Rules and Reality: How Competing Views Shape the Way We Use Language
From The Observatory
Source: The Observatory
From grammar rules to everyday slang, debates over descriptivism and prescriptivism reveal how we balance authority with the way people really speak.
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“Rules and Reality: How Competing Views Shape the Way We Use Language” by Danica Tomber is licensed by the Observatory under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
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Introduction
What is language, why do we use it, and how did it evolve? These are questions that language researchers are still working to answer. From a basic standpoint, a language is a shared system of symbols that we use to transmit information between a sender and a receiver. On a social level, we use language to convey ideas, build community, and resolve conflict. We also know that language is a psychological phenomenon; we use language to think and talk to ourselves and to express our identity.
There are many definitions of human language that outline key features distinguishing it from other forms of communication. For one, “human language is distinct from all other known animal forms of communication in being compositional. … [This] gives human language an endless capacity for generating new sentences as speakers combine and recombine sets of words into their subject, verb, and object roles,” stated Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist, in BMC Biology in 2017. Human language sets itself apart through its property of limitlessness: It possesses the ability to convey virtually any idea or experience in limitless ways.
This property of limitlessness is similarly apparent through its hallmark of recursion, perhaps one of the most intriguing features of language. In terms of grammar (or more technically, what linguists call syntax in this particular case), recursion allows for the ability to create an infinitely long sentence. Think about how you could keep adding to this sentence without ever starting a new one: “Yesterday around noon, I spoke with an old friend on the phone who knows someone from a neighborhood nearby who told them that… .”
Scientists have differing theories about how long humans have been using language. This type of question is difficult to trace, compounded by the fact that there are different forms of communication, with gestures and non-speech vocalizations dating back further than spoken and signed languages, and written language emerging even later. George Poulos, researcher and professor emeritus at the University of South Africa, states in a 2022 article in the Conversation that the first speech sounds emerged around 70,000 years ago.
Meanwhile, a March 2025 article by MIT News proposes that “our unique language capacity was present at least 135,000 years ago. Subsequently, language might have entered social use 100,000 years ago.” According to Shigeru Miyagawa, linguist, MIT professor, and co-author of the meta-analysis discussed in that article, “the question is not when primates could utter certain sounds; it is when humans had the cognitive ability to develop language as we know it, combining vocabulary and grammar into a system generating an infinite amount of rules-based expression.”
Today, it is estimated that there are more than 7,000 languages in use worldwide. Many of these languages are endangered, at risk of extinction. “More than half of the world’s approximately 7,000 signed and spoken languages are currently endangered. … Regions where all Indigenous [languages] are endangered—including parts of South America and the United States—face the greatest consequences,” states a 2023 article on the Yale News website.
Language is not a static or steadfast system. It changes over time. These changes are shaped by sociocultural, geographic, historical, political, economic, and technological influences, highlighting that language is a social phenomenon. With the rise of a more globally interconnected world and easier access to information, communication, and movement of people, building our understanding of language is now more important than ever.
New insights into how language works can help us enhance language learning methodologies, develop language technologies, and build bridges with other cultures and communities—a big endeavor, to say the least. With applications such as these in mind, a question that often comes up is: Are there correct and incorrect ways to use language?
Descriptivism and Prescriptivism
A common framework in linguistics is the distinction between descriptivism and prescriptivism. Descriptivism is concerned with language in use. It seeks to describe language as it naturally occurs. From a descriptivist approach, there is no right or wrong; there just is. Prescriptivism, on the other hand, makes assertions about language as it “should be.” It sets out how language ought to be used, implying that there are both correct and incorrect choices when it comes to language use. This latter concept may raise some questions.
In 2020, the Académie Française, a moderator of the French language, ruled that the word COVID was feminine. Unlike English, nouns in French follow a binary gender system that classifies them as feminine or masculine. In this case, the organization asserted that because the primary word “disease” (“la maladie”) in “coronavirus disease” (“la maladie du coronavirus”) was feminine, the acronym COVID should follow suit as “la COVID.” As a new word, it appeared that COVID needed to be assigned a gender. Or did it? Apparently, many French speakers had already been referring to it as “le COVID” (using the masculine form).
This type of language moderation is a classic example of prescriptivism, and it surfaces important questions, such as who gets to make decisions about language use? Do people in positions of power and authority have the final say, or does this debate get settled through more organic and less concrete mechanisms?
We also see a prescriptivist approach in dictionaries, although this language resource comprises both prescriptivism and descriptivism. Dictionaries define how words should be used. They include rules of standardization, such as how words should be spelled and pronounced, and whether they should be classified as nouns, verbs, prepositions, etc. At the same time, dictionaries account for the words in use and the meanings they carry among those who use them. Dictionaries are a survey of a language’s lexicon as it currently stands.
In March 2025, the Oxford English Dictionary added entries for the words collab, n.; collab, v.; grawlix, n.; guyliner, n.; judgey/judgy, adj.; lumpia, n.; para-athlete, n.; unfollow, v.; and vape, n., to name just a few. New words come into existence through various means, including contact with other languages and the demands of new environments, behaviors, or social practices. Words can be shortened, merged, or moved into new word categories (for example, combining two separate words or adding a prefix or suffix to an existing word root).
Given these considerations, dictionaries are largely the result and responsibility of their authors. Lexicographers must be diligent about following and analyzing emergent word usage patterns to maintain dictionaries that accurately reflect (i.e., describe) the current state of a language’s lexicon—in other words, how people use it.
On the other end of the spectrum are much clearer examples of descriptivism. One of the clearest ways to learn about this approach is to examine the tools that researchers use to study language.
Ethnographic studies of language offer firsthand insight into the people and culture that use said language in everyday life. They only describe, as their goal is understanding the complex interplay between language and its social motivations.
The domain of corpus linguistics seeks to understand language use through quantitative methodologies. In linguistics, a corpus is a dataset of spoken or written language. Many are quite large, and most cater to language professionals, with built-in capabilities for advanced search functions and statistical analyses. COCA, the Corpus of Contemporary American English, for instance, is a collection of more than 1 billion words from spoken and written samples of text from 1990 to 2019. Other corpora, such as Google Books Ngram Viewer, are much more accessible. This tool offers a quick and user-friendly way for anyone to look at word usage trends over time (from a multi-language corpus of books that totals approximately 500 billion words), dating back to the 1500s.
While corpora provide valuable insights, it is important to remember that these tools are still limited, even though many contain millions, if not billions, of words. It is more helpful to think of them as snapshots that are relatively narrow within the vastness of all that a language includes. Any given corpus is a collection of text that is specific to a certain stretch of time, the genre(s) and environment(s) in which its text was produced, and the people who generated the language samples. The key here is not to overgeneralize from how language is used in a specific context.
Beyond Right and Wrong: Rethinking How We Judge Language
Many people might think that prescriptivism has no usefulness since descriptivism is a more neutral approach, free from bias and control, an attitude that allows language to exist naturally without any judgment or constraints. Others might say that there are times when language choice should be corrected. I believe that there are, in fact, some useful contexts for the latter.
Second language learning, for example, is a situation where building a solid foundation and adhering to rules is essential for understanding and effective communication. For instance, it would benefit an English language learner to know the difference between “let’s meet there at six” and “let’s meet there in six”—not just because the prepositions “at” and “in” have different meanings, but also because “at six” implies at six o’clock and “in six” implies in six minutes, which could lead to mix-up about the time to meet up. (Granted, this is much easier to catch in writing if the person distinguishes between a numeral and a written-out number, but if they do not, or if the message is spoken, then this extra clue is absent.)
As another example, if a student is writing an email to their professor to ask for a deadline extension, using a formal introduction is more effective than using an informal one. Learning a language is not just about building vocabulary or knowing how to conjugate the correct verb form; it is also about understanding how someone would speak in different situations with different people that call for varied levels of formality or informality.
Similar to how it can be useful to prescribe rules of formality to a language learner, we could also make a case for taking a prescriptivist approach toward language use in formal writing, although this can be a slippery slope. Genres such as textbooks, research reports, newspaper articles, and official letters use more formal language and mostly follow the prescriptive instructions of language style guides.
While it may seem overly authoritative to have usage rules for things like capitalization or punctuation, this kind of standardization can contribute to the readability of written information. When information is presented in a more uniform, organized manner, it is easier to digest. For areas such as academic and scientific writing, rules around language use ensure that information is objective, specific, succinct, and hedged when necessary. Despite these benefits, scholars urge that pushing for language standardization, even in written language, perpetuates gatekeeping and discriminatory attitudes about language and “can unfairly limit people’s access to opportunities, including in educational and professional realms,” according to a 2023 article published in the journal Daedalus.
Another way to consider our language choices is to reframe the question around appropriateness and respect. When was the last time you encountered an example of politically correct language? This type of prescriptivism, also known as inclusive language, aims to respect the way we refer to people, often in terms of identifiers such as gender, race, religion, or sexual orientation. While some may argue that extreme forms of politically correct language verge on being controlling or euphemistic, its core intent is rooted in showing respect—both to one’s audience and to the communities being addressed.
Within this context lies the purpose of many language movements: to create meaningful connections through education about and acknowledgement of identity. Examples of this are the gender-focused movements, such as preferred personal pronouns and gender-neutral terms like flight attendant over stewardess. We also see this in person-centric constructions like a person with a disability instead of a disabled person. In written language, guidelines for capitalization can also serve as powerful acknowledgements of identity, such as Aboriginal, Black, Indigenous, and Latine.
In short, prescriptivist approaches to language use are not always dogmatic. In these examples of second-language learning, formal writing, and politically correct language usage, prescriptivism should still be approached with caution, but it can serve as a beneficial communicative tool. Of course, there are far more circumstances where a descriptivist approach is the better (and more ethical) option. These situations where it would not be helpful to correct someone’s language choices are, arguably, vastly more numerous. For instance, pointing out a text message typo with “your” versus “you’re” in a sentence such as “your late.”
What this boils down to is that consideration of the people, context, and long-term implications matters. Both prescriptivism and descriptivism can be useful, but appropriateness depends on a multitude of factors. So if you find yourself taking a decidedly prescriptivist attitude toward someone’s language choice, stop and ask yourself if you understood the sender’s intended message, despite any standardized rules that language authorities have declared or opinions you have about how the message “should” have been conveyed.
A clear understanding of the speaker’s intended message is a major component of successful communication. If it still bothers you, consider the context in which the message was produced, along with any beliefs you might have about a person or community in connection with how their language use differs from yours. These kinds of questions can help shape a better-informed opinion about language choice.
So, is there a better approach? Depending on your answers to the considerations discussed here, some level of prescriptivism may be appropriate and meaningful, but it is also important to remember that descriptivism honors the diversity of language—and, by extension, people.
