Folk Linguistics - Examples

Examples

Jackendoff (2003) cites the following statements as typical examples of folk linguistics beliefs:

• “Parents teach their children to talk" - meaning that adults assume that children either learn language directly from their parents or via simple imitation. However, research in child language acquisition shows that a child acquires language more automatically through a systematic pattern rarely noticed by adults. Although interaction with parents, adults and other children is crucial, it is actually very difficult to "correct" a child. Instead most children are able to learn to speak native languages (including those of their peers of the same age) through a process called "acquisition". Any errors noticed by a parent are often self-corrected by the child weeks or months later.

• “Children will get confused if they try to speak more than one language” - meaning that many parents are afraid a child cannot sort out input from multiple languages. In reality, children can easily become bilingual (native proficiency in two languages) if they are exposed to more than one language. There may be period of confusion, but most children are able to segregate two distinct grammars.

• "There is a proper, correct English" - meaning that speakers generally value an educated form of the language, often its written form, and that other dialectal/spoken forms are considered structurally inferior or "sloppy", and speakers of these forms are often regarded as "stupid, lazy, sloppy, hick" or other pejorative terms. However linguists generally agree that dialectal forms such as African American Vernacular English (AAVE) have the same grammatical complexity as a standard English. Folk linguistic beliefs view these forms as inferior, and as a result speakers of non-standard forms often suffer forms of linguistic discrimination.

• "The modern language is going downhill" - meaning that changes in the spoken language (e.g. new words, innovations in grammar, new pronunciation patterns) are generally regarded as being detrimental rather than just change.

Other beliefs may include:

• A belief that a language's grammar can negatively influence and restrict how people think. This is also known as the strong Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Although some linguists do advocate a form of this, many linguists reject this as being too simplistic. For instance, just because a language does not formally distinguish "he" vs. "she" in their personal pronouns does not mean that speakers do not distinguish and treat men and women differently. Similarly, just because English lacks a formal hodiernal tense does not mean that English speakers cannot distinguish events which occur "today" versus those on another day.

• Examples folk etymology such as interpreting "asparagus" as "sparrow-grass". These are cases where speakers deduce an incorrect word origin. Another folk etymology is the assumption that the New York place name "Fishkill" (on Fishkill Creek) means a place to kill fish. In reality, -kill is from a Dutch word meaning "creek" (found also in river names such as Schuylkil (PA) and Wallkill (NJ)). However the folk etymology caused animal rights groups such as PETA to demand that the town should be renamed.