The discipline of linguistics

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CLEARING THE AIR

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(from “ An Introduction to Language”)

Attitudes toward language are likely to be highly charged emotionally, almost as much so for those who hold them as are attitudes toward God and country. It is perhaps not strange that this should be so, since even the humblest of men, simply by virtue of being human, have language always with them.

Even though we may never give much thought to language as such, regard­ing it merely as a means to an end—which is primarily what it is—we are likely to be put off by forms of speech different from our own and may sometimes show a considerable degree of intolerance toward such forms. Many Americans dislike British speech, and vice versa; many may even resent, to the extent of being prejudiced against, the speech of regions of their own land other than those in which they acquired their own speech habits.

These resentments and prejudices are often evinced in national political campaigns when candidates for office have markedly regional types of speech. The eastern New England speech of the Kennedy brothers, with its intrusive r's (as in "Cuba[r] and the United States"), at first caused considerable amusement in parts of the United States unaccustomed to it, though it is doubtful that anyone ever actually resented it. The prejudice in many parts of the country against the inland southern speech of Lyndon Baines Johnson was, however, so great that in some quarters it doubtless affected attitudes toward the man himself. It is certain that, had his speech been of the coastal southern ("plantation") type, these attitudes would have been considerably modified, although it is difficult to say why this should be true in a so-called democracy. Even Franklin Delano Roosevelt's expensive Groton-cum-Harvard accent, so greatly admired by his followers, was caricatured by entertainers and derided by those who disapproved of the late president and his policies. Few were really indifferent to it.

(from “ An Introduction to Language”)

Though not totally immune to such attitudes, most professional students of language—that is, linguists—as a rule avoid them, much as doctors avoid any emotional approach toward the symptoms that they diagnose. But, as every doctor must be aware, many persons who are otherwise intelligent and even highly educated have altogether fantastic notions about physiology and pathology, notions that they express vehemently, sometimes even to experts. After all, everyone has a body of one sort or another. And everyone has language of one sort or another.

Thus it is not too surprising that so many people should fancy themselves authorities on the language that they themselves speak and write constantly and sometimes quite effectively, and often on other languages as well, if they have had even a smattering of schoolroom instruction in them. Linguists are likely to find themselves soundly resented by otherwise well-informed laymen, who set forth in the most authoritative manner their opinions about language, or more often about what they fancy language is or, still more often, ought to be. The linguist's claim to a special understanding of the phenomena of language is, it should be said, not nearly so widely respected as that of the doctor in his special field. For one thing, the doctor has had a high, not to say glamorous, status for a long time, and he is concerned with considerably more crucial phenomena—matters of life and death, in fact—than any possi­ble linguistic ones.

As we shall see, the study of language—that is, linguistics—is a discipline at least as rigorous as the study of any other branch of learning—medicine, philosophy, literature, architecture, and so on. Moreover, it is a discipline whose mastery—assuming that it is ever really mastered—does not necessarily confer upon the linguist a command of literary style; otherwise linguists would write and speak more stylishly than many of them do. But a discipline it is, and it cannot be acquired by intuition, any more than we originally acquired our native language by intuition; we have merely forgotten the hard work, joyously undertaken in childhood, that went into the process of acquir­ing it.

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