As linguists studied among the Indians, they departed from the traditional point of view concerning languages. Up to that time, the stress in language study had been upon historical linguistics. The method used in studying the history of different languages was to examine extant manuscripts in order to detect changes in vocabulary and form. These researchers in language,
however, were forced to concentrate on oral language in conversational speech due to the fact that the Indians had no written alphabet. Their concern lay with what people said, not with what the learned scholars of society wrote. From their work came the basic tenets of descriptive, or structural, linguistics.
First, working with unwritten Indian dialects convinced the descriptive linguists that language was primarily an oral phenomenon. All native languages are learned orally before reading is begun. (In fact, in the 1920s the majority of the world's languages had no written form.) In their opinion, language was considered to be a stream of oral sounds. Written language was a secondary representation of speech.
Descriptive linguists made no attempt to try to force all languages into the classical mold. They felt that each language was a unique system and that each must be learned within the context of its own system, not in comparison to another. Brooks (1964, pp. 56-57) was reflecting this opinion when he asserted, "What he [the learner] does not know is that the sound system and the structural system of the new language are different in nearly every detail from those in his mother tongue, that meanings in the new language will never be identical with those in English, and that there is no more a universal grammar than there is a universal diet."
Rather than beginning with Latin grammar and searching for that system in the language being studied, the descriptive linguists began with the language itself and studied the recurring patterns. As they pursued this study of patterns, they concluded that each language system is a purely arbitrary one that is learned by the members of the speech community. In their study of language patterns, the major portion of their attention was focused on the phonology, phonemes, and the morphemes of the language.
Another idea of the descriptive linguists was that correct speech is what people say, not what grammarians decree they should say. The standard by which language was evaluated was not some formulation of abstract rules and regulations. Instead, proper language was to be based on descriptions of how the language is used by the speakers of that language.
The Indians themselves were not of any great help in studying their language. They spoke the language, but they could not describe it. The patterns of the language had to be classified on the basis of collected samples of speech. This led the descriptive linguists to the conclusion that native speakers cannot describe their own language system. At the same time, it was evident that language is overlearned to the point at which the speakers are able to focus their attention on what is being said rather than how. In his Outline Guide for the Practical Study of Foreign Languages , Bloomfield (1942, p. 12) stated, "The command of a language is not a matter of knowledge: the speakers are quite unable to describe the habits which make up their
language. The command of a language is a matter of practice/' and " language learning is overlearning: anything else is of no use ."