Laurie Bauer and Peter Trudgill
The main reason for presenting this book is that we believe that, on the whole, linguists have not been good about informing the general public about language. To see this, you have only to look at some of the major books about language aimed at a non-specialist audience which have appeared in recent years. Robert McCrum, William Cran and Robert MacNeil’s The Story of English (New York: Viking, 1986), which derived from the TV programme of the same name, is written by an editor, a producer of current affairs films and a TV reporter. Bill Bryson’s entertaining The Mother Tongue (London: Penguin, 1990) is written by a journalist, and Steven Pinker’s tour deforce The Language Instinct (London: Penguin, 1994) is written by a psychologist. Only David Crystal’s The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) are written by a linguist. So what have the linguists been doing? And why is it that if you look at something written by the most influential linguists (Noam Chomsky, Claude Hagège, William Labov and others) you will not necessarily come away any wiser than you were when you began? The answer is that our knowledge about language has been expanding at a phenomenal rate during the latter half of the twentieth century. Linguists have been busy keeping up with that developing knowledge and explaining their own findings to other linguists. The most influential linguists are the ones who have had the most important messages for other linguists rather than for the general public. For various reasons (including the highly technical nature of some of the work), very few of them have tried to explain their findings to a lay audience. That being the case, you might wonder whether journalists, editors, poets and psychologists are not, despite everything, precisely the people who should be telling us about language. They are the ones who have had to break into the charmed circle and extract relevant information for their own needs.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we take a different line. We believe that if you want to know about human respiratory physiology you should ask a medic or a physiologist, not an athlete who has been breathing successfully for a number of years. If you want to know how an underground train works you should ask an engineer and not a commuter. And if you want to know how language works you should ask a linguist and not someone who has used language successfully in the past. In all of these cases, the reasoning is the same: users do not need to have a conscious knowledge of how a system works in order to exploit it. Explanations of the system require the type of knowledge that only the specialist can provide.
We have therefore invited some specialists – linguists – to address a number of important issues connected with language, and in this book you will find their responses. We have, though, been very specific in what we have asked them to write about, and that specificity requires some explanation. As linguists, we are very much aware that ordinary people have some well-established ideas about language. We meet these ideas when non-linguists talk to us at parties, in the common rooms of universities, from members of our families and in the media. Some of these ideas are so well established that we might say they were part of our culture. It is in this sense that we refer to them as myths (although our colleagues in mythological studies might not approve of this use of the term). But in very many cases, our reactions, as professionals, to these attitudes, to these myths, is: ‘Well, it’s not actually as simple as that.’ Sometimes we think that the established myth is downright wrong. Sometimes we think that two things are being confused. Sometimes we think that the implications of the myth have not been thought through, or that the myth is based on a false premise, or that the myth fails to take into account some important pieces of information.
So what we have done in this book is to choose some of these pieces of cultural wisdom about language and ask professional linguists to explain why things may not be as straightforward as they seem. In each case we have tried to present as a title a brief formulation of the myth, and then we have asked the linguists to consider the idea from their professional point of view. If they think the idea is wrong, they have said so. If they think it is based on a false premise, they have said so. If they think that people may not realize where the idea comes from, they have explained this. But in every case, you will find that the linguists are not totally happy with the myth encapsulated in the title, even though they may agree with some aspects of it.
You will notice that a number of common themes appear and reappear in the chapters that follow. We consider this repetition to be a sign that, however surprising our points of view may be to non-linguists, the professional linguistics community is agreed about many fundamental issues. Some of these topics reappear because of the nature of the questions we have asked: for example, the strength of the influence of Latin upon English; the ongoing and inevitable nature of language change; the fact that different languages do similar tasks in rather different ways. You will find other such recurrent themes as you read the book. One of the recurrent themes – one that has encouraged us to produce this book – is that people in general are very concerned about the state of English and wish to know more about language.
Crucially for this book, some of the recurrent themes show the ways in which the beliefs of linguists about language may differ from the beliefs about language held in the wider community. We are agreed that all languages and dialects are complex and structured means of expression and perception, and that prejudices based on the way other people speak are akin to racism and sexism. We are agreed that most views about the superiority of one language or dialect over another have social and historical rather than genuinely linguistic origins. And we are agreed that languages and dialects are unique and miraculous products of the human brain and human society. They should be discussed respectfully and knowledgeably and, for all that we may marvel at them as objects of enormous complexity and as vehicles, sometimes, of sublime expression, they should also be discussed dispassionately and objectively if we are to achieve a better understanding of this uniquely human characteristic.