Growing English

While using Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network, it is not unusual to be corrected by someone or to see someone “teaching” the “right” way to talk or write. Sometimes, this argument may be accompanied by other prejudices: speak right if you want me to listen to you and to consider what you’re saying; illiterate; go to school; if you want to talk about this, learn how to write first. All of the sentences above can be easily said on the internet, but its root is not there. 

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Many people claim that there is a correct English to be spoken: The Standard – Standard American English, United Kingdom Standard English, and the Received Pronunciation. They are the so-called language purists, prescriptive grammarians, people who consider the English taught in school to be the appropriate and unique, criticizing and humiliating others dialects as if they were superior, they claim to use the “good” language.

 Language is a tool of power: to build – by its changes and transformations naturally caused by the socials involved; or to destroy and conquest – by colonizing, downgrading the users of a dialect and banning languages as a mean of political control, as it happened with Cajun English and French in southern Louisiana, American Indian languages, or even during the occupation of Korea (1910-1945) when the Japanese prohibited the Koreans to speak their language by 1943, trying to Japanize it. If you are interested in learning about Korea under Japanese Occupation, I recommend the Korean drama “Chicago Typewriter”. 

Máquina de Escribir Chicago - Episode 6 | Rakuten Viki

This also happened in France, 1977, when the French Government passed a law banning the use of English in official contexts (political, juridic, etc.) aiming to preserve French expressions, but it didn't work out (CRYSTAL, 2002, p. 273). However, from a linguistic point of view, one dialect is neither better nor worse than another, nor purer nor more corrupt, nor more or less logical, nor more or less expressive. It is simply different (FROMKIN et al., 2002). For example, despite American English is the most influential dialect worldwide and British English the “purer” and “elegant” English, it is wrong to assume that they rule the social language use, once we have different dialects, idiolects, regional dialects, cultural groups, word choices that are made according to the context (how formal is the situation, the relationship between the speakers, etc.). 

English, as we can see when we study its development, emerged from the contact and transformation of different languages and cultures – as well as other languages. Today, considering the limitless internet, the viability of information, and the use of it as commercial, technical or cultural language (ALGEO, 2009, p. 183) it is baseless and clueless to assume that it has a purity or a pattern that must be followed. It is contradictory to downgrade a dialect or even a pronunciation when it comes to language – being a native or not – once it is made and transformed by its users, that are affected by at the same time that is affecting it.

 Language change is not corruption it is richness. 

ALGEO, John. Late Modern English (1800-Present). In: THE ORIGINS and Development of the English Language. 6. ed. Boston: Wadsworth CENGAGE Learning, 2009. cap. 10, p. 181-202. ISBN 978-1-4282-3145-0.

CRYSTAL, David. English Today. In: CRYSTAL, David. The English Language. 2. ed. England: Penguin Books, 2002. cap. 14, p. 270-291.

FROMKIN, Victoria et al. Language in Society. In: FROMKIN, Victoria et al. An Introduction to Language. 7. ed. [S. l.]: Thomson Wadsworth, 2002. cap. 10, p. 445-491.

When people hear or read the word “Aryan”, they probably think about Nazism, a fascist ideology that defends the supremacism of a “superior German race”, which led to the torture, dehumanization, and death of Europe’s Jewish, Romani and other racialized people, LGBTQ+, and people with disabilities.

Aryan (ārya आर्य) is a Classical Sanskrit term which means “one who does noble deeds; a noble one” (WIKIPEDIA, 2020) it was also used to refer to the Indo-European language branch spoken in Iran and India (ALGEO, 2009, p. 51). However, in XIX, some Philologists referred to the Indo-European Family as “Aryan”. In 1861, Max Muller, a German Scholar of Comparative language, religion, and mythology, was the first writer to mention the existence of an “Aryan Race” (DAVID and NICHOLLS, 2016, p. 96).  In 1926, Gordon Childe, Australian Archeologist, specialist in European Prehistory, published a book called The Aryans, which was full of archeological and linguistic arguments in an attempt to establish the supposed homeland of the Indo-European Family.

According to Colin Refrew, a British Archeologist and Paleologist, the discussion about a homeland it wasn't purely academic, once the “German Scholars preferred and Indo-European homeland in Northern Europe”. The “Aryan race” Theory then became more and more popular in Germany. While some authors opposed to it, other writers argued that the Aryans were a biologically superior group of humans, based on it's Nordic Traces, while the Semitic were considered an “inferior race”. Muller was deeply saddened that his studies were used to justify and reinforce a false ethnic superiority based on nordic traces. In 1888, he wrote that "an ethnologist who speaks of the Aryan race, Aryan blood, Aryan eyes and hair, is as great a sinner as a linguist who speaks of a dolichocephalic dictionary, or a brachycephalic grammar".

Since this term was appropriated by the Nazis, Linguists substituted “Aryan” to “Indo-European”, a term without a racist connotation, that refers “only to the culture of a group of people who lived in a relatively small area in early times and who spoke a more or less unified language out of which many languages have developed over thousands of years.” (ALGEO, 2009, p. 52). The Academic words, must always be free of prejudice and a sense of superiority, in language and race.

"Indo-European is a matter of culture, not of genes."
— John Algeo