There's a change coming

Before we get started, we'd better get a few ideas straight. Otherwise, this will be just be a confusing mass of words for the nonlinguist.

Let's being with the idea of diglossia. This is quite difficult for the English speaker to get their head round but it's second nature for, say, German speakers. A Swiss German, for example speaks, and importantly writes, two languages: Swiss German and High German. They very likely speak more than two, of course. But this is the bare minimum. Swiss German and High German are different varieties of German. They don't sound very similar and even if you have learned German to a degree of fluency at school, you'll find Swiss German difficult.

High German is the standard German as we understand it. It's generally speaking the language of education, of parliament, of newspapers and so on. It's the German Germans speak. Other varieties of German, and related Germanic languages are diglossic with High German, although some are no longer spoken much. Franconian shades into High German and many people in western Germany speak a dialect or even a different language at home but are fully fluent in High German. When I visited Lower Saxony for instance, some people could speak Platt -- and everyone could understand some -- which is Low German (the names are related to the topography of the areas they predominate in, not their relative social worth).

Diglossia can be quite extreme. One of the more famous examples is Arabic. Arabs tend to speak the "local language" at home but can generally also understand Classical Arabic, which is the literary language among other things.

Now, we should be clear. There are many varieties of each language. People in Damascus can often speak three languages that are all "Arabic": a street version of their local language, Syrian Arabic and Classical Arabic. We can call different varieties of a language that have different purposes "registers". We are familiar with the idea, if not the name, because we all use different forms of our language in different circumstances. We're quite comfortable with the ideas of "informal" and "formal" language, even if we don't always agree on the words that should feature in each type. Some registers are more heavily subscribed to by people of one age than people of another and this has always been true. The kids use "text English" and "verlan" and they used to use "pig Latin" and "gang language" and so on. Americans will be familiar with the language of "gangsta rap", which is largely influenced by what we might call Black Vernacular English, or Ebonic, or Standard African-American English, which is diglossic with Standard English. I hope that some have just learned something new. When you hear a black speaking "bad English", you are in fact hearing someone speak a different language fluently. BVE has different rules from English and a somewhat different vocabulary. The speakers are no more "wrong" than speakers of Swiss German.

The final idea is easy to understand. We all grasp "borrowing". Languages take words from each other, sometimes because they don't have a word for the concept expressed (so "million" is the world's most cognate word and "computer" isn't all that far behind) but also for social reasons. If the king starts using a French word, the peasants will too. What's probably less apparent is "internal borrowing", where one register is changed by adopting words from another. To make things slightly more complicated, there are also "sociolects", which are the varieties of languages spoken by different social classes.

But this borrowing does also happen. Take "ain't" for Standard English (StE) "isn't" and "don't" for StE "doesn't". The former is recognised as part of a "lower-class" sociolect and "incorrect" on that basis, and the former is mostly considered incorrect even by the sociolect that allow "ain't". But both were part of the "upper-class" sociolect in Victorian times, as a quick jifty at Vanity Fair will confirm. And today, posh young lads from the Home Counties can be roundly mocked for their use of "Estuary English" or "mockney". I mean, seriously, does anyone who actually works for a living say "pukka"?

The key takeaway here is that languages are fluid and functional. We learn them to use them. And the notion of correctness has more to do with sticking to the correct register (keeping within a style, if you like) than it does with some absolute measure of correctness. "I ain't never givin you one" is just as much English as "I am never giving you one". When we are babies, no one sits us down with the rulebook. We actually make up the rules for ourselves, fresh in each generation. (This is one good reason linguists tend to be "descriptivists" because we are aware we can only ever describe languages and not say what they are supposed to look like.)

So let me digress for a moment (you'll have to imagine your own big grinny emoji here). Many languages have an "existential identifier" (or words to that effect). It has a word, or sometimes words, that point out that something is. Turkish uses "var" for this purpose; French uses "il y a" (and often in speech a single word that ought to be spelled something like "illa". English does not have just one. Or did not. One is being born and it's a question of "reanalysis".

Remember what I said about babies. They make up the rules afresh in their generation. You and I did it and your children do it too. You may have corrected them when they said "hitted" and overgeneralised the standard rule for the past tense (you needn't have bothered; they continue to adjust their language long past the phase in which they get strong past tenses wrong, and they do the same in every language that has them).

So what does a child hear when you say "there's a dog"? You are expressing (don't worry if you don't actually know that you are doing this): existential deictive+copula+article+noun and you likely pronounce it /thai:z uh dog/ or similar (apologies for lack of IPA but I can't be arsed digging out a font and in any case, the point is you recognise that /thai:z/ is heard by the child as a single unit).

Interestingly, the plural version doesn't work quite as comfortably. /thai:ruh/ doesn't really work so we don't often say "there/re" (I won't go into why it doesn't work) and /thai:ra:/ is a bit formal for the spoken register.

So children generally understand /thai:z/ altogether as an existential deictive (existential just means "being" and deictive means "pointing"; deictives are "pointing words" such as this, that, those). They don't analyse it as containing a copula because in fact there's no copulative function (I know I just sounded like I took off into Martian but it's fairly easy: copulas are (usually) verbs that link phrases in a sentence and in effect say they are equivalents: "I am a man" says that the identified person (me) and the identified descriptor "a man" are equivalent; technically, in English, the copula allows subjects and predicates to sit in a co-equal relationship (compare "I am a fish" with "I ate a fish", where "I" am the subject of the verb "to eat" -- I do the eating -- whereas in "I am a fish", both "I" and "a fish" can be considered subjects of the copula).

Without getting overly technical, the verb "to be" in a phrase such as "there is a man" is not a copula. Although it's not actually true that all things copulated by "to be" are strictly equal (the sentence "the man is a fish" is not the same as "a fish is the man" at all), it's true that it allows equivalence of subjects with subject complements (it says things are the same thing). But "there is a man" is not saying "there" is the same thing as "a man"; "there" is a "dummy pronoun" that doesn't stand for anything.

Children analyse spoken language. No two-year-old can read. So they analyse "theres" as a single word with no apostrophe and have done for some time now. And in spoken language, it is used as a single word with no apostrophe. But, I hear you say, where is the verb? Well, many languages simply do not use a verb in copulative sentences and it's perfectly "logical" not to. Spoken English is quite happy to deploy many sentences without verbs. We like to call them "sentence fragments" but they are often perfectly well-formed sentences. "Not likely." "Sometimes." "You fucking idiot."

So in spoken language, constructions such as "there's three of them" have become not only common, but correct. And the rather awkward English method of introducing an object has become streamlined. In Australia, "there's" is standard in the spoken language and has begun to be written too. I've noticed it is common in spoken English, although a speaker would consider it "incorrect" and no one would allow it in any kind of writing. But they will.

You cannot hold back the tide of language change with worthless pedantry. Unless you're Icelandic and nearly everyone lives in the same town. Rejoice in seeing history unfold. There's big changes ahead.

posted by Dr Zen @ 9:03 pm