Three More Myths About Language

A few months back, we looked at some common misperceptions about the nature of language. Today we revisit Language Myths, edited by Laurie Bauer and Peter Trugdill (Penguin, 1998), to consider three more challenges to conventional linguistic wisdom.

Myth #4: TV Makes People Sound the Same

J. K. Chambers, a professor of linguistics at the University of Toronto, counters the common view that television and other popular media are steadily diluting regional speech patterns. The media do play a role, he says, in the spread of certain words and expressions. "But at the deeper reaches of language change--sound changes and grammatical changes--the media have no significant effect at all."

According to sociolinguists, regional dialects continue to diverge from standard dialects throughout the English-speaking world. And while the media can help to popularize certain slang expressions and catch-phrases, it's pure "linguistic science fiction" to think that television has any significant effect on the way we pronounce words or put together sentences.

The biggest influence on language change, Chambers says, is not Homer Simpson or Oprah Winfrey. It is, as it always has been, face-to-face interactions with friends and colleagues: "it takes real people to make an impression."

Myth #5: Some Languages Are Spoken More Quickly Than Others

Peter Roach, now an emeritus professor of phonetics at Reading University in England, has been studying speech perception throughout his career. And what has he found out? That there's "no real difference between different languages in terms of sounds per second in normal speaking cycles."

But surely, you're saying, there's a rhythmical difference between English (which is classed as a "stress-timed" language) and, say, French or Spanish (classed as "syllable-timed"). Indeed, Roach says, "it usually seems that syllable-timed speech sounds faster than stress-timed to speakers of stress-timed languages. So Spanish, French, and Italian sound fast to English speakers, but Russian and Arabic don't."

However, different speech rhythms don't necessarily mean different speaking speeds. Studies suggest that "languages and dialects just sound faster or slower, without any physically measurable difference. The apparent speed of some languages might simply be an illusion."

Myth #6: You Shouldn't Say "It Is Me" Because "Me" Is Accusative

According to Laurie Bauer, professor of theoretical and descriptive linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, the "It is I" rule is just one example of how the rules of Latin grammar have been inappropriately forced on English.

In the 18th century, Latin was widely viewed as the language of refinement--classy and conveniently dead. As a result, a number of grammar mavens set out to transfer this prestige to English by importing and imposing various Latin grammatical rules--regardless of actual English usage and normal word patterns. One of these inappropriate rules was an insistence on using the nominative "I" after a form of the verb "to be."

Bauer argues that there's no point in avoiding normal English speech patterns--in this case, "me," not "I," after the verb. And there's no sense in imposing "the patterns of one language on another." Doing so, he says, "is like trying to make people play tennis with a golf club."

More About Language:

• Key Dates in the History of the English Language
• Anthony Burgess on the English Language
• Five Extreme Language Blogs for Grammar Geeks