Hopefully This Makes Sense: Reflections on Language Change

As part of speakers in a language, we follow rules and make use of a vocabulary in order to express our ideas. Also as speakers, we have the capacity of changing the language as generations before us have—in some sense we ARE the language in its current state. Whenever the rules allowing for such transfer of ideas are broken, however, then the message can be deemed incomprehensible. Based on our usage of different aspects of our language (say, noticing that a certain morpheme is out of place, or that a word is in the incorrect syntactic category), we can know when an idea has been expressed in a complete or incomplete manner.

However, there are rules that we can break without impeding understanding of our message. For example, in common speech we can say “Between you and I” or “To who did he give it to?” without confusing the listener. These classical malapropisms could be happening so frequently for a number of reasons—schools not appropriately teaching the distinction between the normative and objective case, media figures popularizing the malapropism, or even people not knowing (or caring) that there is a distinction between the two. It appears that we have gotten a sense of what is meant with those prescriptively incorrect sentences, and might not even wish to point out to the people who speak them that those sentences are breaking rules of English.

So when do we correct people for their improper use of language? If patterns in common parlance point out that certain rules can be broken without hurting the message, corrections can be said to happen because of their loyalty to proper English than because of confusion, or because of a notion that English can only be spoken with the correct rules. These protectors of linguistic integrity have appeared in all generations in different incarnations, such as Jonathan Swift and “Weird Al” Yankovic, much to the annoyance of some. The interesting thing here is that their corrections are based on standards of what can and cannot be called “English”, which are different for Swift than they are for Yankovic. These standards must have shifted at some point, and despite these changes, the language still preserved its general identity as English. When and how do the standards shift so much that they no longer constitute “English” but another language system?

The difference between modifying a language and creating one seems to lie on what group is doing the change. Take African American Vernacular English, for example. A person making a statement such as “I didn’t do nothing” or “He be walkin’ down the street” would not be following the rules of Standard American English, and would be likely corrected in environments that do not subscribe to AAVE. Some people are so vehement in their rejection of AAVE that they will not even accept it as a form of correctly spoken English, and would rather have their speakers educated in how to properly speak SAE.

Nonetheless, as our textbook tells us, AAVE and SAE both follow a comprehensive system, and neither can be said to be more “correct” than the other. Indeed, the legitimization of AAVE happened as a result of its speakers’ conscious perseverance and need to address their identity in the greater American community, just like how SAE developed as a result from the British colonists’ need to create their own separate linguistic community in the soon-to-be United States. This is clearly different from the change of the use of “hopefully”—originally meaning “with hope”, and now meaning “I hope so” or "I hope"—which is championed more unconsciously, along with other changes, by the younger populations that speak SAE.

Now my question is this: when is a linguistic change a legitimate systematic change to a language, and when is it a consistent error from the current norm? Or is there even any difference? Considering the dynamic nature of language, what can we correct in someone's expression of language—or should we correct people at all?