Descriptivism and Prescriptivism Essay Example

For centuries, language has been evolutionary. Take the English Language from example; it progressed from Old English (an example would be a heroic epic poem Beowulf) which was used in the earlier centuries until the 13th century, when it was mostly reformed into Middle English (as shown in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer), until Early Modern English replaced it in the 15th century (what we know now as the works of William Shakespeare), which eventually developed into the Modern English that English speakers are familiar with nowadays. The journey English Language embarked on over the centuries first emerged over time out of the many dialects and languages of the existing colonizing tribes, thus earning itself the name of a “borrowing” language, with an enormously distinct vocabulary, and then gradually forming its own distributive dialects, like the American English, British English, Canadian English, etc. With such monumental changes throughout time, it makes some curious and wonder how and who started each deviation. A question soon arises: “What or who’s to say which form of English is better than the others?” In Authority and American Usage, David Foster Wallace presented a language war between Prescriptivists, whom he mostly referred to as SNOOTs, and Philosophical Descriptivists. He claimed that “we SNOOTs are just about the last remaining kind of truly elitist nerd” [Wallace p.624] and that SNOOTs, being the arrogant Dogmatic Spirits that they are, maintain the notion that Standard Written English (SWE) is the “best” language out of all English dialects, and should be the only representation of the English Language. On the other hand, Descriptivists believe that the “Spoken language is the language.” [Wallace p.633] I personally feel that language does not determine a person’s worth in society (elitist or not), but instead helps to display said person’s ability to handle or react accordingly to a given situation. There are several circumstances