I have a pretty cavalier attitude towards grammar, myself. I try to stick with standard usage, although sometimes I will depart from it for emphasis, or simply to make a line flow smoother. And I’m sure I mistakenly occasionally split an infinitive or fail to have subject and verb agree, or accidentally committ some other grammatical faux pas. But so what? English is a difficult language, and I doubt if the world will come to an end because of a minor lapse of grammar.

What I will not tolerate is people who deliberately and repeatedly use bad grammar or spelling because they think it sounds cool. I’m through being cool. Rappers and rednecks are the worst offenders.

>sigh<

Merely an interesting sidebar — for me.

The introduction of writing, then printing, and now broadcasting, seems to have moderated this process, but not eliminated it altogether. In fact, some new innovations can now propagate at lightning speed over widespread populations. In some countries, like Spain and France, formal “Academies” have been established to serve as language police to keep the language pure, but they have failed. At best, they have only succeeded in creating an official dialect for literature and the bureaucracy, while the people continue to speak whatever they want.

Even in the USA, efforts were made to standardize our language by some of the early lexicographers like Webster, to create a truly American English, which is why there are differences in some of our spellings and grammatical structures from British English. But English was never standardized to begin with, certainly not in Britain, where there is enormous variation in the Mother Tongue. This Webster Worship has led to that annoying habit Americans have of rushing to the dictionary to try to establish what a word really means, as if what “love”, “freedom” or “Fascism” meant could be learned from a book. A dictionary is not a source of philosophical truth, it is, at best, only a snapshot of current usage. Standardized definitions are as suspect and arbitrary as standardized pronunciations or spellings. It is one of the prices we pay for the exquisite redundancy and flexibility of our subtle and beautiful language. Language is not like mathematics; we cannot demonstrate the validity or even the precision of a statement or proposition simply because we have used accepted grammar and an approved vocabulary.

All languages are the result of a genetic process of evolution and hybridization, so even English today is mostly a blend of Norman French (which in turn came from Latin)and Anglo-Saxon. It evolved into something like its present form when the poetry of Chaucer became popular about 800 years ago. Prior to that, there were many mutually unintelligible dialects of English current in what is now England, not to mention dozens of other totally distinct languages like Cornish, Welsh and Scottish. English is one of the most hybridized tongues on earth. That probably explains why it is so easy for foreigners to learn to speak passably, (and so difficult to learn to speak well!). Even native speakers haven’t mastered it.

We are fortunate that most variants of English today are mutually intelligible. Spain is still fractured into regional dialects like Galician, Asturian, Catalan, and the variants of Leon and Castille. South American Spanish is more or less standardized, having primarily originated from the province of Extremadura where most of the Conquistadudes came from. My own Spanish is highly influenced by the dialect of the Canary Islands, from where many settlers emigrated to Cuba in the 18th and 19th century. My cousin, on a recent visit to Spain, was often asked if he was a “Canary Islander”, because of his Cuban accent. I can converse pretty well with any South American, and with Standard Castilian speakers (the “official” version of the Spanish tongue).

Unfortunately, modern political fads have slowed the process of standardization, and there are now political, cultural and regional movements attempting to preserve or re-establish the old provincial dialects, for some misguided patriotic reason. Many of the Spanish websites I surf are written in these dialects, some of which I can easily read, others which I can barely penetrate. Latin American Spanish differs from Castilian in that some entire tenses and conjugations have vanished. Still, I have no trouble reading or speaking Standard Castilian or any Latin American variant of it. But everybody knows I’m Latin American, and they can be reasonably sure I’m Cuban.

I know that it is now fashionable in Haiti to promote and teach the native Creole instead of the French from which it evolved. National pride is all well and good, but I personally think it is stupid to educate youth in the local insular dialect when you could be providing them with a base in a language spoken world-wide. Of course, France is fractured into linguistic zones just like Spain is. So are Germany and Italy. Each has its “official” dialect. In a way, we English speakers are quite lucky. We have many regional dialects in the US, but they differ only in detail, and there are no really unique variants of English spoken in the countries of the former British Empire. I’m personally familiar with only two unintelligible versions of English: Cruzan (US Virgin Islands) and Texan.

To sum up, I wouldn’t worry much about the purity of the language, there’s not much we can do about it anyway.