but that’s not necessary).
@Brett, you are assuming that women arenot “privileged”.
I understand that the word “privileged” means “don’t deserve our support” but this hardly has much to do with langauge, what matters is “prestige”. And I don’t know how we define prestige, but women are generally better educated.
WTF?
“Better educated” is imprecise of course. Globally more women are receiving higher education. (absolute domination of women among professors and researchers is Myanmar, though Tunisia also performs well).
And if we can’t simply point at an univeristy and say: their langauge is prestigeous, then I don’t know how you’ll define a prestige dialect. (One which is the usual direciton of shift? That’s useless)
I spoke about education, because it is associated with a register and it is possible that a linguist will ignore innovations in this register.
When a dialect is associated with a group that holds political/economic power a half of speakers are women.
P.S. was not meant as an answer to the above WTF, but maybe is.
@Brett, if this WTF was about my comment, I simply mean that I don’t see based on what female speech patterns can be called low-prestige or grouped together with [a list of dialects considered “low-prestige” and usually associated with lack of education].
It is not clear to me how one can define “prestige dialect” (other than – for low-prestige dialects – “I, a linguist, look down upon its speakers. If they look down at me as well, I don’t care, MY opinion matters, not theirs”) but women are said to be ahead of men in shifting to it, so apparently most speakers of a prestige dialect are always female… If this observation is true (and even if we identify prestige dialects by consulting women).
One of the chief functions of language is social signaling. Language change is also heavily driven by social cues and by the creation of cliques and self identified groups who use language to distinguish insiders from outsiders. Correcting your child’s “errors”, or encouraging them to speak the standard language rather than in a way that identifies them with a group with lower social status is no different than encouraging your child not to pick his nose in public, get face tattoos or wear dirty torn clothing.
We can argue about the ethics but it’s not a linguistic myth.
What if instead of Iraq and Morocco that were Birobidzhan and Minsk? Or Almaty?
AVOID????????
Are they kidding?
@ Bathrobe:
Is this really a myth? Of course you can “know a language” without being literate in that language, and in a purely linguistic sense this is true. But language is a “social” and not merely a “linguistic” phenomenon; it’s perfectly normal for people in a literate society to expect that members of that society should be proficient in both spoken and written language.
Well, I might imagine that “in a purely linguistic” sense is what’s at issue. And, for what it’s worth, the specific myth they’re testing for is “Understanding a language requires one to be literate in it” (emphasis added).
Mind you, the way they tested for this was a bit ambiguous, since it involved presenting the following “vignette” + question:
(Note that we can assume Fatima is proficient in written English, at least, and that the question isn’t, say, “Would people in Jordan think she understands Arabic?”)
I can imagine some people (maybe including myself) thinking she might do badly on the exam — not because she doesn’t understand Arabic, but because maybe that kind of exam isn’t the best possible way of determining whether someone understands a language. (It’s more a way of testing whether someone adequately went through formal instruction in a language.)
I can imagine some people (maybe including myself) thinking she might do badly on the exam — not because she doesn’t understand Arabic, but because maybe that kind of exam isn’t the best possible way of determining whether someone understands a language. (It’s more a way of testing whether someone adequately went through formal instruction in a language.)
Indeed I suspect that many native English speakers (even if otherwise literate) would not do particularly well on such an exam in English – they’d fail the quiz (almost certainly so if it’s based on a Chomskyan view of grammar), and, depending on what it’s graded on, might not necessarily do a good essay either.
(And conversational speaking is more a test of extroversion than of language. My mom’s conversational speaking in English is way better than mine, but her actual knowledge of English is far below mine – she’s just a lot less anxious about using it for conversation.)
They interpret the answer this way:
“As can be seen in Figure 1, people readily endorse the myth that literacy and explicit grammatical knowledge are intrinsic to knowing a language, as exemplified by the vignette about a heritage language speaker: Fatima will do well on the exam because she grew up speaking Arabic with her family, so she probably sufficiently knows the language well enough to pass a university exam. ”
Nice to meet you Fatima, but where is Ali?
It of course should be noted that (a) literary Arabic and spoken Arabic are not mutually intelligible (b) even though people do write spoken Arabic in chats, I doubt that anyone will ask this on an exam. (c) many speakers believe that spoken Arabic does not have rules.
In this case it is more complicated because in a course of an Arabic dialect for foreigners the teacher can, in principle ask you questions like “what form will you use here?”. But there is no corpus of rules taught in school.
Also, of course, rules taught to foreign learners are different from rules taught to native speakers.
With Arabic it is particularly funny. When foreign langauge education meets Arabic (that is, one literary language and continuum of spoken dialects) many people – unexpectedly for me – feel confused. “So what I should learn/teach then?”.
So there is, for example Formal Spoken Arabic, created artificially and meant to approximate what an educated Syrian (of the time) will speak when talking with an educated Egyptian.
“By contrast, a bi-modal distribution emerged on the topic of linguistic diversity, with roughly half the participants endorsing myths about the universality of sign languages and the absence of dialects in other languages (e.g. She studied the language in a country that spoke Arabic, so she shouldn’t have trouble understanding it) while roughly half the participants rejected such myths (e.g. People in different parts of the world can speak the same language differently. There could be accents, different dialects, different speed, regional slang, etc.)”
I would not call that “a myth”.
“By contrast, participants strongly rejected the myth that one’s native language determines one’s thinking. They overwhelmingly believed it was possible for someone to learn a new concept that had no label in their native language: Because people learn new concepts all the time when learning new languages.”
I expect a user of the absolute frame of reference (which is not the same as speaker of a language – I know how to use a computer not because I have a word for it) to have a hard time remembering what is “left” and what is “right”. I also expect the designer of the question to have a certain difficulty with always knowing where’s north.
But I don’t know if it will be hard to learn the concept (that is: “for every object that has well defined “front” [define front] and “top” and reflexion symmetry relative to the plane crossing those English speakers also define left and right halves. You don’t have to remember which one is what – but if you – independently – as two English speakers what is the “left” side of this object, they will always point at the same side! Try it, it works. Fantastic! Yes, Engish speakers can remember this all the time, they just have it in their heads. No, not with that object, it does not have front. This object.” No, of course it is not what we will be saying to those people, we will show examples. But I just don’t know how much time it will take).
Well, I think
– Such studies are useful and I’m not inclined to criticise it
– The study is nevevertheless simple.
It did not take too much effort to do. And you don’t have to be a linguist to write it, enought to be a linguist’s husband (again, not a problem! It is not an exam, it is collecting potentially useful data). But they run into a number of philosophical and psychological problems, and I won’t be surprised if even some myths on the part of linguists:)
The model they use for dealing with those (philosophical problems) is crude. Particularly, a “myth”. A myth is some self-reproducing narrative, a story or (simpler) a statement or (more complex) whole set of beliefs that likely wouldn’t occur to you if you haven’t heard it from others. But you did and you repeat it. It may affect your opinions and actions or not – the defining characteristic of myths is that they reproduce. This is not exactly what they are dealing with here (they are not even interested in stories and their reproduction!), and they use this word because linguists (their addressees) use it disapprovingly as a label for a range of things (not necessarily “myths”) they don’t like.
It is difficult to capture people’s thinking and behaviour (especially thinking about complex matters) and difficult to predict it based on questionnaires. I guess there is a lot of space for improvement here (and I’m confident they could learn many useful things from professionals from several other fields who study opinions and behaviour of people).
Regarging the myth that linguists know langauges, generativists greatly contributed in disproving this shameful misconception….