Who Decides What’s Good English?

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Sarah, and I’m calling from Zion, Illinois.

Hi, Sarah, welcome.

Hey, Sarah, welcome to the program. How can we help?

Well, I majored in French in college, and now I’m learning Spanish.

And they’re always saying in class that the Académie Française or the Académie Reale said so-and-so about the rules of language.

And I got to thinking, well, you know, English doesn’t have something like that.

No, we don’t.

I’ve always wondered who makes the rules then in English that we learn in grammar books.

And also, why don’t we have an academy?

And I kind of wish we did because I get a little irritated when I read columns about grammar usage when people write in questions, and the answer is always, well, technically it’s supposed to be a certain way, but whatever people say is okay because the language always changes.

Or when you listen to a show like ours and hear kind of the same message.

Is that where you’re going?

Oh, Sarah, this is such a gigantic question, but let’s just recap a little bit.

So you’re talking about the Académie Française and the Académie Royale, and these are two august bodies filled with intellectuals who make the official dictionaries for French, French, and for Spanish, Spanish, or Castellano, right?

And so they make the Spanish dictionaries now have been going for, well, they’ve been going for centuries.

Each of them is going for several hundred years.

And these are considered the official kind of touchstones of the language.

These are the dictionaries of ultimate resort, the ultimate arbiters on how those languages should be spoken, right?

Right.

Okay.

And you’re learning English.

In English, we don’t have that.

And so the problem that you’ve got is who is your authority, right?

In English, we have dictionaries we kind of turn to as an authority.

We turn to a couple of goofy radio hosts as authorities.

William Sapphire before he died, maybe.

You know, there’s all these different people that we turn to.

And so if you want this big body of highly educated people to make these pronouncements, it just doesn’t exist.

So it’s a little bit of a free-for-all.

Yeah, and I can understand being wistful about that.

You know, it’d be nice if things were cut and dried and black and white.

And I think we’ve missed our chance.

There was a strong movement for this in the 1500s and 1600s, particularly in the 1600s.

Jonathan Swift was one of the people who made a movement, dried and made a movement.

A lot of people came out and said, look, we need this body, like the French and the Spanish have done, to really kind of fix this once and for all.

Spelling is all over the place.

Pronunciation is all over the place.

And so on and so forth.

But ultimately, they failed to do it because there was too much infighting.

They couldn’t decide who should prevail.

A lot of it was just the internal politics of the great thinkers of the age.

I don’t like so-and-so.

I don’t want him on the academy.

And nobody could even agree who should appoint the academy.

Does that make sense?

It’s weird, though, because Spanish speakers are fractious, French speakers are fractious, but they have these institutions.

Yeah, but the institutions, like for in France, it’s basically ignored, except in the utmost, like when they do the dictée in the newspaper or by the governmental bodies.

But for most of the French people, they learn it in school, but it doesn’t really dictate how they write and speak.

Well, sure, and in South America as well.

Yeah, yeah.

So the academies exist, and they are a resource, but that doesn’t mean that the people necessarily pay attention to them.

Exactly.

Students do, though, Sarah.

You would want to pay attention because you were probably reading some of the finest literature in French and Spanish, right?

Right.

And so for you, you want to learn the best Spanish that you can possibly learn so that you start out at a good place and you’re not learning just like street slang from some Cuban kids, right?

Right.

And also, because if I go and speak with an educated, you know, like if I go to school in that country, I’d have to know how to use it properly because that’s how they’re going to be talking.

Right.

Well, because you’re going to learn academic, you’re going to learn academic language.

I had this when I lived in France.

I learned French as well.

And what I read in school, I read the highest of literature, the best works of our age and of previous eras.

And then I would go on the street and it didn’t sound anything like the French that I was speaking in class.

And that right there is the problem in a nutshell, is that the academy can do all of the work that it wants, but it doesn’t mean that people are going to pay attention to it.

Well, sure.

And in Latin America, there’s so many different Spanishes, and they’re all different from the one in Spain.

So, Sarah.

Yes.

I don’t hear you being satisfied.

I’m not.

I mean, I can see what you’re saying.

And it’s true that the French people just talk however they want and they ignore.

I mean, the academy will say, no, you can’t use the word parking lot.

And they do.

Everyone does.

Right, right, right.

But at the same time, something just would feel better.

I get the feeling that if there was at least an attempt to do it, then maybe it would slow down the disintegration.

Well, that’s a complicated statement because English is not disintegrating.

It’s a kind of a natural, think of it as a river.

It continues to flow.

And we can attempt to dam it, but it will frequently overflow its banks.

Here’s the thing that I think will make you feel better.

Choose a very good dictionary.

There are several dictionaries out there that have what are called usage panels, where they’ve basically created little mini academies of great writers and thinkers and intellectuals of all different backgrounds and races and genders, and put them together in a room several times a year and say, here are the language questions that we’re all wrestling with.

What do you think?

And they take a vote, and then they enshrine that vote into the work of their dictionaries.

And that is a great way to know that you are following the advice of the best thinkers and writers of our age.

And that’s about as good as anyone can hope for.

Yeah, that’s as close as we’ll get, I think.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

How about that?

Well, all right.

Well, thank you very much.

All right.

Thanks for calling, Sarah.

We really appreciate it.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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