In this talk I explore the sorts of attitudes and common sense views that Australians have about English, as revealed in letters, emails and general feedback received during more than 20 years involvement with ABC radio and television, and more recently commercial radio stations. In these programs, listeners/viewers query and lament usage (their questions and complaints are being collated to create a database of public opinion about language; Severin & Burridge in press).

Currently there are many processes underway that are releasing English from the conservative forces of the literary standard and its prescriptive ethos (e.g. see Svartvik and Leech 2006:207-10; Crystal 2006). Despite these changes, ordinary Australians continue as ever to write letters to newspapers and phone into radio stations, criticizing those words and constructions they feel do not measure up — some even branding the speakers themselves with such labels as “ignorant”, “uneducated”, “stupid”.

In fact, the complaint tradition downunder is a particularly thriving one; as Lukač (forthcoming) describes, Australians engage in verbal hygiene activities more than other English-speaking nations. This behaviour is completely out of whack with the otherwise informal character of Australian culture and the enthusiastic take-up of vernacular features generally in Australian English — a take-up that goes beyond the kinds of colloquialization noted in other English varieties (Peters and Burridge 2012).

These views aired about language and value, can be ferociously passionate and confident, but are often lacking in the norms and standards of evidence we have come to expect of public debate on other topics (“post truth”, “alternative facts” and “fake news” aside!). The social consequences of all this can be far-reaching, sometimes disastrous, especially when popular views on language influence people’s fair access to employment, education — and even the justice system. As Eades (2010) and Fraser (2014) describe, innocent people can even be put into jail on the basis of common knowledge about language that linguistic research has shown is simply wrong-headed.

Those working in the new interdisciplinary field called Ignorance Studies point out that certain areas of not-knowing can present considerable difficulties for the would-be removalists — as Smithson (2015:396) argues, “[i]t is very difficult to unmake ignorance that is neither accessible to conscious inspection nor desired to undo”. Language disputes involve matters of privilege and power, traditional values and stereotypes, and these make for powerful barriers to any “unmaking”.

So how can Australian linguists make people better informed, specifically how can we reduce the ignorance and unfairness that surrounds language use? And how can we ensure that language users, and most especially educators, politicians, lawyers and those in the media, put well-researched principles of linguistics above what can be dangerously inaccurate views about how people speak (or should speak)? There is no simple unmasking of the ‘truth’ about language here — too many big issues are at stake.

References

Crystal, David. 2006. Into the twenty-first century. In Lynda Mugglestone (ed.), The Oxford history of English. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press; pp. 394–413.

Eades, Diana. 2010. Sociolinguistics and the Legal Process Bristol, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Fraser, Helen. 2014. Transcription of Indistinct Forensic Recordings. Language and Law/Linguagem E Direito 1 (2): 5–21.

Lukač, Morana forthcoming. Grassroots Prescriptivism. PhD Thesis. Leiden University.

Peters, Pam & Kate Burridge 2012. Areal linguistics in the South Pacific. In Ray Hickey (ed) Areal Features of the Anglophone World. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter; pp.233-260.

Severin, Allie & Kate Burridge in press. “What do “little Aussie sticklers” value most”; in Don Chapman and Jacob D. Rawlins (eds) Values and Multiplicity: Identity and Fluidity in Prescriptivism and Descriptivism. Multilingual Matters.

Smithson, Michael 2015. Afterword: Ignorance studies: Interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, and transdisciplinary. In Matthias Gross & Linsey McGoey (eds) Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies. London: Routledge; pp. 385-399.