Rodney Huddleston Award for the best paper published in the journal in that year.
Nola Stephens-Hecker is an Associate Professor of Linguistics at Covenant College, UK. She received her BA in linguistics and Germanic studies from Indiana University and her PhD in linguistics from Stanford University, where she specialized in child language development. After graduate school, Nola worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Penn State before moving to Covenant in 2012. Since transitioning to Covenant, Nola’s primary research interests have shifted to sociolinguistics and the intersection of language and religion.
Loreta Vaicekauskienė is a Professor in the Centre of Scandinavian Studies at Vilnius University, Institute for the Languages and Cultures of the Baltic, Lithuania. She is Head of the Centre of Sociolinguistics and Senior Researcher at the Research Institute of the Lithuanian Language and a board member of the Association for Applied Linguistics of Lithuania. Loreta’s research interests include language ideologies and planning, social meanings of language variation, language attitudes and global English. She is the author of Naujieji lietuvių kalbos svetimžodžiai: kalbos politika ir vartosena, a book on new borrowings in the Lithuanian language (Lietuvių kalbos instituto leidykla, 2007), and editor of two volumes on language ideologies and change, Lietuvių kalbos ideologija: norminimo idėjų ir galios istorija (with Nerijus Šepetys, Naujasis židinys-Aidai, 2016) and Lietuvių kalbos idealai: kaip keitėsi geriausios kalbos idėja (Naujasis židinys-Aidai, 2017).
Marten van der Meulen is currently pursuing a PhD at the Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His project focuses on the interplay between prescriptivism and language use in 20th century Dutch, in particular with regard to morphosyntax. His other research interests include fact checks, science communications and cursing. Next to his academic work, Marten has (co-)authored several popular scientific books about language and is an avid blogger.
1Introduction: Values and Binaries in Language Evaluation
Jacob D. Rawlins and Don Chapman
1 Introduction
A quick survey of language blogs, letters to the editor, comment sections or YouTube videos will confirm how important evaluating language variants is for people from all walks of life. But the importance of prescriptivism isn’t limited to internet cranks, complainers or so-called ‘Grammar Nazis’. Most people have some opinion as to how language should be used. As Deborah Cameron pointed out so well, language is so completely tied to our identity and experience that we cannot but evaluate it and assign moral judgement to its use (Cameron, 1995: 9–17).
The constant evaluation of language use opens a large and fascinating question: How do individuals frame language evaluation into their self-perception, conduct and identity? This question can be examined from a number of different angles, but it should receive special attention from linguists. As Cameron put it, if evaluation of language is a part of using language, it is certainly a question that linguists should be interested in (Cameron, 1995: x–xiv). Indeed, we are seeing an increasing attention from linguists on language prescriptivism as a useful object of study. Calvet (2006) addresses language prescription briefly in his discussion of language security/insecurity but deliberately avoids focusing on language evaluation ‘so as not to set the judgements or the classifications of speakers against those of the linguist’ (Calvet, 2006: 152). Still, Calvet recognizes prescriptivism as an important player in sociolinguistic attitudes and language change. In the past decade, several edited collections have been published that recognize the connections between language judgements and larger social issues, particularly social issues that shed light on the practice of prescriptivism. Percy and Davidson (2012), for example, focused on the connections between standardization and nationalism, while Tieken-Boon van Ostade and Percy (2016) addressed standardization and tradition, and Pillière et al. (2018) examined norms and traditions of language prescription. Tieken-Boon van Ostade has addressed questions of prescriptivism and the history of usage guides in volumes published in 2018 and 2020, as well as in her ongoing Bridging the Unbridgeable project, which has produced PhD theses and special journal issues. While each of these collections approaches the study of prescriptivism from different angles, each of the volumes has revealed additional facets of the operation of standardizing and prescriptive forces. The attention from linguists has complexified the view of language evaluation with multiple perspectives and foci so the simplified slogan ‘prescriptivism vs descriptivism’ is rendered largely meaningless in serious discussion.
This volume continues to examine social connections to language evaluation as a follow-up to the examinations of nationalism, traditions and norms. In particular, this volume focuses on values. The importance of values in the operation of prescriptivism is implicit in the fundamental activity of evaluating variation. At their core, prescriptive pronouncements are expressions of individual or communal values, and they are often phrased in binary terms: good/bad, correct/incorrect, careful/sloppy, formal/informal. As we would expect, however, language evaluations are made, diffused or disputed by a wide range of people who hold a wide range of values. Even fairly simple questions about values reveal the inadequacies of any binary formulation: Who values prescriptive pronouncements and why? How do prescriptive pronouncements derive from or challenge other values? What values are uncovered from studying the operation of prescriptivism? The binary labels applied to prescriptive pronouncements are really covering a multitude of values that come to play in making evaluations of language variation – a complex view that offers insights about language, but also about society, culture, individual and community identities, education, social status and social performance.
In this volume, the contributors address values in linguistic prescriptivism from a variety of approaches and methods. As linguists, the authors share core professional values about language study that are often cast as opposing traditional prescriptivism. Yet the authors explore the value of linguistics for studying prescriptivism and the value of prescriptivism for illuminating language use. A recurring motif in this volume is self-reflection, as authors examine how their professional values relate to prescriptivism. Along the way, the authors identify several other ideologies and value configurations that inform responses to prescriptivism: natural/unnatural, religion, nationalism, education, and social interaction with wider groups.
One insight that is shared among nearly all the authors in this volume is that the binaries that characterize prescriptive discourse – prescriptivism/descriptivism, correct/incorrect, standard/nonstandard – are inadequate for investigating the complexity of the phenomenon. The binaries undoubtedly serve their purposes for capturing broad trends, but they prove an impediment to a better understanding of prescriptivism and the values associated with it. Language variation is closely connected with the identities and values of speakers and groups of speakers (Coupland, 2007; Eckert, 2000; Edwards, 2009; Joseph, 2004), and those identities and values vary widely from individual to individual and community to community. While some members of a community may value the identifying features of ‘correct’ language and the accompanying boundary markers that denote members of different groups, other members of the same community may value linguistic variation and multilingual approaches that blur or change boundaries. The values are multiplex even within one individual. As Edwards states, ‘the multiplicity of identities, or facets of identity, is matched by a range of speech styles and behaviour. It is not only bilinguals who have more than one variety at their disposal: if we are not all bi- or multilingual, many are at least bi- or multi-dialectal – and all of us are bi- or multi-stylistic’ (Edwards, 2009: 3). Because language encapsulates values in a multitude of different ways and people use language for a multitude of purposes, and people speaking the same language have a multitude of different values, the number of distinct values of a large group of individuals is too great to be encapsulated by two ends of a spectrum. Rather, we need to acknowledge the entire spectrum. Some of the chapters in this volume address the inadequacies of the binaries head on, while others acknowledge the inadequacies less directly. But the sum effect is to explode the binaries so we can view the more complex phenomena associated with prescriptivism and the values of those who practice it.
