Grammar, you’ll remember from Chapter 6, is the way we build sentences out of words. When we learn to talk, we discover the rules which control the way this is done. In English, we hear lots of sentences like this:
I bought a coat.
Little Johnny broke a window.
The postman delivered some letters.
We can work out that each sentence has three parts. Someone (‘I’, ‘Little Johnny’, ‘The postman’) did something (‘bought’, ‘broke’, ‘delivered’), and something was affected by the result of that action – ‘a coat’ was bought, ‘a window’ was broken, ‘some letters’ were delivered. Everybody talks and writes like that in English. They have to put the words in that order to be understood. If someone began to say things like this:
Bought a coat I.
A window broke little Johnny.
Delivered the some letters postman.
we’d call for the men in white coats.
Similarly, we learn that the parts of sentences have rules too. We say ‘a coat’, ‘the postman’, and ‘some letters’, not ‘coat a’, ‘postman the’, and ‘letters some’. We say ‘little Johnny’, not ‘Johnny little’. Everybody agrees about that too.
These are some of the basic rules of standard English. And if we know some grammar terms, we can say what the rules are. ‘The’ is called the definite article. Words like ‘postman’ and ‘window’ are called nouns. So we can say, ‘In English, the definite article always comes before the noun.’
Do all languages have the same rule? Not at all. In some languages, the definite article goes after the noun. In Romanian, the word for ‘hotel’ is the same as English, and the word for ‘the’ is ‘ul’. But if we want to say ‘the hotel’ in Romanian, we have to say ‘hotelul’ – ‘hotel the’.
The English language has hundreds of rules of grammar whose purpose is to help us say whatever we want. If we want to talk about more than one thing, the language lets us do so by giving us singulars and plurals – ‘egg’ and ‘eggs’, ‘mouse’ and ‘mice’. If we want to describe things, the language gives us ways of comparing – ‘big’, ‘bigger’, and ‘biggest’. If we want to talk about what’s happening in the future, the language gives us several choices, each with a slightly different meaning – ‘I will go’, ‘I might go’, ‘I’m about to go’, and so on.
These are all examples where every English language user does the same thing. In other words, they’re part of standard English. But every now and again we come across sentences where not everyone does the same thing. For instance, how would you express the idea that there’s no post office in a village? Here are just a few of the ways:
1. The village does not have a post office.
2. The village has no post office.
3. The village doesn’t have a post office.
4. The village hasn’t got a post office.
5. The village hasn’t got no post office.
6. The village ain’t got no post office.
They all say the same thing, but they don’t all feel the same, do they? Examples 1 and 2 sound rather careful and formal. Numbers 3 and 4 sound a bit more everyday and colloquial. Examples 5 and 6 sound straight off the street.
Which would you see in a newspaper report or hear on the television news? Numbers 1 and 2 are the most likely. We might hear numbers 3 and 4 from a roving reporter who was visiting the village. And we might hear numbers 5 and 6 from the people in the village that the reporter was interviewing. But we’d never see numbers 5 and 6 in a newspaper, unless the reporter was quoting what someone had said. And would we ever hear them coming out of the mouth of a newsreader? Try and imagine it:
This is the six o’clock news. Thousands of people took to the streets today in the village of Plopton in Yorkshire, protesting about the closure of their local store. The village ain’t got no post office, and…
I don’t think so.
Usages like ‘ain’t’ and ‘hasn’t got no’ are examples of non-standard English. They’re both used by millions of people in their everyday speech, but they aren’t felt to be ‘good English’. For over 200 years, English-speaking society has lived with the notion that some ways of speaking and writing are ‘good’ and some are ‘bad’. The same point applies to other kinds of behaviour, such as table manners. It’s bad manners to put a knife in our mouth. It’s bad manners to slurp our soup. It’s bad manners to pick our bowl up and suck in the soup. On the other hand, it’s good manners if we tip our bowl slightly away from us and use our spoon to eat the soup (quietly).
Why is it ‘good’ to eat your soup one way and not another? It’s just the way things are. Sometime in the dim and distant past it became the fashion, among the most powerful people in society, and it stayed that way. And if we don’t want to be criticized, that’s how we have to behave.
Why is it ‘good’ to say ‘hasn’t got any’ and bad to say ‘ain’t got no’? The same reason. Sometime in the past – during the eighteenth century, to be precise – the most powerful people in society began to speak and write in a way which they felt to be especially elegant. They heard ordinary people on the streets say such things as ‘ain’t got no’, so they decided that they would speak and write differently. Several other kinds of sentence were affected too. No upper-class person would ever say such things as ‘I were sat down’ or ‘We was eating’, because that’s the way ‘ordinary’ people spoke.
Well, once the royal family, the aristocrats, the bishops, the professors, and all the other important people chose such patterns as ‘does not have any’ as their normal way of speaking and writing, there was huge pressure on anybody who wanted to be somebody in society to do the same thing. So a big gap opened up. The upper classes called anyone who used examples 5 and 6 above, or sentences like ‘I were sat down’, a whole host of bad names – they were ‘slovenly’, ‘ungrammatical’, ‘careless’. In return, the lower classes called anyone who used examples 1 and 2, or sentences like ‘I was sitting down’, by a different set of bad names – ‘posh’, ‘affected’, ‘la-di-da’.
The gap is still there today. Examples 1, 2, 3, and 4 are all considered to be standard English – 1 and 2 being more formal in style, and 3 and 4 more casual. But examples 5 and 6 are considered to be non-standard English. And that means we have to be careful. It’s no problem if we use examples like 5 and 6 in the street with our mates. But if we use them in an essay, or in an exam, or while talking in public, or in any other place where people expect us to be on our best behaviour, then we’re likely to get some strange looks – and some low marks!
So there’s more to standard English than at first meets the eye. It isn’t just the kind of English that’s most widely understood around the world. It’s also the kind of English that’s the most useful if we want a good job or an influential position in society. And it doesn’t come naturally. We all have to learn to write standard English. That’s what happens when we go to school. Also, very few people grow up speaking standard English as young children. They have to learn to speak it – which also happens when they go to school. Outside school, most children speak a kind of English where sentences like examples 5 and 6 are natural. So do their parents and most of the people in their society. You’ll hear ‘ain’t’ used throughout Britain, Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia, South Africa … anywhere, in fact, where English is spoken as a mother tongue.
What happens in school, then, is that children learn there’s an alternative way of speaking to the one they use at home and in the street. In former times, teachers would tell them that their home way of talking was ‘bad’ and that only the standard way was ‘good’. That simply gave generations of people inferiority complexes about the way they spoke. Today, most teachers take a more balanced view. They see that both versions have a point.
We need both street grammar and classroom grammar, if we want to handle all the situations that life throws at us. Children will be criticized (by their teachers) if they use street grammar in the classroom, but they’ll also be criticized (by their mates) if they use classroom grammar in the street. It’s important, then, to understand the differences between the two kinds of language, so that we don’t mix them up. Then, once we’re in control of them, we can start using them in clever ways, just as we can with spelling and punctuation.
Some newspapers and magazines play with non-standard English. Every now and then we see headlines like this:
WE AIN’T SEEN NOTHING YET
That breaks both the rules of standard English that I’ve been talking about in this chapter. But we can see immediately that the paper is playing a game with us. The same kind of thing is going on with this one:
IF IT AIN’T BROKE, DON’T FIX IT
Here, as well as ‘ain’t’ the headline-writer is using a non-standard form of ‘break’. In standard English, the headline would have read:
The effect just ain’t the same.
I said earlier that most people don’t speak standard English at home with their family and friends. What do they speak, then? This is where dialects come in.
Aliens often use non-standard English word order. The best example I know is the Jedi Master, Yoda, in the Star Wars films, who speaks a highly unusual form of English. The expected order of the parts of his sentences is back to front.
Killed not by clones, this Padawan. By a lightsaber, he was.
To fight this Lord Sidious, strong enough you are not.
It’s a clever piece of writing by the scriptwriters. The sentence patterns are quite close to those used in normal English, so we’re able to understand them easily. They also have some echoes of English from many centuries ago, so they suit Yoda’s great age. But English has never used word orders quite like these, so we get the impression of something totally alien. Which is what Yoda is. Nobody knows where he comes from. In the Star Wars Databank, we are simply told that he is of ‘species unknown’.
