Why it is time to accept that the English language today is a diversity policentric entity, and no variety is inherently superior to (or more real than) any other.
The new video is out now! Watch it in the language you prefer! 😉
🇬🇧 The myth of ‘real English’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UcB-IDEQT4
🇪🇸 El mito del ‘verdadero inglés’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3DZjHDlfig
🇮🇹 Il mito del ‘vero inglese’:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIs_IGqT-0c
The links to all YouTube videos are listed in reverse chronological order here.
The ‘Exploring Language(s)’ YouTube channel is officially kicking off! 🙂
A short video introducing my YouTube channel ‘Exploring Language(s)’ is now available. You can watch it in your favorite language by clicking on the relevant link below! 😉 All my YouTube videos will also be stored in the apposite section of the website. 🙂
🇬🇧 ‘What is Exploring Language(s)?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rq_1zJPFmdI
🇪🇸 ‘Qué es Exploring Language(s)?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWcjvfPNMro
🇮🇹 ‘Che cos’è Exploring Language(s)?’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UrfxcFSP80
This video is just a short introduction. Honestly, I know that the result is not perfect: it is quite evident that I was not at ease in front of the camera. Moreover, the recording and editing of a simple video took me days and was quite stressful. However, I am thrilled to launch the channel. It is the beginning of a new project that is making me rediscover the joy of learning something new from scratch through a process of trial and error. In my next videos, I will do my best to get better and better results. 🙂
I have just published an opinion article on the Spanish website Globedia. It deals with the longstanding myth that some language varieties are inherently better than others, illustrating, in particular, the case of English and, to a lesser extent, Spanish. It is, for the most part, a translation of this post into Spanish. Read it online or download the PDF! Please comment and let me know what you think! 🙂
From the beginning of my M.A. studies back in 2008, I have always approached language from a broadly cognitive/constructionist perspective, in the belief that, within this framework, I could best account for the target linguistic phenomena. Throughout the years, I dedicated myself to gain a broad and in-depth knowledge of this paradigm and applied it to my case-studies with commitment and enthusiasm. However, by the time I was approaching the end of my Ph.D., something had changed. I had begun to see inconsistencies within the framework and to question many assumptions I had previously taken for granted. Therefore, I began to explore different frameworks and to consider how to combine insights from other approaches. Still, I was experiencing a general sense of dissatisfaction concerning these theoretical frameworks. Then, one day, I came across a paper by the Finnish linguist Esa Itkonen entitled ‘On explanation in linguistics.’ In this article, the scholar boldly states at the onset, “[…] I have resisted here the utopian impulse which is all too common among the representatives of ‘theoretical’ linguistics: the present is thought to be full of promises that will be redeemed in the near future. As far as I can see, the reverse is true. If the present moment is experienced as less than satisfactory, it is so concerning the past and not to the future. Is this view justified? Certainly, no one who is ignorant of the history of linguistics has the competence to answer this question.”
That was an eye-opener.
What did I know about the history of my discipline? Very little, I had to admit. In my student years, I had never had the chance to attend a course in the history of linguistics. Whenever the ‘past’ was mentioned, it was just in passing (and these mentions, normally, referred to de Saussure or, at best, Franz Boas). The received view went as follows. After the publication of Chomsky’s book ‘Syntactic structures,’ generativism replaced structuralism as the mainstream framework. Later on, a few competitors arose. So strong was the advent of Chomskyan linguistics, that some overenthusiastic scholars claimed that more knowledge about human language was gained in the 1980s than in the previous 2,500 years (!). Advocates of rivals traditions (such as construction grammar, functional typology, or sociolinguistics) generally maintained the same forgetful attitude toward structural and pre-structural linguistics.
As I read Itkonen’s paper, I grew intensely curious and decided to go on and read his books and the sources mentioned therein, in particular authors such as Eugenio Coşeriu and Raimo Anttila, among others. Not only have these authors in common a vast knowledge of the history of linguistics, but they also have a strong background in philosophy, classical languages, literature, and so on. Reading their work lead me to look for further readings, including both primary and secondary sources. In particular, I focused my attention on (especially American) structural linguistics, but I also explored in some detail the kind of linguistics which was practiced in antiquity and not only in Europe, but also in India, China, and the Arab world. Becoming acquainted with the linguistics of the past was a really rewarding experience, which helped me see how distorted the general idea of linguistics as science we tend to have, at least in the Western world.
We tend to hold the belief that successive approaches replace the previous ones because of greater scientific merit, and that this change is relatively quick and sharp. This is far from accurate, as often pointed out by historiographers of linguistics such as e.g., Dell H. Hymes or E.F.K. Koerner, whose calls generally tend to fall on deaf ears among theoretical/empirical linguists who do not share the same historically-oriented outlook. More importantly, knowing the past of the discipline is necessary to appreciate the many similarities, along with the differences, between contemporary linguistic approaches and past practices. To this end, it would be very important to teach the history of linguistics to students, although they may often find it hard to follow or, in the worst-case scenario, see it as a waste of time (but it should not be too hard for the lecturer to help them change their mind). Even more importantly, it would be relevant to point out that the so-called (somewhat inaccurately) ‘paradigm shift’ which can be observed in the history of Western linguistics is not to be found in the history of linguistics in India, where the practice of grammar is still based on Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī (c. 400 B.C.), a grammar of Sanskrit still unsurpassed today. A similar consideration also holds for Sībawayhi’s Al-kitāb fī an-naḥw (c. A.D. 760-796) in Arab countries.
As a consequence, it would be wise to adopt a less Western-centered and more inclusive approach to the teaching of linguistics. Indeed, while Pāṇini’s work, the oldest grammar of a known language, is often mentioned as a monumental intellectual achievement, it is normally only known by fame by non-specialists, despite the availability of exegetic sources (though admittedly not free from controversy). The significance of this work could not be stressed enough: this grammar, consisting of 3,959 rules on syntax, morphology, and semantics, composed and transmitted orally, was more advanced than any theory put forward in the Western world until the 20th century. As Itkonen suggests in the conclusion of his book ‘Universal history of linguistics,’ not only does this call into question the too often taken for granted Western ‘intellectual supremacy,’ but it would also suggest that we should revise our beliefs about the potential of the human mind, which we see through the lens of our culture. It is no chance that centuries ago certain Eastern societies developed the ability to exert control over one’s thoughts and emotions, which is often still seen as a utopia in our hyperkinetic Western world. It may, therefore, be time for us to forget our egotism and dive into the adventure of exploring other traditions as well as our past.
When I was a student, it was not infrequent for me to have an idea and write an essay in one go. In the phase of editing, I could not see any faults in my essay because I knew what I wanted to say. Much to my disappointment, when I had my essay read by somebody else, sometimes I found out that I had communicated something quite different from what I had in mind. I believe this is one of the most insidious pitfalls in essay writing. Indeed, your intentions are unfathomable (and irrelevant) to the reader: s/he will only know (and be interested in) what you have actually written. In other words, poor word choice can fatally undermine the logic of your argument. I will now clarify this point with the aid of a simple example.
Let us suppose that you are describing an entity, which is made up of three elements standing in a given relationship with each other: your description of this scenario must be careful and consistent; otherwise, you may find yourself in trouble. Let us also suppose that you have decided to introduce your entity as ‘A’. Later in the text, you want to provide some more details about this entity and say it is made up of the three components ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’. A (not so) small oversight has led you to claim, inconsistently, that ‘A’ is at the same time the whole entity and one of its three components. This already amounts to a reductio ad absurdum of your argument and you are also running the risk of going further astray. For instance, you may later term the relationship between the two components ‘A’ and ‘B’ as ‘C’. Then, you would be claiming that ‘A’ is an entity that is made up of itself and two more components, one of which (‘C’) is the relationship between ‘A’ itself and the other component (‘B’). The danger of infinite regress would then be looming large.
You may be tempted to dismiss the present post as ‘stating the obvious’ and/or dealing with a trivial issue. Though perhaps legitimate, this comment does not find support in my experience. It is true that the problem mentioned above can be resolved by rephrasing the concept so that ‘A’ is an entity made up of three components ‘B’, ‘C’, and ‘D’, with the relationship between ‘B’ and ‘C’ being labeled ‘E’ (for the sake of completeness, let us add that the relationship between ‘C’ and ‘D’ could be labeled ‘F’ and the one between ‘B’ and ‘D’ could be termed ‘G’). However, this is the kind of issue that tends to slip under the radar. Indeed, not only can you find this kind of oversight in student essays, but also in academic books. For instance, in an otherwise well-written monograph on English phraseology, an internationally recognized linguist claimed that his analysis was “… expected to reveal very strong qualitative trends rather than statistically measurable patterns” (the emphasis is mine). This assertion is controversial because the notion of ‘trend’ is inherently quantitative, i.e. a trend is a statistically measurable pattern. In a nutshell, the author is claiming that the analysis is expected to reveal ‘As’ rather than ‘Bs’ but he is overlooking the fact that ‘A’ and ‘B’ are extensionally identical.
Putting the above quotation into context, I guess that the author aimed to say that the scope of his study was not carrying out a detailed statistical analysis, but rather identifying general tendencies and then proceeding to carry out a qualitative analysis. However, this is just my interpretation. To prevent misunderstandings in your essays, you will need to put forward sound arguments as clearly as you can. To do so, reflecting on what you want to say will be vital. However, the way you choose to say it is no less important since an unfortunate lexical choice may turn into a serious logical problem. Indeed, it seems safe to state that, in academic writing, logic and word choice must go hand in hand.
It happens very often, and it is quite amusing. Speaking about someplace in the English-speaking world, at some point somebody (often a non-native speaker) will say that locals “do not speak ‘real English’ there.” Even if I limit the scope of my attention to England, I have heard this comment about the North West, the North East, the West Midlands, the East Midlands, the South, and recently even London! It is funny because it would mean that ‘real English’ is not spoken anywhere in England. I have singled England out because I live there, but of course, I have heard the same comment about the rest of the UK, not to mention the US, Australia, Jamaica, and so on… nobody in the English-speaking world speaks real English! This rather awkward claim makes one wonder what on earth this ‘real English’ is supposed to be.
When a native speaker mentions ‘real English,’ they normally refer to a variety or a cluster of varieties (usually, including their own) that are supposed, for some reason, to be better representatives of the English language than others. Sometimes these comments are made in jest but sometimes they are meant to be taken seriously. When a non-native speaker mentions the phrase ‘real English’ instead, they normally mean a speech that is similar to the English they were taught in school. In European countries, this is usually a standard variety of British English, which is supposed to be close to the variety spoken in London (as if a single, uniform variety of English could be detected in such a diverse megalopolis). Both native and non-native speakers are wrong on this point.
The former are mistaken because although different varieties are more prestigious than others, and more used in formal situations, the English language belongs to the whole English-speaking community. No variety is inherently ‘superior to’ (let alone ‘more real than’) any other: it is a matter of social perception, which depends on variables such as region, class, age, gender, and so forth (the interested reader is referred to the sociolinguistic literature on this topic, in particular, the seminal work of William Labov in the US and Peter Trudgill in the UK) Non-native speakers are mistaken because the variety of English they are taught in school is just a variation-eliminating idealization based on a (rather artificial) variety which is used in the media and other formal contexts. The importance of this kind of language can hardly be overstated, and it has always proved its worth in language teaching. However, standard varieties are largely the result of a process of abstraction, and surely there is no reason to consider any of them as representing ‘real English’.
In conclusion, there is no such thing as an opposition between ‘real’ and ‘non-real’ English. The English language is a diverse, multifaceted entity, which is characterized by a myriad of (to a large extent, mutually intelligible) varieties whose commonalities and differences cut across a range of dimensions. Of course, non-standard varieties can be hard to understand for the non-native speaker, but there is no reason to claim that these varieties are any less representative of ‘real English’ than more standard ones. Rather, the high level of diversity which characterizes contemporary English reflects the different historical and cultural heritage of the many distinct English-speaking communities around the world. Therefore, while it is a fact that some varieties of English are more standard and/or more prestigious than others, we are not entitled to claim that any of them is ‘real English’. Instead, we should recognize that all these varieties are integral parts of this beautiful, multi-colored entity that is the English language today.
Image credit: Talking People
In a passage of his book ‘Fluid concepts and creative analogies,’ the famous A.I. scientist Douglas R. Hofstadter ridiculed small, pocket bilingual dictionaries while praising thick multilingual thesauri. Although I see his point, I do not share his views on this matter (to be sure, the book is fantastic). Indeed, it would be unreasonable to pick up a pocket dictionary of, say, English and expect to find a comprehensive coverage of the English lexicon, let alone an introduction to the language. However, dismissing pocket dictionaries altogether does not seem reasonable. As with any other resources, I believe it depends on the use one makes of them.
It is just wrong to assume that every person who buys a dictionary aims to become a fluent speaker of the language. In my experience as a private language tutor, there are many reasons why people may want to become familiar with a language. Some prospective learners may have a family in a country where the language is official. Others may enjoy going there on holiday. Others still may have a passion associated with that country (e.g., in the case of the United Kingdom, it is often pop and rock music). In all these cases, they have no ambition to attain a high proficiency level; consequently, they will not spend tons of money on thick dictionaries, grammar books, or compelling and expensive courses. Therefore, as a private tutor, I must tailor my classes to the individual needs of every single student. The choice of the resources to be used must be maximally functional to reach the goals set at the beginning of the course. Sometimes, these are very ambitious (as in the case of an absolute beginner planning to move abroad within six months) but are often more humble (as in the case of a learner who enjoys visiting a country for a couple of weeks a year).
Of course, a professional linguist or language teacher will need many advanced resources. Indeed, we often spend a long time in libraries scrutinizing dictionaries, grammar books, textbooks, exercise books, collocation dictionaries, idiom dictionaries, urban dictionaries, and lists of common mistakes. We do it out of genuine interest. Alas, the linguist’s passion is often not the language learner’s. The vast majority of learners will content themselves with carrying out relatively down-to-earth conversations with native and non-native speakers of the language. Each case will require a careful selection of appropriate tools, possibly a combination of paper and electronic resources. The only wrong resources are those containing factually incorrect information (or are poorly written and organized). As for the rest, it depends on the use teacher and learner together make of them.
Enrico Torre 
