[This is the continuation of a  series of articles on Languages and Linguistics that I am writing for a magazine for school kids, EducationEdge, that a friend of mine has started recently. These articles are targeted at students of classes VIII to XII. I will keep posting those articles on Linguistrix once they are published. The first article can be found here.]

In the previous article, I introduced you to Linguistics and discussed a few examples from various fields within this discipline. This time, we shall move ahead and look at how languages are looked at from an analytical point of view.

In school days, language is synonymous with having to learn grammar rules, do pointless transformations (convert a complex sentence into a compound sentence, or convert to/from passive voice, or insert appropriate clauses etc.) It also brings bad memories to most students who manage to score close to full marks in all other subjects but are always thwarted by English/Hindi. Linguistics, thankfully, is much more fun and is a lot more analytical. Whatever language education you have had so far has mostly emphasized on correctness. The emphasis was on writing correct stuff, and to this tune, you were taught rules and your knowledge of these rules was tested, graded and so on. But linguistics doesn’t care about what a style manual or a grammar text dictates about language—it looks at evidence in the form of what native speakers consider grammatical in their language. If you look at the language you have acquired, you will realize that most of the rules that you seem to know were never explicitly told to you. Sample this:

  • Who did you give the book to?

Does it sound correct to your ears? It mostly did. However, if you look from the point of view of prescriptive grammar books which try to impose upon you certain constructions (and ban others) without fact-checking them with native usage, this sentence has not one but two errors. Hard-core prescriptivists will tell you that the first word has to be whom and that you couldn’t end a sentence with a preposition like to. According to them, the correct sentence would be:

  • To whom did you give the book?

Now, let’s consider another sentence. Read it out and ask yourself

  • To whom you give did book the?

That almost hurt, right? This is clearly an ungrammatical sentence. However, if you look at your language education, you were rarely taught sentence structure and syntax in detail, but can still very easily figure out the ungrammaticality. Why is this so?

Speakers of a community acquire the language used by that community as it is, without incorporating silly biases about what language should be according to a group of curmudgeonly prescriptivists. You grew up with speakers of the language who rarely made a distinction between who/whom and who frequently put prepositions at the end of their sentences, because this is how their language works. How do we decide what is called grammatical and what isn’t? We look at data. We see the writings of good authors, look at usage of the language in mass media and on the internet, look at corpora (data banks) of conversations between native speakers. A good dictionary or usage book takes into account all of these things and presents bare facts to you, and then let’s you decide what best fits what you want to convey. Let’s summarize the facts. Languages are not

  • Necessarily logical—Just because multiplying two negatives numbers in Maths gives you a positive number does not mean that using two negatives in a sentence will necessarily give you a positive sentence. In Standard English, yes, but not in many other dialects of English, nor in languages like French. Trousers constitute one piece of garment, but the word is plural, while bikini, constituting two separate pieces of garment, is still singular. That being said, while language may have such flaws based on everyday logic, the sub-stratum is still very structured and can be analyzed, as we will discuss in subsequent articles.
  • Necessarily optimal/space efficient—the word that in I think (that) he is not well is optional, so, from considerations of space efficiency, there would be no point using it. Such logic does not work. Speakers are still free to use either of the two sentences and they are both perfectly grammatical.
  • Superior to other languages—there is nothing inherently superior about Standard English or about Standard Hindi, the kind we are taught as correct. What dialect of a language gets to be considered as the prestige dialect (a dialect which is considered as posh or educated or whose speakers are considered respectable) is a socio-political issue, not a linguistic one. All of the (close to) 6000 languages of the world show the same kind of underlying structure, whether they are spoken by people of developed nations or tribes in the Andamans.

Here’s a list of a few rules of English which are not actually rules:

  • Don’t split infinitives—it is perfectly grammatical (and often stylistically preferable) to insert an adverb between to and the verb. Eg. …to boldly go where no man has gone before.
  • Don’t start sentences with conjunctions—it is perfectly fine to do so as long as you don’t create clumsy or fragmental sentences.
  • Don’t end sentences with prepositions—it is grammatical in English to do so. Eg. What do you want the book for?

However, please note that many teachers and editors might still insist that you follow these and several other silly rules. If your teacher/education board wants you to follow them, please do so, but please also keep in mind the spirit of looking at language in a scientific way.