IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR

Hooray! Another article about how 'textspeak' is bad for kids is out! (Daily Mail link, so don't click it – you can get the idea from just reading this post.)

It's really a shame that the experts they asked were not experts in the thing they asked them about. They're experts in children's potential and curriculum development, both important things, but not actually language, which is the thing we're concerned about the harm of here. It seems comparable to asking experts in primary education if mobile phone masts are harming children's concentration or something. They'll have relevant things to say about concentration but they won't actually have the expertise to say if it's the mobile phone masts that are the problem.

Anyway I just came here to say this: IT IS LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE A SENTENCE WITHOUT GRAMMAR.

In the image above, Prof. Mellanby says 'these sentences do not contain grammar', of the following:

OMG ikr
Yo dude r u still coming to party Friday

I'm just going to take the second one. It contains, among other things, the following grammar:

• a vocative (Yo dude)
• subject-verb agreement (r for 2nd person singular)
• question inversion (r u rather than u r)
• a verb phrase with a prepositional complement (to party) and adverbial (Friday)
• present tense (r rather than were)
• progressive aspect (coming)
• pre-verbal adverbial (still)
• knowledge of which words can be omitted in this context (the, on)

It also has 100% correct spelling, if one allows that r u is an abbreviation rather than an error.

Southern privilege

One of my favourite writers is Justin Myers, who among other things writes The Guyliner. He reviews the Guardian Blind Date every week and I look forward to it eagerly. It's funny, but it's also clever and insightful and often poignant. This week, he threw in a comment about 'doing funny accents' that was so spot-on in its identification of the problem of centring privilege.

Just to take a step back: we normally think about male privilege, white privilege, or straight privilege. It doesn't meant that (say) men don't have problems, or never face discrimination, but that they don't face the kind of systematic discrimination that those who aren't men face, while of course they may face systematic discrimination of other kinds (e.g. you might be a gay man, or a black man, and have male privilege but not straight or white privilege). In the grand scheme of things, northerners aren't who you think of as facing the worst discrimination, but nevertheless, there is a sort of 'southern privilege'. (North and south here refer to England, by the way - in itself this minimises the existence of the other UK countries and especially Scotland.) This shows up mostly in accent discrimination, which can be a proxy for class discrimination.

Justin talks about the way that people frequently imitate a 'northern' accent when he tells them that he is from Yorkshire. (UGH by the way - 'the north' is a big place with a lot of different accents.) He specifically mentions the way that they say 'oop north', and the way they think this must pronounced like 'poop' because they don't realise it's just the vowel like in 'book' but written with a double 'o' to emphasise the difference from the southern pronunciation. And here comes the part that I'd never even thought about before, which is that having this special spelling to indicate the northern pronunciation is in itself a staggeringly southern-centric way of doing things. As Justin points out, there is no northern equivalent of an approximation of the southern pronunciation (he writes it as 'ap', which is pretty close to the IPA for the RP pronunciation). The word 'up' spells both the southern and the northern pronunciation; the letter 'u' represents both the sounds /ʌ/ and /ʊ/. To write 'up' as 'oop' leaves it as representing only the southern pronunciation, ignoring the northern one altogether.

In this situation, as always, the people in the position of relative power fix the language in a way that positions the less powerful ones as 'others', not the norm.