In previous parts of the "Misunderstandings" series, I asked out loud whether or not linguists have studied this concept of speaking different languages depending on who you speak to, and if so, whether there is a name for this concept. So it looks like yeah, they did. Still don't have a name for it, though. This post is only a "half" part, as it primarily brings up evidence for previously presented ideas, does not raise many new ideas, and quickly digresses into autism and shameless self-boasting.

Our [comic strip] teacher here shows a good awareness that the acceptability of "double negation" varies from language to language, for example, mentioning Spanish.But she reveals her fundamental ignorance when she goes on with "In English, we say...", as if negative-concord Englishes don't exist. Overall, the lesson is a prescriptivist nightmare, framed in the normative language of correctness and error, perpetuating the notion that there is such a thing as 'good grammar' that is 'difficult to learn'. If it had been presented just slightly differently--for example, as a description of some of the salient features of the dialect of English favored in professional or academic life--it would have been much more acceptable to me qua linguist, albeit still pretty sad.

But the thing that bothers me the most about the cartoon is not its depiction of blunt-weapon prescriptivism, which is surely unremarkable in a world of Strunk-and-White-educated English teachers. What kills me is the idea that, for 99.99% of the educated American public, this is what "grammar" is: a laundry list of half-remembered strictures against certain forms and usages, understood as commandments from on high about How To Do Right, not even dignified with a discussion of what the proscribed forms and usages actually are, grammatically speaking. Nonstandard irregular verb forms in the English perfect? Accusative (or 'object') pronouns appearing in nominative (or 'subject') position? The structural properties of negative polarity items like anything? The teachers don't know this stuff, let alone the students. All anyone knows is that He should have did it is "bad grammar", and must be avoided and looked down on, like pointing, farting, or scratching yourself in public. This stuff is not "English Grammar". At best, it's lessons in (Standard American) English Deportment and Etiquette. It is really, really demoralizing that almost nobody out there knows the difference.

- Heidi Harley

The author implies that there exist negative-concord Englishes (note the plural), and uses the term "dialect" to refer to the different variants of English one might use in a professional setting versus an informal one. However, I feel "dialect" is too generic a term, and I have an intuition that surely there must be a more specific term for the concept of having different languages depending on the audience one is speaking to.

I also agree with the author about how demoralizing the widespreaded-ness of this ignorance is. It's demoralizing because the realization is not some obscure linguistics-only factoid that one might have to spend hundreds of years of research, building upon the shoulder of giants, to discover. I see occurrences of these "different languages" every day. Every time a flame war erupts on some Internet bulletin board, you will inevitably see an argument on the definition of words: "Foo is Bar." "Foo isn't Bar. You don't even know what Bar means." "Bar means such-and-such." "No it doesn't. According to Merriam-Webster, Bar means blah-blah-BLAH, note the emphasis." "I don't know about your dictionary, but ask anyone on the street what Bar means, and they'll tell you such-and-such." "Hey guys, I don't mean to intrude, but it seems you are taking an overly American definition of Bar. Here, in Great Britain, we use Bar to mean mumble-mumble." "I'm not an American, you asshole. I'm Canadian." etc.

Now why would people argue about the definition of words, if we all spoke a single, common language? The answer is that we don't speak a single, common language. Each person speaks a different language. When they were kids, they encountered some new word, and they assigned a meaning to that word. The meaning came from a blend of what their parents told them the word meant, what their teachers told them the word meant, what their friends told them the word meant, and the context in which the word was used. Everybody has different parents, teachers, friends and contexts. Everybody gets a slightly different definition.

I'm surprised with the difficulty that people seem to have to understand that there is no "The One English". To me, being unable to understand this implies an underdeveloped Theory of Mind (the ability to understand that others have beliefs, desires and intentions that are different from one's own). I find this idea particularly astonishing because I'm a (self-diagnosed) autist, and autists are supposed to have particularly poor Theory of Mind (ToM).

I might get into more detail about ToM and autism in a later post, and I might not.