A funny thing happened in a work meeting yesterday and it really threw into relief some of the core qualities I think you need to be a linguist, both for me and for some of my non-linguist colleagues (I work in a school of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, which also incorporates Creative Writing).
The meeting was the long kind that involves a lunch laid on to ensure you don’t just crash for the afternoon (I mean, I still did…) On one platter was a label, perched on top of carrot sticks and chopped pepper, that read “Crudets and dips”. I asked a colleague who is from the region whether crudet was a North East dialect word for crudité, which is what I’d call strips of veg at a buffet. Turns out not – it’s a Newcastle University catering creation, as far as we can tell.
Another colleague, who like me, is not from the area, began to expound on how a linguist had told him that he was a prescriptivist, because he’d have seen crudet and deemed it to be “wrong”. He was interested that I’d first entertained the idea that this could be a case of linguistic variation – essentially that I was looking to describe what I was seeing.
Prescriptivism vs. descriptivism is part of A-level English Language syllabi, and we also cover in it explicitly in the first couple of weeks of a first year English Language/Linguistics degree. However, it’s easy to preach descriptivism and even easier to forget to deploy it. We all carry around linguistic prejudices from our life experience to date, and we may have aesthetic preferences about words, sounds, shapes, phrases – it’d be silly to deny that these exist and persist.
What’s important as a linguist, then, is to learn to identify and actively suppress these when confronted with a new language phenomenon, because they can cause us to miss something potentially interesting.
Relatedly, we need to continually question what we know, especially when faced with our first or dominant languages. Just because we think we know what’s being said doesn’t mean we’re right about it – so, when appropriate*, ask the question.
I’m going to carry this forward into my first year teaching, which starts in two weeks’ time. SEL1008 Nature of Language – a real breakdown of what it is to be a descriptivist is coming your way, so park your linguistic judgments and get curious.
*This is a blog post to follow in the future – specifically, when the question might not be appropriate to ask.