Folk linguistics

Last updated July 03, 2024

Folk linguistics consists of statements, beliefs, or practices concerning language which are based on uninformed speculation rather than based on the scientific method, which characterizes the modern field of linguistics. Folk linguistics sometimes arises when scientific conclusions about language come off as counterintuitive to native speakers.^[1]^[2] However, folk linguistics may also be motivated by confirmation bias, prejudice, ideology,^[1] or nationalism.^[2]

Examples

Jackendoff (2003)^[3] cites the following statements as typical examples of folk-linguistic beliefs.

Claim: "Parents teach their children to talk". Adults assume that children either learn language directly from their parents or via simple imitation.
- On the contrary, research in child language acquisition shows that a child acquires language more automatically, through a systematic pattern rarely noticed by adults. Although interaction with parents, adults, and other children is crucial, it is very difficult to "correct" a child. Instead, most children can learn to speak native languages (including those of their peers of the same age) through a process called "acquisition".^[4] Any errors noticed by a parent are often self-corrected by the child weeks or months later.
Claim: "Children will get confused if they try to speak more than one language". Many parents are afraid a child cannot sort out input from multiple languages.
- In reality, children can easily become multilingual if they are exposed to more than one language. There may be a period of confusion, but most children are able to segregate many distinct grammars.
Claim: "There is a proper, correct English". Speakers generally value an educated form of the language, often its written form, and that other dialectal/spoken forms are considered structurally inferior or "sloppy", and speakers of these forms are often regarded as "stupid, lazy, sloppy, hick" or other pejorative terms.
- However, linguists generally agree that vernacular varieties such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have the same grammatical complexity as standard forms of English. Folk linguistic beliefs view these lects as inferior, and as a result speakers of non-standard forms often suffer forms of linguistic discrimination.^[3]
Claim: "The modern language is going downhill". Purists opine that changes in the spoken language (e.g. new words, innovations in grammar, new pronunciation patterns) are detrimental rather than just change.
- In fact, living languages are not static. Their evolution is not just a modern phenomenon.

Other beliefs may include:

A belief that a language's grammar can negatively influence and restrict how people think. This is also known as the strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Although some linguists do advocate a form of this, many linguists reject this as being too simplistic.^[4] For instance, just because a language does not formally distinguish "he" vs. "she" in their personal pronouns does not mean that speakers do not distinguish and treat men and women differently. Similarly, just because English lacks a formal hodiernal tense does not mean that English speakers cannot distinguish events which occur "today" versus those on another day.
Examples of folk etymology such as interpreting asparagus as "sparrow-grass".^[4] These are cases where speakers deduce an incorrect word origin. Another folk etymology is the assumption that the New York place name Fishkill (on Fishkill Creek) means a place to kill fish. In reality, -kill is from a Dutch word meaning "creek" (found also in river names such as Schuylkill, Pennsylvania and Wallkill, New Jersey). However, the folk etymology caused animal rights groups such as PETA to lobby that the town should be renamed.^[5]

Related Research Articles

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Functional linguistics is an approach to the study of language characterized by taking systematically into account the speaker's and the hearer's side, and the communicative needs of the speaker and of the given language community. Linguistic functionalism spawned in the 1920s to 1930s from Ferdinand de Saussure's systematic structuralist approach to language (1916).

In linguistics, a grammar is the set of rules for how a natural language is structured, as demonstrated by its speakers or writers. Grammar rules may concern the use of clauses, phrases, and words. The term may also refer to the study of such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are, broadly speaking, two different ways to study grammar: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.

The following outline is provided as an overview and topical guide to linguistics:

Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.

Universal grammar (UG), in modern linguistics, is the theory of the innate biological component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that there are innate constraints on what the grammar of a possible human language could be. When linguistic stimuli are received in the course of language acquisition, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare, and the theory of universal grammar remains controversial among linguists.

An idiom is a phrase or expression that usually presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase. Some phrases which become figurative idioms, however, do retain the phrase's literal meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom's figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five thousand idiomatic expressions.

A creole language, or simply creole, is a stable natural language that develops from the process of different languages simplifying and mixing into a new form, and then that form expanding and elaborating into a full-fledged language with native speakers, all within a fairly brief period. While the concept is similar to that of a mixed or hybrid language, creoles are often characterized by a tendency to systematize their inherited grammar. Like any language, creoles are characterized by a consistent system of grammar, possess large stable vocabularies, and are acquired by children as their native language. These three features distinguish a creole language from a pidgin. Creolistics, or creology, is the study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.

Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people.

In linguistics, transformational grammar (TG) or transformational-generative grammar (TGG) is part of the theory of generative grammar, especially of natural languages. It considers grammar to be a system of rules that generate exactly those combinations of words that form grammatical sentences in a given language and involves the use of defined operations to produce new sentences from existing ones.

Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:

to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families
to develop general theories about how and why language changes
to describe the history of speech communities
to study the history of words, i.e. etymology
to explore the impact of cultural and social factors on language evolution.

Linguistic prescription, also called prescriptivism or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes informed by linguistic purism, such normative practices often propagate the belief that some usages are incorrect, inconsistent, illogical, lack communicative effect, or are of low aesthetic value, even in cases where such usage is more common than the prescribed usage. They may also include judgments on socially proper and politically correct language use.

Standard Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, and Serbian are different national variants and official registers of the pluricentric Serbo-Croatian language.

In linguistics, mutual intelligibility is a relationship between languages or dialects in which speakers of different but related varieties can readily understand each other without prior familiarity or special effort. It is sometimes used as an important criterion for distinguishing languages from dialects, although sociolinguistic factors are often also used.

Etymology is the study of the origin and evolution of words, including their meanings across time and their constituent morphemes and phonemes. Such a word origin itself is also called an etymology. The modern scientific study is a subfield of historical linguistics, philology, and semiotics, and draws upon comparative semantics, morphology, pragmatics, and phonetics in order to construct a comprehensive and chronological catalogue of all meanings that a morpheme, phoneme, word, or sign has carried across time.

Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide an explanatory semantic representation. Explanatory in this sense refers to the ability of a given linguistic theory to describe how a component of language is acquired by a child.

In linguistics, linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one knows when they know a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which includes all other factors that allow one to use one's language in practice.

Language documentation is a subfield of linguistics which aims to describe the grammar and use of human languages. It aims to provide a comprehensive record of the linguistic practices characteristic of a given speech community. Language documentation seeks to create as thorough a record as possible of the speech community for both posterity and language revitalization. This record can be public or private depending on the needs of the community and the purpose of the documentation. In practice, language documentation can range from solo linguistic anthropological fieldwork to the creation of vast online archives that contain dozens of different languages, such as FirstVoices or OLAC.

Linguistic insecurity comprises feelings of anxiety, self-consciousness, or lack of confidence in the mind of a speaker surrounding their use of language. Often, this anxiety comes from speakers' belief that their speech does not conform to the perceived standard and/or the style of language expected by the speakers' interlocutor(s). Linguistic insecurity is situationally induced and is often based on a feeling of inadequacy regarding personal performance in certain contexts, rather than a fixed attribute of an individual. This insecurity can lead to stylistic, and phonetic shifts away from an affected speaker's default speech variety; these shifts may be performed consciously on the part of the speaker, or may be reflective of an unconscious effort to conform to a more prestigious or context-appropriate variety or style of speech. Linguistic insecurity is linked to the perception of speech varieties in any community, and so may vary based on socioeconomic class and gender. It is also especially pertinent in multilingual societies.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguistics is based on a theoretical as well as a descriptive study of language and is also interlinked with the applied fields of language studies and language learning, which entails the study of specific languages. Before the 20th century, linguistics evolved in conjunction with literary study and did not employ scientific methods. Modern-day linguistics is considered a science because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language – i.e., the cognitive, the social, the cultural, the psychological, the environmental, the biological, the literary, the grammatical, the paleographical, and the structural.

References

1 2 Gröschel, Bernhard (2009). Das Serbokroatische zwischen Linguistik und Politik: mit einer Bibliographie zum postjugoslavischen Sprachenstreit[Serbo-Croatian Between Linguistics and Politics: With a Bibliography of the Post-Yugoslav Language Dispute]. Lincom Studies in Slavic Linguistics (in German). Vol. 34. Munich: Lincom Europa. pp. 147, 312–329. ISBN 978-3-929075-79-3. LCCN 2009473660. OCLC 428012015. OL 15295665W.
1 2 Kordić, Snježana (2010). Jezik i nacionalizam [Language and Nationalism](PDF). Rotulus Universitas (in Serbo-Croatian). Zagreb: Durieux. pp. 116–119. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3467646. ISBN 978-953-188-311-5. LCCN 2011520778. OCLC 729837512. OL 15270636W. CROSBI 475567 . Archived (PDF) from the original on June 1, 2012. Retrieved March 5, 2019.
1 2 Jackendoff, Ray (November 5–8, 2003). The Structure of Language: Why It Matters to Education (PDF). Learning and the Brain. Cambridge, MA. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 9, 2021.
1 2 3 "Linguistic Purism in Germany - Folk Linguistics". Department of German. University of Bristol. Archived from the original on October 30, 2005.
↑ McRae, Mary Ann (September 6, 1996). "A fishy name will stay the same". CNN. Fishkill, NY. Archived from the original on October 29, 2014.

External links

Ask a Linguist with FAQs Archived 2016-09-04 at the Wayback Machine - linguists' answers to questions based on folk linguistic beliefs
PBS, Language Prejudice & Myth: "They Speak Really Bad English Down South and in New York City"
Language Log - Prescriptivism and folk linguistics

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[BerGr-1] 1 2 Gröschel, Bernhard (2009). Das Serbokroatische zwischen Linguistik und Politik: mit einer Bibliographie zum postjugoslavischen Sprachenstreit[Serbo-Croatian Between Linguistics and Politics: With a Bibliography of the Post-Yugoslav Language Dispute]. Lincom Studies in Slavic Linguistics (in German). Vol. 34. Munich: Lincom Europa. pp. 147, 312–329. ISBN 978-3-929075-79-3. LCCN 2009473660. OCLC 428012015. OL 15295665W.

[KordiJin-2] 1 2 Kordić, Snježana (2010). Jezik i nacionalizam [Language and Nationalism](PDF). Rotulus Universitas (in Serbo-Croatian). Zagreb: Durieux. pp. 116–119. doi:10.2139/ssrn.3467646. ISBN 978-953-188-311-5. LCCN 2011520778. OCLC 729837512. OL 15270636W. CROSBI 475567 . Archived (PDF) from the original on June 1, 2012. Retrieved March 5, 2019.

[Jackendoff-3] 1 2 Jackendoff, Ray (November 5–8, 2003). The Structure of Language: Why It Matters to Education (PDF). Learning and the Brain. Cambridge, MA. Archived from the original (PDF) on September 9, 2021.

[German-4] 1 2 3 "Linguistic Purism in Germany - Folk Linguistics". Department of German. University of Bristol. Archived from the original on October 30, 2005.

[5] McRae, Mary Ann (September 6, 1996). "A fishy name will stay the same". CNN. Fishkill, NY. Archived from the original on October 29, 2014.

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Folk linguistics

Contents

Examples

See also

Related Research Articles

References

External links