“EVEN THE ENGLISH PEOPLE SAY IT”: ON LANGUAGE AND STANDARD
Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose, PhD.
Often, people get to tell me that some of the expressions I describe as nonstandard are heard among native speakers of English who speak no other language. I’ve even been asked by some if I mean I speak the language better than the “owners”. In one of the recent confrontations, a friend said to me “R. Kelly said if I could turn back the hands of time. Now you’re saying it’s I wish I could turn the clock back. Even if you speak better than us, do you speak better than R. Kelly?” Funny question right? Interestingly the answer is not a very direct one. The controversy surrounding such interrogation is what I shall be addressing in this piece.
To begin, my choice of standard and nonstandard expressions in my daily lessons is mainly to avoid the descriptive fallacy around the use of terms such as correctness and incorrectness in linguistic description. No doubt, descriptive grammarians have argued that every utterance that performs its communicative essence cannot be adjudged incorrect. This is because communication is the basic essence of talk. Language like many other living phenomena is open to dynamism and creativity. This, however, must be put under check to avoid all forms of abuse. This can be likened to the case of human beings who enjoy fundamental human rights but are, at the same time, constrained by laws.
Among other definitions, standard is defined as something used as a measure, norm, or model in comparative evaluations. In relation to language, this is to say that every convenient style of using language cannot be accepted as a model for language use, especially because language must serve some official functions. The official and pedagogical functions of language make regularities a necessity. Again, the global spread of a language such as English will warrant standardisation in order to ensure global intelligibility.
It is essential to state that what can be described as the standard form of any language which is usually the variety used for writing and teaching is often used by less than fifteen percent of the language users. This standard variety is often considered the sophisticated variety which, sometimes, do not befit casual settings. For instance, the expression “It was me” is not only popular, even among native speakers, but it is also befitting of casual conversations. The expression is, on the contrary, nonstandard and should be rendered as “It was I” in official documents and examination situations. Also, many native speakers of English conveniently use the tag question “init” for every kind of sentence. Tag formation, on the other hand, is rule governed in standard usage.
This piece argues that all languages have their standard variet(ies)y co-existing with informal usages among both native and non-native speakers. Everyone who uses any language in official capacities is, therefore, expected to have a mastery of such language and bear in mind that standards are codified rules which, in most cases, must be learnt even by native speakers of the language.
(c) 2019 Ganiu Abisoye Bamgbose (Dr GAB)
