On the Flow of Language

Finding myself in a land wracked by debate of the proper tongue and coming myself from a continent historically ridiculed for bastardized habits of speech, the question of language is one that has harangued me for a spell.

Spellings, syntax, pronunciation, phrases and vocabulary vary between times and places and drift with the currents of popularity. When a language has enough drift to warrant talk of dialectal differences but not so much as to demand new classification then the voices of conservative propriety descend to the levels of school children arguing over whose father works the assembly line in the more important factory.

How have these high horses climbed to such altitudes in the ivory towers and who is the poor fool that must clean the stables?

Americans certainly do not speak the Queen's English. They have no queen and the king was abducted by aliens decades ago. But in popular discourse it is rarely made explicit which queen is in question and if all works of language must be rewritten upon succession to the throne and her particular peculiarities of the mother tongue.

Perhaps I am taking that too literally, but I believe the point lies: how are standards of a language established and what gives them a position of superiority over other standards in the same language? It seems to be quite like taking a picture of a particular bend in a particular river at a particular point in time and demanding that at all bends and throughout all time all rivers must adhere to that shape and flow.

The English language today as found in England is not the English of Shakespeare and even his English was not that found fifty miles to the north of him. Where does the condescension of linguistic purists find its foundation?

As a transmitter of human experience language is incredibly useful but has severe limitations. Anyone in the passionate moment of intense love or anger can attest to its shortcomings.

But as poor as language is at expressing reality honestly, the vague shadows it casts do illuminate the figures of societal assumptions. Hierarchical relations in Japanese are far more clearly established than in Romanian which has its own pronoun and conjugations of respect. That in turn is more clear than British English and in American English it borders on being forgotten, shown most often through maximum levels of vulgarity set based upon current company.

I sure as hell don't speak with priests as same way as I speak with you crackers. Not until I've bought him a beer, at least.

I am almost positive that that past paragraph is a gross over-simplification, but the destratification of the former colonies is surely reflected in the diverging flow of its language from that of the colonizers. Slavery being an obvious and regrettable exception. It also evolved in America to meet different needs and circumstances than were found in England at the same time. Where is the outcry against creation of the word "Internet?"

And again I must think - without some set standards, whether implicitly assumed or explicitly defined, we return to Babble. The arrogance of placing one language in that tower in the sky above all others, however, came to the ruin of all. The question of where the line should be drawn is not as clear, I think, as purists would have it. It is clear, however, that the divisions created between neighbours over disagreements how to spell "neighbor" are far more troublesome than just swapping the spellcheck over on your computer.