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Language Prescription
Series Editors: John Edwards, St. Francis Xavier University, Canada and Dalhousie University, Canada and Leigh Oakes, Queen Mary, University of London, UK.
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In the ‘Black English trial’ (Martin Luther King Junior Elementary School Children et al. v. Ann Arbor School District) that took place in my native Michigan in 1979, William Labov helped to persuade the court that Black English has a regular structure, rather than just being a cover term for haphazard errors in Standard English. And therefore, its speakers should have the same educational rights the US Supreme Court had granted to second language speakers five years earlier (see Joseph, 2017b; Labov, 1982). This liberation was achieved not by deconstructing prescriptivism, a strategy unlikely to have swayed the Court, but by extending the basic principle of prescriptivism to a nonstandard form of English. Treating its rules neither as thin constitutive ones nor thin regulative ones, but thick hybrid ones – showing that there are right and wrong ways of speaking it – made Black English a language in the legal sense.
Educational systems are bound up with languages. Population movements over centuries have led to a small number of languages carrying particular economic advantages and social and educational power. Linguists’ interventions in the choices made by minority language communities are important, and it is often the case that getting recognition and respect for their languages as being real languages means showing that they have norms of usage that are prescriptive in nature, that are teachable and testable. Our interventions need to be done with sensitivity and thought, not in a polarized way that denies the language community’s right to define its own well-being, its own basic values, and to not have these prescribed to them – even when what they seek from us is support for a prescriptivism that goes against our descriptivist grain.
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