static.^5 This is as true in Asia as it is in on the North American continent,
as it is for every language in the world.
Linguists base this assertion on observation, experimentation, and
deduction, so that the statement all living languages change is not a matter
of faith or opinion or aesthetics, but observable fact. And yet, some people
- some of you reading this right now – are doubtful. There are many
people who are uncomfortable with the idea that they cannot control all
aspects of language.
For me as a sociolinguist, the interesting thing about this question is
how it came to be asked in the first place. Why do so many people feel
threatened by the idea of language change? Why do they contest the idea
with so much emotion? How did the idea of a perfect, unchanging
language become so deeply instilled? Even the most idealistic and
nostalgic of language observers cannot argue that Chaucer, Shakespeare,
Milton, Austen, Woolf, Wharton, Morrison and Erdrich (to take us from
the fourteenth to the twenty-first century), some of the men and women
who wrote what is commonly regarded as the great literature of the
English-speaking world, all wrote the same English.
To take it one step further: Toni Morrison^6 does not write or talk like
Shakespeare wrote and talked. Few people would claim that because that is
true, Morrison’s command of the language is faulty, that the English she
speaks and writes is bad, less efficient, less capable of carrying out the
functions for which it is needed. And still people will take up the battle cry
and declare war on language change. All those attempts – and there have
been a lot of them – are doomed to failure, unless they are instituted by
means of genocide.^7
Sometimes languages die a less sudden death, for example, when the
community of speakers who use them disperse, succumb to plague, or
otherwise are forcibly assimilated into dominant cultures (as in the case of
most of the languages indigenous to the American continent); languages
are born through the processes of pidginization and subsequent
creolization.
Language standardization could be characterized as an attempt to stop
language change, or at least, to fossilize language by means of controlling
variation. We’ll continue to explore that idea as a part of an in-depth
consideration of the ideological structures which make standardization
seem like such a good idea.